More On New Testament Marriage - 12:55 PM, 1/22/2009 |
More On New Testament Marriage Bernard Pyron The Jewish marriage ceremonies were not brought into the New Testament to make them into Christian marriage ceremonies. But God's creation of marriage as stated in Genesis 2: 24 was carried over into the New Testament by Christ in Matthew 19: 5-6. Genesis 2: 24 says "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Christ beings this verse into the New Testament when he quotes it in Matthew 19: 5-6, "And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? 6. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." In commenting on Genesis 2: 24 Adam Clarke says " We have here the first institution of marriage, and we see in it several particulars worthy of our most serious regard. 1. God pronounces the state of celibacy to be a bad state, or, if the reader please, not a good one; and the Lord God said, It is not good for man to be alone. This is GOD'S judgment. Councils, and fathers, and doctors, and synods, have given a different judgment; but on such a subject they are worthy of no attention. The word of God abideth for ever. 2. God made the woman for the man, and thus he has shown us that every son of Adam should be united to a daughter of Eve to the end of the world. See Clarke on 1 Corinthians 7:3. God made the woman out of the man, to intimate that the closest union, and the most affectionate attachment, should subsist in the matrimonial connection, so that the man should ever consider and treat the woman as a part of himself: and as no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and supports it, so should a man deal with his wife; and on the other hand the woman should consider that the man was not made for her, but that she was made for the man, and derived, under God, her being from him; therefore the wife should see that she reverence her husband, Ephesians 5:33. Genesis 2:23,24 contain the very words of the marriage ceremony: This is flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone, therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. How happy must such a state be where God's institution is properly regarded, where the parties are married, as the apostle expresses it, in the Lord; where each, by acts of the tenderest kindness, lives only to prevent the wishes and contribute in every possible way to the comfort and happiness of the other! Marriage might still be what it was in its original institution, pure and suitable; and in its first exercise, affectionate and happy; but how few such marriages are there to be found! Passion, turbulent and irregular, not religion; custom, founded by these irregularities, not reason; worldly prospects, originating and ending in selfishness and earthly affections, not in spiritual ends, are the grand producing causes of the great majority of matrimonial alliances. How then can such turbid and bitter fountains send forth pure and sweet waters? See the ancient allegory of Cupid and Psyche, by which marriage is so happily illustrated, explained in the notes on Matthew 19:4-6." In Genesis 2: 24 God ordains the institution of marriage, defining it as a man and woman becoming one flesh. Literally, becoming one flesh means when they first have vaginal intercourse, they are married, or as the churches later taught, sex consummates the marriage. Physical union has been taken to be metaphoric for the union of the couple spiritually and psychologically. If becoming one flesh in the physical sense is the marriage ceremony as given by God in Genesis 2: 24, then because of what Christ immediately says in Matthew 19: 6, "What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," the man and woman should be aware of what they are getting into. In God's marriage institution they are expected to stay together and one is not to reject the other. If they engage in sex with another person after they have first had sex with one another, this is sin in the eyes of the Lord. At marriage both people are probably joyously willing to agree to stay together and they trust in the commitment of the other to do just that. And so from the time of the early Christians, believers have wanted some kind of statement of commitment to one another until one spouse dies, a promise to nuture and take care of one another, and an asking of Christ to enter into their marriage. On http://www.independent.co.uk/ "Consummation, as set down dispassionately by the Oxford English Dictionary is "the action of making a marriage or relationship complete by having sexual intercourse"; from the Latin verb consummare, uniting con- (altogether), with summa (sum total), the feminine of summus (highest, or supreme). An end, then, that may be no less a beginning and a lofty one at that, ripe with connotations that the act itself should prove consummate." On http://everything2.com/title/ "To consummate something means to complete it, to bring it to its final fruition...a marriage is said to be "consummated" when the couple has sex for the first time." And on: http://www.vaginismus- "Consummation in this sense requires that a man penetrate his wife through intercourse. " . |
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