Scripture Daily

Context No. 622 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 2:17-25: in context

17but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.” 18The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.” 19Out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature became its name. 20The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper comparable to him. 21The LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. As the man slept, he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. 22The LORD God made a woman from the rib which he had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. 23The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken out of Man.” 24Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother, and will join with his wife, and they will be one flesh. 25The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.

In the creation account, God repeatedly looks at what he has made and pronounces it good, good, good, and very good. So it is arresting when, for the first time, God says that something is not good. It is not good, the LORD God said, that the man should be alone. Before the fall, before any sin has entered the world, in a perfect garden with unbroken fellowship with God himself, God identifies one thing lacking: the man is alone, and that solitude is not good. So God sets about remedying it, forming a companion and bringing her to the man, who receives her with delight, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. The human being was made for connection, not isolation, and God says so in the strongest terms.

That is worth sitting with, because it dignifies a need I am often tempted to be ashamed of or to deny. The need for companionship, for others, for not being alone, is not a weakness or a failure of self-sufficiency; it is written into me by God, who declared aloneness not good before anything had gone wrong. Even in perfect communion with God, the man was made to also need human connection. Self-sufficiency, the pride of needing no one, is not the created ideal; it is a distortion of it. God made me for others, and he called the lack of them not good.

That confronts a drift I am prone to, especially when hurt or busy or proud: the drift toward isolation, telling myself I am fine alone, that I do not really need anyone, that keeping to myself is safer. God's own verdict stands against that: it is not good for me to be alone. He made me for connection and provides it, and refusing it is not strength but a quiet rejection of how I was made. Am I drifting toward an isolation that God calls not good, convincing myself I need no one, when he made me for the companionship and community I am holding at arm's length?

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