Marriage

Based on Gen. 2:18

  Back in the days when women were fighting for the right to vote there were a number of women speakers who could expound eloquently on the virtues and values of women.  The story is told the one such speaker who brought her message to a conclusion by saying, "Where would man be today without the care and comfort of women?  Where would man be today without the hands and heart of women?  Where would man be today without the labor and love of women?  Just tell me where would man be today without women?"  Just then a little man shouted from the back of the crowd, "Paradise!" 

        The battle of the sexes is one in which each side seeks to reinforce its position by going back to paradise and showing that everything would have been great if it hadn't been for the other.  Like the woman who said to her husband, "Our marriage would have been perfect if it hadn't been for you."  He probably agreed with the philosophy, but not the application.  Women delight in pointing out that man was incomplete without woman, and that even in paradise he was not happy without her.  There are no lack of poets to back up her claim to be the poetry of earth as the stars are the poetry of heaven.  Hargrave wrote, "Clear, light‑giving harmonies, women are the terrestrial planets that rule the destines of mankind."  Moore adds, "Ye are the stars of the night, ye are gems of the morn, ye are dewdrops, whose luster illumines the thorn."

        Men are quick to label this as sentimental nonsense, and they insist that Adam was better off when he had paradise to himself.  They also have poetic support, for Andrew Marvell has written,

Such was that happy Garden‑state

While man there walked without a mate;

After a place so pure and sweet,

What other help could yet be meet?

But 'twas beyond a mortal's share

To wander solitary there:

Two paradises 'twere in one

To live in paradise alone.

Women retaliate with the words of Dryden,

Our sex, you know, was after yours designed,

The last perfection of the Maker's Mind:

Heaven drew out all the gold for us, and left

Your dross behind.

Man then counters with these words:

For woman due allowance make.

Formed of a crooked rib was she.

By Heaven she could not straighten be;

Attempt to bend her, and she'll break.

        On and on the battle rages ad infinitum, ad nauseum, or in other words, until it gets sickening.  We are interested in this battle only because it calls our attention to a basic human need, and the only adequate solution to meet that need.  Man is made a social creature, and if he does not feel a part of society, or if he does not have companionship, he ceases to find value in life.  One of the most unbearable conditions of life is that of loneliness.  We want to examine God's relationship to this basic human problem and seek to discover what it means for our own lives.  In spite of all the fighting, men and women need each other, and they know it.  Josh Billings said, "Adam without Eve would be as stupid as a person playing checkers alone."  In verse 18 we find two aspects of God's relationship to the problem of loneliness.

I. GOD'S ATTITUDE.

       God says it is not good for man to be alone.  Man was to be a social being, and so he can never be complete alone.  Loneliness is opposed to the very nature of God Himself.  God is not alone and never has been in all eternity.  He is a trinity of three Persons in one Godhead.  He has had eternal fellowship within His own being.  One of the key values of recognizing God to be three Persons in One is that it explains His self‑sufficiency.  No other being is self‑sufficient, for they are dependent upon God and other forms of life.  God alone is self‑sufficient, for He is Triune, and all the requirements needed for love and fellowship are contained within His very nature.  God is complete in Himself, but man is incomplete in himself. 

        God did not intend to make man in His image with the nature of love and desire for companionship, and then not meet that need.  But for awhile Adam was alone, and it is interesting that God would say that it was not good.  This means that with all of the beauty of nature, and with all of the abundant provision of the garden, and with a job to keep him active, and with many animals to keep him company, there was still something missing.  There was an imperfection even in Paradise. That imperfection was not in what was there, but it what was not there. Without human companionship all of the physical blessings of the universe cannot satisfy the human heart.  If this was true in paradise, how much more is it true in our world today?

     Cyril H. Powell, in his book The Lonely Heart, tells of how an English landlady found one of her lodgers unconscious and almost dead due to gas fumes. It was discovered that he was once a well‑known actor whose name had been a household word in England. Yet apparently all of his popularity and prosperity had not gained for ham any true friends, and when he ceased to be famous he was left alone. Unlike the Prodigal Son in the same situation he had no father to return to, and apparently he did not know of God's good news of acceptance, and so he wrote a note saying, "I am taking the only way out of this hell of loneliness"

     If this was an isolated incident we could ignore it, but the fact is, this is a common experience. The statistics are shouting out the truth from every land that it is not good for man to be alone. It is, in fact, a very positive evil.  One of the most frequent causes for suicide is loneliness. G. Ray Jordan wrote, "Loneliness has driven far more people to nervous collapse than all the theoretical doubts of mankind added together."  Erick Fromm in The Art Of Living wrote, "The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.  The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity." 

        All of the facts from every field of study confirm what God stated from the beginning, and that is that it is not good for man to be alone.  Man has to concede the point to the women here.  Paradise was incomplete without her, and every life is incomplete without someone to love, and someone to love them.  This was God's attitude in the beginning, and is, no doubt, His attitude yet today.  But God does more than express an attitude.  We see also in this verse:

II. GOD'S ACTION.

       God says, "I will make him a helper fit for him."  God did not stop with an attitude, but went on to action.  He did not make a pronouncement, and then not follow it up with performance.  He was not concerned with a resolution only, but was determined to come up with a remedy.  It is failure to follow God at this point that has led to the church becoming ineffective and meeting the world's deepest needs.  Paul Rees says something that we all know to be true, but he says it in a way that we need to hear it.

"One of our substitutes for basic Christian action is talk.

We are beguiled by the wizardry of words.  Our fault here

is both collective and personal.  Churchmen, meeting in

conference or synod, labor long and tediously over "resolutions"

and "pronouncements" they are going to make to their constituents

and the world.  Often the mountain labors and brings forth a mouse!

Some tame, nebulous statement is drooled out ecclesiastical jargon,

which pitiably few people will ever hear or heed.  We easily mistake

the saying of a thing for the doing of it.  And that goes for the piously

woolly talk that you and I do as individuals fully as much as it does

for the high‑sounding "whereases" and "resolves" of professional

ecclesiastics." 

        It is simply another way of saying that faith without works is dead.  We have told ourselves so often that there is no merit in good works that we have begun to believe that there is merit in doing nothing.  We need to realize that good works cannot save us, but they may be the means by which God can save others.  Someone has divided the world into three classes of people.  They are those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who do not know what is happening, and the last includes the vast majority.  If we take Christianity seriously, it demands that we dare not be in any category but the first.  Christians must be people of action.

        The whole Bible is a history of God's great redemptive acts, and it is a challenge to His people to become Godlike in their acts.  God cared about Adams loneliness, and He did something about it.  If we care, then we too must do something about the great need of lonely people.  Paul Tournier in his book Escape From Loneliness says that practically everyone is lonely, and the root of this is in man's sin and revolt against God.  Man's loneliness is basically his lack of an ultimate companion.  The unsaved person recognizes that no relationship will last, for all people must die.  What can a Christian do about this?  That is just the point, for though we cannot provide a mate for every lonely person, nor can we create friends for everyone, but we have a Gospel that offers every person a relationship to Christ, and it is an eternal relationship.  Christ is the Friend who alone can satisfy that empty place in the lives of all people. 

       We need to remember that it was not as a sinner running from God that Adam was alone, and that God then said it was not good for him to be alone.  It was an estate of perfect fellowship with God that he still felt alone.  Jesus experienced great loneliness not because He was out of fellowship with God, but because He lacked human companionship.  Jesus experienced what the great majority of people experience.  There can be crowds everywhere, and still not anyone really near you who understands you.   It is not true then that a Christian needs only to trust in God to escape all the loneliness.  We are still social creatures, and without friendship and companionship of others we will still experience loneliness, even when we have good fellowship with God. 

       It is at this point that the church plays a major role in providing fellowship.  Christians must learn to accept one another with all of their differences and weaknesses, and they must seek to provide a companionship in which there is real understanding.  This is the essence of what makes the church different from other groups of people.  Where there is not total acceptance of persons the church is failing to be the church.  We live in a world of loneliness with the only satisfactory answer to it.  God has given His Son, and the Son has given His life that we might be reconciled to God and know Him as Father, and Jesus as Friend.  All those who are friends of Jesus are friends of one another, and this is the key to overcoming loneliness.