The three-year Lectionary that many Catholics and Protestants hear in public worship gives us a great variety of Holy Scripture.

Yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

My series Forbidden Bible Verses — ones the Lectionary editors and their clergy omit — examines the passages we do not hear in church. These missing verses are also Essential Bible Verses, ones we should study with care and attention. Often, we find that they carry difficult messages and warnings.

Today’s reading is from the English Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK) with commentary by Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.

Genesis 2:25

²⁵ Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no Shame.

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First, may I wish everyone a Happy New Year: a healthy and prosperous 2024!

I hope that some of our New Year’s resolutions concern a deeper commitment to God and His Son as well as the life to come, notably through the study of Scripture.

Last week’s post discussed how the river in the Garden of Eden broke out into four other rivers, including the Tigris and the Euphrates, surrounding the Cradle of Civilisation.

Genesis 2 goes on to describe the creation of woman, a helpmeet for the man (emphases mine):

¹⁸ The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’ …

²¹ So 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^[g] and then closed up the place with flesh. ²² Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib^[h]he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

²³ The man said,

²⁴ That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Both Adam and his wife were naked and they felt no shame (verse 25).

Matthew Henry tells us that this was:

An evidence of the purity and innocency of that state wherein our first parents were created, v. 25. They were both naked. They needed no clothes for defense against cold nor heat, for neither could be injurious to them. They needed none for ornament. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Nay, they needed none for decency; they were naked, and had no reason to be ashamed. They knew not what shame was … Blushing is now the colour of virtue, but it was not then the colour of innocency. Those that had no sin in their conscience might well have no shame in their faces, though they had no clothes to their backs.

To think that eating from the Tree of Knowledge (of Evil, that is), as Satan in the guise of a serpent, could produce the downfall to come is startling. Every day, our news outlets are full of reports of sin, including sexual sin.

However, let us contemplate what that initial time must have been like for Adam and his helpmeet.

John MacArthur points out that God gave them everything they needed for their happiness:

Now man has the perfect compliment, the perfect partner. And then Adam’s poem to women ends – it’s a short one, one verse – and the chapter closes with a word from the Creator. This was given to the inspired writer Moses who wrote, of course, the book of Genesis. Verse 24 – now God’s going to make a comment on this relationship: “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”

That is a comment from the Creator. And this, beloved, establishes the foundation for marriage; and it also establishes the foundation for sexual behavior. There’s only one kind of sexual behavior that God recognizes in the human realm, and that is the sexual behavior between a man and a woman who have left father and mother, and cleaving to each other have become one flesh. That is the only context in which God has ordained and recognized sexual conduct.

… And what God established in the garden has never changed, never changed, so that you have marriage defined right there in the classic statement of Genesis 2:24. And you will find that that statement is a point of contact with the apostle Paul, and it’s a point of contact with Jesus Himself. This establishes God’s design for man, made in His image, to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over it. He does it through marriage. And marriage is defined as one man and one woman, leaving and cleaving, becoming one flesh for life. That is the only biblical definition for marriage …

Now, the Jewish leaders in the gospel of Matthew come to Jesus and they say, “Well, look, Moses allowed for divorce.” And Jesus responded by saying to them, “Yes, because of the hardness of your hearts.” Remember that in Matthew 19? “But from the beginning it was not so, it was not so.” “God” – says Habakkuk – “hates divorce.”

MacArthur discusses the couple’s rightful lack of shame in their innocence:

… they weren’t ashamed because they didn’t know any evil, they didn’t know any evil. They didn’t know that sexual desire could be used for wicked purposes. They didn’t know that sexual desire could be perverted and twisted. They didn’t have any wicked thoughts running around in their imaginations. They had no capacity to feel shame, because they didn’t know evil existed.

Can I give you a simple definition? Shame is produced by the consciousness of the evil that may exist in a thing. Shame is produced by the consciousness of the evil that may exist in a thing. We feel shame in our lives as sinners because we have evil thoughts, because we have evil desires. They didn’t exist; and there was a beauty in the shameless wonder of that original marriage …

God brought them together, and they enjoyed the full joy of that relationship; and certainly their marriage bed as it were was absolutely and utterly undefiled. They had no capacity to feel shame because they had no knowledge of anything evil. How sad when you think about that, and then you think about the fall, and how that the fall produced sin and took the pristine, pure, shameless joy of that union and corrupted it by bringing into their thoughts evil ideas that cause them, even in their own relationship, to bear a measure of shame.

But in the beginning it wasn’t that way. In the beginning in the perfect environment, there was perfect love, there was perfect rapture with each other and the perfection of wondrous creation by God. It was a shameless love that God gave these two. They had that kind of union that God has designed to be the pinnacle …

So woman was made for man, and there is where relationship begins. And, folks, I want to tell you, this is the purest and greatest, and most blessed and wondrous relationship that God has ever given; that’s why Peter calls it the grace of life. It is the best that life has to offer. It is the best gift that God could ever give.

… The ideal is one man, one woman, in a strong bond for life, becoming one flesh. No relationship outside of that can even come close to the joys and the fulfillment of that relationship.

Woman was made specifically for Adam to meet his needs: physical, emotional, and relational needs. Marriage is the very, very, very best.

MacArthur has brief words of advice for the single and the married:

… if you’re not married, get married. Some of you people are so picky. You’re just pushing off the best of life until who knows, some nebulous tomorrow when no one’s left. It isn’t a hasty decision you make, but it certainly ought to be the objective and the goal …

Proverbs – I don’t have time to develop it – but Proverbs talks about being satisfied with your wife; and Scripture just puts so much honor into marriage. It is the primary and essential relationship for a man. If you want to be fulfilled as a man or a woman, this is where you find your great fulfillment.

And having said that, obviously your heart aches because there has been so many unfaithful wives and so many unfaithful husbands who have made havoc out of marriage. And that’s part of the curse, that’s part of the fall. And we’ll see that when we get into chapter 3; that’s part of the chaos that comes. But this is God’s ideal, and this is the wondrous way in which it all began.

The next two posts concern what God told the couple after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. The woman’s curse is the subject of next week’s entry.

Next time — Genesis 3:16