One Flesh: Notes on Ephesians 5:29-33

After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church - for we are members of his body.  "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."  This is a profound mystery but I am talking about the church.  However, each one of you must also love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.Ephesians 5:29-33

It's fascinating to me how God uses everything he created to point back to His Design and the reason He did it that way in the first place.

He created the heavens and the earth and the animals on it out of nothing. He makes a point of describing man as coming from dust or clay with His breath infusing him to give him life... and then He makes woman from the core of man, from his own flesh.

He could have just made us all from nothing just like he did everything else. But the fact that he didn't means he was trying to make a point about relationships and intimacy. Paul picks up the conversation and shows us how the fractal pattern of his design fits into all the bigger relationships.

Follow this: God is not alone but lives in community within the triad of the trinity. They are all equally God, but there is also a design of order within them, where Jesus submits to to the Father.

Then He creates man from his own breath... the echo of Spirit from His own Body and contained in his lungs (near the rib?) where presumably the wind of heaven (Holy Spirit) resides.

When he makes woman he takes a rib from Adam pointing back to his own creation telling the man that in the same way I have shared and care for you so you should care and love her.

Paul puts the pattern in the next larger context of community saying that collectively WE are the body of God since through creation, marriage and family - then in community as the body of Christ we are intimately HIS.

Even through those intimate relationships (the Godhead, man and woman, and then in the body of Christ)  there is mutual submission with a clear sense of order.

I don't pretend to understand all the complexities contained within this structure of intimacy, but rather, I am like the child who sees the kaleidoscope fractal patterns and says, "ohhh pretty!  What does it mean?"