Marital Union in Heaven, and in Creation, Part 3

First Stage of Holy Marital Union: Man – A Covenant of Flesh

As we saw in Part 2, the process of the perfecting of the Creation is still going on. Biblical history clearly shows this process, “the Chain of Events,” having taken place in earlier manifestations; the most obvious being in the case of Adam and Eve.

Like the primordial Divinity, Adam was at first an undivided whole, until –

Genesis 2:21 …the LORD God caused…a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his tsēlaim/sides/“ribs,” and He closed up the flesh underneath it. 22 And the side which the LORD God had taken from the man He built it [Hebrew banah] into a woman, and He brought her unto the man. 23 And Adam said: “This now is bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh. [So this tsēla was more than just a rib bone.] For this, she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife, and they [two] shall become one flesh.

Matthew 19:6 “Wherefore they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

The by far most common translation for the Hebrew word tsēla is “side” (KJV, 19 times), not “rib” (2 times, both in this passage). Now, “God created man in His image…male and female…” Gen. 1:27 Adam was both sides together before God made the outward division, separating the two sides. Mystical understanding is required here. Genesis 2 clearly states that the female came out of the man: she was not separately created from the dust, as Adam was. So we can see how this first biblical-historical case of a division of a wholeness into two, followed by a perfecting of the separated part, followed by the bringing together of the two into one, depicted the archetypal plan of the Hishtalsheluth in the realm of the flesh.

Adam, and later Eve, at first lived in a harmonious face-to-face relationship with their Creator. After they sinned, however, they “hid themselves from the face of the LORD God…” Gen. 3:8 That is, this individual part of the Creation, like the original whole of it, became separated away from Divinity. Human marriages ever afterward became in need of being perfected, in order to restore this original Union. And that perfection will require the resumption of male-female marital relationships being in face-to-face communion with the Creator.