We get a slew of questions from listeners from Indiana to India. And this one comes from a listener named Ruby in Jaipur. Hello, Pastor John. Thank you for your sermons and for this podcast. I got married recently and here in India, culturally, a woman lives with the husband's family.

What would you say about this in light of the multiple times where the Bible talks about a man leaving his parents to become one with his wife? What does this leaving look like in a marriage where he physically doesn't leave his parents' home at all? It's risky for me to speak with too much specificity across the miles and across the cultures into a situation that I know very little about culturally.

So let me see if I can say some foundational things without too many specifics that might nevertheless give some clear guidance in this matter, because it really does have relevance. This question and the text she's referring to, it really does have relevance to every culture, mine, hers, even though some cultures make this word of Scripture more pressing than others.

So here's the text. In Genesis 2, 23 and 24, Moses writes, just after God created the first woman from Adam's side, he said this. Moses said this, "Then the man said, 'This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

Therefore," here's the key verse, "Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast," we call it leaving and cleaving, "hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." This command to leave mother and father is all the more remarkable because Adam and Eve didn't have any mother-father.

Moses was taking this moment in the creation story to lay a foundation for all subsequent human life. That's very significant. And the three things he stresses are, one, leave mother and father; two, hold fast or cleave or be united in a new covenant relationship, new covenant relationship, not new covenant relationship, in a new covenant relationship with your spouse; and then third, become one flesh, which includes at least a new intimacy of sexual union, its depth, and all its fruitfulness.

Then Jesus cites this verse, Matthew 19, 5, and Paul quotes this verse in the all-important passage of Ephesians 5, 31 and 32. So both Jesus and Paul recognize how foundational this sentence was in Genesis 2:24, and they reaffirm it for their day, I think our day as well. So Ruby is right to draw attention to this verse as relevant and indeed urgent, it sounds, for her situation.

Now, the reason I call Ephesians 5 an all-important passage is because Paul more clearly than anyone in the Bible reveals the mystery that was present there from the beginning in Genesis 2.24, namely, the union of a man and a woman in marriage was modeled on the covenant relationship between Christ and his church.

Here's the way he says it. This is Ephesians 5, 31. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife. The two shall become one flesh." This mystery is profound, and I am saying it refers to Christ and the church, and that's what gives such weight and lasting durability to Genesis 2.24.

So in answer to Ruby's question, Ephesians 5, 23 to 33, that whole unit gives the best guidelines to the essence or the heart of what it means to leave mother and father and cleave to each other in marriage. And I think if we read it carefully, we can draw out at least four aspects of a marriage relationship that distances it from former participation in the household with mother and father.

So here they are. One, there is now a new allegiance, devotion, affection, intimacy, priority, which is clearly implied in the analogy of Christ and the church. That's number one, a new allegiance. Number two, there is a new structure of responsibility for who bears the primary burden of providing materially for the family, namely the husband, not the father, not the wife.

Of course, everybody in the clan, the extended family, all the more so in an agrarian culture, everybody's pitching in to make life work, especially in the agrarian society, but there is a unique responsibility falling to the new husband. Number three, there is a new structure of responsibility for who bears the primary burden of protecting the new family.

Of course, the whole clan is important in providing protection, but there's a new special burden that falls not to the father any longer, that is the father of the groom, but falls to the husband in seeing to it that his wife and children are protected and safe. And number four, there's a new structure of responsibility for who bears the primary burden of providing leadership in this new unit of marriage.

And hence Paul calls the husband the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church, which has profound implications for how each of them relates to the generation that has just gone before, which used to embody so much authority. Those four new structures of allegiance and responsibility necessarily lead to a kind of leaving mother and father, leaving old structures of allegiance, old structures of provision, old structures of protection, old structures of leadership.

At least that much is built into the very nature of what the New Testament describes as marriage. Now, what's not mandated with any explicitness or specificity is how much geography or distance, like 10 feet or 10 miles, must exist between this new unit of social life called marriage on the one hand and mother and father on the other hand.

I would guess this is very different from culture to culture, depending on how clans and villages and cities and vocations are conceived in those cultures. So I think the principle would go something like this across all cultures. We may adapt to present cultural norms to the degree that they don't undermine the new structures of responsibility in marriage.

And whenever there is a compromising or undermining of those new structures, we should be moving towards some cultural alteration in our living situation. So that's the best I can do without too much specificity. But let me close with one last thought. When Paul is thinking about taking care of widows in 1 Timothy 5, 8, he says, if anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for the members of his household, he's denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

He's thinking about mom or grandmama, and her husband has died and she has no resources. So I don't think that leaving mother and father in the forming of a new family should mean a loss of care or a loss of thankfulness or a loss of respect, but that whatever distance happens, there should be some sense of ongoing responsibility that aging parents be taken care of.

Amen. That's a good and helpful perspective. Thank you, Pastor John. And Ruby, thanks for the email question. And on a related note, we recently talked about caring for aging parents. That was in episode number 1078 titled Retirement Homes and Caring for Aging Parents. That was an episode we released back on August 9th.

You can find that episode in our archives at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And there you can search our past episodes, browse them all, and check out all the many questions we have addressed over the years. Well, the apostle John tells us that there is a sin that leads to death and there's a sin that does not lead to death.

So what's the difference between the sin that leads to death and the sin that doesn't? We'll look at 1 John 5, verses 16 to 17 on Monday. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you then. Amen. Amen.