The Two Shall Become One: God’s Design for Marriage | Genesis 2:21-25, 3:7-12
Brian Hedges | June 14, 2026
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to the book of Genesis. We’re going to be in Genesis 2-3 this morning as we begin a new series called “Redeeming Marriage: God’s Vision for Intimate Partnership.”
Some of you are thinking, “Finally, a series on marriage! My spouse really needs to hear this.” Of course, I want to encourage all of us to be attentive this morning to what the Lord is saying to us personally. Let me just say, even if you are not married—if you are single or maybe you’ve gone through the pain of divorce or maybe you are widowed—this is a series that can still speak to you, and it’s important for us as the church to embrace what God’s word says about marriage, because marriage is a stewardship of the whole church. Whether you’re married or not, you have a responsibility and a privilege to encourage and to hold up marriages and to strengthen the institution of marriage through your prayers, through your exhortation, and through your love.
In this series over the next four weeks, we’re going to look at some very practical issues together. We’re going to talk about marriage roles, we’re going to talk about some of the nitty-gritty issues of communication and conflict resolution and other relational dynamics in marriage. Today, I want us to begin at the beginning with the very first marriage in the Bible, the first marriage recorded in human history. It actually has the first love song that was ever written, in Genesis 2. We’re going to be looking at Genesis 2:21-25, and then a little later in the message we’ll look at some portions of Genesis 3.
Our purpose today is to understand God’s design in marriage and then how the brokenness of sin and suffering through the fall have affected that design and then how the good news of the gospel can bring restoration into our relationship. So Genesis 2, beginning in verse 21. Hear the word of the Lord.
“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man [this is Adam], 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. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
This is God’s word.
This is a foundational passage in Scripture for understanding marriage and human relationships. And in fact, verse 24 is quoted about five other times in the Bible, including by the prophet Malachi (or at least an allusion), twice by the Lord Jesus Christ (in Matthew 19 and in Mark 10) in Jesus’ own teaching in marriage, and also by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 5.
Today, as we look at this passage, I want us to see three things. I want us to consider oneness, brokenness, and grace.
1. Oneness: God’s Design for Marriage
2. Brokenness: How Sin Fractures Intimacy
3. Grace: The Gospel Paradigm for Healing Our Relationships
1. Oneness: God’s Design for Marriage
We see this in the verses that we have just read in Genesis 2.
(1) The first thing I want you to note here is that marriage is God’s idea, not ours. Marriage, far from what many people think today, is not merely a social construct. This is not something that human beings came up with in the development of civilization. Marriage is instituted by God.
You see this in verses 21-22, where God is the clear actor in this passage. God is the one who causes the man to fall into a deep sleep. God is the one who makes the woman. And God is the one who brings her to the man. The very first presentation of a bride to the groom in human history takes place right here when God presents Eve to Adam.
Marriage is God’s idea, and as such, we must look to God to understand what marriage actually is. This is important in our day, when the very definition of marriage is highly contested. What we see in this passage is that marriage is to be one man and one woman who are devoted together for one life. So here you have the basic foundational teaching in Scripture that marriage is heterosexual. It is monogamous. It is exclusive. It is permanent.
This rules out all of the deviations, including gay marriage, polygamy, polyamory—all of the different forms that human relationships might take that deviate from this pattern. This is God’s pattern: one man, one woman devoted to one another for life in a covenant relationship.
(2) We also see here the equality and complementarity of the two sexes. God had created the man, and now he creates the woman. Genesis 1 tells us that both male and female are created in the divine image. They are different from one another, distinct from one another, and yet equal to one another, both the image-bearers of God.
I rather like the quaint words from the old Puritan commentary by Matthew Henry. He said,
“The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him; but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.”
You can’t improve too much on that. That’s wisdom. God created man and woman equal and yet to complement one another.
(3) That complementarity is to be expressed in their oneness in marriage. So this is the next observation: marriage was designed by God for oneness or for intimacy. You see that in verses 24 and 25.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife [it means to be stuck together, to be glued together, to adhere to one another], and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
This is intimacy, and it is, of course, including the physical aspects of intimacy, but it’s much broader than that. This is the fusion of two hearts and two lives together into a new unit. It is an intimacy of the whole life.
We might define intimacy like this: Intimacy is when you have unflinching honesty combined with unfailing love. Intimacy is when you have people who are both fully known and fully embraced. They are naked and unashamed. There is no hiding, there are no masks; there’s no shame, no pretense. Instead, here, this first couple knew together the powerful, reciprocal experience of the wonder of being known and loved and returning that love to the other.
Friends, I do believe that there is an innate human longing in all of our hearts for love, that is a reflection of God’s design. All people long to be known and to be loved. Most adults long also for this exclusive, romantic, physical, committed relationship—there are some exceptions to that, and of course, God in his providence does not lead everyone to it. But most people have the longing in their hearts to be able to say, in the words of the Song of Songs, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”
I think one indication that God has woven that longing into the heart is seen in the way even popular culture looks at marriage and relationships. I’ve noticed, in watching occasionally the romantic comedies or the romantic movies or even some of the TV sitcoms that are about relationships, that even while these expressions in popular culture tend to have a cavalier attitude towards sex outside of marriage, and even though they hold out as kind of the basic worldview something like individual self-expression as the highest good, there is still this sense of longing in the hearts of the characters as they’re looking for the “one.” They’re looking for that one person that they would be united to that will fulfill their hearts and their dreams. The whole plot of these stories has to do with searching and finding the one and overcoming the obstacles that keep them apart until they’re finally united together.
It’s an indication of what God has put into our hearts. He had said early in this passage, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” That’s why he created a companion. That’s why he created the woman.
We desperately long for this. We long to belong to someone and to be able to say, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”
Let me just say briefly for anyone this morning who is not married: if you are single or if you are divorced or widowed, or even if you are married but you have been deeply disappointed in marriage such that this kind of intimacy has eluded you even in marriage, I want you to know that the story of the Bible is the story of the divine lover who pursues his bride. In fact, the Bible begins with a marriage in a garden and the Bible ends in Revelation with a marriage supper and then a garden, as God is united with his people; as Christ, the heavenly bridegroom, comes for his bride. It holds out hope for every human being, for the longing of every human heart, that there is the fulfillment of this kind of intimacy, of being fully known and fully loved. There is a fulfillment of that supremely in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
But this is what God intended when he created marriage, this kind of intimacy. This was God’s design, this oneness in marriage.
The problem, of course, is that sin and suffering and the brokenness of our world has fractured that intimacy.
2. Brokenness: How Sin Fractures Intimacy
That leads us to point number two in Genesis 3. We all know the rest of the story. In Genesis 2, Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed in Eden, the garden of delights; but in Genesis 3 we learn that there’s a snake in the garden, that there is evil lurking that will seduce them away from God and introduce a tragic rupture into the human relationship with God and into their relationship with one another.
One of the most important things that we must understand about marriage is that marriage is not exempted from the tragedy of the fall. While we long for this intimacy that God designed in the original creation intention, the reality is that our attempts to experience that oneness and intimacy have been affected by the fall.
Dan Allender and Tremper Longman in their book Intimate Allies warn us to never be so naive as to think that marriage is a safe harbor from the fall. They say, “The deepest struggles of life will occur in the most primary relationship affected by the fall, namely marriage.”
We see that rupture, we see that disruption, we see that fracture and that brokenness in Genesis 3. Let’s look at Genesis 3:7-12. It says,
“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.”
They have eaten the forbidden fruit, they have sinned against God, they have transgressed God’s commands, and immediately they experience shame.
“And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ’Where are you?’ And he said, ’I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ He said, ’Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ The man said, ’The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’”
It’s a tragic story. And immediately in those words we see the symptoms of the fractured intimacy in their relationship both with God and with one another.
We see, first of all, shame. You see that in verses 7-8. They know that they are naked, they feel shame, and they begin trying to cover themselves.
We see not only shame, but we see fear, when the Lord speaks to Adam and he asks him why he had hidden. Or “Who told you,” rather, “that you were naked?” Adam says, “I was afraid.”
“Where are you?”
“I was afraid.”
So there’s fear, there’s shame, then there’s blame. What does Adam do when confronted with these questions by God? He blames Eve, “the woman whom you gave me. She is the one who gave me the fruit to eat.” He doesn’t take responsibility for his own sin, his own transgression. He blames her and ultimately blames God.
These are symptoms of fractured intimacy.
Kent Hughes in his commentary shows that there is a unit enclosed in this passage, from Genesis 2:25 to Genesis 3:7, because both focus on the couple’s nakedness, but in contrast. He says, “Whereas 2:25 pictures Adam and Eve at the pinnacle of innocence and intimacy, Genesis 3:7 describes them in the pit of guilt and estrangement.”
What a fall! They have gone from the pinnacle of innocence and intimacy and joy and delight—unflinching honesty, unfailing love—and now they are in the pit of guilt and estrangement and shame. Here we see the first blush of shame on a human face, the first pang of guilt in the human conscience, the first impulse to run and hide in the human soul, and the first breakdown in intimacy in a marriage relationship. Shame and fear and blame.
Sin makes us hide. It makes us cover up, blame, and defend. I want to suggest to you this morning that all of the resulting issues in marriage flow from this: that sin and the suffering that sin causes create barriers to intimacy in marriage.
For example, there could be deeply-rooted dysfunction in marriage, if a person, for example, was raised in a family where the currency was shame and blame, you bring that into marriage. When there’s been trauma in a person’s life, there’s been heartbreak and heartache and deep suffering because of sins against you, you bring that into a marriage.
On Monday this week, our family had been together for dinner and Stephen and I, my oldest son, were moving a treadmill, and Holly was trying to help adjust the mat. And she tripped, fell on the floor, and she hit her arm in just the wrong way and broke her arm. (Now, she’s here this morning, she’s doing fine; it looks like surgery will not be needed, and she’s now in the process of recovery.) But that was a painful experience for her, an agonizing few hours, as we were in ER and trying to get the diagnosis and x-rays and CAT scans and all the rest.
When she had her first meeting with a physical therapist this week and she was talking about just how sensitive the arm was, he said, “Well, your body’s been through trauma, and it’s going to be sensitive for a while, sensitive to the touch.”
That same principle holds true in our lives and in our relationships. When there’s been trauma in a person’s life, there’s going to be a deep sensitivity to any further kinds of injury, deep-rooted dysfunction. That’s an issue in many marriages because of things that happened all the way back in a person’s childhood.
There are also the results of unhealthy coping mechanisms. We see Adam and Eve in the garden using fig leaves to cover themselves. They’re not actually dealing with the problem of their sin or their shame. They’re using an inadequate resource to try to deal with it.
There are all kinds of ways that we use fig leaves to escape the pain in our hearts and lives rather than confronting it, rather than dealing with it, and rather than dealing with the breakdown that causes in relationships. So you just consider all of the ways that we distract and dissociate. It could be as mild as constant scrolling on your phone, which will have an effect on your relationship; do not doubt it. It could be things like use of pornography or overeating or over-drinking or the use of drugs or disassociation through hours and hours of gaming or hours and hours of soap operas. I mean, pick your poison—they are all fig leaves. They are all ways that people try to cope with the pain in their lives. That’s why people do these things, because they’re trying to escape something. It’s easier to disconnect and disengage and withdraw from their spouse than it is to face the issues and actually talk through it.
Unhealthy coping mechanisms, and then emotionally immature relational patterns. Think about conflict in marriage, playing the blame game, gaslighting, avoidance, passive-aggressive behavior, anger—in whatever form anger takes. And listen, anger can run hot and it can run cold. Most of us know the difference. You may blow up or you may clam up. You may be a shouter; you may be a pouter. Usually you’ve got one spouse who’s one, one spouse who’s the other. That makes for a perfect storm, doesn’t it? You’ve got one person who gets angry and wants to talk it out and the other person who just withdraws into their shell and doesn’t want to talk at all.
These are all results of the fall and how it impacts our relationships, how it hurts our hearts, our relationships. We’ll talk more about how to deal with some of those things, some of the solutions that the Scripture gives us to those things. But what I want you to get today is that the problem is not only that we experience this—and every marriage experiences some degree of these problems—but the problem is not merely that we experience these things, but that we put the wrong interpretation on them.
There’s a guy named Jay Stringer who recently wrote a book called Desire, where he talks quite a bit about relationships. And in this book, he talks about the marriage illusion coin, a two-sided coin. He says on one side of the coin is the expectation that marriage is going to be easy. “Marriage should be easy. This shouldn’t be so hard.” And on the other side of the coin is the idea that “If this is difficult, it must mean that we have irreconcilable differences; we should just give up.”
You’ve got naive optimism and idealism on one side; you’ve got hopelessness and cynicism and despair on the other. Two sides of the same coin. It’s all based on the fact that we have wrong expectations of marriage and that we have not really reckoned with the reality that when we are married, we are sinners who are broken who are marrying sinners who are broken. I mean, that’s what happens in marriage. You’ve got two sinners who come together, who say, “I do.” They are imperfect. They are in an imperfect world. They will have an imperfect relationship. The temptation is to hold on to those ideals to the point that it leads someone to disillusionment and despair.
It neglects the reality of the fall, but if we give in to the despair—if we start to think that these irreconcilable differences, so-called, mean we should just give up, divorce, and try someone else—we’re also forgetting another part of the biblical story. We’re forgetting the gospel. We’re forgetting God’s grace. We’re forgetting what God does to bring restoration to broken people.
3. Grace: The Gospel Paradigm for Healing Our Relationships
That leads us to point number three: grace, the gospel paradigm or pattern for healing relationships.
Here’s where I want you to see three things from the text and really turn these into three practical takeaways for marriage. These are things that you can take and use this week in your relationship with your spouse, three ways that we see God express grace to Adam and Eve, and they translate into three ways that we can show grace to one another.
(1) First of all, we see God’s pursuit. You see it in verses 8-9.
“The man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ’Where are you?’”
God comes searching for them. They hide, and God comes searching for them. It is the story of the gospel right there, isn’t it? God comes to seek and to save the lost. That’s what Jesus did! That’s why he came. And we see God doing it right here in Genesis 3. He comes looking for them. He pursues them. He confronts them. He seeks them out. He doesn’t let them remain in hiding, and he also doesn’t wipe them out for their rebellion.
So often in our relationships, guilt leads to denial, shame leads to covering, fear leads to flight. That’s what Adam and Eve are doing here. But grace pursues.
This is the pattern for us as well, and what this means in marriage is that a practical thing you can do and should do when there’s been disruption in the relationship is you move toward your spouse. You don’t move away; you move towards.
Sometimes that means physically moving towards. Sometimes when there is a conflict, the most important thing you can do is stop talking and move closer. This is what psychologists and marriage therapists call a repair attempt. It’s where you move in and you put your hand on your spouse’s hands and you express your love for him or for her, and you soften your voice and you try to start moving into solution and into love and into affirmation instead of staying entrenched in anger or in shame or withdrawal or whatever. Move towards your spouse.
This is what grace does. This is what God does! And this is how love behaves.
(2) The second thing we see in this passage is that God provides. We see God’s provision in verse 21. Here are Adam and Eve, naked and ashamed, desperately trying to cover themselves, but doing so inadequately. And in verse 21, “the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” He clothes them.
Again, it’s a wonderful picture of the gospel. The New Testament talks about how we are clothed with Christ. We have put on Christ. We put on these garments of righteousness, to use the language of Isaiah. We are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, as his righteousness is credited to us. All of our attempts at self-salvation are just fig leaves. We can’t fix ourselves. We need God to do something for us. And he does! He provides. He provides a covering; he covers their shame.
This is also very practical in marriage. One of the most powerful things you can do in your marriage is to cover one another’s shame. “Love covers a multitude of sins,” Scripture says. And I think nothing will test us more in marriage than this and nothing will bring healing more than this, when you love your spouse in his or her shame; and just as difficult, you receive your spouse’s love for you in your shame.
Did you know this is how shame is healed? Shame is healed by coming out of hiding and bringing it into the open, at least with another person, where there is confession, there is honesty, where we allow ourselves to be fully seen and fully known by another person. The most healing thing in the world is when that person still loves you.
That’s a powerful thing to experience in marriage. Cover one another’s shame. Show love, show affirmation, affirm the relationship, express forgiveness. We’ll talk more about some of the specific dynamics involved in that in the weeks to come.
(3) Move towards your spouse, cover one another’s shame; we see this in God’s pursuit and God’s provision. Then we finally see God’s promise, the promise of a serpent-crushing descendant, Genesis 3:15. Derek Kidner calls this the first glimmer of the gospel in Scripture. “I will put enmity between you and the woman—” God here speaking to the serpent. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”
You know what this is? It’s the first promise in Scripture of a Son who’s going to come, who’s going to be a redeemer. Just a few chapters later, God’s going to make a similar promise to Abraham. “I will give you a son, and through your son I’m going to bless all the families of the earth.” And a few centuries later, God’s going to make a similar promise to David, and he says, “I’m going to give you a son who’s going to sit on the throne. He’s going to reign over my people Israel forever.” The son of Adam, the son of the woman, the son of Abraham, the son of David.
There’s a reason why our New Testaments begin with just that. In Matthew 1, the very first verse tells us it’s all about Jesus who is “the son of David, the son of Abraham.” And when you go to Luke’s Gospel and you read the genealogy of Jesus in Luke, the genealogy ends like this: “The son of Adam, the son of God.”
All those passages and more are showing us that Jesus is the fulfillment here. He is the Son. He is the descendant that God promises. And what does he come and do? He comes and he bears our sins on the cross. He takes our shame as he hangs naked on the cross, bearing sin and judgment in our place. It’s an example of costly love.
(4) That story of the gospel, that work of God’s grace, calls us also to embrace costly love. That’s the fourth takeaway in marriage: embrace costly love.
Marriage is not easy for anyone, not if they stay married, not if they stay married for decades. There’s always going to be hardship. It’s why we make vows, isn’t it? “To have and to hold for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.” The very vows anticipate the difficulties that are going to come. And this is the call; it’s the call of the gospel on marriage. We see it explicitly in Ephesians 5, where Paul tells husbands, “Love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” It is the call to bear the cross in your love for your spouse, and it’s, of course, not only for husbands. It is a call for both husbands and for wives. It’s a call for all of us as we are called to love one another and bear with one another and forgive one another and be kind to one another as God in Christ has done for us.
Friends, I’ve seen some beautiful demonstrations of that costly love. I’ve seen it in young couples who fight for their marriage when they may be months or a few years in and they are dealing with unexpected heartache and disappointment and disillusionment. I’ve seen it in middle-aged couples, where spouses have borne patiently with one another in the long, slow process of change. And I’ve seen it in aged couples, senior marriages, when one spouse becomes the caregiver for the other, where difficulties in health begin to set in and it leads to a difficult season of marriage.
Every time, this love is costly; every time, it’s hard; but listen, every time, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, and it’s beautiful because it’s telling a story. It’s telling the story of the gospel. It’s telling the story of God’s love for his people, of Christ’s love for the church.
Maybe you noticed it even in the outline this morning. This is a sermon on marriage, yes, but really it’s a gospel sermon, because all we’ve done is we’ve looked at marriage through the lens of creation, God’s design in marriage and creation is oneness and intimacy; and then the fall, the brokenness that sin brings into our relationships; and then grace, redemption, the gospel pattern for restoring those relationships.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, when we stay faithful in our marriage, when we keep believing and we keep hoping even in the face of hopeless or difficult circumstances, when we continue to pursue one another, when we cover one another’s sins and shame in love and in grace, when we express and embrace the costly love to which God calls us, we’re doing more than preserving an individual marriage. Instead, we are upholding an institution that God has given that tells a story to the world, the story of God’s redeeming love for his people, the story of Christ’s redemptive love for the church.
That’s why a series like this is important for the whole church—not just for the married, but also for the single, for the widowed, for the divorced—because marriage is so precious that it’s something that all of us should fight for, that all of us should pray that God will uphold. Pray for the marriages in our church. Do that regularly, but do so especially these next four weeks. Pray for your own marriage if you are married, and may we all recognize that we are part of a bigger story, the story of our divine husband’s love for his church, the bride of Christ. Let’s pray together.
Our gracious Father in heaven, we thank you this morning for your word. We thank you for the hope of the gospel that we find in your word. We thank you that you have not left us alone in our sin and our shame, but you have pursued us, that you have covered us, that you have loved us. We thank you especially for the supreme demonstration of that love through the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ, who having loved his own, loved them to the end.
Lord, as we lift our gaze today beyond our personal relationships to our relationship with you, we ask you, Lord, to draw near to us in grace, that we would experience in a fresh way the power of your redemptive love to restore us to intimacy with yourself, where we are fully known and fully loved—fully known in all of our brokenness, but fully loved because of your free grace given to us in Christ.
As we come to the Lord’s table this morning, may the table be for us a visible and a tangible representation of that love and just how costly that love was, and may we receive that love this morning as we receive the elements of the bread and the juice, and may we do so with dependence on you, our God and our Savior. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
