Thus the first father of our race prophesied, and sang his wedding song. In some mystical, but real sense, marriage is a reunion, the reincorporation of what had been sundered. Seeking his other self, the complement of his nature, the man breaks the ties of birth and founds a new home. So the inspired author of the passage in Genesis explains the origin of marriage, and the instinct which draws the bridegroom to his bride.
But our apostle sees within this declaration a deeper truth, kept secret from the foundation of the world. When he speaks of “this great mystery,” he means thereby not marriage itself, but the saying of Adam about it. This text was a standing problem to the Jewish interpreters. “But for my part,” says the apostle, “I refer it to Christ and to the Church.” St Paul, who has so often before drawn the parallel between Adam and Christ, by the light of this analogy perceives a new and rich meaning in the old dark sentence. It helps him to see how believers in Christ, forming collectively His body, are not only grafted into Him (as he puts it in the epistle to the Romans), but were derived from Him and formed in the very mould of His nature.
What is affirmed in Colossians i. 16, 17 concerning the universe in general, is true in its perfect degree of redeemed humanity: “In Him were created all things,” as well as “through Him and for Him.” Eve was created in Adam; and Adam in Christ. We are “partakers of a Divine nature,” by our spiritual origin in Him who is the image of God and the root of humanity. The union of the first human pair and every true marriage since, being in effect, as Adam puts it, a restoration and redintegration, symbolizes the fellowship of Christ with mankind. This intention was in the mind of God at the institution of human life; it took expression in the prophetic words of the Book of Genesis, whose deeper sense St Paul is now able for the first time to unfold.
In our union through grace and faith with Christ crucified, we realize again the original design of our being. Christ has purchased by His blood no new or foreign bride, but her who was His from eternity,—the child who had wandered from the Father’s house, the betrothed who had left her Lord and Spouse. In regard to this “mystery of our coherence in Christ,” Richard Hooker says, in words that suggest many aspects of this doctrine: “The Church is in Christ, as Eve was in Adam. Yea, by grace we are every one of us in Christ and in His Church, as by nature we are in our first parents. God made Eve of the rib of Adam. And His Church He frameth out of the very flesh, the very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of man. His body crucified and His blood shed for the life of the world are the true elements of that heavenly being which maketh us such as Himself is of whom we come. For which cause the words of Adam may be fitly the words of Christ concerning His Church, ‘flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones—a true native extract out of mine own body,’ So that in Him, even according to His manhood, we according to our heavenly being are as branches in that root out of which they grow.”[147]
FOOTNOTES:
[141] Compare pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.
[142] Heb. ii. 9–12, ix. 14, 15, x. 5–22, xiii. 12.
[143] See Rom. vi. 1–11; Col. ii. 11, 12; 1 Cor. x. 2, xii. 13.
[144] Ἐν ῥήματι. Λόγος is word as expressive of thought. Ῥῆμα, the utterance of a living voice,—a sentence, pronouncement, message; it is the Greek term employed in all the passages here cited.
[145] The words “of His flesh and of His bones,” following “members of His body” in the A.V., appear to be an ancient gloss adopted by the Greek copyists, which was suggested by Gen. ii. 23. They are unsuitable to the idea of a spiritual union, and interrupt rather than help the apostle’s exposition.