Friends of the blog know its founder put significant thought into its tagline, and particularly the content and order of “faith, life, and people.” I settled on this list and order in part because it emphasized, in many ways, the last item; “people” is at the end of a “rule of three” list, is longer than the other two words, and is the only one with hard syllables. So why the emphasis?

People are central to the faith and to life. The story of the Bible centers around God’s partnership with people, and their subsequent failure in that partnership, until God becomes a person in order to redeem all other people. Today, we – as people redeemed by Christ – carry this partnership forward.

From the first pages of the Bible, the Bible has a consistent view of people: who we are, what we were made for, and how we should live. And I think that our society and our Church is doing a terrible job of recognizing one of these fundamental truths: that people were not made to be alone. Genesis discusses this thoroughly, even stating it outright from God’s own voice, so I’ll make my argument there.

I’ll highlight each use of the Hebrew word “adam” (according to Blue Letter Bible), which is used in a similar way to the archaic use of the English “man”. In other words, it could refer to an individual man, males as a concept or whole, or humans (think “mankind”) broadly. It’s also used as the name of Adam, the first person, but that shouldn’t be an issue since his narrative role is to stand in for all men. (This is acknowledged in Genesis 2:24.) I won’t argue about exactly which party is being referenced where, because I think any interpretation of scripture this side of Dante should show that my points today are equally applicable to men and women.

First Creation

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26-27 ESV (emphasis added)

The first two instances of the word for people are in Genesis 1. The verses above are day six of the creation story, after God has created everything else in the heavens and the Earth, and called it good. Today, though, something special is made – mankind. Mankind, both male and female, was created to be like God, who is full of love and is always loved by the other parts of the trinity. Not only that, but mankind is created as not only the crown jewel of creation, but as the very crown – we were given the task of ruling over everything else God had created except the very stars and the heavens they ruled.

And when God had done this, when He had created His likeness and given it authority over all the Earth, Hhe said that it was very good in verse 31. It was not merely just as good as the first five days of creation; it was moreso. It is evidenced throughout the rest of the Bible that God loves his creation. How much more must He love people? And what else could we have been created for, if not to be loved and to love, and to be together with each other and God?

Second Creation

The next use of the word “adam” comes during a more detailed creation story. Genesis 2 focuses on the creation of humans, describing exactly how God created the first one in verses 5-8. Continuing the theme of people being elevated above the rest of the earthly creation, God puts Adam in the center of what He has made: Eden, a garden of paradise in which God and Adam walk and work together. (Reminder: Adam shares a name with mankind because he serves as an example or stand-in for the rest of us.) That’s six more instances of the word “adam” through verse 16, for those keeping count at home.

So now that God has created the co-ruler of His creation and installed him in the throne room, what’s next? First, in verse 17, God sets out the condition of the arrangement: that Adam trusts His judgment of good and evil, rather than trying to decide for himself. Immediately after this, we find the next few uses of the word “adam”:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 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. 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. 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. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

Genesis 2:18-22 ESV

In this passage we find the verdict: God’s own words that people need a type of partnership that only other people can provide. So important is this fact that it’s addressed right after the ground rule, before Adam can do anything in his new kingdom. In fact, he first exercises this authority in order to find a suitable partner. The only thing more important than Adam having a helper was the covenant of his rule in Eden.

And this importance is recognized. Adam is so thrilled to have someone who is his match that he immediately bursts into song! In verse 23, he uses idiom to express how the woman is like him at a deep level (think of how the phrase “I feel it in my bones” refers to a deep, inner self or intuition). Then he finishes with naming woman after man (using a different word from “adam”), further celebrating their similarity.

Lessons for a Fallen World

Genesis 2 finishes with a note on marriage, and then things go downhill in chapter 3. In the fallen world, how do we read this passage?

The top-level reading is that men and women were made to be married. There’s been much analysis and debate on this, which I’ll leave alone for now – my argument here is that people were made for deep relationships. Yes, this relationship can be marriage, but perhaps it’s a consequence of the fall that we don’t get a tailor-made spouse as our first order of business in life. If marriage was the only deep relationship we could form, then there’s pretty big groups of people who would be hopelessly lonely: children, widows and widowers, and those not called to marriage to name a few. So to find hope, I believe we need to form deep relationships in our spiritual community.

There are patterns for this throughout the Bible. David, before he became king and before he got married, had such a friend in Jonathan. In the new testament, Paul wrote of how he was not called to marriage and even wished the same for others. However, he had no lack of deep personal connections strong enough to refer to them as brothers and sisters, his spiritual children, and at least one woman who was like a mother to him.

I want to encourage you to take this lesson and apply it to your life. I believe that people, and the Church as a whole, are strongest when they are in community. This takes getting to truly know one another. Until I moved a few weeks ago, I was blessed with a rich church community who loved getting together and walking through life with one another. The beauty of the relationships I formed there have transformed my path in life, and many of them were inspiration to start this blog.

The call to action here is to lean into community. Like most journeys in faith, there are many steps on this path, and many starting points. I’d suggest finding a church to attend regularly as a starting point. If you already are, find a small group, or maybe an opportunity to start one. Within an existing group, encourage vulnerability and openness, which will lay the foundations of deep relationships as we no longer carry the burden of our facades and performances.

This is where I think the Church is perhaps most deficient. It is evidenced by the epidemic of loneliness across the West, and by the shocking statistics of people who identify as Christians but don’t attend regular gatherings at all. It is evidenced by the reputation churches have gotten for being a performance, where people go to show off how good they are at being Christian, where newcomers who don’t have their religious act together feel out of place or even judged.

We can be a Church that welcomes the outsider and has all things in common, and that starts with your local church.