Complementarianism

Genesis Sermon Series
Written By Andrew Knight

Text: Genesis 2:4–25 ESV

Review & Introduction

From Genesis 1:1–3:25, God is the master storyteller who, because he is God, his story is real as he speaks it. And he too is laying the groundwork with his own character and images that will set the foundation for everything we know in life. This morning, I pray you walk away and see these three points:

  • God is the one instituting place, presence, purpose, and partnership across all of Scripture and life to point all people to himself and his glory and to their need for a relationship with him.

  • God is the one who institutes marriage—the union of one man with one woman—as a way that people image one of his greatest plans through their partnership—the union of Christ and his people (the church).

  • We are to receive God’s revelation of his plan as knowledge of good (and wisdom) for us, instead of sinfully desiring to elevate ourselves in pride and judgement of God’s plan.

Person, Place, Presence, Purpose

Whereas Genesis 1:1 starts with “In the beginning, God” and rightly orients us that this story—our world and our life—is all about God and his glory and his plan, Genesis 2:4 starts with

“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 2:4 ESV)

The focus changes and God, through Moses, gives us a better glimpse into how we, as part of the creation of the heavens and earth, came into being.

This setting starts with a desert, which may seem odd since in Genesis 1:1–2:3 we see God create all the bushes prior to creating mankind. Yet the image here isn’t that there are no bushes or trees on the whole earth, but that this particular place, Eden, has yet to be cultivated. The small plants and bushes of the field are the types of plants that come through cultivation and care, through farming or gardening, the kind befitting an English “garden” or yard. A place to be, relax, and even live. A place with grassy lawns and shade trees and fruit to eat. It says God has not yet caused rain to come on this place, not the least because there was no man to work it. God is getting ready to prepare a person with a purpose for a place where his presence will be with mankind.

Person

We should find it striking that God starts not with man and woman, but with just man. In other creation accounts like the Enuma Elish there were seven pairs of men and women made originally. Plato claimed that mankind was made either androgynous or multi-sexual (having both sexual parts in a two-sided human) whom the gods then separated to make man and woman. Here we see that God makes Adam first and, for a season, relates to him before creating woman. God starts with making just one person.

Presence

God then takes Adam, places him in the garden in the east of Eden and begins to work around Adam. We see in this section of creation just how condescending and intimate God is. He forms Adam himself from the dust of the ground. The language is meant to make us image a potter forming clay in his hands, making every crevice and wrinkle purposefully and carefully. The crease of where an arm joins the torso and bump of an elbow were not happenstance or accident, but lovingly crafted by God himself. As he places Adam in the garden, all around Adam he brings forth every tree that is both good to look at and good to eat. Out of the ground he brings forth rivers and he “bejewels” and “bedazzles” this garden better than any second grader or Kardashian ever imagined with gold and onyx and every precious stone we have ever known. God is intimately active, and he is doing this for his people. This is God’s very presence with his person.

Place

Again, this creation account is not primarily about the creation of all things, but about the creation of a special place for mankind. This garden is setup for the provision of man and woman. This garden points again and again to the very presence of God and the abundance of his fatherly care. God is not burdening man with the things he does not want to do, rather he is lovingly inviting them into relationship with him—in his presence—in this place. It has food for eating, water for enjoyment and cooling off in during the heat of the day, and God is there with the man, in his place.

Purpose

In fact, as God places Adam in this place that he has made just for him, he surveys the garden with Adam and gives him his purpose. There is no getting around the fact that God is doing something distinct and different with Adam. Adam is made first. Whereas in Genesis 1:28–29 we see the mandate for all of mankind—men and women—here it is Adam that God first places in the garden and tells him to work and to keep it. This idea of “to work” has with it the idea of stewarding and making provision. Adam is being called to be a servant of the creation.  God has put him over it by caring for it and using it to make provision for himself and others. The image behind “keep” is one of guardianship and protection. He is to be a caretaker of God’s creation and a watchman to make sure that what God has intended and commanded happens. In short, Adam is being given a purpose: to be a lead caregiver, steward, and protector.

A person, a place, God’s very presence, and God’s purpose for this person. We know from the original creation account this isn’t complete yet (we only have one person and not a people), but we can already see images that God is setting up that are for our knowledge of his final work. These images come up again and again throughout the rest of Scripture:

  • Eden, like the later sanctuaries of the tabernacle and temple, were entered from the east and guarded by cherubim (Genesis 3:24; cf. Exodus 26:22; 27:13; 38:13; 1 Kings 6:23–29).

  • God’s instructions for the tabernacle has a lamp stand whose almond-tree appearance likely symbolize the tree of life (Genesis 2:9; 3:22; cf. Exodus 25:31–35; 34:17–24), and it’s seven lights likely point to the seven days of creation (Exodus 25:31–40).

  • The descriptions of the tabernacle and Solomon’s temple are filled with garden imagery reminiscent of Eden—gourds, pomegranates, lilies, seas, oxen, lions, wreaths, and clay woven into the tapestry of the tent and engraved on the walls of the temple. (Exodus 25:31–36; 28:33–34; 37:17–22; 39:24–26; 1 Kings 6:18, 29, 32, 35; 7:18–20, 22–26, 29–30, 36, 39, 42, 44, 46, 49; cf. 2 Chronicles 3–4.)

  • The same gold, onyx, and other precious stones that God adorns the garden with are used extensively to decorate the later sanctuaries (the tabernacle and the temple) as well as the priestly garments (Exodus 25:7, 11, 17, 31, 35; 27:48–50; 28:9–12, 17, 20–21; 31:5; 35:9, 27, 33; 38:24; 39:6, 7, 10, 13–14; 1 Kings 6:20–22, 28, 30, 32; 2 Chronicles 3:5–7, 10).

  • The 6+1 pattern of the creation appears to be modeled again in the tabernacle instructions where God initiates the building of the tabernacle with seven speeches (paralleling the seven days) and each beginning with “Yahweh said to Moses” (Exodus 25:1; 30:11, 17, 22, 34; 31:1, 12). The sixth speech (like the sixth day) sets apart two humans to oversee the building project (Deuteronomy 30:1–11) and the seventh calls Israel to keep the Sabbath (Deuteronomy 31:12–17)

  • We see that Yahweh God walks in Eden (here in Genesis 2 as well as Genesis 3:8) as he later does in the tabernacle (Leviticus 26:12; Deuteronomy 23:15; 2 Samuel 7:6–7).

All of these are pointing forward to the New Eden, the New Jerusalem, where God is remaking heaven and earth and making his people new bodies, that they will no longer have the temptation of sin. We see this in places like Ezekiel 47:1–12, which echoes the rivers that flow out of Eden with a new river that flows out of the new Jerusalem and flows down into the Dead Sea and finally brings life to the barren, salty spot, making it a new oasis. We see all of this again in Revelation 22, which describes the new heavens and new earth. Out of the new Jerusalem is a river that flows, this time not just out of the ground, but from the very throne of God and represents the Spirit of God flowing out from the Father. The tree of life is back in this new Jerusalem—a new Eden—with many other good trees bearing twelve fruits, one for each month of the year. In this new place God himself is our light, and it never fails. Rest is constant even in our work.

It is obvious that God is not being arbitrary in how creates. The beginning of God’s creation story points all the way through the story to the very ending. This includes God’s character, and it includes the place, presence, purpose and people he is creating. Even though one of our main goals this morning is to look at how God made man and woman specifically, it is helpful to see how he is creating in general. He is not arbitrary since these images keep coming back again and again. I hope you are beginning to see that God is the one instituting place, presence, purpose and partnership across all of Scripture and life to point all people to himself and his glory and their need for a relationship with him.

He has also arranged this account of creation in a way that is as purposeful and creative, similar to how we noted in the Genesis 1:1–2:3 account. Here, in Genesis 2:4–3:24, it is not repetition of words and the numbers, but the overall structure, that point to its purposefulness. Genesis 2:4–3:24 is set in seven ‘scenes’, as it were, that move from the outside to the middle—scene 4.

Scene 1—Genesis 2:5–17—God is the sole actor; man is present but passive.

Scene 2—Genesis 2:18–25—God is the main actor; man has a minor role, the woman and animals are passive.

Scene 3—Genesis 3:1–5—Snake and woman

Scene 4—Genesis 3:6–8—Man and woman

Scene 5—Genesis 3:9–13—God, man, and woman

Scene 6—Genesis 3:14–21—God is the main actor; man has a minor role, the woman and animals are passive.

Scene 7—Genesis 3:22–24—God is the sole actor; man is present but passive.

In Scene 1 & 7, God is the main actor. Man comes from the ground but is driven back to the ground after sin. Both these two parts of the story take place outside the garden.

Scene 2 & 6 are concerned about relationship between man and creation. There is an ideal order in creation—animals are created to be man’s companions, woman his perfect partner. In reality this doesn’t happen—there is perpetual conflict between man and the serpent, frustration in relationship between the sexes. Both these scenes show hierarchy: God is creator supreme. Man is superior to the animals, implied by his naming of them. Similarly, there is differentiation between man and woman in that he names her (twice: Genesis 2:23 and Genesis 3:20), but in her superiority to the animals, she is shown as his perfect companion. Both scenes end with comments about women’s roles as wife and mother and clothing.

Scenes 3 & 5 are about eating the fruit and its consequences. Both take place inside the garden, but not at the center/at the tree. The serpent and the woman talk, but they are obviously a ways away from the tree (“the tree that is in the middle”, she says when talking to the serpent), and in scene 5 the man and the woman have fled away from the tree and are hiding elsewhere in the garden.

Scene 4 stands alone. Man and woman are by themselves in the middle of the garden. God’s order, God-man-woman-animal has now been turned on its head. Animal-woman-man-God.

Again, the purposefulness here is to point to its trustworthiness and its truthfulness. No section can be pulled out without ruining the continuity of the whole. This is not a pieced together, fanciful account through allegory. It is a structured story that points to the purposeful roles that God and his creation take in each scene. Both the structure of Genesis 2:4–3:24 and the fact that God is instituting images that are enduring throughout all of Scripture and true to our lives today gives us a helpful pattern to trace as we come to the sometimes-tricky understanding of men and women being created the same but different.

People in a Partnership

When we started looking at how these images go throughout all of Scripture and how this section is organized, we stopped in the creation account with God only having created Adam. Adam may have been created first and called to be a leader, but he was not to be alone. This is the only place in the creation account where God calls something “not good.” God himself has created the tension and now he is going to resolve it.

In Genesis 1:26–28 we see the high-level creation of man and woman and their joint purpose—to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue and have dominion. But as with creation and the place God was making for man, we shouldn’t be surprised to see more clarity and more beauty in the exact way God chooses to make man and woman—in how they are the same and in how they are different.

It is helpful to note here what we see clearly about men and women from Genesis 1:1–3:25. Men and women are both equal and distinct from one another:

  • Men and women are equal in their opportunity to relate to God;

  • Men and women are equal in their call to rule over God’s world;

  • Men and women are equal in their responsibility to image God in ever-increasing ways on a global scale;

  • Men and women are equal in their dependence on God to fulfill the mission;

  • Men and women are distinct in their gender;

  • Men and women are distinct in the role they will play in being fruitful, multiplying, and filling the earth with God’s image.

There is equality and differentiation. There is sameness and distinction. This differentiation is God-noted and God-created. Adam has not pleaded or strived for a leadership role. God is the one who makes Adam first and gives him specific commandments and roles. Adam is not sitting there feeling a hole or need, but rather God declares to him that not having a helper is a problem. God creates both the problem and the solution. God heightens the tension in Adam’s naming of the animals and his noticing that they all have suitable partners, but he alone does not. There we see Adam take on another leadership role, that of naming. Like God declares and speaks things, so in Genesis 1:1–2:3, Adam speaks here for the first time and declares the names of the animals in an act that images his Father.

We also see this differentiation in how God talks about Eve. He notes that Adam needs a helper. Now we must remove from our minds any thoughts that being a helper is implying that they are inferior to the one they are helping. In fact, the language for helper cannot be about being inferior. Most frequently it is used of God—Yahweh—who is Israel’s helper precisely because he is the stronger one in the ways they need him (Exodus 18:4; Deuteronomy 33:7, 26, 29; Psalm 33:20; 115:9-11; 124:8; 146:5). Rather, we are talking about differentiation in roles. The helper comes to aid the other’s needs and direction. This is a distinction in similar goals for God’s people (imaging God to all of creation) but different roles (leader and helper).

We see the differentiation in how God creates Eve. God puts Adam to sleep and takes up his side (probably a better translation than rib) and builds it into woman. She is not built from the dust up, but rather she is taken from man and then God builds those pieces of Adam into a woman. That is what makes her a ready-made partner for Adam—she is from him! Then, just as he brought the animals before Adam, God brings before him woman, and Adam is amazed! He beholds another, lone human in whom he now can see his partner, his helper.

And again, we see differentiation when Adam names Eve and creates the covenant with her. He is the one who names her like he named the rest of creation that God brought before him. Yet here he names her like himself, as he sees in her the sameness that God declared he would make in both man and woman—equal image bearers. Adam is the one who makes a covenant with Eve. He sees her and then looks to God and says:

“This at last is bone of my bones

And flesh of my flesh,

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.”

(Genesis 2:23 ESV)

We may think of “blood relatives” in our day and age, but throughout Scripture it is talked about as flesh and bone. Families were made from “bone and flesh”, and it was a covenant relationship that took precedent even over mother and father (cf. 2 Samuel 5:1) when you left home to start your own family. Man and woman would stick together, as it says in Genesis 2:24-25, to become one flesh (Genesis 34:3).

While we often have feelings and opinions about creation—how it came into being, and how God went about his work of doing that—nothing touches so closely to home as how God made men and women distinctly in creation. That’s because none of us (despite what our current culture says) had an option in whether we were born male or female. It was God’s sovereign plan that determined that for each of us. So, when we notice the differences and differentiation in man and woman—both through the structure of Genesis and through storyline itself—we need to determine what we think about it.

That is partly why we started with the place God was making and God’s presence with his people. If these images are enduring and move throughout Scripture and point to God’s purposefulness in this part of the creation account, we can start with the assumption that God is also being purposeful with how he made man and woman. As we noted, this isn’t a section that we can just pull out and declare it as made-up or added into the entire account, unless we want to throw out the other sections. And similarly, we should expect that if this image is purposeful that we will see it come up again and again throughout Scripture. And we do.

At a high level, we see God’s intended marital partnership between one man and one woman upheld over and over again. In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, marriage is said to be between one man and one woman. When asked about marriage and divorce in Matthew 19:5 and Mark 10:7–8, Jesus looks back to Genesis 2 as the definition that marriage is between one man and one woman until they die. Barring some particular sins, nothing can change this. In 1 Corinthians 6:16 Paul reminds us that it is immoral to join to a prostitute because God designed men and women for only one other person—not many—in marriage. Men joining with men, women joining with women, men or women joining in partnership with the animals in this unique covenantal way is said to be a sin because it isn’t the image God instituted from the beginning (cf. Leviticus 18:22-23, 20:13, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10; 1 Timothy 1:10).

In addition to this image of one man with one woman in the partnership of covenantal relationship, we also see some of the differentiation upheld. In the Old Testament, we see that the same command God gives to Adam—to work/serve and to keep/guard is only used again of the Levitical priests of the sanctuary of God in how God describes their duties to that special place (Numbers 3:7–8; 8:26; 18:5–60) and the priests were only to be men. Similarly (but with some distinct differences), we see in 1 Timothy 2:8–15 that Paul uses Genesis 2 as the reason and grounds for the types of roles that women have in the church (women are not to teach and have authority over men). In Ephesians 5:22–31 we see wives are called to submit (this is Paul’s way of saying the same thing as “help” in Genesis 2) to their own husbands, and husbands are called to love and lead their wives.

Man and woman—equal in their opportunity to relate to God, their call to rule over God’s world, their responsibility to image God in ever-increasing ways on a global scale, and equal in their dependence on God to fulfill this mission. Man and woman—distinct in their genders and distinct in how they carry out the role and call to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth with God’s image.

Just as it is helpful to see through Scripture that the garden of Eden, the tabernacle, and the temple all point us forward to the right relationship we are meant to have with God in the new heavens and the new earth, the new Jerusalem where we will walk daily with him alongside the river flowing out from his throne, in the splendor of his glorious radiance, it also helpful to see how the goal and purpose of this union of one man, one woman, equal but distinct, points us very specifically to God. Paul notes exactly this for us as he ends his section in Ephesians 5:31–33:

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” (Ephesians 5:31–33 ESV)

When Paul says this is a mystery, we have to understand how that word is used in the New Testament. Mystery is never something we can’t know in the New Testament, rather something that was not easy to see before Jesus but now in Jesus is very clear. Throughout the Old Testament, marriage is a “mystery” seen rightly sometimes but never fully. We see men love women but also treat them poorly and lord over them their role, and women who similarly don’t want to be a helper to their husbands but grasp for their own purpose outside of God’s plan—as Genesis 3 says they both will in sin. But in Jesus we see the real purpose. Where men and women have failed, where we still fall short today, Jesus succeeds. In marriage God was creating an image for us, however imperfectly we walk it out, of how Christ and church love and relate to one another.

In that picture, we see that there must be differentiation. Christ and his church have similar goals—loving the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, and mind. Christ said again and again that his mission was to show us the father (cf. John 1:1–18, Matthew 11:27, Colossians 1:15). Similarly, we are told we are to be Christ’s body (1 Corinthians 12:27), his very hands and feet, to demonstrate God’s love to others that they may know him. Yet no one in the church would claim the church is Jesus, and the joy of Jesus is that he is not the church.

It is this image of men and women as representatives of Christ and his church that brings so much meaning and context back into Genesis 2 for us. A woman is subject, or a helper, to her husband, like the church submits and comes alongside Christ’s mission to bring glory to God. Husbands lead their wives but are called to show nothing less than Christ-like, Calvary-like love to his wife. Women and men fulfill different roles in leading the church precisely because of this difference in how we are to image God. Our partnership in a marriage is meant to point to the union between Christ and the church as the fulfillment of God’s purpose for all creation, the uniting of all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10).

It is biblical to believe that men and women are equal and to believe they were created different in gender and how they fulfill their mandate to have that dominion BECAUSE in marriage men are to image the ways Christ loves his church and women are to image how his church responds to him.

This isn’t a popular statement now in our culture. Not only is marriage at an all-time cultural low[1], but we currently debate whether marriage can be between those not a man and woman. We have even gone so far as to question whether man-ness and woman-ness is something that God gave us each or if it is something we can change or decide we want to be different or somewhere in-between.

Now, I want to note that there are considerations that Christians must take in a country where there are those who do not follow Christ and consider how our laws protect and care and are equal for everyone. God-loving-Christians may all land in different places on that question and the right kinds of laws and protections our government should offer. And we all will struggle in different ways in relationship to our own maleness and femaleness: some because we live in sinful bodies with minds and chemicals that are not operating the way they were designed, some because we were raised with differing perspectives and specific hurts and struggles, and some because we are just sinners. But when we come to Scripture, starting here in Genesis 2:5, we see that God has a distinct purpose for men and women and when they come together in partnership, it is to be in marriage, one man to one woman, and this is meant to image the glory of God seen most clearly through Christ and his church. God is the one who institutes marriage—the union of one man with one woman—as a way that people image one of his greatest plans through their partnership—the union of Christ and his people (the church).

When this is hard for us, when our own minds or the arguments of our culture are pressing against us, it is exactly what we see here in the context of Genesis 2:5–25 that can help us. One of the commandments God gave Adam was to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The best way to understand that phrase “good and evil” is to equate it with wisdom. But at first glance that seems wrong, since in other places in Scripture, we are called to pursue wisdom (Proverbs 1) and to seek it out. Why would God have a way to find wisdom that we shouldn’t have or pursue?

Truth be told, there is a wisdom that we shouldn’t have. There is a wisdom that is only God’s that we shouldn’t aspire to. Places like Job 15:7–9, 40 and Proverbs 30:1–4  talk about the wisdom that is the full knowledge of God, the universe, and his plan for us that is beyond our comprehension. For us to pursue, to sit in judgement of God, is for us to assert our autonomy and our own supremacy. That is the opposite of what Proverbs 1:7 is saying when it says the

“Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” (Proverbs 1:7  ESV)

This is the same as the story of the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28, which looks back to Genesis 2–3 and says that this king (likely Satan) was expelled from Eden because of his pride and for proclaiming himself to be “as wise as a god” (Ezekiel 28:6, 15–17). Similarly, Psalm 19:8–10 alludes to Genesis 2–3 where the law is compared to the tree of the knowledge—the law (God’s revealed will for us) is what makes wise the simple and enlightens the eyes. God’s only revealed law in Eden was “don’t eat the tree,” and Adam and Eve preferred their own autonomy over God’s law. So too, for us, as we come to this section, we need to ponder, wrestle with, and ultimately accept God’s revelation of his place and his presence as good and helpful in understanding his plans for us and his people throughout time. And we need to again ponder, wrestle with, and ultimately accept the ways and purposes he made for his people, both in our equality and our differences as men and women. His people, in a partnership of marriage, imaging Christ’s love for his church. We are to receive God’s revelation of his plan as knowledge of good (and wisdom) for us, instead of sinfully desiring to elevate ourselves in pride and judgement of God’s plan.

Conclusion

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."—Hannah Arendt

That is our goal as Christians. To help others enter into the great story of what God is doing by helping to expose the meaning of the story without defining—or redefining—it. God lovingly pairs easy to accept ideas—even joyful ideas—like preparing a place for us where we can dwell in his presence, with equally joyful yet sometimes more complicated truths like the fact that we are made man and woman both equal yet distinct.

I pray that you walk away this morning remembering that:

  • God is the one instituting place, presence, purpose, and partnership across all of Scripture and life to point all people to himself and his glory and their need for a relationship with him.

  • God is the one who institutes marriage—the union of one man with one woman—as a way that people image one of his greatest plans through their partnership—the union of Christ and his people (the church).

  • We are to receive God’s revelation as knowledge of good (and wisdom) for us, instead of sinfully desiring to elevate ourselves in pride and judgement of God’s plan.

Benediction

"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:33, 36 ESV)

[1] 6.5 marriages per thousand people, down from 9.8 marriages per 1000 people in 1990 https://www.statista.com/statistics/195951/marriage-rate-in-the-united-states-since-1990/

Andrew Knight
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