Confront Article: What is God Doing When Bringing Adam and Eve Together?

When bringing Eve and Adam together, God did something very, very clever.  What he did was to recognize that creatures learn by experience, not by abstract thought.  We have a silly approach to what is education that says if we teach ourselves information, we learn.  The Bible verses of Genesis do not approach life fm like that.  The New Testament teaches to give a person an experience, and he or she will learn; give data, and the point will be missed.  God is creating an experience for Adam in Genesis.  When Adam was done with the experience, he absolutely understood the significance of the woman.

God knew that He was going to give Adam a female. The grace of God know, however, that if He just handed over a female to him, the man would have no depth perception to appreciate the gift.  He needed an experience. Our deeper God, therefore, walked him through a zoo.  When the man was at the other end, he had enough depth perception to appreciate what he would be given.

Notice what occurred:

. . . and out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky. Genesis 2:19

It was like a wonderful magic act.  God created an owl, an elephant, a cat, a dog.  Right in front of him, they were made – out of the ground.  Then He brought each of the animals to Adam.  Initially it was very exciting, but how many animals can one look at in a day?  God told the man, “You name them – put a name on them.”  Out of the recesses of his being, this absolutely brilliant man, who would be able to call eagles from the sky – named an eagle.

God allowed him to imitate the way God had named the day and night, the sun, moon and stars, the waters and the land in chapter one of Genesis.  Adam looked at these animals and gave them names.  Each time he named an animal, God asked him whether he had found a helper or not.  He did not.  When he finished naming them, he was crushed with loneliness.  He previously had a name for loneliness; now he had the experience of being lonely.

When the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a significant helper for him.  Genesis 2:20

After the experience of going through the world of animals and not finding a helper, he was put to sleep by God.

The purpose of putting him to sleep was not only to get the rib, but to heighten the drama.  The curtain went down and came up.  After Adam woke up, he burst forth into poetry.

And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man and the man said,

‘This now, is Bone of my bones,
flesh of my flesh
she shall be called woman,
because she was taken out of man.’

Genesis 2:22-23

This is actually a poem.  After all of those animals, this was someone like him, but she was feminine.  The phrase “this now” referred to the person he saw, as opposed to the animals.  Delight was his.

What New Testament teaches about healthy relationships says that the commonality for humanity is that we are made in the image and likeness of God and for the glory of God, but the difference is that the man is focused on purposes and the woman is focused on relationships.  They were made to be a team.  Whether a person is married or single, he or she needs to have a deep appreciation of how special it is to be human, and how the genders are similar to and different from each other.