Why Was Adam Lonely If God Is Enough?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:02.000 | Bennett writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, I recently read the following in a book,
00:00:09.280 | "God purposefully created the world to function in such a way that He is not enough for us.
00:00:15.200 | That is why God says it is not good for man to be alone. If God were all that Adam needed, then Adam would not be
00:00:22.160 | alone, but he is alone. Not because God is there, but because one of his kind is not there.
00:00:28.320 | By choice, God limited his ability to be everything Adam needed.
00:00:32.840 | This flies in the face of what many of us have heard on a regular basis.
00:00:37.160 | I hear people say, 'All you need is God. God is enough.' Well, that sounds nice,
00:00:40.740 | but the problem is that it's not true or even biblical for that matter from a
00:00:44.240 | relational point of view. If we're talking about grace, then these statements are true. God's grace is enough.
00:00:50.240 | However, if we're talking about relationships, they are not so."
00:00:54.920 | So, Pastor John, does Christian hedonism teach that God is enough to satisfy every relational longing of our souls,
00:01:02.440 | or has God created us with an intrinsic need for others that God cannot satisfy?
00:01:09.160 | How would you answer Bennett on this question?
00:01:11.160 | That is an absolutely
00:01:14.320 | excellent question, and the reason it's an excellent question is that it grows out of a text.
00:01:21.520 | Genesis 2 18, "And the Lord God said, 'It's not good that a man should be alone.
00:01:28.640 | I will make a helper fit for him.'" So on the face of it, God clearly does not want Adam to respond,
00:01:35.960 | 'No, thank you. You've got it wrong, God. I am not alone. I have you!'
00:01:42.400 | So God thinks the present state of creation is not the final good that he intends,
00:01:51.240 | namely the man and the woman having God together.
00:01:55.000 | So having another human being is not a
00:01:58.280 | luxury in God's mind. So it seems
00:02:03.240 | Bennett's case here is pretty strong.
00:02:06.080 | It looks like an overstatement to say to Adam in the garden,
00:02:12.160 | "God is all you need." And let's make the case stronger
00:02:17.160 | by adding a few other texts, like 1 Corinthians 12. "God arranged the members of the body,
00:02:23.640 | each one of them as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is,
00:02:31.080 | there are many parts, yet one body, the eye."
00:02:34.680 | So let's say
00:02:37.400 | Tony Reinke is the eye. "The eye cannot say to the hand," that's John Piper,
00:02:44.080 | "I have no need of you."
00:02:46.080 | Nor again, "The head can say to the feet, I have no need of you."
00:02:51.640 | So there's God Almighty in his words saying flat out,
00:02:55.240 | "You dare not say to another
00:02:57.960 | member of the body of Christ, 'I don't need you.'" That's a sin to talk like that.
00:03:05.640 | In other words, God forbids us from saying, "I have God. I don't need members of the body of Christ."
00:03:12.760 | Lots of other examples could be cited. We're
00:03:15.400 | commanded to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread."
00:03:19.320 | And we're told not to be anxious about food and about clothing because Jesus said—now mark these words—
00:03:25.000 | "Your heavenly Father knows that you
00:03:28.840 | need
00:03:30.600 | them all."
00:03:32.600 | So clearly, God created a material universe,
00:03:37.160 | not just a world of spirits, and He created other souls, not just one soul to relate to Him, and He created
00:03:44.360 | society and the church, not just isolated souls relating to Him. And in doing all of this,
00:03:51.640 | creating the world, creating the church, creating society, He ordained
00:03:55.660 | that we be benefited by all these things and that some of them
00:04:01.240 | be essential for life—food, water, shelter, clothing, air—
00:04:06.760 | and others be essential for obedience, like love your neighbor as you love yourself.
00:04:11.960 | You couldn't obey that command if there were no neighbors. You need a neighbor in order to obey the command, "Love your
00:04:17.160 | neighbor." So it's not wrong to talk about needing the neighbor in the sense that God has set it up
00:04:22.360 | that way. And all this
00:04:24.920 | is a result of God not creating just idolatry or occasions for idolatry, but
00:04:30.600 | creation. He created these
00:04:34.520 | things. He created us with those kinds of needs
00:04:39.560 | that He Himself
00:04:43.080 | would meet only in the sense of giving them to us, but not being them
00:04:46.760 | for us. So, question, should we say, "God is enough,"
00:04:51.800 | or "I don't need any more than God"?
00:04:55.400 | And there's a good reason why those statements stick in our craw.
00:05:03.800 | I can tell they do by this question, and they do in mine.
00:05:06.360 | Why do they sound belittling to God when we say them, "God is not enough," or "I've got enough. I don't need
00:05:14.200 | God"? The reason is that one of the most important teachings of the Bible
00:05:20.120 | is that when all our human needs go unmet and we are utterly alone and on the brink of death,
00:05:28.520 | God will never fail us. And in that moment,
00:05:33.160 | He will be
00:05:35.160 | enough.
00:05:37.000 | That's what we mean
00:05:38.840 | when we honor God by saying, "He's all I need." In other words, if all my needs fail to be met,
00:05:46.120 | He will never fail.
00:05:48.280 | That's the point of Romans 8:35, right?
00:05:50.520 | "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" Tribulation, distress, persecution,
00:05:55.420 | famine, nakedness, peril, sword. The point of that list
00:06:01.160 | is that all those God-given needs—they're real needs for life and for obedience—all those God-given needs
00:06:09.000 | may fail.
00:06:10.840 | Famine may take food away. Nakedness may take clothing away. Sword may take
00:06:15.480 | life and limb away. In other words, every good and perfect gift that God has given us to need,
00:06:22.840 | in one sense,
00:06:25.320 | is being shown in this moment not to be needed ultimately.
00:06:30.380 | No.
00:06:32.380 | In all these things, we are more than conquerors. Nothing can separate us from
00:06:36.460 | Christ. He is enough
00:06:39.100 | in that
00:06:41.180 | moment. That's why we feel like we're dishonoring Him
00:06:44.140 | if we say we don't need Him or we have other things that we need also, and He can't satisfy.
00:06:51.180 | Now, I emphasize
00:06:54.220 | in that moment
00:06:55.980 | because God is still committed
00:06:59.180 | to the world He created, and in the resurrection, He will give back
00:07:03.420 | what He has taken away in death.
00:07:06.860 | He will have taught us in the moment of death to rely wholly on Him. Paul talks that way in 2 Corinthians 1, 8, and 9.
00:07:15.340 | Then,
00:07:17.180 | one more thing needs to be emphasized.
00:07:19.680 | Even in
00:07:22.780 | wife, food,
00:07:24.780 | church members,
00:07:26.700 | and all the other
00:07:28.300 | life-sustaining, life-enhancing needs that God
00:07:31.260 | gives us, He Himself remains
00:07:35.360 | the cream of all those pleasures, the way the Puritans talked.
00:07:40.780 | When we
00:07:43.740 | have those pleasures rightly, we are enjoying God in and through wife and
00:07:52.140 | nature and wonders and
00:07:55.980 | food so that they're not really in competition
00:07:58.960 | with Him, and in one sense,
00:08:02.540 | we can say, "I have God in all those things, not just God in addition to all those things which satisfy me." So in the end,
00:08:11.020 | our need for people
00:08:13.740 | and our need for food
00:08:15.820 | becomes a way to say,
00:08:18.140 | "See,
00:08:19.740 | here I am in this gift, God says to us. See, here I am in this gift. Do you see me?
00:08:27.260 | Do you enjoy me in this?" And so it turns out that God, in creating what is not God,
00:08:34.060 | created a world in which God Himself
00:08:37.100 | would be most fully known and most fully
00:08:42.220 | enjoyed. Amen. That is awesome. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:08:46.460 | And if you, like Bennett, have a question for Pastor John, please email it in to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:08:51.200 | We return tomorrow to look at one prayer you can pray for your family every single day.
00:08:59.980 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow.
00:09:03.500 | You
00:09:06.060 | You
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