Intro
In this World Reframed series, we’ve been going through some of the most touchy things I can imagine going through. We’re talking about stuff that I would rather not talk about, because I don’t actually like controversy! But these topics, like gender and abortion, environmentalism, technology, science, marriage and sex, these are the issues that people today talk about. They’re the substance of most of our news stories in one way or another. And as a pastor, I want to help you think biblically and “Christianly” about them. I want to help you understand why people think the way they do and how to reframe those issues in light of the Bible. This section of the Bible, Genesis 1-3, provides the basis for a biblical worldview. It’s so foundational. It’s so rich.
Now, before we get into it, I want to make a few points. First, it should not surprise us if what we find in Scripture does not fit with our current cultural mindset. If God is to be truly God and not just a god of our own making, then He’s going to confront us and challenge us and convict us in all kinds of ways. There are inevitably going to be aspects of every culture throughout all of history that don’t jive with God’s created intent. Guaranteed. So it shouldn’t surprise us if people in our culture feel offended or jolted by what we say here. It shouldn’t surprise us that even if we have been following Jesus for a long time, there will still be things that don’t sit well with us and challenge us. I know I’ve experienced that many times.
Second, if you are here and you’re not a follower of Jesus, if you have a very different worldview than what I’m representing today, let me say first of all how glad I am that you are here. My goal is not to impose a distinctly Christian worldview on those who don’t share faith in Jesus, but I’d like to persuade you that this is a good and true way to see things. For you, maybe this is an opportunity to learn why Christians have traditionally thought the way they do about certain issues. Maybe it’s a chance to evaluate this worldview. If you’re the praying type, you might even ask God to show you if this is true or not.
And third, to go back to something I said previously, it’s important to remember that simply by being human, we have a status as those who bear the image of God. This is true no matter what your beliefs you possess about gender or sexuality or marriage. All people are worthy of dignity and respect. One of the most powerful witnesses we can have is to be willing to share our view of the world while also genuinely respecting and treating with kindness those who disagree with us. There is this idea in the world today that to love someone, you must affirm everything that they do or think. That doesn’t work in a whole bunch of ways, so this is an opportunity for us to show the world it is possible to disagree and yet love those we disagree with.
But let’s get going. We’re talking about themes like marriage and sex and we’ll even touch a bit more on gender. So, easy breezy stuff, right? Let’s jump right into the text:
“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Genesis 2:7
“18The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LordGod 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. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” 24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Genesis 2:18-25
1. Formation of man
The first verse we read here has to do with God’s formation of man. I have no problem affirming the historical existence of Adam and Eve, but I believe that this little text is telling us something about humanity in general. Adam stands for all of humanity here. What’s true of him is true of all of us. And what is true is that we are both formed from dust and breathed into by God.
We are formed by dust. What does that mean? Among other things, it seems to point to our mortality or our frailty. This is the meaning it’s given in 3:19, where we read God saying to Adam, “from dust you are and to dust you will return.” In Genesis 18:27, Abraham is arguing for the preservation of Sodom and Gomorrah and says that he has been bold “even though I am nothing but dust and ashes”. This is true of all humanity. Ecclesiastes 3:20 says that “all go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” Psalm 103:14 says “for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.” If you’re paying attention, the implication is that from the start, Adam is mortal. Many assume that Adam must have been naturally immortal before sin entered the picture. But Genesis 2 tells us about a tree of life in the garden which he is free to eat from. The question is, why is there a tree of life if he’s naturally immortal? Could it be that God had provided an antidote in some sense to death, but that sin deprived humanity of that? I’m not sure. In any case, what we can say from the rest of the Bible is that humanity is frail and mortal and prone to weakness, no matter how hard we fight it. The COVID pandemic was in some ways a reminder of that fact. We are dust.
However, at the same time, we are breathed into by God. This goes back to the image of God language we talked about in another sermon. I said that images in the ancient world were believed to bear the breath of that god and to have that god’s essence. Images represented the god. Here, humans are living images, placed in the temple that is God’s whole world, and they are breathed into by Him. They have an incredible status and dignity as those who are to represent God’s presence in the world. Isn’t that amazing? From dust, breathed into by God. It’s like Psalm 8 says, “what is man that you’re mindful of him?” You look at the universe, you gaze at the galaxies, and you realize we’re these tiny beings. We’re so frail. And yet, Psalm 8 says, He’s made us a little lower than the heavenly beings, He’s crowned us with honor and glory. That’s the dual character of humanity.
Then there’s this other idea that comes out of Genesis 2: we were not made to be alone. Everything so far in Genesis has been good. And what we said about that word “good” is that it means things are functioning the way they’re meant to. God’s blessing is being experienced. But suddenly, in Genesis 2, there’s something that is not good: Adam is alone. He has a calling to work and take care of the garden. He has God’s blessing. But he’s alone, and that means things are not functioning as they’re supposed to.
Before we look at God’s solution, let’s soak in this a bit more. We were not meant to be alone. This is not just a statement about marriage. It’s not that to be fully human, you need to get hitched. If you’re single, you might be wondering if this message has anything to say to you. It does. Look at Jesus. Is he deficient as a human because he was single? Or look at Paul, another single man who didn’t think his lack of a spouse deprived him of authentic humanity. But what do you notice about their lives? They lived them in community! Jesus lived his life in close proximity to the disciples. He was deeply immersed in relationships where he gave and received love. Same with Paul. To be fully human is to be a person in relationship with others. It is to be immersed in communities where we give and receive love, where we are not turned in on ourselves.
This is significant because there’s a contrary movement in our culture. I came across a news article about the phenomenon of “self-partnering”. Apparently, the actress Emma Watson recently popularized this term when she said she wasn’t dating anyone but instead was “self-partnered”. This news article was about a documentary about this, and highlighted an Ottawa woman who was tired of failed romantic relationships. So she decided to marry herself. She wanted to make it very romantic, so she purchased a ride on a hot air balloon and proposed to herself. I assume that she said yes, because the other people on the balloon cheered her on and congratulated her on this huge life decision. And now she’s going to have a wedding and invite people to it and marry herself. This is a real thing. A few lines from that article especially caught me. She says, “I think it’s really important to invest in yourself and honour yourself…What’s really important to me is having the most important relationship, the one with myself.”
This is, in some ways, a natural extension of a culture that centres on the individual, on finding fulfillment and satisfaction for myself above all else, on getting what I want, on focusing on my wants and needs. The Bible tells a different story. It says that humanity is fundamentally tied to relationships. And that’s because of the character of the God who made us, since we are made in His image! In the New Testament, we discover more clearly that God is Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three and yet one, distinct and yet in perfect unity. God and relationship go together! As author and pastor Darrell Johnson says,
”At the center of all things is a Relationship, and we were made by the Relationship, for the Relationship, to live in relationship”.
Darrell Johnson, The Story of All Stories, 38
We were made for relationship. To be fully human is to be in community with others. We need to be that as a church. If you just show up on Sundays and leave and aren’t connected to anyone, you’re missing out. Join a community group, plug in with people, serve alongside of people. It’s not just what we’re meant to do as church, it’s what we’re meant to do as humans. Formed of dust, breathed into by God, made for relationship.
2. Formation of Woman
Let’s look now at God’s solution to the problem of Adam’s loneliness. God essentially puts out a job description in Genesis 2:18: Adam needs a “suitable helper”. Look at those words, starting with “helper”. We hear that word and we think it means someone inferior, weaker, someone to do stuff we’d rather not do. Or worse. We don’t bake stuff very often, but sometimes Carolyn will and the kids beg to be able to “help”. What this usually means is that there will be flour and sugar all over the counter and floor. They’ll be jostling for position and bugging each other. By the end, everybody is in tears. “Help” in this case is cute at first but ultimately much less effective than doing it on your own. That’s not at all the meaning in Genesis. The word for “helper” is most often used in the Old Testament to refer to God, actually. God is the helper of Israel in numerous passages, meaning that He is the one who protects, saves, and strengthens Israel. He’s the one who empowers the people of Israel to be the people He intends them to be. It’s anything but a position of weakness. Instead, it’s about providing strength and protection. Adam, it turns out, can’t do this on his own. He is not Superman. He is not the Lone Ranger. He needs a helper. God’s on the lookout for one.
Then we have the word “suitable”. This is an interesting word. Its essential meaning is something that corresponds, something across from but equal. I think it was Karl Barth, a theologian last century, who said that if God gave Adam someone exactly like himself, he still would have been lonely, because he only could have seen himself. If God had given Adam someone totally different, like one of the animals that are brought to Adam to name, then Adam would have still been alone. There would have been no equality. But instead, God wants to give him someone who is equal but different. He gives him someone who corresponds.
To do that, God places Adam in a deep sleep. This term is often used not just of sleep, but abnormal, even visionary sleep. That connects with what Adam sees when he wakes up and sees the woman. It’s a revelation, a visionary experience! Over 10 years ago, Carolyn and I went to a concert during the Olympics here in Vancouver. We had been friends for a couple of years, but something happened to me that night. Maybe she did her hair differently or something, maybe it was the sweet ballads of Our Lady Peace, but I had a revelatory experience. I looked at her and went “whoa! I like what I see!” And one year later we were married! I can relate to Adam.
What’s important here is how God forms Eve. We talked about how he forms Adam and what that teaches us about humanity in general. The same is true of Eve. He forms her from his “side”. I grew up hearing that God formed her from Adam’s rib. That’s how a lot of translations still put it. However, almost every scholar and commentator I read says that this word doesn’t mean “rib” anywhere else. It always means something like “side”. As in, the side of a house or a box. God forms Eve from Adam’s side. She’s his other half. The picture is of God splitting humanity into two. The man and woman are corresponding halves. This is what Adam says when he goes “she’ll be called woman for she was taken out of man”. The word for woman is ishah, the word for man is ish. Ish and ishah. Two corresponding halves. As I said last week, God has made humans in two categories, male and female. As much as our culture resists binary thinking, the vision in Genesis is unavoidably binary when it comes to gender.
Marriage, then, is the re-joining of these two halves. That’s where Genesis 2:24 goes next, to a general statement about marriage. Marriage is male and female, as the two halves of humanity, joined together as one. This is the text that the New Testament writers rely on when they talk about marriage. This passage is foundational for what God intends for marriage. And it’s clear here, and everywhere else the Bible teaches about marriage, that it is to be between one male and one female.
Now, I’ll grant that the Bible does refer to- doesn’t advocate or encouarge, but refers to- polygamous marriages where there is one man and numerous women. But these arrangements are basically always negative. They don’t work. There’s all kinds of dysfunction and jealousy and brokenness, which shouldn’t really surprise us. And by the time we’re later in the Old Testament, and then into the New, we’re back to the original monogamous ideal. But throughout the Bible, it is always a male and a female. It is always the re-joining of these two sides.
I know full well how this sits with most people in our day. There is little about Christian faith that is as revolting to our present culture as this: our insistence that marriage is rightly understood as a relationship between male and female. And again, I don’t intend to impose this on anyone. I’m not trying to fight a legal battle here. Anyone is free to reject this. I am only telling you what I understand the Bible to be telling us about God’s created intent.
The question for most, of course, is what about people who are attracted to people of their own sex? Would God deny them marriage? What about all the stories of those who have suffered trauma, abuse, and worse from attempts to “convert” them to heterosexuality?
I could tell you so many stories of people who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex but have found the biblical worldview to in fact be freeing, to be good news. (If you’ve got the time, here’s a lengthier video of a panel discussion involving a number of those voices).
Sam Allberry is an Anglican pastor who is celibate and gay and has written a book about the Christian view about sexuality. He says:
”As someone who lives with homosexuality, I have found biblical Christianity to be a wonderful source of comfort and joy. God’s word to me on this issue at times feels confusing and difficult. But it is nevertheless deeply and profoundly good.”
Sam Allberry
There’s Jean Lloyd, who lived openly as a lesbian for many years but writes:
“I began to trust the One who knew the truth of my identity more than I did, who wrote His image into my being and body as a female, and who designed sexuality and set boundaries upon it for my good”.
Jean Lloyd (in Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body, 176)
Now married with kids, she says that telling others to “be true to themselves” is not loving. What is loving is helping “me honor my body by living in accord with the Creator’s design.” Elsewhere, she writes about a single friend of hers with the same struggle and that “our individual fulfillment lies neither in our marital state nor in our sexuality, but in our surrender to our Creator’s truth, love, and will for our lives.” I could go on with other examples, but let me sum it up. In many of these stories, people still experience attraction towards and desire for people of the same sex. It’s not that they’ve been converted to heterosexuality. Instead, in their own words, they have submitted to what they understand God’s design for them to be as men and women. In the process, they are experiencing the goodness and blessing of that design, whether single or married to someone of the opposite sex.
Goodness and blessing. Let’s go back to that. Because in all the talk about where our culture is, we can easily lose sight of the gift that marriage is. In the end, marriage is not primarily a way to restrain or safely satisfy our lusts. It is not primarily a way to solidify political alliances or gain the right family connections. On that note, I would say that being as incompetent at anything practical as I am and having a father-in-law who is a framer and carpenter was a really strategic move. A lot of things get done around our house that would not get done if it was me. Or they’d get done, but would result in multiple house fires. Marriage is also not primarily about satisfying our deepest longings, and it is not primarily an imitation of some cheesy Hollywood love story. It is two halves of humanity coming together as one, in order to rule together as image-bearers in this world. It is a way in which to bring glory to God and empower one another to do what God has called us to do.
3. One Flesh
I know some of that was tricky and difficult. Let’s move on to something much easier. Let’s talk about sex. There was once a young boy, let’s say about 7, who came to his mom and asked, “mommy, where do I come from?” The mom was surprised by this. She didn’t think he was at that stage yet! She wasn’t ready for “the talk”, but she thought, ok, he’s asking. So she begins a clumsy, unprepared accounting of the birds and the bees. She’s all over the place. She realizes this isn’t working, she realizes she doesn’t know how to explain this, so she finally asks, “is any of this making sense?” To which the boy shrugged his shoulders and says, “Jimmy just says he’s from Edmonton”.
Some of you are thinking, yeah, let’s just talk about geography! However, this stuff is inescapable as a human. It’s talked about by the Bible, and if God is our Creator, we should want to know what He thinks about something like sex. We should know what He intends for it. And that’s what we get here in Genesis 2.
We talked about marriage. Woman is created from the side of man, and marriage is the unifying of these two halves. The words at the end of Genesis 2 are about how the two “become one flesh”. This “one flesh” language has a few levels to it. Again, it points to a reunion of sorts. It also points to the way a marriage is to be characterized by intimacy and shared life. That’s what the idea of being naked without shame in Genesis 2:25 is also pointing to. Intimacy is what a healthy marriage should be characterized by. But “one flesh” also clearly refers to the physical act of sex. The physical act of sex is two bodies becoming one flesh. And what is clear in Genesis 2, and in the rest of the Bible, is that this act finds its proper expression in a relationship where two have become one in every other way. According to Genesis 2, sex is a good gift from the Creator to be enjoyed in the context of marriage.
Let’s break that down a little bit. Sex is good. It is not a result of the fall. It’s not that sin enters the world, and then God goes, “well, now they’ve gone this far into sin, they might as well know about this other thing too.” Some Christians have been guilty of thinking that sex is inherently dirty or somehow sinful and unspiritual. That’s resonant with an issue in the first century church of Corinth. This was a church where some people were were consumed with ideas of the “spiritual” and thought this meant that they had transcended physical existence in some way. It seems that some were practicing what we might call “spiritual marriage”, abstaining from sex altogether. Paul writes to them in 1 Corinthians 7 and says “each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband…do not deprive each other” (1 Cor. 7:2, 5). The Bible reminds us that sex, in its proper context, is good.
It also tells us that sex is a good gift, given by a good God. And if He’s given us a gift, He has an intent or purpose for it. What we do with the gift matters. Imagine I gave you a painting. I put a lot of thought into it, spent a lot of money, it’s a meaningful gift. Let’s say the next time I came and visited you, I saw that you had hung it up on the wall and had used it as a dart board to practice your aim. There are holes all over it. Or let’s say the next time I entered your home, you had put the painting on the ground in front of your door and were using it as a doormat. What would that say about your view of the gift. What would it say about your view of me, the giver? You’ve received the gift, but you haven’t used it as it is intended. If God gives us this gift, He has a purpose for it. It matters what we do.
I think about Corinth again in the first century. In addition to those wanting to practice “spiritual marriage”, you also had some who were consorting with prostitutes…it was a complex church! And here’s what Paul says to them:
“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “the two will become one flesh…flee from sexual immorality.”
1 Corinthians 6:15-16
Here we see Paul quoting Genesis 2. He’s pointing out that what we do with our bodies sexually matters big time. So much of Genesis points to this: that our bodies matter. Created stuff matters. God made a physical word and made us embodied, and called it good.
There are voices in our culture that want to say that what you do sexually doesn’t really matter. They say that it’s just a physical act, that there’s nothing fundamentally moral or immoral about it. It’s just a release of an impulse. Nancy Pearcey, in her great book Love Thy Body, has this great analogy. She says,
”Imagine a child taught a ‘no big deal’ view of food. That food is just about pleasure. That it does not matter what you eat as long as it feels good. That food is a strictly private matter and no one can judge whether any particular food is good or bad for you. That you might not like broccoli, but that’s okay because what’s good for me may not be good for you. It’s all a matter of personal preference. If a child hears this script his entire life, he will believe it and eat a steady diet of cookies, pizza, and ice cream- and then have no idea why his body is not healthy.”
Nancy Pearcey, Love Thy Body, 152
The analogy, if you haven’t caught it, is that if we believe and live a script that says that sex is just about pleasure, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s all personal preference, that it’s not a big deal, there will be consequences. We’re going to end up in a place where our sexual lives are disordered, unhealthy, and broken. But there is sex that is healthy and good, and it’s sex that honors the intent with which God our Creator made us.
Even in our culture, there are echoes of this understanding. There are so many movies or shows that display the unsuccessful attempt to make sex a purely casual, physical exchange. I remember watching Vanilla Sky years ago. It’s a weird, weird movie. But I remember a line Cameron Diaz says to Tom Cruise after his character had been sleeping with her and another woman. She says: “don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise, whether you do or not?” That, right there, is an echo of what we find in Genesis 2. Sex is an act of one-flesh union. It works best in the context of the relationship (marriage) where that unity and commitment is expressed across the board.
Conclusion
In the end, though, all of this- community, marriage, sex- point to a need deep in the heart. This need is to give and receive love in all its fullness, a love that can only come from God. This is the love that enables us to love others and live into God’s intent for our lives. Here’s how John puts it in his letter:
“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another…we love because he first loved us.”
1 John 5:9-11, 19
So today, above all else, receive the love of God in Jesus that fills us up and heals us and forgives us and restores us as those who can give love. This is what you were made for. This is what your heart cries out for.
*Biblical insights mainly gleaned from three commentaries: Bruce Waltke (Genesis, 2001), John Walton (NIV Application Commentary, 2001), and Victor Hamilton (New International Commentary on the Old Testament, 1990), as well as Iain Provan (Seriously Dangerous Religion, 2014)
