Clough Genesis Lesson 13

God makes Adam’s helper – Genesis 2:18-25

Turn to Genesis 2:18; we’ve seen man given the first divine institution, given human responsibility; we’ve seen him placed in the garden, and this by the way, still goes on on the sixth day. The way to visualize Genesis 2 and Genesis 1 properly is to visualize the seven days, and the sixth day of creation being expanded. And Genesis 2 is the expansion of that sixth day. It’s to open it up, put it under the microscope so we can see the details of what really happened on that sixth day. Now this tells you immediately the force of the Holy Spirit in this matter because the Holy Spirit’s interested in zeroing in on the most important part of the six days of creation; which day was the most important. Answer: the sixth day. Why? Because the sixth day is the one that’s brought up for close inspection and scrutiny.

So Genesis 2 scrutinizes the work of the sixth day and so far we’ve noticed the following. We’ve noticed that first you have the planting of the garden; then we’ve noticed that man has been placed in that garden and that this is a sequence within the sixth day, that the plants planted in this garden are not the ones created on day three; day three the plants were just general plants, the whole botanical realm but here we have particular plants, plants needing cultivation; plants needing man.

Now the narration continues and we’re still on the sixth day; we haven’t finished yet, and thus we read in Genesis 2:18, “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.” Now this can’t happen after the sixth day because by the end of the sixth day God saw everything, that it was good. So if verse 18 is saying something is not good, then we do have a collision with Genesis 1:31. Well, since Genesis 1:31 tells us that when the creation was finished it was all very good, there wasn’t any pieces left undone, we therefore have to say that verses 18 and 25, this whole compartment of Scripture, must have occurred too on the sixth day.

Then if during the sixth day God’s going ahead, He’s just created man, He’s brought him into the garden, and now God says to Himself, “it is not good that man be alone.” The interesting thing about this is that stopped speaking, really, to man at the end of verse 17; from the end of verse 17 on through all of this episode of the creation of woman, all the way down to Adam’s recognition of his wife, all these things are simply not addressed directly by God. God stopped talking at the end of verse 17. Verse 18 is God sort of in a soliloquy, God is talking to Himself.

And so God says to Himself, it isn’t good that man be alone, “I will make a helper suited for him.” And the word “helper” here is a word, ezer, and it is a word that is used in the Psalms for God; it’s very interesting, some of you know the way the language of the psalms go, and I looked and there was no helper by my side, and so Jehovah became my helper. Well, in that case ezer is being used and very clearly being used of God Himself. So this is the elevation of the role of the woman in verse 18; whatever role the woman plays in history she is going to be the ezer for man.

Now again with this there is an irony in Genesis 2 that you want to pick up; the author is having a little fun with us because he’s not only using the word ezer but he’s using the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now both of those words have irony, in that if Adam and Eve would have done what they were supposed to have done, namely submit to the commands of God in faith, had they done this, then the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would have given them knowledge of good and evil in the sense that they would walk by the tree and they’d declare their volition against that which is against God’s Word and they’d say no; and they’d walk by it on Tuesday and they’d say no; they’d walk by it on Wednesday and they’d say no; they’re walk by it on Friday and they’d say no; in other words, their volition would be exercised against the temptation. Similarly, also their volition would be exercised positively to obey what God said. So the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would precipitate pressure that would generate a choice and a knowledge of good and evil.

Similarly had Eve done what she was supposed to have done, she would have been a direct ezer to the man. Now it’s interesting in history, of course, because of the fall, these things backfired, but they still form their function; and this is what you want to notice about evil, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil still functioned when man sinned. It functioned by giving him knowledge of good and evil. It was a tree that would give knowledge of good and evil if man went positive or a tree that would give knowledge of good and evil if man went negative. But the tree would always do what God designed it to do, namely, give knowledge of good and evil.

All right, man, in other words, couldn’t change the function, he could only change the moral direction involved. The same with the woman; the woman became the helper to man to sin. The woman is no more capable of not being a helper than she’s capable of stopping breathing; it’s an automatic response. The woman will help a man and she will pull him down or she will elevate him; she will help him solidify human viewpoint in his life or she will help him solidify divine viewpoint but a helper she will be and a helper she will always be in one direction or another. Why? Because she’s made that way; she can no more avoid it than the tree could have avoided causing the knowledge of good and evil.

So these functions, you want to watch this, and this is why there’s an irony to all these words; these words have double meaning; she’s a “helper” all right, and she becomes in chapter 3 a real helper, a helper to sin. But now grace turns it around, and this is why in our communion service you know that we always before serving the elements have a woman of the congregation step forward, read the passage out of Luke, and light the candles on the communion table. Now why do we go through that ritual? Simply to show the principle preserved in the Jewish Passover that the woman is the one who initiates the process, she is the helper of salvation. The man needs salvation; who is his helper? The woman. How is she his helper? Because it’s through her womb that the Savior was born. And so again, woman can’t help it, she turns into a historical role of bringing the Light into the world and she can no more stop that than she can stop breathing. So these are functions that are embedded in the universe and you and I are helpless to change these structures; all we can do is either resist them and sin and produce the works of death, or we can submit to them and produce the works of life but we cannot avoid the functions themselves.

Now let’s watch it further, “I will make a helper especially suited for him,” that means one who is designed to fulfill Adam in a way that no other piece of the creation can fulfill Adam. How? Well, woman in the Bible is always connected with adornment; she always embellishes things, and this is why in many of the decoration passages of the Bible you’ll see the woman commanded to adorn herself. You never find the man command to adorn themselves. James kinds of laughs at the man, he says you know what men are, they look in the mirror and they keep on going, no problem. But women are commanded to be the ones who adorn. For example, when the tabernacle was built, the men put out the {?} beams and they poured the gold overlay, but who made the finery of the tabernacle. It was the women. So always the woman is looked upon as the more refined of the two.

The woman is always the one who decorates and finishes. You can see this very easily, just go into a single guys room before he’s married and then watch the bedroom after they’re married, and generally speaking there’s some improvement. Now why is this? Because it’s the woman’s influence. Now that in a very physical way is a picture of the deeper theology of the Bible and this is why the Bible records wisdom as female; wisdom is the tool that man has that gives him a structure, gives him an ability to subdue the earth, it’s the knowledge in one sense, one meaning of the word is that it’s knowledge and insight, into the structure of the universe into general revelation so I can go out here and I can subdue. It’s skill, skill in living. And this skill is what produces the embellishment in life and therefore it’s remarkably… this is the only time it really occurs in sanctification; the believer is pictured in the male role, and his helper is pictured in the female role. So this is a constant theme in the Bible and it’s one that we have to look at seriously.

So the woman, it goes on, God says okay, now I’m going to make, so verse 18 announces a series of action, and these actions proceed from Genesis 2:19-25. These actions have preliminary phases, verses 19-20; they have the execution phase, verses 21-22, and they have the enjoyment phase, verses 23-25. So the rise of the woman is a special chapter in human history. Now this is very interesting; of all the parts of creation which part is given the most verses in the Bible? The creation of the woman. So whereas woman, it’s true, is put in sort of a subordinating position in the Bible, let it never be said that the Bible demeans the woman. She is given more Scriptures than the man ever thought of having. Why is this? Well, she’s a special case, that’s why. And therefore God is going to reveal her special case in all sorts of detail.

Let’s watch how God does this, and keep in mind this all happened on the sixth day. Creation isn’t finished yet; and so in the pre-execution phase, verses 19-20, you have woman is not even started to be built here yet. But in verses 19-20 what do you have but God preparing the man to recognize his need of the woman and he does it without special revelation. That’s the marvel of this whole passage, there’s not any special revelation here. Now the passage itself is special revelation of what went on, but I’m talking about if you were in the garden with Adam as sort of a motion picture recording this event, God stopped speaking at the end of verse 17 and didn’t speak again. We have no record of God even saying to Adam, you’ve got something missing boy. He doesn’t tell him that; what God does, he arranges a situation and then Adam begins immediately to infer from general revelation that something is missing and when he recognizes the woman it’s all done also by general revelation.

Do you know what the significance of this is? Watch; here’s special revelation coming in Genesis 2:15-17; who exists at the time special revelation is operating? Only the male. And so we only have the man recipient of special revelation. Now the woman is created and how does the woman get her special revelation? How does she have to get it? God stops speaking, and she has to get it passed to her by her husband, and so this forces, from the very beginning, it forces the man to be in a position of mediating revelation to his wife. And this is carried on in the pages of the New Testament, in that passage, “let women keep silence in the church,” and we’ve just basically gotten away from that [can’t understand words] from the Scriptures, but the principle behind that passage holds. The passage is teaching again that the man, the husband, is the mediator and the spiritual head of the woman and it’s implicit in the very way the woman is made. God shuts off verbal revelation when woman begins to created and so watch how these themes set up and you’ll see the theme pop out again and again and again and again in the rest of the Scripture.

Now Genesis 2:19-20, the pre-execution phase, when special revelation stopped and now what God is doing, He’s stressing Adam. His new creation only minutes old, just been placed in the Garden of Eden, and now what God is doing is making Adam aware of a lack, and what you have is the preparation for the rise of human sexuality. “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them to Adam….” Now this the one that the critics always have a heyday with, saying ah, see, what you’ve got here now is a clear-cut conflict because in Genesis 1 you’ve got on the third day you’ve got plants, and then on the fifth day you’ve got the birds and on the sixth day you’ve got animals, and over here in Genesis 2 you’ve got plants first, then you’ve got man from the sixth day, then you’ve got the mammals and the fowl of the air coming here. So the order is all screwed up; it’s different. And they cite a contradiction.

But as we said earlier, the verb in Genesis 2:19, “formed” has to be rendered as a pluperfect. Pluperfect means God “had formed,” and what happens in a pluperfect is that the author will be narrating a series of events, X1, X 2, X 3 and so on, and by the time he starts to narrate event X3 he needs a detail which we will call Y1 over here, but Y1 occurred in connection with X1, nevertheless, the author, because to explain X3, he needs to come over here and pick up Y1, he will pick it up with a pluperfect tense and he will say, “and the animals which had been formed,” now are being used. And this is the way we write, we use this in English, but in Semitic literature it occurs again and again. And let me show you one example I found from Professor Keil and this example is over 100 years old and there is no excuse why people who teach religion courses in university campuses, religion courses in a high school campus, can’t see this point and why it’s not just the 20^th century fundy that’s cranking it out. This example was well known in scholarly circles for at least a century.

Hold the place a moment and turn to 1 Kings 7:1 and 13, we have a very obvious case of this pluperfect setup. In verse 1 we have “But Solomon built his own house thirteen years, and he finished his house.” He built of the forests of Lebanon and it goes through the pillars and the beams and so on, the porch and this and that. It describes the palace of Solomon. It also describes it as having been finished. Yet, when you look down at verse 13 you have it stated, “And King Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre.” But Hiram was the one that was involved in the building of the palace; well, then why does Hiram appear to be called out of Tyre after the palace has been finished. Because he wasn’t, that’s pluperfect. And the text goes on and it wants to work with Hiram a little bit and it says, “And King Solomon had sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre,” to do his work, and here’s the kind of man Hiram was. So you see, we misread the text because we keep thinking in terms of simple sentences. But originally the people who wrote this didn’t think this way. So that’s why there’s no conflict between Genesis 2 and Genesis 1.

Going back to Genesis 2, “God had formed” the creatures. Now here’s the picture of what’s happening. Again, drawing a map of Eden as a long oval with a circular area toward the eastern end as the garden, Adam is sitting there and all of a sudden he hears this clop, clop, clop, and we have a zoo coming in to the garden because there’s no animals there, and so what God is doing is He’s running an animal parade by him, putting Adam on the grandstand and one after another these animals start hopping through.

Now they’re a certain kind of animals, they’re not all animals of all the zoological realm, because it says very particularly in Genesis 2:19 only the “beast of the field” and the “fowls of the air.” Now if you take a concordance and check “beast of the field” and “fowl of the air” you will see that every place that occurs in the Bible it’s talking only about the animals that will be normally encountered if a farm yard or farm field, not cattle even. It’s talking about things like a wild deer, rabbit, coyote, these kind of inhabitants of a rural field, and the birds that would be associated with it; it’s not intended to be that every zoological kind would traipse through the Garden of Eden at this point. It’s only some and Adam stood there; remember, nobody has spoken yet. So you could really use your imagination vividly with this kind of thing. God stopped speaking in verse 17; God has left him in verse 18; verse 18 just gives you what’s on God’s mind, He’s not telling Adam this.

And now in verse 19, from some place, the north, the south, the east, the west, come this whole animal zoo, one after another. And the interesting thing is, without any verbal trigger from God by way of special revelation what does Adam immediately do? Remember what God had told him to do in verses 15, 16 and 17? He said “keep” the garden. Well, if somebody told you to keep the garden and take care of the garden, how would you interpret it if all of a sudden 3,000 animals start traipsing through? You’d probably tend to exclude them. But instead of excluding them Adam had a very interesting interpretation of shamar, which is the Hebrew verb here to keep or to hold. His interpretation of the verb is shown by what he does in verse 19, unprompted. Unprompted! Unprompted by God Adam immediately begins to name them. A coyote goes by and he says, huh, isn’t that interesting and he starts studying it because the word “name” means to study and to name, to label. So as these animals go by, without prompting from God, he begins to study it.

Now the lack of prompting is also emphasized at the end of verse 19 when it says that God stood back and let man loose; God stood back and let man begin the interpretation of general revelation, without any direct moment by moment special revelation. You say well doesn’t that contradict what you just said? No, special revelation gave him the framework, Genesis 1:1-10 God does the naming, God starts the naming. God names the heavens, God names the earth God names the day, God names the night, God names the earth, God names the sea and then God stops. And the interesting place he stops in the Genesis 1 narrative is with the creation of plant life because that’s the first thing that man begins to name. And he begins to name the animals.

And so within this realm, framed by the special revelation, now man starts to study. And so Adam, then, is born, so to speak, or created curious. The animals come by and curiosity out of his soul immediately spills forth. See, here’s the first divine institution functioning; he doesn’t have to be prompted, he doesn’t have to be told, he’s built that way. Ever watch a small little child, you know, before he’s had it knocked out of him, how curious he is; he’ll take a block and he’ll look at that block, he turns it around and he’ll look at this thing for hours and you wonder what’s he doing, taking a course in solid geometry. No, what he’s doing is just exercising… he’s feeling the texture of it, investigating, may be slamming it up against something to see if makes dents, and just investigating, that’s all. I remember one of my sons took my wire cutters one day and came in the living room, we had nice chairs around the living room table and he gouged, right smack in the middle with these wire cutters, gouged every chair and I walked in there and his answer to me why he did it was well I didn’t do that chair. Well, he was just experimenting, he wanted to see how sharp those wire cutters were, and they did a real good job on the living room chairs. Now what prompts children to do that? It’s curiosity. They’re born with the curiosity. You don’t have to tell a kid to be curious, he’ll just take off and he’ll be curious.

Well now that’s the picture of man when he left the fingertips of God. Adam was the most curious person who ever lived. When he heard this thump, thump, thump, thump, thump coming into the garden he said hey, what’s this, and started studying all this kind of thing. So watch man in his creativity and his curiousness.

In Genesis 2:19 you’ve got man functioning in a creative unfettered environment. This is what we all would be if we could be what we ought to be. We’d be creative in this area. The nature around us would attract us. Now what happens in the usual fundamentalist circles? To the Word of God we have encrusted tradition upon tradition upon tradition, always justifying it, as in the beginning it is now and ever shall be, everything! And we kill creativity. Now creativity has to be within bounds, yes, like Adam’s creativity was in bounds, but we don’t kill creativity.

We have come so far in our fundamental circles and this process has gone on so long that here’s what we’ve got to: we now get to the place where somebody faces a decision in life about what kind of suit they’re going to buy, what kind of dress they’re going to wear and they want divine guidance on it. Call up God, you know, just ring Him on the hotline and find out what our wardrobe is going to be for the next 24 hours. Now listen, come on, let’s be real. God isn’t interested in giving you hot line scoop on what you’re supposed to be wearing for the next 24 hours; that’s a zone where you can be creative, or not, you can wear jeans all the time if you want. But you can also be creative and that means that God gives areas where, if you could pray from now until hell freezes over you are still never going to get special revelation from God because He’s not going to give it to you. You say well I don’t like that idea. No, because that makes you responsible; that makes you have to create, you see. Don’t resist it, don’t fight it, get with it, like Adam did.

Adam is a human being functioning like we ought to function, freely creative within the bounds of the Word of God, truly creative because he’s doing what God wants him to do, and he’s doing it without moment by moment by moment by moment by moment by moment by moment by moment reference to what do you want me to do, what do you want me to do, what do you want me to do, what do you want me to do… shut up and do it! And you find God, in verse 19 specifically withholding special revelation. How else can you interpret it? He “brought them to Adam to see what Adam would call them: and whatsoever Adam called” them, “that was the name thereof.” Delegation of authority; man has been given delegation of authority and once God delegates that authority God is not going to intervene in His own delegated authority. That’s a principle; it’s a good management principle. And this is why you can’t get divine guidance, as frustrating as it is, I’ve been in that, you’ve been in it, and you want… oh, could I get some special revelation on this one decision in my life; nothing happens, all you’ve got is principles. That’s all God wants you to use, principles, take the principles and the doctrines and apply them but you’re not going to get a private tutoring session how to do it; that’s up to you.

And the reason I think it stymies us, to go back to my point, that in fundamentalism we’ve got a creeping heresy that denies the creativity of man. And you can see this, you walk into the average evangelical congregation, do you see your artists there, do you see your musicians there, do you see your creative literary people there, the very people you need to communicate the gospel into a culture? No you don’t find them there. Where do you find them? The First Liberal Church, where the theology reeks but at least they can be creative with it.

So then we go on to the process, Genesis 2:10, “Adam gave names to all the cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field,” now the word “all” and “every” here are as frequently happens, all within the scope of the narrative, that is, all that came through the garden. “But for Adam there was not found a helper suited for him,” and the niphil stem in the Hebrew is the passive stem here and it draws emphasis, not to the fact that Adam’s doing it, but it draws emphasis to his lack. It doesn’t say: and Adam couldn’t find a helper. It says a helper wasn’t found. And just that little turn of the verb throws emphasis away from Adam over to the lack of the woman that he so desperately needed. Now that’s all the pre-execution phase.

And this shows you something, incidentally, about your life and how God works in your life and how He will work in your life. If you take a diary or a log of your spiritual experiences I think you generally find this: that before there’s a blessing, or before there’s a provision, that comes into your life in some way, before that there’s been this long time of preparation. Oftentimes that period of preparation has been frustrating. You’ve been kind of bent out of shape, well why can’t He do this, why can’t He do that, and why am I left hanging on a limb all the time, and then finally there’s blessing. I believe that God as a general principle trains us to appreciate what He’s going to give us before He gives it to us.

I see this in world history; this is why I do think that Jesus Christ has not come back yet because when Christ comes back again it’s not going to be a little carpenter traipsing around the hills of Judea. The next time Christ comes back it’s going to be a worldwide government established in His name where all nations, all cultures, and all men bow their knee. Now had Christ returned in 1560 the human race did not have a global consciousness and therefore couldn’t appreciate Jesus Christ’s global kingdom, but today in the 20^th century we’re gradually getting a global consciousness, experiments with the leagues, experiments with the U.N. These are experiments where man’s just trying to try out his legs with a global consciousness and try to derive some sort of what he calls international law. But Jesus Christ, according to Isaiah, is going to give international law, but only after men have tried and worked with it to realize their lack.

And so it is back with Adam, the woman is not given to him until he is set up to appreciate it. Now Genesis 2:21-22, the execution or the building up of the woman here. “And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs,” and the word “ribs” can be there or side, “and he closed up the flesh…. [22] And from the rib, which God had taken from the man, He made a woman.”

First of all, notice in verse 21 that you have the first surgery performed under anesthesia in history. Notice too the word “deep sleep.” The word “deep sleep” is the closest to death that an unfallen creature could have come… the closest to death, there’s something that mirrors, something that’s going to happen in the future, because what it is is that the man almost has to die to gain his bride; a picture which the New Testament then pick up for Jesus Christ dying in order to gain His bride, the Church. But Adam can’t literally die because the fall hasn’t happened, so the next thing to death for an unfallen creature is a deep sleep, deep, dark sleep. It also shows something else; that the man must give in order to gain his wife and here Adam is giving, and he’s giving of himself in order to gain it back.

So “the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took out of his flesh,” and this is interesting because though this may seem like a little child story, the creation of woman, and believe me, a lot of people want to make it a child’s story and I’ll tell you why: because your theistic evolutionary evangelical friends who want to play fast and easy with the Genesis text, boy, watch them squirm on this passage, because there’s no way you’re going to allegorize this one around, because you’ve got woman coming out of the side of man and that isn’t going to phase, fit, and slide together with any known cosmogony today. So you’ve just got to buy it or chuck it, one or the other, and you’re not free, really, to chuck it, because the Lord Jesus in Matthew 19 quotes from the passage; Paul quotes from the passage in 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 11 and we know that Paul accepted its literalness. So now we’re stuck, either we chuck the whole New Testament and Old Testament out or we buy it, but you don’t have any other choice. So woman was then created in this way.

Now notice something; we’ve had special revelation come to the man, it turned off, and now the woman exists without special revelation except that which she gets through the man. I’ll comment on that further when Eve goes to meet the serpent, how well Adam trained her. But the point there is is that there’s a definite sequence or chain of command. Now watch what happens. Not only is the spiritual this way, the physical is that way, as though the spiritual wasn’t enough, God creates the woman and He creates the woman so you first have the man and we’ll say his genes, and the woman is derivative of this, and I’m told by those who study biochemistry that if you look at the chemical derivatives of the female hormone they are derivative of the male; a certain particular chain of derivation. And this certainly reflects the fact that this is the way the female was created, she was created physically as a derivative.

This has other implications, before you too easily dismiss this text. This is why Eve, down here, though she is a separate person, is part of Adam, so that when Adam sins the whole race sins, so that you and I don’t have genes of Adam and Eve, we have genes ultimately only of Adam. And that is what produces the unity of the human race in Adam, the unity Paul refers to in Romans 5; it is all physically unified. So now the woman is made and it’s very interesting, in verse 22, “and from the side, which the LORD God had taken from man, he built a woman,” and the word is banah, and that’s what it means, it’s used for civil engineering in the Old Testament. As we’ve often said, when you say there’s a woman well-built you are on sound biblical ground because this is exactly what the Hebrew is saying, well-built woman.

Now notice something else about this. Here’s the ground; do you notice how this word “ground” has occurred several times in the text; now we’re ready to go back and check into something that this guy was doing with our vocabulary and we might have read it too fast to see it. Back in Genesis 2:7 it said that the man was created from the ground; “out of the ground” He made the man. Then in verse 19, the very verse that gave us so much trouble, what does it say about the animals? It says that they were made “out of the ground.” Now why do you suppose this is repeated therefore? Because what he’s saying is that he brought the menagerie by Adam in the garden, as the animals stomped through, He brought this menagerie by and everyone in the menagerie had been built out of the ground, and from the ground there was not found a helper, and Eve is not made from the ground. She is it first one to walk by, she is at the end of the parade, she’s the first one to walk by that hasn’t been made out of the ground. In other words, the text here emphasizes not only the fact that the woman is adorning but it emphasizes the fact that she is more refined than the man in His creation.

Now John Milton had a lot to say about this and when I did the manhood course on this text I brought you to Book IV of Paradise Lost; Paradise Lost is one of the great Christian classics and for those of you who don’t have these on your bookshelf I recommend that you buy several of the good Christian classics and don’t buy, don’t waste your money on all the junk, get something like Calvin’s Institutes, Luther’s Bondage of the Will, Augustine’s City of God, his Confession, something like Milton’s work, Bunyan’s work, and these are classic works that will be in your family for years to come and they’re good investments; you just have to watch book sales and so on when there’s a deal on for them. But here’s Milton’s interpretation of this text. We’ve looked at the text, now here’s what a literary artist does as he begins to embellish the text and give it a picture for you so you can visualize what it must have been like.

Here’s a picture of what Milton visualizes after Eve becomes self-conscious. Now you see, in the way she was made, we don’t know where the O.R. was that God did this, but here’s Eden, here’s the garden, Adam’s there; apparently the woman was taken out of his side and put outside here, and we have all the parades, the dogs and the cats and everything else going through the garden and she’s at the end of them. And so Milton pictures here a couple of minutes after she’s created, and so she’s just become conscious, and she looks first at a smooth leg, “and as I bent down to look, just opposite a shape within the watery gleam appeared, bending to looking at me; I started back, it started back, but pleased I soon returned, pleased it returned, as soon with answering looks of sympathy and love; there I had fixed mine eyes till now and pined with vain desire had not a voice thus warned me, what thou seest, what there thou seest fair creature is thy self; with thee it comes and goes but you follow me and I will bring thee where no shadow stays; thy coming and my soft embraces, he whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy.”

In other words, guys, what is the first thing the woman does when she’s created? She’s looking in the mirror, and so Eve is pictured as getting the first mirror she can to look in, she’s just infatuated with herself, so infatuated the Lord Jesus has to come along and tap her on the shoulder and say hey Hon, I got another job for you. And so He has to tear her away from her mirror in order to bring her to Adam.

And then Milton has this fantastic scene as the Lord Jesus Christ ushers the woman in and she first, she gazes on Adam and here’s her impression. She’s wondering what she’s going to do, “until I espied thee,” this is Eve talking to Adam now, “fair indeed and tall, under a platen, yet me thought less fair and less winning soft and less amiable mild than that smooth watery image back I turned,” in other words, Eve isn’t too impressed with Adam, she recognizes that he isn’t quite as refined as she is. And so one would say that Milton has pictured the woman very well, coming from the fingertips of God. It’s not inspired; it’s just an embellishment of the text to feed your sanctified imagination.

Let’s think further about this, and watch the text. And so God made the woman, He built her up, literally, “and brought her to the man,” made of his genes, made of his body chemistry; derived, yes; changed, yes, but physically derivative, just like she was spiritually derivative. Now in Genesis 2:23 something happens that’s different. Now again, picture this menagerie traipsing through the garden. From the very first coyote that walked through the garden what has Adam been doing? If you had a tape recording it’d probably sound like this: hmm, look at that; I think I’ll call that a coyote, hmm, look at that, hmm, look at this and I’ll call this something else and I’ll call this a deer, and then all of a sudden around this tree comes this walking beauty and what does he say in verse 23, now the thought changes and you’ve got the first poetry of Scripture. This is the first song of the Bible, he breaks out in song, this blows his mind just what came at the end of the parade.

“This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of the man.” And what does he do with the woman that he did with everything that came through the garden? Remember what we said, he’s naming them. And what is the act of naming but an exercise of dominion. And so the moment that Eve comes into his sight she doesn’t name him, he names her, and there’s the third evidence you’ve got of the spiritual leadership of the man. He begins to exercise dominion over her as he did all the animals that walked through; not in the same way but it’s dominion nevertheless. Eve doesn’t name her husband; her husband names her.

Now what does he call her? In the Hebrew this is the way it looks; ish, isha, that itself gives us cause to ponder. Dr. Arthur Custance, a Canadian man who has done a lot of study in this kind of thing, drops this thought on us; try this one on for size. What he’s doing in the context of this discussion is trying to figure out what language they speak before Babel, a very legitimate question, did you ever think of that? English wasn’t the language; but they did speak, all the world spoke one language before the tower of Babel; what was that language. Now here’s an interesting observation that gives us a hint about what the language was. It happens that the word “woman” is a translation of Semitic word which is a feminine form of the word “man.” “Man” is “ish” and the “woman” is “isha.” In no other language does it appear to be true that the word for “woman” is a feminine form of the word for man. Compare, for example, the Latin vir, v-i-r, and mulier, m-u-l-i-e-r, for woman; or Greek aner for man, but gune for woman. In English the word “woman” is broken down from a form of original [not sure, sounds like: woof or wolf] man, which meant the man who weaves. In Spanish the form Señor and Señora may seem at first sight to be parallel but Señor is not really the word for man, nor Señora the word for woman. They are more exactly titles of courtesy, as Sir and Lady in English.

“This exceptional circumstance in the story of Adam and Eve is, in itself, some evidence that Semitic was the form of speech which Adam employed, since it would seem only natural that the first human being should have named his helpmate by a modified form of his own name.” And so it’s one of those little fine details of the text that ought to cause you to stop and ponder for a moment. So he names her isha, and by the way, that’s her name, not Eve at this point. Don’t confuse this woman; she’s not called until lots of things happen down the line. Her basic name is isha, that’s her name.

Now at Genesis 2:24 we have an intrusion; this is an editorial remark, an explanation, an application. Obviously neither Adam nor isha had a mother or a father. “Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother,” this is Moses interjecting a little application here. You see, the woman, though made by God, was put with the man in the garden and God left them alone. And the application in verse 24 is if God leaves them alone, then parents and in-laws surely ought to leave the couple alone. And you have a strong principle here which some of you who are newly married better use because some of you are headed for a crash; you’ve got yourselves so heavily and financially involved with your parents or your in-laws, which if they can do this and you can hack the relationship, fine, but very often this becomes a little bargaining tool, a little pressure point on your marriage. Well now, we gave you this thing over here, now what are you going to do about this other thing over here, you see. And it’s sometimes very delicate, a couple just married, to develop their own proper relationship without this constant looking backwards all the time. Now parents have their roles to advise and so on, but you’ve got to be careful of this kind of thing.

So verse 24 is a warning, if God left the couple alone then parents, leave your children alone when they get married. Then the second thing, “he shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall” not “be one flesh,” “they shall become one flesh.” The Hebrew literally says “and they shall turn into one flesh.” Now gobs and gobs has been written on what does it mean to become one flesh. I don’t know all that’s involved in one flesh; I can point you in certain directions. One is that in 1 Corinthians 6:16 the expression is used for sexual intercourse so very obviously the center point of this whole thing is sex, “they shall become one flesh.” But there’s more to it than just that because the becoming of one flesh has something deeper to do than just the physical act because back when you study 1 Corinthians 6 you’ll quickly see that sexual sins there are said to differ from non-sexual sins in something they do to the body. Now this is the only passage of the Bible I know, other than Genesis 3 and 1 Corinthians 6 that addresses itself to this particular problem. Maybe later on in medical research and physiology and anatomy studies, maybe someday somebody is going to figure this out. But the Bible, I think, is pointing us to something that is not well known yet about what goes on during sex. There’s some transfer or something that goes on in the body itself and whatever this is, the people who are involved in the sex are approaching each other in some sort of conversance. And it’s just simply not just having babies, that’s not the point here.

The “one flesh” is a more profound nature. And the reason I say there’s a mystery involved here is Paul picks it up in Ephesians 5 and he uses it of the Church. And he talks about Christ and His relationship with the Church that is only partially visible; he calls it a mystery. He says there are unfathomable things about this and I’m not even going to go into them. So what does he do, he picks out the one other relationship in general revelation that would be an adequate mirror for this most mysterious and spiritual relationship and uses it. So based on that day I would say that maybe someday we’re going to be very startled or surprised in advanced research in this field that would find out more what’s involved here.

Genesis 2:25, this is the last comment because it gives the characteristic that will then be picked up after the fall. “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.” Now this is connected after the fall with several things. The first observation is that after their fall they are aware of temperature changes because the first words for being chilled occur in Genesis 3 and in the chill of the morning the Lord spoke, and they heard the Lord. And then the second thing about it is in Genesis 3 it talks about “in the sweat of your brow,” you will eat your bread, indicating the metabolism, the thermal balance of the body, must have been shifted at the time of the fall. So the awareness of nakedness, one theory appears to be a thermal awareness, the body changed in some way.

But more basic to that is the fact that the organs of reproduction have become contaminated by the fall and this is played out in proposition after proposition after proposition after proposition of the Mosaic Law, where it talks about both the sexual discharges of the female and the male are declared ritually unclean. Now that’s not saying that sex is evil but it’s saying that sex is too put under the domain of total depravity, that even legitimate sex has become contaminated by the fall. In what way we don’t know, except we know this; that propagation into the next generation through reproduction causes the sin nature to be passed on. So the very heart of the sexual relationship that in the Old Testament was looked upon as the source of life, your fertility goddesses, all your cultic practices that were so heavily erotic, all these processes were looked upon as live-giving processes, except in one place on earth: Israel, and then they were all downplayed as just processes that like with everything else, is tainted with death.

And so the Bible is very conservative in this area; it’s not demeaning it, it’s just saying don’t blow it all up out of proportion, it’s not any big thing. And so here it starts out, “they were both naked,” and this is before their bodies had any mark, before their nerve systems had any sensations that bothered them, and they were in no way… of course, as we often say, verse 25 obviously includes the psychological side, this is the last time a couple was compatible. So when you hear so and so is getting a divorce because they’re not compatible, well join the club friend, every other member of the human race hasn’t been compatible since the fall… every person. And in the second divine institution, which we have here, arrives on the six days… again here’s the days, we’ve looked at the six days, we’ve looked at the events of it, we’ve seen the planting of the garden, we’ve seen the creation of the man, we’ve seen the woman, we’ve divine institution one, we’ve got divine institution two, and the last thing that happens, turn back to Genesis 1, is the final commission. After Eve’s on the scene, Genesis 1:28, then God gives and He speaks, “And He blessed them,” plural, and now special revelation was given, and He said, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth,” and that’s divine institution three, family. So it’s all set up here in these first two chapters of Genesis, chapters that picture the root of human sexuality, the strange maleness and femaleness that every person knows of, and the strange humanness that sets apart the male and the female human being from all the animals. All this, now, is preparation for the next chapter which is the fall, and now we’ll see how deep and how heavy the damage has been.