A Proper Order: God Ordained Headship

Introduction:

New interpretations of the Bible, based on cultural issues: presuppositions of LGBTQ

For example: Gen 19 and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. When angels appear as men go into the city to rescue Lot and his family, the men of Sodom seek to attack the men and act immorally towards them. The Scripture literally says that they want to “know” them. To know someone in the bible refers to know them intimately, most commonly in a sexual way. The traditional view has always been that God judged Sodom for its gross sexual sin.

One critic of the traditional view, John Boswell, states,

Lot was violating the custom of Sodom...by entertaining unknown guests within the city walls at night without obtaining the permission of the elders of the city. When the men of Sodom gathered around to demand that the strangers be brought out to them, “that they might know them,” they meant no more than to “know” who they were

Twisting scripture, presuppositions of feminism that twists issues of headship in the home.

John Piper and Wayne Grudem wrote in 1991,

“Men and women simply are not sure what their roles should be. Traditional positions have not been totally satisfactory, because they have not fully answered the recent evangelical feminist arguments. Moreover, most Christians will admit that selfishness, irresponsibility, passivity, and abuse have often contaminated “traditional” patterns of how men and women relate to each other.

But the vast majority of evangelicals have not endorsed the evangelical feminist position, sensing that it does not really reflect the pattern of Biblical truth. Within our churches, we have had long discussions and debates, and still the controversy shows signs of intensifying, not subsiding. Before the struggle ends, probably no Christian family and no evangelical church will remain untouched.”

John Piper and Wayne Grudem, “Preface (1991),” in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), xiv.

We begin our study today in chapter 11 of 1 Corinthians. This will be a journey in these 4 chapters where Paul deals with issues relating to order in the church gathering and worship. Our worship gathering is never to be chaotic and unruly. Instead, God so desires that it have structure and purpose so that it reflects God’s design of the church and God’s nature of order and purpose in all that He does. Paul will deal with issues in these chapters such as :

head coverings: what are they, who should wear them and why?

the Lord, supper and its abuses

the role and function of spiritual gifts in church gatherings

Today we will look at the first three verses of first Corinthians chapter 11 to deal with a foundational understanding and interpretation of the role of headship in God’s created order. This may sound strange to talk about in relationship to head coverings, but as we read from first Corinthians chapter 11, Paul begins his argument by appealing to who God created all things and how he designed the relationship of God to mankind and mankind to each other in distinct roles and functions in the world.

1. Be Imitators of the Head who is Christ

Our primary study today will focus on v 3 but lets begin by looking at 1-2.

1 Corinthians 11:1–2 NASB95

1 Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ. 2 Now I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold firmly to the traditions, just as I delivered them to you.

Paul transitions from the study on Christian liberty to exhort the people to imitate him in his pattern of loving his neighbor for the sake of the gospel above claiming his rights in Christ. To imitate means to mimic what someone else is doing and as Paul demonstrates a holy life before the Corinthians and other churches, they should see and mimic such a lifestyle.

But of course, that imitation is only faithful imitation as long as the one being imitated is reflecting Christ. Every spider web has a center, a starting point for the spider. From there the spider branches out connecting each strand of the web from its origin. That interconnectivity is like a church across the world that looks like the one who looks like the one who looks like Christ.

He praises the Corinthians in v 2 for remembering him and holding to the traditions that were delivered to them. The traditions that Paul is referencing is the word of God. These were delivered to the church in oral and written form as the Canon of Scripture began to solidify into the Bible that we have today.

2 Thessalonians 2:15 NASB95

15 So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us.

To hold fast to this traditions passed down by holy men who where inspired by the Holy Spirit, we do not abandon or seek to change what the word of God says. We are not editors of these traditions, we are merely recipients and consumers of them.

Since the first temptation of the garden, Satan is busy seeking to tempt the world into this grave sin, to be loose with the word of God that was given to us. He desires the human race to doubt God’s very word and character and to believe that this word needs to evolve and change.

But Paul says to to hold fast to it and the idea of holding fast means to cling to something that is immovable and that does not change. Church, we do need a 2.0 upgrade to the word of God. It has and always will be sufficient for our spiritual needs. The Gospel is still full of power to save those who believe. The comfort of the Scriptures is still capable of bringing peace to the troubled heart. The quickening blade edge of the word of God is still just as sharp as ever to pierce our souls.

This leads us perfectly into our second and main point of this study today because we are in a battle over the traditions that have been passed down to us. Let’s look at secondly,

2. Be Faithful to God-Ordained Headship

For us to understand this chapter 11 regrading head coverings, our interpretation hinges upon one word, and our translation of that word. In the Greek, the word is KEPHALE and it is translated across the board as “head.” It is not an underestimation to say that the meaning of this word has met great disagreement and debate in latter days. I would make the case that the rise of feminism in our culture and the purpose of the liberation of women from their God’s given distinct roles as a reason for such debate and reinterpretation centered on this word.

The word KEPHALE in GK has two basic meanings:

It means head, authority, chief. This speaks to the meaning of something having leadership and authority over someone else.

Some usages of the word also imply the meaning “source.” Examples from the world around us would be the head of a river is the source of that body of water, not its authority.

In our passage in 1 Cor 11, the argument, like many other of Paul’s writings is that Paul uses KEPHALE to mean that something is the head or source of something else. This meaning would then refute the other meaning.

My goal is to try and show you that KEPHALE should be translated to mean “head” as authority and NOT head as “source.” I believe that if the church takes the view that KEPHALE means “source,” then it will continue to plummet into egalitarianism and the degradation of the roles and function of the family and church that God has designed in eternity past. We have already seen this degradation in the home as wives lead their husbands and husbands lazily submit to their twisted function of marriage where the wife leads the home.

Similarly, this growing problem spills over into the church where more and more women are being installed in the role and function pastors of churches. Even in the beloved SBC, this battle was fought and the side of complementarianism won the battle this year at the convention. It was there is New Orleans that messengers voted to reaffirm their stance that the BFM defines the role of pastor applicable for men only and therefore multiple churches, including the well known Saddleback Church in California, were disfellowshipped from the convention of Southern Baptist churches.

23 years ago, Bruce Ware wrote about the battle in the church over these issues:

“Today the primary areas in which Christianity is pressured by the culture to conform are on issues of gender and sexuality. Post-moderns and ethical relativists care little about doctrinal truth claims. These seem to them innocuous, archaic, and irrelevant to life. What they do care about, and care about with a vengeance, is whether their feminist agenda and sexual perversions are tolerated, endorsed, and expanded in an increasingly neo-pagan landscape. Because that is what they care most about. It is precisely here that Christianity is most vulnerable. To lose the battle here is to subject the church to increasing layers of departure and surely it will not be long until ethical departures (the church yielding to the pressures, for instance, of women’s ordination to the pastoral ministry) will yield to even more central doctrinal departures, like questioning whether Scripture’s inherent teaching about manhood and womanhood renders it fundamentally untrustworthy for the Christian life. I find it instructive that when Paul warns about departure from the faith in the latter days, he lists first “ethical compromises and the searing of the conscience” as a prelude to the doctrinal departures.”

1 Bruce Ware, “Ethics in a New Millennium,” The Sourthern Baptist Journal of Theology 4, no. 1 (Spring 2000): p. 92.

All this to say that this is an important study to dive into. We will jump around to a few others passages this morning to sollidfy the meaning of KEPHALE in other places in Scripture. This will give us a greater foundation for the meaning in 1 Corinthians 11 and thus help us understand the greater passage as a whole.

a. Examining KEPHALE in the LXX

If you are not familiar with LXX, that is how we refer to the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the old testament scriptures, and that translation in the Greek would be very familiar to the apostle Paul, who would've used such a translation. This is important, because we have to understand how the term KEPHALE in the Greek would have been understood since Paul was living in a Hellenized time in Church history.

The most common use of KEPHALE in the Old Testament refers specifically to the human head. This is how the word is used most predominantly. When David's head was anointed with oil as the future king of Israel, it was his KEPHALE that was anointed. But there are other uses where we can determine that authority is being used in these old testament passages in the Greek.

To begin let's look at first kings 8:1

1 Kings 8:1 NASB95

1 Then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel and all the heads of the tribes, the leaders of the fathers’ households of the sons of Israel, to King Solomon in Jerusalem, to bring up the ark of the covenant of the Lord from the city of David, which is Zion.

Here, in this passage, we see the term head used in regards to Solomon, assembling the elders of Israel, and all the heads of the tribes of Israel. Hear the word head is used, not in the sense of the source of the tribes, but of those who were appointed as authorities over each of the tribes of Israel.

Deuteronomy 28:13 NASB95

13 “The Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and you only will be above, and you will not be underneath, if you listen to the commandments of the Lord your God, which I charge you today, to observe them carefully,

Here the Lord is speaking about the way in which Israel, as a nation will be the head of all the other nations, and not the tail. Again we are not wise to interpret this as Israel being the source of those nations as much as God, placing Israel above them as authority, and with power that comes from God alone.

b. Examining KEPHALE in Paul’s Other Writings

Ephesians 1:22 NASB95

22 And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church,

Here Paul talks about the authority of Christ that has been given to him from the father to the sun as the head over the church. Some might argue that Paul is saying that Christ is the source of the church therefore, the church coming from him through his work of Redemption. But noticed that he uses the word subjection, and therefore is stating an issue of authority and not merely source in origin. Christ, of course, is the head of the church, ruling it with all authority and power

Ephesians 5:22–25 NASB95

22 Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. 24 But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her,

This leads us down to consider what Paul said in the same letter to the Ephesians regarding wives and husbands. He uses the same type of wording in regards to the relationship between a husband and wife. The roles that God has given the husband is to be the head and authority over the wife just as Christ is the head and authority over the church. This means that the husband is given the responsibility of leader ship and held accountable to that leader ship as the head of the home.

It would not make sense for Paul to be saying that the husband is source or Origen of his wife, for the wife, does not originate from her husband. Notice also that Paul uses again the word, subject or subjection. He clearly defines the role of the white submitting to her husband, just as the church submits to Christ. These are the God ordained rolls that God has established in his good design.

Colossians 2:10 NASB95

10 and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority;

Colossians 2:15 NASB95

15 When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.

The last set of verses come from the letter from the apostle Paul to the church at Colossae. There in chapter 2, verse 10 Paul is stating that Christ is the head overall rule and authority. What Paul means is that Christ is sovereign over all earthly rulers and spiritual principalities. This would include Satan and his demons who are constantly seeking to disrupt and disarm the work of Christ in this world, we read inverse 15 that Christ has disarmed the rulers and authorities, and has triumphs over them, putting them to shame. Therefore, with Christ, being the head overall rule and authority, he is simply being displayed as the sovereign lord, overall with all authority, and all power.

It would again not fit for us to consider that Jesus is made the “source” over all rule and authority for to be over something or someone implies authority not origin. Paul is the not saying that Jesus is the origin of the earthly rulers or demonic powers but instead that he rules in authority over them as Lord.

This all leads us then to our verses in 1 Cor 11:1-3 which we will examine now.

c. Examining Kephale in 1 Cor 11

In our passage in 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the KEPHALE 14 times in just 16 verses in our Bible. The majority of the time he is using the term literally for the head of the body but as we will see, he is also using it with a double meaning in some cases for both the physical head, and the authority over a person.

1 Corinthians 11:3 NASB95

3 But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.

What Paul does is lay out the created order in which liberals want to push against but the order is clear and should not be tampered with. This order is not an order of value and worth. Paul is not saying that Christ is the most valuable, the men second and then women third. Of course that means that men and women have an equal physical and spiritual value before the Lord.

Instead, he is laying forth the God-ordained order of leadership or headship in creation. God has so ordained that the man is under subjection to Christ for Christ is the true head as we have seen from Paul’s other writings. Christ is the authority over all mankind. We must not first of all that this is the true doctrine that is being denied in the battle for headship in the home. When an argument is posed that redefines who should lead in the home or in the church, it is not an attack on man, it is attack on Christ and his headship over all.

Paul makes clear here as well as the passages in Colossians and Ephesians that we looked at previously, that Paul is not saying Christ is the source of the church. Instead, Christ is the head authority, the chief, the leader of the church through all history.

Secondly, we must understand then that God determined man to be the head of woman. This order is a creation order and it has been a design as undeniable as the difference between water and rock. This was not a result of the fall for we see that leadership and authority played out in Genesis 3 when God seeks out Adam as the responsible leader of his home that violated the covenant with God. He does not seek out Eve first even though she was guilty of falling into temptation. Instead, man is the authority and that authority plays out in the social structures that God has designed, most importantly, the family and the church.

Men lead in the home and church and women should submit themselves to that leadership. Male headship means that God ordained men and women are to be equal in their value but distinct in their role and function. This does not mean that man is superior to women but that God has given the man a unique responsibility to lead in all of life but most particularly in the home and in the church. We must acknowledge that sin entering the world has distorted the good designs of God which cause greater struggle in these areas. This can be seen by the rise of feminist ideology and the degradation of the male leader.

For the Corinthians, we will see that the issue with head coverings in the latter verses were an issue because the distinctions of men and women in the church were not being emphasized. However one interprets what head coverings are, the point of the passage that we will look at next week is that the church, like the home, must always make the distinctions clear between men and women.

Therefore we should all be familiar with the term Complementarianism. It is the belief that as God made men and women equal in worth and value, yet He gave them distinct roles and functions in the world to compliment each others gifts and abilities in order to reflect the glory the Lord to all the world.

In 1987, a group of evangelicals who formed the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood met and formulated a statement called the Danver’s Statement which addressed a proper biblical view of manhood and womanhood. In this statement they affirmed,

Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood (Affirmations)

“In the home, the husband’s loving, humble headship tends to be replaced by domination or passivity; the wife’s intelligent, willing submission tends to be replaced by usurpation or servility.

—In the church, sin inclines men toward a worldly love of power or an abdication of spiritual responsibility, and inclines women to resist limitations on their roles or to neglect the use of their gifts in appropriate ministries.”

But because of the redemption of Christ in His people, we can see the effects of that change in these roles such as

Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood (Affirmations)

“—In the family, husbands should forsake harsh or selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives; wives should forsake resistance to their husbands’ authority and grow in willing, joyful submission to their husbands’ leadership.—- - In the church, redemption in Christ gives men and women an equal share in the blessings of salvation; nevertheless, some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men.”

While we cannot expect a sinful world to follow such a created order by God, we as the church must stand firm upon God’s good design and know that he created it for our good and not our harm.

This leads us then to Paul’s final statement in this verse, that “God is the head of Christ.” This verse has again been denied by egalitarians or evangelical feminists who want to remove any idea of submission in God’s design of man or in the godhead itself. But clearly, the word of God does in fact teach that there is a subordination in the godhead, whereby the Son submits to the Father. I need to be careful to state that the Son submitting to the Father is not a denial of the euqality in the Godhead of essense of being. The Father ,Son and Spirit are equally God in essense and being. None of the persons of the godhead are less of God than the other persons. As Bruce Ware states, “ three divine persons possesses fully and simultaneously the identically same infinite divine nature”

Bruce A. Ware, “Tampering with the Trinity: Does the Son Submit to His Father?,” in Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood, ed. Wayne Grudem, Foundations for the Family Series (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002), 245.

But Scripture teaches that the Son submits to the Father and the Spirit submits to the Son. In verse 3, this is what is being communicated in such a way to communicate that submission always belongs to headship. Man submits to Christ as head. The woman submits to the man as head. The Son submits to the father as head.

Subordination in the godhead, simply means that there is a distinct in role and function within the godhead and so in this function, the Son submits to the Father.

PT Forsyth writes,

Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood Response to the Egalitarian Embrace of Masculine Trinitarian Language and Rejection of Inner Trinitarian Functional Subordination

Father and Son co-exist, co-equal in the Spirit of holiness, i.e., of perfection. But Father and Son is a relation inconceivable except the Son be obedient to the Father. The perfection of the Son and the perfecting of his holy work lay, not in his suffering but in his obedience. And, as he was eternal Son, it meant an eternal obedience.… But obedience is not conceivable without some form of subordination. Yet in his very obedience the Son was co-equal with the Father; the Son’s yielding will was no less divine than the Father’s exigent will. Therefore, in the very nature of God, subordination implies no inferiority.29

Acts 2:23 NASB95

23 this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death.

1 Corinthians 15:27–28 NASB95

27 For He has put all things in subjection under His feet. But when He says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is evident that He is excepted who put all things in subjection to Him. 28 When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.

Application:

This truth of subordination in the godhead is thus a solidfying truth that concretes the idea of headship in the home and the church. For if there is eternal submission between Father and Son, the the earthly submission between man and woman is a palatable and purposeful design of our good God. This is how he designed us to function in this world church and in our arrogance, we can try and edit that design but it always will end in failure and God’s judgment upon our heads. instead, let us embrace God’s purposeful order of his creation and in doing so bring glory to his name. Men: how are you fulfilling your purpose as the leader of your home and in the church?

Women: how are you displaying a humble submission to the leadership of men in your home and in the church?