Redeeming Singleness (Foreword by John Piper) E-Book

Barry Danylak

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Though marriage is highly esteemed throughout Scripture, the Bible also affirms singleness as an important calling for some Christians. Redeeming Singleness expounds a theology of singleness that shows how the blessings of the covenant are now directly mediated to believers through Christ. Redeeming Singleness offers an in-depth examination of the redemptive history from which biblical singleness emerges. Danylak illustrates the continuity of this affirmation of singleness by showing how the Old Testament creation mandate and the New Testament kingdom mandate must both be understood in light of God's plan of redemption through spiritual rebirth in Christ. As the trend toward singleness in the church increases, the need for constructive theological reflection likewise grows. Redeeming Singleness meets this need, providing encouragement to those who are single or ministering to singles and challenging believers from all walks of life to reflect more deeply on the sufficiency of Christ.

Leseprobe

RedeemingSingleness

How the Storyline of Scripture Affirms the Single Life

Barry Danylak

Foreword by John Piper

Redeeming Singleness: How the Storyline of Scripture Affirms the Single Life

Copyright © 2010 by Barry Nicholas Danylak

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Amy Bristow

Cover photo: Getty Images

First printing 2010

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked AT are the author’s translation.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from TheNew American Standard Bible®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NET are from The NET Bible® copyright © 2003 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. www.netbible.com. All rights reserved. Quoted by permission.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica. Use of either trademark requires the permission of Biblica.

Scripture references marked NLT are from TheHoly Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Ill., 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked RSV are from TheRevised Standard Version. Copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-0588-1PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-0589-8Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-0590-4ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2286-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Danylak, Barry.

Redeeming singleness : how the storyline of Scripture affirms the single life / Barry Danylak ; foreword by John Piper.

      p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-4335-0588-1 (tpb)

    1. Celibacy—Biblical teaching. 2. Single people—Religious life—Biblical teaching. I. Title.

BS680.S5D36        2010

220.8'306732—dc22                                                    2010006579

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

VP                  19    18    17    16    15    14    13    12    11    10

14    13    12    11    10    9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1

Tomy parents,Walter and Marjorie Danylak,who begat me in Christ

Contents

List of Abbreviations

List of Figures and Tables

Foreword by John Piper

Introduction

1. Begetting from the Beginning:

Procreation, Marriage, and the Blessing of God to the World

2. Living in the Land:

Why Every Israelite Man and Woman Married

3. Prophetic Paradox:

How Failure of a Nation Brings Blessing to the World

4. Good News for the Gentiles:

How Abraham’s Offspring Come from Jesus Alone

5. The King and the Kingdom:

Jesus’ Surprising Statements on Singleness and Family

6. A Charisma in Corinth:

Paul’s Vision of Singleness for the Church

Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes

Subject Index

Scripture Index

List of Abbreviations

ABAnchor BibleBABiblical ArchaeologistCBQCatholic Biblical QuarterlyCTRCriswell Theological ReviewHRHistory of ReligionsIntInterpretationISBEInternational Standard Bible EncyclopediaITCInternational Theological CommentaryJAOSJournal of the American Oriental SocietyJBLJournal of Biblical LiteratureJETSJournal of the Evangelical Theological SocietyJRJournal of ReligionJSNTJournal for the Study of the New TestamentJSOTJournal for the Study of the Old TestamentLCLLoeb Classical LibraryNACNew American CommentaryNICNTNew International Commentary on the New TestamentNICOTThe New International Commentary on the Old TestamentNIDOTTENew International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and ExegesisNIGTCNew International Greek Testament CommentaryNTSNew Testament StudiesOCDOxford Classical DictionaryOTLOld Testament LibraryResQRestoration QuarterlyRevExpReview and ExpositorScrHierScripta hierosolymitanaSPSacra paginaTDNTTheological Dictionary of the New TestamentTDOTTheological Dictionary of the Old TestamentTLOTTheological Lexicon of the Old TestamentTynBulTyndale BulletinUSQRUnion Seminary Quarterly ReviewVTVetus TestamentumWBCWord Biblical CommentaryZAWZeitschrift für die alttestamentliche WissenschaftZNWZeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

Figure 1.1 Marital Status Trend: United States

Figure 1.2 Marital Status Trend: England and Wales

Figure 2.1 God’s Covenant People in the Old Testament: Citizens and Foreigners

Figure 3.1 Illustration of a Woman

Tables

Table 1.1 Occurrences of “Be Fruitful and Multiply”in the Old Testament

Table 1.2 The Parallel Structure of Genesis 15:1–6 and 15:7–2

Table 1.3 The Promises as Given in Chapter 22 Comparedwith Earlier Promises

Table 1.4 God’s Promises in His Covenant to Abraham

Table 2.1 Key Points of Similarity between the Abrahamicand Davidic Covenants

Table 4.1 Paul’s Allegorical Comparison of Galatians 4:22–31

Table 5.1 Comparison of Jesus’ Dialog on Marriageand Resurrection

Foreword

by John Piper

The greatest, wisest, most fully human person who has ever lived never married—Jesus Christ. His greatest apostle never married and was thankful for his singleness. Jesus himself said that in the age to come we do not marry. And he added that the age to come had already broken into this world.

Therefore, the presence of single people in the church not only “attests the sufficiency of Christ for the reception of God’s covenantal blessings in the new covenant,” as Danylak has written, but also reminds us “that the spiritual age has already been inaugurated in Christ and awaits imminent consummation.”

When I met Barry Danylak at Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, in the summer of 2006, I was amazed at the research he was doing on a biblical theology of singleness. Not only was the scope of it unprecedented, but the theological and practical insights struck me as biblically compelling and practically urgent. I don’t know of anyone else who has ever provided the extent of biblical reflection on singleness that Barry has provided for us here.

Both marriage and singleness demand the most serious and solid biblical insight. These are realities that affect every area of our life and thought. We cannot settle for superficial pep talks. Our lives cry out for significance, and significance comes from seeing ourselves the way God sees us—including our singleness. My guess is that virtually every single who reads this book will finish with a sense of wonder at who they are and how little they knew about this gift and calling.

Barry is keenly aware of the progress of redemptive history and its stunning implications for the single life. Early in that history, marriage and physical children were fundamental to the blessings of the Mosaic covenant, but they are not fundamental to the new covenant the way they were then. And what is beautiful about the way Barry develops this historical flow is that the glory of Jesus Christ is exalted above all things.

Barry elevates but does not absolutize the calling of the single life. Its greatness lies, he says, in this: “It is a visible reminder that the kingdom of God points to a reality which stands beyond worldly preoccupations of marriage, family, and career.” Indeed. And that greater reality is the all-satisfying, everlasting friendship of Jesus himself in the new heavens and the new earth. Marriage and singleness will be transcended, and Christ himself will make those categories obsolete in the joy of his presence. A life of joyful singleness witnesses to this.

—John PiperPastor for Preaching and VisionBethlehem Baptist Church

Introduction

This book is not like many others you will pick up about a Christian perspective of singleness. It does not focus on the personal experience of singleness, or on cultural analysis of the phenomenon of singleness in the contemporary church. Nor is it a conventional presentation of the biblical teaching on the subject, or an attempt to glean from exemplary models of single people from Scripture or church history. This book is also not a how-to manual either for living the single life well or for most expediently relieving oneself of the status. There are many other well-written books that focus on all these areas. The starting point for this book is to reflect on the purpose of biblical affirmation of the single life by exploring how singleness itself fits into God’s larger purpose of redeeming a people for his glory. The fruit of such reflection will contribute toward constructing a biblical theology of singleness.

One must confess in this modern age that to claim that a book is a “theology” of anything is tantamount to playing with fire, and perhaps it is even the kiss of death for any author wishing to attract interested readers. For many Christians theology connotes that which is boring and obscure and divides well-meaning people over distinctions without a difference. Why then would a theology of singleness be even remotely helpful? The answer is that theology provides a degree of logic and coherence for understanding our faith. It is theology that provides the handles for us to make sense of both what we believe as Christians and why we believe it. So our purpose here is to explore the logic and coherency of why the Christian Scriptures affirm singleness as good in a created world in which sexual partnerships and marriage are the pervasive norm for human beings.

The payoff of such an endeavor is that such theological grounding gives rootedness and dimensionality to living as biblically principled people. Just as prudent theological reflection on the nature and attributes of God (e.g., his omnipotence, omnipresence, sovereignty, etc.) might revolutionize how we approach God in prayer, so too, prudent theological reflection on a comparatively minor biblical topic—singleness—can revitalize how we think and approach living as the family of God in the modern world. Moreover, biblical theological reflection is especially fruitful on topics such as marriage and singleness because at the surface level the cultural bridge between our modern world and the biblical world can be very great.1

The aim of such a biblical theology of singleness is not to provide an apologetic for singleness as an attempt to biblically persuade anyone either to marry or to remain single. Nevertheless, theological reflection can give an added degree of excitement and richness to living a life singly for the kingdom of God. Likewise the whole church can benefit through such theological reflection, whether we are married, single, divorced, or widowed, since greater clarity in understanding any one part of the body of Christ simultaneously brings greater clarity in understanding the whole.

Christianity versus Judaism, Islam, and Mormonism

One might wonder why singleness should have any theological significance at all. In our modern Western culture, the decision to marry or not to marry is largely viewed as a personal lifestyle choice without any particular ethical or theological implications. For many, the decision to marry is inextricably linked to encountering or not encountering a suitable partner; it is not seen as a conscious a priori choice apart from potential partners. Why then should we expect any fruit at all in exploring the unmarried state as especially theologically significant?

The first clue is the observation that the affirmation of singleness as a lifestyle commitment is somewhat distinctive to New Testament Christianity. This is most visible when comparing the view of celibate singleness within Christianity with Christianity’s closest monotheistic siblings: Judaism, Islam, and Mormonism. In regard to marriage and family values, all four “sibling” faiths have much in common. Adherents of all see themselves as champions of “family values”; all look to the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 as normative for understanding the institution of marriage as fundamentally good and part of the designed order of creation; conversely, all uniformly condemn the practice of adultery and fornication at least in part on the teaching of the Pentateuch. Yet on the question of maintaining a life of celibate singleness, Christianity is strikingly different from the other three. Rabbinic Judaism viewed procreation and, by implication, marriage as a divine commandment on the basis of the creation mandate in Genesis 1:28 to “be fruitful and multiply.”2 A negative disposition toward a life of celibacy persists in modern Judaism. The citation for “celibacy” in The New Encyclopedia of Judaism begins bluntly: “Marriage is a commandment in Jewish tradition and celibacy is deplored.” The Koran similarly encourages the single person to marry, and Mohammed himself apparently condemned the practice of celibacy as “exceeding the law of God.”3 Celibate singleness is also explicitly rejected in Mormonism, where undergoing the rite of celestial marriage in the temple is necessary to achieve exaltation in the highest heaven in the hereafter, whereby human beings become gods and increase their posterity eternally.4

Thus while Christianity is similar to its Judeo-Christian siblings in its sexual ethics and value for family, it is notably different from its siblings in its affirmation of singleness as a gift and valued lifestyle within the life of the believing community. This difference, as we shall see, is more than simply an enlightened relegation of the marriage decision to the realm of individual choice but relates to something fundamentally distinct within Christianity itself—namely, the atoning work of Jesus Christ.

The Emerging Culture of Non-marriage: The Data Speaks

There are also powerful cultural forces at work in the twenty-first century that compel the need for clarifying theological reflection on the question of singleness. This is evidenced dramatically in demographic trends of the past generation. The two graphs below show that since the mid-twentieth century the percentage of married adults has been on a steady decline from (in the U.S.) over two-thirds of the overall adult population in 1960 to less than 55 percent by 2009 (Fig. 1.1).5 In England and Wales the trend has been even more severe, where the percentage of married adults has dropped from over two-thirds of the population in 1971 to less than 50 percent by 2007, and is projected to drop to only 41 percent by 2031 (Fig. 1.2).6 The increase in the never-married single population as indicated in both graphs is a major factor (along with the notable increase in divorced population), and a major factor in this is the rise of cohabitation as an acceptable lifestyle. But the demographic reality is that the world the church is trying to reach in England and Wales is now in the majority an unmarried world, and the trend in the United States is not far behind. Whether or not we like it, we now find ourselves more and more living amidst an unmarried society.

Figure 1.1: Marital Status Trend: United States

Figure 1.2: Marital Status Trend: England and Wales

While unmarried adults are becoming dominant outside the church, a recent study by George Barna suggests they are significantly underrepresented in nearly every facet of church life.7 While on a typical week slightly more than half of married Americans attend a church service, only about one of every three single (adult) Americans attends.8 Presence at a service is much more likely among widowed singles than among divorced or never-married adults.9 Though 23 percent of married adults additionally attend a Sunday school class, only 15 percent of single adults attend. Although singles might have more discretionary leisure time for church-related activities, fewer than one in five regularly volunteer at church, attend a Sunday school class, or participate in a small group. On the other hand, singles are 50 percent more likely to volunteer their services to a nonprofit charitable group during a typical week than to offer themselves to the ministry of their church.10

Single adults are also less financially committed to their respective churches, with never-married adults contributing in an average year less than a quarter of what their married counterparts contribute.11 Similarly, they are half as likely to serve in leadership capacities within the church.12 The trend is the same in every category. Single people are less involved in the life of the church than their married counterparts. And while most single American adults think of themselves as Christian, Barna’s research demonstrates a remarkably tepid level of commitment among them. The composite message of data is clear: the future life and vitality of the evangelical faith will require greater engagement with single adults both inside and outside the walls of the local church.

Understanding Biblical Teaching on Singleness

While only a minority of adults remain single their entire lives, we all begin our lives single, and the majority of us also will exit this life single. Also, most married people are close to people who are unmarried, whether not-yet-married children or friends or divorced or widowed friends and family members. Even those who are healthy and happily married will typically on occasion find themselves reflecting on the possibility of losing their mate to disease or accident and the prospect of living life alone again. The tendency for such reflection generally increases with age as the potential becomes greater. The apostle Paul also hints that there is a constructive dimension to keeping the temporality of marriage in view, when he admonishes that even those who have wives should be as if they had none (1 Cor. 7:29). Indeed there is health and vitality in keeping an appropriately loose grip on all aspects of our temporal life as a way to acknowledge that all the material bestowments we have are good gifts from God but temporary in their duration.

But in exploring biblical teaching on the subject of singleness, one inevitably encounters a couple of immediate difficulties. First, all questions relating to marriage, singleness, divorce, and procreation of children are heavily conditioned by culture, and the culture of the biblical world is considerably different from our modern context. Moreover, the “biblical” world itself was far from culturally monolithic. The customs and cultural expectations of Moabite Ruth and her Jewish fiancé Boaz of early Israel were a far cry from the Greco-Roman urban world of first-century Corinth. The concerns of the ancient Israelites with the institution of levirate marriage, for example, are entirely foreign to our modern experience, while the modern question of homosexual marriage would have seemed utterly absurd to the ancients. Since the reasons and purposes for why people married then are not always precisely equivalent to the modern world, fully appreciating the biblical teaching on marriage and singleness also requires some attention to the world of the original writers and readers of the biblical text. This task is not insurmountable, nor can we afford to ignore or underestimate it.

Moreover a number of the biblical texts that speak to the subject are exegetically difficult. What did Jesus mean when he spoke of making oneself a eunuch “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” in Matthew 19:12? Though the figure of the eunuch was generally negative in the Old Testament and they were banned from access to the temple,13 Jesus appears to speak of them positively. The statement in 1 Corinthians 7:1b (NASB), “it is good for a man not to touch a woman,” is especially perplexing. On the one hand the language recalls the language of Genesis 2:18, “It is not good that the man should be alone” and would thus be a surprising assertion for Paul to make given his Jewish heritage. But nor does it seem to be a logical assertion of the Corinthians, who from evidence elsewhere in the letter appear to be anything but celibates. A close reading of both biblical Testaments reveals a curious dichotomy. While in much of the Old Testament we find a generally negative disposition toward one who is single and unmarried, in the New Testament the view we find is much more positive. Given that the New Testament authors generally affirm Old Testament ethical principles on sexuality and family, it is curious that New Testament authors deviate from the Old Testament on this particular point.

The Approach of This Book

Taken at face value both the eunuch statement of Jesus’ in Matthew 19:12 and the “it is good” statement of Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:1b appear to conflict with the creation story affirmation of Genesis 2:18, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” How these texts are best reconciled is the task of theologians. Some might opt to let the clearer texts interpret the less clear or to look for an appropriately qualified overarching principle that seems to reconcile the apparent differences. The approach taken here is a diachronic biblical-theological approach, by which we mean one that acknowledges the theological development that occurs through the progressive stages of biblical revelation. What is often depicted and described at first by means of illustrations, metaphors, allusions, and prophecies is often seen more clearly in a richer, more fully orbed form in subsequent phases of biblical revelation.

We can simplify our task by identifying a few major stages of biblical revelation. The most obvious division in the biblical canon is the separation between the Old and New Testaments. The word testament is an English derivation from the Latin testamentum, which is the common translation of the Greek word diathēkē, which means “covenant.”14 Thus, from its name the Old Testament is primarily an account of the old covenant that God established with the nation of Israel, while the New Testament is primarily an account of the new covenant God later established with the church.

Within the Old Testament we may identify a further distinction between the ideal embodied by the Old Testament covenants, which include the Abrahamic covenant, the Sinaitic covenant, and the Davidic covenant, and the resulting failure of the nation of Israel to keep the Sinaitic covenant, as recorded in the prophetic books. The prophets stand in a critical juncture. They pronounce judgment upon the nation for its failure to live according to the stipulations of the covenant. But, at the same time, they offer a picture of expectant hope, anticipating a coming messiah and a new covenant.

The New Testament represents a new stage of biblical revelation in two important and related respects. First, the New Testament authors wrote from a post-resurrection perspective. They had witnessed the fulfillment of the ages in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But they also had the benefit of the illuminating insight of the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). Luke records in the Emmaus road experience that the two walking with Jesus had their eyes “opened” when they recognized Jesus (Luke 24:31). The same Greek word for opened (dianoigō) is used by Luke in the very next verse to describe how Jesus opened the Scriptures to them, explaining from Moses through the Prophets all the Scriptures concerning himself.

The writers of the New Testament thus had the benefit of all the early writings of the Old Testament, the prophets and their prophecies, the life and testimonies of Jesus, and the theological illumination of the Holy Spirit. Writing from the perspective of their distinct vantage point, they were in a position to provide a theological capstone upon the whole storyline of biblical history.

The Structure of This Book

The book is divided into six chapters that explore the issue of singleness, mindful of the progressive stages of biblical revelation we have just examined. The primary benefit of this approach is that the topic can be seen to fit within the developing flow of the biblical storyline and the primary theological point of that storyline, namely, God’s plan to reconcile a people unto himself for the sake of his glory. That plan centers upon the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ by which God retains his justice in reconciling a people unto himself. A secondary benefit to taking this approach is that some of the apparent dissonances between the view of singleness in the Old Testament and the view in the New Testament can be much more readily reconciled when they are seen within the developing biblical-theological storyline.

Chapter 1 begins where the biblical canon begins, examining the importance of marriage and procreation within the pre-history of the old covenant, namely in the accounts of creation and the patriarchs. The next chapter focuses on the place and importance of marriage and procreation within the Sinaitic and Davidic covenants and how they were lived out in the nation of ancient Israel. Chapter 3 examines the new hope given to singles and those without children amidst the prophets’ expectant hope of a new work of God. Chapter 4 jumps to the end of the story and considers what is fundamentally different in the new covenant, as described by the apostle Paul, and its implications for singleness and marriage in the church age. Chapter 5 considers Jesus’ teaching on birth, singleness, and family as described by the Gospel writers. The final chapter concludes with an examination of the topic of marriage and singleness given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7—a capstone discussion of singleness as a spiritual gift for the Corinthian church.

This is one biblical topic for which it is crucial to get to the end of the biblical story, i.e., the post-resurrection perspective of the New Testament writers, in order to most fully appreciate the beginning of the story in the Old Testament. So I urge readers not to stop the journey too soon and thereby miss the full sense of how things develop. One key to good biblical theology is always to keep the parts in proper perspective to the whole, and that is also my desire in this biblical treatment of singleness.

1

Begetting from the Beginning

Procreation, Marriage, and the Blessing of God to the World

When I have occasion to speak before various church groups on questions of singleness and marriage, I often begin the discussion by asking, “Can anyone tell me what is the first commandment in the Bible?” After some momentary blank stares, generally one or two individuals are brave enough to assert themselves and faithfully quote Matthew 22:37, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

“Ah, yes,” I respond, “you have faithfully cited the first and greatest commandment. But I actually only asked for the first commandment in the Bible, as in the first one we would find if we began reading it from page 1.”

At this point I encounter more quizzical stares. After all, most Christians do not pay much attention to the order of biblical commandments, and even when we do, we struggle to agree on what constitutes a bona fide command.

If I were addressing a circle of Orthodox Jews, my audience would probably not have been tricked by the question. They would likely have known of the work of the twelfth-century Jewish sage Maimonides, who codified all 613 commandments of the Torah. The first of these 613 to appear chronologically in the Old Testament is the commandment, “Be fruitful and multiply,” in Genesis 1:28.

Once the answer is given, it seems painfully obvious. So I press the audience with a further question: “And to whom was this commandment first given?” If there is silence a second time, it is because the question appears too obvious to answer. Once again the question is a bit of a trick, because the commission to “be fruitful and multiply” is first given in Genesis 1:22 on the fifth day of creation, to the sea creatures and the birds, when God says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” The mandate is given again by God to human beings on the sixth day: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).

In the Beginning . . .

The First Commandment

Reflecting upon this double occurrence in Genesis 1 of the mandate, “Be fruitful and multiply,” is instructive. It underscores that reproducing oneself is a fundamental and natural task, commissioned by God not only for human beings but for the whole created order. The procreative mandate is given even before human beings are created. It is woven into the very fabric of the created order that God fashioned before human beings were on the earth. What differentiates human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom is not found in the reproductive commission but in the distinctive that they were created in the image of God and have an additional mandate to subdue the earth and have dominion over it.

Jewish tradition, from the rabbinic interpreters of the New Testament era onward, has not questioned interpreting “be fruitful and multiply” as a divine command of the Torah. The Jewish Mishnah makes it explicit: “No man may abstain from keeping the law, ‘Be fruitful and multiply,’ unless he already has children.”1 The rabbis were explicit that the duty of procreation falls on the man and not the woman.

Some of my Protestant friends, on the other hand, have questioned the presumption that “mandate” need be understood as a commandment at all. Is it not rather a divine blessing? Genesis 1:28 makes the association between begetting and blessing explicit:

God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

The imperative to “be fruitful and multiply” expected of the first human beings goes hand-in-hand with the act of God’s blessing them. Procreation requires that a human act be carried out, but the results of the human act are efficacious only through divine provision. We already have perhaps a hint of the forthcoming drama found later in Genesis where the offspring of the covenantal blessing arises not simply through the human procreative act but as a result of God’s supernatural act of provision.

While the act of being fruitful and multiplying is thus a divine-human act, in actuality the Hebrew author sometimes stresses one aspect more than the other. By examining whether blessing is mentioned in the immediate context of the reference, and by looking at the subject and form of the verb, we can get a relatively good sense of where the dominant emphasis is being applied. Table 1.1 provides a list of all the occurrences of the couplet in the Old Testament (it never appears at all in the New Testament). Of the twelve Old Testament references to being fruitful and multiplying, only five are clear imperatives upon humans or creatures (bolded in the table). It is given as an imperative to human beings only in three instances: to the first human beings, Adam and Eve; to Noah and his family; and to Jacob. At first it might seem surprising that it was given to Jacob and not also to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob’s sons, or Israel as a nation. But it does make some sense when we consider that Adam was the progenitor of the human race, Noah was a second Adam, and Jacob was the immediate progenitor of the nation of Israel.2 Each of the three was father to a human race of critical importance.

From the table it seems surprising that the mandate is given twice to Noah, and in the second instance it is issued without the blessing. However, as Genesis 9:1–7 forms a single text unit, the command, as given in verse 7, may be nothing more than an emphatic reiteration of verse 1. Maimonides cites Genesis 1:28, 9:1, and 9:6–7 as proof-texts for including “be fruitful and multiply” among the commandments of the Torah.3 Whether Maimonides was correct to include it among the divine commands for all human beings is debatable. What we can conclude from the creation account is that procreation is part of the pattern of the created order, it is associated with God’s blessing, and it was an explicit divine commandment given to Adam, Noah, and Jacob.

Table 1.1: Occurrences of “Be Fruitful and Multiply” in the Old Testament

The Provision of Marriage

While marriage is not explicitly mentioned early in the creation account, it is certainly implied in the concluding clauses of Genesis 1:27: “In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The biblical etiology (an account of something’s origin) of marriage as a divinely sanctioned human institution does not appear until the final scene of the creation account in Genesis 2:18–24. In this latter episode we find no mention at all of procreation as the basis for marriage; rather, here the motivation for the account is the initial observation by the Lord God that “it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:18).

With this initial pronouncement God puts Adam to sleep, takes his rib from him, and creates Eve. The didactic function of the episode is made clear in the concluding pronouncement in 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” So while an implied purpose for marriage in the creation account is to enable fulfillment of the divine mandate to “be fruitful and multiply,” the explicit purpose the account gives is for companionship and assistance.

Here we see emerging a seminal theology of marriage. The wife serves both as relational companion and as provider of material assistance to the husband. The husband in turn functions in a complementary role for the wife. The separation of the two incidents perhaps serves to highlight the author’s point that marriage was intended to provide more than the mere need to procreate legitimate heirs; it was also the foundation of the new institution of relational support in the human family unit.

In Jesus’ discussion with the Pharisees about divorce, he cites as the basis for marriage Genesis 1:27, “male and female he created them,” which he conjoins with the conclusion in 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”4 In the context of Genesis 2, the “therefore” of verse 24 follows from the man’s condition of first being alone (v. 18) and subsequently receiving the woman as “flesh of my flesh” (v. 23). Jesus, however, links the conclusion not to the man’s need for companionship but rather to God’s ordained pattern of creation as constituting them “male and female.”