This message was delivered at the Women in the Church Intensive Bible Study, Covenant Presbyterian Church, Cleveland, MS, on Saturday, March 18, 2000.Genesis 1:26-31
26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." 29 And God said, "See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. 30 "Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food"; and it was so. 31 Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. The question before us today is, What is woman? And, by way of contrast, What is man? These are two very basic questions about life, two foundational questions, two very significant questions. And yet all you have to do is to watch the advertisements for the television talk shows to learn that much of our culture has answers to these questions which are at best confused and at worst perverted. We find this cultural confusion and even the perversion in some segments of the Christian church today.
Allow me to read to you a portion of a presentation made on July 1, 1996, to the Standing Committee on Ordination and Human Sexuality, a committee of one of today's mainline denominations. In the speaker's opening remarks, he identified himself as an ordained minister who had taught Bible for 32 years in seminaries and churches. Here is something he said near the end of his presentation:
There are clear texts which suggest we should not ordain women, but the church said at the leading of God's Spirit that a new day had come, a new time and new practice were in order.Now let's analyze a bit what this man has said. This Bible teacher of 32 years implies that the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Spirit can give contradictory guidance. And he appears to endorse in such alleged times what he calls "the leading of God's Spirit." This man would do well to learn a simple lesson from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which says,
I think the Spirit is moving again. I don't find anything in Scripture that labels all homosexuality as sin or anything that prohibits the ordination of gays and lesbians.Jesus exerciseth the office of a prophet in revealing to us, by His Word and Spirit, the will of God for our salvation.Notice that this says that Jesus reveals the will of God for our salvation by His Word and Spirit. It doesn't say by His Word or by His Spirit, take your choice. Beloved, whenever we are led to take a course of action contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture, whatever led us to do it, it was not the leading of God's Spirit. It was more likely the leading of the spirit of this age, the spirit of the world.Also, notice that this seminary Bible professor sees this schizophrenic conflict between Word and Spirit only in regard to the ordination of women. He sees no such conflict on the issue of homosexual ordination because he knows of no Scripture that would prohibit it. I am reminded of the words in 2 Corinthians 3:15-16
Our culture is filled with confusion and perversion. And, as I think I have demonstrated with my example, it has even made its way into the church. I want to begin, however, not by focusing on the confusion and the perversion, but by focusing on what the Bible has to teach us about human femininity and masculinity.
15 But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. 16 Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Genesis 1:27 says:
So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.This passage speaks of creation in the image of God. Creation in the image of God is what makes humanity special. Deny that, and humanity loses its unique value. And our society is denying that humanity is created in God's image. The result is, to use the words of chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall:The line dividing man from beast has become increasingly blurred.And here is what Ingrid Newkirk, director of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had to say:The smallest form of life, even an ant or a clam, is equal to a human being.And she expressed her opinion even more dramatically when she said:Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses.Such a statement is so nonsensical that we smile, but really it is no laughing matter when someone no longer sees the difference between the Holocaust and the slaughter house. We categorically reject such nonsense because humanity is created in the image of God. That is what sets humanity apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. That is what gives the human being special dignity and worth.Now our Scripture passage says:
... in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.This special dignity belongs equally to the male and to the female in the human species because both sexes, as this passage makes clear, are created in God's image.Society often strays from this basic Biblical teaching. Back in the nineteenth century, a common secular attitude was that men are decidedly superior to women, and women are decidedly inferior to men. I believe we can see something of this attitude in a line from one of Rudyard Kipling's poems, The Betrothed:
And a woman is only a woman, But a good cigar is a smoke.I first ran across that quotation in a crossword puzzle, of all places. The poem is meant to be humorous, but I believe it does presuppose and even exude an attitude of male superiority. In the so-called Age of Reason, women were looked down upon. Human reason was elevated to a god-like status. Men were regarded as rational creatures, and women as emotional creatures. Therefore, in that age, men were viewed as superior to women just as cold logic was viewed as superior to warm feelings.Today people seem to prefer feelings to impersonal logic, and it is not uncommon today for people to view women as superior to men. Men are such aggressive, violent creatures. Women are, in contrast, loving, nurturing, caring. Men, the sex that has held the reins of society for so long, have made such a muddle of things. Now is the time for women, the truly superior sex, to have their turn at the helm. Women should today be wearing the pants in the family, occupying the formerly smoke filled board rooms, and filling the pulpits of the land, leading in the worship not of the patriarchal Father and Son but of Sophia or the Heavenly Mother. Or so the argument goes.
Both of these viewpoints are wrong. The male is not superior to the female, and the female is not superior to the male. Male and female are both equal in dignity and worth based on their common creation in the image of God. Neither is superior to the other, and neither is inferior to the other.
This equality in dignity and worth, however, does not mean that male and female are largely identical with but superficial distinctions. That seems so obvious, and yet there was a time not that long ago when many in our society believed that the only real differences between men and women were the obvious physiological differences. I can remember getting into a debate with another college student back when I was in college in the late '60s and early '70s over this very issue.
Today even the secular world recognizes the implausibility of that view. Just a few years ago, the cover story of TIME magazine was the newly discovered scientific fact that men and women are profoundly different. We now know that male and female hormones affect people's development from their earliest days, even when they are still in the womb. The result is that men and women are different not only in the obvious physiological ways. They also think differently, view life differently, and have different priorities. God created Eve not as Adam's clone but as Adam's complement. God created Eve not to duplicate Adam but to complete Adam. God didn't create a second Adam from the dust but created Eve from Adam's rib.
The relationship between male and female is like the relationship between your right hand and your left hand. Your right and left hands are not identical. If they were, when you put your right and left hands together, the palm of one hand would be against the back of the other, instead of palm to palm. They would not work together that way. The right and left hands are not identical but instead are mirror images of each other made to complement each other and to work well together. So it is with male and female.
Male and female are different in gifts and roles and yet equal in dignity and worth. I want to look at two verses which illustrate this, one verse in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament. Our Old Testament verse is Genesis 2:18, but to get a little context, I want to read down to verse 23:
Eve is here called the helper comparable to Adam. We read in verse 20 that before Eve was created, Adam could not find such a helper anywhere in all of God's good creation. There is no substitute in all of creation for a man's relationship with his wife. There is no other creature and no activity, neither work nor recreation, which can replace the wife as the answer to that deficiency expressed in the words, It is not good for man to be alone.
18 And the LORD God said, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him." 19 Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. 21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. 22 Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. 23 And Adam said: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Eve's equality to Adam is here found in the phrase "comparable to him." The Hebrew means one who is conspicuously and prominently before you, one who stands before you looking you in the eye. The idea is one who is an adequate equal. Eve was Adam's equal; she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. And yet she was different from him as expressed in the word helper. She was not another Adam molded from the dust of the earth, but rather a complementary creature made from a rib from Adam's side.
By the way, some feminists do appear to see the significance in Eve's being created from a rib from Adam's side. There is a Jewish feminist magazine called Lilith which is "named for the legendary predecessor of Eve who insisted on equality with Adam." According to a medieval Jewish myth, Lilith was created simulataeously with Adam from the dust of the earth, and Adam rejected her because of her independent spirit.
The New Testament passage is 1 Peter 3:7:
This passage clearly teaches the equal dignity and worth of the woman: she is an heir together of the grace of life. In this sense, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).
7 Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered. But in another sense, the male and female are clearly different. The husband is to give honor to his wife as to the weaker vessel. The text does not say that a woman is weak but that she is weaker than a man, weak when compared to men in general. This in certainly true in regard to physical strength, and thus women as a rule are not as suited as men in general to be combat soldiers or fire fighters. The woman as a rule is more vulnerable than men, and I say that even though my oldest daughter has her black belt in karate, and I wouldn't want to get into a scrap with her.
Now notice that the phrase "the weaker vessel" is not meant here as a derogatory term, even though that is how many women today regard it. The passage says that the husband is to give honor to his wife as to the weaker vessel. The word honor is not the language of disrespect. The word honor here means to value something highly, to respect something because of its great worth. The thought is not that woman is weak in the sense of inferior and unfit. No, the passage implies that a good wife is of great value. As it says in Proverbs 31:10:
The thought is that a good wife is something both valuable and vulnerable, and thus someone to be both prized and protected. She is a weaker vessel in the sense of a valuable yet delicate work of art such as a Ming vase or a porcelain statue.
10 Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. This idea that women are to be prized and protected is embedded in our culture. We are surrounded by testimonies to this concept. For example, there is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. Chiseled into its black marble are the names of 58,000 men who died in that conflict, and the names of 8 women. If the egalitarian view that men and women are basically identical and suited for the same roles in life were true, then there should be the names of 29,000 men and 29,000 women on that monument, but there are not. The numbers are 58,000 men and 8 women.
Work statistics testify to the concept that women are to be prized and protected. 93% of the people killed on the job are men.
And there is the testimony of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. When the Titanic sank, nine men died for every woman because of the Western tradition of "women and children first." American First Lady Nellie Taft led a drive to raise the funds to build a monument in Washington, D.C. with the inscription, "To the brave men who gave their lives that women and children might be saved." Mrs. Taft explained: "I am grateful to do this in gratitude to the chivalry of American manhood."
We can contrast the sinking of the Titanic with a more recent event in Indonesia, a Muslim country with a different understanding of the value of women. In 1996, a boat carrying thousands of passengers sank off the shores of Indonesia. Like in the Titanic disaster, hundreds died. Like in the Titanic disaster, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone. Unlike the Titanic disaster, women died that men might live. The men were given preferential treatment over the women and children.
In a Biblically defined culture, women are treated as a delicate vase that is to be both valued and protected. That is Biblical patriarchialism. But the other side of the patriarchial coin is that in a Biblically defined culture, the male is given the role of leadership in the family (Ephesians 5:23-24) and in the church (1 Timothy 2:12-15).
Egalitarian feminists argue that women cannot have different roles in life than men and still be equal to men in dignity and worth. Different roles, they argue, means different worth, different value, different dignity. The Bible, however, argues the opposite. According to the Bible, the woman's ability both to have a different role than the man and to submit to men in family and church and also to be fully equal to men in dignity and worth is a part of being created in the image of God. God is the ultimate reality, and the very person and work of God proves that different roles are not incompatible with equality of being. According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism,
There are three Persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.The three Persons of the Godhead are each fully divine and thus equal; yet they all three have different personal properties. According to the Westminster Confession of Faith (chapter 2, paragraph 3), "the Son is eternally begotten of the Father." From all eternity, there has been a relationship between God the Father and God the Son that is analogous to the relationship of a father to a son. That relationship involves God the Son's voluntarily submitting to the will of God the Father. Christ is equal to the Father in essence, but eternally subordinate to the Father in mission and role. That has been the official orthodoxy of the church since the council of Nicea in A.D. 325. In 1 Corinthians 11:3, this teaching is stated and applied to the relationship of men and women:As to their essence, God the Father and God the Son are both fully God. They are the same in substance, equal in power and glory. Yet in regard to mission and roles, the Son voluntarily submits to the will of the Father. In regard to their personal properties, they are different, and the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father.
3 But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Here is the answer to the egalitarian feminist who claims that men and women must have identical roles in life if they are to be truly equal. That is not the case in regard to the Persons of the Godhead. And neither is it the case in humanity created in God's image. This same basic relationship between worth and role which exists from eternity within the Godhead is also found in humanity as created in God's image. God created them male and female, equal in dignity and worth and yet different in mission and role.