Devotion:
Read Genesis 2:18-23.
We were created for fellowship with God and each other. This golden thread of truth is woven throughout all of scripture. God created you, me and all of us. God loves, understands, sees, hears and provides for us as human beings created in God’s own image.
Reading the account of God creating all things in Genesis 1, we hear this repetitive theme after each created order, “God saw that it was good.” It is interesting to note then, that in Genesis 2:18 God declares, “It is NOT good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Rev. Wil Gafney has written, “In Genesis, God is present, caring, attentive, thoughtful, and actively nurturing. Assessing God’s singular creation, God sees the need for companionship and addresses it immediately; making a statement about what it is to be human.”
God brings all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air for Adam to name and yet among them, “no suitable helper was found.” So God created woman from the side of man. And man is given voice for the first time written in scripture speaking, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; and she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”
The identity of “helper” has too often been misinterpreted to imply “a lesser creation”. But in Genesis 49:25, I Samuel 7:12, Isaiah 41:10-14, that help is very often divine. My Mother would humorously say, “Would you go to someone who knows less than you do for help?”
Focusing on who is greater and lesser, we can truly miss the point. Our focus is on God. It is God who has created and is creating. It is God who sees the needs of humankind. It is God who creates us for fellowship with God’s own self and with others. God understands how God made us. And God provides others to walk along this path called “life” with us.
The New Testament epistle of I John 1:3 says, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.” God loves us and teaches us about this gift of love through Christ and others.
Personal Worship Option;
Listen to this Youtube video presentation of James Weldon Johnson’s Poem, “The Creation” by the Primitive Christian Church.
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