Dennis Tuuri

# The Goodness of Marriage and the Transformation of Culture

Genesis 2:4

The sermon title is “The Goodness of Marriage and the Transformation of Culture.” Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew, for the Lord had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden. And there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground, rather, made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.

The tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison, that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. There is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon.

The same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel, which is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates. And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden, thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.

For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him an help meet for him.” And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them. And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh.” And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for these opening sections of your scriptures. And we pray now that you would illumine our hearts with your Holy Spirit. We thank you for the good gift that your word is to us.

We confess, Lord God, that we are incapable of determining good and evil apart from that word. And we also know, Father, that this word is spiritually discerned. That your Holy Spirit must indeed minister it to us, must write it upon our hearts, as it were. We pray that be the case. We don’t approach these scriptures with an intent to get merely intellectual knowledge. We would ask, Father, that you would write them upon our hearts that we might see our lives transformed by them.

Our marriages and our culture relationships amongst the saints here at RCC and then in our extended families and extended communities as well that these may be affected positively by your word ministered to us by your spirit. We ask this for the sake that indeed your will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

I was asked this morning if the purpose of this sermon was somewhat personal in light of the courtship we announced a couple of weeks ago. It really had nothing to do with that. Well, maybe secondarily. The reason I’m starting up a series of talks here on marriage and the family is really preparation for family camp.

Our family camp this year is going to focus on the reconstruction or transformation of the family. As you probably know, Reverend Brian Abshar will be up, who’s with Chalcedon now and is actually the director of conferences for Chalcedon. And he’s beginning to form some conferences in California on behalf of Chalcedon—an exciting development. He’ll be sharing with us a lot from his new book. I’m not sure if it’s quite out yet, but he has done extensive studies in the Puritans and the family and in the biblical reconstruction of the family, which I think is the title of his book.

And I wanted to sort of get us thinking about camp, about a month away or so now, to think about these topics a little bit more. Additionally, I’m starting to do research for a talk or two that I will give at camp on the reformation of the family in Calvin’s Geneva. We have had—I have had an idea and others have shared it—that we find in Geneva a model for us in many areas of life. It is a tremendous mine that can be obtained, much good gold and diamonds out of in terms of historical research. Men who were very self-conscious about the reformation that they affected in that land, and certainly the family is one of the most important aspects.

So the purpose of this sermon is to begin to prepare us for camp and get us to think about these things. And I’m sure I will take this series well beyond camp as well.

Today what I want to do basically is lay out a very simple set of propositions—fourteen statements here. They’re very simple, don’t require a lot of time to develop. They’re fairly straightforward. They’re kind of the underpinnings. In two weeks I’ve decided to move into Genesis 3. So we look at Genesis 2 today—the creation of the family prefall—and then what happens to the marriage relationship itself after the fall and in the context of that fall. And then we’ll try to move on to the various applications of this in the rest of Scripture.

So today we’re just laying some underlying presuppositions or foundations, and we get to have this beautiful viewing of this perfect husband and wife relationship in the garden of Eden and the presence of God. It’s a startling passage in many ways, one that calls forth much musing and meditation on the things that are said.

Now, in preparation for this, I have begun to read, not just for this, but for my talk at family camp. I began to read from a book, the title of which I give you on the outline. This book is a very interesting work done by a professor at Harvard University, I think published about ten years ago or so, and it has some very interesting insights. It is a seminal work—and actually, you know, a seminal work is one from which a lot of other things come out of. It’s the beginning of a lot of other discussions and conversations.

He does a tremendous amount of research that preceded the writing of this book. And what he’s working against is this odd myth that somehow the Reformation damaged the role of women, hurt families, whatever it was. In point of fact, as he clearly shows and as the research clearly demonstrates, the Reformation was a tremendous resurgence of marriage. It saw a tremendous resurgence of the importance of marriage. Geneva was actually known as a woman’s paradise.

Now, you don’t hear that very often when people talk about Calvin at Geneva, but after the Reformation, it was called a woman’s paradise. The state of women had diminished to an abominable low. Forty percent of all women pre-Reformation were not married. And child deaths were quite high. Marriage had fallen into much disrepute.

It was interesting in reading one of the commentaries of Genesis 2—we’ll get to this toward the end of the sermon—that God witnesses the marriage of Adam and Eve. And this is a community event. And the idea that somehow marriage is a completely private affair is a modern notion. Well, it’s not a modern notion. It’s a sinful notion, and it’s a sinful notion that prevailed in Europe prior to the Reformation. Private marriages, secret clandestine marriages were all over the place. Marriage was not seen as a good thing. These marriages were not usually honored by the husband. There was a lot of sexual immorality, tremendous amount of illegitimacy.

What we see in our culture today is the resurgence of this pagan view of marital relationships—or I probably should say sexual relationships, because it really degenerates into that apart from the biblically covenanted idea of marriage.

So it is a good time to blow forth the trumpet of the Reformation as we look at this particular topic, because just like pre-Reformation days in Europe, America has slid into—or is beginning to slide into, and the world is as well—the same denigration of marriage. People don’t get married, and as a result their sexual license, the debasement of women that follows that. It’s interesting that in preparation for this sermon that in the last month we now have a position in this country where men feel emboldened by the actions of the courts and our president. You know what some of these talk shows—I’ve seen some of these talk shows that I watch, political talk shows, Chris Matthews on Hardball, for instance—talks about the fact that now you get one grope before she says no, and you know men can just move down the line now from office to office groping all the women once and that’s okay according to apparently to the laws of our land. It’s okay. It was not—it was not outrageous conduct on the part of the president according to the judge who dismissed the Paula Jones lawsuit—to expose himself and say, “Let’s get at it here.”

So we’re sliding down into that same trough that faced men and women in pre-Reformation Europe. And so it’s important to look at what God says about marriage, look at some of these basic truths that are being denied. And the transformation of our culture, I think, will happen as we transform our understandings and get them in line with the scriptures about the husband and wife relationship. And we’ll get at that a little more at the end, too.

Now, I’ve called the sermon “The Goodness of Marriage and the Transformation of Culture” because it kind of forms the beginning social relationships that will indeed transform culture, and then secondarily it’s observations on the creation of the first husband and wife.

Now I use the term self-consciously “husband and wife” instead of “fathers and mothers.” In its essence here, the creation of the woman is not strictly speaking as a mother. She is created as a wife, and so she’s valued in and of herself apart from childbearing capabilities. Childbearing is not a requirement for marriage. And couples that are infertile are fully married and fully reflect the image of God as Adam and Eve did in their created state. Very important to see that.

We’ve stressed families and children at our church. That’s good. But before we get to families and children, you have to have husband and wife relationships properly lined up. I’m going to suggest at the end of the talk—I’ll suggest it now as well—that as important as homeschooling is, it is a very encouraging sign that at this church and throughout the homeschooling community and other elements of the Christian community as well, courtship is being discussed and betrothal and views of the scriptures about marriage. I would be almost willing to say that in the providence of God, it’s probably more important to us and to the transformation of culture that our children be taught and then discipled in biblical marriage than in homeschooling, because marriage precedes the bearing of children and it is more fundamental to the culture, and there are aspects of the marriage relationship that have implications for single people as well.

I want to say this as a caveat at the beginning that these truths are true of couples, but they do have implications—obvious ones—for single people.

Man is normally called to live in the married state. Now, we know that’s not always the case. The Apostle Paul is an example of being single and that’s okay as people are called to that and enabled to be single by the Lord. But generally speaking, these truths are for most people and they have implications for the rest of us as well.

Now I do want to read some quotes from this book to give you an idea of this correlation of what was going on in pre-Reformation Europe and our own days and help you to see again the importance of getting marriage down.

The very first sentence in this book, which is written by this Harvard University professor, says this: “According to contemporary observers, marriage and the family were in a crisis in the late medieval Europe.”

He says that both humanist and Protestant commentators closely associated the prejudices that existed in Europe at that time against marriage and family with exaggerated clerical ideas of virginity and celibacy and the religious culture these ideals nourished. So one of the big problems that led to the denigration of marriage and the resultant denigration of culture was an ungodly exultation of celibacy. And we’ll see at the conclusion of the sermon today that indeed sexuality is a God-blessed good thing.

“Many accuse the medieval church of forcing virginity upon unwilling and incapable youth while at the same time stereotyping marriage as a distinctly inferior and burdensome institution. For Martin Luther and his followers, the cloister became the symbol of the ages’ anti-feminism. By suppressing monasteries and nunneries and placing women securely in the home as wives and mothers, the Reformers believe that they had liberated them from sexual repression, cultural deprivation, and male clerical domination.”

“Reformers also discern threats to marriage and family in the laws of the medieval church which formed a major part of the moral governance of late medieval cities and towns. On the one hand, church law was seen to encourage immature and impulsive unions by recognizing as valid so-called clandestine marriages that had occurred without parental permission and apart from public witness.” That refers to what I talked about earlier—private marriages and the need for the public witnessing of marriages.

“On the other, the medieval church was accused of placing legal obstacles to mature and reasoned marriages by arbitrarily defining numerous impediments to marriage between people related by various blood, legal, spiritual, and familial ties. It became a major goal of new Protestant and secular marriage ordinances in the sixteenth century to end such secret unions and define impediments more realistically—or we would say more biblically.”

Okay, so they had a couple of problems. They had celibacy. They had these private so-called marriages without parental permission or public acknowledgement. And on the other hand, they had tremendous impediments against people marrying later in life.

Now he goes on to say this. “Three years before his own marriage, Martin Luther wrote a treatise on the estate of marriage in 1522, his first lengthy discussion of the subject in which he complained that ‘marriage has universally fallen into awful disrepute, that peddlers everywhere are selling pagan books which treat of nothing but the depravity of womankind and the unhappiness of the estate of marriage.’”

Well, that fits our times pretty well. When Larry Flynt can be seen as a national hero, a movie being made about him last year. This is just what he does. A reference to classical misogynist—misogynist means woman-hating, that’s what it means—and anti-marriage sentiments and to the body of anti-feminist stories that were popular among Luther’s contemporaries.

“The connection between the celibate ideal and misogyny was revealed in Sebastian Frank’s collection of popular German proverbs in 1541 which preserved a proverb used by St. Jerome to defend the single life. Jerome said this: ‘If you find things going too well, take a wife.’” St. Jerome said that. “A proverb Frank paired with another: ‘If you take a wife, you get a devil on your back.’”

This is what was being said. It’s interesting. I thought about that. You know, St. Jerome, “If you find things going too well, take a wife.” It’s almost akin to Henny Youngman, isn’t it? “Take my wife, please.”

And we have these popular jokes and proverbs that underlay a feeling that is anti-marriage, pro-single, and really becomes anti-feminine or anti-woman.

“Parents and parents,” said Luther, “were buffeted by such sentiments and by the religious propaganda in praise of celibacy. In response, they turned their children away from marriage and encouraged them to enter the cloister.”

Okay, so you got this going on in the culture and the parents then don’t want their kids marrying, so they send them to the cloister. Now, this idea of celibacy in the clergy—here’s a confession written by a priest who was celibate. And this is what happens when you impose celibacy upon a large group of men. He says: “Thus am I entangled. On the one hand I cannot live without a wife. On the other I am not permitted a wife. Hence I am forced to live a publicly disgraceful life to the shame of my soul and honor and to the damnation of many who have taken offense at me—that is, by refusing to receive the sacrament from his hands. He lived with a woman. How shall I preach about chasteness and against pornography, adultery, and lascivious behavior when my own whore goes to church and about the streets and my own bastards sit before my eyes?”

Celibacy was a terrible imposition upon the clergy by the medieval church. R.J. Rushdoony, by the way, treats the origins of the requirement of celibacy for priests to an attempt to control land. That land was passed on in inheritance, and if you broke up the family then the church and the state could maintain control of land.

Going on to another few quotes here from this book: “Casper Gutell, Protestant pastor at Iserlohn, Saxony, commented on his contemporaries in a sermon published in the same year. He said this, quoting now: ‘Having seen how much effort, anxiety, pain, need, care and work are involved in marriage they would not recommend it to a dog. And to save their children from it, they give them over to the devil by forcing them into the cloister. Thereby, they gain for them an easy life on earth, but they dispatch their souls to hell.’”

“Now, Protestant pamphleteers accuse the secular and clerical critics of marriage of desiring personal and sexual freedom in the single life and of conjuring false fears and excuses to escape the responsibility and self-discipline imposed by monogamous marriage because they prefer whoring and sodomy. ‘Not a few want to avoid holy matrimony,’ argued the Protestant pastor Gutell.”

And again, these are the same things that are going on in our day and age today in a major way.

“The Protestant Reformers were the first to set the family unequivocally above the celibacy ideal and to praise the husband and the housewife over the monk and the nun in principle. Repeatedly one reads that God respects marriage as much as virginity. That an unhappy marriage is preferable to unhappy chastity. That celibacy, while more desirable than marriage for those few who can freely and happily maintain it, is a supernatural gift God rarely bestows.”

And during this time, the wedding services—couples were required in the context of the wedding service and in preparation to think about Genesis 2 and what it implied for marriage. They were trying so hard to build back up a proper estimation of marriage based upon the scriptures against these predominant cultural ideas of celibacy, licentiousness, private marriages, etc.

So we have a very similar thing going on today.

Now, against this as well, the priests talked about the necessity then of seeing the marriage ideal from Genesis 2. And this is what, quoting from another one of these pamphlets: “What could be happier and sweeter than the name of father, mother, and children? That is a family where the children hang on their parents’ arms and exchange many sweet kisses with them. And where husband and wife are so drawn to one another by love and choice and experience such friendship between themselves that what one wants, the other also chooses. And what one says, the other maintains in silence, as if he had said it himself. Where all good and evil is held in common, the good all the happier, the adversity all the lighter because shared by two.”

That’s what we like to see in this church. That’s our goal. And that goal will have an effect upon the entire culture as well as we line ourselves up with biblical models and reject the prevailing contemporary ideas.

It is amazing to me that even Christian parents don’t like courtship. No, maybe not so much Christian parents, but secular parents don’t like the idea of their children moving to marriage. They want their children to have a variety of sexual relationships, a variety of sexual experiences, and we are quickly moving back to this pre-Reformation morass where the family and marriage itself is seen in much disrepute. And so most people don’t get married anymore. Illegitimacy rates have climbed, etc.

Okay. So the point here is that this is not just some little aspect of the Christian life that we need to tend to occasionally and get it shored up. We now live in the context of waters in the culture that run radically anti-marriage, and it is a godly thing that every family in this church is doing by stressing to their children the goodness of marriage, the requirement of marriage, and the requirement of God’s regulation of marriage involving the parents.

And so what I’m saying is what you’re doing is a good thing, and it is a good thing not just for your own family. It is a good thing for the extended culture. Reformation and reconstruction occurs in some big things that are going on, some big ideas that are being talked about. But more importantly, it’s the small everyday acts of husband and wife maintaining this creation image we just read of in Genesis 2 that produces true societal change.

Okay. So this has a relationship to all of that. I know that was a rather extended introduction. But it really is sort of an introduction to the whole series of sermons.

Okay. Now, let’s move on then to an actual discussion of the text itself. So turn in your scriptures to Genesis chapter 2.

And all I’m going to do is make a series of observations based on this text.

Now, first of all—and I’m I’ll talk more about this in a couple of weeks—a chapter or verse 4 of chapter 2: “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created.” This is a marker that is found throughout Genesis to set off sections of the scriptures. When you look at a particular section of scripture, we want God to determine for us what are sections of scriptures. And there is a unit here that this verse introduces for us that goes through the end of chapter 4.

And I’ll talk more about the structure of that unit. It’s very interesting. We’ll talk about it next week. I’m tempted to talk about it now, but it would take a little bit too much time to explain the structure of those six component elements that move up through Genesis based on these structures.

But note for now that verse 4 introduces a section in which the Garden of Eden is prominent. And we’re dealing today with just the first half of this section—the Garden of Eden portion of this whole section of scripture. It breaks up into first of all the creation of man and woman that we’ll go through end of chapter 2. The next major section delineated is the fall. Okay? And we’ll spend time in that in chapter 3 in a couple of weeks. Then there is the next section that talks about the murder of Abel. We won’t get into that for a while.

But in any event, this is a section that God has determined by his word. And this verse 4 is essentially a transition into a new section of the text. Now, that means it’s moving from what we normally see as chapter 1, including the first three verses of chapter 2, into chapter 2.

And it may be a little confusing for you. Understand this, and again, I can’t dwell on this at great length. Chapter 1 is a chronological series of events. The importance there is a chronological sequence, and the focus of the whole thing is God’s creation of everything. And man is the climax of that in the last few verses of chapter 1. In the opening verses of chapter 2, the rest that he experiences. But we have a chronological sequence in chapter 1.

In chapter 2, we have more of a logical or a theological or you might say an anthropological—man-centered—focus on the creation itself. So, you know, some people take one and two to say there’s two different kinds of creation and they talked about all kinds of weird stuff about different races, etc. But that’s not what’s going on.

All that’s going on is chapter 2 retells the creation stuff from the context of the centrality of man in creation. So chapter one, he’s the climax. In chapter two, he’s the focal point. He’s the pivot for everything else. Now, this is important because right away it tells us of the importance of man. All this created order we can see in terms of chapter 2 is created for us to take pleasure in and to discipline ourselves to act in relationship to it according to God’s good graces.

So the centrality of man is talked about in chapter 2. It’s a different sort of sequence. It’s not chronological. If you try to read it that way, you’re going to get mixed up. The Bible uses different literary styles, and there’s a chronological style used in chapter 1 and there’s a different theological emphasis on the centrality of man of the created order in chapter 2.

Okay. So we’re to see the world as we are meant to see it here in chapter 2—a place expressly made for our delight and for our discipline. That’s a quote from Derek Kidner in his commentary on this. The stage narrows from the whole world in chapter 1 down to Eden and then specifically the garden of Eden in chapter 2.

Okay, first observation then of this text is that we read here “the Lord God.” Now it may look in your King James version that this is used a lot in the scriptures. It’s not. This particular form of Yahweh Elohim—”Lord God”—is very distinctively used just here. Very few other places, couple other occurrences, but this is used repeatedly in chapter 2. What does it mean?

Well, the word “Lord” is Yahweh. It’s the covenant name of God. It’s his covenantal relationship to man that that name implies. Elohim talks about his sovereignty and his creation of all things. Okay. So we have here that God stresses and acts both sovereignly but he also acts fatherly as the covenant head of Adam that he knows by way of covenant.

In this section we read in the opening verses that he formed man and then he breathes the breath of life into him. And you can see this same Yahweh Elohim construction in that case because the forming of man involves skill. It involves sovereignty in terms of creating man. And then when he breathes the breath of life into him, it’s a different deal, isn’t it? I mean, if you think about what’s going on now, God is face to face with man, so to speak. There’s a much closer kinship.

There’s the Yahweh element, the fatherly element, that’s stressed as God, you can almost see it by way of a kiss, where God gives of himself, even his breath, in the creation of man. Yahweh, fatherly care for Adam is stressed here. And notice here we see the beginnings of what will become: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” God so loves Adam as his creation that he gives him his spirit, his breath, to make him a living creature and to distinguish him from all the rest of the creatures.

So this is important that we recognize that God acts in a sovereign as well as in a fatherly sense to man. He is giving as well as making, and self-giving as I said at that now.

One other aspect of this is that he puts the man in the garden in verse 15. Now that word for “put” is not the normal word for put. It is a word that is used in two other exclusive senses apart from here. What it means in other places where this particular word is used is to place man in the land that he will be given by God by way of rest from his enemies. Okay? It refers to rest or safety in the land when it’s used later in the Old Testament.

Secondly, it refers to putting something in dedication before God. That’s the other way this word is used. So when God puts man, this creature that he has sovereignly and lovingly and fatherly created in Eden, he does it by way of giving him rest. And by way of setting Adam as dedicated or consecrated to him—he’s using liturgical language, as it were, of rest, Sabbath rest, and consecration to God in the very placing of Adam in this place in the garden. It’s not just like you put a pencil someplace. It’s like you put your offering money up, or it’s like God placing us in a position of rest and security.

So God sovereignly and fatherly does this for his created men.

Okay. Observation number two. God determines good and evil. Oh, pretty obvious, isn’t it? But very important. We need to know this. We need to remember this. We don’t remember this. We think somehow that we’re able to figure out for ourselves what’s good for us and not good for us.

But the creation of woman here is seen as something good. He determines that it’s not good for man to be alone. And the answer to that is to provide a good—the creation of woman. So it’s interesting to note by way of implication here that the first good that he gives to us replacing something that wasn’t good is the creation of woman.

We’ll talk about that in a minute. But it’s very important that we see here that God is the one who determines good and evil. Man is not to do that for himself.

Now in our day and age, that’s what people want to do. They want to decide for themselves what’s good and what’s not good. But to the writer of the book of Genesis, to Moses, such a concept that we cannot know, we have to figure out for ourselves what’s good and bad, is absolutely horrifying. And if you think about the fact that you need the revealed word of God to tell you what’s good and what’s not good, then for God to withdraw that from you would place you in a place of great confusion, wouldn’t it?

So we have to say that God in these opening chapters shows himself as the one—the sovereign one—who lovingly tells us, “This is good. This is bad. This is positive for you. This is bad for you. This will bring blessing. This will bring curse.” It’s a great thing that God gives us. And it reminds us that we’re not to try to figure those things out for ourselves. There’s an absolute necessity of God’s word involved with this truth.

And it means that if you think that somehow you’ve got a few doctrines under your belt and can go about living your life apart from a frequent reading of God’s word and exposing yourself to the preaching of God’s word and involving yourselves in the study of God’s word, you’re just plain wrong. You’re being foolish. You’re forgetting first things. And first things are that we need God. We need the spirit of God and we need his declared word to tell us what’s going to make us happy, what’s going to make us best able to glorify him, and what’s going to make us enjoy him.

Okay, so his word.

Now, you can kind of put these first two together by way of application. I was counseling someone this week who was angry, and I was telling them that you know a person gets angry because somebody else does something. Well, who decreed everything that comes to pass? God—Elohim, sovereign God—decrees it all. But does that help in and of itself? And that doesn’t help in and of itself, does it, if you forget Yahweh? If you forget the loving actions of God, all you’ve got is the Greek view of God who sovereignly does these things just to make us mad and to frustrate us and to just play with us.

God is sovereign. That doesn’t help a person in and of itself. It helps to begin down the road for correction of sin. But the second thing we must tell each other and must tell those that are exhibiting sin of this particular type is that God loves us in that sovereignty. But that doesn’t do much good either because we know that we determine for ourselves all too often what’s good and wrong. We ignore his word.

If all we have is a God who is sovereign and who is loving toward people that obey him, we know that he’s not loving us because we’re sinful.

The third thing we must bring is this consideration: that God in his love for us sent his son to die for our sins. God’s sovereignty, his covenantal relationship to us, confirmed by the son, put into effect by the death of the son, the atonement is what frees us to be able to move in terms of maturity and away from sinful anger and other things.

And that’s really kind of wrapped up in these first two basic observations from the book of Genesis.

Observation three: The first evil, quote unquote, is man’s solitariness. Man is created with social needs reflecting God’s unity and diversity. Now, in Genesis 1:26 and 27, we read the same thing. In Genesis 1, in the creation, in verse 26: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, or the fowl of the air.” Verse 27: “He created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, man, male and female created he them and God blessed him and multiplied them.”

The image of God is bound up with community and it’s not good for man to live outside of community. Now I say “evil” in quotes when the text talks about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This word “evil” is not the one that’s used when it says “it’s not good.”

But also the word that’s used for “not good”—the particular phrasing in the Hebrew—also is more than just an absence of good. It means a positive presence that is negative to the man. So it’s a strengthened form of “not good.” So it kind of is almost evil and it’s not evil but it approaches that. It’s not just a small thing. It’s a big deal at the bottom of our being that it’s not good for us to be alone.

Man is made to exist in the context of community. Okay. Man is made in the image of God. God is unity and God is diversity. God is one and God is three. God lives in community and because we’re image-bearers of God, it’s not good for us to isolate ourselves from community.

And this is a big deal too. It’s one of those everything in Genesis of these big truths that apply to so much of our lives. You know, men—when you pull back from your wives in isolation from them for whatever reason, it is not good for you. And I say this to men to begin with because men are more prone to do this.

I used to, when I was in high school, I love that song by Paul Simon. “I am a rock. I am an island,” you know. I had an interest in a girl and it was unrequited. And so I’m, you know, I can take this stuff. I’m tough. You know, well, you’re not tough. God says it’s not good for you. You may get tough and you may end up living your life in isolation, but you will not be a blessing in the terms of the transformation of culture. You’ll be the reverse. You’ll be those single men that commit most of the crimes in our country.

George Gilder has done some astonishing studies some years back on singleness—men being single—and how it leads to incredibly high rates of crime, suicide, murder, the whole thing. Bad deal singleness. And it’s for most people, and it’s a bad deal. Men, when we pull back from our wives out of defensiveness, out of pettishness, whatever it is, remember when you do that, God says it’s not good for you to be alone. It’s not good to pull back.

Now wives, it’s not good for you to be alone either. Man is the covenantal representation of all humankind here, right? It’s just Adam. Now wives don’t typically be alone unless they have husbands who are alone a lot, and then they tend to wall themselves off to protect themselves.

By way of application, I want here for us to see that God says at the core of our being we have this need to reflect unity and diversity—being made in the image of God. We have a need to live in the context of community. This is really kind of a startling statement, isn’t it? That God wants us to attend to this. He makes everything and says it’s good. And then this is the first thing that he says is not good. Startling in its declaration. Very important for us to tend to.

And God says that what man needs is a help who is “meat” for him. The word “help” here is an unusual word too. It is not the normal word for help. It’s the word that almost exclusively in the rest of the Bible is used for God helping man. And there are a couple of other places where it’s used for an army helping someone, but for the most part it refers to the divine help of God given to man who is needful of help.

The word for “meat” is the word corresponding to or opposite of. So it isn’t some help who is totally like him, but it’s also not a help who is totally different from him. It’s a help that is the opposite or complement—might be another way to say it—in terms of who he is.

Now this help God does not—at this point we can say well, the context says that he be fruitful and multiply. He’s going to need help doing that. And the context says he’s going to garden, keep the garden. He’s going to have to have help doing that, too. And we can make that as an implication of the text.

But recognize that it seems like what God is saying is he’s saying something about the very essence of what man is. He doesn’t say he needs—it’s not good for him to be alone. He won’t be able to get the garden tilled. It’s not good for him to be alone. He won’t be able to have kids. He says a very flat, bold statement: “It’s not good for men to be alone.” And I think it has to do with the essence of our being—is why it’s singled out that particular way.

It’s not just for work, the work we’re called to do, or procreation. It is for the very fulfillment of who we are to exist in the context of the marital state for most people. We must abandon the illusion that we can be alone contentedly with God or that we can ever be alone. That itself is an illusion from God. He says that he’s not going to make you alone anymore. He puts you in the context of community.

One commentator said that “the constitution of each of us is a summons to community.” The constitution of each of us, how we’re made, is a summons to live in community. And do you see now why it’s so important to have a proper context, a proper community, to build a proper culture, to transform culture, that we deal with this opening set of relationships—husband and wife?

Okay. Our constitution is a summons to live in community. And God is going to teach us in Genesis 2 the essential elements we need to know so that community reflects heaven here on earth. Very important.

Now, I have some words here. If you’re having a little trouble following this, let me just point you to the key words for each point. For point number one, that God is sovereign and fatherly, the words I have are “submit and trust.” You submit to his sovereignty and it’s a trusting submission because he’s your father.

In point number two, where God determines, he decides and then communicates to us what’s good and evil, what I want you to get out of that is the word “attend.” That means you’ve got to attend to what the word of God is saying about a particular topic and particularly today what the word of God is saying about marriages.

For this third idea, that God says it’s not good for man to be alone, I want us to go away from this with the word “correct” on our minds. We want to correct ourselves. We think in our own sinfulness, particularly in the fallen state, that it’s good for us to get alone by ourselves a lot. God says, “No, it isn’t.”

And we think of Jesus even. Well, he went off a long time to pray. Well, he did sometimes, but recognize that Jesus grew up in the context of family. And when he left family, he formed disciples—a community of men that he essentially lived his life out in the context of. And he was in preparation for a bride, the church. He’s the bridegroom. So, you know, you can’t get too much with Jesus in terms of trying to elevate celibacy or the singleness or the solitary existence as something that’s good. It’s not good. God says very explicitly it’s not good. We have to correct then our views of who we are and what we think will make us happy.

All these things I just read from St. Jerome to Henny Youngman—whether you’re a saint or a comedian—guys get it wrong and they enforce, they reinforce to other guys getting it wrong. That wives are not handy and wives are a problem. That is a lie from the pit of hell that’s repeated, as I said, from people from such different perspectives as Henny Youngman on one hand and St. Jerome on the other. We got to correct our understanding of this thing.

Okay. Fourth. Further, man requires a helper to fulfill his purpose. This purpose is to dress and keep, worship and obey in the garden—temple, paradise, throne room—and take this beauty into all the world and bring the world’s beauty into the throne room. Holy work is of the essence of manhood.

Now, God places there—is so we said that the requirement for a wife is essential to who we are, but it is also essential for our task. Okay? So we can go from the central area that we have in terms of our essence. It is good for us, delightful for us. It is best for us to live in community with the wife for most of us. But then we can say also that it also enables us then to fulfill our task.

What is our task? Well, it’s easy. You till the garden and you guard it. And we talk about that a lot in this church. And I’ve told you, when I preached for this number of years back, that those two words are used repeatedly in temple references. God could have used other words, but the words he uses here are really temple reference words later in the context of the scriptures.

The Levites tilled, so to speak, worked the temple, and the Levites guarded the instruments of the temple and guarded the temple itself from intrusion by people that shouldn’t be in it. Now we can take this two different ways. And what one commentator, Frank Gabelein, in his modern expositor’s commentary says—he thinks that the words “till” and “guard” ought to be translated…