It's Not Good for Man to be Alone

 

In my previous post I wrote about Helen Keller and how learning language gave her the tools to understand the world and communicate with others.  Helen is known for her disabilities, namely that she was both blind and deaf, but what many don’t know is that this wonderful woman, who’s story would come to inspire the world, wasn’t born that way.  She started life with both sight and hearing, even speaking at a young age, but lost both of these senses after a terrible sickness when she was a year and a half old.

I find her story fascinating on many levels, first is that her unique situation reveals how language points to a Transcendent Mind. One who formed our minds and wired us to readily attribute symbols, words, to the various parts and pieces that we experience in the world.  Helen was cut off from this because of her disabilities, and describes this time as being “lost at sea in a dense fog”.  Her story shows us that without God giving us the internal makeup to both distinguish and then give words to the different things of our world that we too would be lost in the fog.

But on another level her story is a kind of parable of the human condition.  She was born completely healthy and lived for a short time in an idyllic paradise in her family’s cottage home in the American south.  In her book she states that she has faint memories of this time, though wonders if they be memories at all, or more imaginations of what that time may have been, based on everything that she had read and learned about what having all 5 senses would be like.

She speaks in her memoir about how she realized that not everybody was like her after she would feel her family members’ mouths moving and sense that one member was responding to another.  She would move her mouth like them but not get the same reaction.  It was around this time that she realized that she was different.  It was later on that she learned that something was wrong.

We Are All Helen Keller

While the majority of people don’t have anything close to the impairments that Helen lived with, we all eventually notice that life on earth doesn’t feel right.  This centers around death.  All people will die one day, we know this, but something about it feels like a violation of a deeper principle, a truth our soul knows within itself. We don’t think about it a lot when we are young but as we age we go to funerals, and we become more aware that the world we live in doesn’t match the one we feel we should belong to.

C.S. Lewis reflected deeply about this dissatisfaction with death and our longing for something better and came to the conclusion that the desire was prophetic.  He writes about this in Mere Christianity saying,

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

This is perhaps why Christianity speaks most clearly to us.  I deeply believe in the Authority of Scripture and try to obey and teach all of God’s Commandments, but it wasn’t the moral teaching of the Bible that brought me to Christ; rather it was when I heard about the Promise of Eternal Life, something within me bore witness to it.  Something that I can’t put my finger on that knows that there is something fundamentally wrong with death, I know within myself that I’m not meant to perish.

This is why I remain a follower of Jesus even though life is hard and seemingly every major influence in the world is focused on getting me to leave the faith – the sweeping accusations of the New York Times, the mocking of Hollywood, and the anti-Christian polemics of academia cannot quiet that sense within me.

Scripture speaks directly to this. Jesus has made a home for all who have faith in Him.  Eternal Life in the Father’s House (John 3:16, John 14:3), where there will be no pain, no sorrow and where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Revelation 21:4).  This is the destination of anyone and everyone who calls upon the Name of the Lord (Romans 10:13).

Furthermore, the Bible shows us that the state we find ourselves in this world is in fact not the way God made it.  There was a time, like that of Helen’s infant life, where things were not broken and where death had not entered the world.

It all starts with Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Life in the Garden

Life in the Garden was good.  It’s probably the greatest understatement that one could make about Paradise and yet it is the most repeated phrase in Genesis 1.  God saw the light and said it was good (Genesis 1:4).  He said the same thing about the earth and the seas (Genesis 1:10), plants (Genesis 1:12), the planets (Genesis 1:18), sea creatures and birds (Genesis 1:21), and land animals (Genesis 1:25).  They were all “good”. The chapter concludes with God musing over the entirety of all He had made and saying that all of it was good (Genesis 1:31).

And yet, there is one thing in Eden that God says isn’t good.  And that was that Adam, the crown of all His creation, was alone (Genesis 2:18).

Now it is my belief that Genesis 2:4-25 actually occurs on the 6^th Day of Creation.  I say this because God creates man and woman in His Image on Day 6 (Genesis 1:27) and then gives them – man and woman - commands on the same day.  Thus, I think it’s reasonable to believe that even though Genesis 2 comes after Genesis 1 sequentially, that the second chapter is a more in-depth account of what happened on the 6^th day.¹ * So when God looks over all creation in Genesis 1:31 and says “it is good” it is after He has created Eve.

Either way as God was creating people, He decided to create Adam first.  The first man lived and existed without woman for a distinct period of time and then Scripture testifies that God said “that it’s not good for man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18).

God the Gardener

There is a kind of tension that I think is important for us to have in our minds as we approach passages like this. Genesis 2:18 could be read as God discovering that Adam needed a companion in real time.  God creates Adam first and realizes that he is lonely and needs a helper, thus God tries a bunch of things, none of them work and then God decides to create woman.  One could also read God’s decision to flood the earth in Genesis 6:5-7 or His choice to divide the tongues of mankind in Genesis 11:5-8 in this way as well. But I think if we read these and assume that God lacked the foresight to see the inevitability of Adam’s loneliness, or man’s proclivity towards violence and self-sufficiency, then we aren’t getting the whole picture.

God knows the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10), a point that Scripture illustrates by stating that Jesus is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8).  The very fact that there is an “end” and a “beginning” means that God has chosen to lead the world similar to the way a gardener creates a garden. Creating a garden is an arduous task that requires tilling the soil to make it fertile, planting seeds, pulling weeds, and then directing what grows in the way the gardener intends by pruning branches that are not healthy.  All of this takes place over time and actions made by the gardener have to occur at the right moment.  Planting seeds, for example, before the soil is ready, will just lead to incomplete and unhealthy growth.

God leads mankind in a similar way.  He knows what He will do in each stage of man’s development, but he is waiting for the “fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4) to enact each step of His plan.  This is why prophecies come true, because they are from the God who both knows and forms the future.  As the leader of man, in the same way the gardener is acutely acquainted with the state of his garden at each particular moment, so God is deeply connected to Adam’s needs.

Thus, after a period of time, where Adam has become self-aware, conscious of his connection with God, excellent of his role in maintaining Eden - well-adjusted enough to acknowledge his existence in the world he finds himself in – then he begins to sense a feeling of something being missing in his life that he just can’t put his finger on. It is at this point that God decides to deal with Adam’s loneliness.

The need for companionship is an inescapable part of the human condition.  We weren’t made to just work and commune with God - as essential as both of those are - we are pieces that need to be joined with another in order to be complete (Genesis 2:24).  Adam lived in paradise, in a world uncorrupted by sin, yet he knew deep within himself that something was missing.

And there was in fact something, or better put, someone, missing.

God obviously knew this the whole time and, I believe, allows Adam to experience loneliness so that he would appreciate Eve when God brought her to him.  This again speaks to God’s Leadership style, where God waits for the proverbial soil to be ready before He plants the seed.  He knows what He wants from the beginning, but He leads in real-time, acting at the right moment, so that His flowers will be able to bloom unhindered.

Thus, we see God bringing all the animals before Adam to see if any of them will make an adequate companion.²  After Adam has named all the animals, he realizes that none of them have the ability to share in his experience of the world and thus cannot fix his problem.  So God puts Adam into a deep sleep, takes one of his ribs and uses it to create Eve.

The entire process that God brings Adam through, where he feels his isolation, can’t find an adequate partner and then has a piece of himself formed into someone new, causes Adam to appreciate Eve in a way that he wouldn’t have, had she been created at the same time as him.  Thus, the time in Eden becomes a kind of primordial honeymoon, one where man is connected to God and where men and women live together in harmony.

The chapters that follow in Genesis involve God leading the world in a way that accommodates for man’s sin, creating traditions that provided checks against humanity’s selfish nature.  Genesis 9:5-6 is an example of this, where God commands Noah to punish murder.  This obviously wasn’t necessary in Eden, but becomes useful after the Fall to form societies that put fear in the hearts of those who otherwise are powerful enough to abuse others.  While the ability to punish evil requires power, and power in the hands of sinful men is itself problematic, it is still an overall better thing for people to live in a world where governments punish wrongdoing, than it would be to have to avenge your loved ones yourself.

But marriage, the lifetime union of one man and one woman, is not a calculated half-measure that that accommodates for the corruption of the broken world, rather marriage was born in Eden, an institution that brings together the two types of people that God made; man and woman.

The Lessons in Genesis are Common Sense

One of the things that I’ve noticed as I put my focus on the early chapters of Genesis is that pretty much everything that is taught in Genesis 1 – 11 is common sense.  One doesn’t have to read Genesis 1 to know that the existence of the universe points to a Transcendent Mystery.  Pretty much everybody in history recognized this until very recently, which is why the ancients of every place were religious.  I dedicated a whole book to this that I titled Science, Scripture and the Beauty of God.

Genesis 2 is also common sense.  One doesn’t have to know the story of Adam not being able to find an adequate companion from the animals to know that Men and Women were made for each other.  This fact is apparent just from looking at and spending any amount of time with them.

We will get to Genesis chapters 4 through 9, which chronicle the bygone age of man, which serves as a cautionary tale to the chaos of life without civil government.  But one doesn’t have to read about Cain and Abel, or even know who Noah was, to recognize that anarchism creates a world where the powerful use violence to take what they want from the weak.

The first chapters of Genesis are a kind of philosophical handbook, comprised of historical stories, that give people the basic framework for understanding who God is, who they are, what society is and how they should live in the world.  It turns out that you don’t have to read Kant, Foucault or Heidegger.  Nor do you have to mine the ancient minds of Plato or Aristotle.  All one needs to have a good understanding of the world is the Bible.  It’s always been this way because Scripture is a gift given to us by a Loving God who wanted to direct His people towards life and life more abundantly (John 10:10).