Genesis Chapter 2 Part 5

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back. Last week, as we studied through Genesis chapter 2, we stood at the pinnacle of creation. Starting going all the way back to Genesis chapter 1. We saw that humanity, male and female, was made in the image of God. And we saw that creation was declared very good. And today we're going to continue to slow down just a little bit. We're going to go much deeper today, because I believe this is a very important lesson. Genesis chapter 2 is not a second-day creation story that contradicts chapter 1. It's a zoom lens. Chapter 1 gives us a wide angle view of all creation. Chapter 2 zooms in on the garden, the man, and then in its climax, the woman. And when we arrive in Genesis chapter 2, verse 21 through 25, we are standing at one of the most theologically rich passages in the entire Old Testament. And this passage answers a lot of questions, like why was marriage created? What is the biblical foundation for the union of a man and a woman? Why does loneliness exist even before sin? What does woman's creation reveal about the character of God, about God Himself? And why does the Apostle Paul call this passage a great mystery pointing to Christ? These verses form the foundation for biblical marriage, human community, the nature of the church, and ultimately the gospel itself. And I would say without Genesis chapter 2, the rest of the Bible's teaching on marriage and covenants and redemption could not be fully understood. So let's read the text here. Genesis chapter 2, verse 21 through 25, and it says, So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. Then he took one of the ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed. Now, before we dive in, let me give you a little context that most people, I believe, skip right past. To understand verses 21 through 25, we have to understand what happened just before that. God had already declared in verse 18, it was not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. Now stop right there and just consider that verse going through these next verses that we read. This is the first time in all of Scripture, again, we talked about this in the last lesson that God declares that something is not good. Every chapter, everything was good. The light was good, the land and sea were good, the creatures were good. But now, man standing alone in the garden, God says, this is not good. Now, what does this tell us? It tells us that relationships are not optional. It is built into the design of humans for physical, for relationships between a husband and a wife. Loneliness, I want you to get this, loneliness is not a weakness, it's a signal. And here's something absolutely fascinating. In the surrounding cultures of the ancient world, in Egypt and Canaan, creation stories often portrayed humans as an afterthought. In the famous Babylonian uh creation epic called the Enuma Elish, humans were created from the blood of a slain god. And their purpose was to serve as slaves to the gods. Relationship and dignity were not part of that picture at all. In the Atrahapis uh Atrahasis epic, uh which was another, it was a Mesopotamian text, it was a creation text, humans were made to relieve the lesser gods of their labor. They were workers, not worshipers. They were tools to be used by their gods, not image bearers. But Genesis radically differs. Genesis portrays God not just creating humanity, but being personally concerned about human loneliness. God looks at the man and says, it is not good for him to be alone. Now, no creation story in the ancient world sounds like that. Then God does something remarkable in the verses 18 through 20. He brings animals before the man, he names them all. But among all the creatures, none is found to be a suitable helper for them. Now, why does God do this? Scholars have debated this for centuries. Many believe God was teaching Adam something he needed to understand before the woman appeared, and that is that Adam needed to see that he was unique among creation, that no animal could meet his deepest need, that he was made for something and made for someone that the created world could not provide. And after that, after he saw the need, God acts. And next we see that God calls the deep sleep to fall over him. The Hebrew word for deep sleep is an interesting word. It's a word that carries the meaning of a supernatural or divinely induced sleep, a deep trance-light sleep, a state beyond ordinary sleep. The same word appears later in Genesis chapter 15, when God makes a covenant with Abraham. Abraham falls into a deep sleep, and God passes through the covenant sacrifice alone. In both cases, God is doing something that humans cannot do for themselves. And so when reading this passage, I want you to see a couple of important theological truths. Number one, the woman is not man's achievement, the woman is actually God's gift to man. So while the man slept, God worked. And this is a picture of grace. God provided what humanity could not provide for itself. And next, God, it says that God took one of man's ribs, one of Adam's ribs. Let's do a little Hebrew word study. And here's something that most people sitting in a Sunday morning church service or Sunday school class will never hear, or maybe have never heard. The Hebrew word translated for rib in English is a word that more broadly means side or chamber, one side of a structure. The same word is used elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe the two chambers of the of the temple in Ezekiel, the planks, the two sides of a plank on the ark, and the and the sides of the tabernacle. And so many ancient interpreters, both Jewish and Christian, understood this to mean that God took an entire side of Adam, not just a rib, but a side of him. Now I want to be careful here. I'm not saying that interpretation is definite. Most Orthodox Christian scholars understand this to be a literal rib. But the deepness of the Hebrew word, the depth of that Hebrew word, is significant because it tells us something important. And that's the woman is not a lesser version of the man. She is taken from the very substance of his being. She is made from his side, not from his head to rule over him, not from his feet to be trampled by him, but from his side to stand beside him. And this imagery comes from Matthew Henry, the great Puritan commentator who wrote in the 1700s, and it has stood the test of time because it captures the heart of what the text is actually teaching. Next we see in verse 22, notice what God does. He fashions the woman and then brings her to the man. The Hebrew word for fashion is very different than the word used for man's creation. When God formed the man back in verse 7, he used a word that means to shape like a potter. But here, the word for fashioning the woman carries the idea of building or constructing with great care, bringing something to its final, completed form. There were many ancient rabbis that noted that God spent more time and care in fashioning the woman than forming the man. And then God presents her, God brings her to Adam. And what this is, it's the first marriage ceremony in history, and God is the one who performs it. And this is not a small detail. The text is teaching us that marriage is not a human invention. It's not a cultural convention. It's not a legal arrangement created by governments. Marriage was created by God before there was a government, before there was a religion, before there was a temple, before there was any law. This means that according to Genesis, marriage is older than civilization itself. Now consider what the ancient Near East believed about women. This is one of the places where Genesis stands in a dramatic contrast to the surrounding world of the time. In ancient Mesopotamia, women in most social classes had very limited legal standing. A wife could be traded for debt. Daughters were property that could be sold. Widows had no legal protection. In ancient Egypt, women had a few more rights than in many cultures, but in religion, they were often portrayed as lesser divine figures, and many times they were seen as dangerous and unstable. In the Canaanite religious world, fertility goddesses were worshipped, but actual women were exploited in temple prostitution. False goddesses were celebrated in mythology, while real human women were devalued in life. And then there's Genesis, where God Himself fashions the woman, where God Himself presents her, where she is bone of bone and flesh of flesh, equal in substance and equal in dignity. There are no ancient texts that treat the creation of women with this kind of dignity and intentionality. And next we see the first human speech in all of Scripture. This is a remarkable moment. Up until now, in Genesis chapter 2, we have not heard Adam speak. We've heard God speak, and we've heard God's commands and instructions, but the first recorded words of any human being in history are found in Scripture saying, This is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, and she should be called woman because she was taken out of man. And I want you to notice his first words are not about himself. They're not about God, they're about his wife. The first human words in the Bible are an act of recognition, a declaration of the connection between the two, and I would say a cry of joy. The Hebrew text here is poetic, almost song-like quality. And many scholars describe it as maybe the first poem in the Bible. Adam is not just identifying a woman, he is celebrating her. And he said, She is bone of my bones. In the ancient Hebrew culture, that phrase alone, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, was a covenant formula. The same expression appears later in the New Testament. In 2 Samuel chapter 5, verse 1, when the tribes of Israel come to David and say, We are bone of your bone and of your flesh, they were pledging a covenant of loyalty to them. In Genesis chapter 29, when Laban greets Jacob, he uses similar language, acknowledging a kinship between the two. And so when Adam says, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, he's not just describing her biological origin. He is making a covenant declaration. He is saying, She belongs with me. We are one, we are bound to each other. I am bound to her and she is bound to me. And so the first marriage in history begins with a covenant, not just a ceremony. Now, he goes on and says, She should be called woman. Now, this is a Hebrew wordplay. In Hebrew, a wordplay in this verse is actually quite stunning. The word for man in Hebrew sounds like Ish. The word for woman sounds like Isha. And so Adam is saying she Isha is Isha because she came from Ish, if that makes any sense at all. The very name of the woman is rooted in her relationship to the man. And the very name of the man points back to her. Now, sadly, this wordplay is completely lost in English translation. But in the original Hebrew, the entire creation of woman is wrapped in this linguistic beauty. The early church father Totulian, writing in the late second century, reflected on this passage and said that woman was formed from man so that man would understand. He said, The one who came from him is not alien to him, but is from him and belongs to him. Next, we read in verse 24 that therefore a man shall leave. Now we come to the one of the most important verses in all of Scripture on the topic of marriage. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Now we have to break this down carefully. Let's start with this. He shall leave. The word means to forsake previous attachments, to transfer primary loyalty, to establish a new household. And this is striking because at this point in the story, there are no fathers. There are no mothers. Adam has no parents. And so why does the text say leave his father and mother? Because this verse is not written just for Adam. It is written for every person who will ever come after him. The narrator steps out of the story and makes a universal declaration saying, This is how marriage works for all of humanity and all of history and all of future marriages going forward. Then he says, and he was joined to his wife. The Hebrew word joined or cleave in older translations means to cling, to stick by, to stick fast, to be bound so closely that separation would mean a tearing, a ripping apart of the two. This is the same word used in Ruth chapter one when Ruth clings to Naomi. It says, but Ruth clung to her. It's used in the book of Deuteronomy of the covenant relationship between Israel and God. You who held fast to the Lord your God are alive today, holding fast. And so the marriage bond is described with the same language as the covenant bond between God and his people. And this is not an accident. The phrase one flesh means far more than a physical intimacy. In fact, there have been many who have tried to reduce it to that, and it's it's quite disgusting. In Hebrew thought, flesh, the word there refers to the whole person, body, and being together, a full life shared between two people. And so the one flesh means one shared life, one shared future, one shared identity before God and the community. The early church father Augustine, one of the most important theologians in all of Christian history, said, Our heart is restless until it rests in you, O God. But Augustine also taught that marriage was one of the primary means by which God images a covenant love with creation. The one-flesh union of husband and wife was meant to visibly reflect the union of God with his people. And verse 25 says they were naked and not ashamed. Now, this verse is one of the most theologically loaded sentences in all of Genesis. And we have to understand this in light of what comes next. Because when sin enters into Genesis chapter 3, the very first thing Adam and Eve do is to cover themselves. Shame is immediate as a result of the fall, which means that shamelessness before the fall would represent a perfect transparency between the man and the woman. There's no hiding, no fear, no exploitation, no using the other person as an object. They were fully known and fully loved by one another, and they had nothing to hide from each other or from God. And this is the picture of what marriage was meant to be as it was created by the Lord. It was a place of complete safety, of complete honesty, of complete acceptance. And the tragedy of Genesis chapter 3 is that sin comes in and shatters all of that. Every broken marriage, every betrayal, every moment of shame and intimacy, every wall built between a husband and a wife traces back to that fracture in Genesis chapter 3. I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. We'll get there in the next study, in the next section. Let me share what I believe Genesis chapter 2 says to our world now. And here's something that many people, again, will never hear on a Sunday morning or maybe in a Sunday school class. Modern evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience have discovered that human beings are in, in scientific terms, what they call pair-bonding creatures. Studies in neuroscience have shown that human brains release this chemical, a bonding hormone, in ways that create deep psychological attachment. Long-term committed relationships are proven to produce measurable health and mental benefits. Humans uniquely suffer from loneliness in ways that most animals do not. And so, from a purely secular scientific perspective, humans appear to be built for a committed pair bonding. I just want you to remember that Genesis said that first. It is not good for man to be alone. The Bible does not borrow from modern science. In fact, I've said this in previous lessons. I would caution us against trying to tie modern science and physics and things like that to the scriptures. Modern science stumbled onto what Genesis had already declared. Now we live in a world that is already, that is, already deeply confused and has deconstructed marriage. And I want to say this carefully and with compassion. There are many people who have been deeply hurt by broken marriages, both with a spouse and sometimes children and families. And there are divorced people in your life that you know who have walked through tremendous pain. None of what I'm saying is meant to add weight to that pain. But we have to be honest about what the culture is telling us. The culture around us tells us that marriage is just a legal contract easily entered into and easily broken, that commitment is conditional and it's conditioned on personal fulfillment, that intimacy has no spiritual or covenant dimension, and that the design of marriage as one man and one woman is just a cultural option amongst some. Genesis chapter two tells us something completely different. That marriage was designed. It did not evolve. It was never voted on. It wasn't negotiated. Marriage was given. And the design of marriage, one man and one woman, is a covenant that is rooted in creation itself. It predates every law, every religion. It is woven into the fabric of what it means to be a human. Consider what the early church father said. One of my goals in these lessons is to make sure you hear things that most Christians have never heard. And one of those things is how seriously the early church took Genesis chapter 2. It was John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople in the late 300s, who taught that in the creation of Adam, uh, um, of Eve from Adam's side, God was showing the unity and equality of marriage. This is what he wrote. He said, God did not form her from his head that he should rule over him, or from his feet, that, um, nor from his feet that she should be a slave, or from his side that she should be close to his heart. Irenaeus, one of the great early theologians from the second century, saw in the deep sleep of Adam a foreshadowing of Christ. Just as Eve was taken from Adam's side while he slept, the church was brought forth from the side of Christ as he hung on the cross. From his wounded side flowed blood and water, symbols of the sacraments that give life to the early church. Tertullian wrote in the late second century beautifully about Christian marriage being rooted in Genesis. This is what he said. He said, How beautiful is the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, in desire, and discipline, in the same service. They pray together, they worship together, they fast together, they instruct, they instruct one another, they exhort or encourage one another, and they sustain one another. Now, these are not modern ideas, these are ancient convictions rooted in Genesis chapter 2. And in all of this, we see a fulfillment in the New Testament. Here's one of the most important things I can tell you about Genesis chapter 2, verses 21. 25 is that Jesus quotes it. In Matthew chapter 19, the Pharisees come to Jesus trying to trap him in a debate about divorce. And Jesus answers them by going all the way back to creation. This is in Matthew chapter 19, verses 4 through 6. And he answered and said, This is Jesus. He said, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together let no man separate. Jesus doesn't appeal to Moses. He doesn't appeal to law or tradition. He goes all the way back to Genesis, to creation, to design. And so the authority of marriage rests on creation, not on culture. And then there's the Apostle Paul. Paul does something in Ephesians chapter 5 that is breathtaking. He quotes Genesis chapter 2, verse 24, saying, The two shall become one flesh. And then he says something that would have stunned the readers of the first century. In Ephesians chapter 5, verse 31 through 32, he says, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. He says, This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Paul is saying the marriage described in Genesis chapter 2 was always pointing to something greater, that the husband is a picture of Christ, that the wife is a picture of the church, that the one flesh union of marriage is a living parable of the covenant between Christ and his people, which means that when God put Adam to sleep and opened his side, he was not just creating woman, he was writing prophecy. And centuries later, another man would be put to sleep on a cross, and his side would be open, and from that open side comes forth his bride, the church, those who would follow Jesus. Irenaeus saw it in the second century, Augustine saw it, the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas saw it. And it's all right here in Genesis chapter 2, hiding in plain sight. So let me bring this together. Genesis chapter 2, verse 21 through 25, this is what it teaches us. Loneliness is real, and God takes that serious. Woman was created with intentionality, with dignity and care. She was not an afterthought. She is the completion of creation's design. Marriage was created by God before government, before religion, before civilization. And the one flesh union is a covenant, not just a contract. Shamelessness before the fall reveals what marriage was designed to be, a place of total safety and total knowing. And the whole story points forward to Christ and his bride, the church. This passage is not ancient history. It's speaking directly into our moment and time today, into our marriages. You're not married into your future marriage, into our loneliness, into our longing for a connection. Every human being who has ever ate to be truly known, to be truly understood, to be truly loved, to not be alone, is feeling the echo of Genesis chapter 2. And the gospel of Jesus Christ says, what was broken in the garden, he has come to make new. Now, I'll be back next week as we step into Genesis chapter 3. There's a lot of stuff that happens there. It's where everything changes. And the most important question we'll look at through that chapter three in human history is answered where did evil come from? I hope to see you next time. Have a great day.