Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: MARRIAGE (08/25/16)
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TITLE: The First Man and His Maiden | Previous Challenge Entry
By Ernest Yoder
09/01/16 -
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King Solomon wrote of the amazing mystery of the way of a man with a maiden. (See Proverbs 30:19) As with everything created there was a first man with his first experience with a maid. It is veritably impossible to imagine all the implications of such a situation. The first man, Adam, had no parents to teach him on how to meet a woman, how to introduce himself to a woman, or even what a woman was. Unless God had provided Adam with some preprogrammed initiative he was probably at a great loss when he first met the first woman. Perhaps God with a sense of humor decided to sit back and watch both of these extremely intelligent and beautiful creatures navigate through the waters of learning to know each other. I’m sure it would have been quite entertaining to witness.
Adam had had quite a day although he did not think of his first day as something of significance because he had no other day to compare it to. With his tremendous brain capacity he had been naming the animals as they appeared before him. His was the original language of God second to none in the capacity to express thoughts and concepts. Perhaps this first day’s work for him was like one hundred days of our work in what he accomplished.
But he did get sleepy – very sleepy. God gave Adam the new sensation of needing to lie down and go to sleep which overcame his desire to keep exploring the new world he found himself in. It could well be that his last thought as he dozed off was the fact that all the animals had mates. And perhaps he wondered why he did not have one. I’m suggesting it was about four or five o’clock PM when he went to sleep. He did not know his sleep was provided as an anesthetic.
God could have performed the entire process of creating woman instantly or He perhaps He removed Adam’s rib and spent some “love time” fashioning the most exquisitely beautiful of all creatures. The Bible does not give us the details but we do know that God had Adam’s welfare in mind when he created Eve from Adam’s body. (I would think that God made another rib to replace the one He removed. Just a thought.) In doing what He did and how He did it cements the fact that woman is part and parcel of man and they are to complement each other.
Did Adam awake suddenly or gradually? We do not know. Was Eve at his side when he awoke or did God send Adam on a treasure hunt to find her among the verdant flowers and plants of His new creation? We do not know. But we do know that these two discovered each other and it was love at first sight. Perhaps they were a little shy at first until they got better acquainted. But whatever path they took in learning to know each other, I think it happened in a timely manner that same day. Adam knew enough from what God did that that he waxed poetic and made the declarative statement we know so well.
The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24 (NIV)
I guess God had either programmed Adam’s mind to believe this or He told Adam all about married life. Either way the marriage of a man and a woman was the first social institution and it has been the only definition of marriage since then.
Marriage is a commitment. It provides a home. It produces children as a heritage of the Lord. There is no other plan that can provide or replace the stability that comes with following the blueprint of the first marriage. The fact that marriage is part of all cultures and has been for all of known history proves its validity for all of humanity. With all its mystery, the way of a man with a maid, resulting in marriage, is God’s only plan from the beginning.
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