A LITTLE MORE ABOUT EVE AND SOME THOUGHTS ON ORDER

===

Basic Assumptions:

* Sin creates inequality between men and women.

* Sin creates identity issues for human beings related to gender, sexuality, and a relationship with God.

* Men are imagers of God.  Women are imagers of God.

* A human family consists of one male and one female married for a lifetime and in many cases also children.

===

GOD in Three Persons (YHWH) has established an order in humanity.  Humans are created to reflect GOD.  Because He is so complete and beyond us, God fashioned us body, mind, and spirit to reflect Him in the order He is and thereby we should live. 

For example, God created males and females to live together and to have dominion over the earth because in this way we practically reflect God’s love.  He made us to be together His imager.  We are to reflect Him in mutual submission to one another (by an interdependent counterbalancing love). 

This interdependent counterbalancing love is equality in accordance with God’s inspired role for each gender as revealed in Scripture.  We are to reflect Him in how we rule over His Creation in that love of which the Father, Son, and Spirit are manifest.  This Biblically based equality is the inspiration for role reflecting as family and in community.  Both men and women are (as God’s imagers) to reflect Him in the life-giving orderly roles by which God gives and maintains life.

Focusing only on self does not reflect the God of the Universe. 

Selfishness or being unloving does not reflect the God of the Universe.

Mismanaging the Creation does not reflect the God of the Universe.

To this end, God did not leave Adam (a male) alone but created for him a helper… Eve (a female).  Eve is the helper. This is the Hebrew word ’ezer.  This important word is used to describe the woman in Genesis 2:18 and elsewhere in the Bible of God and or the Spirit of God.  Note: ‘ezer refers to woman and God as the helper.  This is a unique use of the word as someone who is needed for human life.  The word ‘ezer is only used of women and God.  Psalm 146:5 is a good example of God (the LORD) being referred to as the helper.

Eve, then, is the glory of man in the same way that the Spirit of Christ is the Helper.  The woman is the extension of what the man is doing in the same way the Holy Spirit is the extension of what God is doing.  Eve is the extension of what Adam was to do.  Both gender roles reflect the relational order of the Godhead.  Man needs a helper. 

God is One (complete in and of Himself). Therefore, in order to reflect God, human beings need to be unified (one) like God which happens when a man and a woman become a family.  As we relate this to God and His nature and relationship, we see the close-knit nature of Christ and the Spirit shows that they Both bring life.  The Father gives us life through Jesus by the power of the Spirit.  The order/pattern is there.  The fruit that is produced is life.

Eve reflects God most when she brings forth life (what only she can do) and in helping Adam (her ordered role).  Because of Eve’s role, both Adam and Eve can participate with God in bringing forth life. Woman must be recognized as indispensable in humanity reflecting the LORD.

THE PARALLEL OF WISDOM AND WOMEN

Proverbs 8:22-31 (ESV): “The Lord possessed Me at the beginning of His work, the first of His acts of old. 23 Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. 24 When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. 25 Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, 26 before He had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. 27 When He established the heavens, I was there; when He drew a circle on the face of the deep, 28 when He made firm the skies above, when He established the fountains of the deep, 29 when He assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress His command, when He marked out the foundations of the earth, 30 then I was beside Him, like a master workman, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing before Him always, 31 rejoicing in His inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.”

Likewise, the New Testament proclaims of Jesus all things were created through and for Him.  Colossians 1:16 (ESV): “For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through Him and for Him.”  Hebrews 1:2 also says: “but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through Whom also He created the world” (ESV).  When one links Hebrews 11:3 with John 1:1 we see the same message.  The creative process comes through Christ.  Jesus is wisdom.

God by calling forth wisdom as a helper created everything by speaking it into existence.  We should note the relational pattern:

God calls forth a second that by the same authority…

… sends a third which brings about God’s Will.

God then, we can gather from both Old and New Testaments, called forth wisdom (Who is Christ by the Colossians passage), and so through His Word, and by His Spirit created all things in heaven and on earth.  God is the Creator who calls forth.  This is the pattern.

In a parallel pattern, God brought forth woman from man (Genesis 2:21). Women fulfill the Second Person role to help bear life literally and qualitatively in representing God.  So, through her is birthed new imagers… other human beings.  She is given the unique role (Genesis 3:20) on earth that reflects the second person of the Godhead fulfilled by the power of the Spirit.  We should note the pattern that God creates humans and then brings forth a second uniquely able to birth more imagers.

Human beings… the imagers… are to reflect God individually and as family/community.  We reflect Him individually in character, but then communally like the Father, Son, and Spirit (which are all GOD).  It is in parallel with this relationship that people create, maintain, and multiply life’s realities that parallel the LORD.