Transcript
My series on the subject of marriage. And for our first text, would you turn in your Bibles to Ecclesiastes, chapter 4 and verse 9.
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor.
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor.
Now turn back to Genesis, chapter 2. And in Genesis, chapter 2, I want to read verse 15, skip to verse 18, and then read mostly to the end of the chapter.
So, Genesis, chapter 2, verse 15:
Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it.
And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.’
Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name.
So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept. And He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place.
Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.
And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.’
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Quite a few years ago when I was still teaching on the seminary faculty, I used to go out frequently to lunch with several fellow teachers on the faculty. And we always had a good time solving all the problems of the seminary and the world over lunch.
But one semester came when the schedule makers did not accommodate us very well. And so it looked like, on the basis of our class schedules, we were going to have to eat lunch at different times.
So one of my faculty friends said to me, “Even though I won’t be eating with you,” he says, “I would be glad to come out with you when I can, because,” he said, “I know how awful it is to eat alone.”
Now the thought that was going through my mind at the time was, “That’s very nice, but I love to eat alone!”
I love to eat with people, too, of course, you understand. But if I eat alone, which I frequently do, I have a good time also because I very often take a magazine or a book or something that I want to read. And I enjoy myself reading.
And so I appreciated my friend’s concern for me. But somehow or other it didn’t quite exactly fit my particular situation.
I remember another faculty friend saying to me one time, he said, “I just couldn’t stand to come home to an empty house and four walls.”
And I remember the thought that was going through my mind was, “I love to come home to an empty house and four walls.”
I make my living teaching people. And I talk to people all day long. And it’s great to come home and not have to talk to anybody, not have to hear how their day went, and not to have to tell them how my day went.
And so I can settle down and take a nap, or I can turn on the TV, or I can read the newspapers or the magazines and have a great time all by myself in an empty house with — well, it’s not totally empty — but in a house that has nobody in it but myself.
So maybe by this time you were thinking to yourself, “Well, Zane must be the exception to the statement that God made in the book of Genesis about Adam when He said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’”
Well, I’m not so sure I’m an exception to that. Because the question I want to raise is this. When God said that, did He mean it’s not good for a man to go home to an empty house, or not good for him not to have somebody to eat lunch with, or did He mean more than that?
Did you notice that when He says, “It is not good for man to be alone,” He does not then go on and say, “I will make him a companion.” He didn’t say that.
Now, undoubtedly He did make man a companion. But what He did say was, “I will make a helper comparable to him.”
Have you ever stopped to think about those words — “a helper comparable to him”?
Now having said that, the next things we read are that God begins to make the animals. And He brings the animals to Adam. And Adam gives names to all of the animals.
And when he’s finished naming all the animals, we are told again in verse 20, “But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him.”
I think it’s obvious, isn’t it, that each of these animals was brought to Adam not only for the task of naming them, but for Adam to consider whether any of these creatures could be what he needed to keep himself from being alone.
Now you say, “How can that be? Because man cannot talk to the animals. The animals can’t even talk to man, so how could they even be good companions for him?”
Are you sure of that? Have you ever stopped to think that in chapter 3, when we read that the serpent was more cunning than any of the beasts of the field, and he came into the garden, and the serpent said to the woman, “Has God said, ‘You shall not eat of all the trees of the garden’?”
The woman said, “Eek! You’re talking! Where did you get the ability to talk?” She doesn’t say that, does she? She carries on a conversation with the serpent just like, “This is not the first time I’ve talked to an animal.”
And then, of course, we all remember the story of Balaam’s donkey, do we not? Balaam is riding his donkey along, and God is angry at Balaam because Balaam is going to meet with Balak, who wants him to curse the children of Israel.
And the donkey sees the Angel of the Lord standing in the road with a drawn sword. And Balaam doesn’t see him, but the donkey does. And so the donkey just turns outside of the road and walks through the field. And Balaam gives him a whack.
But a little later they’re riding through a very narrow road through a vineyard with stone walls on either side. And again the donkey sees the Angel of the Lord standing there with a weapon. And so the donkey tries to get around on one side, and in the process he kind of crushes Balaam’s leg against the wall. Balaam gives him another whack.
After a while, they come to a place that is too narrow to pass on either side. And there again, the Angel of the Lord is standing with a drawn sword. And so the donkey just lies down and refuses to move. And this time Balaam takes his staff and whacks it. I guess this was the hardest whack of all.
And then, to our amazing surprise, the donkey says, “You’ve struck me three times.” And Balaam says — Balaam is very angry. He may have been surprised, but he’s mainly angry. And he says, “Because you’ve abused me. And if I had a sword in my hand, I’d kill you.”
And the donkey says to him, “Haven’t I been your donkey on which you have ridden ever since you got me? Have I ever treated you like this before?” And Balaam says, “No, you haven’t.”
And then Balaam, of course, sees the Angel of the Lord. But the donkey talks to him.
Forgive me if I offer you a conjecture, but I suspect very strongly that the animals, many of them if not most of them — perhaps all of them — could talk at the time that God brought them to Adam to get names for them. And that they have lost the capacity to talk as a result of the fall.
And it is one of the interesting possibilities of the future of our destiny in the kingdom of God that maybe we will be able to talk to the animals. We’ll see.
But in any case, I don’t think it’s very likely that God brought all these animals to Adam and none of them could communicate with him. But even though they could communicate with him, apparently, none of them provided him with what he needed.
So for a few minutes I would like to discuss the phrase on which I want to center my conversation this afternoon, “a helper comparable to him, a helper comparable to him.”
Let’s start with the word “helper.” As I’ve already said, God did not say, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a companion.” Neither did God say, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a lover.”
And certainly God did not say, “It is not good for man to be alone. I’ll make him a dishwasher, or somebody who will keep house.” Of course, as you know, there were no dishes to wash in the Garden of Eden and no house to keep.
I think it is significant that what God wants man to have is a helper.
Now in the very first talk in this series, you may remember that I suggested the obvious first application of the idea of the woman being a helper is that the man had a job to do. He had a job to do in the garden.
We read it a few moments ago. God created the man. He set him in the Garden of Eden. And He gave him the responsibility of tending the garden and taking care of it.
Now he has a helper who helps him with the job that God has given him to do in the garden. And we have already made the point at the very beginning of this series that one of the major roles of the woman in the marriage is to help the man carry out his responsibilities for God, to be his helper in the work that God has called that man to do.
He may not be called to preaching — I’m not talking about that — but I am talking about the various things that each and every man can and should do for the Lord. All of us have a gift. And the woman can also be his helper in that respect. And that’s a very important role, indeed.
Why is it important? Well, stop and put yourself in Adam’s place for a minute. He’s there in the garden without Eve. Okay?
He’s trimming the trees, I guess. I don’t know what all was necessary in a garden where really there was nothing much going wrong because there was no sin yet. But there was something to do that he had to do — to trim the plants and cultivate the garden and all of these things.
And, when it’s all over, he looks around and he says, “Good job, but so what? I’m doing it. I suppose God appreciates it, but you know, here it is, it’s beautiful. But if I’m doing it just for me, how can I really enter into the value and the pleasure of doing it?”
I don’t know whether he felt that way or not, but that brings us back to Ecclesiastes 4:9.
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor.
Now we get Eve into the garden, and she does her thing and Adam does his thing. And then, at the close of the day, Adam and Eve stand there and they say, “Hmm. That’s pretty. Don’t you appreciate that?”
“Yes, I appreciate that and my, you did a good job on the gladiolas.” “And, Adam, you did a good job on the peach tree.”
And they multiply their satisfaction — their reward for their labor — by the fact that they are able to enjoy it and appreciate it together.
You know, I’ve said to you that my dad didn’t much enjoy his job as a chief of personnel with the Letterkenny Ordnance Depot as he worked for many years for the Defense Department. But almost as soon as he retired, guess what he started? Luis would be able to tell you this. He started a garden.
He started a vegetable garden. And my dad loved to get out into his garden and cultivate the garden and grow corn and string beans and tomatoes and whatever else he had to grow. And he fought his ongoing war with the chipmunks who were determined to take advantage of the products that he produced.
And during his years of retirement, my mother and my father would go out during the daytime. And my mother wasn’t interested particularly in the vegetable garden, but she was interested in flowers. So while my father cultivated the vegetable garden, my mother took care of the flowers, and they had a good-looking yard.
And, you know, then they enjoyed the fruits of their labor together because when they brought in my dad’s corn or tomatoes, they ate it together. If my mother brought in a bouquet, why they could both enjoy it together. They had a good reward for their labor.
Now if you ask me, cultivating a vegetable garden is Dullsville, USA. I mean, I can’t think of anything more boring than to grow a vegetable garden.
And whenever I went home, I knew I was in for the grand tour. My dad was going to take me out in the garden and he was going to show me plant by plant what he was growing.
And I think Luis was up there and I believe my dad took him out once or twice to see the vegetable garden. And then, of course, when they fed me at night, my mother would say, “This corn comes from your father’s garden,” or, “These green beans were grown by your dad,” and they were good.
But I often thought to myself, “I will never never ever retire to a house and start a vegetable garden.” But that was their thing, and they loved it. And they enjoyed it together, and they had a good reward for their labor because they shared the pleasure of working together in the yard.
I’m wondering whether the husbands and wives who are sitting here have ever thought of the whole process of marriage as a sharing of labor.
First of all, of course, you normally would have kids. And, as we all know, there are certain things that mothers do better for kids than dads do, and certain things that dads do better for kids than mothers do.
And as we’ve been listening to Luis’s very fine ministry in the mornings from the book of Genesis, we know how important it is for mothers and dads to do the right thing for their kids so that their kids grow up to be the right kind of people.
And if Mom and Dad are successful in raising their kids so that they raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord, don’t you think that’s a wonderful joy to share between husband and wife?
Now we know that we have a lot of problems with the children in this particular church. And that’s why we have a parents’ prayer meeting. It takes work.
If you’ve already raised your kids, or nearly already raised them, and they’re not really walking with the Lord, it’s going to take a different kind of work to do the job of getting them back. And that work is prayer, by the way. That’s one of the primary activities in which you can engage.
And I’m always glad when I see both husband and wife together at the prayer meeting for parents, praying for their children.
And after your children are gone, husband and wife ought to consider what other things they have to do together that are very important. And all the way through the years when you raise your children, both parents have to think of the ways in which they can serve God.
In fact, if you don’t serve God in front of your children, your children are not going to learn how to serve God from you. They may learn it from somebody else down the line, but they should learn it from you in your home.
They should see Mom and Dad love God, Mom and Dad enjoy the Bible, Mom and Dad pray, and Mom and Dad serve the Lord. If they can see that in you, that will be instilled in them and God, in due time, can make it fruitful.
I’ve often said that one of the things that I learned from my father was to pray about everything. He taught me a lot of lessons. I can’t even begin to list the lessons that my dad taught to me, but that’s almost the most important thing. I learned that you pray about everything.
My dad prayed about everything. And there is no estimating how valuable that is to children.
So you have to be serving the Lord all the way along. And when your children are gone, you still need to be serving the Lord.
So I’m saying to the mothers and fathers here, “What are you up to together? If your children are out of the nest, what are you doing together? What are your objectives together? Are you working together for God? Are you doing something for God? You’re serving in the church in the roles that He wants you to serve?”
That’s the question, isn’t it? It’s not good for a man to have to do it by himself. He needs a helper to help him do his best for God.
And then the second phrase is “comparable to him.” He needs a helper comparable to him.
Now here I want you to notice that it doesn’t say he needs a helper identical to him. That would be bad, don’t you agree, if your mate was absolutely identical to you?
Some of you may remember when I lived downtown at the high-rise apartments called the Manor House at that time. I was up on the 16th floor. And I shall never forget, there was an elderly pair of men. They were twins. They looked almost identical to each other.
I couldn’t tell them apart. They were almost identical clones. It was my understanding that neither one of them had ever been married, and they lived together.
And I must say they were not too extremely friendly. So if you talked to them, you might get a very slight recognition that you had greeted them, and that’s about all.
Maybe — now, that’s the way they looked to me from the outside — maybe they were happy, you know. I’m not going to criticize them. But they were kind of like clones of each other. They were too much alike.
And I think that men and women can thank the Lord for the fact that they’re not identical. They’re just comparable to each other.
Now you understand that when God brought the animals to man, that was something that was radically different, don’t you agree? I mean, even though the serpent could talk, who’d want to have as their bosom buddy a serpent? Or who would want a donkey as their bosom buddy?
I mean, even if Balaam did talk briefly to his, we don’t want to spend a lot of time talking to a donkey. But the woman was like him. And yet at the same time there were physical and emotional and psychological differences.
And don’t you see the wisdom of God in this, that God knew that man needed a helper who, though not identical with him, was comparable — comparable — to him and who complemented, therefore, his own weaknesses and deficiencies with her strengths and skills.
Well, one of the things I would like to suggest to all of the married partners here is that the next time you get a real good opportunity to do it and you’re by yourself for a few minutes, instead of thinking about all the things in your partner that annoy the daylights out of you — which is pretty easy to think about sometimes and consume your time with — get by yourself and think of all the strong points that your partner has that you don’t have.
I shall be greatly surprised if you can’t pinpoint some very real strengths that your partner possesses that you do not possess. And then thank God for giving you a partner with those strengths and kind of make up your mind that you’re going to take advantage of being married to this partner of yours and learn from their strengths even as you try, perhaps, to enable them to learn from yours.
Here’s a husband and wife, and the kid has done something really bad. And I do hope the husbands and wives talk to each other about their discipline problems. And I hope they get their acts on the same page.
There’s nothing worse than one parent saying one thing to the kid and the other parent saying another thing to the kid. And the parent says, “You can’t do this,” and the other parent says, “Yes, you can.” That’s chaos and very damaging for the children.
You need to get your act together. But here is the husband and wife, and they’re sitting together. The kid has done something wrong. And the dad perhaps feels, “They need to learn a lesson from this. And we need to exercise a discipline that will really communicate this lesson.”
The mother, being the sympathetic person that mothers usually are, may say, “Yes, that’s true. But I think I understand why our child did what they did. And I think we ought to take that into consideration.”
What happens next? Well, in some families what happens is the man says, “We’re gonna do it my way. We’re gonna discipline my way.” And the wife says to herself, “OK, but as soon as I get a chance with the kid, I’m gonna communicate my own message to them.”
Now what they should do is to kind of merge their points of view into an acceptable discipline that takes into consideration, perhaps, the weaknesses in the child which the mother feels, and takes into consideration the need that the father feels that the child should learn a lesson.
Do you see what I’m saying? Husbands and wives can learn from each other. You can’t do it by being on a two-track program — the husband’s off this way, and the wife’s off this way, and you’re just kind of like ships passing in the ocean at home.
You need to get your act together. You need to cooperate with each other and to incorporate the strengths of each into the way that you handle and discipline your children.
I close with the famous nursery rhyme, “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, His wife could eat no lean.”
Am I so old that nobody remembers this except me? Possibly.
“Jack Sprat could eat no fat, His wife could eat no lean. And so between the two of them, They licked the platter clean.”
Jack Sprat couldn’t eat any of the fat part of the meat, and his wife couldn’t eat any of the lean part. I forbear to try to figure out what the results of this were.
I imagine Jack Sprat as a skinny, thin, skinny old man, and his wife as a humongous woman ‘cause she ate only the fat and he ate only the lean. But this was a cooperative venture.
So when they had a piece of meat on the table in front of them, Jack Sprat ate his part, and the wife ate her part, and the platter was clean, and no food was wasted. Isn’t that great?
Well, I don’t know what’s on your platter as parents, but let me suggest that to clean up whatever the platter is on your plate — I’m using a figurative way of talking about this — you need to work together.
The husband needs to do the part he does well, and the wife needs to do the part that she does well. And between the two of you, you can wipe that platter clean.
It’s not good that I’m alone. And I have to get some of the benefits that you all have very naturally from your spouse, from people that — you know — from different people.
I’ve often thought, really I’ve often thought this. A preacher is very fortunate if he has a sympathetic wife who will go home with him and after he’s — you know — don’t attack the preacher the minute he gets home because he’s already, you know, kind of wound up.
But at an appropriate time she will say to him, “You know, such and such an illustration was really confusing. And I didn’t follow it. And I just wonder if everybody followed it.”
Or, “You seemed to get lost in point three. And I got lost with you.” But you have no idea how valuable that kind of input can be.
And I regret that I don’t have somebody who does that with me on a regular basis. Now, I have a friend or so who will do that. Yes, well I try to encourage this friend to do that.
But you know, that’s just one illustration of many things that I could mention where the single man labors under — you know, there’s some advantages to being single, too, don’t get me wrong — but the single man labors under many disadvantages simply because he doesn’t have a helper comparable to him, an in-house helper who loves him, wants the best for him and is willing to give him her honest and open counsel.
Now, you ladies, if your man is serving the Lord in the church, give him the benefit of your advice. But remember that you’re not trying to cut him down to size. You’re trying to build him up to size. That’s the important thing.
And then you’re a real helper to that husband.
And you may be thinking of the passage where it’s talking about giving the daughter to . . . the one who gives in marriage does well, and the one who doesn’t . . . and the one who does not give in marriage does better.
First Corinthians 7 seems to suggest that there are some very concrete advantages to single life, which Paul recognizes. But it is still, in my opinion, not good for man to be alone because there’s also something missing from the single life that the married individual who has a happy and a successful marriage has.
You have advantages and perhaps if we weigh them in the scales, maybe the advantages are better than the advantages to the married condition. But there are still debits that make that a true Scripture, I think, for everybody.
“Each man has his own gift,” says the Scripture, “one after this manner, one after the other.”
God knows what’s best for each individual. And for most individuals, marriage is best.