A Partner in Paradise

Genesis – a study in relationships

When we last visited Adam, he was in the Garden of Eden, but he was there alone. He was single. He was living in this incredibly beautiful lush natural paradise—but in one respect, it was actually a wilderness. It was a relational wilderness because there was nobody else there to share it with him. And that was a problem.

It was a problem because Adam, as it says in Gen. 1:26, was made in God’s image. That means that Adam—and all of us, as human beings—share certain things in common with God. Now we know from the Bible that God is relational. This is one of the great facts of God’s nature. The Bible tells us that God is love. You can’t have love if you don’t have someone to love. God is always reaching out and getting involved with others; helping others; loving others.

From what we understand of the trinity, we understand that within his own Person, there is a relational dynamic as the three members of the Trinity relate to one another. So relationship is a fundamental part of God’s character. And because it’s part of His makeup, it’s part of our makeup, because we bear His image.

So here is Adam, made in the image of God, but he has no opportunity for relationship with others of his own kind because he is the only human being on the planet. And that’s a problem. Is God aware of this problem? You bet he is. Look at…

Genesis 2:18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.”

Up until this point in the book of Genesis, we read that God looked at what he had made and saw that it was good. Nine times he says that creation is good. Until he sees that Adam is alone and he says “Here is something that is not good.”

This tells us an incredibly important truth: God knows our needs. Jesus said…

“Our heavenly Father knows what we need before we ask him”

He knows what we need even before we do! God knew that Adam was alone. He knew that Adam needed a partner. God was aware of the problem.

But do you think that Adam was aware of the problem? I think he gradually became aware of it; he had a growing realization that something was missing in his life. He had a growing desire for companionship.

Our deepest needs are revealed through our deepest desires. Because our deepest needs are the result of how God created us. Here is Adam, created in the image of God; a relational being. And yet he is in an environment in which there is no opportunity for human relationship. He is the only human being on earth. So there is within his heart a deep, unfulfilled desire.

We see this unfolding in verses 19-20:

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. 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. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

God gave Adam a project. Name all the animals. Can you imagine! Remember, the act of naming was very significant in the Bible. If you named someone or something, it indicated that you had a special relationship with that person or thing.

In Bible times, people went about choosing names very carefully because they felt that a name had to express something of the fundamental character of that person or that thing. For example, Jesus gave Simon a nickname: Peter, which meant “rock”. Now at first, Peter wasn’t anything like a rock—he was more like quicksand when he denied the Lord and ran away. But under God’s grace, Peter became like a rock; he became one of the foundation stones of the church.

So when God brought all of the animals to Adam for him to name, what he really intended Adam to do was to get to know these animals—to observe their habits, to study their behavior – to the extent that he could give them names that would be appropriate to their nature.

Now in the process of studying all these animals, Adam would have noticed that they came in pairs. There was male and there was female. And he must have observed that relationship – how they shared their responsibilities, divided their labor, and they looked after each other.

And while he was observing that, he felt in his own heart an increasing realization that there was no partner like that for him. He felt very much alone. And I believe that God wanted Adam to come to that realization. God wanted Adam to feel that sense of yearning. God wanted him to experience the desire for companionship.

As Christians, I think we that we don’t always have a healthy understanding of our innermost desires, appetites, needs, whether it be the desire for…

• Food & shelter

• Security & love

• Significance, meaning & purpose

• Companionship, sexual intimacy

This whole area of our desires, our appetites is kind of scary to us. We may have been taught to suppress our desires; to deny having them. We may have been raised to believe that our desires are the enemy of what God wants to do in our lives. We begin think that our desires are sinful.

But wait – the Bible says that God put our innermost desires in us. He built them into us. They are the product of how he made us. They are not the result of the Fall, because here is Adam before the Fall, and he is feeling this sense of loneliness.

The key is in what we do with our desires – how we handle them.

Because we live after the Fall, when we feel a desire awakening within us, we will always be tempted to take matters into our own hands – to go out and fulfill that desires in an illegitimate way that will take us away from God.

For example, we crave significance in life – we need to feel a sense of affirmation of our uniqueness, so we go out and frantically acquire things which we think will give us that – and perhaps they do, but only for a short time. And then we’re left feeling empty. Which leads to another round of compulsive acquisition.

A man craves sexual intimacy – he needs a sense of affirmation of his manhood. So he is tempted to turn to pornography. But that fleeting moment of gratification leaves him feeling empty, guilty, and ashamed. He feels demeaned and cheapened by the experience. Which leaves him feeling less than a man. And that makes him want to do it again, just to take away the pain. And so the futile search to fulfill his desire spirals into addiction. And he thinks, if only I could eliminate this inner desire.

But we need to understand that the innermost desire that is ultimately driving his behavior was put there by God. It is what he is doing with that desire, how is choosing to deal with it, that is leading him away from God.

Seeking to fulfill our desires by our own means, independent from God’s will, leads to despair. But submitting our desires to God, and depending on him to meet them, leads to delight. But the fulfilment may not be immediate.

Look at how this happened for Adam. God put a desire for companionship in his heart; for intimacy, for partnership. He created him that way; he wired him to be relational. Yet God didn’t fulfill that desire immediately for Adam. Instead, God led Adam through a period of time when that desire was awakened and became that much more intense. Why?

1. To teach Adam to wait on God for the fulfillment of his desires. Our modern culture has taught us to be impatient. We want our needs met NOW. We seek immediate gratification. And so we’re willing to settle for a cheap substitute, instead of waiting on God for his answer to our heart’s desires. Here we are in the Garden, before the Fall, and God is teaching Adam to wait on him, and to trust him. He is giving Adam a lesson in faith. The flower of faith grows best in the soil of patience.

2. To help him better appreciate the answer when it came. You know yourself that anticipation accounts for at least half of the enjoyment of a good thing. (e.g. cruise)

Genesis 2:18 teaches us that Adam’s desire was put there by God. Verses 19-20 tell us that Adam learned to be dependent on God for the fulfilling of his desire.

Let’s look at verse 21…

Genesis 2:21 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 closed up the place with flesh.

Why is it significant that God put Adam to sleep? Why a general anesthetic and not a local? Two ideas:

1. Activity—God didn’t expect Adam to do anything to solve this problem. God solved Adam’s problem while he slept, so that he would know, and we would know, that is was all God’s doing.

   This is why God designed us to need sleep. To remind us that we are not indispensable – we can go to sleep and God will take care of our world while we’re “out of it”.

2. Awareness—Adam wasn’t even aware that God was working on the problem because he was asleep. And that reminds us that God is at work even when we don’t realize it.

There is a tremendous lesson here for you who are single and thinking about marriage. God knows your situation. He knows that you are alone. God knows that you yearn to have a life companion. He put that desire in your heart. Perhaps He has been putting you thru a process of increasing that desire in your life.

The question is: Are you willing to trust God to bring that special someone into your life? Or are you going to try to take matters into your own hands to make it happen?

I’ve seen Christian singles who have said “I want to get married. And I don’t seem to be able to find anyone attractive or appealing here in the church, so I’m going to start looking outside the church.” And before you know it they find themselves involved in a marriage relationship with an unbeliever. Moving in two opposite directions.

You may be discouraged by the lack of eligible partners. But if you want to talk about an unpromising situation for finding a mate, think about Adam. He was the only person on earth! Women hadn’t even been invented when he was in the market for a wife!

Just relax, and turn it all over to God. Go to sleep in the will of God and he’ll take care of that whole area of your life. Wait for the one of his choosing. And when God brings that person to you, believe me, like Adam, you’ll know!

Awhile ago, I had the privilege of conducting a wedding ceremony in Montreal. The bride was a beautiful young woman, talented, lots of athletic ability and a great personality. But most significantly, she was a committed follower of Jesus Christ. And as such, she had been determined to wait for God’s choice for her marriage partner.

She waited and she waited and she waited. And nothing happened. Most of her friends got married, and she was in their weddings. But there didn’t seem to be any wedding bells ringing for her. So what did she do? She got on with her life. She kept serving the Lord.

She had a chance to go to Australia and spend a year working at a Christian youth ranch just outside of Sydney. Unbeknownst to her, God’s choice for her husband was serving there on staff. He, too, had just been waiting on the Lord’s choice to come along. And one day, he wakes up and into his life walks this beautiful Canadian girl from 12,000 miles away. That girl is my niece.

What was Adam’s need? He needed a companion. And God knew his need. So he did something about it. What did he do? He created a woman.

Have you ever wondered why God didn’t just create another man? Wouldn’t that have been simpler? (Cut his inventory of spare parts in half.) Why did God go to all the trouble of creating a totally different version of human? Why introduce that level of complexity into creation?

The answer is that man apart from woman is incomplete. The key is in those two words in verse 18—“helper suitable”. (KJV - help meet).

In Hebrew, the word for “helper” is the word “ezer”. It comes from a Hebrew root that means to surround and protect. And interestingly, the word “ezer” is often used in the OT to refer to God Himself. There are many verses that tell us that God is our helper, our protector, the one who surrounds us and shelters us and defends us. God is like a mother bear defending her cubs, or a hen gathering her chicks under her wings.

This is the set of character traits that woman brings to the table – she is a nurturer, a protector, a shelterer. There is something in a woman that is very protective.

C.S. Lewis once said “If your dog bites a neighbor’s child, would you rather face the mother or the father to discuss the issue?” One of the great strengths of a woman is that she desires to nurture and care for and protect her husband and her children. And in that way, she is expressing a part of God’s character that the man by himself does not possess.

Now the word “suitable” in verse 18 is the Hebrew word “kenegdo”, and it means to be a counterpart—to be corresponding and complementary, but to be different.

Think of a jigsaw puzzle. You always have to begin a jigsaw puzzle by finding two pieces that fit next to each other. They’re not the same shape. They’re not the same size. They’re not the same color. But they fit together, because they are “kenegdo”—they are corresponding. And when you put them together, you get a bigger picture than either of those pieces could give on its own.

That’s why God created a woman to be Adam’s companion, not another man. Her differences from him are what make her fit together so perfectly with him.

One of the great errors of our culture is to deny, or scoff at, that biblical reality. The homosexual philosophy ignores God’s solution as revealed in Gen. 2, and moves off in its own direction, seeking to fulfill desire on its own terms. And that is an implicit rebuke to our Creator. It says to him “You don’t really know us. You don’t really understand our needs.”

God created Adam from the dust of the earth, but he created Eve from Adam. Why did God create Eve this way? Why didn’t God just take some more dust and form it into a woman and breathe into her nostrils the breath of life?

I believe that God did it this way to teach us that woman is of the very same essence as man. They are really of one substance - they don’t have two separate origins. Adam recognized this immediately when God brought Eve to him. He said

She is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”

That’s the very first poetry in human history. Adam recognized that Eve was part of himself. She shared his body, his soul, his spirit. The breath of life that was in him was the breath of life that was in her. They were equals in every sense of the word. There was no way that Adam could say that she was inferior, since she was made of his very substance.

Have you ever wondered why God used a rib to make Eve? I think that no one has explained this better than Matthew Henry, the great Welsh Bible commentator who lived in the eighteenth century. He said…

Eve was not made out of Adam’s 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 to his heart to be beloved.

We don’t need the feminist movement to tell us that women are equal to men - The Bible has already told us that on the second page. Adam and Eve were of one essence and one substance. Please look at one more verse…

Genesis 2:24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

This is the Biblical basis of marriage. I want you to notice the order of events in that verse. The leaving of parents precedes the uniting in a one flesh relationship.

In other words, a marriage must take place before the man and woman enter into the one flesh relationship. A lot of couples want to do it the other way around these days. They want to live together before making a marriage commitment. But that is a very damaging thing.

Living together ultimately involves sexual intimacy. And sexual intimacy – the physical joining together of a man and a woman – is far more than just a biological act. Our culture wants us to believe that sex is nothing more than a physical act. But God says it is far more than that – it is also the joining together of two persons on a spiritual level, with lifelong ramifications. When the Bible talks about sexual intercourse it uses the expression “to know”: the man knew his wife. It is the bonding together, not just of two bodies, but of two souls.

In that sense, there is no such thing as “casual sex”. Sex is always serious, profound, fraught with “soul-level” consequence. And because it is, it needs the framework of lifelong commitment between two partners undergirding it.

Sex is a lot like fire. In its proper place, fire is good - it warms our homes, it cooks our food. But if fire gets out of its proper place, it destroys us. The same is true of sex. God designed sex to happen within marriage. In that context, sex is good. Outside of that context, sex is harmful.

Genesis 2:25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

There was total trust, total openness, total intimacy between Adam and Eve, because there was that lifelong commitment. It’s a beautiful picture. But things didn’t stay that way. And that’s what we’re going to look at next week.

But let’s remember what we have learned today. Adam had a need, a desire, a yearning for a companion. God knew that desire; he cultivated that desire, and ultimately he fulfilled that desire by creating Eve to be Adam’s partner.

God knows our needs. He is aware of what we need to be happy, what we need to be at peace. And he wants to provide for our needs. But he wants to do it in His time and His way. And our responsibility is to wait on Him and trust Him to do that.