God’s Word for You

Genesis 2:21 Adam’s rib

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, August 30, 2026

21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he was sleeping, he took one of his ribs and closed up the place where it had been with flesh.

After all the activity of the sixth day of creation, the Lord was not yet finished. In many ways, it reminds me of being a guest at a wedding. The day is getting old; afternoon is going to turn into evening, the people are waiting for the couple to appear.

But here God unveils everything for us to see. The animals have been created. Adam has been formed and given life and a soul. God has given the man a commandment. God has paraded the animals in front of the man to be named, and now at last God causes a tardemah to fall upon the man, a deep sleep. This is no nap, but the deep sleep of the darkest part of night (Job 4:13, 33:15). Here it is a deep sleep sent by God, like the one in 1 Samuel 26:12 when David crept through Saul’s camp in safety. This time, the Lord removed something from the man’s side. There is not really any bone in a man’s side to be removed apart from a rib, and so we take the word tselah to be “rib.” That word can also mean “ridge” or ridge of hills or the “frames” on the sides of the tabernacle (Exodus 26:26). God surely took the bone and some of the flesh surrounding it; we come to this conclusion first because God closes up the place with (more) flesh, and secondly because Adam uses both terms, bone and flesh, when he describes the woman when he sees her.

Here all of the speculations of the philosophers are rolled up and set away on the shelf, because they argue and debate as to whether there could ever have been a first man. On the one hand, men like Epicurus thought that the making of man was an accident, and therefore man should enjoy the accidental life he leads. On the other side, Aristotle cannot conceive of a “first man” and therefore denies that there ever was a time when men did not exist. His philosophy dismisses many other philosophies, and such arguments are left with nothing much to say. But Moses (who lived and wrote a thousand years before Epicurus or Aristotle) gives us the answer: There was a first man, and his wife did not come from among lesser creatures, whether animals, apes, or pre-humans. His mate was a mature woman made from his own body. All other people come from the body of their mother, but Eve came from the body of her husband.

Luther writes: “Therefore this is an outstanding text. The more it seems to conflict with all experience and reason, the more carefully must it be noted and the more surely believed. Here we are taught about the beginning of man that the first man did not come into existence by a process of generation, as reason has deceived Aristotle and the rest of the philosophers into imagining. The reproduction of his descendants takes place through procreation; but the first male was formed and created from a clod of the field, and the first female from the rib of the sleeping man. Here, therefore, we find the beginning which it is impossible to find through Aristotle’s philosophy.”

Neither science nor philosophy can tell man where we truly came from. Human beings don’t know anything about their beginning or their end apart from the Word of God. But here is the real trouble. It is the beginning and the ending of life that we must consider: the beginning, because that is the text before us. The end, because that is what is inevitably coming to each one of us.

Too many people catch and rip their pantleg on this nail of the creation of mankind and ruin their opportunity to listen to Christ and be ready for the end. Yes: God put the man into a deep sleep. Yes: God took a rib from the man and closed up the place with flesh. Yes, as we are about to hear: It was from this matter that God formed the woman. She is not a descendant of anyone at all; she was made from the body of the man, and the man was formed and given life by God. And it is to God to whom we must look for everything, not only this account of the beginning of the human race, but the consequences of sin in our flesh and in our lives, and what hope we have in the coming Judgment Day.

God wants us to learn about him, to trust in his Word, and to be brought safely by the grace of God into eternal life. We will have a while to wait, not quite like a bored wedding guest, but a peaceful slumber with an even greater joy awaiting us than Adam had on that day he had been made. We will, in this sense, be born once again from the soil, as Adam was, as we are remade and reunited with our spirits (which were brought to life from water and the Spirit at our baptism).

We will be given life again, breath in our lungs, strength in our limbs, and faith in our hearts—the same faith we had in life, now fulfilled as we will be brought to the Paradise that awaits us with our Savior in heaven.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

Browse Devotion Archive