Ezer Kenegdo - A Suitable Helper

Genesis 2 and the Authority of Scripture

In our scriptures to Genesis chapter 2. Genesis chapter 2. Upon hearing the reference, our minds are reminded of how many controversies there are today concerning these texts, specifically the first few chapters of Genesis.

And we recognize as believers what is contained in this particular passage is particularly the brunt of the jokes of the world today. If we were to speak about what is found in these words with most unbelievers, there would be a general expression of scorn, disrespect, and disbelief.

And at the same time, we are hopefully aware of the fact that when it comes to ultimate authorities, when we look at the Lord Jesus believed and taught, He specifically quoted from these texts, as did the Apostle Paul, and held them in the highest esteem, and in fact viewed them as the very thoughts and words of God Himself, and held men accountable to them.

And so we have the choice of either bowing to the authority of Christ, or the authority of our society, and to those individuals with whom we have conversation, who generally have never even read all of these texts, do not know them in their original languages, know next to nothing about their history, and are simply going on third, fourth, and fifth-hand information.

But so ubiquitous is their scorn that we cannot help but remember that as we turn to this text. Now, part of that scorn is due to the fact that the religion of our society, naturalistic materialism and secularism, is based upon the absolute dogmatic acceptance of certain theories that run directly opposite what the Bible says concerning the existence of God and God's creative purpose in the universe.

So it is not surprising whatsoever that it is this text that speaks to us with clarity concerning the nature of man and the relationship of man and woman. I refer specifically to Genesis chapter 2. You will undoubtedly hear it say, if you ever referred to Genesis chapter 2, well, that's just the second of the contradictory creation narratives, because very surface-level readers and thinkers will read Genesis 1, and they'll read Genesis 2, and if they've had access to the Internet, or Wikipedia, or other such in-depth scholarly sources, or if they have gone to churches, where the leadership has been trained within theological liberalism, or these days, almost any form of theological training, the fundamental assumption that is accepted is that the Old Testament is a hodgepodge of contradictory traditions cobbled together very poorly sometime around the 7th century or so, that almost nothing in the Pentateuch has anything to do with a guy named Moses, anyways.

Hence, Genesis 1 and 2 were just two competing creation mythologies that were shoved together and maintained in this book by editors who clearly had no interest in creating anything that was coherent or understandable.

That, unfortunately, is what the vast majority of theological students are taught within seminaries today, even into a lot of what would be considered very conservative seminaries. I know that all of the commentaries, when I took a class on the Pentateuch, all the commentaries we had to read and report on took that very view of everything in each one of the books of the Pentateuch, that they were just cobbled together mythologies with obvious and glaring contradictions to one another.

Now, with that wonderfully edifying background, just to warn you as to what you're going to encounter, I want to look at Genesis chapter 2, beginning at verse 18, and I do, again, want to utilize the appropriate name of God that is found here.

I've been reminded once again, it's easy to slip into the I'm-not-going-to-worry-about-it, but following the old Jewish tradition of not saying the name of God leads to all sorts of strange incoherences and inconsistencies.

The Creation of Woman as a Suitable Helper

Then Yahweh God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. Out of the ground, Yahweh God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

And it's interesting, brought them to the Adam. It's not just to Adam, but to the Adam, the man, to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, the birds of the sky, and every beast of the field.

But for the Adam, there was not found a helper suitable for him. So Yahweh God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept. Then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

Yahweh God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. The man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

Verse 23, there it's Ish, is man, Isha is the woman. You can hear the clear connection between the two. And then notice after the description of woman by the Ish, by Adam, you have then the commentary of verse 24.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and he shall become one flesh. Now, immediately, hopefully, we especially see that and we go, yeah, Jesus quoted those very words in Matthew chapter 19.

He did so in such a way as to make it very clear that these words were normative for all of human history, that these are divine words, they are the very words of God. He based his response to the question concerning the issue of divorce and the nature of marriage directly upon this text.

And therefore, really, it is incumbent upon us as followers of Christ to have his view of Scripture. I know that the way around this for many people is to say, well, that was just Matthew's view of what Jesus would have said.

He has never said any of these things. There's always a way to be, to come up with unbelief. But it truly is amazing to me that there are so many who call themselves Christians and yet when it comes to issues like this, they ignore the reality that the one who died and rose again viewed the Scriptures in this way and viewed this text in that way as being the very revelation of God.

And so for Christians there can be no other way but then to allow the brightest light to show the way when it comes to answering questions of gender role and the purpose of male and female. And so with that in mind, I want to make sure that we see what is taught in this text and recognize that today what we take for granted in many ways is under direct assault.

And if we want to understand why we take the positions we do and why we are willingly putting ourselves in a minority position within even the religious community in an ever more secular society, then we need to understand the foundations upon which we stand.

Previous generations did not have to invest the amount of effort that we will have to invest, that we must invest, to understand these things. But the world has changed and our nation has changed and therefore we must recognize these things.

The Meaning of etzer kenegdo

So all through the creation account when God would make something, he would examine it and he would say that it is tov, it is tov, it is good. It is not until we get to verse 18 that we read, then Yahweh God said, lo tov, it's not good, it's not good.

First time that there is something said about God's creation where there is a expression of dis-approbation. There we go. I might misunderestimate that. I was going to George Bush's. Misunderestimate, that's a good term.

Anyway, there is disapproval on God's part. There is something that is not as it should be in the created order. But it's not because God created something that was not right or good but that the creation process itself was not yet complete as we know the rest of the story.

So it is lo tov for God, the man, to be alone, to be unique, the only one of his kind, to not have, and the term is either conegdo. There is conegdo, that's the term that you at least want to get the transliteration of.

Conegdo, etzer, I didn't put it up there, I should have, etzer means help or helper. Most of you know that when we sing one particular hymn when it talks about the evaneser, that's actually evan-etzer, evan means stone, etzer help and evan-etzer, evan-ezer is a stone of help, it is a monument that a person would put up to memorialize God having done something in their life, having come to their aid and assistance in their life.

So here I raise my evan-ezer, my son rolls his eyes because he knows I'm going to sing that as evan-etzer because that's how it's actually, it's not evan-ezer, here I raise my evan-ezer scrooge, you know, I mean that's how most people, here I raise my evan-ezer scrooge, what's that all about, I don't know, but we all know around here that evan-etzer means a stone of help, well here's the same Hebrew term, etzer, and it's etzer conegdo, helper, corresponding to, or suitable for.

Now, it is, we understand what this text is communicating to us. Many people in the world today read this and they go, oh this is just, why does anyone care about what a bunch of ancient shepherds in the middle bronze age thought about these things, it's all mythology, people are holding us back, I mean this is what the attitude of our society today, and I saw just a portion of a fairly conservative Christian who went on Bill Maher's program, and you just listen to the sneering scorn of people like Bill Maher, of course it's based upon an incredible level of ignorance, but the sneering scorn of these idiots in the Old Testament, and they had no idea what they were talking about, and they were just so behind the times, and you Christians, how can you even be smart enough to turn a computer on and not realize it's time to move beyond this stuff, and so on and so forth, and as a result, when they read these texts, they do so without even engaging their gray matter, I mean they think more deeply about almost any piece of literature than they do what is being communicated to us in the scriptures, because they have such a low view of the Bible and of the authors of the Bible, and so when we look at this, we ask ourselves the question, well is there anything in Aether Conegdo that is relevant to us today and vital for us today to understand?

Well, certainly we can look at the lexical forms, we can look at how these terms are used in the Bible, how they're used in other texts, all that kind of stuff, and Conegdo actually is the term neged with a cough attached to the front, phenomenal cough, and then it's the third masculine singular, so for him, so we can look at neged and the related terms, and it's really almost a directional thing, but when you put it all together, it's one standing opposite of one, it is one that is there, but yet has correspondence, and so we can sort of look at that, and we get a range of possible meanings for the word, then you put it with aether, and it's a helper, it's an assistant, it's one that assists one in accomplishing something, but if we just looked at the words, that would be very difficult to nail things down just in the words, but thankfully words are always used in, well, should be always used in a context, and so when we look at the context, the first context is that ha-adam alone lo-tov, not good, answer for lo-tov, create aether Conegdo, so something about aether Conegdo will correct the lo-tov of the adam being alone, whatever that is, verses 19 and 20, out of the ground Yahweh God formed every beast of the field, every bird of the sky, and brought them to adam to see what he would call them, and whatever adam called a living creature, that was its name, now God could have done this on his own, obviously, and probably would have done so in a wonderfully fantastic way, but he instead entrusts this to adam, partly because this man has set over all of these things, he's put in that position in creation, which again is something that was vitally important in the rise of western civilization, but now is being denied by many in western civilization, we're just a part of the creation, and you know, we just need to serve mother Gaia, but so adam gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and every beast of the field, and then you have the reason why, I think, one of the reasons why, but an important reason why, the author puts this information where he does, in between the statement of it's not good for man to be alone, and then the solving of the low-toe problem, last phrase, and to every beast of the field, but for adam, there was not found an etzer k 'negdo, an etzer k 'negdo, exact same phrase, so this must have been, I can't imagine that this was a one-day affair, you know, there are a few critters out there, and I would assume that adam being a perfect unfallen man, we often think of him as some type of little infantile child, we have absolutely no reason to think that, here would have been a man whose intellect is unclouded by the ignorance of tradition, not impacted by sin, in perfect harmony with his God, in an unspoiled, uncorrupted world, he's never seen death, I mean, we have to restrain ourselves from speculating as to what adam was like at this time, because we're just not given much information, but certainly everything that afflicts us did not afflict him, he had never had a pulled muscle, he had not been sick, had not been ill, it's amazing to think what that would have been like, but certainly he would have had the intellectual capacity to do this, and I would imagine he didn't just simply, you know, as they go trotting by, you know, elephant, pig, dog, I would imagine that there would be an examination of these animals, an observation of these animals by a keen intellect, and there would not have been, I can't imagine why there'd be some great rush and the only way you can name properly the vast majority of animals is to see all of the manifestation of those animals.

In other words, you want to see a bull as well as a cow, you want to see the lion as well as the lioness, because they're going to look different from one another, and there would have been no way that Adam would not have seen that as you move up from the creeping things to the animals and to the chimpanzees and orangutans and so on and so forth, that there is this binary of male and female.

And he would have seen that the elephant with his tusks as his aetheric anegdo, the female elephant that doesn't have tusks, and the lion has huge mane, but the lioness does not, and would have seen that the male often has the bright colored tusks and the female not so much, and there's this relationship that exists that he would have seen over and over and over and over and over again, and he would have seen in the created order the concept of aetheric anegdo repeated in his observation of necessity over and over again.

And as the process finished up, however long that took, it would have been truly impressed upon his mind by the end of that process for Adam, there was not found an aetheric anegdo. There was not in any of these created beings, one that corresponded to him in the binary fashion that he had already observed in the created order around him.

It is not by some chance or by bad editing, the story of the naming of the animals is placed between the divine statement, lo tov, Adam has no aetheric anegdo. It is not just happenstance, it is put there purposefully to communicate to us that Adam was searching, Adam was observing, Adam was learning, and what his full examination of what God had created that time impressed upon him was that there was no aetheric anegdo for him.

That he was unique, he was alone, and yet there was no binary, there was no male-female in the sense of he's looking around going, wonder where mine is. And so the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept, then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

Now, again, this is why many people will say, well, God didn't have to do this, well, of course he didn't have to do this. If God had just wanted to do the enterprise thing and there's Eve, he could do that.

I mean, that's how I would have done it, that would have been pretty cool, but blinding flash of light and there she is. And that would have been certainly within his power to do that, but he had already formed out of the dust of the ground both Adam as well as all the created living creatures as it was emphasized.

And so he's not forming a new race, he's not saying I need to add something to what I've done. Instead, by doing it in this way, a message is communicated and Adam picks that message up very, very clearly in what he's going to say when he first sees Eve, because Yahweh God fashions into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man.

Again, this is not, oh, this is just ancient pagan mythology. No, there's a point here. I think it's appropriate that she's not taken from his foot, it's appropriate he's not taken from his head. I think there is something appropriate that's from his side.

Maybe there's something there that corresponds to Aether, helper, assister, connecto. The point is she comes forth from him. Lord God, Yahweh God fashions into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man.

And so there is a self-giving on the part of Adam. I wish I had probably the healing capacities that he had. Takes me a long, long time to get over aches and pains now, but I would imagine that that was a fairly swift process of the man.

And it has been well observed that the very first thing that says when he sees woman is he breaks into poetry. So, if you ever feel, guys, like you just got to break into poetry, then you know where it came from.

Because that's the first thing Adam did, is he breaks into poetry. And immediately founded a greeting card company as a result. And so, and the man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. She should be called Eshah because she was taken out of Esh. So, he recognizes, he fully understands that this is the etzer connecto. This is the one that corresponds to me in the way that I saw the God ordained, created, purposeful, binary relationship in the created order itself.

And he sees that she is his etzer connecto. She is the one that corresponds to him. She is of his type and yet stands opposite of him. She is not his mirror image. He recognizes this. He recognizes the connection that he cannot have with any of the rest of the created order.

We would just boil that down these days in our western way of thinking to, she's got the right DNA. She's got the right chromosomes. Just because we've learned what these things are and named them, we have, we think we've got it all figured out.

We don't. But there is the similarity that we would call the genetic or species similarity. But there is also the complementary, complementarianism, the complementary relationship. Because even though she is bone of my bones, even though she is flesh of my flesh, she's not called man.

She's not called Ish. She's called Isha. There is a difference because she was taken out of man. And so the text, without question, recognizes the two elements that we must keep in balance to have a truly biblical anthropology, a biblical doctrine of man, and a recognition of the rightness of male and female.

Because as we know, when Jesus interpreted this text, what did he say? From the beginning, God made them male and female. This was God's intention. This is God's creative decree. It cannot be undone. It is for man's flourishing.

It is for man's happiness. His creator knows what is best for Adam. And so, when Jesus interprets this text, and hence that becomes the normative interpretation for us as believers, when Jesus interprets this text, he interprets this text as establishing the normative created order of male and female.

And that is not a difficult reading of the text. That is what it suggests to us. And so, after Adam defines this one whom he sees and immediately knows, naturally knows, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called Isha because she was taken out of Ish. When he recognizes what God has done in the creation of Eve, then you have, not in his words, I mean we can't prove this, but this is Moses recording this.

For this reason, verse 24, the Ish will leave his father and mother and will be joined to his wife and he shall become one flesh. For this reason, the reason is creation. The reason is God's creative statement.

It is lo tov for Adam to be alone. I will make an either connecto. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. Now, there are some conservative biblical interpreters, and I'll just tell you up front, I'm uncomfortable with this, who have basically said that before this took place, Adam was basically an undifferentiated human and that the differentiation of male and female takes place in this special creation of woman and it's primarily when they become one flesh that you then have the full representation of the imago dei, the image of God.

There are some who have gone to that point. I don't see that that's what the text is saying. The text has already indicated in the previous summary statements in regards to creation that male and female are created in the image of God.

Yes, there is a special sense in which there is a special revelation and demonstration of the image of God in the fact that male and female together can create life. When you look at your children, when you look at that little child, you cannot help.

Everybody does it. Everybody goes, oh, I see some of you there, but I see some of your wife in the eyes. And we recognize that this offspring is a mixture of these two. And, of course, we talk about genes and traits and all the rest of that stuff.

Again, very much dragging it down to just the nuts and bolts thing and very often don't get above that to see the real beauty of it. I mean, everybody's been fairly amazed at how much Clementine looks like Summer.

And, of course, we have old VHS tapes now of Summer at the very age Clementine is now. And you can put them side by side. It's freaky. It really is. And I've talked with Josh about this, but there are times I will be driving along and and I'll laugh about something or say something.

And I'm all of a sudden shocked because I go, I mean, it just it sounds like my dad. And I told Josh that he goes, yeah, I know. I'm experiencing the same thing. So, you know, and and, you know, you just we we we see this.

It's just all around us. We can't we can't avoid it. Sometimes we wish it weren't that way, but that's that's the way it is. And so there there might be a sense in which in in the sense that we can bring forth life in that process of of man and woman, woman coming together, they become one flesh.

OK, I can see that, but not to the point where there would be any question of the fact that the man in of himself and the woman in of herself both bear the imago dei, the image of God. I think it's very important to affirm that, especially because there are people that in the providence of God don't get married.

And are you going to say that they somehow do not bear the image of God in that way? That they're somehow lesser? I don't think that that's that's what's being communicated. But what whatever else we do, the commentary from Genesis chapter two, when we talk about the establishment of marriage, it could not be established on any deeper bedrock than verse 24 for this reason.

What reason? What God did in the creation of male and female. There's nothing that's prior to that. There's nothing more basic as far as the as the appropriate societal relationship. And it's just amazing we now live in a day where we have to lay it out boldly and and and firmly heterosexual marriage.

One man, one woman, and it is one man, one woman. Even when polygamy enters into man's experience, it's still heterosexual. It's never homosexual. It never abandons the humankind or anything else. And even when you have that drop down, it is a drop down as Jesus taught.

From the beginning it was not so. Divorce, polygamy, all these things, that's a that's a step away. Clearly seen in the coming of Christ and the relationship of Christ to his church. But the point is this is a creation ordinance.

It is rooted in God's purpose. And to change it or to think we have the power to change it is the ultimate act of hubris and rebellion on the part of mankind. For this reason, a man shall leave his father, his mother, and be joined to his wife, and he shall become one flesh.

That is the only ether connecto man will ever have. This complementarianism assumed within Christian orthodoxy for a long time is now rapidly becoming a minority viewpoint. Egalitarianism is on the rise.

I would assert directly in correlation to the diminishment of one's belief in the authority and consistency and inspiration of the Word of God. They go hand in hand. But in many denominations today there is a rejection of complementarianism.

And if you haven't already seen from what I'm saying why this is extremely important, the primary apologetic materials being produced over the past number of years promoting not only egalitarianism in regards to church offices and things like that, but likewise in promoting homosexuality as a God-given gift, the redefinition of marriage.

The books and arguments that are doing this are all based upon a frontal assault against complementarianism. A frontal assault against the idea that there is something about maleness and femaleness that has correspondence.

Now, we all sort of go, really? It's sort of obvious, isn't it? No, no, not for many. For many today, even the obvious physical complementary aspect is not enough. There is a madness that has infected our society.

And even those who have spent their lives studying Greek and Hebrew, so that just last year a book came out by a professor in a Reformed seminary, not a conservative Reformed seminary, but a Reformed seminary, where he can look at texts like this and say, I don't see anything that's related to gender here.

It's just that she was a human. She was just the only other human. It had nothing to do with the fact she was a woman. So evidently, God could have created Steve and he would have broken into the same poetry, I guess.

I'm less stuttering at such things, but that's what we're facing. And so it is absolutely necessary for the promotion of these perspectives to fundamentally deny a biblical perspective on manhood and womanhood.

And we need to know, not just the verse, but we need to know the context that the verse is in. Because I think for most folks, if you actually sat down with this text and read through it and just covered some of the things we've covered this morning, you can rip the mask off of a lot of the pseudo-scholarship that's out there.

There's something called common sense. Because the words mean what the words mean. They really do. So some thoughts this morning for you that hopefully, once again, I mean, these are issues that come up a lot in our society.

And hopefully they will be helpful to you as you have opportunity to testify of the grace of God. Let's close our time in a word. Our Grace Heavenly Father, once again, we thank you. And we consider that these words were first revealed by your spirit many millennia ago.

That you have preserved them for us. And that even in this day, computers and space travel, that you have not left us in the dark as to why you made us the way you made us. We thank you for these words.

We ask that we would understand them. That we would recognize their importance. We would apply their truth. Give us wisdom and insight. And in the words to speak to those around us, that we might be salt and light.

We pray in Christ's name.