Loneliness

Reading these passages

The first thing God calls not good in the entire Bible is a person being alone.

That verdict lands in Genesis 2, and the placement is what makes it remarkable. Nothing has gone wrong yet. There is no sin in the account, no death, no expulsion, no curse on the ground — the chapter has been saying good about everything it describes. Then: And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

Loneliness is therefore not diagnosed in scripture as damage. It is named as a deficiency in a world that is otherwise working correctly, which means the ache is functioning as designed rather than indicating that something in you has broken.

The remedy that is not God

There is something in that verse the rest of this page does not prepare you for.

Every other passage here answers loneliness with divine presence. I will not fail thee. I am with you alway. God setteth the solitary in families. The Lord is nigh. In Genesis 2 the man is in unbroken company with God — there is no barrier of any kind at that point in the story — and God's own assessment is that this is not sufficient. The remedy he provides is not more of himself. It is another creature.

That sits awkwardly beside the rest of the page and it should be allowed to. Christians have handled it in more than one way: some read it as establishing that human company is a genuine need God designed rather than a substitute for him; some read the Genesis account as describing a pre-incarnate arrangement that the New Testament passages complete; some take it as a straightforward statement that people need people, full stop, and decline to make it theological.

What none of the readings support is the pastoral advice most often offered to lonely people, which is that God should be enough. Genesis 2 records God himself declining to say that.

The word for only

Two psalms on this page use the same Hebrew word, and having both here makes it visible.

David: Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and afflicted. The word rendered desolate is yachid — only, solitary, the single one of its kind. It is the word used of an only child, and Genesis uses it of Isaac when God calls him Abraham's only son.

And then: God setteth the solitary in families. Same word. The yachid is placed in a household.

So the page holds both ends of it — a man calling himself the only one, and a claim about what God does with such people. The word is not a description of circumstance in either case. It describes a category of person, and the psalm says the category is one God moves people out of.

Notice what Psalm 68 puts next to it, too: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains. Solitude and imprisonment are set side by side as two things God reverses, which tells you how the psalmist rated the seriousness of the first.

One promise, twice on this page

Deuteronomy: Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.

Hebrews: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.

These are the same promise. Hebrews is quoting Deuteronomy, and both verses are on this page, which is worth pausing on because of the distance between them.

The original was said to Joshua, in front of the whole assembly, at the edge of a country he was about to enter without Moses — a specific man, at a specific border, facing a specific loss. The quotation is aimed at Christians roughly fourteen centuries later, in a letter about something else entirely, and applied without qualification.

That reuse is itself the argument. The writer of Hebrews is not treating the promise as a historical detail about Joshua. He is treating it as still in force, and he does not explain the move or defend it — he introduces it with he hath said and lets the tense do the work.

All the days

Matthew ends his gospel on it, and the placement is deliberate: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.

These are the last recorded words in the book. Whatever else Matthew wanted his readers left holding, this is what he put at the end of the sentence.

Alway translates pasas tas hemeras, which is not an abstraction — it means all the days, plural, one after another. Not "always" in the sense of a permanent state, but every individual day as it comes. The Greek is closer to a list than to a condition.

And it is said immediately after a commission to go out to the nations, which means the promise attaches to dispersal. The disciples are being sent away from each other. The reassurance is calibrated to that.

Nearer, not further

Psalm 34 says something about location that cuts against how isolation usually feels: The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.

The verse specifies who. It does not say God is near everyone, or near the deserving, or near those who have got themselves together. It names a condition — broken-hearted — and attaches proximity to it.

Loneliness tends to carry an inference with it: that being unwanted by people is evidence of being unwanted generally, and that whatever distance exists between you and everyone else probably extends upward too. This verse asserts the reverse, and it asserts it without softening the description. The person is still broken-hearted at the end of the sentence. Nothing about their state has been revised. Only their position has.

Isaiah does the same thing with a reason clause that is easy to read past: Fear thou not; for I am with thee. The for is carrying the argument. Not "fear not, because it will work out", and not "fear not, because you are stronger than you think". The ground given for not being afraid is company — and the verse offers it first, before anything about strengthening or helping.

Which is worth noticing about the whole page. What is repeatedly offered against isolation is not a solution to the circumstances producing it. It is somebody being there, stated as though that were the answer to the problem rather than a consolation for failing to solve it.

Two are better than one

Ecclesiastes reaches the same conclusion by arithmetic, and it is worth reading the verse before the famous one, because that is the one about loneliness.

There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good?

That is a portrait, and a modern one. A man with no one, working without limit, accumulating without satisfaction, and — the detail that makes it sting — never once asking himself who any of it is for. He is not described as unhappy. He is described as not having posed the question.

Then the conclusion: Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. Ecclesiastes is not being sentimental here; it has spent three chapters establishing that most effort is vapour, and it does not reverse that. It observes that the vapour is more bearable with someone in it, and closes with the line that outlived its context: and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Which is the most any of these passages claims. Not unbreakable. Not quickly broken.