Man and Woman

 DEVOTION

GENESIS

MAN AND WOMAN

Gen 2:18-25

18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

NIV

Interestingly, we never make much of what language Adam spoke when we named all the living creatures that God brought to him. It is also interesting that God brought all the living creatures before Adam. We think about how God brought all living animals to Noah so they could enter the finished ark and be saved. Do we ever consider that God has that much power and authority over all living things? However, the narrative here is that although Adam named all living things, and that each had a mate so they could multiply and fill the earth, for Adam there was no mate. He was all alone, except for God who spent time with him. Therefore, here comes Eve, but this time she was not formed from the dust of the ground, but from the body of Adam. We would think as God formed Eve from the rib bone of Adam, he would have to give her breath just as he did with Adam so that both male and female have the breath of God in them. Nevertheless, he formed Eve and brought her to Adam, and he named her Woman for she is bone of man’s bone and flesh of man’s flesh. We will get to a time when Adam gave the woman the name Eve, but for now, he called her Woman because she came from a man. It is interesting how this relationship between man and woman was established by God. He gave man this woman because it was not good that the man should be alone. It is not that the man would have been lonely for he had God to walk and talk with in the cool of the day. But the fact that man was not capable of multiplying and filling the earth, as all the rest of the living things were. So, we have this sort of symbiotic relationship between man and woman. If it were not for man, the woman would not have life, and yet it is from women comes both other women and men. In fact, we are going to find when Adam names her Eve, this word means giver of life. How close we are associated with each other, and in need of each other, for woman cannot give life without the man, and now man cannot have life without the woman. We do not know all the various relationships that existed between a man and a woman that existed before us, but we now live in a time when co-existence co-dependency may be in danger. It seems there are so many who have decided not to follow the pattern of God and want to be something other than man and woman. We think it does not matter how they want to be identified or what pronoun they want to be called by, all of us are either men or women as God formed each to be mates, to produce other men and women and thus fill the earth. God declared that man and woman should be one, a union of two becoming one. No matter what the world wants to believe about the gender dysphoria confusion and this transgender hysteria, God established through forming man from the dust and woman from the man, that there would be two genders male and female as there is with every other living thing that God created. How can anyone misunderstand that is beyond reason. What we know is that we are not confused nor do we live in or as in partnership with this world’s refusal to acknowledge the truth, for we live in the truth of God, partnering with God, as he partners with us, thus we live as man and woman united as one by God.