Posted by: biblestudyseattle | October 20, 2015

Marriage Dynamics

The bible really does have insight:  “Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.”  Genesis 3:16 NASB

This translation really isn’t helpful even though it’s accurate.  The Hebrew word for desire is Tashuqah, Strong’s number 8669.  It is only used three times in the bible, and always as a strong, almost controlling desire, whether good or bad.  Another translation is:  “Yet your desire and longing will be for your husband, And he will rule [with authority] over you and be responsible for you.”  Genesis 3:16 AMP

The idea seems to be that Eve would be cursed longing for Adam as she should only long for God.  When they disobeyed, their relationship with the Lord God was forever tainted and the relationships became muddled and misplaced.  The curse includes that Adam would react to this inappropriate desire by ruling over Eve – a way of rejecting this misdirected desire.  The tendency for wives to attempt to elevate their husbands to God status can be seen when they expect their husband to read their mind.  Cannot God read minds?  Then so should my husband.  Another common fault is trying to make God (or husband) into the wife’s image by changing him.  Do not most women expect to be able to change their man?  Let’s see if we can reframe this verse:

“You will have a strong, worshipful desire and longing for your husband, yet he will disappoint you and try to deflect this controlling desire by ruling over you.”  BSS blog version.  We see this dynamic all the time in marriage.  Psychologist John Gottman calls this negative marriage pattern ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’.  It starts with what he terms the ‘harsh startup’.  This is usually begun by the wife.  She is bringing up an issue and using disrespect.  This is her desire gone wrong.  She is trying to control her man.  Men usually get defensive; that is him trying to rule over her disrespect.  And this pattern was started by Adam & Eve!  We must not look to our spouses as our savior, we must look toward our real savior!


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Categories

%d bloggers like this: