Genesis 2:18. Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
God is relational. That means that God loves and cares for others. Remember, God is a Trinity; he is three persons in one being. So God has always existed in a relationship. The Father loves the Son and Spirit. The Son loves the Father and Spirit. And the Spirit loves the Father and the Son. And that is very good.
Why did God create us? He created us to have a relationship with us. That’s why he made us in his image and likeness, so that we could be relational like him. God wants us to join the Trinity in their loving relationship with one another. God doesn’t NEED to have a relationship with us, but he sure WANTS to have a relationship with us. Beyond this our relationship with God, he made us to need a relationship with each other. In the same way that God needs God, we will need each other.
It is not good.
These are some of the most shocking words in all the Bible. Seven times in Genesis 1, God declares that his creation is good, even very good. God rested on day seven because his creation work was complete and there was nothing more to add. So how could something be “not good?”
Because Adam was not meant to live with just God alone.
I know that may sound surprising or even wrong, but it’s true. But isn’t God all we need? Isn’t knowing God enough? The answer to this is both yes and no. Yes, if all we had was God we would still be fine (better than fine, actually). Yes, God can satisfy all of our deepest desires. Yes, God will never fail us, even though everything else in creation can and will.
But it is also very important to understand that God created a physical world for us to live in, in which the way he relates to us is through his creation. The way God satisfies all our needs is through what he made. For example, if we need food, God created food for us to eat. If we need to see something beautiful, God created beautiful things for us to see. If we need love, acceptance, and honor, God created a helper fit for us, another person to offer God’s love, acceptance, and honor to us. You see, we don’t have God on top of all these things that satisfy us; we have God within all these things that satisfy us.
Adam will need to learn how to love another person if he is going to truly live in God’s image. He will need to learn how to live sacrificially for another, living for someone else and not just himself. That’s why God will create the woman, Eve.
Genesis 2:21-22. 21So 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. 22And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
Adam could have never learned to love without another person. God knew that Adam needed someone who was like him, but also different from him in order to learn how to love. Thousands of years later, Jesus knew this too, which is why he expressed the greatest commandment as the dual command to love God AND love others.
Jesus is now the Helper fit for us. He has entered into our hearts to dwell within us, empowering us by his love to love others, even those who are different from us.
Questions: Do you ever try to do things on your own, without any help from others? How does knowing that Jesus loves you help you to love others?
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