Complementary Roles in Marriage

How you feeling? Good I hope …4th of July and all…past my bedtime

Introduction

It isn’t often that I share a story about how a particular Bible verse effected a group of people but I have the opportunity today. Back in my mid twenties I was involved in a College and Career Bible Study with a group of friends. We called ourselves. “The Group”, pretty creative I know.

It was loosely associated with the Church I grew up in as many of us were from that church and grew up together. We hung out together a lot, even outside of the Bible Study. We laughed, we learned we had fun we had struggles and all in all we just helped each navigate the waters of late adolescence…when you are not really a teenager anymore but you haven’t fully taken on all the responsibility of adulthood either.

Well ‘The Group” had just finished a particular Bible Study and our leaders Chuck and Randa - a wonderful couple who genuinely cared for us - did what many Bible Study leaders do and asked the group what they might be interested in studying next. And the typical ideas sprung up. Someone always wants to study the weird stuff in Revelations and someone else mentioned relationships and when you know you are ready for marriage

…and then one young man - I don’t want to mention his name in case he is listening (or talking) right now...but with a gleam in his eye and smirk on his face as he boldly suggested,

“I think we should study 1 Timothy 2 where it says that girls are supposed to keep their mouths shut at Church”

And of course, much to this young man’s delight, the room erupted with objections and sarcastic responses galore.

all these adolescent guys saying “Yeah lets talk about that, that sounds good...”

and all girls were saying, “It doesn’t say that” and then the guys pointed out how it does say that “women are to remain silent”

and the girls were like “that’s not what it means”

and the guys maturely responded (fingers in ears) “I am sorry I can’t hear you because you are supposed to be silent right now”

By this point everyone was either shouting over one another or searching for their next comeback until finally Chuck and Randa were able to step in and settle us all down to finish out the night.

Obviously, this young man (whoever he might be) had intentions other than the pursuit of a right understanding of God’s Word in mind when he made his less-than helpful suggestion. I am sure by now he has matured…at least enough... to realize that while that night the subject brought about a good opportunity to tease some girls, the issues that have come from the wrong application of these verses are not really a laughing matter.

Tension

The truth is the subject of gender differences in leadership roles in the Church is one of the most contended subjects inside the Evangelical Christian Church right now. I emphasize “inside” because there are many Churches that would label themselves a “Christian” Church and we would disagree with them in all kinds of Theological areas. What is unique about this particular issue is that we find ourselves on the other side of it from Churches where we have alignment in most all other doctrinal issues.

In other words, this is the kind of issue that Jesus loving, Bible believing, Christian Brothers and Sisters in Christ…disagree on. And our position as a Church is becoming less and less culturally accepted.

It’s not that our position on this subject is so historically unique, the Christian Church has held to our position for better part of the last 2000 years. It has only been for about the past 50 years that many Churches have decided to no longer affirm what we still do about the importance of Gender roles in the leadership of the Church. Even the denomination that planted this Church 40 years ago, has become a flagship for the new ideas on this this subject, and many other denominations and Churches that we would largely agree with on most all doctrinal issues, we disagree on this one.

So my hope, at this point, is that I have so convinced you all of the centrality of the Gospel message that you are all asking the same question: “Is this issue a Gospel Issue?”. That is great question and I am so glad you asked…and I would have to say, No. I do not believe that it is in and of itself a Gospel Issue. I freely admit, that it is possible…to find yourself on either side of this issue and still have a saving faith in Jesus Christ.

I also freely admit that there is some inherent risk in focusing in on a subject that is not a direct Gospel Issue. I don’t mean risk in the sense of: speaking the truth when people don’t wanna hear the truth. I don’t call that risk, I just call that preaching. There are many times when I don’t want to hear that truth too, but God has still called me to speak it. No, the risk that I see in this is that someone might get distracted from what really matters in the Gospel because they are hung up on this one aspect of our Theology.

So again, especially considering the risks involved, the good question is “Why not just skip over this part” or at the very least quickly mention it and then get on with something that we can all agree is a “Gospel Issue”

The reason that I believe this teaching is worth the risk is that I have found that the kind of arguments that are used to defend one side of this issue or the other have indirectly led people into Gospel Issues…and as your pastor, friend and brother in Christ... I don’t want this to happen to any of you. I don’t want you to go down a road that seems just less significant than other ideas - only to find yourself chopping away at the roots of some of the most significant truths of the Christian faith.

So here is what we are going to do. We are going to put a pin right here in 1 Timothy 2, and come back to it next week. And the reason is that we need to lay some groundwork in order to understand those verses better. Our next verses in 1 Timothy are about how leadership in the Church is affected by a Biblical understanding of gender roles. Well we can’t get after that until we first look at the Biblical understanding of Gender roles in general. So we are going to do that this week and then next week we will return to 1 Timothy to see how those roles play out in the “Behavior in the household of God”.

So we are going to open up our Bibles to Ephesians chapter 5, p. 978 if you have a Bible like the ones in the Chairs. This book is one of Paul’s earlier letters to the Church in Ephesus, which is the same Church that Timothy is at when Paul wrote his letter to him. So we will see what this Church was already given on the topic of Gender roles this week, so that next week we can better understand how they play out in the Church.

Before we do that however, we will submit our time to the Lord in prayer. Take a moment to ready your heart for this…and let’s pray.

Truth

So my concerns, as I shared earlier, is how particular positions on gender roles seem to work toward Gospel Issues.

One of the ways that I see this happening is when someone argues for one truth in God’s Word so fiercely that they don’t even realize how they have swung so far the other direction that they are violating God’s Word in another area. I though that a good way to illustrate is to use the picture of a swinging pendulum. That the force that they apply to move away from one tragic un-Biblical poistion has swung them so far in the oppsoing direction that they have landed themsleves in another just as tragic and un-Biblical of a position.

Let’s start with the “Patriarchal-ism” swing of the pendulum.

(Let me just warn you that we are going to handling several very long words today. If you played these words in scrabble you would win every time. But I promise to do my best to explain them in ways that we all can understand, because I had to look a lot of this stuff up myself.)

In the field of Sociology, a patriarchal culture is simply a culture where the eldest father, or Patriarch is accepted as the head of the tribal family group. There are also “Matriarchal” cultures where the eldest Mother of the tribe is the head. So as the Bible says in Ephesians 5 that the “husband is the head of the wife” it seemed natural in field of Theology to borrow this sociological term to describe the Biblical understanding of gender roles to be “patriarchal”.

The problem came in when Christian men began displaying more of the sociological “tribal” understanding of their role as head, than the Biblical one. Ephesians 5, which we will get to, clearly lays out what being the “head” means for a Christian man, but they went more “tribal” instead.

So over time, men began to treat women as second class creations, where they were told in words or attitudes that their place was to be subservient to the whims of “tribal rulers” and with this understanding men justified many horrible abuses and oppressions toward women. So what was an innocent term borrowed from a different field of study, became a label used to describe a gross misunderstanding of the Biblical call to headship.

In our world today, defining terms is so important, so for our purposes this morning we are going to summarize Patriarchal-ism to say that: Since the Bible gives Men headship over women, Men must be superior to Women in competence, abilities and value.

and the result of this terrible miss-interpretation is that

Result: Women are not treated as the equal image bearers of God that they are.

So about 50 years ago or so, many people took a look at the horrible practices that this model had degenerated into and they rightfully rejected it as the horribly un-Biblical position that it became…however.. the force of their objections was so strong that they swung themselves to the opposite end of the spectrum, and found themselves proposing an equally un-Biblical position.

This position is called Egalitarian-ism, and we will summarize this position to say that:

Since Women are equal to men in competence, abilities and value, the Bible must not give Men headship over Women.

But the unfortunate result of this claim is that

Result: God’s Word is not honored as trustworthy and applicable to our world today.

Both of these views set out to accomplish something good and right, but they both got off track and ended up swinging into a set of propositions that are very difficult to defend Biblically.

So about 40 years ago, in response to these polarizing views, a group of Biblical Scholars got together to try and sort this mess out. They too saw the abuses of what had come to be known as “Patriarchalism” but they were just as concerned with force of this new teaching called “Egalitarianism”.

So they set out to answer this key question:

Is there a way to affirm the equality of Men and Women in competence, abilities and value…

…while still honoring the Word of God to be trustworthy and applicable to our world today?

The answer that they came up with is another Scrabble winning word Complementarian-ism. This is what I and this Church teach to be a right and Biblical perspective on gender roles in a Christian household. So what is a Complementarian?

A complementarian is a person who believes that God created male and female to reflect complementary truths about Himself.

Ok, so what is a “complementary” truth?

Compl-e-mentary should not be confused with Compl-i-mentary, even though they are two of the most confused words in the English language.

Compl-i-mentary is when you issue someone a compliment, like when Nick says, “Dan I really like that tie” and I respond, “Thanks Nick, I really like your sweater vest”. Those are compliments…or they could be.

Compl-e-mentary - is defined as Something that completes or makes perfect; either of two parts or things needed to complete the whole; counterparts.

So being the great question askers that you are, your next great question would would be where in the Bible did these Scholars get this information from? Well since you asked, I’ll tell you.

Almost every time the Apostle Paul talks about gender roles in his many writings he points us back to the creation story in Genesis 1. So, keeping your finger in Ephesians 5, turn to the beginning of your Bible in Genesis chapter 1, page one and we will start on the sixth day of creation or verse 26 where it says:

Genesis 1:26–27 ESV

26 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.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

So what seems impossible to deny here is that there is something of the image of God that was built into the the uniqueness of the two genders that God created. Not one gender…two genders. Not an infinite possibility of genders according to how one feels that their personality and temperaments lines up with the gender stereotypes of their particular culture…Two genders were perfectly designed, by our perfect creator, for his perfect purposes. At least for the Bible-believing Christian, it is hard to imagine how there is any confusion on this part.

Then if we continued into chapter two of Genesis we will find the second, more detailed telling of this day of creation. After God made Adam from the dust of the ground and gave him charge over the garden and instructions about the tree of life and the tree that would bring death…is says this in verse 18

Genesis 2:18 ESV

18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

After 5 days of creating where everything was “good, good, good, good, good” we get to the very first “not good”. What was not good? Adam need a helper that was fit for him. So they looked over all creation and nothing was a fitting helper for Adam…and so God put Adam to sleep and brought forth from from one of his ribs a Woman, someone who was fit for Adam. And then finally just a few verses down from there in verse 24 it says

Genesis 2:24 ESV

24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

This is the well known wedding verse isn’t it, but it is not just about the man and woman getting together…it is about them coming together to reflect complementary truths about God. They were made in his image, male and female, and through their design God took what was “not good” and made it “very Good” in that they are able to be together something that Adam was not able to be alone. They now more accurately reflect the image of God.

This idea of gender roles being “complementary” is something that literally goes back to the beginning of time and then as you look through out Scripture you can find it over and over again. It is rooted in a foundational belief that we were created by an all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, sovereign God who wants us to know Him. So he created in us a reflection of who He is, a reflection that is necessarily both male and female.

When we understand our design in this way, then there is no room for a Patriarchal-ism, which claims that men are more competent, able or valuable than women. How could they be when God said, “It is not good for man to be alone!" They are only one part of the whole.

And with this understanding of our design, there is no room for an Egalitarianism that would claim that genders is insignificant and interchangeable to the degree that there is nothing that is uniquely male or uniquely female... because we were gifted with these unique features to be able to fit together in such a way as to reflect the “image” of God that he has placed in both of us...together.

Speaking of common wedding verses, we are finally now going to take a look at Ephesians chapter 5 to see how Paul explains this idea of complementary roles to the Church in Ephesus. I don’t mean to be predictable, but just know that if you ask me to officiate your wedding then these verses are going to play a part in it. The reason is that I believe that they are so vital to understanding the purpose filled design of our gender roles in any Christian household. This week we will look at it from the perspective of the Christain household, next week the household of faith.

So let’s take a look, Ephesians 5, beginning in verse 22 first of all the text instructs

Ephesians 5:22 ESV

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.

This is a high and heavy charge isn’t it? But there is much that we can learn about God’s design for the genders in it. The calling for a wife to submit to her husband is not about the worthiness of her husband. It is not because he is more capable, competent and valuable. In so many ways, my wife is smarter, stronger and just a better human than I am. But my wife is not called to submit to her husband, in light of who her husband is. It is a much richer calling than that. She is called to submit to her husband in honor of who Jesus is.

It is almost as if God has asked women to look right through their husbands and aim their submission to God on the other side. It certainly effects their husband, as it passes through him (1 Peter says that a woman’s submission to her unsaved husband could bring him to salvation!) Ultimately this act of intentionally submitting to your husband is an act aimed at honoring the one on the other side. No matter how good a man he is, the man in the middle doesn’t deserve the submission of his wife - when a Christian wife willingly submits to her husband it is an act that reaches well past your husband’s value and into the worship of your Lord.

This Biblical understanding of submission is strikingly different from how our culture sees that word.

Ephesians 5:22–24 ESV

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 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. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

So this is where the Bible clearly lays out that the statement that “the husband is the head of the wife”. To deny this statement is to deny Scripture. In their desire to value women as equal image bearers...Jesus loving, Bible believing brothers and sisters in Christ have tried to explain away these verses in ways that they would, thankfully, never use for the rest of the Bible…because if they read the rest of Scripture through the same lens that they use for these verses then they would have many “Gospel Issues” on their hands. And that is what makes that position so dangerous.

And the saddest part is that they don’t need to do this. There is in these verse a way to affirm the equal value of both genders and the eternal value of the Word of God.

There is a prototype for the kind of “headship” that is being called for here - it is not a “headship” made in the image of men, but a call to headship that reflects the image Christ Jesus. That is how a Christian marriage becomes successful in accomplishing what it was designed by God to do. How those two “counterparts” come together to complete the whole. The Christian wife is called to submit to her husband, as to the Lord and the Christian husband is called to headship as Christ is the head of the church.

This is how Paul describes that role:

Ephesians 5:25–30 ESV

25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body.

The authority that God has given men in their “headship” is not the right the rule…it is the responsibility to serve. This is what Jesus did for the Church and we are called to be like Him in our servant leadership. We are called to “give ourselves up” - sacrificing our desires, our comfort, our calendar in order to see her flourishing.

What do you think would happen to a marriage if the husband led like this? I’ll tell you. The submission of that man’s wife would simply be her joyously desiring to follow her husband who is leading so well.

And the image of God would be so gloriously displayed in that union....because God created male and female to reflect complementary truths about Himself.

Gospel Application

Then Paul brings us back to the book of Genesis

Ephesians 5:31–32 ESV

31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

The mystery behind God’s design of the two genders is to point us to the relationship between Christ and his bride the Church. When we start chipping away at that, we are in danger of distorting the message of the Gospel, and that is why we needed to take such an in depth look at this today.

Landing

There is so much more that I could say on this topic, and I will say more next week when we return to 1 Timothy to take a look at how the Compelementary views on gender are applied to our behavior in the Church.

But first let’s pray, and prepare our hearts for celebrating the good news of the Gospel in communion.