Marriage Provides a Healthy Connection

No person can navigate life successfully by attempting it alone. We need one another, and marriage is one of God’s gifts to address our loneliness.

If we go back to the original question of why someone should get married to a particular person, we are starting to get closer to knowing how to discern a suitable answer. God designed marriage to provide a helper because He knew that, even before sin, we needed someone to walk beside us in life. We aren’t wired to navigate life alone.

Marriage is meant to help restore something broken inside of each of us. It remedies much of our loneliness. A spouse brings help to the vulnerable parts of our lives.

God knew that we were needy, so He designed marriage to meet those needs in healthy ways.

In Genesis 2:15-23, God revealed something paramount about the human condition that marriage was supposed to address as no other relationship or institution could. Before sin was ever committed as an act of treason against God, it was evident that something significant was missing from Adam. In reality, someone was missing.

Throughout the days of Creation, God had a rhythm of stating, creating, and celebrating each day’s work. 1) “Let there be,” God would utter, 2) the “be” was unable to resist, and 3) God commented that each creation was, in fact, good. It was a simple rhythm that proved very effective for six days.

Each day was concluded by God remarking upon the day’s work as good (טוֹב). “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day” (Genesis 1:31).

With all these days regarded as good, our ears pick up on the shocking turn within the narrative. After hearing how God considered so many things good, His lack of enthusiasm towards a particular creation should grab our attention. The author throws an intentional curveball by describing God’s grandest masterpiece as “not good” (Gen. 2:18). Why? Because Adam was alone.

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make a helper fit for him.”

Genesis 2:18

Pre-Fall, God believed that His creation, Adam, with whom He is walking and talking within the garden, is undeniably alone, and He dislikes the scenario so much that He does something about it. God is going to address something critical within Adam’s life. He needed a helper.

Adam’s loneliness had to be addressed. Now it wasn’t as if Adam was ultimately relationally deficient. He had such a deep relationship with God at such a level that it is hard to comprehend. To say that God and Adam were close is an understatement.

And yet, amidst this intimacy, God says one of the most shocking statements concerning the only creature He formed in His unique image: Adam is not good. He is alone. And it must change.

All other creations were deemed adequate. The rolling rivers were good. The peculiar berries on the tree were good. Even the curiously formed duck-billed platypuses were good. And yet Man, made in God’s striking image, was not good.

We weren’t wired to navigate life alone. Through marriage, God provides us with a needed connection. It doesn’t mean that you have to be married to experience relational connection, but marriage is designed to address that need in a significant way.