Show notes
In the beginning, God was good. He created us for intimacy, co-dominion, and co-stewardship of His creation. Male-female relationships and marriage may have gotten distorted after the Fall, but in the beginning, it was not so. Listen in to hear what Genesis 1-3 has to say about God Himself; God’s original design for humanity; and God’s plan for salvation following the consequences of sin. You might be surprised to learn what’s actually in the creation narratives…and what’s not. If you’ve learned something new here and are enjoying this series on “Marriage, Mutuality, and Gender Roles,” please leave a rating & review!Podcasting by: Kensi Duszynski, MA, LMFT, CPCEditing by: Evan Duszynski, MAMusic by: John TibbsFULL TRANSCRIPT:Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast! Thank you so much for your earnest desire to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live a mutually empowered, purposeful life in Christ. I’m really glad to be working my way through this series with you and really encouraged by some of the conversations I’ve been having lately. In upcoming weeks, we will get into a few interviews where we’ll dive more deeply into marriage and mutuality, but today, we’re covering marriage in the Creation account and after the Fall. I believe last episode, I said I’d cover Ephesians 5 as well, but that was a little ambitious, I found, and so that episode will drop on Monday, November 29th. And the reason I wanted to include these biblical teachings in a series on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles, is because I think for many of us, we’ve heard these passages so much that we often don’t even hear them for what they actually say, or we hear these verses so piece-milled to prove a point, that we don’t even understand their context. So what I’m hoping is that the questions posed in the last episode encouraged you toward your own reading of Scripture, because today, we’ll be diving into it together with fresh eyes and ears. Let’s start by taking a look at the Creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2: Genesis 1:26-31 says:“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ [So notice, when God says, ‘let us make man in our image, and after our likeness,’ He’s referring to the relationality between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—whom we know as the Triune God. The word man used there is adam in Hebrew, and the them is ha’adam in Hebrew. It’s plural for humanity or mankind. And Scripture says that God made humans to have dominion over the earth and other created creatures—not dominion over each other.]So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [In other words, from the Hebrew, God created mankind, in the image of God he created mankind; male and female he created mankind.]And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”So in the first creation narrative, here in chapter 1, we have the Creator God, who in the Hebrew in chapter one, is referred to as Elohim. Elohim, God, we’re told, created the earth and humanity in His image. And compared to other creation accounts at the time, this God was described quite differently. For one, He was one—3-in-1; secondly, He was a good God; and third, He was a relational God, completely unified within Himself. In chapter 1, we’re zoomed out a bit, seeing how this all-powerful, relational-within-and-between-Himself God created the entire universe. If you can, imagine a movie that begins with a look at earth from outer space. From this aerial vantage point, we see that this God completed His work with the creation of humanity, instructing them to be fruitful, to multiply, to create, to rule, to subdue, and take care of the earth He created. And only after God created male and female—humans in His image—and instructed them to steward the earth for His glory, did this Creator God proclaim His creation “very good.”Here’s how I read that: In contrast to other renderings of the text I’ve heard, woman isn’t the epitome or the icing on the cake of creation, nor is man the “cake” itself, or instructed to bear the weight of the world alone. It wasn’t the man or woman whom God called very good; rather, it was the fullness of His image and His instructions to man and woman to be like Him (relational beings who were to be procreative and co-creative and stewards of His creation) that God called very good. But even more important than that, in my view, is the point of chapter one, the reason why males and females have meaning and purpose and see themselves in this story at all, and it’s this: in contrast to other beliefs about creation and different deities, the Hebrew people believed in a relational, monotheistic, Triune God who wasn’t afraid or threatened to create humanity in His own image, as other gods are portrayed, who valued human life so as not to engage in human sacrifice, as other religions did, and who created both man and woman with free will, whereas other creation narratives cite the creation of woman as a necessary evil, the gods’ punishment to men for their arrogance. Instead, the God of the Bible is loving toward His creation, values human life, gives humans free will, and instructs both men and women to rule, fill, and subdue the earth. This is a story about an all-powerful deity who created man and woman to be in relationship, to bear the fullness of His image, including, in how we act upon the created earth together. Now, as we take a look at the second creation account in Genesis 2:15-25, I want you to imagine we’re zooming in, moving from a distant view of the earth or an aerial view of the earth, to a zoomed-in, up-close, and personal look at the creation of man and woman. So imagine, revisiting the creation of humanity on the sixth day, and this time, we’ll get to know God not just as Creator and relational-within-Himself, but as the personal God of Israel, who is also very much relational-with-us. Starting with verse 15: “The LORD God [that is, Yahweh Elohim] took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’ Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’ [Why? Because as we saw in chapter 1, God is a relational God and we are created in His image. Verse 19…] “Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them [right, here we get this picture of a personal God who meets the man, who brings things to Adam to see what he will name them. It’s like God is delighting to watch Adam create as God had instructed him to.] And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.”Meaning, he was creating and ruling and stewarding the earth alone, outside of a relationship with someone like him. But remember, in Genesis 1:26-31, God did not call creation completed until male and female were both created and both co-creating.Now in Hebrew, a ‘helper fit’ or a ‘helper suitable’ is translated as ezer kenegdo, meaning “a strength, an aid, or an ally who is like”, not a help who is subpar or who does a husband’s bidding. I was in a book club a few years ago where a woman, a pastor’s wife, shared that back when her husband was pastoring, they attended a marriage conference for pastors and pastors’ wives, where the speaker likened the husband-wife relationship to the relationship between a CEO and his executive assistant. But if the speaker had taken a look at the Hebrew, rather than just putting his own capitalistic cultural spin on the text, he would have discovered that the word helper, or ezer in Hebrew, is used 21 different times in the Old Testament to describe God’s strength and aid to Israel! So I can hardly imagine that what God had in mind when He said, ‘I will make an ezer who is suitable to, and like Adam,’ is a female secretary for Adam. Furthermore, if God Himself is an ezer, and if the Trinity is 3-in-1, equal in power and glory, this has significant implications for the way men and women are to partner to bear the fullness of His image. Let’s keep going, verse 21…“So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman [ishah in Hebrew], because she was taken out of Man [ish in Hebrew].’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”As I read this, God delights to see the man respond to the woman He places in front of him. The animals got named; the woman got a poem in verse 23, which is what that indentation represents in your Bible as you read it. And the man essentially says, “at last, I have a help who is like, yet somehow, different from me, so that now, I am fully created in the image of God because now, I am in relationship, not just with God, but also with someone like me—a help who is like me.” And jumping back to Genesis 1:28, this is where God blesses mankind. This is where God gives His instructions to humanity to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, while ruling over the earth and its creatures. So in the garden, in God’s perfect plan for creation and for humanity, there is intimacy—between God and humanity, between man and woman, between husband and wife. There is love, there is relationship, and there is procreativity, co-creativity, and co-dominion over other created creatures, but not over each other.This is Eden. This is the picture of male-female relationality, of co-leadership in respect to the earth, and of co-servanthood in respect to God. Right? God did not create us for hubris, dictatorship, or human oppression on the one hand, nor did He create us for self-degradation, powerlessness, or purposelessness on the other; he created us for intimacy, relationship, and mutual empowerment as we co-labor with Him and with each other. But then, we get to chapter 3 and everything goes awry. The serpent enters the picture, man and woman sin, the woman is deceived, the man says nothing and blames Eve, and the consequences of the Fall enter in. Let’s take a look at Genesis 3 from the New American Standard Version.“Now the serpent was more cunning than any animal of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”Notice here, the contrast between the writer of Genesis, who cites the personal name of God, Yahweh, or LORD God, and the serpent, who refers to God as Elohim, God rather than LORD God. Right, the serpent, representative of Satan, is even deceptive in his language, distancing the woman from God in the way that he’s framing Him, even before casting doubt as to what God said. So she then picks up his language. “The woman said to the serpent, ‘From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’”The serpent said to the woman, “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil.”When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate.”Now, we have the gift of hindsight and more importantly, Jesus, to help us see where Eve went wrong here, and what led man and woman to sin. As John recounted in 1 John 2:16, it was “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life” that led Eve, and Adam, to sin—these things, we’re told as not coming from the Father but rather, from the world.So the strategy I see in the serpent here is: 1) Create discomfort and discontentment. 2) Create distance between God and His people by twisting the Word of God. 3) Lure them in with worldly things (the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life) and lead them to doubt God’s good plan, nature, words, and intentions toward them. 4) Wait for them to choose disconnection and disobedience to the LORD God, their personal connection to the Father. And what’s wild is that we see this same old strategy that satan used with the woman, used with Jesus, in Mark chapter 4. Before Jesus began his earthly ministry, he was led into the wilderness and tempted by the devil himself. And after 40 days and nights of fasting and growing weak in the flesh, the devil starts into Jesus. First, he tempted Jesus by questioning His relationship and sonship to the Father, saying in Mark 4:3: “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread”—the lust of the flesh. But amazingly, in His hunger (at least to me, because I am good for nothing when I’m hungry, just ask my husband) Jesus said to his tempter: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of God.’” Second, the devil tempted Jesus by asking him to stand on the pinnacle of the temple in the holy city, saying:“If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down; for after all, You know it is written that ‘God will give His angels orders concerning You…On their hands they will lift You up, so that You don’t even strike Your foot against a stone”—the boastful pride of life. But not pulling one past Jesus, Jesus replied: “On the other hand, it is written: ‘You shall not put the LORD your God to the test.” And third, Mark 4:8 says that: “Again, the devil took Him along to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory; and he said to Jesus, ‘All these things I will give You, if You fall down and worship me’—the lust of the eyes. But thankfully, Jesus said to him, ‘Go away, Satan! For it is written: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.’”So Jesus shows us what could’ve been said here, by the man or the woman in the garden, seeing as how they were both right there when the serpent made his case. They could have said: “Serpent, we have everything we need, every green plant and tree for food, not to mention a perfect, loving relationship with God.” They could have said, “on the other hand,” like Jesus did, “God told us to be fruitful and have dominion over the earth, not to be ruled by it.” They could have said, “Go away, Satan! For God has created us, blessed us, instructed us to be like Him!” But they didn’t. And…
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