Friday, August 8, 2008

IDEA: Husbands and wives must leave their families of origin and cleave to one another.

PURPOSE: To help listeners think about what it means to leave and then to cleave to a spouse.

Q: When we look for God's blueprint for marriage, we find it spelled out in Genesis 2:24—"Therefore a man leaves his father and mother, is joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh." Jesus, when questioned by the Pharisees about divorce, took them back before the Law to God's original design for marriage, reminding them that the law about divorce was given because of people's sinfulness, but God had something better in mind. He quoted Genesis 2:24 (Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:7). Then the apostle Paul picked up on the same statement at the end of his discussion in Ephesians 5 about how husbands and wives are to relate to one another. In our last conversation, Gay and Alice, you were telling us that the first step in God's blueprint is for the man as well as the woman to leave father and mother. You said that leaving is crucial to marriage. What else?

A: The second step is what the older Bibles called "cleaving," and in our translation is "being united." The Hebrew word translated "be united" actually means "cling together" and it has the idea of being glued together. It's like gluing two sheets of paper together. If you try to separate them, you'll tear both sheets. We like the old fashioned term cleave because it's more than being united in the way we usually think of people uniting in marriage.

You can talk about being "united" if you mean by that two become a unit. Cleaving means marrying with a commitment to permanence in the marriage.

Leaving and cleaving belong together. You cannot really cleave if you haven't really left. And you don't really leave if you're not committed to cleave. You make the decision to cleave.

In today's postmodern world (and even in the modern world that preceded it) people have been reluctant to commit to permanence in marriage. But God says that it is an essential ingredient of marriage. We have such an emphasis in our culture on the individual's right to pursue not only life and liberty, but even more, to pursue happiness that the kind of commitment God calls for seems to be counter to everything we think we have a right to achieve.