Eve was guilty of picking a forbidden fruit, but many of us are guilty of sin-picking on a daily basis. It’s so easy to focus on the sin of others and totally miss the gifts and calling of the sinner.
Bible teacher and commentary writer Solomon Mekonnen was my guest on a recent Greenelines podcast, and we discussed the life of Eve and what many Christians miss about her.
Solomon told me, “The story and the narrative about Eve is probably one of the most misunderstood or wrongly labeled facts of biblical history, because we simply pick up only the last aspect of what she did on her way out of paradise. We only know her as Eve who was the initial cause for the fall. And I do think that is a disservice and absolutely the wrong perception. I’m not saying she wasn’t the cause of the fall, but that’s not what she is all about. My interest was sort of triggered in this when I was making another study on knowing the purpose for which we are created. I think one of the greatest problems that we all have as human beings is we don’t really understand who we are. We know our names and our identities and all that. But from the divine purpose point of view, most of us struggle and don’t take time to prayerfully and spiritually seek and search.
“We see how God gives us the reason why He created Eve,” Mekonnen continued. “He created Eve to be a helpmate to Adam. He created her to meet a need, to complement Adam. If you talk to most men, or just listen to conversations, few people look at Eve as a complementary creation, as one who was given to us by God to meet a need to take away the loneliness. And so that simply means without Eve, we are incomplete. Adam was incomplete.
“We deny the fact that God created Eve. We fail to call to remembrance that she was created for a glorious and a wonderful purpose—to come to Adam, to be his helpmate and, in that aspect, to be the mother of all the living. When Adam woke up from the deep sleep and was sort of recovering from the surgery, he saw her, and immediately he recognized that point and said, ‘Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones, and you shall be called Eve.’ So, the point there is with Adam, the first thing he realized is that she was a gift to him from God, to complement him, to fulfill him and to become his helpmate. And so she is an image bearer, a steward, and she is uniquely a helpmate, complementary that he might be complete,” Solomon said.
Time hasn’t changed much. Women today still feel misunderstood and slighted for their contributions in the church, Mekonnen agreed.
“That has been the case over the years, over the centuries,” he said. “But simply because we have focused on the fall and we forgot the original purpose for which Eve is created, we have actually caused pain and suffering on women and hurt her daughters, as the generations continue to do so. And they, for the most part, and in most of the different periods of human existence, continued still to be the helpmates and to do the work of raising a family and supporting the husband.”
