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No Comments One Flesh
Genesis 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
My wife and I have been married 41 years at this writing and now I reflect on how precious those years have been. I chose her but she also chose me. We’ve become one flesh over these many years. She knows what I think; I know what she thinks and it matters to us.
A man is supposed to leave his father and mother. That doesn’t mean he forgets them or doesn’t attend to their needs or doesn’t love them. It simply means when push comes to shove, his wife can depend on him being unquestionably loyal to her. That is the recipe for becoming one flesh.
My mother told me that once I married my sweetheart, then I should forget about her. No, she still wanted me to care about her but she wanted me to put my wife first. Why? Because that didn’t happen to her. I don’t want to diminish my father because he was a gentle man, someone I loved.
But for whatever reason he didn’t cleave to my mother; yes, he was faithful but he never regarded her as his equal, his partner. Mom was never consulted on anything. You could say he cared about her, but they never had that spiritual closeness because he never cared what she thinks. He never thought how his decisions would effect her or their family.
Most men have trouble with cleaving to their wives. According to the Bible, it’s his job. The wife doesn’t do that. That’s not her job. It’s the job of the husband to put her above his father and mother and as the apostle Paul said, give himself totally to her. A wife needs to know she is without a doubt number one, that she is on his mind all of the time. Her welfare, her future, their children’s future, he takes most seriously.
I think the problem so many of us husbands have is that we live with an attitude that things just happen. We don’t ponder outcomes too much; we become yes men or no men. If life just happens, we have no responsibility for the end result. God doesn’t see it that way. To whom much is given, much is required. When you’re single you’ve got nothing. When you marry and possibly have children, you’ve been give a lot. A lot is required of you. You give up all that selfish wasting of time in your youth. God expects you to cleave to your wife and raise up your children in the way they should go.
So you need to know the way and engage your family in the pursuit of knowing Christ. If you don’t know it, you can’t teach it.
Some may say their spouse isn’t perfect, they’re a little hard to love some days. That may or may not be but that doesn’t release us from the obligation to cleave to our wives It’s for richer or poorer, good times and bad, in sickness and in health, till death do us part. So many can’t do that. It’s pretty obvious by the divorce rated that marriage vows for many are like New Year’s resolution, full of good intentions but no real commitment. They fail and maybe next time they’ll get it right. Not going to happen; there’s no love there.
I love my wife. I want to make sure she’s all right. I want her to feel like her life matters and that it was well spent with me. But it just doesn’t happen. Our lives are directed by the Word of God. We are not our own; we have been bought with the blood of Christ.
We’re not perfect. There are things about each other that could use changing. We know this. It’s OK. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love never fails. Love is a decision to do the right thing and understanding what’s right comes from God’s Word. What we’re after is making God’s will our will. Then what either one of us wants pales in comparison to our pleasing Christ. One day my wife and I will be the bride of Christ and Christ will vow to us never to leave us, never to forsake us, even to the very end of the world. That is our mandate, to love our wives, never leave them, never forsake them right till death do us part.
Sometimes those wrongs plague our lives and we need to forgive. Desmond Tutu said a very simple thing but is very profound. “Without forgiveness there is no future”. That is true for a country and that is true for a marriage. God gave us that example. He sacrificed Christ so we could be forgiven. He wants to forgive and forget; we should do the same.