Stephen
Terry, Director
When
Alone
Commentary
for the April 27, 2019 Sabbath School Lesson
“ The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make a helper suitable for him.’”
Genesis 2:18, NIV
Sadly, our lesson this week is seriously flawed in that
it implies that one might have a holier state of being as a result of being
alone or single. This is not God’s desire for our lives and when we misquote
Paul in regards to the idea of remaining alone we do serious harm to God’s
image in us. Worse, we also ignore that the context of Paul’s counsel is that this
is his opinion and not an opinion from God.[i] Our willingness to take
his personal opinion and elevate it to a commandment from God perhaps says more
about our distorted perspective on the inerrancy of the Bible than it does
about any willingness God has to isolate us from one another in celibate
solitude. The harm we inflict on the lonely in socially condemning them to an
eremitic lifestyle as the answer to their loneliness we may one day have to
give account for.
Many years ago, while pastoring small churches in the Midwest, I became sadly
aware that often the elderly brothers and sisters, who may have even been
members of the local congregation since they were children, would go the entire
week between Sabbaths without feeling the touch of another human being. I
reasoned that at least at church they should feel the touch of human kindness
and compassion, if nowhere else. I encouraged those who were greeting these
dear, lonely saints to feel free to hug them if they were willing. Seeing their
faces light up with the knowledge that someone cared about them was priceless.
However, one “church lady” decided it was unseemly and embarked on a campaign
to stop hugging in church. She made life so miserable for these lonely souls
that they felt compelled to refuse the hugs to avoid conflict with her. Once
these seniors were relegated back to their social isolation, she was happy, and
they were once again depressed and lonely, and sadly now afraid to show
openness to those who cared about them.
Making matters worse, some in the churches have decided
that standards needed to be set for whatever hugging might continue to exist.
For instance, a “side hug” was determined to be holier than a frontal hug. In order
to enforce this, they decreed that any woman who was confronted with a frontal
hug should immediately turn sideways and thrust her hip forward to discourage
the effort. It seems to me that simply saying, I do not care to hug would be a
more appropriate reaction, unless the person persisted in spite of the
declaration of refusal. However, if that were the case, I would hope that the
pastor or an elder would step in and not leave the sister to her own devices in
dealing with inappropriate aggression.
It seems ironic that we would isolate those who are
single in this manner and then establish rules of behavior designed to further
isolate them from others. As Seventh-day Adventists, we do not have monasteries
or convents, but we are too often just as effective in creating Adventist monks
and nuns by discouraging their interaction in any intimate sense. Discouraged
by such restriction and expressing their loneliness, they are told to look to
the words of Paul about avoiding marriage and to find God’s will in that, just
as our lesson has done. But is that God’s will? Does he really want us to live
lives of silent desperation and sexual frustration? If that were the case, why
would he create us with sexuality and sexual desire? Is he deliberately setting
us up for failure to meet a God-ordained requirement of celibacy? The LGBTQ et
al, community may be well ahead of the rest of us on this, for many of them
have come to the conclusion that they were created with their sexual
orientation, so how could it be wrong to be what they are and also Christian?
Regardless of how we may feel one way or another about their lifestyle, their argument
is logical if we assume, as we often assert, that God designed us while we were
yet in the womb.[ii]
While we may debate its applicability to less common sexual identity, sexuality
is very much a part of who we are created to be. Without that sexual aspect to
our being, we would have a very hard time being fruitful and increasing in
number.[iii] This was the very first
commandment given to mankind, even before the Sabbath and perhaps even before
the concept of marriage, shared later, was developed.[iv] That this idea of
marriage was a later concept can be seen in that it involves a young man leaving
his parents. At the time of Creation, there were no children to leave their
parents in such a manner.
Some have maintained that Adam and Eve could not fulfill
the requirement to fill the earth until after they sinned, and therefore, their
sin was intended to enable them to fulfill the command. However, the command
preceded the Fall, and God does not command that which cannot be realized. Also
the fact that mankind was created male and female demonstrates that sexuality
and all that it entails was intended from the moment of creation. As a result,
the idea that it is somehow God’s intention for the lonely and the single to
remain in a celibate, social netherworld is a most profound denial of God’s
purpose for us as his creation. This is equivalent to the Book of 2 Samuel
telling us that God made David number Israel,[v] a sin that resulted in the
deaths of thousands. The later writer of 1 Chronicles took issue with that idea
and stated that is was Satan and not God who was behind David’s sin.[vi] Both statements could not
be correct and illustrate that it is possible for God’s saints to get important
details wrong, even in the Bible. This means that Paul’s opinion about marriage
could be just as wrong as the writer of 2 Samuel had been about David’s census.
Also, if we can see an instructive parallel in the example of David numbering
Israel, the idea of people leading lives of desperate loneliness may not be part
of some plan to further his work by removing the distraction of marriage from a
person’s life as Paul asserts. Instead, if we see it as the result of sin and
not of God’s will, we can realistically make the issue a matter of prayer and know
that we have a sympathetic ear with God.
When we have cancer, and we pray about it and do not
experience healing, we do not say it is God’s plan for our lives. We recognize it
for what it is - the result of a fallen world. We may come to accept a terminal
diagnosis, but we will never accept that God really wants that for his people.
In the same way, we should not accept the idea that God created us as sexual
beings and then said “Don’t be sexual.” That makes no more sense than giving us
legs and commanding us to only go about in wheelchairs. Even a child would then
question why we have legs, and rightly so. God has even endorsed our sexuality
by not only making it possible, but also making it pleasurable. Perhaps this
contributes, to a large degree, to our willingness to fulfill that commandment.
With a population not far from eight billion, some might argue that we have
more than fulfilled that commandment. However, if biblical examples are any
indication, God is capable of closing up wombs, so the continuing birth of
children may be indicative of whether or not God agrees that the commandment has
been satisfied.[vii]
So what is the bottom line here? It is simply this. As
Christians, we have so often placed so many taboos around the expression of
human sexuality that not only does it far too often result in people leading
lives of celibate loneliness, it also encourages those who would enforce such
ideas to use those mores in attempts to control, exclude and socially isolate
others from the normal human experience. Instead of reinforcing the right of
every human being to seek out and fulfill reproductive purpose, we relegate
some in a “survival-of-the-fittest” style scenario to never being allowed to
compete as fully sexual human beings due to some imagined inadequacy. Those
ideas of inadequacy are often created by Hollywood and other media efforts and
not by God. Instead, perhaps, we should recognize God’s divine purpose in the
sexuality we were created with and encourage others who are lonely and isolated
in seeking out social interaction in a manner that creates pathways to deeper,
more meaningful relationships through shared social networks. Maybe, in the
style of “Fiddler on the Roof,” we could use more match-making Yentes and fewer social-rule-enforcing church ladies in our
congregations. This might result in fewer lonely Adventist monks and nuns who
sit at home on Saturday nights wondering why God has abandoned them to
solitude.
