Not Good to Be Alone

And the Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
--Genesis 2:18

I would like to offer some more thoughts on the idea from yesterday—about our utter loneliness in the midst of our ability to fulfill our every physical desire. Our society of indulgence has given us ample opportunity to test this theory firsthand—having everything you want does not fill the emptiness of the soul. Our self-centered culture has yet to understand a basic component of the human condition, namely that we were made to live in community. We were made for relationships, and as we sever those relationships with one another and with God, we reap a fractured society and a broken sense of self.

As any lawyer or counselor will tell you, a crucial part of figuring out what is going on or how to solve a problem is learning the backstory. We have to learn where we have already been in order to understand who we are and where we go from here. If we are going to understand how to relate to one another, then we must understand how the whole thing was originally supposed to work. We see in Genesis 1 the story of creation, and of God creating everything out of nothing (which is a fairly impressive feat, if you’ve never thought about it). Notice that after each thing that he creates, he declares it to be “good”—not just “finished” or “adequate,” but “good.” Then at the end, he creates man “in his own image” and declares him to be “very good.” This is an absolutely crucial distinction to make here—God has made everything to coexist with everything else, and it is all “very good.” In order for us to properly understand what has gone wrong in our world, we must understand that a guiding principle of creation is relationship—nothing was created in a vacuum. God did not make things and simply throw them on the planet or haphazardly toss things together—everything was made to work together and to depend on one another. We see this easily in nature—we are just now beginning to understand the far-ranging interconnectedness of the created world. We understand now that if we dump motor oil in the river, then it will poison the physical world around us, and eventually end up poisoning us as well. The world and everything in it is created in a state of relationship. What is more, we see when we flip over to Genesis 2, that God himself declared as he watched Adam do the work that God had given him, that “it is not good for man to be alone.” God looked at the situation and said that “you need more than relationship to the world around you and relationship to me—you need a helper, a companion who is like you.” So he puts Adam to sleep and makes Eve. (Just as a side note, can you imagine how disorienting it might have been for Adam to wake up from that nap???) Look at Adam’s immediate response in verse 23—“this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…” He immediately understood that there was a deeper connection than just “hey, you’re pretty cool.” They intuitively understood that they needed one another, that they were made for this kind of community and commitment. The writer even describes the union between them in the most intimate kind of terms—in verse 24, he describes the joined husband and wife as becoming “one flesh.”

There is more to this story (we’ll get to that on Monday), but don’t miss the significance here—from the very beginning, we were designed to live in community. Our insistence on independent and solitary lives is not only counterintuitive to our nature, but it is detrimental to our overall wellbeing.