01-15 Adam & Eve
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Genesis 2:18-22
Genesis 2:18-22
One of the great tragedies of the COVID pandemic (besides the loss of life of those who had complications from the virus) was the isolation it forced nearly everyone into. You can think back to March 2020 when news of the virus spreading quickly in our country caused the knee-jerk reaction (I’m not being critical of the reaction—b/c nobody knew anything about what was going on)—but that reaction caused the shutdown of everything…even the gathering of the church.
Now, for some that isolation was welcomed b/c it forced you to slow down just a bit. But for others—it was truly a difficult time not to be connected with family and friends. That brought about a hardship in all age groups—but apparently, in a study conducted by Harvard Graduate School of Education—that during the pandemic feelings of isolation among older teens and young adults was greatest.
Psychologist Richard Weissbourd gives one explanation: “Older teens and young adults may be particularly susceptible because they are often transitioning from their “inherited families to their chosen families,” meaning they lack important connections to those who can “be critical guardrails against loneliness.”
Just one observation that even though this age group is the most connected in terms of social media—it doesn’t replace the connections that are most healthy.
All age groups encountered that loneliness which—which you don’t have to read very far in the Bible to know loneliness and isolation doesn’t have a positive impact on humanity.
18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
This morning, I would like to point out 2 features in our vv that remind us of God’s constant care and provision and move us to deeper appreciation for God’s creation of the family. Moses has something very important to say about the formation of a new relationship the begins in Gen 2—becomes the deep well from which all biblical instruction regarding the covenant of marriage is drawn from. These vv (thru end of ch 2) are crucial and are repeated numerous times thruout the Bible, so the subject is worthy of our time.
I. Man’s Need Revealed
I. Man’s Need Revealed
For careful students of the Bible, that can be a shocking statement. Up to this point, everything God has created has been declared by Him to be “good” (6x—4,10,12,18,21,25; “very” 31). But for the 1st time— “it is not good.” There was something deficient b/c creation was incomplete (not good does not imply evil). I believe this is expressing the events of Day 6. God created the land animals, then He formed Adam from dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and then put Adam into the Garden with the primary responsibility to worship and obey God (seen in the 1st instruction given to man).
The rest of Gen 2 emphasizes the divine initiative in everything that happens:
God said (18)
God formed…brought (19)
God caused…took (21)
God fashioned…brought (22)
Let me make an observation: God revealed Adam’s need without consulting him. Adam did not complain to God that he was lonely. In fact, Adam may not have known about his condition (perfect environment of Eden—paradise; perfect fellowship with his Creator). Further, it carries true in every other area of knowledge, that if we are to truly understand the nature of man (who we are, what we need, our relationship to God and to one another)—God must reveal it.
So He reveals man’s need— “not good to be alone.” That word “alone” isn’t always negative...
Sometimes it speaks of God who is incomparable and unique in His exclusive claim to be God and who alone works wonderful deeds:
15 Hezekiah prayed before the Lord and said, “O Lord, the God of Israel, who are enthroned above the cherubim, You are the God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth.
Nehemiah 9:6 (NASB95) LEVITES:
6 “You alone are the Lord. You have made the heavens, The heaven of heavens with all their host, The earth and all that is on it, The seas and all that is in them. You give life to all of them And the heavenly host bows down before You.
13 Let them praise the name of the Lord, For His name alone is exalted; His glory is above earth and heaven.
But here in Gen God explains that isolation and solitude is not part of His design for mankind—and particularly, since the covenant of marriage is introduced in this passage, the blessing of the marital union is explained in other Scriptures:
22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing And obtains favor from the Lord.
9 Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. 10 For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up. 11 Furthermore, if two lie down together they keep warm, but how can one be warm alone? 12 And if one can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.
4 An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, But she who shames him is like rottenness in his bones.
14 House and wealth are an inheritance from fathers, But a prudent wife is from the Lord.
II. God’s Provision Resolved
II. God’s Provision Resolved
18b. “I will make…”
Again, notice the divine initiative here. God responds to the only deficiency in Paradise by making provision for and blessing Adam.
“a helper suitable...” 2 words in Heb. עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדֹּֽו (ʿēzer keneghdō) Cassuto: [literally, ‘a helper as in front of him’] /—a helper like him, suited to him, worthy of him, corresponding to him.
The term “helper” immediately conjures an idea and objection that God’s solution means servitude and inferiority. But the word helper is used of YHWH who is Israel’s helper (Ezra—the Lord helps).
In the blessing of Moses:
26 “There is none like the God of Jeshurun, Who rides the heavens to your help, And through the skies in His majesty.
29 “Blessed are you, O Israel; Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord, Who is the shield of your help And the sword of your majesty! So your enemies will cringe before you, And you will tread upon their high places.”
20 Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield.
8 Our help is in the name of the Lord, Who made heaven and earth.
5 How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, Whose hope is in the Lord his God,
“Helper” is not a derogatory word and since it is a term applied to God, Victor Hamilton argues: “Thus the new creation will be neither a superior nor an inferior, but an equal.”
This equality stems from the fact that both male and female are “image bearers”. They are also jointly given the task of ruling/subduing the earth. But within this spiritual equality, there is also the pattern established for male headship.
Raymond Ortlund writes:
God created the man first (2:7) and stationed him in the garden of Eden to develop it and to guard it (2:15). God laid a dual command on the man. First, the man was commanded to partake freely and joyfully of the trees God had provided (2:16). Second, the man was commanded not to eat of one tree, lest he die (2:17). Here we see both God’s abundant generosity and man’s moral responsibility to live within the large, but not unrestricted, circle of his God-ordained existence. For the man to step outside that circle, to attempt an autonomous existence, freed from God, would be his ruin.”
God created Adam first. John Piper when asking why God didn’t create Eve simultaneously from the same lump...”God wants to say something more about the relationship between man and woman. And what he wants to say is that when it comes to their differing responsibilities, there is a “firstness” of responsibility that falls to the man. This is not an issue of superior value. That issue has been settled in Genesis 1:27. It’s an issue of a sinless man, in childlike dependence on God, being given a special role or responsibility. God makes him the initial half of the pair to say something about his responsibility in initiating. God makes him lead the way into being to say something about his responsibility of leadership.”
So there is equality but also headship. The fact that Eve is created to be a helper does not diminish her value but it is made greater by that word “corresponding to...”
James Boice addresses this very issue through a riddle: We’re all intrigued by riddles:
“What is most like half of the moon?…if a child asks you that question the thing to do is guess everything you possibly can without guessing the answer. Half of an orange, half of a basketball…thinking of everything that is orange and round.”
The answer is “the other half of the moon.” What is most like a man? A man…or in this case that which corresponds to him—the woman.
And Adam had no clue that he was missing something...
Adam’s Awareness
Adam’s Awareness
For Adam to become aware of his own deficiencies and incompleteness, God devised a method for that would show him what was lacking—one whose corresponding differences would make it possible for him to do what God intended for him.
9 for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake, but woman for the man’s sake.
The woman would make it possible for man to do what he could never do alone. And likewise for the woman. A “very good” thing would fill man’s loneliness.
God set before man a specific task that would translate (in the words of Ray Ortlund) his objective aloneness into a feeling of personal loneliness by setting him to this task.” In other words, God revealed man’s condition of solitude was not good. Adam had not experienced his deficiency but thru this task he would discover the feeling of loneliness.
It was in this way that by serving God, Adam encountered his own need—one that he didn’t know he had.
So notice what God did…He brought all the animals (vs 19) to see what Adam would call them. And God had given man remarkable freedom in this realm— “whatever the man called…name.”
Now, this was not an arbitrary thing…where Adam simply put a label on each animal. The task demanded Adam consider each animal thoughtfully, exercising his full mental capacity so that every animal’s name was appropriate to its nature—from the aardvark to the Zebra. Adam used great creativity in the task before him.
Dixon Merritt wrote a little limerick on the pelican:
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
Genesis—Beginning and Blessing Man Needs Woman (Adam’s Need) (vv. 18–20)
The classic work of Keil and Delitzsch points out that we must not regard the names that Adam gave the animals as merely denoting their outward characteristics, “but as a deep and direct insight into the nature of the animals,”
It was here then that Adam began to discover that there was no creature that shared his nature. He also discovered his own superiority over the animals, expressed in the privilege of naming them.
It was in this way that God would take the reality of Adam’s loneliness and make him to feel loneliness so that what comes next not only meets the need man has for companionship but the provision so far exceeds what Adam could have expected—to the point where Adam truly valued his ʿēzer keneghdō.
God’s Gift
God’s Gift
Remember the divine initiative in the whole narrative. God doesn’t wait to respond to some perceived need that Adam became aware of. His purpose was to set Adam to task so that he would understand firsthand what loneliness was and why is was not good. So God brought the animals to Adam...
vv21-22
Then, to meet the need… “God caused, took, closed up, fashioned, brought”
This is the first ever surgical act and Adam was not conscious as a spectator. Our only hint of what actually happened comes from what God revealed thru Moses.
God caused the anesthesia (deep sleep—used commonly of “night’s sleep”—same term describing Jonah’s sleep (Jonah 1:5-6). Adam had no awareness of what was happening to him. For all he knew, he went to sleep and when he woke up—WOW! Someone he hadn’t seen before.
In this surgery…God took “rib” (all Eng translations) but the Hen word is lit “side.” (frequently is used of the side of the tabernacle). God took a side of Adam—no further designation as to which part (though the idea of “one of…” is reasonable)…and in doing so “the woman was taken from the man’s side to show that she was of the same substance as the man and to underscore the unity of the human family, having one source” (Mathews).
God then closed Adam up (closing—door or ark). It was instant healing (btw—same is true in Jesus’ miraculous ministry—complete restoration), likely not even the pain of recovering after surgery.
God fashioned that into the woman—and Adam knew exactly what was before him:
23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
Hughes writes:
Genesis—Beginning and Blessing God Makes Woman (God’s Supply) (vv. 21–23)
The significances of this are several and profound. Adam was not created ex nihilo (out of nothing) but out of the dust of the earth, and neither was Eve made ex nihilo. “The rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made [literally, “built”] into a woman” (v. 22a.). She was made of the same stuff as the man—the same bone, the same flesh, the same DNA. Her correspondence in form, her femaleness, her estrogens were shaped and constituted from the man. Eve was the first person to be created from a living being. Because she came from Adam, she perfectly shared the image of God.
You see the spiritual equality in this and as Matthew Henry (puritan commentator points out) Eve was:
not made out of his head to top him, not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.
Finally, God brought her to the man (divine initiative). In our modern day wedding ceremony the father of the bride will walk her down the aisle to her awaiting groom. This was the first marriage, wedding ceremony, giving away of the bride and the beginning of the first family. We can only imagine how full Adam’s heart was as God’s provision for loneliness is resolved.
With Adam and Eve, there is equality and there is the pattern of headship that emerges and we’ll explore that is bit more as we come to the end of Gen 2 next time.
Closing: The family is God’s antidote for loneliness.
6 God makes a home for the lonely; He leads out the prisoners into prosperity, Only the rebellious dwell in a parched land.
The home is a place of intimacy, reprieve, refreshment (where this is not the case—widows, widowers—that is the role of the church). That is underscored by the use of the term “companion, companionship” b/t husband and wife (Pro 2:17; Mal 2:14).
As such—this relationship b/t husband and wife (exemplified in Adam & Eve in the garden) takes precedence over every other earthly relationship and it must be safeguarded, protected at all cost (see Gen 3).
One last note—Where God’s revelation that man’s solitude is not good, there are some who remain single (having the gift of singleness) and Paul explains 1 Cor 7:32-35.
Singleness has great value in affording you undistracted devotion to the Lord. You are able to set yourselves apart exclusively for the work of Christ—that’s is a profound blessing and by God’s grace the impact of loneliness is abated in those who have set themselves apart as such. To these individuals, Paul says, if you’re able to withstand temptation—stay single.
Well, there’s more about this newly formed relationship and we’ll spend some time examining that beginning next Lord’s Day—Adam’s response becomes his public display of loyalty to his ʿēzer keneghdō.