Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
These closing words of the Eden account are not story but rule. God set out marriage here before there was a second family on earth. Adam had no parents to leave. So who is speaking here, and how far do these words reach?
The sentence describes something Adam could never have faced. It looks ahead to those who would come after him.
The first verse describes circumstances entirely different from those of Adam, who had no father or mother to leave.
When people asked the Lord about divorce, He went back to this verse and to who first spoke it.
As He had already answered: "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate" (Matt. 19:3-8). It is not Adam who said this, but God.
"Leave" marks a change in where a man's first duty lies.
Up to the time of a man's marriage the chief relationship he stands in is that of a son, and his responsibility is towards his parents. But when he marries he leaves his father and mother and holds fast to his wife. From then on she becomes his chief care, for he and she are no longer two but one flesh.
"Hold fast" answers two questions at once: how many, and how.
This verse settles many questions. He holds fast to his wife — only one wife, so that bigamy and polygamy are completely unscriptural. Holding fast to his wife involves genuine love for her, and faithfulness and devotedness.
Later law allowed divorce. So which passage shows God's real mind about marriage?
Now the same lawgiver who allowed divorces had, in an earlier book of the law, made known how God first set up marriage. That first account has no clause permitting divorce. Both passages (Deut. 24:1; Gen. 2:23-24) were God's Word. The first was a provision "for the hardness of their hearts"… The second (Gen. 2:24) taught the sacredness and the real character of the tie… So we are taken back to how marriage began, and reminded of how God sees it — two made one flesh, whom He has joined, and whom therefore man should not separate.
God formed this union while the man and woman were still sinless. The ruin that followed did not cancel what He had set up.
It matters greatly that God set up marriage between Adam and Eve while they were still innocent. When they were joined, sin had not entered the world, and death, its just penalty, had not yet come. But when their disobedience brought sin in, marriage kept the holy character God gave it when He set it up.
The same union points past marriage, and becomes a reason for personal purity.
That union is meant to remind the Christian of his own blessed privilege: he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him — not one flesh, but one spirit. This is so because he has received the Holy Spirit. So impurity is a sin not only against his own body, but against the Trinity and the price paid for him. "Glorify God then in your body."
Ephesians 5 ties this verse to Christ and the church. That picture was no afterthought.
God cast Adam into a deep sleep and formed Eve from a rib taken from his side. This is a picture of the church, which was formed by the death of Christ. Ephesians 5:25-32 brings this out so clearly that there can be no mistake about its meaning. Marriage was not just a handy illustration of Christ and the church. God designed it from the start to be a picture of that union.
Even the "leaving" finds its counterpart.
Christ, as man, left what belonged to Him through His link with His earthly people, Israel, so that He might gain and have the church… The marriage bond, therefore, becomes the picture of the union of the church with Christ.
- Speaker — the words describe a man with parents to leave, which Adam never had. The Lord traced them back to God Himself.
- Leave — marriage moves a man's first responsibility off his parents and onto his wife, and a new home begins.
- Hold fast — one wife only, held with love, faithfulness and devotedness.
- One flesh — God tied the two together before sin entered, and sin did not undo it. Later permission to divorce met hard hearts; it was not the original order.
- Picture — the same verse points to the believer joined to the Lord as one spirit, and to Christ and the church. Marriage was designed to picture that from the start.
And they were both naked, Man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
One sentence closes the account of creation. It describes a condition no living person has ever known: two people with nothing to hide, from each other or from God. So what was lost when shame arrived, and can it ever be recovered?
One writer says we cannot measure that state by what we know now. We only know man after the fall:
The first condition of man is described too. "And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." It was a state completely different from that of fallen man. It suited them then, but man as he is now could never rightly imagine it. Yet we cannot help feeling how right it was for innocence, the condition in which God made man and woman. Could He have made them any other way and stayed true to His own character?
Many people assume Adam began as a holy man. One writer draws a careful line between innocence, holiness and righteousness:
There was neither holiness nor righteousness before the fall. The original state was something distinct from both. Adam was innocent, but not properly righteous or holy. To apply innocence to God, or to the Lord Jesus, would be absurd. God is holy: He sees what is bad and hates it. That, at least, is the negative side of what holiness is. A righteous man judges what is contrary to justice, and hates it. An innocent man did not know good and evil in themselves, though of course he knew it was his duty to obey God.
The same writer takes that distinction one step further. Innocence, once lost, never comes back: "He lost innocence, and we never regain it, but we are renewed after the second Adam." The remedy is not a return to Eden. It is something new.
Their lack of shame was more than a fact about clothing. One writer sees in it a picture of open, unguarded closeness:
Finally, we see here the unashamed nakedness of the man and the woman — a happy expression of innocent closeness. No closeness such hearts might enjoy would deserve rebuke, and it will be the same between the true pair in the heavenly garden. There will be no fear of having to hide, and no shame in coming very close. Innocence was the safety between Adam and Eve. In the same way, all the virtues of the new mind will be the necessary, instinctive guard over the ways of the redeemed Bride of the Lamb, as she walks with the Lord.
Their bodies did not change when they sinned. What changed was what they knew:
This verse gives the facts that belonged to that first condition — facts that were not true, and could not fittingly be true, at any other time. Shame followed sin: the knowledge of good and evil made them conscious that they had fallen, and so they covered themselves.
Another writer traces that new self-awareness to conscience:
When they gained a conscience through sin, God planted in them a sense of shame at being naked. Animals do not have this, but even in the lowest type of human culture, conscience speaks.
Once shame came, the first human instinct was to make a covering. That instinct has never stopped:
Adam and his wife in innocence were naked, and were not ashamed (Gen. 2:25), but it was very different when they sinned. They knew they were naked, tried to cover themselves with fig leaves, and hid among the trees. This is a solemn picture of what man is in sin, and at a distance from God. Man knows he is not fit for God's eye in the nakedness of his sinful state. So he tries to clothe himself in garments of his own making — his own self-righteousness. Yet when he is brought near to God's presence, he has to admit that his own words of righteousness cannot hide his nakedness.
God answered that failure with a covering of a different kind. One writer points to the material He used:
Adam and his wife had tried to cover their nakedness with fig-leaf aprons, and had failed. The Lord God did cover them with coats of skins. Now skins do not come from a plant; they come from an animal. They can only clothe man once death has come upon the animal that produced them. Here, then, is the earliest revelation that man can only stand clothed before God on the basis of death.
- Uncovered — The verse records a real condition. It fitted people God had made innocent, and we cannot picture it from our own experience.
- Unknowing — Innocence was not righteousness or holiness. It was not knowing good and evil, which is why no one would call God innocent.
- Unafraid — Nothing needed hiding, from each other or from God. One writer sees that closeness restored when the redeemed are brought near to the Lord.
- Undone — Shame followed sin, not any change in the body. Conscience woke, and it still speaks in every culture.
- Unhidden — Fig leaves and self-righteousness never cover what God sees. Only the covering He gives, which rests on death, lets a person stand before Him.