Sermon Tone Analysis

Genesis 2:18‑25

The Complementary Friend

 

/The Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”//

//So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.//

//The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.//

//So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.//

//And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.//

//Then the man said/,

 

“This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man.”

 

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.[1]

| G |

od’s assessment of the situation confronting the man He had just created should disturb every careful student of the Word.

God said, /it is not good/.

Coming after the repeated affirmation of goodness following each step of creation, this negative assessment startles me.

I had become used to benedictions at each stage of God’s work, and now there is pronounced a malediction.

Light was pronounced /good/ [*Genesis 1:4*].

The earth, the seas and the land were all declared to be /good/ by God [*Genesis 1:10*].

Vegetation, which lends verdant hues to our world, was pronounced /good/ [*Genesis 1:12*].

The lights in the heavens—the sun, the moon and the stars—were affirmed as /good/ [*Genesis 1:18*].

Fish and fowl were confirmed as /good/ when God reviewed His work through the fifth day [*Genesis 1:21*].

Likewise, the animals, which would populate the land, were seen by God to be /good/ [*Genesis 1:25*].

In the final analysis the whole of Creation, working as God planned, was pronounced /very good/ [*Genesis 1:31*].

However, one aspect of God’s Creation brought a negative assessment … and that was man’s lack of one to make him complete.

Out of God’s judgement concerning man’s incompleteness comes the creation of one who is to be Adam’s wife and companion.

You will note that the passage continues with these words: So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man [*Genesis 2:21, 22*].

Woman was made *for* man.

She was made *from* man.

She was given *to* man—the greatest of God’s gifts at the Creation.

We will learn that man named her.

The order in which God created the man and the woman becomes vital if we are to understand the will of God concerning relationships between men and women, especially as those relationships are seen within the two great institutions of marriage and the church.

The function, the role the two genders play in marriage and church, will be determined by this order in creation.

The divine intent is evident, but the implementation is difficult because we are a rebellious race.

Setting aside preconception and refusing to surrender to popular interpretation let us read what God said in order to discover the mind of God in giving Adam a friend who would make his life complete.

Adam’s Deficit — God purposed to make a helper of Adam.

The helper that He would make would be complementary to Adam.

As discovered through careful study of the chapter, this is the meaning of the Word of God when we read of a helper fit for Adam.

There is no such word as helpmeet, as you may have read in older versions of the Bible.

Adam suffered a deficit; his deficit is apparent in reading *verses nineteen* and *twenty*.

Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

A startling word picture is presented here.

It is as though God and Adam stood side-by-side as God caused the animals to parade past.

As each one in its turn passed, Adam named that particular animal.

From Aardvark to Zebra the animals passed by and Adam, after studying each one, gave names based upon the nature of the animal and their relationship to man.

This work of naming the animals as they paraded past was no arbitrary naming, but it was thoughtful statement of the nature of each animal.

The fact that we have dictionaries is evidence that Adam’s labour was definitive for man.

The words we employ reflect our understanding of the nature of all creation, and Adam began this work.

This need to assign a name on the basis of character is, if you will, the essence of man’s unique nature in the work God assigned to name the animals.

Adam studied and categorised each animal.

As part of his study he was to see if there was to be found within all God’s creation any creature complementary to him.

Man can enjoy great fellowship with a dog.

Man and dog can spend hours together and man can enjoy the companionship of that dog.

The dog can be quickly taught to play games, providing again for greater enjoyment still.

Nevertheless, the fellowship must be on the level of the dog because a dog can communicate only on a dog’s level.

If Adam was to have a companion it would be on the level of that which was decidedly inferior, or else God would be compelled to intervene.

There was to be found among all the creatures that God had made no other creature which was specially created by the hand of God and which bore the image of God.

What a blow to those blind individuals who insist upon the evolution of man!

That there are similarities between man and some of the animals is evident.

No one would question such similarities.

All animals breathe air and share in common basic metabolic features.

All the animals move, interact with other animals, and react to common stimuli.

The point of *verses nineteen* and *twenty*, however, is that the dissimilarities were even greater than were the similarities.

Although similar in some respects, none of the animals was *like* Adam [see *hcsb*].

Henry Morris, commenting on this passage, perceptively states:

 

It is abundantly clear and certain that he had not recently evolved from them!

If the latter were true, and his body were still essentially an ape’s body (or the body of whatever “hominoid” form may have been his immediate progenitor), it seems strange that he could have found nothing in common with either parents or siblings.

On this point, as on many others, the notion of human evolution confronts and contradicts the plain teaching of Scripture.[2]

This does not begin to touch on the additional problems for evolution arising from creation of woman.

Of all the animals, Adam alone was really alone.

There was no creature corresponding to him nor was there one that could be said to make him complete.

Adam was unique in intelligence and in spirituality.

Underscore in your mind this sense of uniqueness.

Adam was no evolutionist.

Woman was Made from Man — Adam was prepared for Eve, and Eve was now to be prepared for Adam.

What God would do is to create a creature that would be an ideal counterpart for Adam in this world.

Adam had been created from the dust of the ground.

Moreover, God had Himself breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life.

In this respect Adam was unique in the whole of creation.

The woman whom God would make for Adam was, however, created differently.

She was also unique in her origin, but she would be uniquely dependent upon man for her origin.

There are among those confessing the Faith of Christ the Lord individuals who claim to believe both the Word of God and also evolutionary dogma.

They are, according to their own designation, theistic evolutionists.

They believe that the Genesis account is broadly consistent with evolutionary tenets.

However, the origin of woman is the death knell of theistic evolution, for woman came from man according to the account before us.

The New Testament is explicit in affirming the historicity of Eve’s creation.

/Adam was formed first, then Eve/ is the testimony Paul has provided for us in *1 Timothy 2:13*.

/Man was not made from woman, but woman from man.

Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man /is the clear statement found in *1 Corinthians 11:8, 9*.

Men are born of women.

Everyone has a mother.

That is the created order of things.