One is the loneliest number: Men and women need each other, and that’s OK
Men and women are pieces of the same puzzle. Not opposing teams in Battleship.
“So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:27
Genesis 2:23 offers the first words spoken by a human being: “This is the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.”
Creation had been going well, to that point. God had created day and night and water and land and livestock and waterfowl and man, and they were Good.
He was so pleased with his creation, God was, that he took a day of rest.
But by Genesis 2:18, something is missing. Man has a God, a garden, dominion of the land, except for that tree over there.
“It is not good for the man to be alone,” God says in Genesis 2:18. “I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Everything God had created was good. Except an aloneness that no amount of puppies or watermelon — or even the presence of God — could cure. Not good.
Among the existent creatures of Eden, none were suitable. So God takes a rib from Adam and crafts anew his helpmate, the woman.
Adam gets that name from Ha’Adam, Hebrew for “taken from the dirt.”
As Dru Johnson writes in “The Universal Story,” an account of Genesis 1-11, Adam “is the dirtling precisely because he is taken from the dirt.”
Woman is taken “from the man.” Like Adam, woman is named for what she was taken from.
Genesis 2:24 tells us that “a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
That’s a healthy way to look at the companionship and teamwork of man and woman. Puzzle pieces made differently, but both by a God who loves them. There can be no completion if the pieces aren’t fit together. And for them to fit, they must be equally yoked.
People need people. Men need women. Women need men. We were made for each other. Call it complementarianism, if you must. The book would call it God’s plan.
The very idea that man and woman are different, let alone that we need each other, is under attack today.
One of the more subtle attacks is the trend to call women “womxn,” so as to remove man, or men, from the word. We’ve even seen people end prayers with “awoman,” rather than Amen.
Both are an assault on language, and on God’s vision of man and woman as teammates.
Adam was taken from dirt, and named so. Woman was taken from man, and named so.
To change woman to “womxn” is, in effect, to say it’s worse to come from man than to come from dirt.
It’s interesting, that such a linguistic assertion of independence — I don’t need no man, applied to the dictionary — doesn’t just choose a different word.
Instead, it tries to make the word different. Taken far enough, it will make The Word different.
This separatist vision is a virus that corrupts, not a tree that feeds. The male version, Men Going Their Own Way, is even worse, as it reflects a walking away from the richness of love and life partnership. Men were not meant to opt out. But that is a topic for another day.
Both “womxn” and “awoman” remove the terms from their historical context, to appease the whims of the time. But the whims themselves are wrong.
Both words take a negative, separatist view of the relations between man and woman.
The vision of Genesis 2:23 is a mixed doubles match at Wimbledon. Man and woman working together for a common goal. 1+1=2.
The Battle of the Sexes is a man facing a woman in the Wimbledon finals. One winner, one loser. It doesn’t have to be this way. Even if this is all you have known. Cynicism is the biggest risk of all in affairs of the heart.
The Battle of the Sexes reflects God’s curse, not his plan. After Adam and Eve partake in the forbidden fruit, in Genesis 3, man is turned against animal, and men and women are put at odds.
You will say what you want. You will use the words you prefer. This we know.
But ask yourself. Are you advancing God’s plan, or are you perpetuating the curse?