By Tina Kanu
Marriage is a divine institution established by God Almighty. Everything required for its success is provided by God Himself. It is not a cultural thing.
God means marriage to provide help, but how you handle yours determines whether it helps or hurts you.
God’s standard is the only cure for marital problems, because marriage is entirely God’s idea and not man’s.
To have the best and be happy in our marriage and home, we must follow God’s principles on marriage as written in the Bible.
Culture, tradition, and civilisation have brought in a lot of strange things that pose a serious threat to marital success and fulfilment as defined by God.
But believers who desire the very best in marriage must obey God’s instructions for our marriage to be what God intended from the beginning.
God says, “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh” (Matthew 19:5 KJV).
A couple must understand what God’s command to leave, cleave, and become one flesh means.
Leaving
For a marriage to be what God wants it to be, leaving must take place. Leaving means moving away from the parental home and also breaking away from original parental ties.
Many married couples fail to do this. They wed but fail to move from one relationship to another.
Leave does not mean a couple abandon their parents. Rather, they move out from the authority of parents to establish for themselves a new authority structure.
They determine that ‘from now on our loyalty and authority have changed hands and our highest commitment is to each other and not anyone else.’
Marriage becomes difficult when one or both partners still crave the comfort or security of their parental home.
A husband who continues a dependent emotional relationship with his parents cannot be an effective leader in his own home.
A wife who fails to make a clean break from her parents will always feel insecure and be unable to completely trust her husband’s leadership.
For the marriage to succeed, both husband and wife have to break away from former obligations and move into an entirely new one.
This is hard to accept. But it is the price to pay for marital success and happiness, according to God’s definition.
Cleaving
Cleaving is possible only when real leaving has taken place. Cleaving is not an event; it is a continuous process that requires effort by both partners.
Cleaving is building a very intimate relationship with your spouse. It is an everyday affair. It is a lifetime project.
Two different individuals agreeing to spend the rest of their lives together as husband and wife must show affection to each other. The more intimate they get, the stronger the bond. Intimacy is the life wire of a happy marriage.
Cleaving is a commitment to stand together and fight off whatever seeks to destroy the trust and bond in our marriage.
Love shared on wedding day is not enough guarantee the couple would love each other for ever. Love is more than feeling. Love is a commitment to hold on and also to move the relationship to a deeper and more meaningful level.
A lot of marriages lack the thrill of intimacy because the couple allow issues like career, family friends, business, and the like to create a gap between them.
Many husbands and wives marry their career, business pursuits, and ambitions at the expense of their marriage.
To experience marital joy and fulfilment, the couple must be closest to each other. Cleaving is to stick to, and be glued to, each other.
Becoming one flesh
This is more than physical union (sexual union).
It is two people sharing everything they have; not only their bodies, and material possessions, but also their thinking and feeling, joy and suffering, success and failure.
To become one flesh means two people become completely one in body, soul, and spirit and yet remain two distinct individuals.
This is the ultimate in marriage. A complete melting into one thought, aspiration, vision, pursuit, and goal.
Then the Scripture that “they are no more twain, but one flesh” (Matthew 19:6 KJV) will be truly fulfilled.
This must be the aspiration of every couple. Two hearts beat as one and the couple go through thick and thin together until they fulfil their God-given purpose on earth.
A married couple should understand the importance of these four words – leave, cleave, become one.
They should understand how important it is for them to pull away from parental relationship and see marriage as a union where leadership, relationship, and authority have to change hands.
This Scriptural order equips them to establish a marital union in which in-laws have access but not control.
Leaving is not abandoning or being unappreciative of all in-laws have done. It is simply a new structure being established and a new way of life developed.
We are to honour parents for life. But, in the Biblical context, marriage ceases their authority over us.
