ByWhen God made the world, He placed Adam in Eden to dress and keep it (Genesis 2:15). However, as Adam was fulfilling his mandate, God saw that he was alone. Therefore, he needed a helper suitable for him (Genesis 2:15). So God put Adam to sleep, took one of his ribs (side) and used it to make the woman.
Despite the heavy work on Adam, God never thought of making more than one woman to help him. That means polygamy has never been God’s idea from the beginning. But the question is, “why didn’t God explicitly speak against it in the Bible when some of His people were practising it, especially kings like David and Solomon?”
In Genesis 3, the Bible records how man disobeyed God and opened a portal for sin to enter the world. Before that happened, Adam and Eve didn’t have any children. Cain and Abel were born after the fall, while sin was already in the world. The desire to sin started manifesting in Cain; it resulted in him killing Abel. God punished Cain for what he did, but out of remorse, he left the presence of God (Genesis 4:16).
The origin of polygamy
After Cain left God’s presence, his generations (beginning from the fifth generation) started building civilisations. They also invented evil things like weapons for war and musical instruments for sinful entertainment.
All these things they did were purely evil. In fact, that increased men’s sinful actions over the entire earth because they were outside God’s presence. (Anything that isn’t born or founded in God’s presence ends up destroying people and things.)
But there was a man who introduced polygamy – an evil thing that had never happened before. His name is Lamech. He’s the first man who married two wives – Adah and Zillah (Genesis 4:18-19). He was so evil that he killed a man for hurting him. He never knew forgiveness but vengeance. Because he’s the pioneer of the fifth generation of Cain, he obviously led his family to introduce things that increased people’s knowledge of sin.
God’s initial reply to polygamy
God finished the entire people of the earth except for Noah and his family in Genesis 6. However, people didn’t stop sinning. Polygamy also didn’t leave the world. Yet it wasn’t a sin people did until the time of Jacob and Esau.
Jacob and Esau
God hated Esau but loved Jacob before those twins were born. Why? He knew what they would do in future. Esau married two women – Judith and Basemath, whose families were part of the cursed generations of Canaan, Noah’s grandson (Genesis 26:34-35). Later on, he also married Mahalath an Ishmaelite, making three. That was awful, and his parents grieved about it. However, God was silent.
A time came when Esau wanted to kill Jacob for stealing his blessing. But Rebekah manoeuvred to let Isaac send Jacob to Paddan Aram – the family’s hometown.
Before Jacob went, Isaac told him clearly that he should take a wife (not wives) for himself where he’s going (Genesis 28:2). That means Isaac, being a godly man, wanted to stop polygamy from perpetuating in his family line. But then, the enemy uses Laban again, and Jacob ends up marrying two women – Leah and Rachel.
The spiritual battle to end polygamy continued on and on in the Bible till it ended after Solomon died.
Marriage – A picture of Jesus and the Church, His bride
For God to end polygamy and sin in its entirety, He loved the world and gave up Jesus to die for all (John 3:16, 1 John 4:10). But after Jesus went, He chose Peter to be the rock on whom He’d build His church against the prevalence of the gates of hell (Matthew 16:18).
In the context of polygamy, Jesus is saying, “Through My church, I’ll never permit polygamy – which is from the devil to persist in this world.” When Paul always wrote about marriage anywhere in the epistles, he referred to just two individuals, a husband and a wife (not wives).
To this date, God hates polygamy and will never permit it in the Church, even if any of His servants fail to enforce it in ministry. It doesn’t glorify Him and also doesn’t exemplify Jesus’ relationship with the Church. Believers in Christ, don’t be deceived about God’s intentions about polygamy. He hates it, and it’s not His idea from the beginning. God doesn’t change, and neither does His systems change. Since He made male and female from the beginning, marriage will always be about one man and woman, nothing more, nothing less.
