The Sermon That Made Me Thank God I Wasn’t a Woman

I still remember the Sunday I first heard that line about women being “helpers.”

I must’ve been about ten, wedged between my parents on a wooden church pew, feet swinging above the carpet. The preacher was talking about the beginning of everything — Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden. He read this line from Genesis: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Then he explained it, plain as day: the woman was the helper. That was her role, given by God Himself… apparently. The man’s job was to lead, decide, and provide. The woman’s job was to help him do it.

He said it like it explained the whole world. Like one sentence settled every question about men and women forever.

I didn’t have any fancy theology back then. I just sat there, staring at my scuffed Sunday shoes, and thought one thing: “Boy, I’m glad I’m not a woman.” It’s a childish thought, but that’s exactly what the system planted in me. Even as a kid, I could see who got the bigger slice of the story.

And to be honest? Who would want to be a woman in a system like that? Seriously? Who signs up to live their whole life in someone else’s shadow? To spend every ounce of their energy making sure someone else’s life runs well, while theirs is expected to stay small, quiet, supportive, but never central.

I didn’t know it yet, but that little line — “a helper suitable for him” — would do a lot of damage. I’d see it used to keep women out of pulpits and boardrooms. To silence their voices in meetings and marriages. To tell daughters to dream small, as if the highest hope for their life was to hold up someone else’s.

It took me years, decades, really, to circle back to that verse. To ask what it actually says. And what I found buried in that ancient word “helper” made me wonder how much strength we’ve kept locked away, just because someone told us that word meant “less than.”

Turns out, it never did.

Let me explain

The Word We Got Wrong

For a long time, I never thought twice about that line: “I will make a helper suitable for him.” It sat in my mind like an old piece of furniture, always there.

But the word we translate as “helper” in that verse isn’t just a nice-sounding label. In the original Hebrew, it’s ezer, and that one word changes the whole story.

When we hear helper today, we tend to picture an assistant — someone who does the small jobs while the “real” work happens somewhere else. We hear helper and think junior, backup, support crew.

But that’s not what ezer means.

Think about it like this: if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and you’re stuck on the side of the road, what do you need? You don’t need an “assistant” to sit next to you and watch you be stranded. You need help — real help. The kind that brings what you don’t have. A tow truck. A mechanic. A phone with signal when yours is dead. Without that help, you’re not going anywhere.

That’s the kind of help ezer describes, not a sidekick, but the help that makes survival possible. It’s help that saves. It’s help that fills a gap you can’t fill on your own.

Right from the beginning of the story, the woman is not described as optional or extra. She is described as essential. Adam without Eve is unfinished, incomplete, stuck.

It’s a word of strength, not subordination. And when you see that, the whole story cracks open in a new way.

The Truth We Never Heard

If ezer really means necessary strength — help that holds the whole thing together — you wouldn’t know it from the way the church has talked about women historically.

Somewhere along the line, we shrank that word down. We turned strong partners into background support. We told women to stand back, keep quiet, and make sure someone else’s life ran well — but never to stand out front themselves. Nobody ever got up in the pulpit and said, “Hey, this word means strength. It means you’re essential.” Instead, helper got served up as a nice word for stay in your lane.

And it didn’t stop with that one verse in Genesis. We took other lines and built a cage out of them, too. “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord…” (Ephesians 5:22). “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man…” (1 Timothy 2:12). “Women should remain silent in the churches…” (1 Corinthians 14:34).

Verses like these were pulled out, repeated, and nailed to pulpits and books for generations, usually without their context, and almost never alongside the rest of the story. We left out the parts that didn’t fit. The bits about mutual submission. The stories of women who led house churches, funded ministries, preached the first resurrection sermon to men who didn’t believe them. We forgot that Paul called some women apostles, teachers, prophets. We forgot that the early church survived because women refused to stay silent.

But in the pews where I sat as a kid, nobody talked about that. Nobody stood up and said, “Hey, we’ve missed something here.” Instead, “helper” became a tidy way to keep women boxed in. Be supportive. Be agreeable. Be quiet when it counts. Hold up someone else’s life and calling, but don’t expect to stand fully in your own.

And it worked. For generations, it shaped what women thought they could be — and what men thought they were entitled to. And it made little boys like me sit in pews and think, “Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to be the helper.”

What nobody told us is that helper was never meant to be a smaller role. Because there’s one more place that word shows up — and once you see who else carries the name Ezer, the whole idea of women being “less than” falls apart completely.

The God Who Wears the Name

If you grew up like I did, you probably never heard this part either: The word ezer doesn’t just show up in Genesis. It’s scattered all through the Old Testament — twenty-one times, in fact. And here’s the part no one bothered to mention: 16 of those times, ezer doesn’t describe people at all. It describes God.

Again and again, when people cry out for help they can’t find anywhere else, ezer is the word for the One who shows up — not as an assistant or a sidekick, but as a rescuer, defender, shield, and strength.

“We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help [ezer] and our shield.” (Psalm 33:20)

“Surely God is my help [ezer]; the Lord is the one who sustains me.” (Psalm 54:4)

“Blessed are you, Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is your shield and helper [ezer] and your glorious sword.” (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Same word. Same idea. Same strength.

If ezer is good enough to describe the God who holds the universe together, how did we ever twist it into a word that told women to stand back and hush up?

When Genesis says God made the woman to be an ezer, it’s not saying she’s an extra set of hands to fetch the coffee and pick up the crumbs. It’s saying she’s the kind of strength that steps in when something’s missing — the kind of presence that holds the story together when it would fall apart otherwise.

So if you’ve ever been told “helper” means second place — remember this:
It’s one of the names God wears Himself.

The Ezer Beside Me

These days, I don’t sit in church thinking, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not a woman.” These days, I sit next to my wife in the doctor’s office. I stand beside her while she signs the forms. I watch her hold our family together on days when I’m the one falling apart.

If you want to see ezer in the flesh, you don’t have to look far. Come sit at my table. Watch my wife show up for everyone else, even when her own strength is running on fumes. Watch her stand her ground when life tries to shove her down. Watch her carry things most people never have to carry, and never complain about it.

She’s not my assistant. She’s not my backup. She’s not in the background of my story — she is the story. She’s the strength that makes any of this possible.

God knew what He was doing when He said, “It’s not good for the man to be alone. I will make him an ezer.” Turns out, the preacher got it partly right: I do need help. I need her. Not because I’m the hero, but because nobody holds life together alone.

And maybe it’s time the church told the truth about that.

Ezer never meant less than. It never meant small. It means strong enough to stand face-to-face. Strong enough to carry what others can’t. Strong enough to remind the rest of us what the image of God really looks like — right here, right now.

Maybe if the church had told the truth, we’d be stronger, too, because we wouldn’t have spent generations silencing half the strength God gave us.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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