In God's Eyes - Pt 2

The LORD God 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.” 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. 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. 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, because she was taken out of Man.” 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. (Genesis 2:15-25 ESV). We should start at the beginning before we look at individuals. When God surveyed his vast creation, he declared, “This is very good” (cf. Genesis 1:31). But the Bible notes one exception in Genesis 2; it was “not good that the man should be alone.” So God determined to fix that by making “a helper” for Adam. Unfortunately, this translation makes it sound to us like the woman is very much subordinate to the man. Adam was primary. Eve was his helper. Adam was the CEO and Eve his secretary, brought into the story to help him get his work done. This could not be further from the truth. You see, the word used here for “helper” (the Hebrew word ezer) occurs twenty-one times in the Old Testament, and in all but five occurrences it refers to God as our helper.  Our soul waits for the LORD; he is our ezer and our shield. (Psalm 33:20).  Our ezer is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. (Psalm 124:8).  Happy are those whose ezer is the God of Jacob. (Psalm 146:5). There are many other examples we could list. These are but a few in the psalms. So, in other words, whenever we run into difficulties in our lives, we need someone to stand beside us, to encourage us, to help get us through that experience. God himself is our ultimate ezer. But he has also provided an ezer with skin on, especially our partners in marriage. With this sense of equality between male and female, it is no wonder that God goes on to give his ideal for marriage: that the man and the woman may “become one flesh” (cf. Genesis 2:24). That’s who we are in his eyes. We are different and the same, essential to one another in life.