Back in the days when women were fighting for the right to
vote there were a number of women speakers who could
expound eloquently on the virtues and values of women.
The story is told the one such speaker who brought her
message to a conclusion by saying, "Where would man be
today without the care and comfort of women? Where
would man be today without the hands and heart of women?
Where would man be today without the labor and love of
women? Just tell me where would man be today without
women?" Just then a little man shouted from the back of
the crowd, "Paradise!"
The battle of the sexes is one in which each side seeks to
reinforce its position by going back to paradise and showing
that everything would have been great if it hadn't been for
the other. Like the woman who said to her husband, "Our
marriage would have been perfect if it hadn't been for you."
He probably agreed with the philosophy, but not the
application. Women delight in pointing out that man was
incomplete without woman, and that even in paradise he
was not happy without her. There are no lack of poets to
back up her claim to be the poetry of earth as the stars are
the poetry of heaven. Hargrave wrote, "Clear, light-giving
harmonies, women are the terrestrial planets that rule the
destines of mankind." Moore adds, "Ye are the stars of the
night, ye are gems of the morn, ye are dewdrops, whose
luster illumines the thorn."
Men are quick to label this as sentimental nonsense,
and they insist that Adam was better off when he had
paradise to himself. They also have poetic support, for
Andrew Marvell has written,
Such was that happy Garden-state
While man there walked without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet?
But 'twas beyond a mortal's share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises 'twere in one
To live in paradise alone.
Women retaliate with the words of Dryden,
Our sex, you know, was after yours designed,
The last perfection of the Maker's Mind:
Heaven drew out all the gold for us, and left
Your dross behind.
Man then counters with these words:
For woman due allowance make.
Formed of a crooked rib was she.
By Heaven she could not straighten be;
Attempt to bend her, and she'll break.
On and on the battle rages ad infinitum, ad nauseum,
or in other words, until it gets sickening. We are interested
in this battle only because it calls our attention to a basic
human need, and the only adequate solution to meet that
need. Man is made a social creature, and if he does not feel
a part of society, or if he does not have companionship, he
ceases to find value in life. One of the most unbearable
conditions of life is that of loneliness. We want to examine
God's relationship to this basic human problem and seek to
discover what it means for our own lives. In spite of all the
fighting, men and women need each other, and they know it.
Josh Billings said, "Adam without Eve would be as stupid as
a person playing checkers alone." In verse 18 we find two
aspects of God's relationship to the problem of loneliness.
I. GOD'S ATTITUDE.
God says it is not good for man to be alone. Man was to
be a social being, and so he can never be complete alone.
Loneliness is opposed to the very nature of God Himself.
God is not alone and never has been in all eternity. He is a
trinity of three Persons in one Godhead. He has had eternal
fellowship within His own being. One of the key values of
recognizing God to be three Persons in One is that it
explains His self-sufficiency. No other being is self-sufficient,
for they are dependent upon God and other forms of life.
God alone is self-sufficient, for He is Triune, and all the
requirements needed for love and fellowship are contained
within His very nature. God is complete in Himself, but man
is incomplete in himself.
God did not intend to make man in His image with the
nature of love and desire for companionship, and then not
meet that need. But for awhile Adam was alone, and it is
interesting that God would say that it was not good. This
means that with all of the beauty of nature, and with all of
the abundant provision of the garden, and with a job to keep
him active, and with many animals to keep him company,
there was still something missing. There was an
imperfection even in Paradise. That imperfection was not in
what was there, but it what was not there. Without human
companionship all of the physical blessings of the universe
cannot satisfy the human heart. If this was true in paradise,
how much more is it true in our world today?
Cyril H. Powell, in his book The Lonely Heart, tells of
how an English landlady found one of her lodgers
unconscious and almost dead due to gas fumes. It was
discovered that he was once a well-known actor whose name
had been a household word in England. Yet apparently all of
his popularity and prosperity had not gained for ham any
true friends, and when he ceased to be famous he was left
alone. Unlike the Prodigal Son in the same situation he had
no father to return to, and apparently he did not know of
God's good news of acceptance, and so he wrote a note
saying, "I am taking the only way out of this hell of
loneliness"
If this was an isolated incident we could ignore it, but the
fact is, this is a common experience. The statistics are
shouting out the truth from every land that it is not good for
man to be alone. It is, in fact, a very positive evil. One of the
most frequent causes for suicide is loneliness. G. Ray Jordan
wrote, "Loneliness has driven far more people to nervous
collapse than all the theoretical doubts of mankind added
together."
Erick Fromm in The Art Of Living wrote, "The
deepest need of man is the need to overcome his
separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The
absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity."
All of the facts from every field of study confirm what
God stated from the beginning, and that is that it is not good
for man to be alone. Man has to concede the point to the
women here. Paradise was incomplete without her, and
every life is incomplete without someone to love, and
someone to love them. This was God's attitude in the
beginning, and is, no doubt, His attitude yet today. But God
does more than express an attitude. We see also in this
verse:
II. GOD'S ACTION.
God says, "I will make him a helper fit for him." God
did not stop with an attitude, but went on to action. He did
not make a pronouncement, and then not follow it up with
performance. He was not concerned with a resolution only,
but was determined to come up with a remedy. It is failure
to follow God at this point that has led to the church
becoming ineffective and meeting the world's deepest needs.
Paul Rees says something that we all know to be true, but he
says it in a way that we need to hear it.
"One of our substitutes for basic Christian action is
talk. We are beguiled by the wizardry of words. Our fault
here is both collective and personal. Churchmen, meeting in
conference or synod, labor long and tediously over
"resolutions" and "pronouncements" they are going to make
to their constituents and the world. Often the mountain labors
and bringsforth a mouse!
Some tame, nebulous statement is drooled out
ecclesiastical jargon, which pitiably few people will ever hear
or heed. We easily mistake the saying of a thing for the doing of it.
that goes for the piously woolly talk that you and I do as individuals
fully as much as it does for the high-sounding "whereases" and
"resolves" of professional ecclesiastics."
It is simply another way of saying that faith without
works is dead. We have told ourselves so often that there is
no merit in good works that we have begun to believe that
there is merit in doing nothing. We need to realize that good
works cannot save us, but they may be the means by which
God can save others. Someone has divided the world into
three classes of people. They are those who make things
happen, those who watch things happen, and those who do
not know what is happening, and the last includes the vast
majority. If we take Christianity seriously, it demands that
we dare not be in any category but the first. Christians must
be people of action.
The whole Bible is a history of God's great redemptive
acts, and it is a challenge to His people to become Godlike in
their acts. God cared about Adams loneliness, and He did
something about it. If we care, then we too must do
something about the great need of lonely people. Paul
Tournier in his book Escape From Loneliness says that
practically everyone is lonely, and the root of this is in man's
sin and revolt against God. Man's loneliness is basically his
lack of an ultimate companion. The unsaved person
recognizes that no relationship will last, for all people must
die. What can a Christian do about this? That is just the
point, for though we cannot provide a mate for every lonely
person, nor can we create friends for everyone, but we have
a Gospel that offers every person a relationship to Christ,
and it is an eternal relationship. Christ is the Friend who
alone can satisfy that empty place in the lives of all people.
We need to remember that it was not as a sinner
running from God that Adam was alone, and that God then
said it was not good for him to be alone. It was an estate of
perfect fellowship with God that he still felt alone. Jesus
experienced great loneliness not because He was out of
fellowship with God, but because He lacked human
companionship.
Jesus experienced what the great majority
of people experience. There can be crowds everywhere, and
still not anyone really near you who understands you. It is
not true then that a Christian needs only to trust in God to
escape all the loneliness. We are still social creatures, and
without friendship and companionship of others we will still
experience loneliness, even when we have good fellowship
with God. It is at this point that the church plays a major role in
providing fellowship. Christians must learn to accept one
another with all of their differences and weaknesses, and
they must seek to provide a companionship in which there is
real understanding. This is the essence of what makes the
church different from other groups of people. Where there
is not total acceptance of persons the church is failing to be
the church. We live in a world of loneliness with the only
satisfactory answer to it. God has given His Son, and the
Son has given His life that we might be reconciled to God
and know Him as Father, and Jesus as Friend. All those
who are friends of Jesus are friends of one another, and this
is the key to overcoming loneliness.
