Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler.
And
I'm Wo.
Today's episode of Stone Choir as well as next week's episode will
both be dealing with the subject of feminism, of women's liberation, of
the role and nature of the woman in the Christian life, in
the life of the world and the life of the family, and
what it means both for Christians and civilizationally when these things are
usurped from outside of the church.
Uh initially we had hoped to do this all as one episode,
uh the way we did with slavery last week, but as we
were sort of talking and discussing and just thinking through what we
wanted to say, we realized that even speed running just the scriptural
part of this was probably gonna take you know i even going
at a fast clip, yeah, we'll probably blow past ninety minutes today.
So re Rather than trying to shoehorn it onto one, I think
we're just gonna decide up front to split it into two.
So today's episode is going to specifically focus on the scriptural basis
for the ontological difference between man and woman and what and what
God intends by making one of each.
Why are we different?
How are we different?
What was the purpose of our being created differently and unequally?
And once we establish that this week, next week's episode is going
to specifically deal almost entirely with what has happened really in the
West since the Enlightenment.
It's interesting you can go read through the Wikipedia article on like
women's liberation, you know, the the role the evolution of women in
society and everything in the West, there's stuff that happened in Greece
and Rome, and then there's not really any updates until the Enlightenment.
And the reason for that is that when the last of the
pagan kingdoms, which were really in uh Scandinavia, finally adopted Christianity, feminism
as we know it today in any form, died in the West.
And there was really a homogeneity in the way that Christendom dealt
with and viewed women vis-a-vis men.
And that only began to change after the Enlightenment.
And so that you find this a lot when you're I I
actually recommend reading Wikipedia articles on these things because they're slanted in
the liberal direction, they're going to be bragging about what they've done.
So they're actually very informative in terms of the timeline.
And what you'll find in a lot of these sociological so called
subjects, the reason we're talking about is it's not sociological, it's theological.
But what you'll find is that you'll have stuff two thousand years
ago and then there's a gap and then in the eighteen hundreds
it picks up again in the West.
And that's the reason why is that morality changed a couple hundred
years ago as the West began to abandon Christianity.
So this first episode about feminism is going to specifically discuss Christianity,
what scripture says about it.
And then next next week we'll talk about the destruction that has
been done to the Christian doctrine by the adoption of notions of
feminism, whether it's first, second, or third wave, the notion of the
brand new sin of misogyny for which men are now being excommunicated
from our churches, uh that's a pretty big deal that we have
new doctrine that is damning men that for literally six thousand years
of Christian history minus what has happened since the Enlightenment.
Everyone believed the same thing.
It's a recurring theme on Stone Choir because it is one of
the fundamental issue issues facing the entire church.
So as we get in dig into scripture, we're going to begin
at the very beginning with Genesis two.
I
think I may actually begin with Genesis one because it is then
echoed in Genesis 2.
But because obviously of course we have two narratives, not different narratives,
but two narratives, the second being an expanded of the first of
the creation of man.
And so I'll start with Genesis one verse twenty six.
Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our
likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and
over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on
the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of
God he created him, male and female he created them, and God
blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and
fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish
of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over
every living thing that moves on the earth.
Now of course it's tempting to turn this into a lecture on
Genesis, but that's not our goal today.
We're going to f focus specifically on how scripture treats the interplay
between men and women, the nature of woman, and things like that
And so I want to start here because it is worth pointing
out, contrary to what so many argue today, this does not actually
say that God created woman in his own image.
This says that God created man in his own image, because it
says God created man in his own image, that is singular, masculine
there. And then it says in the image of God he created
him. Again, that is singular masculine.
And so of course then we have the expanded narration of the
creation of mankind in Genesis two, starting with verse fifteen.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden
of Eden to work it and keep it, and the Lord God
commanded the man saying, You may surely eat of every tree of
the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat
of it you shall surely die.
Then the Lord God said, It is not good that man should
be alone, I will make him a helper fit for him.
Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast
of the field, and every bird of the heavens, and brought them
to the man, to see what he would call them, and whatever
the man called every living creature, that was its name.
The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of
the heavens, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam
there was not found a helper fit for him.
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the
man, and while he slept took one of his ribs enclosed of
its place with flesh.
And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man
he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones,
and flesh of my flesh.
She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and hold
fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
There are a number of things we need to pull out of
this passage.
First it is worth noting
who named Adam.
God named Adam.
Naming is an exercise of ownership, of possession, of authority over someone
or something.
That's why parents name their children.
That's why some people name inanimate objects, but why most people name
their pets.
It is an exercise of ownership and exercise of dominance Of dominion,
and so God brings the animals to Adam, Adam names them, because
Adam is the steward of creation, he is given dominion over all
of these things.
This is a demonstration of the dominion
of Adam over creation, and that includes woman, because you will note
that Adam calls her woman.
Later on he also names her Eve, but here he calls her
woman. There's some word play here which actually works pretty well in
the English, merely as a quirk of historical etymology, but because the
word that is used here, as opposed to earlier were the generic
term for man is Adam, in fact the name of Adam is
both man and Adam.
Here it's Ish and Isha, so it's a play on words there
that does come through, thankfully, in the English.
But we note that woman is created out of man, as opposed
to man who was created from the earth.
There is a theological point there.
Woman is from man, man names woman, man is the head of
woman, and we'll see that of course later, more explicitly in other
parts of Scripture.
But man and woman also come back together.
They were from one flesh, Eve having been created from Adam, they
come back together as one flesh, as man and wife, and that
is how the blessings of God to be fruitful and multiply are
retained to humanity by that one flesh union which we call marriage.
I'm glad that you you jump back to Genesis one to point
to the discussion of the image of God.
That's reiterated actually in Genesis five.
It reads When God created man he made him in the likeness
of God, male and female he created them, and he blessed them
and named them man when they were created.
This is why we are called mankind.
This is why linguistically, for example in in languages like Latin, if
there was a single man in a group, the masculine form would
be used to describe the group.
The only time you would have a the feminine in Latin would
be if everyone that you're referring to was female.
So
this has always been baked into creation.
It's been baked into previous languages.
It was baked into the English language until really the last thirty
years or so when suddenly the masculine form of language as generic
is no longer permissible, but it's it's called gendered language.
In fact, we have even church bodies like Wells going so far
as to change the the creeds to remove the so-called gendered language
to say that Christ Christ was m created human and not created
man, which is vulgar on multiple levels.
But that's that's the reason that we're pointing to this stuff is
that these small, small details that can seem like they're picky and
you know, why are these guys being defensive?
Why does anyone care?
Well, I think the real question is why do people care when
they're pushing in the opposite direction?
When someone wants to talk about what the image of God meant
at creation, let's listen to what God actually said.
And he said, man was created in his image.
And when you look at the passage in Genesis 127 or so,
it's verbally awkward.
It would have been much easier to not say male and female
he created them while ignoring the image part.
If the image were obviously to apply to both, it was simply
said so.
And so that re repetition with exclusion has to be significant.
And it's repeated.
It's repeated not only in in Genesis, it's also repeated in the
New Testament.
I think we'll get to one of those passages later.
But uh you'd also mention naming as is an act of authority.
In one of the early episodes we did a name no man
knows, we spent some time talking about that, about the authority of
being able to name something, about the reason that pseudonymity and anonymity
make some people so angry because they want to exercise authority over
someone and they don't know their name.
And that is limiting.
When you don't know, for example, my name, there's only so much
you can do to me.
Once you do know my name, there's more stuff you can do
to me.
And when someone wants to do harm to someone, when someone wants
to they will claim exercise authority in a godly fashion, but we'll
see what the results of those will be and they're not going
to be godly, uh but the the results will speak for themselves.
Naming has authority.
And when Adam named Eve, just as Adam named all the other
creatures, as you said, that was an exercise of dominion.
And as we discussed last week when we were talking about slavery,
dominion has come to mean ruling mercilessly, or authoritarianism in the negative
sense of the word, where if you rule, if you have dominion,
that's it's the worst thing you can do.
it's inherently an act of cruelty in our minds today.
And that's not godly.
God has dominion over us.
Is that cruelty?
Well, that is absolutely what Satan wants us to believe.
That was the pitch that the Satan gave to Eve.
In essence, that God was cruel by not letting them eat the
fruit. And he said, Look how delicious it is, and you'll be
like God.
And so she fell for it.
And that's always the pitch.
The if someone is over you, they're ruthless.
they're heartless.
They're doing something to you that's bad.
And the only way for you to escape this evil that you
just realized is to fight the patriarchy, to fight the headship, to
subvert the rule over you.
That's the essence of everything that's happened since the Enlightenment.
In a nutshell, that's what's been happening.
One by one.
No gods, no masters, no masters and slaves, no man over woman.
You can go right through Galatians 320A, you can go right down
the entire high hierarchy of headship, and you'll find that the world
today and the morality that all of us have been taught to
hold is fundamentally at odds with created order.
And one of the reasons that we're starting in Genesis is not
only that it's the beginning, but as we establish that God's headship
beginning with woman being created from man and as a helper, I
think we're I'm gonna refer back to Genesis two eighteen repeatedly that
the the passage then the Lord God said, It is not good
that man should be alone, I will milk make a helper fit
for him.
That's the essence of everything that we're going to say here today
in both Old and New Testament.
Because this is before the fall.
This is before there was any sin in the world.
This was before there was the curse against either Adam or Eve,
which obviously applies to every man and to every woman in turn.
Before there was any evil, God said, It's not good for man
to be alone.
I'm gonna give him a woman.
I'm gonna give him a helper fit for him.
The reason that that's going to be important throughout this episode and
throughout the second part of the subsequent episode is that
helper inherently has a help E.
So Adam he existed by himself.
He was able to do what he needed to do.
But God said, That's not, I'm not done.
Adam needs more.
He needs a helper.
Eve, on the other hand, was created to be a helper.
In other words, her definition is pointed directly at Adam.
Her purpose is to be a helper.
Absent someone to help, she has no purpose.
And that's fundamentally the root of what we see feminism doing in
the hearts and minds of those who adopt it by any measure
is the notion that a woman can be strong and independent and
oh that's great and you go girl.
And what it does is it fundamentally uproots a woman from the
only task to which God has created her and the only thing
that's ultimately going to make her happy.
So when we discuss these things like slavery, like headship, like the
roles of men and women, it is never in the pursuit of
subjugation or cruelty or saying you are less than, you need to
be ruled.
That's not the point.
The point is that if God has ordained a certain order and
we try to break it and subvert it, what's gonna happen?
The punishment for sin, the temporal punishment, and there is temporal punishment
for every sin.
Every time you do something wrong, God paid for it on the
cross, but you're still going to pay the price in this life
somehow. And the the punishments for these sins are usually baked right
into the sin.
If you know, if someone decides to assert self identity and they
say, I was born a man, but I'm I want to be
a woman now, well the first things they do is they change
their name.
As we said in the name No Man Knows episode, that is
an assertion of self ownership.
Trannies are throwing off the shackles of God and saying, I am
my own maker.
I am remaking by naming myself and I'm going to remake my
body. What do they do when they destroy their bodies and they
destroy their minds by injecting hormones that do not belong in them?
Complete destruction.
It leads to madness.
It leads to despair.
They consume their own bodies in their sin.
And because they're given over to that delusion, it's all consuming.
And in in many cases, there's no way for them to get
back out of it because they go down this path of destruction.
So the sin was believing that God had made them wrong, which
is itself high-handed sin.
But the further they go down that path, the more destruction that
sin causes in their lives.
And so when we talk about the order of creation and how
God has made each of us, it's ultimately serving and obeying God
and saying, if God made me for this purpose, I can't just
veto that.
I can't find a workaround and say I'm gonna ignore it.
Because try as we might, our nature is immutable.
If God made you a man, you are a man.
And if he made you a woman, you are a woman.
You don't get a vote.
And if some days you feel a little weird about it, pray
for help.
And if you need to talk to someone, seek help.
But to believe that God made a mistake is apostasy.
It's to say that God is not God because God cannot make
mistakes. If you believe that God made a mistake to either make
you a woman or to you know, maybe you admit that he
made you a woman, but you're gonna say, Well, I don't I
don't like the role he gave me.
I want a different role.
I want to be in charge.
That is rebellion against the very God who has given you the
gifts of whatever your station is.
And so these conversations are important again, not
because we are men who are seeking dominion over other races or
over the weaker sex.
There's nothing of the sort.
It's all of us saying
God is our head, He has ordained order among us.
The further we stray from that, the worse we make everything.
And what we see around us in the world today is everything
being made worse by us, ceasing to believe that God actually meant
what he did and meant what he said.
And so when he says these things in scripture, it's imperative for
us to listen.
When I say dominion, I just think lordship.
And when I use either of those terms, from my perspective, they're
entirely neutral because I know the etymology and what they mean.
For most people, yes, they're going to have imbibed the implications
the world infuses into those terms, and that of course is negative
because it is a rejection on the part of the world of
rightful hierarchy, authority, etc.
But dominion just comes from dominus in Latin which just means Lord.
I have dominion over my property, I have dominion over my dog.
Parents have dominion over their children.
This is a neutral term.
How you exercise it is what makes it good or bad, good
or evil.
And so dominion in and of itself
is more or less morally neutral.
It's good in so far as it is part of God's design
for creation, but how it is exercised is what gives it its
moral character
The reason it's under
assault. The reason it's under assault is precisely because Satan doesn't want
God to be Lord.
He doesn't want Jesus Christ to be Lord.
All of this is fundamentally rooted in upending God's headship in his
orders. And that that's why it's becoming a dirty word.
And most people today think it is a dirty word.
You're right.
And that's we're talking about this head on precisely because this is
a satanic attack.
Feminism is a satanic attack on God and on the church, just
as the abolition of slavery as a notion is a satanic attack.
It is saying we are all equal, we are completely horizontal.
There's no differences among men.
There's no difference between man and woman.
When God when Satan uses Galatians three twenty-eight as a template for
undoing creation, we need to pay attention and then we need to
fight
back.
Satan was the first rebel.
Alinsky did get that right.
And
the whole goal of rebels in this sort of area is to
overthrow rightful authority.
It's not saying that rebels are always wrong, because of course someone
could rebel against unlawful or wicked uses of authority, and that's a
different matter for a different time Perhaps we'll eventually get around to
an episode on Magnabird and related things.
But Satan's entire goal is to subvert the right ordering of creation
because he wants to be God.
But of course, you may notice the irony there.
He doesn't want to get rid of hierarchy, he just wants to
be at the top of it.
And that is the same thing that he tries to get his
children to do.
And so feminism fundamentally is an attempt
by women to replace men at the top of the hierarchy.
They don't want equality.
They never want equality.
That's not the goal.
Satan's goal wasn't equality with God.
Satan's goal was to be God.
The goal of feminists is to supplant men and be in charge
in the place of men.
Some of them go so far as say they want to get
rid of men.
I don't know how that's going to work out, but
they want to be in control.
They want to take that role of headship and leadership that God
gave to man and make that their own.
And I think that's a good
transition into the fall.
We could talk more about teleology because that was touched on, but
I think we'll save that for later in the episode or possibly
the next episode.
Instead of just reading through Genesis 3, and I recommend you go
and do that, we'll talk through what happens in the fall, what
the fall is, and the nature of the curses that flow from
the fall.
And so of course we all know the narrative of the fall.
The serpent deceives the woman, the woman takes the fruit, eats, and
gives it to her husband.
Now, Scripture is very clear, and this also comes up in the
New Testament it is the woman who was deceived, it is the
weaker vessel who was deceived by the serpent, and became a transgressor.
However, her husband is standing there while she does this.
And so we could debate almost endlessly as to which sin was
the first sin.
In the garden, anyway, because obviously Satan has already fallen at this
point, he is the deceiver, he is bringing sin into the world.
You have the sin of Eve because she listens to the serpent
instead of asking her husband, which is what she should have done.
He's standing there.
He is her head.
He is the one who should make the decision.
But you also have the sin of Adam, who Adam who as
the head is standing there, passively observing.
When he should have interjected, he should be the one, either talking
to or rejecting the serpent, instead of sitting back and seeing what
happens with his wife.
And so then we have the curses that flow from this.
I'll just read through
Already the the fullness of the curses, the Lord God said to
the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all
livestock, and above all beasts of the field, on your belly you
shall go, and dust you shall eat, all the days of your
life, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between
your offspring and her offspring.
He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in
childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule
over you.
I'll pause for a second there because the word The word your
desire shall be contrary to your husband can also be translated your
desire shall be for your husband or against your husband.
We'll get more into that into discussion.
It's important to note there that the ESV that's a complete mistranslation.
That is not an and, that is a but.
And that's really crucial because one of the things that some feminists
have tried to do with this verse when they s when it
says, Your desire shall be contrary to your husband or shall be
for your husband, but he shall rule over you, which is false.
It's trying to set those in opposition to say, well, maybe one
of those isn't quite a curse.
When as we get as you get through the rest of what
is said of Adam, every single phrase here in this passage is
a direct curse against the recipient.
You shall do your desire shall be contrary to your husband, is
a curse, full stop, and he shall rule over you is also
a curse.
Now we'll get to that in a minute, but I just want
to note that when EFC V says but they're lying.
It's a blatant mistranslation specifically to try to to in in interject
doubt into whether this entire thing is a curse.
As I said, when when you read through what it says about
Adam, every part of it is terrible news.
Even the proto evangelium Which is delivered to Satan, which is good
news for us, is a complete curse against Satan.
The promise of a Messiah in Genesis 315 is a curse.
That is the worst possible news for Satan.
It's all bad news.
It just so happens that the curse against Satan is the best
possible news for us.
So every word of this is evil in the proper sense.
Every word of this is being delivered as punishment for evil.
Yes,
and the the underlying Greek here the word that the ESV translates
as but is chi, which is and
so the curse on Adam then, and to Adam he said, Because
you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten
of the tree, of which I commanded you, you shall not eat
of it.
Cursed is the ground because of you.
In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your
life, thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you
shall eat the plants of the field, by the sweat of your
face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for
out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to
dust you shall return.
And then I'll read the the next verse as well because we
touched on it earlier, but it's good to also read the verse
itself. The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the
mother of all living, and so again we see that exercise of
dominion of headship by Adam over his wife.
He names her Eve.
And so to turn back to the curses, the serpent is dealt
with somewhat summarily.
It's just cursed are you above all livestock.
And then of course we get the Proto Evangelian, which is bad
news as stated for Satan, even if it is good news, of
course, for us.
But the curse for the woman and the man will focus on
those two.
You will note first that the nature of the curse goes to
the core of the nature of the of the one who is
cursed. And so Adam is cursed with regard to his work.
He is cursed with regard to the work of being a gardener,
a man of the soil, a husbandman, because that is what man
was made to do.
We have that in Genesis when man was made he was placed
in the garden to work and to keep it.
That is the purpose for which God made man originally.
And here we see that now it will only be by the
sweat of his face, by labor, toil, suffering, and pain, that work
that originally would not have included these things, would not have entailed
these, it would have been a joyful thing to do this work
in the garden.
Now it is toil, now it is labor, not simply work.
And so for the woman, the curse also goes to the core
of her nature, because in her nature she is a wife and
a mother, and so it is her pain in childbearing that God
multiplies, because that goes to her nature as wife, because she can't
have children without a husband, without a man, and mother, because obviously
she has the children by burying them, and that is where the
pain enters as part of this curse.
But additionally, she is cursed in that her submission to her husband
will no longer be
natural as it was before the fall.
Before the fall, woman submitting to man is simply the order of
things. It is the nature of things now that rests less easily
upon woman.
Now it is in her nature to want to rebel.
This is sort of a solidifying of what she did in the
fall, because in the fall she listened to the serpent.
She decided for herself she acted as the head instead of asking
her husband, instead of letting him be the head.
Yes he should have stepped up and done it himself, but she
also should have submitted instead of what she did, and so she
is confirmed in this after a fashion, and now her desires are
contrary to her husband, which is to say, she wants to be
in the place of headship.
She wants to rule, she wants to be the head.
But her desire is also for her husband.
Because woman still has some of that desire to be in the
proper hierarchy.
To properly submit to her husband.
It does not come as easily as it would have prior to
the fall, but it is still there.
And of course, man shall still rule over woman.
This is both a reaffirmation
of the nature of things of the order created by God prior
to the fall, and a statement of how things will continue to
operate after the fall.
But of course this is now rule over the woman, which is
a more active and less agreeable matter than would have been the
sort of headship exercised before the fall.
And
it's important to note with the word that's translated desire here, that
only appears two other times in scripture.
And the most immediate one is again in Genesis 4.7, just a
few, you know, less than a page later after this curse.
So I'm gonna read what what was said to Eve first and
then immediately what was said about Cain to Eve.
Your desire shall be contrary to your husband and he shall rule
over you.
And then so Cain was very angry and his face fell.
The Lord said to Cain, Why are you so angry and why
has your face fallen?
If you do well, will you not be accepted?
And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the
door. Its desire is contrary to
you, but you must rule over it.
I think it's really important to read these two passages in light
of each other, because when we try to imagine what desire might
be, well it's not talking about the sort of you know lust
or any sort of desire that is referred to in the New
Testament. It's specifically referring to the type of desire that Cain's sin
had against him.
Again it says sin is crouching at the door.
It's desire, sin's desire is contrary to you, but you must rule
over it.
Now that almost perfectly mirrors the second half of this curse against
Eve. So the notion that
the desire is almost an operant force outside of the self.
if a sin can have a desire and Eve's desire both are
contrary to the good thing, which is the husband, or in Cain's
case, against himself, who was own his own sinful nature.
I think that when you read those passages together it makes very
clear the nature of what the woman every woman has to struggle
against. And one thing that's frankly it's really missing from our our
pastor's preaching and it needs to come back, women are cursed.
God has cursed women to struggle against their husbands and against their
fathers before that.
And now with the advent of feminism, and many of our pastors
today are feminists, it's not only a an egregious sin among women.
It feminism is normal in our society.
As I said, you will be excommunicated from the LCMS if you
are a quote unquote misogynist.
That is the religion of feminism.
So it's not a small deal to point out that
the woman is cursed in such a way that causes what she
wants to be contrary to what God desires, to the order that
God has established.
And anyone who's who's read dating advice or marriage advice, or just
if you if if you're a man and you've been around women
for any length of time in a relationship, you know that that
sort of struggle and pushback, you know, that's called a a certain
type of testing, if you're familiar with the term, I'm not going
to mention it here, but it never goes away.
It's something that is always there and it's a test.
It's a constant prodding and poking just to see are you still
the man?
Are you still my head?
Because a woman knows the second that a man abdicates his headship,
whether he gets tired of it or he's too weak for it,
or he just you know, whatever excuse he has, if he fails
to be the head, she will come roaring right back just as
Eve did.
And earlier Corey had mentioned the the order of sins.
I just wanna reiterate the first part of that curse.
And to Adam he said, Because you have listened to the voice
of your wife, that was his first sin, that was Adam's first
sin. And we inherit Adam's sin.
We don't simply inherit the sin that he disobeyed God by eating
the fruit.
We inherit the first sin that he listened to his wife.
And
listen is is another term that has a few different common connotations.
It's used it this it's a common word in the Hebrew word
that's used, but one of the common connotations is heed or obey.
And I just I highlighted that here because this is also echoed
a bit later in Genesis in chapter 16.
Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children.
She had a female Egyptian slave whose name was Hagar, and Sarai
said to Abram, Behold now the Lord has prevented me from bearing
children. Go into my slave, it may be that I shall obtain
children by her, and Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.
So twice in Genesis we have two major pivotal moments where a
husband listens and heeds his wife's evil advice.
Eve Eve had disobeyed God, she had disbelieved God, and she had
listened to the voice of Satan.
And here in Genesis sixteen, what is Sarai doing?
She's saying God's keeping me from getting pregnant.
He told me that I was going to have a son, and
now it's years later and nothing's happening.
You need to go have sex with my slave so that I
can have an heir.
It was open disobedience and did Abram correct her as Adam failed
to correct Eve?
No. He listened to her.
And what is the result of that sin?
We have Muslims.
The punishment for all of humanity is a Muslims exist because Abram
listened to the voice of his wife.
That's a bad punishment.
That is a huge deal that has left a permanent scar on
humanity, on the face of the earth, on so many nations, it's
impossible to name them.
We don't understand what the human timeline would be like if not
for this one sin resulting in the birth of the Arab race
and the Muslims that rose among them.
So temporal punishment for sin sometimes has little far reaching consequences.
Abram listened to his wife.
He did not push back against her curse.
She was pushing him, just as God had cursed her to be
to push, not that God caused her to sin, but part of
her curse was to suffer under the delusion that she would know
better than her husband what to do.
And
again, as we talk in the in the next episode about the
genesis and the root of feminism, it's the very opposite of that.
It celebrates the idea that women would be freed from the shackles
of the bondage to men and to having to listen to what
men tell them to do, to be freed from mansplaining.
You know the the t the fact that there's a term for
a man explaining something that's so derogatory and dismissive, he'll you always
laugh at it today, but that's a big deal.
The idea that a man would explain something to a woman has
now become a caricature.
Well that's literally the order that God created.
And we've gone so far down this path of destruction of godly
order that things that God ordained are now punchlines.
And scripture is very clear to expand on the issue of the
Arabs and Islam.
In Genesis 16, later in that chapter, he shall be a wild
donkey of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against
him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.
God tells us exactly the nature of the nations that will flow
from Ishmael, who of course is the son
born to Abraham by Ahar.
And I really, in a to return to the curse, in a
very real way, most of the curse falls on man, which is
of course appropriate, because as the head, man is responsible.
And so the fact that woman rebels, yes, it's a curse on
woman, it is something with which she has to struggle, but it
really is a curse on man as well.
Because now as
a father you have to deal with rebellious daughters.
As a husband, you have to deal with a rebellious wife.
This is just a fact of the fallen nature of mankind.
We don't get around it by ignoring it.
We have to deal with it.
And as was mentioned, pastors need to preach these things.
These things need to be said to Christians, they are in Scripture.
Christians need to hear them.
You are supposed to teach the full counsel of God, not just
the parts that don't make you uncomfortable, and don't make the women
angry with you later on in the Bible study.
This is what Scripture says.
This is what Christians need to say.
And it has explanatory power.
It's not simply a condemnation of sin.
I mean, the fact that women are cursed, we're not going near
neaner boo-boo.
Look at you.
Like it's not it's not meant to be insulting.
It's a fact.
Women are cursed.
Everyone knows that men are cursed.
You know, men die earlier because our bodies typically are beaten up
and even guys who do mi you know work with their minds,
the stress of those jobs typically causes men to die younger.
We get beaten up and worn out as part of the curse.
And everybody knows it.
And you know, the joke is that well, women live longer because
they're more sensible.
Well, maybe they live longer because they're not cursed for their work
to be cursed.
The curse of the woman is to to be ornry, to to
be oppity, to to cause problems for her husband.
And it's not malicious.
And that's why that's the reason that pastors need to talk about
I mean, malicious not might not be the right word.
It's inherent, but It's not inexorable.
See, if you've been in a relationship where a man understands these
things, the man will know that he can tamp it down, and
then the woman will be happy again.
It's only when these things are permitted to run wild where the
where a girl is permitted to continue to push and push and
push and never get any pushback, that the true disaster in a
relationship and ultimately at a civilizational scale occurs.
If a man knows, because you know in the case of Christians,
a pastor will tell him.
Men who are not Christians have learned these things from places like
the Manosphere where you're getting some advice that's good and some advice
that's absolutely wicked.
Our pastors are they're only dealing with the other half of the
baby. they're dealing with the part that's not wicked, but they're ignoring
the part that God has made clear.
So these are matters of wisdom, not only condemnation.
If pastors are telling their flocks, both men and women, look, women,
you're going to inherently want to fight your husband or your father.
And you need to be aware of it.
You need to catch yourself.
And husbands need to be aware of the fact that their wives
are going to do this.
And the solution for the husband is not to capitulate, not to
say yes, dear, just you know, I mean, there are obviously times
where you have to use sound judgment, but when a woman is
being rebellious against God's order, a man needs to have the wisdom
to understand the difference between she's doing something she shouldn't do and
I'm just being lazy or I don't want to hear it, but
there's n she's not doing anything wrong.
Like it's not we're not putting everything on one side or the
other. But the fact that this curse is absent from preaching and
from discussion among most Christians is a crisis because the result, again,
is writ large at a civilizational level.
Because this test of woman against man has scaled up through feminism,
through the franchise being given to women.
It's gone far beyond the household.
It's gone far beyond the wife to husband relationship, where now as
voters, these tests are being applied civilizationally, and the disastrous results are
exponentially more severe.
It's not just one unhappy husband with a nagging wife.
It's an entire civilization with women seeking things that they should not
seek and men not saying, No, you can't do that.
I am the head, we are the heads, you must obey us.
Now it's it sounds offensive to our modern ears to even hear
language like that, and the point of us talking about these things
is to highlight that that's a godly way to talk.
It's not automatically right.
Like a man could say those things and be completely wrong, which
is why there's the onus is on the man as to as
the head to get these things right, to study the word of
God, to be serious about his duties and to obey God and
to take care of those under his dominion.
as Sarah's Lord, and this there's another passage I think in first
Peter we're going to get to towards the end, where she's specifically
commended for calling Abraham her Lord.
That is the view, the proper godly view that a woman should
have to her husband.
And if we don't return to that sort of relationship in families
and then civilizationally where men are in charge of these things and
women are not, things will continue to get worse.
And the fact that there's a correlation that is in fact causative
between the advent of these things that we called feminism and the
wholesale destruction of Christendom, it's not coincidence.
It is absolutely causal in relationship.
To expand just a little bit on your comments with regard to
the word desire in the curse on the woman, any Christian, when
reading that section of the curse in Genesis three
should call to mind Romans seven.
So I find it to be a law that when I want
to do right, evil lies close at hand, for I delight in
the law of God and my inner being, but I see in
my members another law waging war against the law of my mind,
and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in
my members.
And so that sin that dwells in your members of which Paul
is speaking here in Romans, that's that desire of women that is
contrary to their husbands, that desire to rule, to be the head,
to usurp.
That's That is not an inherent part of the nature of woman.
That is a corruption of the nature of woman, because it is
part of sin, it is that corruption of sin that is transmitted
as original sin down through the generations.
And so that is the law of sin.
And we have to resist that as Christians.
And so again, pastors need to cover this, need to be preaching
this, because it's not just that men have to do their duty
and rule over women, although yes, men have to do that, and
most modern men are not doing it as they should, but women
also have to struggle against this sin that is particular to the
nature of woman, because a wife should submit to her husband.
She shouldn't just submit to her husband because he rules over her.
She should submit to her husband because that is her duty as
his wife.
And Christian women need to hear that from the pulpit.
They need to hear that from pastors just as much as Christian
men need to hear that they are to rule over their wives.
Yes, you are to love your wives as Christ loved the church,
but you are also to rule over them.
That is the duty, that is the position that God gave you.
And if you are not doing the things God gave you to
do, you are not doing what Christians are supposed to do.
Because yes, Christianity is a matter of faith in Christ.
Yes, it is by grace through faith.
We know that.
That's not the point of the things we are addressing typically on
this podcast.
Because no one, at least no Protestant, disagrees with that.
We are addressing the matters that have been neglected that so many
do not touch on, the parts of Scripture that make men uncomfortable
because they don't want to deal with it, because the modern world
says these aren't the things that really matter anymore, it's just love.
No, that's not the point here.
There are works that are supposed to flow from a living faith.
For husbands, that is right management of the household, that is dominion
over the household, that is ruling over wife and children, that is
loving your wife and children as Christ loves the church, but there
are duties for the other members of the household as well.
Slaves are to submit to their masters, are to serve their masters
well, not just because they are afraid of punishment, but because as
Christians you are supposed to do your duty.
Children are supposed to submit to their parents, are to obey their
parents the fourth commandment is very clear.
Wives are to submit to their husbands in all things.
That's a quote from Scripture.
That is literally what Scripture says about wives submitting to their husbands.
We'll get to that later and read The context is well, the
context doesn't change it, that's what it says.
The full counsel of God is what is supposed to be proclaimed,
from pulpits and Bible studies, from anyone who wants to be or
stands up to be, has been called to be, a teacher in
the church.
And we have far too few to day who are actually addressing
what Scripture says.
We have most men, who are pretending to be pastors, they will
receive a pastor's judgment, the stricter judgment of a teacher, because they
had the role, whether or not they fulfilled it.
They're not proclaiming the full counsel of God, they are simply parroting
the world.
And the world is today almost diametrically opposed to the things of
God, to what Scripture actually says about these issues And that is
why we are going over these issues.
We are going over them because it is vitally important for Christians
to actually believe what God says.
Not what the world says, not what the world said Christians should
believe, but what God says is true, because God's word is eternally
true. Everything contained in Scripture is true today.
It was true
when it was written.
It was true before it was written.
It has always been true because it is God's eternal will.
The law is God's eternal will.
It does not pass away because we now have the gospel, and
we have the proto-evangelian here in Genesis.
It didn't do away with the law, because the law again is
God's eternal will, and it is vital for Christians to order their
lives according to that will.
In Ephesians five, the Holy Spirit through Paul writes, wives, submit to
your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head
of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church,
his body, and is himself its Savior.
Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit
in everything to their husbands, which is what you just you just
cited. In this one brief passage, it says twice, wife submit to
your husbands, at the beginning and at the end.
So Paul's not stuttering here.
He's reiterating something that's very important.
And I want to highlight this passage as a specific refutation of
the heresy that's very common today among many pastors to discuss this
concept of what they call mutual submission.
They want you to think that, oh well, sure, wives have to
submit to their husbands, but husbands have to submit to their wives
too. If that were true doctrine, then necessarily by implication, they would
they would be saying that Christ must submit to the church.
When you read go read Ephesians two five yourself, you'll see in
in the other passages we're gonna cite, in every one of 'em
where it talks about wives submitting to their husbands as as husbands
submit to Christ and as the church submits to Christ, the notion
that that polarity could be reversed is heresy.
It's absolutely false.
There is no submission of Christ to the church.
Now, Christ submitted himself on the cross on behalf of the church.
And as I was listening to the slavery episode from last week,
I realized that I said something I sorta misspoke a little bit
when I was talking about masters having a duty to their slaves,
I said something to the effect that s masters were slaves to
their slaves.
I I didn't really s state that clearly what I meant was
that there's always a hierarchy, which is something that we cite in
scripture God makes clear.
Masters you two have a master in heaven, so don't mistreat your
slaves. A master is a slave to God, just as the slave
is a slave to his master.
The master's slavery to God involves a duty to his own slaves.
So it's not that there's mutual submission of master and slave, it's
that the master himself, in obedience to God, in slavery to God,
has a duty of care to those under him.
Whether it's a master to a slave, whether it's a husband to
a wife, whether it's parents to children, the duty flows from top
to bottom, from the head through the intermediary to the recipient.
And there's not an inversion there, but the duty is always flowing
upward. Children have a duty to their parents, wives have a duty
to their husbands, husbands have a duty to God, and so the
care flows in one direction, the duty flows in the other.
So
the term mutual submission is patently offensive and it's a sign you're
dealing with a weak, if not a false teacher.
No Christian pastor should ever be talking that way.
It's become very common precisely because everyone wants to flee from these
passages. As we've talked about on a bunch of episodes, this is
about Satan inverting Galatians 3.28.
It's about there's no slave nor free, there's no male and female.
Satan wants those categories to be eliminated, wants hierarchy to be eliminated.
And so what happened with the attack on slavery and what's happening
in feminism with the attack on what they call patriarchy is knocking
out that middle support in the three in the tripartite system.
So at the bottom you have the one in the greatest position
of submission, but also the one to who the greatest amount of
duty flows.
In the middle you have the parent, or you have the husband,
to whom a duty flows from God through him to his wife,
to his children.
He is has dominion over those beneath him in the middle, but
he has a duty to them.
So he has dominion over them and duty to them at the
same time.
The dominion flows down from him in his household, but the duty
flows from God through him.
And so the inversion in the destruction of Galatians 3.28 is about
knocking out that middle.
It's about saying there's we're going to smash the patriarchy, we're going
to end all masters.
You can't even use that word anymore.
Reddit actually broke last week because they pushed a software update that
eliminated master from some of their code and it broke everything.
Like these people have become so obsessed with making sure that master
can't even exist in the English language that they're willing to break
their own systems to do it.
Satan's doing that to civilization too.
He's eliminating the possibility for us to think in terms of master
and slave, of dominion and dominated, and to think that dominated means
something terrible, when a child who's in dominion of a faithful father,
or a wife who is in the dominion of a faithful husband,
are being served by God through that man.
And so smashing the patriarchy is essentially knocking God's hands out of
the system.
And it's it's no gods, no masters.
The one follows right after the other for a reason.
And so the idea that
the man must submit to the woman is is really telling you
that Christ must submit to the church, which is evil on its
face, that never has and never will happen.
It cannot happen.
it's ontologically impossible because of headship.
Because Christ is the head of the church, just as man is
the head of woman, just as God is the head of us
all. So you have the head and you have the body.
The body can only act in accord with the will of the
head, and it's the duty of the head to act faithfully.
So when we advocate these things, we are advocating on behalf of
faithful headship.
Not just headship for its own sake, of ruling for the sake
of ruling and doing whatever you want.
Only a weak and depraved man would think about being in a
position of authority and have his mind go immediately to all man
I'm gonna get away with so much Mao.
No man who's ever actually had authority would think that way.
If you've been in a position of authority where you've been responsible
for a lot of people underneath you, or responsible for some great
duty, you understand the burden of command.
You understand that the burden you have to those beneath you flows
from the from the duty that has been given to you from
above, wherever the above is, whether it's God giving you a vocation
or it's a commander giving you an assignment, or it's just it's
your boss giving you a task.
Duty is neutral, as Corey said.
It can well duty should always be good, you know, we think
of that in positive terms, but how a man exercises dominion is
a function of his character.
And so if there's a man who tells you that any time
you see dominion you should flee, that's a man you should be
afraid of, because as a man who is weak and perverted in
his soul, and he's telling you, if I ever get a chance
to do anything, I'm gonna do it.
that's terrifying.
That is not Christian.
We're talking about the opposite of that.
When we talk about rule and dominion, we're talking about doing it
in a gracious and merciful but firm way, in a way that
does not relent to being pushed back on by those who are
weaker, who don't understand, who wish to do evil.
You start you begin with a gentle correction and then you step
it up if you need to.
Because if someone's going to persist in error, whether it's a wife
or it's a civilization, at some point you have to put your
foot down and say it's not going to happen anymore.
Now obviously the way that manifests will depend on the situation and
the scale, but at the end of the day, the only thing
that will reverse the decline and destruction of Christendom is for faithful
men to reassert ourselves in in the hierarchy.
And some will be lower and some will be higher.
And we have to get used to wherever that is and serve
that position faithfully.
Because all of that service in duty is ultimately to God.
I
was hoping that you would get to that point about headship, because
that is a a key point here, and it's very obvious that
it's important point.
If you just look at how much it is hated by the
enemy, by feminists and others.
And to emphasize that point, we'll turn to first Corinthians eleven.
Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain
the traditions even as I delivered them to you, but I want
you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, and
the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of
Christ is God.
And so the principle of headship is vitally important because
there are those who can look at submission and duty and all
these things and attempt to corrupt those terms.
They have very clear meanings, they teach clearly if you know what
they mean, but headship is
the clearest of the terms, there is no way to look at
the term headship and not understand what is meant.
Just look at the word.
The head is in control.
Period. Your foot doesn't tell you what to do.
That's not to say your your foot can't lodge a complaint.
Your foot can certainly make a request.
If you step on something sharp, you're going to know that immediately.
But you as the head The head are in control of your
body. And so the husband is in control of the wife, she
is the body, he is the head.
Christ is in control of the church.
She is the body, he is the head.
That is right authority.
That is the right order of things.
That is how hierarchy is supposed to work.
And so headship is a vitally important term.
Because people intuitively grasp what is meant by headship, because we all
know that the head is in control, that the body does not,
in fact, tell us what we have to do.
Yes, the body can make demands, yes, we have duties to our
body. We are supposed to take care of our body, it is
a gift from God, and so you don't starve yourself or otherwise
abuse your body.
But ultimately, the head is
in control, and there are other verses that speak of disciplining the
body to keep it in line, which is a related matter, not
directly here, so don't read too much into that.
But it is a related issue of the head maintaining co right
relationship to the body and control.
I'd like to read the rest of the first that first Corinthians
11 passage because it mirrors directly the points that we were making
at the beginning from Genesis 2 and 3.
Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his
head, but every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered
dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head
were shaven.
For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should
cut her hair short, but since it is disgraceful for a wife
to cut off her hair or to shave her head, let her
cover her head, for a man ought not to cover his head,
since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is
the glory of man, for man was not made from woman, but
woman from man, neither was man created for woman, but woman for
man. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of
authority on her head because of the angels.
And this is a passage that we mentioned in the uh Forgotten
Doctrines episode early on.
We did kind of grab bagger, we included head covering.
I wanna begin at the end here where it just mentions because
of the angels, because that's something that we don't really know what
it means.
There's some speculation, but I highlight it specifically to make the point,
it doesn't matter what it means.
Because when the Holy Spirit says because of the angels, that's not
justifying the doctrine that a woman should be in submission with her
head covered.
He's providing an explanation
of some other ontological fact.
Even if we don't understand what it means, it doesn't change the
or the command.
And furthermore, what do we know about angels?
Even if we don't know what this means.
We know that angels are immortal beings.
They're unchanging.
Once they're created, they remain created for all time.
Their nature does not change.
So whatever was true two thousand years ago was true six thousand
years ago and it's still true today.
All we need to know about this passage, even if you want
to try to use, oh well, I don't know what that means,
so it can't count.
No. What it means is that God has given a command and
we don't get to obey it.
And all the surrounding discussion where it talks about he is the
image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.
Woman was not made from man, but man was made from woman.
Woman was not made man was not made for woman, but woman
was made for man.
These are direct mirrors of what is said in Genesis before before
the fall.
These are matters of God's eternal will.
So a lot of times when you have people come along pushing
the feminist agenda, the anti-patriarchal agenda, when these passages come up, they
want to say, Oh, that was just Paul.
That was about Corinth.
That was situational.
It was cultural.
Doesn't apply to us.
We're free in Christ now.
Well, weren't they free in Christ?
No. Paul is not talking about Corinth.
He's not talking about two thousand years ago.
He's talking about eternity.
He's talking about male and female as God created them in the
garden before the fall.
Woman was in submission to man before the fall.
As we discussed in the nature of the curse, woman's submission to
man is not a product of the fall.
The fact that woman bridles under that submission is the product of
the fall.
So the only thing that changed in the fall was not the
submission, but the fact that it was no longer willing, that it
then became unwilling submission.
Which is somewhat i ironic because when you look at the very
happiest relationships today between men and women, it's the ones where the
man is dominant and the woman is submissive, where she is happily
submissive. She's happy to have a head, to not have to worry
about the things that he worries about.
And she can completely and profoundly appreciate the things that he does
and the things that he sacrificed for for her sake and for
the sake of their children, so that she doesn't have to deal
with it.
What these feminists, whether they're men or women, what they're fundamentally doing
by cutting men out of the picture and pushing women forward is
destroying women.
It's putting them in a position to do things God didn't equip
them to do, that they're not permitted to do, that they shouldn't
be doing.
And then when they fail, everyone gets hurt.
And it's one of the problems that we have when we're discussing
these as sociological issues today, because one of the things that men
want to complain about and say, Oh, well, these these women are
doing things wrong, whether it's in the church or in civil society.
Yeah Yes, they are doing things wrong.
You know what we did wrong first?
We put them in a position where they would be making incorrect
decisions outside of their domain.
And we'll get to a minute what the woman's domain is.
She the woman has a domain.
It's not that they're women have nothing to do.
Women have a great deal to do.
To be Adam's helper is profound.
Creation wasn't finished until God gave Adam a helper.
There's no version of human civilization without women.
The problem is that women have been removed from their sphere where
God ordained them to act, and we as men have rebelled against
God and shoved them into other spheres where they don't belong, where
they're not equipped, where they perform poorly, and we all suffer as
a result.
And so the only way to undo all of these myriad problems,
all these layers of failures, is to undo them all at once.
It's not enough just to end women's suffrage.
It's we have to go back further than that.
We have to go back to the point where we realize that
women should not have been put in a position to be forced
to make those decisions in the first place.
We'll talk about this more next week, but if women's suffrage had
been put to a vote for women at the time, it would
have failed.
It was men who put forward women to be given the franchise
when the majority of women didn't want it, they knew better.
They knew it was a raw deal, that it was outside of
their sphere, that it was a rebellion against God, and it was
going to make everything worse.
But because they didn't have the vote, ironically, they then got the
vote and we were off to the races.
But all of those changes were not godly.
But we can't just pinpoint one moment in time and say, Well,
roll back to eighteen fifty or w roll back to at whatever
particular date.
What we need to roll back is the false doctrines that have
permitted us to get to the point where we're making all of
these errors and they're mutually reinforcing errors.
It's not just one mistake.
It's dozens and dozens of mistakes that are all interlocking, interconnected facets
of this
this diamond.
there's a hardness to it that's you can't crack it because there's
such strength in the way it fits together, but it doesn't fit
together the way God wanted it to.
It's the interlocking rebellion against God.
And so what we have to do is just remove the entire
thing at once.
And so as we're discussing all of these myriad issues, it's for
that reason.
It's that there's not just one problem civilizationally to solve.
It's all these problems that have to be solved together.
And that begins with the headship of man, over creation, over other
men, over women, over family.
As long as there's not a man in charge of a household,
as long as there's not a man in charge of a country,
things will happen that are evil, guaranteed, because it's how God ordered
things and any rebellion against that order is inherently inherently fraught with
the wages of sin.
So the next passage I'm going to look at is from 1
Peter 3, the mirror some of the others, but this also the
fact that Peter wrote this instead of Paul gives lie to the
notion that oh well this was just that was that was Paul
being a misogynist.
Well, then Peter is a misogynist too.
In saying either of those says that the Holy Spirit is misogynist,
which by modern standards, yes, God is a misogynist, which is the
reason that evil men see that as a sin, because in their
service to Satan they must uphold their false religion.
So here's what Peter says Likewives, wives, be in subjection to your
own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word,
they may be one without a word by the conduct of their
wives, when they see your respectful and pure conduct, do not let
your adorning be external, the braiding of hair and the putting on
of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear, but let your adorning
be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of
a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.
For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used
to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah, who
obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, and you are her children if you
do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.
As I mentioned, God sees the woman who is submissive to her
husband as very precious.
That's substantial.
That is a profound thing for God to say that when a
woman is submissive to her husband, even in the case where the
husband maybe isn't doing what he should be doing, which is one
of the attacks of feminism on a husband and on patriarchy, is
the notion, well, what if the husband isn't a good husband?
What then?
Well, the same as what if a slave master isn't a good
slave master?
Slaves should obey anyway, because they're ultimately serving their duty to God.
And when that is done, God sees it as very precious.
It's not simply obedience to him, it is to God God's glory
that we obey him.
This the obedience to God that we are pointing out, it's not
for earning salvation, which is something we always say.
There are those who actually think that that this podcast is all
law and then we're trying to say if you don't do these
things, you can't save yourself.
It's just a lie.
It's a flat out lie.
We continuously point to God's sacrifice and his love for us.
This is about the hand then of the Christian life.
Now that we are Christians, how do we live?
Knowing that nothing we can do can save ourselves.
What do we then do in knowledge and recognition and through the
gift of the Holy Spirit to sanctify our hearts?
What do we do now?
We obey God.
Even when it stinks, even when a wife doesn't have a good
husband, she should still obey him, because he is her head.
Even if a master is evil, the slave should still obey him.
That's the hard teaching of this.
It's that things don't always work out, and that's the reason that
so much ink is spilled in scripture where the Holy Spirit gives
duties to masters and gives duties to husbands.
We are not picking on slaves and we're not picking on wives
to bully or to belittle.
It's to point out that the so-called liberation of those who are
in lower states is the very destruction of everything that's good and
holy. It's not liberation to take someone away from their godly role
and set them free is O freedom is some sort of nebulous
thing. That's like being thrown into space.
It's being launched into the vacuum of space where you have nothing.
The only way that a slave can be rooted is through his
master in duty to God.
The same is true of a woman.
As a as a as a daughter and as a wife, her
submission to her husband is her anchor to God's subjugation of her
in the best and most holy sense, and God's response to that
when it's done faithfully is to view it as very precious.
Before we turn to the last two sections of scripture for this
episode, I want to reiterate my recommendation that you read Genesis three,
but actually go ahead and read one through three.
But when you read
that, focus on the wording of what God says about woman and
about man.
Because we don't want anyone to take away the wrong understanding, the
wrong view from this episode.
Yes, wives are to submit to their husbands in all things, as
scripture says.
But it is vitally important to note the nature of woman, what
woman is in relation to man, because
Adam walked with God in the garden, Adam spoke with God, Adam
knew God face to face, and God still said it is not
good for man to be alone.
That is the nature of the gift that is woman.
It is the greatest gift, other than of course salvation, which at
the time Adam did not need, but it is the greatest gift
that God made for man.
Woman was made for man as a gift by God.
And again
to state what Scripture says that is a gift from God
to Adam who at the time walked with God and spoke to
him face to face, it would be difficult to overstate the nature
of the gift God gave to man here.
Yes, there is corruption because of the fall, but the good nature
is not erased by the fall.
Original sin is not man's nature.
Original sin is a corruption of man's nature.
And so I just wanted to say that to emphasize
what scripture actually says in Genesis and what we are and are
not saying in this episode about woman and the relationship of man
and woman
It is fundamentally a question of pointing back to what is said
in Genesis two.
It is not good that a man should be alone, I will
make a helper fit for him.
And that is precisely what God did when he made woman.
He made a helper fit for man.
And what has been done societally with the false idol of equality,
with the demon of feminism, is to eliminate the category of helper,
to say, I'm not helping anyone.
I'm a I'm a free woman.
I'm strong.
I'm independent.
I have a job.
I have income.
I don't need to help anybody.
And then suddenly she's a forty five year old wine aunt with
you know two week vacations where she fornicates with half a dozen
guys halfway around the world, and her medicine cabinet is antibiotics and
antidepressants and birth control pills.
And she realizes that the only thing she has left in
yeah. And she realized that there's nothing in her future except for
despair. And no amount of makeup and Botox and filters on Instagram
are going to take away that despair because what she lost was
being a helper fit for a man by not having a man,
by not being a proper one flesh union with a man, she
has no children.
She has nothing except for memories of sin and disobedience to God,
which is why you see such despair in that set.
Again, the punishment for sin is built into it.
If you try not to have kids, you'll succeed.
You won't have kids.
And then guess what?
You're stuck with the punishment of for that forever.
The punishment of not just disobeying God and not having kids is
you don't have kids.
There's not going to be anybody there to take care of you
when you're old.
There's no one for you to raise up as God commands you
to. The punishment's built in.
And when we talk about these things and say obey God, it's
not to save yourselves.
It's to
have the life that God wishes for us to have, even in
this fallen world, even with the fall, even with the corruption of
sin and the devil prowling as a roaring lion, if we focus
on scripture and we obey God, we can restore these gifts because
they're they're built into creation.
When you do the things that are obedience to God, the gifts
come naturally, even to unbelievers.
the unbeliever who
behaves faithfully in his marriage is going to be blessed with lots
of children.
He's not going to go to heaven because of it, but the
temporal blessing is there through the obedience to God's order, even absent
knowledge
that God, the true God, commanded it.
And so the this is about restoring the helper relationship in all
cases, not just in some cases.
It's not optional.
Uh the second and last passage we're gonna read here is from
Titus two, which a week or two ago I I misreferred to
as Titus five, which of course doesn't exist.
Before we move to Titus, I just want to add two things
real quick.
I know we'll get into this more next week, but what we're
speaking about here is teleology, about talos, the end of things.
Not end in the sense of end versus beginning, but end in
the sense of that toward which you should properly be aimed.
Your purpose would be a a good way to summarize it.
The purpose of woman is as helper fit for a man, for
her husband.
And that's why we are earnest about this and why we treat
it as an urgent matter.
As men, this is less urgent for us.
There's earnestness there still with regard to men, but the urgency is
not the same.
Because for a woman there is a narrow window within which she
can do these things that God has commanded her to do and
be blessed for doing them.
If a woman waits until she is fifty years old to marry,
she will probably not be blessed with children.
She's no longer within the window where she can have them.
That is just a fact of biology.
Unless you happen to be Sarah and God specifically blesses you to
have a child in your old age, which is very unlikely.
But that is the reason we treat this as such an urgent
matter, because when teachers, pastors, and others lie to young women about
these things, when their parents tell them no wait to have children
until you get your master's degree, until you're established in your career,
until X, Y, and Z
You are stealing, they are stealing from these young women any chance
of having the blessings that God would give them if they were
faithful. Because that window is narrow.
There are only so many years during which a woman can have
children. You are not going to be young forever.
That's true for men as well, and it is better if you
have children relatively young, but for men thirties and forties is fine.
For women it really needs to be in their twenties.
And so that is why we treat this matter as again such
an urgent matter.
Because this is not something you can put off.
This is not something where you get a do over.
You do it right the first time, or you're done.
Because the consequences, the temporal consequences, once you have them, that's it.
You cannot go back, you cannot do it over, you cannot say,
well, now that I have my master's degree and I'm established in
my job, now I'll have children.
It's too late.
Biologically, you can no longer have that family.
You can no longer reap the benefits of being faithful to God.
You could be faithful to God still, in so far as you
are able to do so at that stage in life, but the
benefits will no longer be there, because the benefits attend to being
faithful at the time when God tells you to be faithful, not
when you feel like getting around to doing
it.
And of course referring to it as biological as simply the scientific
explanation for God's created order.
That's how God built women.
Uh, we talked of in I think the first episode uh we
were talking about DNA about the fact that a girl in the
w in her mot Mother's womb has what will be all of
the eggs she'll ever have in her entire life.
And they begin to be to die and to be cast off.
And by the time she reaches menopause, she's out.
that is a fixed timer.
It is like grains of sand passing through an hourglass.
That is how God designed a woman differently than a man.
Men can continue to procreate much later, decades later than women, and
to have healthy offspring.
It does fall off over time, but as you said, the window
is much narrower for women and it's much earlier.
And so every lie that is told in our churches and our
schools and our society that pushes girls away from
pairing off to with a good faithful man early and starting families
is ultimately destructive to their own ends, which dovetails well with Titus
too. It begins older women, which you know in this case would
have basically amounted to menopause.
Once you've stopped having children, once your children are out of the
home, what is your duty?
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or
slaves to much wine, their duty are to teach what is good,
and so train the young woman to love their husbands and children,
to be self controlled, pure, working at home, kind and submissive to
their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
That's a short passions, but there's a ton of theological depth there.
One, it makes clear that older women do have a place for
teaching in the church.
It is teaching younger women these things.
This is the only time the women are ever told in scripture
that they have something to teach, apart from their own young children.
If you are an older woman in the church, you should be
teaching the younger women, what?
To obey and love your husbands and your children, to be submissive
to your husbands.
And what do we see in the church when this is disobeyed?
And this is radically despised, even in Lutheranism.
we see far more faithfulness to this in some of the other
adjacent Protestant denominations than we see among any Lutherans in this day.
And the reason for that is that the Word of God is
indeed reviled among us.
This passage is despised by the LCMS today.
You'll be excommunicated if you believe this.
If you say that w the wives should be submissive to their
husbands with no asterisk, that's misogyny.
That's absolute misogyny.
You will be declared damned by the LCMS Corporation.
So
these are not inconsequential matters not only for civilization, not only for
order in the home, but in the church, they are matters of
whether or not our church bodies are apostate or remain Christian.
And they're church bodies that are absolutely embracing apostasy.
Why? So that So that they can remain friends with MSNBC, so
that they can remain friends with Rolling Stone and with Occupy D
Democrats. Those are the people who today celebrate the actions of some
of our church bodies.
That's not the company you want to keep.
Because if you keep that company in this life, you're going to
be cum keeping that company in eternity.
One of the best ways that a woman can achieve this status
of being a respected older woman in the congregation and having And
having younger women actually listen to her is simply being faithful in
her own marriage, which of course is what she is supposed to
train the younger women to be, because if you are a grandmother
or a great grandmother.
If you have a hundred grandchildren and great grandchildren, the younger women
in your congregation are going to be more likely to listen to
you than if you are a spinster with fifteen cats.
That is simply the reality of it.
And that's how it should be.
Because if you are the latter, most likely the advice you have
is simply do not be like me.
That's the best advice you could offer to the younger women.
If you are the grandmother, the great grandmother, who has been blessed
by God for your faithfulness, and you have dozens of grandchildren, you
can tell them Imitate me.
I can tell you what to do in your lives because I
have already done it, and God blessed me because I did it.
I did what He told me to do, and look at the
blessings I have.
When you can give that concrete example of your life and show
people, this is what God will do for you, because this is
what it says in scripture.
This is how He made creation.
This is simply the natural consequences, not in the negative sense of
the term, but just in the neutral, in this case positive sense
of the term, if you are obedient, these are the consequences.
If you are faithful in your marriage to your husband, God will
give you children.
If you are faithful in raising up those children, they will pursue
the same sort of life that you had, and they will also
be blessed in their marriages with children.
If you have six children, and each one of those children has
six children, you have thirty six grandchildren.
This is exponential one generation to the next.
You can, over not as many generations as you may think, if
you're not particularly mathematically inclined, build your own nation if you are
simply faithful to God, which, of course, in this case very clearly
means not practicing birth control.
But a faithful Christian woman, barring of course medical issues and such,
there's always the caveat, even if we don't mention it.
But barring those things, a faithful Christian woman should probably be a
grandmother by about fifty.
Many times over by sixty.
That is the natural course of things when husbands and wives
are faithful to God in their marriages, that is simply how it
works because that is how God designed it.
And so the older women, who have been faithful for decades in
their marriages, in their lives, should be teaching the younger women to
do the same.
Because that is how we relay these things.
Yes, we teach from the Scriptures, yes we attend the services on
Sunday, etc.
But it is also vitally important that one generation relay this information
to the next with the concrete examples of look at these individuals
who were faithful and how God blessed them.
That is vitally important when training up children in the way they
are supposed to go, so that when they are old they will
not depart from it.
Mathematically, it is entirely realistic for one couple to end up
with a thousand living descendants in their lifetimes.
If you have ten kids, they have ten kids, they have ten
kids, it's entirely possible if you were blessed with long life for
you to be alive to see all of them.
And of course, some of the first are gonna be having, you
know, another generation.
So you might not see an entire generation, but you're gonna see
multiple iterations.
It it's literally possible, again, with God's blessing, uh both long life
and fecundity of all of your descendants, for you to have a
thousand descendants alive in your lifetime.
The reason we don't see that anymore is that we are ashamed
and we revile God's word and we despise him.
That's the sole reason for it.
As we see faithful husbands and wives returning to true godly living,
we see family sizes like that again for the first time in
generations. And it is a blessing.
The last thing that we want to focus on is something that's
referenced here within the description of the Titus II wim woman, which
harkens back to the very beginning, the a helper fit for Adam.
Wives are not merely vessels for producing children.
That is one of their most important roles, but that is it
is part of the role.
Is as Corey mentioned, the curse of Eve touches on both of
'em. It touches on her relationship with her husband and on childbearing.
So we talked a lot about childbearing, but we're going to end
with what does the helper part mean?
Because in the middle of this, in Titus 2, it says they're
to teach the younger women to work at home.
Now, there's it's been discussion in the past on this podcast and
online and elsewhere about where is it permissible for women to work.
And so we're going to end in Proverbs 31.
You probably heard of the Proverbs 31 woman before.
It's It's a verse that's used very often as a proto-feminist verse
to say, well, go girl, here's all the stuff you can do.
The reason that we've presented all of this and save that for
last is to frame the nature of the work that the Proverbs
thirty one woman does in view of her role as a helper
for her husband, and in view of her role, as Titus II
says, of working at home
And
so reading from Proverbs thirty one An excellent wife who can find
she is far more precious than jewels, the heart of her husband
trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain.
She does him good and not harm all the days of her
life. She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands.
She is like the ships of the merchant, she brings her food
from afar.
She rises while it is yet night, and provides food for her
household, and portions for her maidens.
She considers a field and buys it.
With the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.
She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong.
She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.
Her lamp does not go out at night.
She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the
spindle. She opens her hands to the poor, and reaches out her
hands to the needy.
She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her
household are clothed in scarlet.
She makes bed coverings for herself, her clothing is fine linen and
purple. Her husband is known in the gates, when he sits among
the elders of the land.
She makes linen garments and sells them, she delivers sashes to the
merchant, strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the
time to come.
She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is
on her tongue.
She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not
eat the bread of idleness.
Her children rise up and call her blessed, her husband also, and
he praises her.
Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.
Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears
the Lord is to be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works
praise her in the gates.
I think that when you view Proverbs thirty-one in light of everything
else that have we've cited here, which of course you must because
scripture is one.
There's no there's no setting these passages in opposition.
This is a beautiful exposition of the nature of a woman, of
a wife as a helper to a man.
And I think if you re the nature of the tasks that
she's performing here, they're all household tasks.
Now it doesn't literally mean that she stays inside all day.
We're that's not that's not the nature of the relationship between husband
and wife that we think is part of the Christian religion.
The point is that what she does is in service to her
husband as a helper.
And that includes producing wealth in some cases, if it is a
part of his household, and there are things that she can do
that builds up the household.
But what is absent from this and is not simply temporally bound
is that she's not going off far away and doing something totally
unrelated and bringing home the bacon.
That's not the purpose of this.
Even when it talks about her producing things and taking them to
the markets, she's selling them to vendors to sell things.
Now it's a small point, but I mean I I would think
that today this would be akin to to a wife having an
Etsy storefront and producing things and then selling them.
You know, if it's something that's good, if it's something that's not,
you know, shameful or pornographic, that's great.
And there there are absolutely ways that women can do more than
cook and clean and make babies and raise them that are also
godly. And that's one of the caricatures that's set up in opposition
by the religion of feminism against what Christianity says about the womanly
role. A wife's role isn't just one thing, it's multifaceted.
And this is the this is how Proverbs ends.
And it's one of the few places in Proverbs where it goes
on and on about these a single topic at length.
And because this is wisdom being passed from a father to son
and of course from God to all of us, we should take
particular care to pay attention.
If you have a wife who is capable of these things, you
know, who's who's physically capable of doing things around the house?
Like if if your wife and your wife is weaker than you,
obviously, because you're a man, you're you know you're much stronger than
her, but that doesn't mean that her own weakness is necessarily something
to be celebrated.
She should be as strong as she can be, as strong as
she needs to be.
Yeah, it's not saying your wife needs to be a crossfitter.
I think that produces some some questionable results sometimes.
But the point is that these things are godly and they're not
in opposition to the nature of a woman being a helper, and
they're not in opposition to Titus making clear the the epistle to
Titus that these are things that happen within the home.
All of this fits together to say that there is much that
a woman can do that doesn't require any of the women's liberation
that we've been sold in the last couple hundred years.
None of that is required for the godly life.
All of these things are obedience to God, and they're a blessing
to the household.
They're obviously a blessing to the husband.
In Proverbs 31, the husband's proud.
He's grateful to have such a wonderful wife.
Who wouldn't be proud and grateful to have a wife like that?
The question is, do you need the lies of feminism to come
along and say, oh, well, this is a proof text to say
you can do so much more?
Think about how much richer you could be if you had even
more wealth, if you did even more outside the home, if you
left the household and pursued greater wealth, because that is when the
she has ceased to be a helper and is seeking to be
an equal.
And that is when these things get upended.
And it happens by a matter of degrees.
It's not an on off switch.
there are small degrees by which something may be permissible that by
a large degree suddenly becomes a usurpation.
And it's a matter of godly wisdom for a faithful husband to
know the difference, to be able to say this far and no
further and everyone wins.
And so as we talk about these things, it is ultimately about
upholding everything that God says, but not shying away from this.
Part of why we say this for last again is that this
is sort of seen by by some who are trying to pretend
that that they're trad and conservative, that it it's actually an anthem
for feminism, if you read it rightly.
Well, I think if you read in light of everything else that
we've cited, it's clearly not an anthem for feminism.
It's an anthem for a helper who is a godly helpmeet, one
who works within the home, as Titus describes, and is the proud
of her husband and the joy of his life.
And that's the sort of God blessing the sort of blessings God
gives us when we obey him in all of our vocations as
husband, as wife, whatever task you have, do it faithfully and you
will be blessed, as Proverbs thirty one describes.
In this entire issue, what we're really focusing on is a simple
foundational truth.
You will You will never be happier than when you are obeying
God. That doesn't mean that there won't be trials, that there won't
be challenges, that there won't be sorrow and pain in life, because
we live in a fallen world.
But the best possible life you can lead is a life of
obedience to God.
Now that doesn't mean that there isn't pleasure and enjoyment, amusement, whatever
else you may find, in a life of rebellion to God, you
may find that for a time.
And so the woman who goes off to college and is promiscuous
and generally does whatever comes to mind with no regard for the
things of God or what she should be doing, may very well
have an enjoyable ten years, fifteen, maybe twenty if she's lucky.
But she will have destroyed the rest of her life in the
process, and not only hers, because she destroyed any potential life that
she would have brought into the world had she been a faithful
wife, instead of what she chose to become.
And so
the point that we are making, of course, the point is always
the truth of Scripture and that all of Scripture matters, but the
point that we are making is that as Christians, we must live
the sort of life that God tells us to live, and believe
that God will bless us when we do so, because Scripture does
not just speak of eternal blessings, of crowns in heaven, of such
things as that.
Scripture speaks of temporal blessings.
I believe that I will look on the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Scripture is very clear that when you are true to God, God
will bless you.
Again, that does not mean that your life will be perfect, that
there will be no trials, that there will be no challenges.
That is not what Scripture promises.
Scripture in fact promises that there will be trials, there will be
tribulations, there will be challenges.
But God will see you through them.
And for women, the way that you are faithful to God is
to fulfill your role as a helper.
That is what God made you.
That is what you are.
And as a creature, which this applies to man and woman equally,
we are both creatures of God.
As a creature, the Creator made us for various purposes.
If we rebel against those purposes, we are going against our true
nature, we are going against our true end, our telos, and we
will suffer for it.
If we rebel against the Creator, rebel against His order, rebel against
what He designed for us, because what He designed for us is
good, because He is good.
And so as creatures, that for which we should strive is a
life lived according to our nature, according to the role for which
God designed us, the role into which He placed us.
For men, that of course is all the various things that God
assigns to the realm of men, chief among them of course being
husband, leader, father, all of those various roles of headship, and the
roles to which God assigned women, chief among them of course being
wife, and what flows naturally from that mother.
If we fulfill our roles, as we are supposed to fulfill them,
as God assigned them to us, then he will bless us.
If we look at the state of our society currently, we can
very clearly tell that we are not blessed by God.
And the reason for that should be clear.
We are not blessed by God because we do not obey God.
Our women rebel against God.
Instead of being wives and mothers, they go off to university and
become professors and corporate leadership.
That is not the role for which God made woman.
God made woman to be a helper for man.
That is the role in which she is happiest.
That is the role in which she fulfills the end for which
God made her.
That is the only role in which humanity continues
in such a way that we will be blessed by God, because
everything breaks down when the family breaks down, and the family breaks
down when Satan comes in and suggests feminism, and men and women
both adopt it.
Women adopt it because we go back to that curse in Genesis,
the desire to rebel to become the head.
That is why women go in for feminism.
And men go in for it because it's easier.
Because being the head is hard.
Because being the head requires work.
Because being the head means you will answer to God for what
you did and what you failed to do.
And so it seems easier if, like Adam in the garden, you
stand back and just watch the snake talk to the woman.
Well, I don't have to be head, I can just stand here
and do nothing.
But that doesn't work, because as a man God made you the
head, and it is your duty to fulfil that role that He
gave you And as a woman, God made you a helper, and
it is your duty to fulfill that role that He gave you.
And so it is incumbent on Christian women to be wives and
mothers, and it is incumbent on those Christian women who fulfilled that
role over a course of decades, and are now the older women
described in Scripture, to teach the younger women to do the same.
If we return to God, as it says so many times throughout
Scripture, then He will surely turn to us and bless us.
If we continue to rebel against God, there is no floor.
Things can always get worse.