Roots of Eden: Part 3

Last week, we looked at the incredible idea that the God of the universe makes covenants with us. This week, in our last look at this incredible chapter for now, we are going to look at what it is to make a covenant with each other, specifically in marriage. There are many examples of covenants that we see made in the Bible. We see covenants made between two men for example in Genesis 31:44 between Jacob and Laban, and famously between David and his friend Jonathan (1 Samuel 20:16). Covenants have been made between nations, for example, in Joshua 9:15, when Joshua makes a covenant with people from another country. 

But there is a special kind of covenant that is unlike the other ones that we have seen in these examples: Marriage. Marriage is a special kind of covenant, a promise of devotion, that points to something more than just a promise between two people. Ultimately, marriage is going to point us towards the relationship between Christ and His Church, a relationship that is the reason for everything existing in the first place. The Bible begins and ends with a marriage, some of the greatest joys and comforts can be found within marriage, which then shows why Satan is so bent on destroying or redefining marriage. 

When we hear something like that in Church, we tend to think then of the national state of marriage. We think that I am going to be preaching against the LGBT movement or national divorce rates. Certainly that is something that we will talk about today because the Bible addresses those things directly in our passage, but I don’t want us to miss the trees for the forest. Yes, we want to say something about these obvious assaults, but we can become so focused on national sins that we forget that there are personal sins in our individual marriages that need addressing. Single people don’t get to sit this one out either. Believe it or not, the problems we have in marriage don’t come from marriage. They are simply revealed in marriage. Selfishness, anger, greed, laziness, critical spirits, and lust are all just as available in the single life as they are in the married life. A lot of times, those sins are developed and more deeply entrenched during those single years, and how well you repent of those things now will give you a good indication of how you will repent of those things in marriage. The Christian life doesn’t start when you say “I do” to a fiance, it starts when you put your faith in Christ. 

So today, we are going to cover that and more as we dive into our last look at Genesis 2, looking (finally) at point number 3: God convenes marriage. 

God convenes marriage 

Here in verse 18, we get a very surprising word from God. So far, everything has been good! But then God looks at Adam and says, “It is not good.” Last week, we looked at the personality of God and the way that He forms relationships with human beings. Yet, we stressed that God didn’t need us for anything, and this is true even for relationships. God wasn’t lonely. He exists as a Trinity, three persons in one God, all existing in relationship to each other. God isn’t alone with Himself. But Adam is. So the Lord is going to fix that by making Adam a helper. 

Here the text says that God formed the animals our of the ground and brought them to Adam. Once again, this is not a contradiction where Moses forgets what order everything was made in. Remember that animals and human beings were made on the same day, but it does look like human beings were made last. In this case, I would say that God simply produces animals in the Garden just like He made the trees spring up in the Garden for Adam. 

Thus begins the parade of the animals as they are each brought to Adam to see what he is going to call them. One source pointed out that Adam was the first scientist! One scholar put it this way: "'Science was simply an advanced state of language. Language in any case is the form and condition of science, and in language the active naming is the first and indispensable operation.''" (Watkins, 109) What he is saying there is that all science is doing is giving us a way of talking about something, naming something. Gravity and how it works has always existed since the world was created, but now, thanks to scientists, we know what to call it and roughly know how it works. 

As an aside, I was talking to the 4th grade class last week, and their teacher told me they were talking about Genesis. The teacher asked, “Why did God have Adam name all the animals first before making Eve?” One of the students responded, “So this way there wouldn’t be any disagreement over what to name them.” 

Anyway, Adam is naming all these animals, but what we are really looking for is a helper, someone to complement Adam and he to complement. But no matter how many birds, bears, and other beasts of the field go by, Adam doesn’t have that match. This is something special because something like a bull or a cow is passed over. LET ME EXPLAIN! To a farming community, it is difficult to overstate how important animals were. If you didn’t have an ox or at the very least a donkey, your ability to grow food was greatly limited. Adam has just been charged to keep a Garden, so having something like an animal would be an extraordinary help wouldn’t it? That would be like being put in charge of a large field, and someone is offering you a tractor! 

But none of these animals fit, because Adam doesn’t really need a plow to complete him. This shows that marriage isn’t meant to be some sort of pragmatic move. Your spouse isn’t supposed to be someone that you exploit for your own ends. Adam doesn’t need someone to do their fair share of the yard work, a good horse will do that. Adam doesn’t need someone to be his employee, an ox will serve that purpose just fine. Adam needs someone who will complete him and he her. Adam needs someone who will help him multiply people to worship and serve God. Adam needs someone who will, with him, complete the image of God.

Adam needs a wife. So God is going to make him one. Now, this is a really interesting procedure here of what God is about to do. We remember that God formed man out of the dust and breathed life into him. We might think that this is the recipe for humanity dirt + breath= living soul! But God has a different recipe for making a woman. It requires some surgery. Adam is put into a deep sleep, a rib is taken out and formed into a woman. 

Now, you’ve got to admit this sounds a little strange. Why do it this way? Well, I think there are a number of reasons for this. One this points to the care of a husband to his wife. Adam wasn’t kidding when he said bone of my bone. That was literal! Now, my wife was not formed of my body, but I am to treat her like it. What does it say in Ephesians 5:28? Love your wife like you love your own body. You nourish and take care of your body (or at least you’re trying to!). If you had a bruised rib, you would be very careful with that, wouldn’t you?  You would do whatever it would take to ensure that it is healed up. Should we not treat our wives in the same way? We care for them gently and in an understanding way. What was physical for Adam is spiritual for us, but the responsibility is the same. 

I think a second reason for forming the woman like this was so that there is no doubt at all that she was made in the image of God and is just as human as Adam. History shows that women haven’t been treated very fairly, and it comes from not seeing women as equally in the image of God as men (in fact, as we will see in a moment, both are needed to image God). I like to make pizza at home, and I have a recipe that produces a large lump of dough that I split into two pieces. One piece is not “more” bread than the other. They came from the same lump. In the same way, the first woman was made from the first man and thereby has every claim to humanity as he does. 

I think a third reason why she was made this way was observed by Matthew Henry, a minister and Bible commentator in England in the late 1600s: “The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor 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.” 

Listen to how Watkins describes what marriage is: "The biblical view of marriage is one of a relation of utter spiritual, intellectual intimacy: this is, after all, how we will know God and be known by him in eternity, and marriage is used in the Bible as a picture of this eternal intimacy.… God did not make two humanities, one male and one female, equally and independently in the image of God, but one united humanity with two genders that together are in God's image. The image of God, it would appear in verse 27, is corporate rather than atomized and individualistic: male and female are in *the* image (not in two images) of God." (99). A parrot is not going to do that. Nothing else but a male and female are going to make a marriage. This is what God has decreed from the very beginning. We went through all the options here. No one else will ever do except Eve. God could have made another man, but He didn’t. He could have said that Adam will just pop children out of his ear or something. But for some reason (that Paul tells us exactly about in Ephesians 5), God has designed that marriage is only between a man and a woman, forsaking all others and becoming one flesh. This is the design that Jesus refers to as well as the rest of the New Testament. It is all grounded right here at the very beginning. 

And marriage was so good there. It says that they were naked and not ashamed. These two could be totally open to one another. There was nothing to hide—total trust of each other. That’s not how it is now. We all wear clothes because we all are hiding from each other. There is vulnerability and threat without clothing. 

Yet in the gift of marriage, that part of Eden is restored. There is one person, and one person only, who has the honor of knowing everything about you. One person who can see every single flaw that you have, physical and otherwise, and still be committed to loving you. That is what marriage should be. 

This picture of marriage is what we should be striving for with each other, because that is what we have with Christ! Ephesians 5 lays out for us that the entire point of creating marriage was so that there would be an earthly picture of a heavenly reality. The husband is supposed to be playing the part of Jesus and the woman playing the part of The Church. It would appear that this was prefigured in Genesis more than we might at first think. I was talking to one person this week who pointed out that Adam goes through what looks like a death and resurrection. Adam goes into a deep sleep, and when he rises, there is his wife. In a similar way, Christ dies, and when He rises again, His bride the Church stands before Him. You could even pile onto the imagery that Christ’s side was opened up, too! But whether these images were intended to be seen that way, the point remains that Christ provides loving leadership to His Church who in turn loving submits. 

We can be unashamed because Christ knows you better than your spouse does. He knows you better than you know yourself. He sees every single flaw as it actually is in all its evil, and yet He chooses to love you still. That is a great spouse. That is a loving Savior.  

So what does this mean for our marriages? We have marriage in a post fall world. We aren’t in paradise anymore, and we aren’t perfect anymore. But this is exactly where we practice the sacrificial love that God calls us to. The marriage we are called to emulate isn’t Adam and Eve. It is Christ and the Church. And it is only in Christ that we can. You aren’t enough to make marriage work. You need power from Christ that you get when you turn to Christ and ask His help. I have a wonderful marriage survey tool and devotional to take you through if you would like a check up on your marriage.