Women: A Biblical Perspective
10/26/1997 - Woman in the Beginning
This morning we begin a new series about women that we've titled Women: A Biblical Perspective. There seems to be a lot of confusion today in Christian circles about the role of women in the church. So a number of months ago our leadership team at Valley View agreed that the church needed some solid biblical teaching in this very sensitive, sometimes emotionally charged area. And guess who drew the short straw to do the teaching? Me!
So over the next few weeks we want to look at some of the major passages in Scripture that give us a window into God's view of women and specifically address the role of women in the church. This series will not be exhaustive. Volumes and volumes have been written on the subject. At best it will serve as an introduction to some anchor texts crucial to this discussion. It will be a kind of Women 101 study for us.
At the outset I have two confessions to make. The first one I'm not proud of. It's embarrassing, but it's true. For years I believed that men were superior to women. I did. I'm not sure why I believed that. Except that I was one. I don't remember being taught that by my parents, by my teachers in school, or even by my church. I may have picked it up on the playground or just from living in our culture. But buried deep in my psyche was a belief, not often, if ever articulated, that men were somehow better than women. And God created them that way!
Now ladies before you drag me out to the parking lot and stone me, you need to know that I don't believe that anymore! I don't believe that God created men superior to women. And God's Word has had a lot to do with correcting my arrogant thinking in that area.
But its been a process, its taken time. And that's the second confession I need to make. It's the confession that I'm a person in process in many areas, but specifically in my understanding of women. I have three right now who live in my house. And it will probably be a lifelong process because as a disciple of Jesus Christ I always want to be in the process of learning and growing. That's what the word disciple means. It means "learner." So I suspect that I will always be learning in this area as well.
So I'm not teaching this series because I finally have the women's issue all figured out and believe my teaching is the last word on the subject. There are passages in Scripture that I still wrestle with in gaining a comprehensive understanding of God's view of women. But in the process there are some convictions that I've grown to embrace intensely. And I hope to share them with you along the way.
Because I'm a person in process, I suspect that many of you are in process too. And I want to respect that and I want us to respect one another. Maybe you've never considered the women's issue in light of Scripture. You've gotten most of your cues from our culture or special interest groups promoting an agenda. This series should be illuminating to you. I think you'll be surprised at how much God has to say on the subject.
Maybe you grew up in a church that was male dominated. Men served as the pastors or the priests, as the elders, as the deacons, as the ushers, as the adult teachers and women served in the kitchen in fellowship hall, taught children's Sunday School, and ran the nursery. So you concluded that certain ministries were off limits to women. I can relate to that. I grew up in that kind of church environment. To you I'm suggesting that you keep an open mind on the subject. And to have the courage to reexamine it in light of the totality of Scripture, not just one or two isolated passages.
Some of you may believe that women are equal to men in every way and should have the freedom to express that equality in every arena, in society, in the marketplace, in the home, at church. You don't see anything wrong with women in leadership anywhere. Maybe you've never grappled with some of the specific New Testament texts that seem to place limits on the leadership of women. And there are some. You need to be sensitive and gracious to those who are trying to figure these passages out because they have a deep commitment to the authority of the Word of God.
There are godly men and women I deeply respect on both sides of the women's issue. And I suspect that there always will be. So that's the gracious, civil spirit that I want us all to have as we approach this sensitive issue of women in the church. Agreed? Good.
Today we want to look at women in the beginning. The book of Genesis means "beginning." And I'd like to make some observations from the first few chapters of Genesis that support the conclusion that men and women were created equal in God's sight and that any hierarchy that exists which places men above women is a result of the devastating consequences of sin and is not God's original intent.
The first mention of a woman in the Bible is found in Genesis 1:27. It is the same passage in which we have the first mention of a man. If you have a Bible open it to Genesis 1:26-28.
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
What I want you to notice in this passage is first of all that male and female, man and woman together, are created in God's image. The image of God is not found simply in the man or simply in the woman. It's found in the male and female together.
That's because the image of God in us has to do with community, creativity, and authority. God exists in community. He is the three in one. That community is hinted at in verse 26 when God says, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness. The capacity we have to experience relationship and community lies at the heart of what it means to be created in the image of God. When we get to Genesis 2:24 we'll see that the marriage relationship between a man and a woman, in which two become one, reflects our God who exists as three in one. So in order for us to be in community as God is in community God created two in his image, male and female.
The image of God also has to do with our ability to create. In Genesis we see God as creator and so male and female together are given the capacity to create new life. 28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number.
Genesis 1:28 is often referred to as the cultural mandate that God gave to the man and woman. Community, creativity, and authority are all part of what it means to be made in the image of God. God gave that authority to both the man and the woman at creation. He didn't give man authority over the woman. He gave them both equal and mutual authority over everything he created.
28 fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.
Does this mean that individually I'm not made in God's image? No. Individually I am in God's image and you are in God's image unlike any other being in God's creation. We have the breath of God in us. But together, as male and female, we experience the fullness of that image in community, creativity, and authority.
In Genesis 1 we see no superiority of male over female. The only hierarchy we see in Genesis 1 is the authority of God over the man and the woman and the authority of the man and the woman together over creation.
Now turn to Genesis 2:18-24. This passage adds further light on the relationship between the sexes.
The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Some have suggested from this passage that man is superior to woman because man was created first and the woman was made from the man to be his helper. At first that might sound convincing, but not when we look at this passage more closely. The Hebrew term "helper" is not a demeaning term that communicates inferiority. In our culture we might think that a helper is someone on the construction sight who does the menial jobs while the skilled carpenters do the real work.
But in Scripture the word "helper" is often used of God. In fact, 75% of the time the word is used in the Old Testament it's used of God being our helper. Certainly God isn't inferior to us. Psalm 46:1 is a classic passage that I often recite at funerals, God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. That's the same word for "help" used here for the woman.
The man was needy. He needed something that only the woman could supply. The community that God wanted the man to enjoy couldn't be achieved without a helper, without a partner. So God made woman, the perfect helper for the man, to complement him in a distinctive way.
The argument that man is some how superior in God's eyes to the woman because he was created first doesn't have any support from the text. In fact, it could just as easily be argued from the order of creation that woman is superior to man because she was created last. The progression of creation was from the less sophisticated to the more sophisticated. Ground, plants, fish, birds, animals, man, woman!
Someone has said tongue in cheek, "Of course God made the man before he made the woman. All great artists make a rough draft before they compose the final masterpiece!" I don't think the order of creation makes any statement about the superiority of man over woman or woman over man. In God's eyes they are equal in worth and value.
So the picture we get of the man and the woman from Genesis 1 & 2 is a relationship of community, equality, mutuality, and intimacy, they were both naked and felt no shame. Wouldn't it be nice if that were the end of the story and "we all lived happily ever after?" But it isn't. In fact, it all changes with one bite of the atomic apple in Genesis 3, the chapter we call "The fall of man."
After the man and woman disobey God's command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God comes to them and describes the consequences of their sin. After addressing the serpent he says this in Genesis 3:16-19,
To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." 17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Sin always brings consequences. And the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve are devastating. To the woman God says, "Life will go on. But now it will be a painful process. Suffering will be a part of every new life that is brought into the world. That's not the way I intended it to be, that's not the way I wanted it to be, but because of sin that's the way it will be."
And because of sin the woman will long for the intimacy and the community that she had with the man before the fall, but her desire for intimacy and community will be met with domination and a desire to control. That's not the way God intended it to be, that's not they way God wanted it to be, but because of sin that's the way it will be. The rule of man over woman is no more God's desire for us than suffering, pain, and death. They are all the results of sin.
The woman desires a mate and instead gets a master. And the man gets a new master too, the earth. 17 '"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
The man is mastered by the earth from which he came and the woman is mastered by the man from whom she came. The ground, once ruled by the man, now rules the man and eventually absorbs his flesh. Someone has said, "The fall spawned the twin evils of woman's suffering in labor and man's labor in suffering." As a result of Satan's work, not God's intent, the woman was now ruled by the man and the man was now ruled by the ground.
Some, who are determined to make a case for man's innate superiority over woman, point to Adam's naming of Eve in Genesis 3:20, Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. Their argument is that Adam named Eve, just like he named the animals and the one who names is always greater than the one named. But his naming of Eve did not occur until after the fall, when the curse was already in affect. Before the fall, in Genesis 2:23, he simply called her Ishah, the feminine form of his generic Hebrew name, Ish.
As a result of the fall, the tendency for the man will be to turn a good thing like dominion into domination. He will be tempted to dominate women, children, other men, creation and frankly anything he can get his hands on. The woman, on the other hand, will tend to turn a good thing like intimacy into enmeshment. The desire for community and intimacy with a man can be so strong that it becomes self-destructive. Which is why bookstores are filled with titles like Women Who Love Too Much or Why Do I Think I'm Nothing Without a Man or Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. These all speak of the effects of Genesis 3:16.
So what have learned about women in the beginning? We've learned that God created the male and the female together in his image. Together the male and the female experience community, creativity, and authority over the rest of God's creation. The hierarchy before sin entered the world is God over the man and the woman and the man and the woman together over creation. Male and female are equal in value and worth in God's eyes.
But the catastrophic effects of sin in Genesis 3 rearrange the hierarchy. Adam's life becomes subject to the ground from which he was taken, and Eve's life becomes subject to the man from which she was taken. So now the order becomes God over creation over man over woman. Was that God's intent? No. It was the result of sin just like death itself.
And in the midst of it all, God in his grace promises a redeemer who will one day reverse the effects of the fall. His name will be called Jesus. And the first prophecy of his coming is found in Genesis 3:15. To the serpent God said, And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.
Jesus Christ, the offspring of a woman named Mary, would one day come and crush Satan's head at the cross, while Satan would cause him to suffer by bruising his heel in the process. And one of the effects of the curse that Jesus died to overcome is the domination of men over women. So he commands us to submit to one another and to serve one another in love. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Next week, we'll look at women in the Old Testament.