In the Beginning: God Formed Partners For Life
This sermon was first given at Sherwood Community Friends Church on Sunday, February 15 during our GENESIS: The Preface series. Watch it here.
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Smoke chokes the sky, the ground is torn apart, and the heroes who were once so confident are now exhausted, wounded, and running out of options. You can see it in their eyes. They are calculating how long they can hold the line before everything breaks.
One of them is down. Another can barely stand. The supercharged enemy is closing in.
And then — out of nowhere…
A figure drops from the sky like a missile and lands between the danger and the defenseless. She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t ask permission. She came because the fight had reached the point where, without her, everyone else was finished.
In one scene, it’s Captain Marvel arriving in the middle of chaos to shield the Avengers who cannot possibly survive the onslaught coming at them.
In another scene, it’s Black Widow, standing on a windswept cliff, realizing the mission will fail unless someone gives everything, and she chooses to become the reason the rest of the team gets to go home.
Instead of watching from a distance, they step into the crisis so others don’t face it alone.
Even if you’ve never watched a single superhero movie, you understand the power of that moment because every human being knows what it feels like to desperately need someone to show up.
To stand with you, strengthen you, and help carry what you cannot carry by yourself.
Why do stories like that move us so deeply?
Why do they consistently stir something fierce and hopeful inside our human heart?
Because they echo something ancient.
They reach back into the first pages of the Bible where God looked at a solitary human being standing in a world of beauty and responsibility and said, for the first time in Scripture, this is not good.
Humanity was never meant to carry God’s world by itself.
From the beginning, God’s design for his purpose has always involved partnership.
As we look today at Genesis chapter 2 we will see just how radical, dignified, and world-shaping that partnership truly is.
From Cosmic Symphony to Sacred Ground
Last week we stood back and watched the whole orchestra.
Light and darkness.
Sky and sea.
Land and life.
God speaking.
God separating.
God naming.
God calling it good.
We learned Genesis chapter 1 is not trying to win a science argument about creation and it’s most certainly not answering scientific questions.
It’s not talking about how.
It’s revealing who.
It’s revealing why.
It’s revealing the kind of world we live in.
Ordered.
Purposeful.
Meaning by the voice and heart of God.
We watched the days move like stanzas in a symphony.
The first three days establish domains.
The next three days install inhabitants.
Everything was in its place and under God’s authority. He called it good.
At the center of it all, humanity was created and called to image God together on the home he built called earth.
Something shifts in Genesis chapter 2. The sweeping, cosmic panorama slows and the camera drops to the ground, because the story is no longer trying to impress us with scale but to draw us in to frame relationship. God wants us to feel what it means to be the kind of humans who actually live in the world he has so carefully ordered.
Before we step into the garden…before we feel dust in the air and breath in lungs… we have to talk about the seventh day.
If we misunderstand the seventh day, we will misunderstand everything that follows.
The Day That Doesn’t End
Genesis 2:2–3 CSB
“On the seventh day God had completed his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it he rested from all his work of creation.”
Notice something.
Evening and morning are mentioned for days one through six.
But not here.
The pattern we’ve come to expect… stops.
Why?
Because this day is different.
In the ancient world, when a deity “rests,” it doesn’t mean he takes a nap.
It means he has taken up residence.
He is seated and ruling in a functional temple.
John Walton says it this way:
“God’s rest is the moment when he takes his place as ruler in the ordered system he has established.”
Rest is about reign.
Which means day seven is not the absence of activity.
It is the beginning of God’s presence filling the world he ordered.
Creation is now his temple as Heaven and earth overlap.
God is at home with his creation.
In the second chapter’s opening verses we don’t see the common Sumerian expression we saw in chapter 1 where “evening and morning” signify the end or transition from one phase of creation to the next.
Many scholars — and many Jewish readers through history — have noticed:
The seventh day is still going.
We are living in it.
God’s project of bringing order, life, and partnership in his world started in the beginning and has not yet ended.
It continues: right now, with us.
Which means Genesis chapter 2 is a closer look at life inside the beginning of day seven.
Humanity Placed in Sacred Space
As the camera on Genesis moves from the wide horizon of chapter one and settles into the earthen soil, the story becomes personal. We are no longer watching galaxies come into being; we are watching God deal tenderly with the creature who will live in the world he has ordered.
Genesis 2:7–8 CSB
“Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed.”
The God who spoke light into existence now slows down as he stoops to the earth. The picture tightens. He forms. He breathes. He places.
The word translated formed is the Hebrew yatsar — this is language of a potter shaping clay with careful intention. This is craftsmanship. Personal involvement. Not distant power but intimate attention. Humanity begins with the touch of God.
And what does he shape us from?
Dust.
Hebrew: Adamah — soil, earth, ground. From adamah comes adam. The human is an earth, a dirt, creature.
As Carmen Joy Imes observes, “being made from dust is a declaration of creaturely dependence; everything we are is received, not achieved.”
But dust is not yet alive. So God breathes into the human. Life is shared from Creator to creature.
Notice the text does not say the human received life. It says the human became a living being. Humanity lives because God gives his own life to sustain it (Michael Heiser). Every inhale is a gift of his grace.
Then God makes a place for this human by planting a garden in Eden.
Eden is the region.
The garden is a smaller, intentional space within it.
Already the Bible is introducing temple language. Sacred geography. God prepared a place where heaven and earth overlap for humans to live in his presence. This garden functions as holy space — the kind of place later echoed in the tabernacle and temple.
From the beginning, God is not building distance.
He is building residence.
Jumping ahead in the story…
The tabernacle will carry this forward.
The temple will deepen it.
And in Acts chapter 2, God’s Holy Spirit will fill people themselves, making us his sacred space when we receive him.
God has always wanted to dwell with humanity. The story of Scripture is the story of God moving toward nearness.
Next scene, instead of moving immediately to what happens next in the life of human, Genesis pauses to describe rivers.
And at first, it feels like an interruption, but it is not.
A World That Touches the Real One
Genesis 2:10–14 CSB
“A river went out from Eden to water the garden. From there it divided and became the source of four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon, which flows through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. Gold from that land is pure; bdellium and onyx are also there. The name of the second river is Gihon, which flows through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which runs east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.”
Why does Genesis suddenly slow down and start naming geography?
Because the story is insisting that this is not a myth floating in the clouds like what the Hebrew's surrounding neighbors had for their origin stories. This is God’s real world, touching real soil, connected to real peoples, real histories, real futures.
Heaven and earth are not separate realms here; they are overlapping realities, and the life that begins in God’s presence is meant to move outward into the ordinary places where humans actually live.
The river that flows from Eden is never meant to stay hidden or private. It carries the life of God beyond the borders of the garden.
Even the river’s names whisper this.
Pishon is associated with abundance, winding through lands known for gold and precious stone.
Gihon which flows through Cush (Ethiopia) suggests bursting forth, the surge of life-giving water.
And then the Tigris and the Euphrates — names Israel would immediately recognize — the great arteries of civilization like Assyria and Babylon, the places where cultures are built, where cities rise, where human history unfolds.
Euphrates flows right by the city of Babylon (Genesis 11).
Rivers have a positive connotation in the Bible. A river flows out of Eden to water the whole Earth. Rivers also flow down from holy mountains, like the one Ezekiel sees in his vision or the one in Psalm 46. Rivers and springs become divine gifts of life at just the right moment for Hagar in the desert, the Israelites in the wilderness, and the Samaritan woman when Jesus gives her living water at the well. The book of Revelation also talks about a river of life flowing down from the throne of God.
Do you see the picture Genesis is painting?
Life with God at the center does not remain contained. It moves outward.
From the very beginning, Eden was never meant to be a retreat. It was the source of a river headed toward the nations, toward the world.
This is the pattern we still live in today. Some of us are called to step across the street into our neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools, carrying the life of God into ordinary conversations and faithful presence. Others are called to cross oceans and languages so that people who have never heard the name of Jesus might finally have the opportunity to worship him. Both matter. Both bring God’s holy space. The mission of God is always moving toward the places where worship does not yet exist.
The life of God is always on the move, pressing outward toward the world, but Genesis now brings us back to the beginning of that movement, because before blessing can travel through humanity, humanity must first learn what it means to live with God in his presence. So the camera settles again on humanity, and we listen as distinction, vocation, boundary, and partnership are given their shape.
Genesis 2:15-25 CSB
“The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.” The Lord God formed out of the ground every wild animal and every bird of the sky, and brought each to the man to see what he would call it. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky, and to every wild animal; but for the man no helper was found corresponding to him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man. And the man said:
This one, at last, is bone of my bone
and flesh of my flesh;
this one will be called “woman,”
for she was taken from man.
This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.”
Sidebar: What Kind of Helper Is This?
If we move too quickly past what we just heard, we will miss something Genesis is determined to make clear.
Truthfully, many of us have inherited assumptions and church traditions about this moment — about men, women, authority, and purpose — that feel familiar, but may not actually rise authentically from the Hebrew story itself. So before we continue, we need to slow down and let God’s voice speak through his text on its own terms, even if it challenges the narratives we have grown used to.
Let’s look at when God says,
Genesis 2:18 CSB
“It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.”
The word translated helper is the Hebrew word ezer (etz er).
And in English, helper can sound small like:
Assistant.
Support staff.
Someone who helps from underneath or is subservient.
But that is not what the Hebrew word ezer means.
In the Old Testament, we find twenty one occurrences of ezer with the overwhelming majority of times it’s referring to God himself coming to rescue his people.
Listen:
Psalm 121:1–2 CSB
“I lift my eyes toward the mountains. Where will my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
The word for “help” here is the same word: ezer.
Deuteronomy 33:29 LEB
“Yahweh, the shield of your help.”
Yep. Ezer.
One Hebrew scholar, R. David Freedman, argued in a landmark 1983 study that the word used in Genesis 2 should be translated “delivering ally.” After tracing how ʿēzer is used throughout the Old Testament—again and again for God coming to save—he warned that translating it “helper” can shrink the role the text is actually giving (see “Woman, a Power Equal to Man,” Biblical Archaeology Review, 1983).
This is not the language of an assistant hovering in the background. It is the language of a powerful rescuer rushing in with strength where there is lack.
As modern Old Testament scholar Carmen Joy Imes has helped many rediscover, if we are comfortable calling God our helper, we should be very careful about making the word small when it describes the woman. Which means when she arrives in the story, she is not beneath the man; she is the ally whose purpose makes their shared calling with God possible.
An ezer is not a domestic assistant.
An ezer, properly translated, is a delivering ally.
So when God says, I will make an ezer, he is not creating a junior partner.
He is creating strength that corresponds, partnership that matches the man with power that comes alongside him.
Tim Mackie summarizes it like this:
“Ezer never implies a subordinate assistant [because] it most often describes God as Israel’s powerful rescuer.”
So if we would never reduce God to a sidekick, we cannot reduce the woman that way either.
Okay, let’s go even deeper.
The way the woman is brought forth has also often been misunderstood.
Many of us have heard, and even read what was translated right in the Biblical text— it says she was made from a rib.
But the Hebrew word in the Bible is not the word for rib. It is is tsēlāʿ.
It means side.
It is architectural language.
For example:
Exodus 25:12 CSB
“Cast four gold rings for [the ark of the covenant] and place them on its four feet, two rings on one side and two rings on the other side.”
That word for side?
Tsēlāʿ.
Or consider the temple:
1 Kings 6:5 CSB
“He then built a chambered structure along the temple wall, encircling the walls of the temple, that is, the sanctuary and the inner sanctuary, and he made side chambers all around.”
Side chambers.
Tsēlāʿ.
These are structural realities.
Load-bearing.
Significant.
God (bānâ) builds the woman from the man’s (tsēlāʿ) side.
bānâ is a verb (what God does).
tsēlāʿ is a noun (what God uses).
So when Genesis says God takes a tsēlāʿ from the human, the natural Hebrew hearing is not of a small bone being removed.
It is the image of a whole being divided into equal corresponding parts.
This is the birth of male and female— two differentiated, distinct beings out of the original genderless humanity.
No where do we see hierarchy or difference or superiority.
We see partnership.
In other words, humanity is incomplete until both stand together.
Notice what happens next.
The man does not say,
“Finally, someone beneath me to do my chores.”
He says,
Genesis 2:23 CSB
“This one, at last, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”
That’s equality language.
Shared substance.
Shared dignity.
Shared mission.
Later in the story, he names her as he assigned names to the animals before and with a name comes status and function. With their names comes vocation and responsibility.
Here in the story is where we are introduced to Human and Life. Adam and Eve.
The picture Genesis gives us is not one of domination, but of collaboration.
God’s world requires partners.
And neither can carry the calling alone.
Mistranslated and Misunderstood
What we have just seen in the Hebrew text is equal partnership, shared substance, and shared mission. Yet many of us grew up hearing this story through a much smaller lens, one shaped by centuries of interpretation in cultures where male authority was rarely questioned.
When the King James Bible was translated in 1611, Europe operated with deeply fixed ideas about hierarchy between men and women. Translators, pastors, and theologians were not neutral observers; they were sons of their age. As a result, when English readers heard the word helper, they often filled it with meanings drawn from their social world rather than from the writings of Moses.
People living inside strong hierarchies naturally heard Genesis through that hierarchy.
To feel how strong those assumptions could be, listen to the language of the Scottish reformer John Knox, written in 1558:
“To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature… a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance… Woman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man.” (The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women)
When voices like that shaped the air people breathed, is it any surprise they sometimes read Genesis through those lenses?
And we should say carefully and humbly: every generation faces the temptation to do the same thing.
Which is why we are slowing down.
Which is why we return to Hebrew.
Which is why we let the Biblical text speak for itself.
All of this perfectly aligns with what we already learned in Genesis chapter 1.
Humanity — male and female together — bears the image of God.
Not separately, but together— collectively.
Which means Genesis 2 is not introducing hierarchy.
It is revealing intimate partnership.
This birth of partnership is the foundation of family, the seed for the future covenant people of God, and ultimately, the groundwork for the church.
God formed partners for life.
Side by side.
Equal in worth.
Distinct in identity.
United in our calling.
When our denomination started as a movement in the 1650s to uncomplicate Christianity so we could authentically apprentice Jesus, George Fox and the early Friends understood the scripture in this exact way. Evangelical Friends have always been egalitarian, viewing men and women as equal partners. We still practice this Eden ideal today.
Now — why does this matter so much?
Because it prepares us for what comes next.
When this story is told accurately, God, speaking through the Biblical text’s author, does not describe the arrival of a servant. He announces the creation of the partner without whom the human vocation cannot even begin. Only once they stand together can the mission move forward.
Before Genesis ever tells us how that partnership will fracture, it insists we first see how beautiful the design truly is, because we will never understand redemption if we do not first understand what was lost.
Now with humanity standing together — sharing life, filled with God’s breath, united in dignity and distinction — only then does the question rise from the page with urgency.
What were they made to do? What does it mean to live as God’s order-bringing imaging partners in his world?
We needed to get to this point for the story to be ready to answer. The answers never come all at once.
Remember, reading the Bible is a journey of discovery over our lifetime.
And if we are listening carefully, we begin to realize what it's saying.
Close
We hear the design revealed in the beginning, and our human vocation flowing directly from that design. We are given the what — not the how. God does not breathe his life into humanity so we can stand at a distance admiring the garden.
From the beginning, his presence creates participation. To bear God’s image means joining his work — tending what is good, guarding what is holy, and extending his wise order into the world he loves.
We step into this calling as people welcomed into the rhythm of the seventh day. God reigns. God dwells. God rests in royal delight over his world, and humanity is invited to share in that life with him.
We enter the already playing music of creation to carry outward what we first received from our Creator, just as Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and the Euphrates flowed from the place of his presence to bring life far beyond the garden.
Genesis, then, is not merely telling us where we came from. It is announcing who we are right now and where the story is going. The river of Eden becomes the river of the New Jerusalem in John’s vision of the future restored earth at the end of the book.
Revelation 22:1–2 CSB
“Then he showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations”.
The beginning and the end agree. God with his people. His life flowing outward to a world healed.
And we are invited to live that future now.
The vocation spoken to Human and Life in Eden does not evaporate when humanity fails. It reverberates through the story of Israel, pulses through the promises of the prophets, and comes to full voice in the commission of Jesus. We are again given the what — not the how.
Matthew 28:18–20 CSB
“Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Hear the resonance of human representatives being sent on mission, on purpose.
The garden vision becomes a kingdom people in sacred relationship with sacred vocation.
What began with two humans in sacred space now expands to a Spirit-filled community moving outward into every culture, every neighborhood, every nation, carrying the life of our King.
This has always been the plan.
God formed partners for life — partners with one another, and partners with him — so that his presence would fill the earth.
And when we step into our God-given calling, we are not inventing something new.
We are coming home.
And if we let that sink in, it begins to reshape how we see Monday morning, our relationships, our work, our obedience, our worship. We are not random. We are people who came from dust, filled with divine breath, invited into holy partnership.
That is our identity.
But the story we are reading is honest.
It will not let us romanticize the garden without preparing us for the moment everything begins to unravel.
Next week we are going to step into Genesis chapter 3, and we will watch Human and Life engage creation in a new way. For the first time, suspicion will replace trust. Dependence will give way to the deception of autonomy. They will reach beyond their limits, and in doing so they will step away from the intimacy of God and violate the sacred space he has given them.
We are going to feel and recognize the weight of that moment because we live in Genesis 3 every day.
But before Scripture takes us there, it anchors us here.
God wants the sound of harmony in our ears before we hear the discord.
He wants us to know what humanity is supposed to be so when we see what it becomes, we will long for and acknowledge why we desperately need a Savior.
And friends, that longing is exactly where God meets us.
So as we leave today, let’s not leave merely informed. Leave remembering the Eden ideal.
Remember who we were created to be.
Remember the dignity we share with one another.
Remember the calling placed on humanity from the very beginning.
And remember that the Creator God who breathed life into dust has not abandoned his project.
He is still forming a people.
He is still inviting partners.
He is still restoring his image in us through Jesus Christ.
He is still moving the story forward.
And we are given sacred space to live inside it.
To be part of his story, we need to trust.
If God exists and Jesus predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead to prove he was God, would you trust in him and follow him?
This is mere Christianity, the essentials of what it means to follow Jesus.
There is a God. You and I are not him.
You’re fallen. I’m fallen.
We violated the standard of justice and we can’t save ourselves.
God came into this universe, added humanity to his DNA, took our punishment for our sins upon himself, and by trusting in him we’re not only forgiven, but given his righteousness.
And one day he will return to judge the living in the dead.
If today you are ready to surrender, to trust Jesus, and to step into the identity and calling we were created for, then this is God’s word for us to live as renewed humans. Open your hands and heart in a posture to receive.
2 Corinthians 5:17–20 CSB
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come! Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.”
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