At the beginning of recorded history, God created Adam, but He knew that it was not good for Adam to be alone, so He created Eve. At this point, God instituted marriage, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24).
The culture we live in today and many other cultures in the past have looked upon this holy institution as a contract between people. It has become almost laughable when some people go to the altar and promise before God that they will bind themselves together until death. Many of them do not believe in God at all. What weight does a promise hold when they do not believe in the one to whom they are promising? So they promise to each other. Do they really mean it? Will they go through sickness, poverty, and worse? Our divorce rate says they won't. Even within the church, the divorce rate in comparable to the divorce rate outside. I spoke last night about how Christians are to live a life that honors God before an unbelieving world, and we cannot even keep a promise to God or the one we say we love! Pathetic! It makes me wonder if I ever want to get married.
What is the main reason for divorce in this country? Money. Money! Did the vows not say "for richer or for poorer?" God gives one acceptable excuse for divorce, infidelity. Even in this case, the desire is that there would be reconciliation, forgiveness, and preservation of the marriage rather than divorce. If there is no repentance or continuation of the infidelity, then it can be grounds for divorce. Ultimately, the goal is to be like Jesus. Through Him we have been forgiven of our infidelity to God, "When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, 'Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD'" (Hosea 1:2). We need to be seeking to love and forgive, even in cases of infidelity. If you desire to see how much God loves and forgives, read chapters one through three in Hosea.
Marriage is a covenant, not a contract. It is not meant to be dissolved when either party is dissatisfied with the arrangement. It is meant to persist as long as both parties are still living. This is what Jesus said about divorce, "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery" (Matthew 5:31-32).
What about those famous kings in the Old Testament who had a ton of wives? I'm thinking specifically of Solomon who had many, "He had 700 wives, princesses, and 300 concubines" (1 Kings 11:3a). Dude! Seriously?!? How on earth do you deal with that many? Why was God fine with that if marriage is supposed to be only one man and one woman? Even David, who is referred to as "a man after His [God's] own heart" (1 Samuel 13:14) had many wives and concubines, "And David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem, after he came from Hebron, and more sons and daughters were born to David" (2 Samuel 5:13). The answer is that God is not fine with it.
The Bible is not a list of people without flaws from whom we can model our lives. The Bible shows us people, men and women with faults. It is history. Abraham, David, and Solomon lived and breathed just like we do today, and they sinned just like we do today. Their actions are not somehow acceptable to God merely because they were written down in the Bible. The verse that speaks of Solomon's many wives and the following verse tell us that, "His wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father" (1 Kings 11:3b-4). David desired God and wanted Him, but he made mistakes, too. The most famous of these mistakes has to be with Uriah and Bathsheba. David murdered him in order to have her. That is all kinds of evil! In fact, how would you view even your best friend if you suddenly found out that they murdered someone in order to marry that person's spouse? It would be hard to continue that friendship in exactly the same way, right? You might wonder what they would be capable of doing to you if they suddenly decided your spouse was looking particularly nice one day.
I do not know of any "thou shalt not" verse in Scripture that specifically prohibits polygamy (either polygyny or polyandry), but Scripture as a whole has a negative view of the practice. The original establishment of the institution was one man and one woman. In Genesis 16, the marriage between Abram and Sarai is defiled when Sarai brings Abram to Hagar to conceive a child, "But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise" (Galatians 4:23). It was not God's will for Hagar to be brought into the marriage bed, and we feel the repercussions of that mistake even today as the children of Ishmael spread their beliefs by oppression and murder. Men with more than one wife are prohibited from holding the office of pastor or deacon in the church, "This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you—if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach" (Titus 1:5-7a), and "The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach" (1 Timothy 3:1-2). If God was fine with multiple wives, this prohibition would not have been one of the first prohibitions on both of these lists. God is not fine with polygamy. He never has been. Chalk another one up to the freewill of sinful people.
The Scripture only gives us one person to model our behavior after in all ways, and that person is Jesus, God Himself. He is the only one who is good. Men and women throughout Scripture can be looked at as "heroes of the faith," but they all fall short somewhere. Having multiple spouses is where several of them did sin. Having multiple spouses even drew Solomon away from God and damaged that relationship. God is not for that. He loves us and wants the best for us, that includes any marriage to be only one man and one woman. That is how He set it up, and that is how it should remain.
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