"The Primacy of Word"
Genesis 2:18-24
March 10, 1996

Review

v. 25 "bone of bones and flesh of flesh" is the Hebrew way of saying "flesh and blood." The closest of relationships, family relationships.

I drew your attention last Lord's Day morning to the NIV's translation of the first line of v. 25. I told you that a better translation would be "This, at last, is bone of my bones..." Such is the translation of other English versions and such is the translation the NIV itself gives for that same word elsewhere in Genesis.

It is an important detail because it transforms Adam's statement about Eve from an unanimated explanation or mere definition of the woman to what it actually is: an exuberant, celebration of her by a man whose emotions have been deeply stirred by his discovery of her and whose words are reflective of the depth of his feeling and his delight.

And this fact, I want to demonstrate to you this morning, is a fact of immeasurable importance to any true understanding of human life.

As we have said, Genesis 2 is a recapitulation of a portion of the sixth day of creation. Because that part of the history is most important, we needed it to be given in greater detail. This is what we must know about the creation of man and the life of man before the fall in order to understand our place in the world, the effects of sin upon human life, and the purposes of God in salvation. As it is, it is a sparse enough account. There are so many things about the life of mankind before sin entered the world about which we are legitimately curious. What was human life like before the curse? Indeed, there are any number of questions that have been debated in Christian theology through the ages: did Adam and Eve have a sexual relationship before the fall? Did they kill animals and eat meat? Did the carnivores of today exist then and did they kill and eat other animals? Did Adam have a belly button, and on and on. But God answers none of these questions in his account of the creation and the life of man before the fall. He told us what is imperative to know, he was not interested in satisfying our curiosity.

And that makes it a matter of great interest and importance what Adam said to and about Eve. In a narrative so concise, so spartan, we are given but one example of human conversation before sin entered the world. Among many things we might have had recorded for posterity that Adam said, or that Eve said in reply, we are given but one single statement by a sinless human being. And what was that statement? It was an utterance of exuberant praise, appreciation, and celebration spoken by the man to and about his wife.

Don't imagine for a minute that this is a matter of minor importance. Every word in this narrative has great weight. The one piece of human speech uttered before the fall that God saw fit to record in his Holy Scripture for the education and the benefit of mankind was the husband's words of praise, compliment, and loving and romantic possessiveness concerning his wife.

Just as v. 24 explains for all time what a true marriage is, a union of one flesh between man and woman, so v. 23 describes the nature of that union, an animated affection for one another and appreciation of one another, communicated, carried, fostered, and protected first and primarily by speech and especially the husband's speech. Such is the importance of this representative fact about marriage that God saw fit to communicate as absolutely needful if we are to understand what he intends in marriage.

The vast importance of this fact, the exemplary character of this speech, its place in the Bible's picture of an ideal humanity and an ideal human life and an ideal marriage is confirmed over and again throughout the rest of the Bible.

It is confirmed, alas, already in Genesis 3:12 where we have the next recorded speech of a husband to or about his wife. But now, sinner that he is, he is not loving her, or celebrating her, or acknowledging her as God's supreme gift to him. He is instead blaming her, accusing her, and hating her with his words.

The rest of the Bible will teach us that God's grace, insofar as it bears on a marriage -- and, more broadly, as it bears on all human relationships -- has as its purpose to get the conversation, to get the speech, to get the words -- especially the husband's words and the father's words -- out of Genesis 3 and back into Genesis 2 where they belong!

We are often enough, taken back to Genesis 2:23 in the rest of the Bible. What is the crown and the reward of the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31? We are told what it is: her children rise and call her blessed; her husband also and he praises her: 'Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all!" The same language of exuberant and unrestrained emotion that the first husband used in celebrating the first wife.

Or, what of the Song of Songs, the Bible's own celebration of marital romance, erotic passion, and the possessiveness of true love. What is that book except alternating sections of affectionate, complimentary, and loving speech? The man begins by describing the glory of his bride and the depth of his feelings for her and longing for her, and she returns the favor with words of her own. He then responds with more words adding still more to his picture of her beauty and worth and of his ardor for her and she responds with more words of her own. He speaks and then she speaks, he speaks once more and she again and the book is done. In the Song it is now both man and woman who speak, though even there the initiative in speech lies with the man.

Take the Bible's teaching together and we learn that the practice of married love is primarily a matter of speech and first and foremost the husband's speech to and about his wife. So, when we come, for example, to a passage such as Ephesians 5 with its exhortation to husbands to love their wives, what Paul there means, more than anything else, is that husbands should speak love to their wives, that husbands should love their wives with their words, words of appreciation, of celebration, of compliment, of affection, of desire, and of a possessiveness appropriate to a deathless love.

In the Bible, love is mostly speech. Love between man and woman, between parents and children, between friends, it is mostly speech. You say, well it is action too, it is sacrifice also. And you are correct in saying so. But, isn't it interesting that both in the Bible and in human life as we observe it today, the action is of little meaning and of little use in conveying love, if it is not accompanied by and interpreted by speech.

No doubt our community is full of men who, if asked, would aver their love of their wives and children: they put a roof over their heads, they put food on their table, clothing on their backs, and, no doubt, they feel themselves that they really do love them. But ask the women and they will be less sure. The provision means little if the man never tells his wife that he loves her, never communicates his desire for her and his affection for her, never says in one way or another: "Many women do noble things but you surpass them all" or "you are bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." And so with children. They want their father's love. Especially the daughters. They want to know as much as they want to know anything that they are prized by their Dad and that he literally thinks the world of them, but what they must have is his words, his speech, and this is what they never get, or rarely get, and never get with the passion that Eve got Adam's speech when relationships were pure and right and as God intended them to be.

Speech is everything in human love. Speech is the primary carrier of human love. Speech is what fosters and protects that love. And speech and the lack of right speaking are what destroy it more than anything else. We say "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." And, of course, that is the purest nonsense. A desperate kind of bravado, covering the hurt and the sorrow. You can fix broken bones easily enough. But the damage words do, and the damage that the absence of words can do, is often the most grievous damage in a person's life and is often never repaired. What becomes of so many little girls in our society whose fathers do not love them, really love them, always love them with his words? And what of the multitudes of women who crave such words from their husbands but never or rarely receive them?

Now, if you are a Christian you should not be surprised by this at all, by the premium that is placed on words and the speaking of words of love and appreciation and gratitude as the primary way of creating and maintaining a true love and the happiness of love. It is what God has shown us in a thousand ways is true of his relationship with us.

Do you realize that this capacity to speak and to understand words is what more than anything else separates us from and exalts us above the other creatures; it comes very near to what it means to be made in the image of God. We can take a thought, form it in words, speak those words and so create the thought, even the reality itself, in the mind and heart of another. God can speak to us in the same way and change us by his words. Love, anger, patience, kindness, gentleness, and the like, God communicates to us with words, almost entirely with words.

It is not only words, of course, God created us and Christ died for us. But, isn't it interesting that, even there, the words are essential. God created us, the Bible says, by speaking a word. As Luther put it: "the words of God's mouth are not so many merely grammatical vocables. The words of the mouth of God ar true, and actual, and essential things. The sun and the moon; the heavens and the earth; Peter and Paul; you and I, are all so many words of God."

[And, of course, being made in God's image and living in God's world, so are our words: true and real things that bring other things to pass in the world: happiness, sadness, life and death.] And, though Christ died for us, it was essential that he should explain that death to us, tell us over and again what it meant and why he surrendered his life for us.

And then, how is it that we become Christians. The Bible says, God calls us. And when we are Christians, how is it that we live in communion with God. It is by words: his to us in Holy Scripture and by the Spirit in our hearts, and ours to him in constant prayer. His relationships with us and ours with him travels on words, exists in words, waxes and wanes according to the words that are spoken and heard.

Indeed, it is surely no matter of minor importance that Jesus Christ himself should be called "the Word."

Jim Jordan recently directed my attention to a new study of the icon as a conveyer of truth in the thought of the Orthodox Church. Icons are the images of Christ, Mary, and the saints that decorate Orthodox churches and which Orthodox Christians reverence, though they claim they do not worship them. They are, in their view, symbols of those they represent. The book is a very arcane study I would have known nothing about otherwise. It is Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council, by Ambrosius Giakalis. According to Giakalis, the Eastern Church followed Aristotle in its conviction as to the priority of the faculty of sight in the process of education.

He quotes Aristotle's Metaphysics as follows:

All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem of the senses; for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight. ... The reason for this is that of all the senses, sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions.

This was the conviction of the fathers of the 7th Council who said, "The icon is greater than the word and this by divine providence took place for the sake of uncultivated people."

But this is wrong! The sight is not the most important sense and it does not, in fact, reveal the really important distinctions. Close your eyes; close them. Now, can you see what I am doing? When you close your eyes, you have complete authority over what you see, what your imagination conveys to you. Now, close your ears...! Sight is more for things than for persons; not entirely, but more so. Sight tells you almost nothing about a person.

Sight can tell you that a person is overweight, but it cannot tell you whether that person overeats, or why he overeats, or whether he has a medical condition. Sight can tell you what a person looks like on the outside, but it is only when the person speaks words that you come to know what that person truly is, essentially is, his or her character and personality. How many times has it happened that we have had one thought about a person until he has opened his mouth and begun to speak. And we have found ourselves loving a person and admiring a person, or, contrarily, found our opinion of a person lowered all because of his words.

The archangels and the devil look the same -- the Evil one can disguise himself as an angel of light. It is his words that give him away.

This is why the Bible never makes much of sight for our lives in this world, but makes a great deal of words. It is why the Bible and why sermons and prayers play such a central role in the Christian life; why worship given to God -- again mostly our words, sung or said, is always in the Bible regarded as the most important single piece of our Christian life. [This is also why, by the way, those forms of worship are so dangerous that have the congregation just looking and not speaking words to God.] It is why God gave us his Word but not icons and why he made words the great and most essential acts of godliness in the world. Why did the martyrs die, after all? It was because of their words: words they could not help but say, and words they would never consent to say.

A man or woman can be a hypocrite, to be sure. But, isn't this the point? Hypocrisy is such a terrible crime precisely because it is an offense against words -- words are used insincerely, they are mere pretense -- and this is a great crime because of the vast, singular importance of our words in defining our lives.

No, brothers and sisters, let this be clear from Genesis 2:23 and the rest of the Bible that follows to confirm it. We are as our words; we love with our words or we do not love. Marriage, family, brotherhood, these are things of speech and words. Words that compliment and appreciate and celebrate another: a wife, a daughter, a son. Such words give live and are life. Both cruel words, words that fail to love, and silence are death. Husbands, if you are not loving your wife every day with your speech, you are not loving your wife as Christ loved the church -- for he speaks his love to her every day. And the bride of Christ can only reply; her husband must speak first, then she can speak herself. So with children and their parents.

You come into the kitchen in the morning, gentlemen, and you take your wife in your arms and you tell her that she is bone of your bones and flesh of your flesh and that you still cannot understand why God should be so good and generous to you in giving her to you; that you regard her as an unspeakable gift. And tell your sons and daughters that you love them and that they are God's wonderful gift to you and that you want always to show him your gratitude by loving and caring for them just as their heavenly Father desires.

I've told some of you before that one of the most charmed afternoons of my entire life was spent in the company of a retired professor of theology in Holland in 1984. In my Sabbatical study at the Free University of Amsterdam, I had been reading a group of Dutch theologians and discovered that Prof. van der Linde, recently retired from the University of Utrecht, was the acknowledged expert in these writings and the theological movement they represented. I called him and he very graciously consented to see me. The day arrived and I made my way to his home in Utrecht and spend several hours in the most engaging conversation with a most learned, but humble and gracious and deeply interesting Christian man, 78 years of age. We explored his library -- he died this past Spring and his library is now being sold and my bookseller friend in Amsterdam who is selling it, told me it was the largest privately held collection in the Netherlands. We spoke of things both private and professional. He gave me a copy of one of his books and inscribed it for me: "To Dr. Rayburn, a small present, S. v. d. Linde, co-pastor." This learned man calls me Dr., a still wet-behind-the-ears novice and schoolboy in all matters of scholarship, but calls himself "co-pastor." Such was the man.

But, the most amazing thing about that afternoon, as I reflected on it later, was that in those hours we were together talking, I learned more about Prof. van der Linde's wife, than I learned about him. He told me about her, about her character and godliness. Once when we went into his bedroom to find a book -- his home was floor to ceiling bookshelves everywhere, he took her picture off his bedside table, and with tears in his eyes told me -- a virtual stranger -- that he never went to bed at night without thanking God for her. His wife had been dead for seven years when I met him, and yet his words were full of her praises, still he was rising and calling her blessed and praising her, still he was saying in so many different ways that she was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh.

And no one can doubt that his words celebrated her so beautifully seven years after her death because they had in the same beautiful and gracious way celebrated her during the years of their life together as one flesh. In other words, the words did not merely reflect a wonderful marriage, they had created it, deepened it, and preserved it through the years.

Here is what we are being taught in this single verse in Genesis 2, the only record of human conversation before the Fall: words are the great conveyer of human life, love, and happiness. God made us to speak, and most of what is most important for us to do, we do with our words. Most of what others depend upon us to do, we must do with our words. We must not imagine that we are loving -- God or our wives or husbands or children or friends -- if we are not loving them with what matters most and what conveys reality the most, viz. our words. Your speech is a great instrument, the greatest you have. Give it as a gift to your loved ones and your brethren and then, above all, to God.

Do not let a day pass that your wife does not hear from you that she is bone of your bones, and your children the same, and your brethren as well. And you will find what glorious things words can do when we speak them in obedience to and for the sake of the one who is himself "the Word."

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