Episode Details

Prayer

Lord and our God, we praise you and we thank you for your great mercies to us.

We pray, O Lord, that you would be exalted and glorified in our lives.

And we pray now as we take a few moments to

Meditate on your holy word and fill our minds with the truth of your word.

Our Lord, we pray that you would renew our minds and help us that we may glorify you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Reading

Genesis 2:18-25.

“Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19. Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

Meditation

Have you ever looked at the face of a groom as his bride walks down the aisle to him? Speaking as a man, there are many things that men particularly enjoy. We enjoy taking apart a motorbike and putting it back together. Boys like to wrestle and test each other’s strength, and that kind of mindset carries on into manhood. Men like the physicality of a contest on the football field – sprinting at top speed in competition with the man next to you. Men like a good juicy steak after a hard day of physical labour, with mushroom gravy and chips on the side and a pint of beer to drink. We like the satisfaction you get from splitting wood and stacking up a massive pile ready for the winter. Especially when you strike a piece of wood in just the right spot, and there’s a big crack, and it splits in half perfectly under the force of the blow! But there are few things in a man’s life that compare to the sight of his bride walking toward him, dressed in white on their wedding day.

What does it mean to be a man? Why did God make men? Why not something else? Why not a world full of women? Why not a world of sexless beings able to self-replicate? Our sexual identity is something about us that goes right down to the core of who we are as people. Because of this, it should come as no surprise that sexuality has become the idol of our culture today. It is because it is such a precious treasure, and that it cuts so close to everything about who we are, that it has been able to be misused to such potent effect.

As we’ve been studying Genesis 2 we’ve been discovering what life is really all about. We’ve seen that life is central to God’s purpose for his creation, and that he wants to fill the earth with life. We’ve seen that he does that through work and the fruit of our labours, and the gift of wisdom. There’s one more piece of the puzzle, according to Genesis 2, that we need to think about when it comes to flourishing life. It’s at the centre of it all, really. I’m talking about relationships – and our sexuality is one of the main engine rooms for these relationships.

To understand relationships, then, I’m going to suggest that we need to start with this question: What is a man? What does it mean to be a man? What is masculinity? Because that is where it starts in the text itself: God makes the man.