A Journey Toward Oneness

This is the fourth part of Chapter 2 in the unfinished Book: The Ruling Household.
Here are links to The Intro and the third part of Chapter 2.

Becoming One

“Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”... The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“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.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:18-24 ESV)

The oneness of a husband and a wife is the foundation of every multigenerational household.

Katy Faust, author of the book, Them Before Us, points to a study that demonstrates that when a child’s biological father or mother shows love toward one another the child feels like he or she is being loved. Why would that be? (By the way, this same feeling does not happen in the same way with a child’s step-parent).

Because the oneness of the father and the mother is what gives the family stability, and identity and puts love at the epicenter of the home.

It’s the covenantal love between a husband and wife that lifts the fragile nuclear family out of survival mode and puts everyone on a path toward becoming a flourishing household.

You can’t take the army on mission when it’s in danger of blowing apart.

When you’ve banished all doubt of betrayal and learn how to function as an inseparable duo the family moves past fruitfulness and multiplication and into filling, subduing, and ruling.

This is why the covenant is so critical.

We live in a day that thinks marriage is “just a piece of paper.”

“We already know we love each other” the logic goes, “we don’t need a piece of paper to remind us.”

This attitude is understandable.

If marriage is simply a declaration of our current feelings of love an official paper and ceremony are absurd exercises in overstating the obvious.

But that’s not the point of marriage.

Marriage is not about your current love, it’s about your future oneness.

And the purpose of that oneness is to strengthen and establish a family line.

That’s why we make covenants. In the months and years following the marriage, the husband and wife are about to do things no one should ever do if they were not certain of one another’s commitment.

We make our finances one.

We make our relationships one.

We make our futures one.

The things a new husband and wife do in the early stages of their marriage will maximize the cost of a divorce. But taking this risk is a feature of marriage and not a bug. They must give it their all. Hold nothing back. Go all the way in. There’s no other way to create the kind of household that gets to the final stage; that rules together.

Everything about this journey toward true oneness is experienced and acted out in the exclusive gift God gives every new couple to do when they join their lives to one another.

The gift of sex.

Tool: An Exclusive Union

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” (Genesis 2:24-25 ESV)

I’m often asked, “If the Bible promotes the concept of multigenerational family why are husbands commanded to leave their father and mother or as the King James Bible puts it “to leave and cleave”?

I’ve noticed many Western Christians read the modern practice of a son or daughter heading off to college, getting married, settling in a new region maybe thousands of miles from his parents, and returning home occasionally to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas into the Genesis 2:24 concept of leaving.

Is this kind of leaving, which we frequently see in the modern world, what the author had in mind?

Is God advocating for starting the family over every generation the way we do today?

The short answer: no, nothing like this practice was normative in Biblical times.

What was common was for a new husband to add a room onto his family’s house or to pitch a new tent apart from the tent where he lived with his parents. Why leave one’s parents in this way? The author tells us the reason, to “become one flesh”. This has nothing to do with Western-style hyper-independence and everything to do with sexual oneness.

Scripture has a view of sex so high that it shocks the modern mind. Sex is a physical act that has the power to create spiritual oneness. The Genesis 2 concept of oneness leads to this statement made by Paul in his instruction to Christians. “Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” (1 Corinthians 6:16 ESV).

This view of sex necessitates a lifestyle of privacy and exclusivity for the married couple.

The boundary between parents and their newly married children must be clear enough to allow them to go as far as the married couple is able toward becoming one. The more parents honor and support the growing oneness between their children and their spouses the more it’s healthy for them to continue to work together as a multigenerational family team.

This explains the difference between how Abraham and Isaac related to their fathers. Through Joshua God says to the newly established nation of Israel “Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods. But I took your father Abraham from the land beyond the Euphrates and led him throughout Canaan and gave him many descendants. I gave him Isaac” (Joshua 24:2-3 NIV)

Leaving and cleaving for Abraham looked like moving to a distant country (Genesis 12:1). He was no longer aligned with his idol-worshipping father. But leaving and cleaving for Isaac involved staying with his father and moving into a separate tent with his new bride (Genesis 24:67).

Every new couple must establish their own private relationship and be given the space necessary to develop their own union as they become one. The level of independence they choose to create from their parent’s household is based on the level of alignment they experience with the previous generation and the kind of calling God is giving the new branch of the family.

In the excellent little book “Letters to Philip” the author writes to his son about the process of sexual oneness as “The 20-year warm up”. The journey toward intimacy takes lots of time and lots of privacy. In a world before multiple sexual partners, sex manuals, pornography, and sexual performance anxiety the process of becoming one physically was something for a couple to explore and discover at their own pace. Leaving and cleaving meant no one else was allowed in the bedroom. In ancient times parents were the largest threat to the private space new couples needed in their journey toward peak intimacy. While interfering parents can still be an issue today the enemy has conspired to put a load of baggage that each new husband and wife carries with them into the bridal chamber.

This is where real leaving and cleaving comes into practice. Oneness requires radical exclusivity. It’s a world that the couple shares entirely on their own.

Think of how powerful sexual union would be in a modest culture where the first time a young man would have ever set eyes on a naked woman would be on his wedding night.

The level of total dependence on one another is why Paul makes the shocking statement “The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife.” (1 Corinthians 7:3-4 NLT)

Historians have pointed out that this is the first known occurrence in human history where a woman is said to have sexual authority over her husband’s body. But to Paul, this is simply a logical extension of the commands about sexual union in Genesis 2.

This makes the essence of leaving and cleaving simple. Leave anything that interferes with your total sexual dependence on your spouse. This includes sexually explicit images, sexual or emotional affairs, any act of satisfying oneself and resisting any encroachment from family or friends that would interfere with the private and fragile process of a couple’s growing oneness.

Keep in mind that this does not mean families who respect these boundaries should hit the reset button every generation. On the contrary, this modern practice of moving away from family and starting over can make it harder on a couple’s journey toward oneness. Many new parents find few things as helpful to their intimacy as dropping the kids off at grandma and grandpa’s house to allow them the time for an exclusive getaway to focus on their relationship when it's needed most.