“It’s Not Good to Be Alone”
Genesis 2:18-25
We are going to wrap up chapter two today of the book of Genesis, which focuses on day six of creation. We have recognized that God created a place for humanity. We all need a place to belong to, a place we can call home. In the beginning, God took all of creation, placed a garden in the center of it for humans, and said, “All of this is for you.” God then asked humans to come alongside and help out in taking care of creation. They were to subdue, or manage the world in a way that both humans and creation could flourish. Unfortunately, sin entered in and made a mess of things, which we will discover next week, in chapter three. Yet, even when humans mess up, God has a plan of redemption.
At this point in the story, we have a human, spending time with God, helping God take care of the garden. Which indicates that work has been around since before the fall and therefore is good. Humans should be working to the betterment of others. Even the things that may seem mundane can become sacred and done with divine meaning.
(Story of Navigator work study, headaches and laundry.)
Today we are going to focus on the third aspect of chapter two that involves “others.” The purpose of others is that humans were made in the image of God, who is a community within Himself.
In the beginning, God was creating things left and right and all along the way He claimed them as “good.” Until He created Adam, the human. In verse 18 we read,
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
The word “good” used during the creation story has two meanings. God claimed the things He had created as good when they were
- Something He took pleasure in
- As He had intended
So when God completed creating something He looked at it and when He was pleased with what He made and it was doing what He intended it to do, “It was good.”
When it came to the creation of humans, God looked at Adam and realized it wasn’t good. Why?
There are multiple reasons.
When we look back at Genesis 1, when God finally did say the creation of humans was good, God blessed them and told them to be fruitful. Man alone, without his counterpart, cannot be fruitful. He cannot reproduce, the other isn’t there yet. So on a practical level, it is not good, because it was not what God intended.
This point of practicality puts a dent in the world’s view today of individuality. It also puts a dent in today’s cultural view of gender and that it is malleable and impermanent and something that can be manipulated. This may seem awkward, because we live in a culture that puts an awesome amount of pressure on us to re-think what it means to be image bearers of God. It is significant to return back to the creation of human beings and remember that God puts His blessing on them when they could be fruitful and multiply.
Unfortunately, I think this passage has often been seen as a mandate that everyone should be married and multiply. That is not the case. Both Jesus and Paul encouraged their followers to stay single, 1 Corinthians 7:6-8,
“I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.”
This verse also speaks on a deeper level, not just for procreation, but at the core of what it means to be image bearers of God.
We have a picture of Adam, he is in the garden and all alone with God, and he is in a sinless state. God looks at him and says it isn’t good. I think we need to acknowledge this.
Because one of the things that has occurred in modern Christianity, especially in the United States, is the idea that the Christian life is a private affair. We have been told it is about your personal relationship with Jesus. This is not true, we are not saved into a vacuum. So many people believe they don’t need to be a part of the body of believers. Either they think they are better than others, or that the church is all messed up, full of hypocrites. Hello, the world is hypocritical, and the church is full of people, who are sinners. We are all desperately in need of grace.
Eugene H. Peterson is quoted as saying, “If we would remember people are sinners, we wouldn’t be surprised when they sin”. Peterson also said, “All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us”.
Jesus came down to earth because of our moral imperfection. He is trying to restore in us the right relationship with Him and with others. The goal of the Christian life should never be your personal intimacy with God. If you say you’re a Christian, yet you refuse your neighbor, you have refused God.
So, go back to the garden. Even though God is with Adam God stills said it wasn’t good.
Was God saying being with Him wasn’t enough? No.
What He is saying is, “You are not yet, what I intended.”
In other words, God looked at Adam and realized in order for humans to be in His image, a Triune God, He would have to create another human.
Look back at Genesis chapter one, verse 27,
“So God created humankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.”
So the image of God was only complete with the other. Our uniqueness is discovered in the presence of others. If you want to experience the presence of God, you need to invest yourself in the community of God’s people. One of the primary ways God speaks to us is through others.
God purposefully created a gap, to make Adam feel his incompleteness, without the other. Everything else was in pairs, Adam was all alone.
This verse has so much more to do with the need for community, the need for being with others, than it has to do with man and woman together in marriage, which is part of what the verse is about. There is a much broader view of this verse that human beings are not meant to be isolated.
We experienced this during the pandemic. We were forced to be isolated in our homes. We were told that being close to others was dangerous. But we discovered that for many it was even more dangerous to be isolated. Because of this isolation, we are still dealing with the aftermath of psychological breakdowns, especially in young people.
As we continue with Genesis chapter 2, God invited Adam to assist Him in naming the animals that had been created. Again, with the idea that they are looking for a suitable partner for Adam. It’s not like God doesn’t know one won’t be found, but Adam doesn’t. God was setting the stage for Adam to recognize his aloneness.
“But for Adam no suitable helper was found.”
It is significant for us to know our Hebrew at this point.
I believe this verse has been misconstrued throughout the ages. The word “suitable” in this verse, means “equal.” Up to this point, everything Adam had been introduced to was something other than he was. It wasn’t a compatibility thing, it is one that is equal to him. One that will bring completion to him, speaking to the need for the other.
Another word we need to look at in this verse is the word “helper.” This word has also often been misunderstood.
Adam doesn’t find someone who can help him.
Help him what?
He doesn’t have an appropriate servant? To help him out?
That is not what “helper” means. The Hebrew word used here is “ezer.” The word ezer is a power word. The woman is to be the ezer, which means something like this. You are in a battle and you are losing terribly. The ezer comes alongside and helps balance out the odds. There is a rescue element in this word. There is a warrior element to this. We see this same word in Psalm 121:1&2,
“I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help (ezer) come from? My help (ezer) comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
The Greek word for ezer, which is “paraclete,” is found in the New Testament, John 14:16,
“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, so that He may be with you forever;”
Jesus said, “another helper,” referring to the Holy Spirit, but also indicating that He too was a helper, an ezer. Jesus claimed that the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, Matthew 20:28.
Ezer is actually a word used to describe God Himself.
Which means there actually is a servant component to the word ezer, but we need to remember there is a servant component to being a child of God. Going back to last week’s message, Is your life useful? Is it helpful? Is it being poured out for the good of others?
There has been a great deal of controversy around this verse, because in the history of the church there have been three realities built around this verse:
1) The idea that the man is the head in a way that the woman is to quietly and subserviently walk behind him and to be there to help him fulfill his dreams. The classic, patriarchal, hierarchical view of the sexes.
This can be portrayed metaphorically as a march. The man is in front leading and the woman is quietly marching behind him. That is not biblical.
2) The second view comes from a reaction of the first where women have chosen to compete against the man to prove their equality. This can actually be traced back to the fall, which we will go into more next week, where our particular roles are used and abused from both sides. This view can be portrayed metaphorically as a race. The battle between the sexes. It has gone so far as for women to think they don’t need men at all. Women have taken it upon themselves to show men just how independent they can be. Women’s liberation has changed the view of the sexes in many ways. Again, this view is not biblical.
- It’s not a race, it’s not a march, it is supposed to be much more like a dance. In ballroom dancing it’s difficult to tell which one is leading. There is unity and symmetry. It’s a metaphorical image of how man and woman come together, not to fulfill the man’s vision or the woman’s vision, but God’s vision.
That we would be together the conduits of grace to a world that is hurting, that needs to know they are loved and that they matter. This analogy also extends itself to the church. We need to be a church community that works together so that we draw men and women into the family of God. It’s not a hierarchy of patriotism, or feminism, it is covenantal. It’s the commitment to be the fulfillment of God’s commision on earth.
When we read this particular text, the ezer, the equal, comes so they can enter the battle of existence. Together they can manifest the love of God. It is a surrender to one another. We are to honor the distinctions and celebrate the differences and together represent the image of God.
Our uniqueness comes out when we are in a relationship with others. We need one another. We as a church have a responsibility to tell a different story than what the world is telling.
Let’s go back to the story, Genesis 2:21-22
“So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.”
Adam is excited and says in Genesis 2:23,
“At last this is bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called ‘woman,’
Because she was taken out of man.”
Adam has spent a long time looking for an equal and now there she was.
The last part of this chapter not only speaks to the marriage covenant but also speaks to the covenant of family and also to what it means to be the church, verse 24,
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
This often gets interpreted as speaking about the sexual union of man and woman in marriage. That is part of it, but it’s actually not the primary meaning. To become “one flesh” means to be in one accord. It means we are in agreement. We should be in agreement as a church in the one mission to bring the glory of God to earth by being His hands and feet.
This is a beautiful picture of what should occur in the covenant of marriage. Unfortunately, because we are a world full of sinners, this often gets messed up.
But in Christ, we have the assurance that all things can be made new. His mercies are new every morning.
God creates an equal for man for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, in order to procreate, be fruitful and multiply. There is also something more than that.
The world has taken the things that God has taken as good and repurposed them and redefined the terms and perimeters, ignoring God’s perimeters. Think back to the sixties, where rampant sexuality was the rage. There was a movement to liberate oneself from the archaic view of sex, represented by Ozzy & Harriet. Young people thought they should be free to have sex with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
How did that movement go? Not very good.
Humans managed to desacralize what God had meant for intimacy. There is a spiritual component to becoming one as well. Society has taken something that was meant to be sacred, including God, and turned it into merely a human function.
What we should recognize as a church is that everything we do is meant to be sacred. Sacred is when we allow God in, that is when something is sacred.
The world is constantly telling us to do things that please us, the individual. When we allow the world to regulate what we do rather than to look at things through God’s lenses we mess things up. This means we need to bring sexuality back from being just a natural function of the human body. One can be a fulfilled human being without having sex. The most human person that ever lived, Jesus, remained celebit. Jesus showed that real intimacy, real community and real family can be possible as a single man. He didn’t live without people. In fact, He invited even broken people to be close to Him. He demonstrated the concept that it is not good for man to be alone has far more to do with being in community, than being in bed with someone. But we live in such a hyper sensitive sexual society that we have actually bought into the lie that we cannot be complete people unless we are sexual people.
Let us recognize the beauty of this passage, that life is not good when we do it alone. Let us remember God has established perimeters for what it means to be a family because He loves us and wants to protect us, and the covenant between men and women, whether in marriage or in friendship is that we together form the image of God. We need to recognize the beauty in our differences and we need to hold tenaciously to those differences and honor them.
Let’s face it, all relationships are difficult. Whenever two sinful people come together, there will be difficulties. The same is for the church. We all have stuff that we bring with us good and bad. It is because we have been born again and have been given the Spirit of God that gives us the willingness to work out the differences with each other. When we come into a Christian community, we need to remember, we don’t get to choose who our family is. People can be difficult to love.
The question is, will we push through the difficulties of relationships so we can experience its joy.
We can listen to society and say we are best when we are alone, or we can listen to Scripture and realize we need others. We need to commit to be a part of the family of God. That commitment requires time. The purpose of this text is to remind us the reason we are alive is not to satisfy our own needs.
Instead the purpose of our lives is to be useful, a contributing part to the community and find the joy of becoming a servant. We should all be ezers, filling in the gaps, giving ourselves away, reflecting grace. Time is all we have.
Check in time:
How are you spending your time? What is the legacy you will leave behind? Will you be remembered as a person who lived sacrificially for others?
Recognizing that it is not good that you be alone? If you are alone, is it for the purpose of being filled up again so that you can go out and be poured out for others? Again, and again and again.
This is the gospel. This is what it means to have life and to live it abundantly, together, as the family of God.
Let’s pray.
