In the Beginning: The Flourishing Design of Man & Woman (Genesis 2:4-25)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

Thank you for tuning in to Newsong Church's Sermon Podcast.

At Newsong Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.

You can learn more about us and find contact info at newsongportperry.ca.

Our first lesson this morning is taken from Genesis chapter 2, beginning at the fourth verse.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up.

For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground.

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for to for food.

The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden.

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.

For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.

I shall make him a helper fit for him.

Now out of the ground the Lord God had 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, he 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.

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.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

Let's pray.

Great are you, O Lord, and you reveal yourself to us by means of creation.

Chiefly, Lord, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

So we pray right now that we would catch a glimpse of our incarnate Lord.

That we would hear his voice through his word.

That his Holy Spirit would illumine him to our hearts.

Catch us up in the beauty and mystery and splendor of who you've created us to be.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Please be seated.

I should like balls infinitely better, said Caroline Bingley, if they were carried on in a different manner.

It would be much more rational if conversation, instead of dancing, were made the order of the day.

Much more rational, I dare say, replied her brother Charles, but it would not be near so much like a ball.

You might recognize this witty exchange from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Thanks to Rachel, I have indeed seen both the BBC miniseries and the American Adaptation.

And I won't lie, I love them both.

To this day I debate which one's better.

Probably Carlin Firth, though.

See, Carolyn, who's truthfully a really rather vain and antagonistic character, states her truth in this moment, as it were.

Conversation is far more reasonable than dancing.

So, in the interest of rationalism, it would be much more preferable to change the nature of a ball from dancing to discourse.

But her genial brother Charles won't let her off the hook so easily.

Such a change to what the nature of a ball would seem more reasonable, but it would lose something of a ball's beauty and its charm.

It would lose the beautiful symbol that the ball is meant to be of the partnership between men and women.

All of this would be lost.

Reflecting on a changing understanding of gender in a post-war Britain, C.S.

Lewis observes that in a secular discourse, men and women are often treated as homogenous and interchangeable units.

There is essentially no difference between men and women.

So the popular discourse goes.

And in his reflection, Lewis recalls this scene in Pride and Prejudice and writes that the ball exists to stylize something which is natural and which concerns human beings in their entirety, namely their courtship.

Something of the partnership between male and female.

Now, if you're familiar with Lewis's writing on the subject, you may well disagree with some of the specific conclusions he reaches.

But the foundational argument that men and women are not simply interchangeable and homogeneous units is worth us paying attention to.

Because to confuse these two things risks missing the inestimable value that God places on both manhood and womanhood, rightly understood, and it risks losing the beauty discovered in the partnership, in the community of these two sexes.

So there's so much to explore in Genesis, and as I was reflecting on last week's sermon, I realized there are so many nooks and crannies left unexplored.

That'll probably be the nature of our study.

So as it raises questions in your mind, I hope that you'll write these questions down, that you get the chance to discuss these questions.

But for now, we've already seen in Genesis 1 that the transcendent creator God has, he speaks into being creatures who bear his image, male and female, he created them.

God's image is born equally by both, and the significance of bearing God's image is discovered in community.

The author of Genesis goes on: God blessed them, the man and the woman, and he said, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.

See, God, we should understand, is God.

If he wanted to create asexual beings who reproduce by mitosis to fill creation, he could have done.

But it is the life-giving union of men and women that God desires to bring forth life.

And through it, through the ongoing partnership of men and women together as a community, as co-equals, co-image-bearers, God wants to bring all the earth into its fullness and flourishing.

And it is the question of flourishing that is in front of us here in Genesis 2.

Indeed, I think in all the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

Today's passage gives us a complementary narrative, creation narrative, to that of Genesis 1.

It's meant to stand alongside, it's meant to illumine God's creative work from a new angle and draw out a fresh set of questions from us, the readers.

Genesis 2 bears clear witness.

God desires human flourishing, abundance of life, and blessing for all of us humanity.

The question for us, as well as Genesis's first audience, is this How is that flourishing to be realized?

So I wonder if there's broadly speaking two answers to that question.

The first answer might be something like this flourishing will be realized when I am most free to define and express my most authentic self for myself as I define it for myself.

Now, agree or disagree with that statement, I suspect we could all agree that this is largely the dominant thinking of our moment, especially with regards to gender identity.

And this idea of freedom and authenticity is not necessarily off the mark.

We cannot flourish if we are being untrue, inauthentic, if we're being dominated or oppressed.

I hope we'll see that this idea is not altogether wrong, but I suspect Genesis 2 would encourage us to go even deeper still.

Flourishing will be realized when I am most free to discover and express the authentic self that God created me to be, uniquely, indelibly.

For the author of Genesis, flourishing comes by God's design, not by our own self-determination, no matter how rational our self-determination may seem to ourselves.

This bears itself out in every aspect of our personhood, including our gender.

And I suppose I single that out today because that seems to be the conversation of our day, isn't it?

So at the time we have, I'd like to propose we explore two questions.

First question is this: how did we get to this moment of self-defined gender identity?

And the second question is this could God's word and scripture in Genesis 2 point us towards a more beautiful way still?

So if you have your bulletin, pull it out, your Bible, pull it out to Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

And I'd like us to take a little bit of time to explore this text.

The first question is: how did we get here?

How did we get to this moment of self-definition?

Presbyterian thinker Carl Truman writes this in his book, uh, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

This is the first paragraph.

He writes this sentence, I am a woman trapped in a man's body.

He writes that this sentence would have seemed incoherent to a previous generation, say his grandparents, and yet he observes that today this sentence that many, pardon me, today this sentence would be regarded, pardon me, and yet today it is a sentence that in many, that many in our society regard as not only meaningful, but so significant that to deny it or to question it in some way is to reveal oneself to be stupid, immoral, or subject to yet another irrational phobia.

And Truman observes this is just as true for philosophers and French post-structuralist philosophy departments as it is for neighbors that we encounter on the street.

There is an intuitive truth to a statement like that these days.

And the question Truman wants to raise is this how did such an idea become the common orthodox currency of our culture?

This idea didn't come out of nowhere.

How do we arrive at our present understanding of self-identified identity?

Now there's two resources I'd really like to recommend.

If you're the sort of person who wants to understand our cultural moment, wants to understand where these uh where this line of thinking kind of comes from, then there's two things I'd really recommend.

The first is a uh lecture, a four-part lecture given by Roman Catholic bishop Robert Baron called Understanding Our Present Moment.

And you can find these lectures on on YouTube.

Barron traces the conversation of how we understand our identity and how we relate to the world around us in our present moment through four thinkers in particular, and those thinkers are Karl Marx, Frederick Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault.

And Baron argues that these four thinkers have informed our present conversation more than any other.

So if we'd like to understand the conversation, if we feel like we entered into the conversation halfway through and we're catching up, here's a great way for us to get a sense of our bearings.

The bottom line is this: that over the course of, let's say, the last 160 years or so, these four thinkers have inspired Western culture to largely reject objective morality and moral principles and to treat the self as autonomous and self-defining rather than natured, to meet a truth claim with skepticism, since truth claims are often, if not always, an exercise of power.

And this leaves us floating in something of a sea of moral relativism as we search for meaningful identity.

And we are searching for identity, a sense of who we really are and what makes life meaningful.

That's the first resource I'd like to recommend, understanding our present moment.

The second, I've already mentioned, it's Carl Truman's book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, or there's a very readable companion called Strange New World.

Truman tells the story of the philosophical conversation that's evolved into our moment's present ideology of autonomy and self-defined identity.

To this list of influential thinkers, Carl Truman adds the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

Truman writes that Freud has provided the West with a compelling myth, a basic idea by which we can understand the world around us, and the myth is the idea that sex, in terms of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment, is the real key to human existence, to what it means to be human.

So sex is the fundamental principle of our human existence.

And understood along these lines, our sexual desires, our sexual orientation define our core, our most authentic selves.

My point in this is not to, I'm not trying to drop a straw man so that we can knock it aside.

If you disagree with where I go with this, I sincerely hope you'll recognize this position being fairly represented here.

My goal here is not to ridicule.

My goal here is that we gain a clear understanding of where we're at in our present cultural moment, so that we can be meaningful conversational partners here.

See, it's this understanding of moral relativism, self-definition, and sexuality that brings us to this moment where my truth is my truth, and gender is a self-defined social concept.

And all of this is founded upon what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls expressive individualism.

Hang in with me here, we're getting somewhere.

Taylor writes that each of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity.

It is important to find and live out one's own identity as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside by society or the previous generation or religious or political authority.

And to this Truman adds that while sex may be presented today as little more than a recreational activity, sexuality is presented as that which lies at the heart of what it means to be an authentic person.

So that for the expressive individualist, flourishing, which is the question in front of us, comes from the inside out.

It comes from being true to myself as I define myself, not from the outside in, which is acting in accordance to, let's say, a nature or an authority that imposes itself on us from without, whether that's biological or political or religious.

The thing we ought to note is that we all do this.

We all do this.

This is the culture, the world that we're steeped in.

This is the soup we're swimming in.

When I need to understand who I am, I'm largely looking at the things that I've considered most meaningful in my life.

My marriage is indeed genuinely meaningful.

But so often that can become, I can think of my marriage, I can think of my job, I can think of, I can think of my hobbies, I can think of these things that I've elected for myself as giving my life meaning.

I suspect we all do the same one way or the other.

We are all of us, to some degree or another, expressive individualists.

We trust that if my most authentic self can be can can be determined and expressed, then that will lead to flourishing.

And indeed, if we're forced to be inauthentic, if we are subjugated, then good luck flourishing.

There is some truth to that, isn't there?

Here's the moment we're living in.

Now, all of this is not a question of phobia, it's a question of flourishing.

How is it that human beings can flourish?

This is the answer of our present moment.

It's not a new one, but it has taken a new form.

Flourishing will be realized when I am most free to define and express my most authentic self as I understand it for myself.

The question that Genesis would want us to consider is this are we any closer to flourishing following along these lines?

Is there a more beautiful way?

I think Genesis wants us to point us, wants to point us in a more beautiful way.

Than a way of swimming in a soup of moral relativism, of desperately trying to discover who we are without any solid sense of when we've arrived at that understanding.

Genesis 2, let's pull out our, let's pull out scripture here.

Let's begin at verse 5.

Is there a more beautiful way?

Genesis 2, verse 5.

Genesis 2:5

The Lord God formed the man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

And the man became a living creature.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.

The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Reader, take note, there's more to come.

So we see in this brief passage, God, the Creator, breathes into the human being life.

He animates him.

In other words, this man does not belong to himself, he belongs to the God who has animated him, who has given him breath and life.

Verse 15, we continue, the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You shall surely eat of, you may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.

For in that day you eat of it, you shall surely die.

So a couple of really important things packed into this short statement here.

One, the Lord God gives the man a commission.

He gives them a priestly commission.

This language to go into the Garden of Eden, to work it and keep it, echoes the language of the Aaronic blessing in number six.

This is the language that God gives his high priest Aaron to bless the people of Israel.

That the Lord would bless you and keep you.

Might not be obvious in English, but in Hebrew it's unmistakable.

This human man has been given a priestly commission.

He's also been given a precious command.

You shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The bottom line is a relationship with the Creator God exists on the basis of trust.

A relationship, a life giving and flourishing relationship with the Creator comes with a sense of joyful obligation.

The sort that a child Friends to a parent in a way, discovering a greater and more joyful way of being and being subject to one's authority.

Verse 18 Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.

I will make a helper fit for him.

There's this parade of animals before Adam, and no creature is found that corresponds with him.

It is not good that the man should be alone, God says.

Despite the constant refrain of good, good, good, very good we've seen in Genesis chapter 1, the author here wants to make a profound point.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

That it is not good for the man to be autonomous and isolated.

But partnership and community and union is an essential part of being a human being.

Because without a partner, we cannot understand ourselves.

And so the partner that God endeavors to make is for this man a helper, or in Hebrew an ether, which fairly translates to helper or elsewhere helpmeet.

But we ought not to think of this term as something of a subordinate, like a like a tyrannical hierarchy between man and woman.

We know this because this word ezer elsewhere gets translated as something like an ally or a rescuer.

In Hosea 3.9, the Lord most clearly uses this word Easer to refer to himself in his relationship with his people, Israel.

And in Psalm 121, the psalmist writes this: I lift my eyes up to the hills, from where does my help, my Eesir, come?

My help, my Easer, comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

This rescuing, partnering, co-laboring help, this Easer is meant to be a flourishing partnership between male and female.

The man is commissioned to bring something like order into God's otherwise untamed chaos of creation.

And the woman is meant to bring creation's order into its flourishing fullness with God's animating life.

Something like that.

There's a unique partnership between male and female here, and this is true biologically, because the woman herself bears life into the world.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, he 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, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman, Isha, because she was taken out of the man, Ish.

The language there is meant to convey that correspondence.

We have found a partnership together.

Adam is found with the whom the one with whom he is meant to partner, and he understands himself.

He speaks for the first time, only now having discovered unity in distinction.

He is not interchangeable with the woman.

He is meant to partner with her in this ongoing creative work of cultivating creation towards fullness and flourishing.

See, it's this, Genesis and elsewhere in Scripture does not offer us this laundry list of gender roles as though we've to check off domestic chores between men and women.

I don't read that anywhere in Scripture.

But what Scripture does bear witness is that the partnership of male and female symbolizes and illumines something that is true of God's own character and relationship with us, his people.

So C.S.

Lewis can write that as Christians grounded in biblical revelation, we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature, which is to say as sort of these homogeneous and interchangeable units, but as live and awesome shadows or reflections of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge.

Or rather, he says, we are not dealing with them, but they are dealing with us.

Lewis wants us to catch that the mystery of manhood and womanhood, male and female, is meant to point us towards a heavenly reality.

The sort of correspondence that we, God's beloved people, are meant to find in God, our bridegroom.

This is a heavenly reality towards which the very fabric of creation bears witness.

That's why the narrator interjects in verse 24.

Therefore a man shall leave his father and 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.

In other words, the man is meant to leave and cleave.

He is meant to form a new and primary allegiance with his partner, in perfect spiritual and sexual union that brings life into the world.

That's what one flesh is meant to bear witness with.

All of this in perfect vulnerability, because they were naked and they were not ashamed.

This is God's intentional design, and it points beyond itself to God's ultimate redemptive and unitive work that he accomplishes in Christ.

This is how the Apostle Paul understands it.

In Ephesians chapter 5, the Apostle Paul writes, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

The two shall become one flesh.

That sounds familiar, but here Paul wants us to catch what's so profound.

This mystery is profound.

And I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.

This does not mean that all are called to the earthly vocation of marriage, of course, but rather that earthly marriage is purposed to point beyond itself to a heavenly reality, a most beautiful union between Christ and his beloved, you and I, his people, the church.

As evangelicals, we're really good about talking about what we're being saved from: sin and guilt and condemnation and destruction, and all these things are true, but often we struggle to talk about what are we saved to?

What are we being brought into out of sin and death?

And the answer to that question, the Bible's answer to that question, is a picture, and it's a picture of marriage.

We're brought into a saving union with Christ the bridegroom as his bride, the church.

We are meant to find our flourishing in this partnership, in this union forever and ever.

Marriage, like gender, is designed by God to make visible and invisible and heavenly reality.

Therefore, we cannot simply revise our understanding of it, lest we lose its divine significance and mystery.

Again, Lewis writes that one of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church.

We, the Church, have no authority to take the living figures which God has painted on the canvas of nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.

So when Christ Himself is confronted with a marriage controversy in his day, he appeals right back to this very same creation order.

Marriage is designed to point us to the gospel, the reality to which we've been saved.

Christ, who gives everything to redeem his bride, who goes to prepare a place for her and their eternal home together, will return to take us, his bride, back to himself.

History ends with a wedding feast.

In Revelation chapter 19, it's called the Wedding Supper of the Lamb.

Revelation 19 · chapter mention

Christ, we see is not interchangeable with his bride.

God in Christ confronts the chaos of a formless and void creation and brings new life in Christ, the bride, in Christ, the bride, his people, partner with him in seeing this new life come to its fullness and flourishing.

And all of this grounds us in God's ineffable love for us, his people.

Otherwise, we risk obscuring or losing the beauty of a partnership between the great bridegroom and his beloved bride, to which the gospel bears witness.

None of this is meant to be an exclusion of the unmarried or same-sex attracted or a condemnation of those who are divorced, not at all.

Grace abounds.

And God calls us all, one and all, to come to him.

We come to him all, we come to him as his bride, because we are all his beloved.

So a Christian understanding of marriage, of gender is a reflection and anticipation of heavenly realities, of greater things to come, an everlasting and human flourishing found only in perfect union with our Savior.

So what then should we do about it?

Let me offer just a couple of thoughts before we land the plane here.

Number one, can we listen to others with genuine compassion?

So often the dialogue on this topic is so confrontational and vitriolic.

Do you find that to be the case?

And Christians are not the exception.

In fact, Christians often, based on my experience on Facebook, go out of their way to make a point of it.

Can we exercise ourselves with genuine compassion?

Can we put into practice what the Apostle James tells us?

Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger?

Can we dignify and value and respect our conversation partners, whoever they may be?

Don't ridicule or straw man your conversation partner.

God desires their flourishing as well as your own.

A church like New Song will always keep its convictions, but I sincerely hope that this, this can be a community where all persons can hear and consider for themselves the good news of the gospel and find support and community in living the new life in Christ without exception.

Finally, we should look forward to that Revelation 19 reality.

Life is a difficult thing.

Marriage is a difficult thing too.

It's a wonderful thing, but it's a difficult thing too.

Singleness or married life.

All of this is meant to point us not to itself, but beyond itself, to the great union to come.

So we anticipate the marriage supper of the Lamb when we come to the Lord's table.

When we set our hearts on things to come, we know that things as they are, not as they're supposed to be, but one day our bridegroom will come and fully redeem us, and that day we will know flourishing in its fullness.

So how is it that we are meant to flourish in the fullest sense?

Will it be realized when we most freely define and express our most authentic selves for ourselves?

Or does it come realized when we discover and express the authentic self that God created us to be as his beloved in Christ?

Self-expressionism contends our flourishing would be infinitely better if it were carried about in a different manner.

If self-determination of one's identity were made the order of the day, and I wonder if the church, a little like Charles Bingley, would winsomerly respond, perhaps much more rational, but it would not be near so beautiful as the gospel.

Christ will receive us, friends, his bride, and he will say to you and to me and to his church, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

We worship a generous God who calls us to follow him in giving willfully, cheerfully, and sacrificially.

Newsong Church's mission and ministry is 100% funded by the generous gifts of those worshiping and journeying with us.

If you'd like to offer a gift towards Newsong's ministry, please visit newsongportperry.ca slash giving for more information on how to do that.

May God bless you and keep you today and every day.