Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."
— Genesis 2:24
We've all heard the story of Adam and Eve. Perhaps, we've become so familiar with this that we just let the tale pass us by when we read the Bible or listen to a preaching. Some of you might even want to stop reading this article already because you think you've got the whole story: Adam and Eve ate an apple and got punished for it.
But that's not the entire story.
For one, the Bible doesn't mention the fruit was an apple (although you might have missed that because that's what they teach kids in Sunday school). Moreover, the story of the beginning is not just the beginning of man, but the beginning of everything.
Adam and Eve's story is also the first ever marriage to take place. We see in scripture God's true design for marriage: Two people becoming completely one. Adam declared with a true inspirational call from God in Genesis 2:23, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."
After so much searching, the man had finally found someone who he could be one with.
But we all know what happened next. The two got tempted by the serpent, fell into sin, got caught and started blaming each other. Oneness destroyed.
What breaks oneness in marriage is not our differences. Adam and Eve were different in many ways, but they initially existed as one. The trinity is three different beings of God who exist as one so powerfully that they are one. What breaks oneness in marriage is the lack of intimacy with God.
In Adam and Eve's story, we see that it was when they had sinned and broken their oneness with God that they lost oneness with one another.
In the same vein, couples who split up break from each other because they have broken their ties with God. The only way for these couples to reunite is when they restore their oneness with God once more.
Thousands of years later after Adam and Eve, we meet a man who is referred to as the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45) who existed perfectly as one with the Father and Holy Spirit and one with others in compassion and love. That person was Jesus Christ. And it was through His sacrifice that our oneness with God would be restored.
Jesus became the way for us to experience the intimacy of the Father so that we can once more be intimate in the context of marriage. It is in fact only through Christ that our marriages can exist in righteous oneness because He is the only way to the Father and thus the only way to perfect love.
Jesus is perfect love, one that casts our fear and disunity and brings about oneness in marriage so we can freely co-exist as one with our spouse.
