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By Root 845 0

man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”a God made the man first, and for the first time in recorded history, something was declared to be “not good,” even though sin and the curse had not yet entered the world. God declared, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.”b The man had God above him, and creation beneath him, but no woman alongside him to walk as an equal partner, lover, and friend to reflect something of the mystery of the Trinity of Friends. God’s solution was a friendship in the covenant of marriage. Subsequently, the first human friendship was between a husband and wife, meaning your nearest and dearest friend is to be the one you are in covenant marriage with. So, unlike the rest of creation that God spoke into existence, God crafted the woman with His proverbial hands as the gift of a friend.

Curiously, God made the woman from a rib taken out of the man’s side. Perhaps this was because she belongs at his side as an intimate equal and not in front of him as feminism would teach or behind him as chauvinism would teach. For Grace and me, this may also explain why she likes to snuggle burrowed into my side and why it feels like home to her.

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We need human friendships in addition to friendship with God. And God’s answer is first a spouse and then other godly friends of our same gender. For a man, this means he must jettison the stereotype of a “true man” standing alone against the world. God said it best: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.”a Anyone who tells his or her spouse, “I don’t need you” is in fact calling God a liar. A man needs his wife as his companion and friend. And a wife needs to be helpful by God’s design. The more his need for her and her need to help him are celebrated as gracious gifts from God, the faster oneness and friendship blossom in the marriage. Any religious person who says he does not really need human friends because God is his friend is calling God a liar, because He’s the One who says we also need human friends.

D—Devoted

A devoted friend is dependable through varying seasons of life. The Bible speaks a lot about times and seasons. Wisdom is about knowing what season someone is in and responding accordingly. This takes humility, discernment, and attentiveness. A bad friend is one who always has to be happy and have a good time, as if life were a never-ending party; or who always has to be sad, somber, and serious, as if life were a continual funeral. A devoted friend agrees with Ecclesiastes 3:4, which says there is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh.”

To be a devoted friend requires wisdom from the Holy Spirit, accompanied with an emotional sensitivity to others. Rather than first thinking about yourself, Philippians 2:3–4 says, as a good friend you need to “in lowliness of mind . . . esteem others better than [your]self. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.” As we do, we are able to obey Romans 12:15 and “rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.”

The opposite of a devoted friend is a fake friend. Proverbs speaks a great deal about fake friends. Fake friends are what the Puritan Matthew Henry called “swallow friends” who “leave when winter comes.” Fake friends are with us so long as they get something from us—be it the sense of worth they receive from us needing them when we are suffering, to the benefits they accrue from our seasons of blessing. A real friendship is about both people giving and taking in every season without keeping a record of what is given and taken. A fake friendship is about one person doing all the giving and the other doing all the taking. Fake friends quickly desert us when life with us becomes complicated, costly, inconvenient, or no longer meets their needs. Proverbs 18:24 says, “A man who has friends must himself be friendly, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

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It is in the darkest seasons of