Today your family will discover more about God’s creation of marriage and sexuality. I am very excited for you and your family as I hope that what you will learn about today will become the basis for many more great conversations, as your children grow and mature. There is a lot of confusion these days about healthy sexuality. Genesis 2 teaches us that God made sex at the same time he made marriage and that they belong together if they are to be the blessing God intended that they be. My hope is that this basic truth will become the starting place for all future conversations you may all have about this topic. 

 

As a brief overview to Genesis 2, while Genesis 1 provides a detailed account of all 6 days of creation, Genesis 2 zooms in on day 6 specifically to describe in more detail the events of that day.

 

God’s Rules

 

We begin by learning about how God created man and placed him in a garden with 2 trees. The tree of life was meant to prolong his life indefinitely, while the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would result in man’s death if he ate from it. This is a great opportunity for you to teach that God designed rules. Though some people see rules as restrictions to freedom, parents know that rules provide children with freedom; freedom to know where the boundaries are for their safety, and freedom to grow and flourish in the most optimal way. God’s rules exist to show us that God is holy and that when we follow his rules we live holy like him. When we live holy lives as God wants us to then we flourish as humans and appreciate his holiness more. Likewise, when we go against God’s rules we suffer the natural consequences, which are pain and death, and we appreciate his holiness less. So “God’s rules exist because he wants us to flourish in holiness.”

 

Two become one...

 

Up until now, after every act of creation in Genesis 1 God declared, “it is good.” Suddenly in Genesis 2:18-20, God interrupts this pattern with the statement, “it is not good that man be alone.” God did not intend man to be independent and solitary. God created man to need help, so he says “I will make a helper suitable for Adam.” He puts Adam to sleep, removes a part of his side, and fashions the woman out of it. When Adam awakens, God brings Eve to him and presents her in a similar way to how a father presents his daughter to the groom on her wedding day at the altar. At this point Adam realizes that Eve has been created from his own flesh, so he names her woman, which literally means “from man”. Then God makes this single sentence pronouncement in Genesis 2:24 which defines the meaning of marriage and sex forever.

 

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.”

 

So God removed a piece of Adam’s flesh from him, and then brought his flesh back to him in the form of another person. For Adam to be whole he would now need to be closely connected to Eve for the rest of his life, and this is what marriage is all about. Marriage and sexuality were designed by God to be a picture of the unity and completeness of 2 becoming one. That is what the Bible means by “one flesh.”

 

So this is why all sexual practices outside of monogamous marriage are condemned in the Bible, because they do not show the proper picture of completeness between a man and woman that God intended when he created us. Genesis 2:24 is the key passage I encourage you to refer back to whenever your children have questions about sexual ethics. Ask, “does it align with God’s design?” We learned at the beginning of this chapter that God created rules to show us how to live holy lives, and now we see that keeping sex inside marriage between a husband and wife is a rule he created to help humans live holy lives. Anytime we try to do sex or marriage outside of God’s design it will not lend to our holiness and flourishing, but our pain and misery, as well as a diminished view of God’s holiness. 

 

No Shame

 

Day 3 we will explore this theme in more detail as we read Genesis 3, but the last point Genesis 2 makes to us is that Adam and Eve were both naked and they felt no shame. God wants our children to have a healthy view of their bodies, and to feel no shame over our sexual organs. As you teach your children about God’s creation of the sexual parts of their body, do so confidently, stating that God made their bodies, and that everything that God makes is good.

 

May God bless you and your family as you grow closer to him and to one another.