Marriage: Ultimate Glorification of God

While God has chosen to use men and women to demonstrate aspects of Himself, one must never consider that God needs human beings to do His work, as Paul expressed in Acts 17:25. Instead, “all things were created through Him and for Him.” All of God’s creation exists to bring Him glory.

Many married couples bring to their relationship a view of God that is “so small instead of huge, and so marginal instead of central, and so vague instead of clear, and so impotent instead of all-determining, and so uninspiring instead of ravishing, that when they marry, the thought of living marriage to the glory of God is without meaning and without content.”

Knowing God for who He truly is, rather than who mankind selfishly wants Him to be, esteeming His glory over any personal agenda, and eliminating any disrespectful question of His plan from our impure thoughts is the only way to live our lives fully to His glory. Piper says, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”

While most of the debated New Testament passages refer to the marriage relationship, females still cannot dismiss these teachings if they are single. Not only is no one exempt from creation order, but Proverbs 31:12 says, “She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life.” Since mankind is incapable of knowing what tomorrow holds, every woman who professes Christ should sumbit to the Lord, embracing her created purpose, rather than anxiously seeking a man to marry or insisting that she will never marry. Women should submit to men’s leadership over the church and the home. Adopting a serving and submissive spirit, women should pray that thier attitude, like Jesus Christ, will further reveal God to a lost world.

Likewise, the best preparation for males to handle headship like Christ is to be faithful to “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.” In an attempt to display God’s communicable attributes and mimic Christ’s love for the church, Christian men should refuse to see headship as an opportunity for dominating women, but as a chance to truly seek the Father’s wisdom for his family. More than likely, Christians will not be able to convince the media to go back to a sitcom displaying correct gender roles in the family. However, true realization that the Father knows best has the power to eliminate distorted family structures within our churches.

My Sources:

Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood, edited by Wayne Grudem

P.S. The picture above is from our wedding. James and I both treasure this moment as the most special time of our wedding day. No unity candle, no unity sand - just our closest friends and family gathered around us in a continual prayer that God will be glorified through our marriage.

True Masculinity & Femininity

Throughout Scripture, God reveals Himself using masculine terms. Egalitarians say this is another way for humans to understand God, just as He compares Himself to animals and inanimate objects. The main problem with this view is that God created males and females in His image. He did not create Himself to be like human beings. Rather, God created masculinity to augment some of His attributes and created femininity to such display others.

This does not imply that God is male or female. God is not established by gender, but by His simultaneous plurality and unity. Genesis 1:26 says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” (emphasis added). As made in the Trinitarian God’s image, males and females are equal yet different.

Referring back to Ephesians 5, God has given men headship over women, just as Christ has dominion over the church. Men are not given freedom to interpret this headship position on their own. They are instructed to follow the pattern of Christ. While complementarians disagree with much of the feminist movement, most do not hold feminists as the ones who are ultimately responsible.

Rather, they attribute the feminist movement to the negligence of men to practice humble headship like Christ. One theologian notes, “I believe that if Christian men had been the servant leaders in the home, rather than conceited chauvinists, the feminist movement would have died a quick and easy death…I am tired of hearing that feminists are responsible for the breakdown of the family. We need to put the responsibility where it belongs – on the heads of homes.”

Women are just as guilty of not being obedient to their created purpose. “God created woman to directly reflect the man’s headship authority by recognizing it, revealing it, submitting to it, receiving it, and supporting his leadership.” More often, women end up ignoring it, resenting it, rebuking it, disobeying it, and discouraging male leadership.

Appalling feminists everywhere, I Corinthians 11:7 describes women as “the glory of men.” But where is the egalitarian objection that Jesus was sent to glorify the Father? Each time a groom beams as his bride walks down the aisle, Christians should be reminded of the Father’s words from heaven: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Each time a woman gives birth to a child, this miracle should serve as a reminder that eternal life can only come from the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Egalitarians dismiss many of the gender-related passages with an “ad hoc” argument, meaning that they believe these passages were written out of historical circumstance and only refer to the original audience. Due to the mention of head coverings, I Corinthians 11 is a passage egalitarians often disregard theologically. However, because of Paul’s use of the Trinity, an omnipresent deity, there is no way to interpret this as simply cultural wisdom.

While most complementarians agree that this passage does not indicate women today must wear a hat at all times, the cultural implications should remain. “Wearing a head covering communicated a submissive demeanor and a feminine adornment.” Therefore, as women pray or prophesy in public, they must communicate their support for male headship with appropriate conduct and mannerisms.

Teaching Scripture within biblical parameters includes more than just following the Titus 2 mandate of only teaching women. Women should seek to be earnest expositors of God’s Word without emasculating their God-given feminine characteristics. Women were created “to be reverent in their behavior” and embody an “imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.”

Titus 2:4-5 lays out the curriculum for older women to teach younger women to work at home and love their husbands and children, while pursuing purity, wisdom and kindness to uphold the commands in Scripture. This does not mean women are to deliver emotionally driven and spiritually shallow messages. Simply, there are some things God knew pastors, as men, would not be able to teach from the pulpit with the same effect as a biblical woman who has been there.

My Sources:

Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity without Hierarchy, edited by Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

"God, Gender, and Biblical Metaphor (Chapter 16) by Judy L. Brown," by H. Wayne House in the Journal of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

20 Controversies that Almost Killed a Church by Richard L. Ganz

Men and Women: Equal Yet Different by Alexander Strauch

Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, edited by Wayne Grudem and John Piper

For further discussion on the difference between prophecy and teaching, see Wayne Grudem, “Prophecy—Yes, But Teaching—No: Paul’s Consistent Advocacy of Women’s Participation Without Governing Authority,” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 30 (1987): 11-23.

God Is Purposeful & Impartial

With feminism, the issue at stake goes beyond women desiring to work outside of the home and resenting the Biblical mandate to submit to their husbands. Psalm 19:1-6 describes how every part of creation reveals the knowledge of God’s existence. Human beings are God’s supreme creation created in His image. Logically, God’s general revelation should manifest itself most clearly through humanity.

Feminism has essentially blurred some of God’s self-disclosure by human neglect to follow the example set by the divine Trinity. Just as some males try to exercise overbearing authority over women, some women spend their entire lives attempting to eliminate any undermining of their gender.

Paul wrote of God’s manifold wisdom and “eternal purpose.” God has never altered the initial plan He implemented in creation. Beginning in Genesis, there is significant timing when God declared man as the leader by creating him first. Then, He created Eve to be a helper to Adam when He acknowledged that it was not good for man to be alone. Before the fall, God clearly defined the roles He desired for men and women in the perfect world, and His opinion did not change after the fall.

Even though woman sinned first, God rebuked Adam before Eve. Ultimately, God held Adam responsible. After Adam’s judgment, God declares in Genesis 3:16 to Eve that her “desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you.” God warned society at the very beginning that there would be a power struggle between males and females.

However, in Genesis 2, God did not tell Eve to help Adam whenever she felt like it. Rather, Eve’s purposeful existence was to serve as Adam’s helper. God’s creative design for humanity still consists of male leadership in the home and in the church.

Revelation 19:11-16 describes Jesus, seated on a white horse, with eyes like fire, a sharp sword in his mouth, and an iron rod in his hand to rule over the nations. Followed by the armies of heaven, Jesus is declared the King of kings and Lord of lords. Yes, Jesus’ role as the Son is different from the Father’s, but in no way does this passage depict Jesus to be any less God than the Father.

Proverbs 31:10-31 describes the woman who fears the Lord as anything but weak or worthless. God did not elevate Himself above His Son, and Jesus did not attempt to be greater than God. Unfortunately, males and females cannot make similar claims.

The Danger of A Personal Agenda

As early as Eve in the Garden of Eden, feminism’s true quest has been for superiority. Carolyn McCulley says, “One woman decided that God’s boundaries and definition for her weren’t good…The seeds of feminism are, ‘I want what I want,’ ‘I want to define it how I want it,’ and ‘I don’t want to give God the glory.’” The desired object may no longer involve the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The desire to become one’s own God, however, seems to be like a ribbon flowing throughout history that Satan uses to pull people away from God. There is natural rebellion against the prophet Isaiah’s words that God’s ways are higher than man’s ways, and His thoughts are higher than human thoughts.

Recognizing that it was “not good for man to be alone,” God made a “helper fit for him” by creating Eve. In The Feminist Mystique, Betty Friedan tells countless tales of women who feel oppressed by the stereotypical image of females. One woman insists she loves her husband, children and home, but feels she has no personality. She says, “I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?” Selfishly wanting success in some form other than in the family she claims to love, this woman’s personal agenda, like many others, prevents her from flourishing in the Father’s purpose for her life. This is hardly a twentieth century struggle.

James 3:14-16 says, “But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.”

This is exactly what has happened in the world today. Resentment of the created purpose of males and females has created the muddle of effeminate men, manly females, and transgenders. The same bitterness produces depraved habits including homosexuality and pornography. One theologian evaluated the cost of feminism “cannot be measured by MasterCard, for some things are priceless. It is measured in the fifty percent divorce rate, the destruction of the family unity, the elimination of forty million unborn children, and the proliferation of pornography, and its ugly cousin, sexually transmitted diseases.”

What if Jesus Christ had come to earth with a personal agenda? Not only was He brought into the world with the incomprehensible task of living a sinless life and dying for humanity’s sin, but He was also the only One to never question the Father’s authority. Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane before He was crucified, Jesus said, "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”

Though he was fully God, He knew that His role was to be submissive to the Father. According to Paul, Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

Christ’s task was much more demoralizing than making a few beds or cooking a few meals. Realizing the cross that was before him, human logic can see how easy it could have been for Jesus to resent that the Father did not choose him to build the ark like Noah, part the Red Sea like Moses, or ride a chariot of fire to heaven like Elijah. However reasonable this thought is, Paul shares reality in Philippians 2:8. Jesus “humbled himself, by becoming obedient to the point of death.”

Jesus Christ could have used His deity to climb down from the cross. He could have fought back. He had the power, but he refused to use it, because He sought to fulfill the lifelong covenant that God made with Abraham. Andreas J. Kostenberger argues marriage is a comparable covenant “because it is rooted in creation and the will of the Creator Himself.”

I Corinthians 12:9-10 should encourage married couples to seek God’s sufficient grace and power made perfect in weakness rather than divorce. Paul writes, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Works Cited:

The Feminist Mystique by Betty Friedan

"Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and The Contemporary Collapse of Sexual Moral," by Peter Jones - (http://www.cbmw.org/images/articles_pdf/jones_peter/sexualmorals.pdf)

Radical Womanhood: Feminine Faith in a Feminist World by Carolyn McCulley

The Strength of Submission

Since the days of Tertullian, the Church has believed that the Father, Son, and Spirit are God. They are one, but there are also distinctions among them. Jesus Christ, the Son, came to earth to complete the will of the Father. Though Jesus was obedient to the Father, He has always been viewed as equally God and equally essential to Christianity. A.H. Strong says, “The subordination of the person of the Son to the person of the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority.”

Prior to the gender debate, most evangelicals were in agreement concerning the doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, when the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) attempted to set the margins of its doctrinal basis to capture a broad audience, they decided on the inerrancy of Scripture and basic views of the Trinity as the society’s core concerns. The ETS statement reads: "The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs. God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory."

As complementarians began capturing the illustration of gender roles and the Trinity, the views of evangelical feminists began to change. Egalitarians insist that complementarians hold the heretical view of subordination. However, complementarians do not condone an ontological difference between the Father and the Son. I Corinthians 15:28 says, “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to Him who put all things in subjection under Him, that God may be all in all.”

Jesus’ voluntary obedience to the Father did not make Him inferior in essence, but gave the Father priority of authority. Taking away equality or role differences between the Father, the Son and the Spirit essentially abandons the Trinity, which is the center of the Christian faith. Herman Bavick went as far to say, “In the confession of the Trinity throbs the heart of the Christian religion: every error results from, or upon deeper reflection may be traced to, a wrong view of this doctrine.”

Complementarians were not first to draw this comparison. I Corinthians 11:3 says, “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.” Paul quickly establishes three headship relationships exist between Christ and man, man and woman, and God and Christ. As Paul notes these relationships, he shows that Jesus Christ is the example for both genders, as He is submissive to the Father but also the head over man. The headship and submissive roles assigned to men and women in creation offer the ideal opportunity for both genders to apply Scripture’s teaching to strive after Christ’s righteousness.

A similar passage in Ephesians 5:24-25 says, “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Christ loved the church through times of obedience and rebellion, and He died to cover all human sin. Yet, feminists frequently scrutinize these passages by saying the Bible’s “hierarchy created about the whole love life of woman an atmosphere of degradation.” In this passage, redemption resonates far above restriction, and salvation outweighs subjection. Headship and submission were never created, but have always existed in the nature of God Himself.

In Woman and the New Race, Margaret Sanger, a feminist best known for initiating the birth control movement through the establishment of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, insisted that with the world of women’s liberation: "There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the cross." What Sanger thought was a statement of deliverance was nothing less than condemnation of the entire human race.

The core of Christianity can be summarized by submission. If Jesus had refused to die on the cross and submit to the Father’s plan, both males and females would be left without the hope of redemption. Instead, “the ultimate and telling proof that equality and submission may coexist in glorious harmony is found in the mediatorial mission of the Son of God…who completed it in the true liberation of submission to His Father.”

Further explanation...

Tertullian: an early church father who was the first to name the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the term "the Trinity'

Subordination: This is best referred to as putting yourself under someone else's authority (Ex - Children are subordinate to their parents, Humans are subordinate to God).

Complementarian: This is the view that I believe: God created men and women equally, but he also gave them different gender-defined roles. (Males - Husband, Father, Provider, Protector; Females - Wife, Mother, Nurturer). Check out more at http://www.cbmw.org

Egalitarian: also referred to as evangelical feminists, this group believes that one's gender does not determine role or status in life, nor does it limit spiritual giftedness and ministry opportunities. Essentially, they believe the only differences between males and females are physical. You can learn more on their website: http://www.cbeinternational.org

Headship: Humble, loving leadership, such as Christ's love and authority over the church

Submission: Humble, serving respect, such as Jesus' obedience to the Father's plan for His death on the cross for the forigiveness of sin

My Sources:

An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine: Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem

The Hermeneutics of Doctrine by Anthony C. Thiselton,

Systematic Theology by Augustus H. Strong

Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, edited by Wayne Grudem and John Piper

Men and Women: Equal Yet Different by Alexander Strauch

Does Father Really Know Best?

Disclaimer: These next few blogs are going to cover the topic I've been writing this semester for Systematic Theology. Though it might be a little more scholarly than my normal blogging style, the truths I discovered through my research are too important to leave as an assignment. In addition to praying for divine intervention, at the bottom of each post, I'm going to do my best to include definitions of any term that may be unfamiliar. Feel free to post comments asking questions, and I will do my best to respond. As always, thanks for reading and allowing me to share my heart with you.

From 1954-1960, television brought an idealized family into American homes through Father Knows Best. Though the children were not always perfectly behaved, disagreements were always settled by the end of the 30-minute program, primarily due to rational advice of the father, Jim. In just 50 years, American culture has shifted from a father who knows best to fathers including: Homer Simpson of The Simpson’s, who knows nothing; Tim Taylor of Home Improvement, who knows everything about tools, cars, and the emergency room; and Doug Heffernan of King of Queens and Ray Barone of Everybody Loves Raymond, whose wives know everything for them.

Though initial feminist efforts by pioneers such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton sought restoration of equal rights for women, the feminist quest did not end with equal rights nor stay within political realms. The gender debate has not only found its way into television scripts, but inside the doors of evangelical Christian churches. Some churches have called females to serve as senior pastors, an office I Timothy 2:12 mandates for males. A recent translation of Scripture, Today’s New International Version, eliminates masculine language from the Bible, which at times, significantly alters the meaning of the text. The gender controversy today runs much deeper than equal rights.

Genesis 1:27 says God created males and females in His own image. Therefore, human beings can best learn about themselves by seeking to know the nature of God. Wayne Grudem writes that “there are no differences in deity, attributes, or essential nature between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each person is fully God and has all the attributes of God. The only distinctions between the members of the Trinity are in the ways they relate to each other and to creation.” Addressing submission, personal agenda, and impartial purpose, these next few blogs will examine how the doctrine of the Trinity reveals the Father knows best in His created purpose for both males and females.