WOMAN WAS NOT GOD’S ORIGINAL IDEA (PART I)

“What Chris Oyakhilome Gets Wrong About Creation”

By Akin Ojumu

According to Chris Oyakhilome, it was never God’s intention to create a woman. The creation of Eve was a mere afterthought. Perhaps lacking the foresight and foreknowledge that the man He created would feel alone, God had to go back to the drawing board. He had to quickly adjust His creation plans on the fly, just so He could accommodate Adam’s despondency and assuage his melancholy.

Chris Oyakhilome attempted to sell this eye-popping idea to his followers while he was making the case that women are lower-caste creatures whom God confined a lifetime of indentured servitude. In Oyakhilome’s world, the woman is totally inferior and completely subordinate to the man. 

Just so you don’t think I’m making this all up, why don’t you hear it from the horse’s mouth?

“Let me tell you something…let me tell you something. If you want to live according to the Bible…according to the Scriptures, then understand what the Word says. The reason God made woman was because of man. He made the woman because of the man. That’s why He made the woman. So, woman was not His original idea…”

Upon hearing this, you can imagine the uproar in the gathered crowd. The men in the audience loved every word of Lord Chris. And the women? Well, that’s a different story. You could say they went berserk. They would have none of Oyakhilome’s sexist drivel. Astounded that their own King Chris would even harbor such misogyny talk less of utter it, they pushed back with shouts of:

“Nooooo!!!! Booooo!!!!”

Stunned to hear his otherwise obediently compliant subjects booing him in his own kingdom, a suddenly stuttering Oyakhilome attempts to make them see his point. He goes on to say:

“Listen. This is reality. Ok. Alright. Scriptures. Let’s talk about…let’s see what the Bible says. Now listen. When God had made everything, and then He made Adam, the Bible says, everything was very good. Already, everything was very good…no problem. Then, He got Adam…”

It was as if Oyakhilome poured petrol into a burning fire. With those words, pandemonium breaks out in the crowd. While the men in the crowd clap, nod, and raise their fist in solidarity with their chauvinistic “Dear Leader,” the women are by now palpably infuriated. Before Oyakhilome finishes explaining his spurious assertion by citing the Bible, he is met with a thunderous rain of boos and hisses from the women.

Realizing he started a fire he cannot quell, a defeated Chris Oyakhilome resignedly says:

“Ok…” 

If Chris Oyakhilome’s chauvinistic balderdash sounds like utter rubbish to you, it’s because it is. The high-sounding gobbledygook uttered by the man is what in Texas is called pseudo-profound bovine scatology, which in layman’s term means a huge pile of smoldering hot horse excrement.

The idea that any part of the Creation plan was an afterthought is, in itself, a blasphemy of the highest order. Not only does such a notion directly contradict what God says about Himself in Scriptures, it is a clear attempt to denigrate the Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnipresent God.

At several times and in diverse places in Scriptures, God tells us that He knows all things, sees all things, and hears all things; past, present, and future. Nothing escapes the all-seeing, all-hearing, and all-knowing Majesty on High.

Isaiah 46:9-10

“Remember what happened long ago, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me. I declare the end from the beginning, and from ancient times what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and all My good pleasure I will accomplish.”

Psalm 139:16 

“Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Isaiah 42:9

“Behold, the former things have come to pass, Now I declare new things; Before they spring forth I proclaim them to you.”

Now, let me address Oyakhilome’s lack of understanding of the order of Creation of man and woman. 

On the Sixth day of Creation, God created man. The Hebrew word for “man” is “Adam,” which means mankind or human being. Included in the term Adam is male and female. 

Genesis 1:27-28

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.””

After God had completed creating mankind, He was pleased with the work of His hand.

Genesis 2:31

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

Chapter 2 of Genesis simply fills in the details of man’s creation on Day Six. While Genesis chapter 1 can be likened to the headlines of Creation of man, Genesis chapter 2 provides the detailed account. It is, as it were, a deep dive into the sequence of events that happened in the creation of mankind. 

What Chris Oyakhilome fails to understand is that God did not make the remarks in Genesis 2:31 until He had finished creating the male and female species of mankind. The statement, “And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good,” was in reference not just to the man, but both the man and the woman.

Now, with respect to whether or not God has instituted a hierarchical relationship between the male and female species of humankind, let me turn to the late Pastor John MacArthur, a foremost theologian whom I highly respect to shed light on that. He delivered a sermon on the subject at his Grace Community Church back in November 1999.

It is still day six; Adam is in the garden. Everything in the garden is very good, everything God has made is very good, but it is not good for the man to be alone. That means it’s still on day six, because look at chapter 1, verse 31: “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.” So, when you come to the end of the sixth day, everything is very good.

But this isn’t the end of the sixth day yet. This is still in the sixth day, and everything is not very good. There is one thing that is not good at all, and that is it’s not good for the man to be alone. And so, God says, “I will make him a helper suitable for him.” It is not good, it is not very good, because man does not yet have a helper. That doesn’t mean that there was something that was bad or something that was evil, for, in fact, there wasn’t. It isn’t that anything in itself was less than good or less than perfect, because everything was perfect, and everything that had been created was good.

But man’s position, or man’s circumstance in the creation was not yet complete, and it couldn’t be good until it was complete. It wouldn’t be very good until it was not only perfect, but complete. And that completion required a woman. And verse 27 says, on day six, “God created man,” – chapter 1, verse 27 – “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” That simply states that He did create the man and the woman on the sixth day, and here in this chapter we have more detail about that.

So, God says, “It is not good that man should be alone.” Though man as created was good and he was perfect, created perfectly by God, and his location in the garden of Eden was perfect, everything around him was good, there was still one component missing: he could not do what it said for him to do in verse 28 of chapter 1. He couldn’t be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. He certainly couldn’t subdue the whole earth by himself. He couldn’t rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And back in verse 26, “He was given dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” But no one person could do all of that. And man certainly could not be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, unless he had a companion. At this point in the sixth day creation, he is still incomplete. He needs a partner. He needs an equal, a helper to compliment him in fulfilling the task of filling and taking dominion over the earth; and that simply means woman needed to be made in order to meet man’s insufficiency. Now at this particular point in the creation, all reproducing creation was both male and female, all of it, and man alone did not yet have that compliment.

Later on, in the sixth chapter of Genesis, “Of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female.” God made everything male and female initially, except for man. And so, God said, “In order to complete man, I will make him a helper suitable for him.”

As you can see from Pastor MacArthur’s brilliant sermon, God made the woman as a partner and an equal with the man. In the absence of the woman, it is impossible for man to multiply and replenish the earth. And without the woman by his side, man would never be able to fulfil his God-given mandate to have dominion over the earth. 

God created the man and woman to serve different, but complimentary, roles in the world. Each person’s role is not more important than the other. While man is the leader and the head, and the woman is to submit to the authority of the man, the authority given to man should never be confused with a conferment of superiority. Nowhere in Scriptures is it taught that the woman is a lower caste creature.

We’ll take it from here next time.