Turn your bible to the book of Genesis if you would please.
Gen 2:18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
Gen 2:24-25 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
There are several points that we could take away from these verses. Before I do that, I think its important to point out an obvious fact concerning men. We men are visual orientated. That means that we tend to be excited, enticed, drawn to, desirous of, evaluate, pass judgment on, etc things when we see them. I believe that Adam was no different.
Another point I'd like to bring out is that we aren't sure how much time elapsed between Gen 1 and the end of chapter 3. What I mean by that is we don't know if the events surrounding Adam getting a wife and sin entering the world took place on day 6 of creation or if it was days, weeks, months years etc before Eve showed up. We aren't told. We are told that Adam was 130 years old when his first son was born. That gives us a time frame of one day to 129 years 3 months to contemplate.
As the story goes Adam gets a wife. He sees her and the first thing he says, in fact the first thing any man says in the whole Bible is a speech about how amazed he is over the whole deal. The very next thing, right after that, keep in mind this is in the Bible, THE VERY NEXT THING is an explanation that the whole reason, is to have sex. Look it up its in the Bible. Granted the Bible doesn't say something like "do the hanky panky" or "make whoopee" or anything we'd recognize as "make love". What it says is "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." That "one flesh" business, that's Bible speak for "do it".
So I don't make this post too long, I'll highlight the important points:
- God made man and gave him a visual orientation
- God made women so she could "help" man
- God made sure that when Adam and Eve met they were butt naked
- Sex was God's idea
- God's fist positive command to Adam was to "be fruitful and multiply"
- Scripture teaches that a man should leave his parents and be united to HIS WIFE
- Eve didn't birth any children till Adam was 130 years old
- We don't know how long both of them lived together
- We don't know when they sinned
- Assuming Eve was created shortly after Adam say within a year or so and they didn't sin right away, that means God gave them potentially over 100 years of happy, romping around naked in paradise, sex, and they could have had more
- God's ideal is one man, one women, having sex with each other for a lifetime
You're the only person I know who has correctly quoted Gen 2:18. If I hear "helpmeet' one more time.......
ReplyDeleteI grew up with the King James, not the New King James, the King James 1611. You may have seen it, its version God gave to Moses, at least the way some people presented it.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the folks reading King James in 1611 had a very good understanding of what it meant and probably didn't struggle with understanding some of the nuances of various phrases. Language changes and if we want to keep a literal understanding of what was written we have to use words that mean the same thing as the text.
The word "helper" means she helps him. It doesn't mean she is his overseer or even his exact equal. It means she is there to help him. What form that help takes can be different from marriage to marriage. I think its fairly easy to see that item #1 on the list of things to do is sex.
It's only been in the last 50 years or so that society has had a problem with the sex part of the marriage relationship. This is a result of the feminization. Women as a rule like sex just as much as men and are physically capable of doing it more frequently than men are.
No offense Res, but no real woman ever feels the need to be the exact equal to a man. My hubby has his areas where he is the acknowledged expert, I have my areas where I am the acknowledged expert. Nice thing is, they are different areas. Put them together and we have a very nice working machine called a successful marriage.
ReplyDeleteThat is why the Bible also recommends that men and women don't go into a relationship unequally yoked. You can't plow a straight furrow if one of you isn't pulling in compatibility with the other.
Same thing with horses and carriages, stage coaches and carts. They give a great example of this principle in the movie Ben Hur. When he meets the Sheik with the gorgeous horses, Judah figures out why the horses aren't pulling together and corrects the problem. Very nice scene, and very instructive regarding human relationships too.
Putting the cart before the horse, what with all the promiscuity now, makes it seem like sex is being treated like some kind of after thought by so many. Then they wonder why they can't have a successful relationship with somebody.
No offense Res, but no real woman ever feels the need to be the exact equal to a man.
ReplyDeleteNo offense taken. I don't know what "real women" feel. Judging by popular culture there is a great deal of emphasis placed on being totally equal and/or superior to men.
In churchianity today Bible verses like the one quoted are used to promote the ideas that the culture is correct and that the Bible has agreed with it all along.
What you described with your own marriage would be keeping in the spirit of the Gen 2:18 passage. There is nothing wrong with one person being better at something and therefor doing it. There is something terribly wrong with pretending words in scripture don't mean what they say.