“Who was Eve, without Adam?”

Recap on God’s Sovereignty: Part 1

In last week’s study, we started off with one of the questions that was asked during our intro week. I thought this would be a good question to start off with so we could potentially clear up any misunderstandings about the value and purpose of single women. After all, if a woman thinks that she is unable to fulfill God’s plan for her life without being married, she will fail to see how God wants to use her as a single. Here is the question:

“As a woman, how do I fulfill my God designed role of a “help-mate” if I never marry? Is coming under the leadership of the church enough? Eve came from Adam, so who is Eve without Adam? Is this a distortion caused by the Fall?”

We looked at Genesis 2:18 where we see how God brought the woman to the man to be a “helper.” Does this mean that all women were created by God to be men’s “helpers”, and that a woman is not fulfilling her God-created role until she finds a man to “help” (within marriage)? At first glance, this may appear to be the case… but context and the clarity of going to other Bible passages is always key in having a proper hermeneutic (just a fancy word that refers to how we interpret Scripture).

In Genesis 1:28, God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply” as well as to “subdue” and “rule over” the earth. Without getting into to too much detail, it’s quite obvious that Adam could not fulfill God’s command to “multiply” without Eve! Adam was incomplete without someone to complement him in fulfilling the task of filling, multiplying, and taking dominion over the earth. It points to Adam’s inadequacy, not Eve’s deficiency. Adam needed a helper to fulfill the God-given tasks in which he was given.

In the garden, we also see the first example of marriage, and in the context of marriage, the woman certainly was created to be the “helper.” Some see this as a negative thing, but God created the roles within marriage as a picture of Christ and the church (even before sin entered the world). Dr. Matthew Henry said, “Eve was not taken out of Adam's head to top him, neither out of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be loved by him.” We will talk a bit more about this when we look at the roles of the man and woman in marriage, but it is important in this conversation to note that differing roles do not mean differing values. Genesis 1:26,27 tells us that man and woman were both created in God’s image. We also see this in 1 Corinthians 11:11, 12 and Galatians 3:28 that says that men and women were created equal. Their value in God’s sight is the same, but as we will see in a future study, their roles are different.

And is marriage to be more valued than singleness?  In 1 Corinthians 7:7, Paul specifically calls marriage AND singleness both gifts from God. If they are both gifts from God, they are both good and one is not to be valued above the other. If you are single, and you see that your singleness truly is a gift, you will then be free to be a good steward of that gift with an openness and desire to serve the Lord with your life.

~AF