95-39 – High View of Women – Part I

This sermon is Part I of the series "High View of Women" by Dr. Chuck Betters.

“This series, I believe, is needed, because frankly I think today our culture expresses a low view of womanhood. I do not claim to be an expert on womanhood, clearly, I am not, but I believe the Word of God is, so it is from that context I share these messages…” — from Part I of High View of Women 

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Welcome to In His Grip with Dr. Chuck F. Betters, produced by Mark Inc. Ministries. Each In His Grip message is designed to help turn your hearts toward Jesus and equip you to walk by faith. Let's join Dr. Betters as he preaches today's message.

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I've entitled this message the High View of Woman. Because I think, frankly, today we have experienced the low view of woman and of womanhood. And I do not claim to be an expert on womanhood. Clearly I'm not. But I believe the Word of God is, and it is in that context as we open the book that I'm reminded of an illustration. Some time ago, I was watching a sitcom on TV, one that was kind of pioneered back in the 70s, All in the Family. How many of you ever seen All in the Family? How many of you have never seen All in the Family? Well, everybody has seen it one time or another, I'm sure. But it was interesting, and I can't remember exactly what the scripture was that was being quoted. But of course, you remember Norman Lear was a pioneer of high liberalism and seeks to discredit as often as he possibly can the Christian faith. And at the time, one of the characters in All in the Family, Gloria, was having a friend over who was a feminist. And they were going to have a political rally of some sort. And so, in the discussion back and forth with the traditional male chauvinist pig Archie, we have a dialogue that goes back and forth between Gloria and her father. And in the context of that discussion on feminism, this passage from 1 Corinthians 11 and a similar one from 1 Timothy chapter 3 is read. And then at the conclusion of reading this passage, Gloria closes the Bible and says, Now isn't that awful? And here's the passage. 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 3. Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Isn't that awful? Isn't that terrible? And the message of the show, the message of the sitcom, simply characterized a whole decade that has now translated into what we call revisionist history, and now we look upon it as truth. And I believe what we have done in the past 30 years in this country is we have taken the low view of womanhood. And we have relegated our women to a position that, far from being what the feminists and the liberals have promised, is more a role of subservience than it could ever possibly be translated out of the scriptures. We have women today vying for positions of acceptance and looking for a place in their community outside of the context of the biblical norm, and they have come to a place of understanding womanhood through the filtered lenses of the liberals. And we have taken passages like this one, lifted them out of context, never properly examined them within their context, do not even begin to try to understand the meaning and the implication behind these passages. We rip them out of our Bibles and we say, we don't need that kind of understanding of womanhood out the window with this archaic view, out the window with this traditional model. The sad part is many of you have bought into that. That's the real sad part. It's interesting as I've done my research and my studies on what is now called today feminist hermeneutics. Feminist hermeneutics is really nothing new. It goes back into the 60s, we had what was called liberation theology or political theology. The theologians in my day, when I was in seminary, were talking about a liberation theology. Let's simply preach and teach a message of political deliverance and political liberation, and out of that came the social gospel, and out of that came the God is dead movement. Well, now today we have what is called a feminist hermeneutic, which means a feminist interpretation or a system of interpretation of scripture. Now I'm not talking about the radicals that sit down in the now headquarters. I'm talking about women who attend evangelical seminaries today, women who are occupying pulpits in churches across the country, women who hold positions of leadership within the church today. I am talking about people, for the most part, who believe the Bible, at least part of the Bible, to be the inspired word of God. And that feminist hermeneutic goes something like this. You have three basic views. You have, first of all, the liberal view. The liberal view sees a model of progress within a capitalistic society like ours. And it works for political reform, it works for equal rights, and it tends to target its propaganda to the middle class. So the middle class becomes the target audience of the propaganda of this liberal feministic hermeneutic, which says that we must earn equal rights and equal privileges within a context of a capitalistic society, and on the surface, it sounds really good. Then we have a socialist or Marxist hermeneutic coming out of, believe it or not, the studies of scripture. They follow the Marxist assumptions and believe that women can and should achieve full equality only by the full integration of the labor force with property ownership or corporate ownership. So women literally are to take over the ownership of the political structures, ownership of labor, ownership of business per se, and thus form or bring into mind or bring into our conscience a Marxist or socialistic society. That's a second hermeneutic. And by the way, they use scriptures to justify this. And then there is a romanistic or an idealistic view. Some have even gone as far as to call this a mildly romantic view, that women are inherently superior to men. That women are by nature superior to men. Now, when you have these three views, the liberal view, the socialist view, the romantic view, and this forms the hermeneutic of how women in seminaries and women in Bible colleges are interpreting the scriptures, all of that language filters its way into our mainline denominations. Our denomination exists as a separate denomination from another Presbyterian form of government, another Presbyterian denomination, and one of the key issues is our application of passages like 1 Corinthians 11 and the role of women in leadership positions. Sadly, what has been done is contextualization has happened and we have removed the spirit of the scriptures in order to promote our own preconceived ideas. So we walk into passages like 1 Corinthians 11 with presuppositions. We walk into passages like 1 Timothy chapter 3 with presuppositions. And so here's how it fleshes out. Here's how some evangelical people, these are people who claim the evangelical faith, would interpret certain passages of Scripture. For example, they'd look at 1 Corinthians 11, and they would say there are to be no, absolutely no differences in the roles between men and women. That what women do, men should do. What men do, women should do. And that applies to what happens in the church, what happens in the home, and what happens in society. And then you have a second view. We'll call this more of a non-evangelical view. It recognizes that the Bible does place limitations on the roles. It does say, for example, that men and women have different roles, that men are to have different roles within the context of their home than women are. That men are to have different roles within the context of the church than women are. Now there are non-evangelicals who will stand up and say, we admit the Bible says that. However, those parts of the Bible are not inspired. They were culturally determined, so we just take them, rip them out of our Bible, and throw them away, and we say Paul is not inspired. Therefore, Paul, who wrote these letters, was not speaking for Christ, and therefore the foundation of authority becomes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which talks to us about Jesus, and the rest of the New Testament, the epistles, most of which were constituted by Paul, are thrown out of the Bible as culturally irrelevant. Now, when you have this socialist, Marxist, liberal, romantic approach to Scripture, it eventually is going to bring you to bear on troublesome passages. You're going to have to look at passages like 1 Corinthians 11 and verse 2 and verse 3 and ask yourself, what in the world could that possibly mean? Now you got to keep in mind as you study scriptures, and I think it's extremely important that you understand this. Whenever we study Scripture, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is, what did the author say? What did he say? Not what you want him to say, not what you think he should have said, not what you would interpret him to say, but what did the author actually say? And then this is where the real difficulty comes in. We have to transport ourselves back 2,000 years into a culture and ask ourselves if we were reading that for the very first time, how would we have received it? What lenses would we have filtered that information through? And that's really where the problem is. If you look at verse 3 in particular, verse 3. A grossly misunderstood, misrepresented, and maligned verse of scripture is verse 3. By the way, he says three things now. Three things. You can diagram this in a sentence. You can say letter A, letter B, and letter C. Now here's letter A. He says, I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ. That's letter A. Now skip letter B and go to letter C. It says, and the head of Christ is God. That's letter C. We don't have a problem with letter A. We don't have a problem saying that the head of every man is Christ. And we don't even have a problem with saying that the head of Christ is God. The real problem comes when we stick in that little middle phrase there, that little letter B. That little letter B in there says, and the head of the woman is man. Now we're willing to take the bookends and make them theological and make them truth. And we're willing to take what letter A says, what letter C says, and say, I believe that, but now when we come to letter B, we say, wait a minute, that has to be culturally determined. There has to be another explanation. And to a degree there is. And to a degree it is. I want you to hold your place there, and I want you to go to the book of Galatians, chapter 3. Let's set this within context. Galatians chapter 3. Hold your place in 1 Corinthians 11. Go to Galatians chapter 3. Bless you. And look at verse 26. Galatians 3 and verse 26. It says, You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. Now, if you were a first century Christian reading that letter, you'd have a problem with that. Two thousand years later, we don't, because most of us sitting here are Gentiles. Most of us sitting here don't understand, can't comprehend the bigotry and the racism that existed between Jew and Greek. What he is saying is that in Christ there is no such thing as an inferior race. There is no such thing as an inferior people. That in Christ, Jew and Greek barriers are broken down. They don't exist. The ground is level at the cross between Jew and Greek. Then he says, there is neither slave nor free. Now, we don't have slavery in our culture today. At least some of us have never experienced slavery, and some of us don't even have the faintest idea of what it must have been like to be a slave. And some of us have revised history in order to somehow blot out the horrible thing that slavery was in this country. But for the most part, as we stand here today, we don't know what slavery is. But in that first century context, this would have jumped out of the pages. Wait a minute, Paul, what are you saying? Are you saying that a slave man and a free man are equal in Christ? That's precisely what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. That there is no racial barrier, Jew, Greek. There is no economic barrier, slave or free. And then he goes and makes one more statement. There's neither male nor female. Now we look at that, we say, well, we knew that all along. They didn't know that. The cultural context of that first century church, they didn't know that. In the Greco-Roman world, women were placed in a very inferior position. Even within the context of the Jewish substructures, women were placed in a very inferior position. Now Paul comes along and says, let's take the high view of womanhood, because at the cross there is no such thing as male or female. By the way, what's interesting is what those who advocate certain roles within the church for women have done is they have taken this passage that says nothing about roles in the church, has nothing to do with whether or not women ought to be preachers, has nothing to do with whether or not women ought to be teachers of men, has nothing to do with role structure within the church. They've taken these verses, lifted them out of context, and said, see, there's no such thing as male nor female. This is talking about something much higher than roles. This is talking about salvation and the application of salvation and the inclusion into that covenant community and the breaking down of ethnic barriers, race barriers, economic barriers, sex barriers. Then he says, For you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seeds and heirs according to the promise. So in the personal realm, we have what we call today the priesthood of all believers. That is, as Christians, we believe that every one of you who know and love Jesus Christ, regardless of your race, regardless of your ethnic background, regardless of where you stand economically, whether or not you are male or female, whether or not you are fat or skinny, whether or not you are tall or short, all of those barriers are broken down because in Jesus Christ there is a priesthood that belongs to all believers, we can have access directly to God. There is no such thing as male or female. Now listen to me closely. If you were living within the context of the first century church, all of a sudden the Apostle Paul has taken womanhood and catapulted it to a position that it never held within that community. Yet today we go back and we say he was a male chauvinist pig. He deserves nothing in way of our attention to scripture. We rip out portions of the Bible simply because we don't understand what Paul was saying. Hold your place in 1 Corinthians, go over to Ephesians 5. Ephesians chapter 5. In the personal realm there is the priesthood of all believers. Now let's go to the family. Let's talk about the family unit. Ephesians 5, 22. It says, wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Once again, we see two words there, and we don't like them. Can anybody tell me what the first word is? Submit. It didn't take you long to figure that out, did it? Everything inside of you screams out, submit, submit, submit is not for me. And yet we do not understand how that passage was used within that context and what that word meant to those who were in the first century church who read it. We filter it through our own eyes, through our own agenda, through our own culture. And we say, since it means that to us today, it had to mean that to them then, and therefore it is to be rejected. I can't accept that. By the way, let's not read Ephesians 5.22, which talks about wives submitting to their husbands, without reading 1 Ephesians 5.21. And what does Ephesians 5.21 say? We are to submit to one another. There is a mutual submission that is to go between husband and wife, not only the wife to the husband, but also the husband to the wife, and also within the context of the church, each of us to one another. Submission within the context of the first century church was required of all believers. Are you under someone's authority? Every human being who claims to know Jesus Christ must be under somebody's authority. Somewhere. Men, women, children, we must all be in submission to godly authority. By the way, Paul always qualifies his submission requirement. Notice what he says there in Ephesians 5.22. Wives, submit to your husbands. Period, exclamation point, no questions asked. Be a doormat, be a wallflower, let him trample all over you, right? That's what the Greco-Roman mind would have said. Paul then catapults womanhood to a different position and says, Submission has its limitation. And that is as unto the Lord. In other words, there's a higher aspect to submission. Hold your place again in 1 Corinthians and go to 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy, one of the pastoral epistles, 1 Timothy, and look with me at chapter 5. 1 Timothy chapter 5. We are priests, that is, we are individually equal before God as far as our salvation is concerned. There is a family structure where roles are different. And also within the context of the church, notice what it says in 1 Timothy 5 and verse 17. The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. Now you'll notice there's a couple of distinctions that are made there. First of all, elders are placed in the position of responsibility. That elders are worthy of the respect of the congregation. But there's also a distinction between the elders, that is those who are ruling elders and those who are teaching elders. And Paul distinguishes out those who have a position of teaching and preaching and says they're worthy of a double honor. Now I'm not only telling you this because I'm a teaching elder, I'm telling you this because this is scriptural. So there is a chain of command, a chain of authority that exists not only in your personal life, in your family life, and in your church life, but if you go over to Romans chapter 13, beginning with verse 1, Paul talks about, get this now, submission to government. Hold it. How could you possibly understand that? Living in 20th century America where we can get up and blast the president, where we can get up and blast the Congress, where we can go to the polling booths and kick the bums out if we don't like them, where we vote, where we have rights, where we have a freedom of press, at least we call it freedom of press, depends on which, well, that's another story. We have all of these wonderful freedoms. We come to Romans 13. We say, we agree with that submission to government. We're privileged people, we live in a privileged society, therefore we accept Romans 13. What if you were living under a Roman dictatorship? In Romans 13, Christians were being sent to crosses. Paul, who himself was imprisoned and would be beheaded, himself who would be martyred, stands up and says, there is a principle of submission, and it even goes as far as to apply to atheistic, heathenistic governments. So you see, every aspect. Of your life, whether you're a man or a woman, requires submission to authority. Now the question becomes, as you go back to 1 Corinthians 11, what is the context of this passage? What is the context of this passage? Christ is sovereign, he has a name that is above all other names. The husband and the wife role is compared in Scripture to the God and the Christ role. We are equal, we've already said that in terms of salvation, but we have separate functions, which are clearly delineated for us in Scripture. And just as Christ submitted himself to the will of the Father, so the church is to submit itself to Christ. The husband is to model the humility of Christ, the wife is to model the submission of the church. And so our prime example, whether we be men or women, becomes Jesus Christ. It becomes what he did. Now, as you keep that in mind, I want you to focus once again on verse 3. Here is the tradition. Paul says, the tradition, verse 2, I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the teachings just as I pass them on to you. Some other versions, by the way, translate that word teachings to traditions because there's a traditional aspect. In fact, one version actually uses the word ordinances. Paul is saying, I commend you for keeping the ordinances. Now he's not talking about sacraments here, he's talking about fundamental traditions that he had taught them that became vital to how they lived within the context of their own homes. One of those traditions he's now going to expound upon, and it's the headship principle. It's the tradition of headship. Now he says, first of all, the head of every man is Christ. The sovereignty of Christ demands that we believe that. Every one of us is under the sovereign control of a holy God who does all things according to his will and purpose. You were predetermined for salvation if you are one of God's elect. You were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. He contracted with his father to die on the cross, and he knows how many hairs you have on your head. And not one of those that have been given to the Father, not one of those who have been given to Christ will be lost. Not one. Because Christ is sovereign. And so the authority of headship says that the head of every man is Christ. Now listen, you can't possibly understand authority and submission, headship and submission, unless you've got that principle down first. If you don't have that principle in place first, you're never going to comprehend, you're never going to be able to appreciate how to live under authority. And that is the fundamental problem with many who have a problem with submission. They don't recognize the sovereign character of God. That sometimes sovereignty means that God does things that we don't understand. God places people in positions and roles that we don't understand. So we don't have a problem with letter A, and if we do, we're going to have a problem with letter B. Letter B is the head of the woman is her husband. Again, I'm going to tuck that aside for a second. That's the controversial one. But let's see the flow. If you don't understand the sovereignty of Christ, then you're not going to be able to comprehend the beauty of submission. And so if you're a woman, you're going to have difficulty with this passage that says the head of the woman is her husband. Especially, by the way, parenthetically, those of you who live with husbands who are losers. And you know exactly what I'm talking about. And listen, as I make this statement, I want you to mark it very carefully. Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere in Scripture are you ever required to submit to a man who abuses you, who molests you, who injures you, who punches you, who beats you across the floor, who slams you up against the wall. Nowhere are you commanded to submit to somebody who is going to treat you with that kind of degradation and disrespect. Nowhere in scripture are you ever required to submit to a man who will ask you or require of you or demand of you to do something immoral, something contrary to the word of God. Nowhere in Scripture are you to be obedient to that kind of authority that is not authority, that's an abuse of power. And ultimately, your connection and your commitment has to be to what pleases God. Now, listen, I'm not giving you license to divorce. It's not what I'm saying. But you know, one of the things, and this is all parenthetical, one of the things that tires me, as a man who has seen so much over so many years of preaching, I think it's about time Christian women stand up and recognize that there is such a thing as walking in faith. Some of you are tied to your husbands who abuse you and molest you and beat you, and I can't even begin to describe some of the things that I have been told that the women in our church, some of the women in our church have had to endure. From husbands who are drunkards and drug addicts and addicted to all forms of pornography and what have you, I cannot even begin to describe for you what some of these women have had to endure. And what I'm saying to you is that the time has come for you to stand up and say, I will not take that kind of abuse. My body belongs to God, and I'm not going to allow the temple of God to be affected that way. Now, I am not giving you license to divorce. What I am saying is get help and follow that help and take a stand, even if it means you have to place legal restrictions on your husband. Please do not understand for one moment that this church, this pulpit, this session, this congregation would ever endorse in the name of submission a man beating up on his wife. Nowhere in the word of God is that allowed. Nowhere is that ever permitted. Some of you have been the victims of rape and incest and horrible things, and you have somehow or another gotten a hold of some book or some tape where some preacher has told you you have to submit to that. And I don't believe that the scriptures require that. I don't think you can prove that in the Word of God. There is always a limitation to submission to authority. And that limitation is as unto the Lord, as unto Christ. Now I know in making that statement, some of you are going to go even to another extreme, and you're going to look at some of the things that your husband says or does or the way he looks at you and translate that into abuse. I know there's a real danger for that. But if your attitude is right on letter A, you're not going to have a problem with letter B. But now take a look at letter C. The head of Christ is God. The head of Christ is God. Now we're getting to the heart of the attitude with which we are to submit. Now, would all of you agree that Jesus Christ is God? Amen. Would all of you agree that he had the right to glory? Amen. Would all of you agree that he left his right to glory, gave it up and abandoned it to become obedient unto death, even the death on the cross? Let's go over to Philippians and let's take a look at the attitude of submission. Philippians chapter 2. He says in verse 5, your attitude, and this is the attitude of submission, whether you be submitted to Christ, or whether you be submitted within the context of your family, or whether you be submitted to the authority of your church, or whatever your role might be. Now, some of you are not even married. You say, Where is my submission to be? In fact, the scripture says that if you are single, you have a double responsibility. That God has given you that singleness, perhaps in some cases as a gift, to further advance the kingdom of Christ. That is, to work in a double measure because you're not bound by the restrictions of what is involved in being a husband or a wife. So all of us are involved in some degree to another in submitting ourselves ultimately to God. Now, what should the attitude be? Look at Philippians chapter 2, verse 5. Here's your attitude. Here's the definition of submission. Now filter this through the lens of the 20th century. Here's the definition of submission. And you won't find too many of the heroes of our generation filling this bill, will you? You won't find too many politicians with this mindset, do you? You won't find too many economic leaders with this concept of submission. You won't find too many homes with this concept, will you? Here it is. Here's your attitude. Here's the definition of submission. Christ, who, being in very nature, God. Now that ought to stop you right in your tracks there. Well, shouldn't it? It ought to just put you right into place and say, wait a minute. We're not talking about some mere human being, we're talking about God. Here is God. He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. Boy, take that down to the local headquarters of now. Equality is not something to be grasped. Wouldn't it be great if in our marriages men had this attitude and women had this attitude? Wouldn't it be great if in our homes a man would treat his wife with the same equality with which he treats his own body? Wouldn't it be great if our wives treated our husbands with this same kind of attitude that says, no, I do not demand my rights, I give them up? Imagine in a marriage where you have two people who are in conflict with one another. You have a husband squaring off with his wife. And what are they trying to do? He's trying to convince her that he's right, she's trying to convince him that she's right, right? Right. What are we saying here? What happens if now all of a sudden he develops an attitude that says, it's not whether or not I'm right or wrong that's important, it's how I can minister and serve you. And she says it's not whether or not I'm right or wrong that's important, it's whether or not I can minister to and serve you. What happens if both of these people have this attitude, then they're both submitted in the same spirit and attitude of Jesus Christ. Who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself. You say it. Nothing. Taking the very nature of a slave. Being made in human likeness, being found an appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death. Even death on a cross, and it doesn't end there. And I'm so glad it doesn't end there because there is a fruit, there is a reward for that kind of humiliation. There is a reward for that kind of attitude. There is a reward for those who are submitted in that kind of spirit. Therefore, always ask yourself what the therefore is there for. Therefore, in light of what I've just said, in light of the spirit or attitude of submission that Christ exemplified, therefore, God exalted him. Here's a principle of Scripture. Get it through your heads. The key to greatness is humility. The key to greatness is servanthood. The key to exaltation is to bow the knee. Not to demand your rights, not to look for equality, but to give equality up and bow in the same attitude as Jesus Christ did. And he gave him a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. That was an early first century hymn that was put into scriptural form. They used to sing that. You know, you sing things in order to memorize them. It was important for the church to sing humility so that they would memorize humility. It was important for the church to sing, giving up their rights, so that they would remember that's what they need to do. Now go back to 1 Corinthians. Here's the Corinthian problem. Verse 4. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head. It is just as though her head were shaved. If a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off. And if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God. But the woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man, neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. For this reason and because of the angels, the woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head. Now, this is not about hats in church. This is what the church has traditionally done with this passage. They have said, we need to get down to a principle where all women are to wear hats in church. This has nothing to do with hats in church. This was an isolated problem in the church at Corinth, and Paul goes beyond the scope of what you should put on your head and how you should wear your hair, and he gets down to a fundamental principle that was a problem at that time. Now there are two evident thoughts here. Paul is concerned, first of all, about the public ministry of the word. Because he talks about it in the context of prophecy, which is preaching. He is concerned about the public ministry of the word. He is talking here about Christians who are at worship. Christians who are at worship. Now in Corinth, the problem was they lived in a sexually oriented city. In fact, it was a slang word in those days to speak of someone as being a Corinthian. It would be like we would say today, somebody is a piece of trash or some other nasty word that we would use to speak of somebody's sexual character. To be Corinthianized meant that you were sexually promiscuous. That's the city these people lived in. Many of them lived in that kind of sexual promiscuity and were converted through the ministry of the church. Now they come into the church and they form a corporate body called the first Presbyterian Church of Corinth. There they are. There they are, worshiping. Problem is they have all this baggage that they brought with them. They come within the context of that Corinthian atmosphere, and all kinds of problems emerge. That's why all of 1 Corinthians was written. 1 Corinthians was written to dispel many of the problems that emerged in how these people governed themselves because they brought the trash with them. So Paul is concerned about guarding the integrity of public worship. He is concerned about guarding the integrity of the preaching ministry, the public ministry. And so he makes this statement: it is just as important that a man should not be covered as it is that a woman should be. So it's not only the woman covering that he's speaking of, it's the man covering or lack of covering that he's speaking of. He says that a woman should be covered and that a man should not be covered. So both principles are applicable to that church. Now let's not take that principle and drive it into the 20th century and say, therefore, men are never to wear hats and women are always to wear hats when they come to church. That's not what he's driving at. Now here's the key: both men and women were free to exercise a public ministry. Preaching was open to women. Did you hear what I said? Preaching was open to women. Women could prophesy. However, they were to prophesy in different ways than the men were, and to different audiences than the men were. Women were just as gifted in many circles as the men were in expositing the word, in opening up the structures of Scripture, in communicating scripture. So the public ministries of men and women were allowable, but the limitations were placed on the context in which those ministries could be administered. If a man does not pray or preach bareheaded, he dishonors Christ. And by the way, that's an interesting statement for Paul to make to a conservative Jewish audience that might have been listening to that. I mean, even today in Orthodox circles, when a Jewish man goes to church, he puts the little Yamelki on his head, the little beanie on his head to cover his head, because Orthodoxy demanded that the man's head be covered. Paul stands up and says, When you're in a public ministry, take it off. Completely contrary to what they were taught. At least from the time they were little. But then he says, if a woman does not veil herself, she dishonors her husband. Now please don't translate that principle and say that all the women have to wear hats on their heads in order so that they will not dishonor their husbands. That's not what Paul's talking about. Go back into the context and ask yourself, how would the people have received that message? What would they have heard? You're walking down Fifth Avenue in Corinth City. 2,000 years ago. You're walking down the street. Coming toward you is a prostitute. Coming toward you is a temple prostitute. Remember, that city was known for its sexual immorality. Here she comes. She's walking down the street. One thing is very, very clear. Temple prostitutes never, never, never, never veiled themselves. They never covered themselves. For a Christian woman in Corinth to appear in public this way was to open herself up to disgrace and to shame and to show that she had no headship principle at work in her life. She was no better, no different in that cultural setting than the temple prostitute. Notice verse 6. It says, if a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off. And, now note this, if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head. There's a condition. If it's a disgrace. In Corinth, it was a disgrace. In other cities, it was not a disgrace. Because in Corinth it showed I'm no different than the temple prostitutes. In 20th century America, it's not a disgrace. Why? Because we do not see veil coverings as indicative of whether or not you're a temple prostitute. So the condition is placed on it, and Paul says, within the context of this first century church, women veil yourselves in the public ministry because in so doing you are saying, I am under authority. But there's not some sort of universal principle that's now to be applied to us that says that every time we appear in public, we are to have our heads or our faces covered. And if it is a symbol of headship, and she refuses to acknowledge this, then she may as well go all the way and shave her head. That's what Paul is saying. He is saying that the principle of headship is really what's at stake here, not whether or not you wear a veil, not whether or not you cover your head. It's as the corporate body, when you publicly present yourself, are you under headship? So just as the man uncovered his head and prophesied, he was declaring, I am under authority, so also the woman in covering her face and wearing the veil was saying, I am under authority, both within the context of public ministry. Then he takes us all the way back to creation. A man ought not to cover his head, verse 7, since he is the image and the glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man. Boy, I'll tell you, what a passage. What a controversial passage, a crucial passage that is going to help you to understand the context of womanhood in a way you've never understood it before. Paul immediately jumps all the way back to the beginning of time, all the way back to Genesis, and he states that man was made in the image of God. Now listen, before the two sexes were separated, the Bible tells us that Adam was created in the image of God. But don't stop reading there. Because when you go to Genesis chapter 5 and you look at verses 1 and 2, and this is where we're going to end here today, and we're going to pick this up next time. When you go back to Genesis 5, 1 and 2, it tells us that God created them. He created them. In fact, go back to it as we close. Genesis chapter 5, and look with me at verses 1 and 2. Who is it that is created in the image of God? Who is it that is created to the glory of God? Genesis 5, verse 1. This is the written account of Adam's line. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Now notice verse 2. He created them, male and female, at the time they were created, he blessed them and called, what's that next word? Them man. He blessed them and called them man. Now we've just been told that God created Adam to reflect the glory of God. Now he is saying he created them, both male and female, and called them man. Is that therefore both of them, both male and female, are to manifest the express image and the glory of God? Now here's where the question comes. What is, what does it mean to reflect the image and the glory of God? How can a man reflect the glory of God in his public ministry and in his private home life? How can a woman image the glory of God in her public ministry and in her private home life? That's the $64,000 question. That's where all the controversy comes from.

SPEAKER_02 45:50

Now may the grace of God, the love of our Lord and our Savior, Jesus the Christ, the very presence, person, and power of his Holy Spirit, abide with each of you now until Christ comes again and forevermore. And all God's people said.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

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