Relationship as God Intended

It is 2019, the year after the #MeToo movement swept through pop culture, with household names like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey all getting caught up in the proverbial chickens coming home to roost in Hollywood. For the past 100 years, cinema has pushed the boundaries, not just of what is technologically possible, but also of what is socially acceptable. Hollywood portrayed the first sex scene in 1933, the first openly gay character in 1947, and the first blood-soaked shooting in 1967.

With all of the boundaries being obliterated, you would think we would have moved well past sexual manipulation and subjugation. Oh, were we wrong? In fact, the greatest examples of abuse came from the executives, directors, and actors who pushed the boundaries the most. It seems that no matter how much we want to believe that men and women are more equal than ever, even still we can’t escape the very nature of things. This was showcased well in a recent speech given by Glenn Close as she accepted an award for her portrayal of a woman who had lived her whole life subjugated to her husband in a movie called “The Wife”. Close said:

“I’m thinking of my mom who really sublimated herself to my father her whole life. And in her 80s she said to me, "I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything. ‘And it was so not right… We have our children, we have our husbands… But we have to find personal fulfillment. We have to follow our dreams. We have to say, ‘I can do that, and I should be allowed to do that.’”

In 2019, after Women’s Suffrage of the 1920s, The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s, and the Feminist movement that has gone all the way up to the present day, you would think that women would be free and equal. But there are still strains within every man-woman relationship. We still see differences that cannot be overcome. No matter how high a woman might rise in the corporate world, she still can’t escape that basic need for family. No matter how much society tells men that our masculinity is toxic or that our desire to lead is harmful to the world, men still can’t escape those most basic of instincts. It seems that we are destined for relational strife no matter how much we fight to be free of it.

In attempting to explain why this is, most end up just simply saying it is the way things are. The ancient pagans of Moses’ day said that men and women were created for strife. In fact, the ancient Greeks believed that women were created by the gods to torment men. The Canaanite kingdoms that surrounded the Israelites believed much the same, that women were not much better than livestock or slaves. They were viewed as no different than any other property. Today, we just say that we are the sum total of the chemicals that make up our body. We are nothing more than electrical connections and enzymatic impulses that evolution has formed over millions of years.

The ancient world may have believed that women were an evil and our society today may say that women are to be treated as objects and men as barbarians, but God’s Word says something very different about the most important of relationships. All of Chapter 2 is an expansion of the passage that we studied last time from Genesis 1:26-31. Last week we saw the unique value of humans, as God has created us as his image bearers. And, in v. 27 it says that he made both male and female as image bearers. But Moses decides to fill us in on the particulars of that creative work of God. Keep in mind that throughout Chapter 1, after every work of creation that God would perform, he would declare it to be good. Now, starting in chapter 2:18, we find that God has placed man in the Garden of Eden, and there is a problem. Something is “not good”. Throughout the rest of the creation story there has been a pattern that God has followed: he has created everything in pairs (Day and Night, Sun and Moon, Earth and Water, pairs of animals). But Man is alone.

To remedy this, God uses an object lesson. By bringing different animals to Adam to see if they would work as a helper, he wants to show him three things.

First, God is showing Adam that he is made for relationship. There is something very distinct that Adam would have noticed about all of the animals that were brought before him: they had a mate. The fact that Adam is made for relationship and is made as an image bearer of God should tell us something about God as well. God exists in relationship. The reason that we have this incessant need for relationship is because God, from all of eternity, has lived in the perfect relationship of the Trinity.

Second, God is showing Adam that the work that he has given him to do in being fruitful, filling the earth, and ruling over it, will require a helper that is fit for him. Men, this is an important side-note for us. Our moncho culture tells us that we are not men unless we can do things on our own. Our idols are those like John Wayne and the Lone Ranger (who incidentally, wasn’t alone). We don’t need a woman, a family, friends, or a church home. We are just fine by ourselves.. But God says that we cannot fulfill the calling he has given us alone. We cannot be complete apart from relationship.

Finally, God is showing Adam that God himself would be the one who would define what Man’s right relationship would be. Adam named all of the animals that God brought to him, and I’m sure that he found some that were useful in certain ways. The horse was useful for plowing, the cow for nourishment, the dog for basic companionship, but none of them was like him. None of them could reason, love, create, and discover like him. So, to have the helper that would bring fulfillment, God must create her.

After exhausting all of his options, God puts Adam to sleep and performs the first surgery. Most English translations say that he took a rib, but the idea is more that he took from Adam’s side: flesh, bone, sinew, blood, everything. Out of this piece of Adam’s side, God formed a woman. There are two things I want you to notice about this creative work.

First, God does not take from Adam’s head or from his feet. This act of taking from his side says something about the position of woman in the created order. Remember, Genesis 1:27 says that God created both male and female in his image. Before God, men and women are equal.

Second, woman is made to be a helper that is “fit for man”. There are two things that are meant by this. First of all, woman is irreplaceable. Second, woman is equal and yet made for a unique role. Man is made to rule, and woman is made as the irreplaceable helpmate in that rule.

The last thing we find in this creative work is that God creates a covenant union. In verse 24 it says that a man shall leave his family and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. God establishes the covenant of marriage as first among human institutions. Government is not the most important institution. The Church is not even the most important. No, the most important institution is the one-man-one-woman relationship of marriage. And, this union says something about God as well. God creates man and woman to be a covenant relationship with each other because God is a covenanting God.

So, if God created man and woman as the perfect pair, why are things so messed up now? Why does it seem that men and women are out to destroy each other and yet cannot escape our need for each other? The answer is found in Genesis 3:16. There we find that one of the terrible effects of the Fall is that man and woman would be in a perpetual state of relational conflict. As a result of that first act of rebellion, men and women are set against each other.

If this is our current state, how are things to be made right? It’s apparent that 100 years of feminist reforms have done very little to shape the hearts of men and women. Sure, women have more rights and are better protected from abuse. But men still oppress women, even the most educated and liberal. If this most important of human relationships is to be restored, God must do it; and he has. We first see glimpses of it in his relationship with Israel. God makes a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then with the 12 tribes of Israel. This is an everlasting covenant, much like a marriage. And, God even compares it to that. Through his prophets, God compares the unfaithfulness of Israel to adultery (Jer. 3:9). He even tells a prophet named Hosea to go marry a harlot so that he might be a living analogy of the unfaithfulness of Israel. God continually called Israel back to himself as a patient, faithful husband, but even when they were not technically committing idolatry, they would distort his laws for their own gain.

Then, the scene changes. Jesus appears to an Israel that is in captivity to Rome because of their unfaithfulness. And what analogy does Jesus use of his relationship to his people? Over and over again, he compares himself to a bridegroom. He says in Matt. 9:15 that his disciples don’t mourn and fast because they are with the bridegroom. John the Baptist, in John 3:29, says that he rejoices because the bridegroom has come. And, not only did he say things like that, but Jesus’ first miracle in John 2 is that of turning water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana. This was meant to signify the coming of the Wedding Supper of the Lamb that Isaiah prophesied about in Isaiah 25. The Israelites had waited for hundreds of years for the Messiah to come and establish his kingdom and host a great feast with an abundance of well-aged wine, and now here Jesus is turning water into the best wine they had ever tasted.

Oh, brothers and sisters, the greatest way that Jesus addressed our broken relationships is in his death and resurrection for us. We, like unfaithful Israel, were mired in our sin, returning over and over to our idolatry like Gomer the harlot returning to her whoredom. But instead of seeking justice through a divorce, instead of calling for his unfaithful spouse to receive the full weight of punishment (stoning to death), Jesus took the punishment that was due us. And Paul says in Eph. 5:25-26 that Jesus is the perfect husband who sanctified his bride, the church, by dying for her. So now we are a pure and spotless bride, not because we are faithful or pure, but because Jesus has made us pure.

Because Jesus has sanctified us, we can now have right relationships with each other. Paul says that very thing in Eph. 5:21, when he says that we are to submit to one another as to Christ. Wives submit to husbands and husbands love their wives as Christ loves the church. The perfect, Christian marriage is not one where the man is totally obsessed with the needs of his wife, emasculated and subservient to her new-found freedoms. Nor is the perfect marriage one where a woman is under the boot of the man, doing his bidding with precision out of fear of rejection or abuse. The perfect, Christian marriage is one where both husband and wife are focused first, not on each other, but on Jesus Christ. And if both are focused on Jesus Christ, then they will serve him by serving each other.

Friend, your relationships with others will never be right until your relationship with your Creator is first made right. And, you can’t do that. Try as you may, you will keep returning to your idolatry, to your disobedience. Only Christ can declare you right before God. Trust in Christ today and follow him. Know him as your heart’s delight, and you will find that your relationships with other people, your spouse included, will begin to change.

Brothers and sisters, as the church, we are the bride of Christ. It is no insignificant thing that Eve was taken out of the side of Adam, because I believe that this was meant to symbolize a greater creation that was to come. Like Eve was taken out of the side of Adam, so too the church was taken out of the side of Christ. As the blood and water flowed from Jesus’ pierced side, a new humanity was created in his people, the Church. It is with that blood that Jesus promised, as he took the last supper with his disciples, that he would establish a new and everlasting covenant. That new and everlasting covenant is what we celebrate today as we observe the Lord’s Supper. In this supper, we are reminded that Christ has sanctified us through his blood. We are reminded that he has given his body for us, and that we are now a part of that body, if we have trusted in him.