If you’ve managed to find your way to our blog – welcome, we’re so glad you’re here! First of all, I know we said on Monday that we would be posting twice a week, but we got such a great response from readers (and we’ve been brainstorming post ideas like crazy) that we’ve decided to bump it up to 3 a week – Monday, Wednesday, & Friday. We hope you’re as excited about this as we are!
You may be wondering about the title of our site, ‘The Helpmates’. When Cara & I started talking about blogging, we knew we couldn’t do it without a significant spiritual emphasis. We want this blog to be a tool to encourage each other & keep each other accountable in our relationships with both God & our husbands. And we figured that as long as we’re encouraging each other, we should encourage you, too!
So, this post is the first of a 3-post series on ‘The Helpmates’, outlining why wives are called to be helpmates, what it means to be a helpmate, and some practical ways to strive to be a better helpmate to your husband. Please feel free to leave thoughts & suggestions in the comments!
Starting from the beginning, in Genesis 2:18, women have a clearly defined role in marriage:
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
God wanted to provide Adam with a helpmate – someone fit for him, to live life by his side. When you study the Hebrew that verse is really interesting in the way it describes ‘helper’ or ‘helpmate’, essentially an equal but opposite perfect fit.
In the next verses (vv. 19-20), God has Adam look for this helpmate in all the animals. This wasn’t because God thought he might find one there, but to show Adam that no other creature in all of creation could fulfill the needs that God had given him.
Then, God causes him to fall asleep and creates woman from his rib (vv. 21-22). Imagine what it must have been like for Adam, falling asleep after discovering that the thing you most want, the relationship that you have been created to crave, doesn’t exist anywhere in all of creation. He fell asleep in loneliness & despair, and when he awoke – behold, a helpmate, fit perfectly for him! His emotions overflow into song in verse 23:
Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
Then, the chapter ends with this charge:
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
In verse 18, we saw that it was a bad thing for Adam to live without a helpmate. When he is finally given the helpmate that he longed for, his equal and opposite perfect fit, he clings to her as his own flesh. This is God’s design for marriage. That’s why we’re helpmates, because it is the good and perfect design of God.
Now that we have fleshed out (no pun intended) why wives are called to be helpmates, in the next post we will expand on what being a good helpmate means.
