Daily Devotional
Marriage Is A Lifetime Contract

November 30, 2016

When you get married, it is a lifetime contract, not an optional one. Those families who stick it out and those who don’t have basically the same kinds of problems. If we would learn to attack the problem rather than one another, we could work it out.

Genesis 2:24 says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

The permanence of marriage is communicated by God when He says a man is to leave his father and mother to “cleave” to his wife. The word “cleave” literally means to weld or to glue. The purpose of marriage is communicated by the phrase, “to be one flesh.” Now, God is talking about more than a sexual union. When you marry, you marry a whole person—body, soul and spirit. You are no longer an individual. You become one flesh. God’s arithmetic is one plus one equals one.

Marriage is a romance in which the hero and the heroine die in the first chapter and a new person comes into being, and that new person is one flesh.