This is what Scripture is meant to do. It is written for our encouragement (Romans 15:4) and our “instruction” (1 Corinthians 10:11 cp. 2 Timothy 3:15). We ignore what Scripture teaches about God’s intention for human sexuality at our peril. We will end up in the lonely place of an imploded cultural wasteland with only pagan-inspired spiritual navel-gazing, “without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). That is the dreadful state of metaphysical loneliness.

Same-sex marriage is one of the most divisive, burning issues in contemporary Western culture. It is important to get it right.

On a recent Oprah Winfrey show,[1] Kristen and Rob Bell (ex-pastor of Mars Hill (mega) Church in Michigan) made a lavish use of “values language,” to justify same-sex marriage. Kristen stated: “Marriage, gay and straight, is a gift to the world because the world needs more, not less love, fidelity, commitment, devotion and sacrifice.” Who does not want to see more love in the world? But terms like “love,” “commitment” and “sacrifice” need more careful definition. The millions watching Oprah deserve a better defense of biblical sexuality from people to whom they look for guidance. Indeed, the “made-for-TV” superficiality of these arguments is staggering and is part of the trend in certain “evangelical” circles to accept the homosexual agenda on very flimsy, sentimental, even non-existent grounds as perfectly in line with the true meaning of Christianity.[2]

How far the Bells have moved from their evangelical roots (having met as students at Wheaton College) is indicated by Kristen’s comment to Oprah that she now begins each day not with Scripture but with the Deepak/Oprah guided meditation method. According to a reviewer of this method, this meditative program is part of the present Eastern spiritual revolution or global shift of consciousness that is “a move away from traditional religious institutions with their dogmas and hierarchies to a more integrated, inter-faith spirituality that seeks to tap into the common spiritual truths that lie at the heart of all of the world’s religions.”[3] Ding dong! The once evangelical Bells, like the once evangelical Oprah, now ring out on National television the “good news” of Oneist paganism, in direct opposition to the Twoist Gospel of historic Christianity, which declares that when we look within we only see our human problems. Salvation can only come from the outside. The Bells have undergone a radical change of worldview that explains how they can so easily accept same-sex marriage.

In the same interview, the once greatly-admired preacher, Rob Bell, provides his own equally misleading defense of same-sex marriage. Irresponsibly picking and choosing between Bible texts that agree with him and those that do not, he dismisses Paul’s 2000-year old letters that no longer apply—then blithely chooses a 3500-year-old text with which he thinks he agrees, namely Genesis 2:18. In this verse God declares: ^“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” In a purely sentimentalizing interpretation of this foundational text for human civilization, Bell launches into an emotive appeal for the benefits of companionship, perfectly suited to his Oprah-taught audience:

 “One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness…Loneliness is not good for the world. Whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural and healthy to want someone to go through life with. It’s central to our humanity. We want someone to go on the journey with.”

Bell argues that the Bible, in tune with all warm-blooded normal human beings, is, in principal, opposed to loneliness, and thus implicitly and inevitably in favor of all forms of “marriage”—heterosexual, homosexual or poly-sexual, that solve this enormous human problem.

One clear implication from Bell’s interpretation is that he can therefore see no place in Scripture for singleness or celibacy—even though the spirituality the Bells now embrace, namely, Hinduism, has a large place for singleness.[4] Bell is also separating himself from the Jesus he once confessed, for Jesus puts great value on the “God-given” value of singleness (Matthew 19:11–12).

Let’s look more carefully at the Genesis text (2:18) Bell employs to defend his view of homosexual marriage. For him, this text is really just a pretext that creates an aura of objectivity, apparently lending weight to his idiosyncratic opinion. But it is not an inspired text to be studied seriously for its own sake. Bell expresses his real view of Scripture during the interview when he says: “The church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defense.”[5]

Does Genesis 2:18 actually say what Bell affirms? Perhaps Bell does not care, but the text does reserve a big surprise for those interested in what this Scripture actually teaches. There are three key terms –“alone,” “[not] good,” and “helper,” that needs to be examined.

1) “ALONE”

Bell understands the term “alone” in the phrase, “it is not good for man to be alone,” to express emotional loneliness (“one of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity”) from which to be delivered.  I took the time to examine the 204 occasions where the word “alone” (Hebrew, bad ) is used in the Hebrew Old Testament. I can confidently say that it is never used of psychological or emotional loneliness and is certainly not the meaning of the term in this text. At best, Bell’s interpretation, for a once-professional interpreter of Scripture, is superficial and careless, not to say, plainly wrong.

The Bible uses the term “alone” to mean something as distinguished from something else. There is no emotive attachment to the word. In the story of Joseph and his brothers, for example, we read: “They [the servants] served him [Joseph] by himself [literally, “alone”] and them [the brothers] by themselves…” (Exodus 43:32). See also Genesis 47:26 and Exodus 24:2. All the brothers were “by themselves” or “alone,” but not in the sense of “loneliness,” since the brothers, at least, were in a group!

“Alone” is also an expression of Old Testament monotheism: “O LORD, the God of Israel, enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth” (2 Kings 19:15; see also Exodus 22:20).

“Alone” also means that which is unique. This meaning well describes Adam, who, at the moment of God’s declaration, was the only human being that God had then made. The Bible is not telling us that Adam was suffering from emotional isolation, especially since he had God as his companion, but that he was the only human being on the face of the earth. There was more for God to do. Here, the term clearly does not mean psychological loneliness but that Adam was the only one of his kind, and that something/someone was lacking in God’s creative project. The situation of creation “was not good” only because it was not yet finished. In constructing a three legged stool, a carpenter could well say, with only two legs completed, the stool was “not [yet] good” as a functioning, dependable stool.

2) “GOOD”

So we have come to the term “good.” The creation account is replete with references to the “good.” Seven times in chapter one of Genesis, the word “good” is repeated, after every major creative act, and what makes everything good is the divine act of “separation.” Light and darkness, seas and dry land, the many “kinds” of plants and animals, are distinguished from each other, all producing a functioning, creative symphony of unity in difference. Where there is no separation, it is not good. The cosmos, “void and formless” (Genesis 1:2) needed separation into useable forms. When such distinctions are in place, things are declared good.

This goodness has cosmic significance. Twoness describes the relationship of God to creation, two distinct kinds of being, united in a common purpose. Indeed God as trinity is Twoist in this sense, because in God there is both unity and distinction. Little wonder that structures of distinction serve as God’s model for his creative work, making distinct things, like day and night, water and dry land, but uniting them in a common purpose to produce life.

But something is holding back the final overwhelming expression of goodness; something is lacking, not yet good. The process awaits its crowning moment. Adam is still “alone.”

In the final act of creation “God created man…male and female he created them…And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:27, 31). When male and female are in place, as the pinnacle of this distinction-making creative process, the “not good” disappears and everything is not only good, but very good. As soon as Eve appears, “the mother of the living” (Genesis 3:20), things will live, and everything becomes “very good.” The heterosexual binary now established constitutes the wholesome key to a functioning God-honoring, moral, gospel-revealing cosmos.

The situation was not “good,” not because there was sin or emotional suffering in the world but because the process of creation had not yet been completed. For the moment, this situation made Adam not yet effective for a role he was called to play in the future.

A perfect example of this principle of ineffectiveness of function is found in the ministry of Moses as judge of the people, recounted in Exodus 18:14–23. Interestingly, this text contains two of our key words, “not good” and “alone.” Jethro, Moses” father-in-law, sees him toiling and not accomplishing his task. The text reads:

When Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, “What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?”…Moses” father-in-law said to him, “What you are doing is ‘not good’” (Exodus 18:17).

Notice that it is the inefficiently-exercised function that is “not good.” That Moses is alone and unaided prevents him from doing his job correctly-with “not good” results. He is not psychologically lonely: indeed, there are too many people, making him unproductive and exhausted. Jethro adds:

You and the people…will certainly wear yourselves out…You are not able to do it alone…look for able men from all the people,…and let them judge the people at all times….God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people also will go to their place in peace (Exodus 18:17-18).

3) “HELPER”

Moses got help. In Genesis 2:18, Eve is identified specifically as a “perfectly-fitted helper” (Hebrew, ezer) for Adam. She is not merely the answer to a loneliness problem that could have been met by another man. She is, specifically, as woman, an essential participant in Adam’s creational vocation?

In other places in the Old Testament, this term ezer is used for God as “helper,” not for emotional support against loneliness but for military assistance in the life and death defense of Israel from her enemies (Deuteronomy 33:26–29). As Moses stated in naming his son, “The God of my father was my help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh” (Exodus 18:4). For this reason of God as the mighty deliverer, Israel raised to the Lord a monument, an eben-ezer “a stone of help” (1 Samuel 7:12).

Ezer is also used to express needed assistance for a specific task, as in 1 Chronicles 15:26 where it is stated that “God helped the Levites who were carrying the ark of the covenant of the LORD.” The case of Moses the judge, mentioned above, is an example of this kind of help. Though the term ezer is not used, God provides “helpers,” “men able to judge,” to aid Moses in the task to which he was called.

In the same way, to provide an “appropriate helper” for Adam’s present but temporary ineffectiveness, God goes to the trouble of creating, not another able-bodied male friend to help Adam with various tasks of husbandry and animal care, or to solve the problem of loneliness, but a whole new human being in female form, an incredibly specific complement to Adam, perfectly fitted for him, enabling him to do the specific job he was called to do. That demanded heterosexuality, not same-sex, loneliness-ending companionship. Indeed, if we only had the latter, there would be no one reading this article.

To make this abundantly clear, this same term, ezer, used in the Genesis 2:18 text with regards to Eve, is used two verses later, and reads as follows: “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 (ezer) fit for him” (Gen 2:20). When compared to the animals and what they could offer, Eve’s “help” takes on a very specific function for which animals or other men were useless, totally unfit. The help intended was not to lift Adam’s endless sense of loneliness, (though companionship is a wonderful secondary aspect of marriage) but to take up the massive task of the creation mandate, formally given to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” To solve the “not good” situation, God creates the “very good” heterosexual structure of marriage, in which man and woman are perfectly fitted:

…the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh.

Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh (Genesis 2:20-24).

The future of humanity, for which the Bells show little concern in their rush to down-grade the male/female distinction, and to justify homosexuality, depended not on the elimination of solitude by any kind of companionship but on the heterosexual companionship of physical marriage that produces babies, according to the cosmic formula, egg + sperm = civilization.

Ironically, the biblical text Bell uses and, in fact, misuses, comes around to bite him. For this text is not proof of the correctness of same-sex marriage, but actually gives unequivocal support for what Bell attempts to undermine, namely, God-designed, cosmically-essential, heterosexual marriage.

There is something a lot worse than emotional loneliness. Life must be desperately lonely for highly visible, once Christian, spiritual leaders who still have the woeful task of teaching about the essential issues of life but now from purely subjective inward-looking meditative states. How do you satisfy the longing of people who rely on you, who have aches in their bones to know with assurance what God has truly revealed about the essential issues of life? How do you do it without the support and authority of divinely-inspired Scripture?

A day after the crucifixion of Jesus, two of disciples, one named Cleopas, felt lonely and abandoned, “looking sad,” as the text says (Luke 24:17). The answer to their depressed state was obviously meeting the Risen Jesus, but also, as they note, when Jesus, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” This Bible study led by Jesus “caused their hearts to burn within them….when he opened the Scriptures to them” (Luke 24:32 ).

This is what Scripture is meant to do. It is written for our encouragement (Romans 15:4) and our “instruction” (1 Corinthians 10:11 cp. 2 Timothy 3:15). We ignore what Scripture teaches about God’s intention for human sexuality at our peril. We will end up in the lonely place of an imploded cultural wasteland with only pagan-inspired spiritual navel-gazing, “without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). That is the dreadful state of metaphysical loneliness.

Dr. Peter Jones is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Director of truthXchange and Adjunct Professor of New Testament, as well as Scholar in Residence, at Westminster Seminary California.

[1] September, 2014.

[2] Peter Jones, “Evangelicalism in Crisis?,” TruthXchange (February 11, 2015)

[3] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/perspectiveofaseeker/2014/08/oprah-and-deepak-chopra-meditation-experience-review/#ixzz3WGbNjEt7

[4] “What is the role of celibacy in Hinduism?” Patheos Library(n.d.) states: “In general, celibacy in Hinduism is associated with increased physical power, strength, concentration, well-being, and longevity and is also associated with the control of desire (and ultimately the control of oneself).”

[5] Stevie St. John, “WATCH: Oprah Asks if Christian Support for Marriage Equality Is ‘Moments Away?,” Advocate.com (February 17 2015).