What’s the greater good, that’s actually more appealing then the mental fantasy underneath this extreme response that Jesus says, which is to deal with it, but just dealing with it, cultivating lust, you have to have some greater vision that is even more fulfilling than the thing that I’m after by cultivating those mental fantasies. So that pattern of looking for the ideal good that God has in store for human life is what’s operating underneath here.
In Genesis as a crowning act of God’s creative actions and speech on day six after God has separated the dry land from the waters and he summoned the fruit trees to come up out of the ground, that was on day three. Now he summons life to come up out of the ground on day six and it begins with God saying, let the land bring out living creatures and the cattles and beasts and they’re according to their kinds, we have this idea of the diversifying types, the living things on the ground consist of others, that are others to each other. Then when God says let us make human in our image, according to our likeness and let them rule, it presumes that one human consists of more than one, because the verbs, let them rule are plural.
Then the puzzle of how is the one human more than one, let them rule, is addressed in the little poem that’s at the center of the center of day six and the poem is three lines. Elohim created human in his image, in the image of Elohim he created the human, male and female he created them. This wonderfully suggestive, in terms of the shape of the parallelism of the poetic lines, in the image of Elohim he created him, that is the species Adam, male and female he created them, by putting those in parallel, the narrators inviting us to see that there’s something of the essence of what it means for humans to be representatives of Elohim in the fact that they are one Adam and that one Adam consists of two others in terms of biological sex male and female, he created them and then the relevance of the difference is then highlighted in what follows. Elohim blessed them, which means when God gives the gift of his own self-generating being and life, he gives that as a gift to these creatures saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the land, subdue it and rule over the creatures.
The ideal vision is about a creature that is one and more than one and when those two others, the difference between those two others that’s highlighted here is biological sex, because what God wants to give as a gift, is the ability for them to image God through the multiplication of life. So reproduction, is the union for reproduction is what’s highlighted here as at least one aspect of the blessing. So it’s a mutual vision, let them rule and let them represent God and let their unity and diversity become a life-giving process that creates even more than there was before and all of this is an image of God, it’s a beautiful vision of human, male and female mutuality.
Lamech in Genesis 4:19-23 is the first narrative example of God’s lament in Genesis 3, when he said one of the sad results of the man and the woman now having different visions of what is good in their own eyes, because they’ve taken from the tree of knowing good and bad, that the man will rule over the woman, he will rule you, which is a deliberate echo back to which is ideal, which is let them rule together. So the idea of men acting in ways that treat women like less than human, like animals, what humans are here to the animals is what God names as will be the sad reality of male and female relationships outside of Eden.
Do I view the opposite sex as an indispensable essential other to the flourishing of my own life and of my whole community, so that cultivating the fantasy and doing the power play in my heart, it’s harming them and it’s harming ultimately everyone’s well-being and even my own, if you scale it out in terms of people or you scale it out over the course of a lifetime. What is underneath Jesus’s teaching, these beautiful transcendent statements about marriage and it’s status as a symbol of this greater reality of God joining, God becoming one with his human family in and through King Jesus. It’s love, it’s regarding another human’s dignity and being as of much or greater value than my own and that if I act on that vision, it will create the kind of conditions for human flourishing. A marriage is a symbol of what a church community of men and women can become as a group embodying this, it will create, if men actually took Jesus by his word and did what he said, it will create a kind of community that is safe for women, but then also safe for men to totally deal with their issues and to talk to each other about what’s going on in their hearts.
In Genesis as a crowning act of God’s creative actions and speech on day six after God has separated the dry land from the waters and he summoned the fruit trees to come up out of the ground, that was on day three. Now he summons life to come up out of the ground on day six and it begins with God saying, let the land bring out living creatures and the cattles and beasts and they’re according to their kinds, we have this idea of the diversifying types, the living things on the ground consist of others, that are others to each other. Then when God says let us make human in our image, according to our likeness and let them rule, it presumes that one human consists of more than one, because the verbs, let them rule are plural.
Then the puzzle of how is the one human more than one, let them rule, is addressed in the little poem that’s at the center of the center of day six and the poem is three lines. Elohim created human in his image, in the image of Elohim he created the human, male and female he created them. This wonderfully suggestive, in terms of the shape of the parallelism of the poetic lines, in the image of Elohim he created him, that is the species Adam, male and female he created them, by putting those in parallel, the narrators inviting us to see that there’s something of the essence of what it means for humans to be representatives of Elohim in the fact that they are one Adam and that one Adam consists of two others in terms of biological sex male and female, he created them and then the relevance of the difference is then highlighted in what follows. Elohim blessed them, which means when God gives the gift of his own self-generating being and life, he gives that as a gift to these creatures saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the land, subdue it and rule over the creatures.
The ideal vision is about a creature that is one and more than one and when those two others, the difference between those two others that’s highlighted here is biological sex, because what God wants to give as a gift, is the ability for them to image God through the multiplication of life. So reproduction, is the union for reproduction is what’s highlighted here as at least one aspect of the blessing. So it’s a mutual vision, let them rule and let them represent God and let their unity and diversity become a life-giving process that creates even more than there was before and all of this is an image of God, it’s a beautiful vision of human, male and female mutuality.
Lamech in Genesis 4:19-23 is the first narrative example of God’s lament in Genesis 3, when he said one of the sad results of the man and the woman now having different visions of what is good in their own eyes, because they’ve taken from the tree of knowing good and bad, that the man will rule over the woman, he will rule you, which is a deliberate echo back to which is ideal, which is let them rule together. So the idea of men acting in ways that treat women like less than human, like animals, what humans are here to the animals is what God names as will be the sad reality of male and female relationships outside of Eden.
Do I view the opposite sex as an indispensable essential other to the flourishing of my own life and of my whole community, so that cultivating the fantasy and doing the power play in my heart, it’s harming them and it’s harming ultimately everyone’s well-being and even my own, if you scale it out in terms of people or you scale it out over the course of a lifetime. What is underneath Jesus’s teaching, these beautiful transcendent statements about marriage and it’s status as a symbol of this greater reality of God joining, God becoming one with his human family in and through King Jesus. It’s love, it’s regarding another human’s dignity and being as of much or greater value than my own and that if I act on that vision, it will create the kind of conditions for human flourishing. A marriage is a symbol of what a church community of men and women can become as a group embodying this, it will create, if men actually took Jesus by his word and did what he said, it will create a kind of community that is safe for women, but then also safe for men to totally deal with their issues and to talk to each other about what’s going on in their hearts.
