Two for One AGAIN!

Warning: The first link below contains a link that leads to a rather hilarious blog. I spent probably a couple hours reading it and laughing. So if you don't have time or if you are bound to take things seriously, don't bother.

We're skipping this one!
We're not skipping this one!

Note: I can't go over everything that Lalaith brings up otherwise this will take forever. So I'm going to hit a few, and you can either send an email and ask about something specific or just research it yourself. :)

Patriarchy. It's an annoying word if nothing else - there is no smooth way of saying it as far as I'm concerned. We're going to take a moment and look at the way that God made things (Creation) and then the way things went in the OT, and then some of the points Christ made in the NT. Hopefully, you'll see that the Bible does not teach or excuse a lot of what Lalaith is talking about.

Creation: God made Adam. Adam came first; Adam was the representative of the people - not Eve. Eve was created FOR Adam - not as a toy or a thing of pleasure - as a companion, as a friend, as a helper, as a coworker, as his wife (Genesis 2:18).

After the Fall, when God is pronouncing judgment, there is an interesting and debated phrase that is used in verse 16 of chapter 3. There seem to be two basic ideas of what the phrase "thy desire shall be to thy husband" means. One is that God is saying that women will no longer be satisfied with their role as helper and they will want to rule over men. The other is that women will basically worship men. They will so strongly desire to please their guy that everything else is secondary.

Personally, I see no reason to think that God couldn't have meant both. Because I look around and I see both. They are both extremes; they are both wrong; they both make sense (at least to me) with the wording. I see women who HATE the idea of a man being in any way above them. And I see other women who can't imagine disagreeing with their husbands. And it seems to me, with my limited experience, that EVERY woman struggles with one of those two things - which would go along with it being a universal curse upon the female gender, rather than it affecting some and not others.

Either way you look at it, this - sin - is the beginning of the entire problem. Because whether women WANT to rule men or whether women WANT to worship men, the end result is that MAN rules over them. And being in his sinful state, that means that man is not going to rule well. So either you end up with huge conflicts - the war of the sexes - or you end up with women being utterly trampled. Being smaller and weaker physically, it's rather easy in less civilized cultures for the women to be trampled no matter which tendency they have.

The OT: From Able to Joseph (which, by the way, is quite a long time), there's not a whole lot said about women or their role. So we'll get into the big stuff of the Law. Like women not inheriting. How horrible. Or, you know, it's just the order of things. What was it that they inherited? Mostly, it was the land. If you had both sons and daughters inheriting land, then the tribes would get all mixed up - which they weren't supposed to. God gave specific land to specific tribes and specific families. It wasn't gypping the women; in marriage they "inherited" their husband's land. And if there was no son, the daughters DID get the land (Numbers 27:1-7). Why? So that the land would remain with the tribe that it was given to.

Giving and receiving women as property: Every time you read in the Bible that a girl was given to be a wife, remember that the Bible is very practical. Since the sons inherited the land, you TOOK a wife for your son - because she was going to be around - and you GAVE your daughter to that guy because she was probably leaving to live somewhere else. At the very least, she wasn't going to be in your house anymore.

Also, seriously, the "Giving of the Bride" in wedding ceremonies? My dad "gave" me, not 'cause he owned me, because it was a sign of his blessing. Rebecca is a GREAT example of this. Rebecca was ASKED if she would go with the servant; she wasn't told or sold. She agreed and they GAVE her away because Isaac lived somewhere else.

Now, I don't mean to say that the property thing didn't/doesn't happen. It did; it does. My point is just that you have to be careful how you take things, especially when dealing with stuff that's quite old and uses words very differently than we do now. Reading into stuff RARELY gives you the truth.

Breeding massive families - there's quite a large family that's the basis of Israel and you know whose idea it was? Not Jacob's. Leah and Rachel were having child-wars. They actually HIRED Jacob to have with sex with them (Genesis 30:16). Doesn't sound terribly oppressed. Breeding for massive families really doesn't seem to appear in the Bible. Yes, there were massive families, but that's not usually because that was the purpose of the women - it's because people like Solomon couldn't stick with one lady. It wasn't to have tons of kids - it was to have tons of sex.

Does the breeding thing happen today though? Yes. Check out Mormonism for a great example of the way women SHOULDN'T be treated. Oh and a note on that, Mormons don't claim to be Christian, so they shouldn't really be placed under the umbrella of "Abrahamic faith." Abuse of the poor and the weak is not bound by any type of anything. It's just plain, old, universal to humanity, Sin.

Moving on 'cause this is already getting REALLY long, the NT: Something to take note of in the NT is the specific people that Jesus made a point of talking to and how PROMINENT a role He gave to the cast-outs of society in general and to women in specific. First off, there's the woman at the well. The woman who went into the city and told them all about Jesus. He picked HER for that. Not just a woman, but a woman married five times and currently living in adultery.

He raised a little girl from the dead. He healed the woman who was sick for 12 years, He healed the daughter of the Canaanite woman and gave the mother the honor of telling her that her faith was great. As opposed to those 12 guys of "little faith." There were the women who were a normal part of His following - the ones who were there at the cross with His mother, the ones who went to the tomb, the ones to whom He entrusted the message of His resurrection. The Bible is FULL of stories of godly women in both the OT and NT.

The fact that God included books like Ruth and Esther, the fact that God recorded the story of the Shunamite woman and her dealings with Elisha, the examples of Abigail, of Deborah, of Samson's mother who never gets named, but who trusted the angel of the LORD before her husband did, of Lydia, of Lois and Eunice, of Pheobe - these are not things that a god who dislikes women or who doesn't use women, or who thinks women are worth less than men would talk about. And that's why God, the Lord Jesus Who, while He was hanging on the cross, made sure that His mother would be cared for, can be shown beyond doubt to love men and women the same amount.

God does not view women as worth less than men. And you cannot find anywhere in the Bible to HINT at that. God's order and God's desire is not about the worth of someone. When a soldier follows orders, it doesn't make him worth less as a person than his captain. It makes him a good soldier. Jesus OBEYED the Father's will. He SUBMITTED to death on the cross (Phil. 2:8). Why? Because He was less God? Because Jesus is not worth as much as the Father? Absolutely not! Because there is an order. Because submission is godly. Because meekness is beautiful. Because obedience is good.

If you make the argument that submission makes you less of a person, you are inevitably making the argument than Jesus is less than %100 God. Women are worth just as much as men. Christ did not pay a greater price for a man than for a woman. We simply were not created to fill the same capacity.

Men were made to fill the capacity of leading the home and the church. Women were created to fill the capacity of helpers. Those are the roles that the Bible has made clear. And that is not a demeaning thing or a sad thing. It's not sad when Autumn follows Summer. It's just the order of it. It would be rather bad if all our soldiers overseas decided that being obedient meant that they were not worth as much, and therefore, they weren't going to follow the orders anymore. I would not feel very confident in our military if that happened.