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"The Creation of Man in
Two Acts" Text Comments v. 18 "it is not good" Over against the seven-fold refrain in chapter 1 ("And God saw that it was good") God's observation that man alone was "not good" is startling and alerts us to the extraordinary importance of what is about to happen. It also indicates, in a most beautiful way, that not only, as we already were told in 1:27, that both male and female are human beings made in God's image, but that the creation of mankind is not complete until there is a man and woman together, as husband and wife! (Our fundamental difference with feminism: the definition of mankind!) God does not pronounce "his very good" until there is a man and woman together in marriage. "helper" "suitable" You will understand that this is far too crude a way of stating this and leaves too many qualifications needing to be made, but we will still grasp something of the point of that adjective "suitable" or "corresponding" if we say that it is as if God took human nature, cut it in half, gave one half to the man and the other to the woman and it is only when the two of them are joined that you have the human nature in its wholeness. Now, of course, there are men and women who remain single and the Bible has much to say in commending that condition of life, but here in Genesis 2 it is the rule of human life, not the exception that is being considered. We always used to think this was wonderful, that these differences were the spice of life and to be celebrated with gratitude to God our maker. Only feminism could find a way to turn this charming variety into something ugly, cruel, oppressive, and demeaning. Not for us, brothers and sisters. I find it a happy thought that Bible-believing Christians are again the ones appointed in our sad and disintegrating culture to be the defenders of all that makes life rich and fun and gay and romantic. All that makes men and women love one another and long for one another is in this adjective "corresponding" or "suitable." All that makes the man the lover and the woman the beloved, from which differences come all the romances and all the love stories in the world. Feminism cannot write love stories for it has men and women competing with one another as identical or virtually identical beings. The one cannot make up what the other lacks and hungers for, for he or she offers only more of the same. Christianity makes men and women fully human beings but differentiates them from one another in all the ways that make for interest, enchantment, electricity, desire, and true fulfillment for both man and woman. There is that in a man -- a great deal -- that only a woman can satisfy; and there is in the same way a large part of a woman that only a man can satisfy. So God made it to be. Feminism wants us to be interchangeable, for us, in fact, all to be men, and to satisfy one another not as men and women but as human beings without respect to gender. [Peter Jones on American women after 18 years in France.] God however made men and women to be different and those differences to be profoundly important to human fulfillment of human nature and happiness, to the making up of loneliness. He made us to be very different; in our equality to be so different, men and women from one another, that all the novelists and all the poets of the world would not be able to plumb the depth of that difference. Or, as H.L. Mencken put the matter of the difference between man and woman more tartly: "The elementary notion of standardization seems never to have occurred to the celestial Edison." Now, very interestingly and very importantly, God does not immediately act upon his identification of man's need. There is a delay. v. 20 What was the main purpose of the naming of the animals? Well clearly it was to bring man himself to the recognition of his loneliness. Life was knew to him. He did not yet understand his condition as God did. And so God gave him this task. (Fathers giving train sets to their sons long before they are able to appreciate the gift! Or, you women do not let your little children handle the fine china; they have to be ready for something that precious!) Through this exercise of naming, Adam discovers two things: though the animals were, like himself, taken from the ground and though they too were "living creatures" as man is said to be in 2:7, there was no one in the animal world who corresponded to him, who could share his life on the level of a divine image-bearer. What is more, he would also have observed that the other creatures came in pairs: there was a boy giraffe and a girl giraffe, a boy lion and a girl lion, but there was only a boy man. Now Adam knows what God has already said: He is alone. No doubt he now feels that loneliness as he never did before, and he is ready for the gift God intends to give him. v. 22 The creation of the woman makes up what was missing, not only from the perfect happiness and fulfillment of the man, but as well from the perfection of creation. (The last act of the creation: the bride! --new creation!) She was created from man's rib. An interpretation of that fact that goes back at least as far as the medieval theologian, Peter Lombard, comes I think very close to the meaning of this fact: "The woman was created not from just any part of the man's body, but from his side. This was to demonstrate that she was made for loving communion with him. She was not taken from his head that she might rule over him or from his feet that she might be his servant." Matthew Henry gives the same thought a slightly different and more beautiful spin -- perhaps because, unlike Lombard, Henry was happily married: "Not made out of his head to top him, not our 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." In English we speak of blood relationships, but Hebrew spoke of relatives as one's "flesh and bone" as, for example, Laban said of Jacob in Genesis 29:14. Remember this is an extraordinarily compact episode, much said with few words. These few words contain in sum the entire biblical doctrine of marriage and the fact that Genesis 3 is going to show us that relationship disintegrating because of sin makes only the more important that we grasp this ideal of loving harmony and intimacy of the deepest and closest type as the biblical pattern of marriage. NB that God "brought her to the man." Here is God the matchmaker, as in Matthew 19: "whom God hath joined together, let man not separate." v. 23 The NIV fails us here. "Now" should be, as it is in the RSV, NEB, "This, at last" is bone of my bones... Elsewhere in Genesis the NIV properly translates the term "at last" as, for example in Genesis 29:34 when Leah, who knew that Jacob preferred Rachel, gave birth to her third son, Levi, said, "Now at last my husband will become attached to me because I have born him three sons." We will come back to this in detail next Lord's Day, God willing, but now it is enough to say that "at last" fits the context of chapter two much better as well as being a more likely rendering of the word itself. Indeed, even "now" as the NIV has it, suggests the same meaning, just not so clearly and emphatically. Let me pause to say that I regard this section as a real problem for the 24 hour creation interpretation of Genesis 1. It is certainly conceivable that God put Adam in the garden to work it, but that Adam actually did no work because he was immediately called away to name the animals. It is conceivable that there were few enough animals to name or that he named them so quickly that there was still time left in the daylight to take a nap. But, it does not seem to me to be a likely or natural reading of the text. The suggestion is rather that Adam worked the garden, that the naming of the animals was a work of some length of time, and, especially, that by the time the woman was created to join him, he had lived long enough to come to feel keenly his loneliness in the world, so that he might well say "This, at last, is bone of by bones..." It is hard to imagine him thinking or saying that if his entire life up to that point had been a few-hour whirlwind of activity. That makes me think that the sixth day, at any rate, took longer than 24 hours or 12 hours of daylight. Remember, Genesis 1 has already told us that man, both male and female, was created on the sixth day, after the animals that were also created on that day. But if the sixth day were longer than 24 hours one can no longer claim that "day" must mean 24 hours for any of the creation days. Do you see the point? Something to think about, in any case. Remember, long before Darwin, there were Christian thinkers, like Augustine, who held that the creation days were not days such as our 24 hour days. This is the position that our own Jack Collins has argued in a finely crafted essay in the Covenant Seminary Review. They were God's kind of days, not ours. v. 24 The most important statement on marriage in the
Bible, cited in almost all the major statements on marriage in the NT (Matthew 19;
Ephesians 5; 1 Corinthians 6:16). Notice that to this point the creation of man and woman
has been described without reference to reproduction or to children. The woman is
presented first and foremost as the man's partner in love and nothing yet is said of her
as the child-bearer, though that point has already been made in a general way in 1:28. No one should read "and they will become one flesh" without realizing how completely that theology of marriage and of the creation of man and woman for the relationship of marriage has been abandoned, actually forsaken in our culture. Listen to this perceptive analysis by the late Allan Bloom, in his Closing of the American Mind [pp. 122-125]:
Perhaps young people do not say 'I love you' because they are honest. They do not experience love -- too familiar with sex to confuse it with love, too preoccupied with their own fates to be victimized by love's mad self-forgetting, the last of the genuine fanaticisms. Then there is distaste for love's fatal historical baggage -- sex roles, making women into possessions and objects without respect for their self-determination. Young people today are afraid of making commitments, and the point is that love is commitment, and much more. ... Young people, and not only young people, have studied and practiced a crippled eros that can no longer take wing, and does not contain within it the longing for eternity... 'Relationships,' not love affairs are what they have. Love suggests something wonderful, exciting, positive, and firmly seated in the passions. A relationship is gray, amorphous, suggestive of a project, without a given content, and tentative. You work at a relationship, whereas love takes care of itself... About relationships there is ceaseless anxious talk... love is no longer within our ken because [it] requires notions of soul and nature that, for a mixture of theoretical and political reasons, we cannot even consider." But that is what we have here before us in Genesis 2. Considerations of nature and soul -- the way we were made and for what purpose we were made as we are, men and women. The complementarity of our natures, with marriage as the chief purpose and the chief beneficiary of that complementarity. Make no mistake about this. The Bible confirms it in no uncertain terms. In 1 Corinthians 11 the Apostle Paul draws attention to the history of the creation of mankind, to the fact that the man was created first and then the woman and that this order reflects not some historical coincidence, not some merely charming feature of the creation story, but rather teaches us that male and female are two distinct orders of being, that they are to relate to one another in keeping with their distinct natures, that their equality in creation and grace does not at all mean that their lives will be the same or that they were not created to play one particular role in the dance of life. Again in 1 Timothy 2 Paul makes the same point. Adam was formed first, then Eve, which means, Paul says, that God has one role for the man and one for the woman, that he made them different, however much they are also the same as human beings and as the object of his love, and that their differences are directly related to the lives they will lead in the world, the roles they will assume, the contribution they will make to human fulfillment and happiness. Only in the recent past has this become controversial. But now it is deeply controversial, indeed a thought much hated and scorned in the power centers of our elite culture. But, hear the Word of the Lord, brothers and sisters: on men and women, on marriage, and on life as God made it to be and made us to live. The Bible presents us so much more beautiful a vision of life and of masculinity and femininity, so much more real, so much more full of promise, an equality that is true to the nature of both man and woman and true to the real purposes that God has for our lives and that beat however deeply and secretly in our own heart of hearts. Listen to Robert Farrar Capon describe the difference between the vision of Genesis 2 and that being offered to men and women today:
Beautifully and wisely put, I think. You have in the creation of the man and the woman separately here in Genesis 2, the most beautiful expression of their partnership and equality -- she taken from man's side; but also of the order of their relationship and their complementarity, not identity -- he created first and she created as a partner corresponding to him. This is the divine genius and goodness. While our society goes its way urging men and women to compete with one another, to form relationships of varying length and commitment in order to protect at all costs each individual's independence from the demands of his own nature and of another, let us, brothers and sisters, follow our heavenly Father's way: the way that conforms not only to the teaching of his word but to the longings of our own natures: the longing for ourselves to made whole in the partnership of a man or a woman, a partnership that is nothing less than deathless love. God saw all of this too at the end of that wonderful sixth day and said that what he saw was very good! |
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