Once when I was little I broke an old mercury thermometer.
Mum found me playing with this liquid metal in my hands – watching it pull apart and flow perfectly back into itself.
In Genesis 1:26-27 it’s clear God’s plan is to create man and woman, yet in Genesis 2 there’s this odd interruption where in between creating man and woman, He pauses the creation process and stops… bringing all the animals before Adam to name. Then, as though it’s a natural flow on from naming the animals it says “But for Adam no suitable helper was found”.
Huh?
There must’ve been something in Adam viewing and naming the creatures that relates to that flow on.
After naming the creatures he does sees that he is alone. Was God’s purpose in this to create in Adam a desire for companionship? God didn’t create woman because Adam suddenly desired this, He created her because it was always His plan, and yet it seems He DID want for her to be desired, not just accepted… perhaps it was also to enable the first taste of gratitude??? (God gives you the desires of your heart – the placement AND the fulfilment when in and of His will).
And God puts him into a deep sleep, removes a rib, closes the flesh (indicating a wound had been created), creates the woman, and brings her to him on waking.
Adam’s last waking moments seem to have been the naming of the animals and when he sees her, he continues in the same vein and says ““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.”
So it seems that part of God’s purpose was also for the first man to name woman also… part of the odd flow-on from the naming to the slumbering.
Interesting.
Each portion of creation enables the next… or the existence of each potion of creation seems to depend, or flow out from, the existence of the one before. Woman was a part of mans own flesh… taken from his very side… they are of the same substance enabling them to, in their separate distinct bodies, again be ‘of one flesh’.
I can see those droplets of mercury in my hand even now.