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GENESIS 2; PSALMS 3–4

Week 1, Day 2

Genesis 1 told us we are made in the image of God. That’s exciting, but from practical experience it’s also confusing. We don’t feel that God-like all the time; some days, we don’t feel God-like at all.

Genesis 2 helps by telling us more about ourselves. We are creatures of the dust, which is easy to believe. Our physical person will decay into dust, and our personality is earthy enough to suggest our origins. But into that dust, God breathes something of the divine. Here is both our dilemma and our glory—that we are a bit of sod and a breath from God.

Perhaps the best evidence of our God-likeness is that we desire, like God, to communicate. Genesis 1 pictured both male and female created at once (1:27), but this chapter uses a beautiful story to let us know that we human beings need one another. We are bone of each other’s bone and flesh of each other’s flesh. John Donne underlined the point centuries later by saying that when one person dies, every person is diminished.

The intimacy of which we human beings are capable is uniquely expressed in marriage, partly because in marriage there is the possibility of engaging with God in the creation process.

There is a kind of divine humility in this chapter. Though the man is able to commune with God, he isn’t expected to find fulfillment in God alone. “It is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18). We need God, but we also need one another.

PRAYER: Help me, I pray, to see every human being as part of my very being. Amen.

If marriage is part of the divine plan, how does a person who has not married, or is divorced or widowed, interpret her or his singleness?