Adam's Rib

As Memorial Day 2019 approaches I have been hearing comments about plans to barbecue ribs for the holiday celebration. One man commented, 'I will be making my famous ribs!' for the family cookout. I have recently been thinking about ribs but not the barbecued kind; I have been thinking about the most famous rib, Adam's rib in Genesis 2.

As I consider the sexual revolution in our culture and its various dysfunctions, one of the major concerns is the idolatry of the autonomous individual. Our culture has made an idol of the idea that the meaning of freedom is unhindered autonomy for the individual. The individual should be free to create their own world regardless of the realities of their body for example. The view is that the autonomous individual is the basic unit of society. What we see in Genesis is quite different.

At the end of Genesis 1 we are told that God created man in His own image as male and female. The language used is that God made 'him' (singular) as 'male and female' (plural). As Francis Schaeffer pointed out in his book Genesis in Space and Time, one 'man' consists of male and female. (See my prior blog for more on this:  https://dad-isms.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-image-of-god-in-marriage.html)

Genesis 2 then shows us how God demonstrated to the man, prior to the creation of the woman, that there was more to be done before the creation of 'man' was complete. The text says that God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him." (NASB) This has often been understood to mean that the basic problem was that the man was lonely, that  loneliness was the thing that was 'not good'. I think that ignores what was already stated in Genesis 1, that God's completed creation was one 'man' consisting of male and female to bear His image. As I point out in the prior blog referenced above, the image of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is borne by the union of man and woman in 'one flesh' that cannot be borne by one individual alone. The bearing of God's image in 'man' requires both male and female united as one and bearing the image of the communion within the Trinity. So the key issue that was 'not good' was not mere loneliness; it was incompleteness. God was not yet done with His creation of man, so of course it was not yet good.

So God takes His time to show Adam that something was missing, and Genesis 2:19-20 relates how God taught the man that nothing else in creation would fill the bill. There was much to do in this new world and there was the personal God there to keep him company, so mere loneliness is not the whole story. The man is missing something fundamental. To treat this text as if the man's loneliness is the main issue is to treat the creation of woman as an instrument to solve the problem of the man's loneliness. This makes the woman merely instrumental, which is not the message we got in Genesis 1 about bearing God's image. Man alone cannot bear the complete image of God, and God has taken pains in chapter 2 to make the man understand that before He makes the woman.

He had made the man from the dust of the ground, but He did not do that for the woman. He used Adam's rib. If all He wanted to do was make another autonomous individual, the dust of the ground would have been just fine for making the woman too. If mere loneliness were the main issue, another person from the dust of the ground would have been just fine. But to have 'one flesh', for the woman to be part of the man and truly 'one flesh' with him, God used Adam's rib instead.

When he sees the woman, Adam's response is, "This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." Many sermons have made light of this by creating their own version of Adam's response, trying to make the text say something like 'Woo-Hoo! Wow!' in excitement over the woman, While this usually gets a laugh, it completely misses the point. The point is not that the man was excited about the woman, though he may well have been. The point is that the man recognizes that she is indeed 'one flesh' with him, the completion of him. She is in fact the rest of him, made from his rib. Now it is good, not because his loneliness has been fixed, but because the creation of God's image is complete.

The bearing of God's image in this world is not complete in autonomous individuals. That task requires the unity of male and female, which makes the family the basic unit of society rather than the individual.  So if you are cooking ribs this weekend, it may be a good time to contemplate that most famous rib.