Adam and Help

 I have been thinking about sexual intimacy again, and came to a sudden realization: that when God said it wasn't right for the Adam to be alone, the solution was that he would make a "help meet" for him. Knowing from Shakespeare that the word 'meet' meant appropriate back then, I always translated this phrase to mean an appropriate companion. But this is not quite right. First of all, the Hebrew has only one word there, עֵזֶר, which everywhere else is translated simply as 'help'. This sounds kind of second class, but God uses the very same word in many places of the Old Testament to describe Himself, in relationship to Israel. For example, Psalm 115 says "Ye that fear the LORD, trust in the LORD: he is their help and their shield." So God's solution to Adam not being alone was to create a helper for him. After trying out virtually every other animal and bird and finding none of them to be the help Adam was now looking for, God took a piece of Adam and formed a woman. When he brought her to Adam, Adam recognized her at once as "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." He named her 'ishsha' because, he said, she was taken out of 'ish', ie himself. So Adam's aloneness was solved by splitting him into two separate beings, which nevertheless became "one flesh" ie, one multi-person organism integrated through a loving relationship.

Jesus spoke of the church becoming his Bride, which has elements of loving intimacy, and he confirms that when a man and a woman are married together, they become "one flesh". Jesus is using the metaphor of marriage to show how we, corporately as the church, will become His helper, and that the two of us will become a single entity. Paul says in I Corinthians, "But he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit." When we are born again and baptized into His body, we become one spirit with the Lord Jesus; and when the resurrection comes, our physical bodies will be transformed, glorified so that all of our being will become one with God. And God will not be alone any more, but have a help that was made from Himself, separated and then reunited in a loving intimate relationship. Imagine in the next age being able to be a help to God - how cool is that?

I have always thought that the loving sexual relationship I have had with a woman these last thirty years enabled us to recreate, however imperfectly due to our imperfect loving, the Adamic image of God. But wait - that image is not merely a static portrait of joy and pleasure. God is alive. The woman is not just a companion, she is a God-like help to me. I can't begin to count the ways that her different perspective have helped me get on in life. We do not agree on everything - we are two different people - but in loving intimacy, we are free to offer and examine our differences, and it has been uniquely helpful in making us who we are. We recreate the Adamic portrait of God all the time, not just in bed, not even just when we are together in the same place. Wherever I am, I am a part of this multi-person organism, just as I am also a part of that other multi-person spiritual being, the Church.