“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I have been eagerly watching the latest season of Disney’s Loki series. The latest installment of the misadventures of the fan-favorite villain-turned-hero has, in my opinion, been even better than the last season. Reportedly, its viewership is down some from last season, but Disney viewership in general is down because the company keeps doing things and producing media to trumpet their woke bonafides which just keeps pushing more and more people away. That’s a conversation for another time. So is a full review of the latest (and, honestly, probably last) Loki season as I haven’t yet watched the finale. But a bit of dialogue in the penultimate episode did reveal what has been driving Loki and point to what will probably be the big theme of the season, and possibly Loki’s entire character arc. He’s trying to save the world because he’s lonely. That seems pretty basic as far as motivations go, but it struck me as a whole lot more significant than people might think. Let’s talk about why.

I have long taken pains to point out when I get the opportunity that the first thing that wasn’t good in creation was that the man was alone. Throughout the first, zoomed-out creation narrative in Genesis 1, God over and over again pronounces the things He has made to be good. When He finally gets down to making people, He pronounces us very good. He’s really impressed with His work. He is immensely pleased with it. It reflects His glory and His character just as He designed it to (because, of course it does; He’s God).

But then we get into the more intimate creation story, the one that gives the details on how the man and woman were made uniquely and individually, and we discover the first problem in the world. It wasn’t sin. That doesn’t enter the picture until the next chapter. The first problem in the world, one that predates even sin itself, is loneliness.

At this point, God had created just the man. Rather than simply speaking him into existence like He had all of the rest of creation, God got His hands dirty with this one. He formed him from out of the dust of the ground. And then, when He had everything just right, He got right down in his face and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils in what we’ll call the first act of CPR ever performed. He made the man and set him loose to manage creation as His representative.

But then, after watching Him for a while, God noticed something. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. God never notices anything. He simply knows everything. We could perhaps better put this that God pointed out something to the man. He allowed him to experience something so that he would accept it for the truth that it is. And this thing God pointed out that was the first thing in all of creation that wasn’t good was the fact that the man was alone. He wasn’t made to be alone. He wasn’t made to be alone because he was created in the image of a relational God. In all of creation, though, the man didn’t have any kind of a creation that corresponded to him; that was like him in a way he could build a relationship with it. An “it” was never going to correspond to him. He needed a “who.” So, God made her.

Now, from a strictly contextual standpoint, this is how we are first introduced to the institution of marriage, and shown why it matters so very much. I’ve gone to this passage many times when teaching or preaching about what marriage is. It is foundational for that. But in a deeper and broader sense, this passage helps us see the fact that humans were not made to be solitary creatures. We need people. And a spouse isn’t the only person we need; some people are not called to that particular type of relationship anyway. We need a community around us. Our survival as a species depends on it. As I just said, we were made in the image of a relational God, and we will only thrive when we have relationships in our life.

Loneliness is deadly and destructive to us. No less than the U.S. Surgeon General recently gave a speech in which he identified loneliness as one of the most significant threats to public health in the nation. Loki is trying to save the world so he can keep his friends around. One of the saddest and dumbest movies I’ve ever seen is, Into the Wild, which tells the truth story of a college kid who graduates and then decides to go find himself on his own. He rejects his family’s plans for his life, gives away nearly all his worldly possessions, and goes off on his own to find meaning and significance, with Alaska as his goal. Along the way he meets several different people with whom he forms incredibly close relationships. One older couple even offers to adopt him as their own son. But he is insistent that he’s got to find himself first. He eventually makes it to Alaska where he finds an abandoned bus out in the middle of nowhere that he turns into his little home. It’s cute and quaint and he seems to have finally achieved his goal in true Hollywood fashion…until he eats some poisonous berries and dies alone. He keeps turning away from all the people who could have given his life great meaning and dies alone and scared. What a sad, sad, fool he was.

So then, if loneliness is such a terrible thing for us, how do we fix it? That’s obviously a bigger question than I’m going to be able to fully address in the space of this one blog post. That being said, here are three things that can make a pretty significant impact. None of them are particularly easy, but they are worthwhile goals to pursue and encourage because they really will make a difference.

The first thing we need to combat the loneliness epidemic sweeping not just our nation, but the world as a whole, is a church that works. We need the church to be what God designed her to be. She is a unique community that doesn’t have an equal in our society. The church alone is a place (well, the church is a people, but I’m talking about an individual church that meets together in a finite, physical location right now) where people from all kinds of different backgrounds who would normally have nothing to do with one another, much less even like each other, can come together and be united by something larger and greater and stronger than what might otherwise divide them in pursuit of a vision big enough to take all of them.

As compared with any other group in the world, the church alone says that all are welcome. At least, it does that when we get it right. Every other group in the world is tribal. They don’t accept people who are not like them, and they regularly war against other tribes for territory and dominance. Of course, the church certainly can and far too often does fall into that kind of tribalism. That’s what’s natural for us. That’s what sin does to our inherent need for community. It takes it, twists it, and groups us into warring communities. The church, though, is the body of Christ. When it is working as designed, while it may exist as finite local bodies scattered all over the world and which are profoundly different from one another in their particulars, is one united group of which anyone can be a part. Indeed, we are driven by a vision of a future in which “a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: Salvation belongs to our God, who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” When the church works, loneliness is put to flight.

The second thing we need to combat loneliness is humility. This one is tough. There’s no one who can fix this for us. We’ve got to embrace it for ourselves. If we are going to be able to have the relationships we need in our lives, we have to embrace the truth that we need relationships in our lives. We have to accept the reality that we need other people, that we are not enough in and of ourselves to meet all of our needs.

The challenge here is that this cuts right at the heart of the stronghold of sin in our hearts. The core of the sin that keeps us separated from God is a desire to be the gods and goddesses of our own little universes. We can achieve this, but our universes won’t be any larger than the borders of our own minds. Trying to thrive, much less exist, in such a tiny space is impossible. When we achieve this goal, isolation and eventually death will be the only outcome.

This points us to the third thing we need to fight against the loneliness that constantly threatens to overtake our lives and leave us locked in misery: Jesus. Because loneliness is a result of sin, the only way we are ever going to really be able to defeat it and drive it away is by getting rid of sin in our lives. Sin naturally isolates us from one another. It has always done this.

After God declares that the man’s being alone is not a good thing and makes the woman who corresponds perfectly to Him, and the two become one flesh together, in the very next chapter we watch the tragedy of sin entering into the world for the first time as we try to assert our independence from God. And when it does, the very first thing we do is to hide from one another. Moses describes this in Genesis 3:7: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” The real tragedy of this is that at the end of the last chapter they were naked and unashamed together. Loneliness had entered the picture, but this time it was a direct result of sin.

Sin will always separate. It makes us hide from one another in shame. It causes us to hate one another and push away the very people we need to survive. It keeps us existing in warring tribes who look only to destroy one another, and to advance their perceived interests at the expense of all the other tribes around them. All of this just feeds into the loneliness that is slowly draining the life out of us.

The only solution to this is to get rid of sin. Well, the only one who can help us do that is Jesus. Jesus came, lived a perfect life, and then gave up that life to pay the price our sin demanded. Once He settled our accounts with His Father, God broke the power of sin and death by raising Him from the dead. When He came walking back out of that tomb on the third day, He came bringing with Him the pathway for us to be cleansed entirely of our sins and to enter into the presence of God in the relationship we were designed to enjoy most of all. With His help in resisting and overcoming sin’s power in our lives, we can have the kinds of relationships God knew that we needed when He declared our loneliness to be a bad thing in the beginning.

As I said before, none of these three things are easy to achieve. Somewhat ironically, we can’t do any of them on our own. We first need God’s help in Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit. From there, we need people. God’s design was perfect, though, because when we are able to get the people we need to solve the problem, we won’t have the problem any longer. If you are struggling with loneliness in your life, know well that there is a way out. You don’t have to stay there forever. It starts with Jesus, but then quickly grows to include people, at which point you won’t be lonely anymore. Don’t stay by yourself. You weren’t made for that. Embrace the path to real community Jesus paved for you to walk.