Male and Female
During this Lenten season I am writing blogs on marriage. The prophet Jeremiah writes of God’s love for us. “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” Jeremiah 31:3
That love God showed us in His Son. And by faith in His Son Jesus, we are loved by God in the same way He loves His Son. So when we commit our lives to Christ by faith, God remains faithful to us.
It is with faith, not knowing how it will turn out that a male and female enter into marriage–a relationship which God ordained that has been challenged ever since He married those two in the Garden of Eden.
From ancient times on the male was regarded as dominant. Polygamy in the Old Testament is recorded. And there is always this commandment where a man should not covet another man’s wife but no commandment where a wife should not covet another wife’s husband. And, of course, the Bible was written by men.
In the book of Ephesians the Apostle Paul writes about the roles of the male and female in marriage. “But was Paul ever married?” The Bible does not answer that definitively. We speculate. The contention is, “How can Paul, a male, tell females how they should think and be?”
I have often wondered about that, myself. However a husband and wife team have written a book entitled God’s Design for Man and Woman (2014) Faithful to the Word of God and to theology the Kostenberger’s write that this male dominance can be resolved by recognizing the Biblical view that “God created humanity as male and female in His image and they are fellow heirs of salvation through Christ.” pp71-74
I fully realize, having been both a pastor and a psychotherapist, that psychology and religion approach the challenges in marriages, differently What is more, the 21st century church, is highly influenced by the social cultures that surround her, and dares not offend her customers by implying that biological and psychological factors can define a marriage between two people.
Masculinity and femininity are God defined. I would strongly recommend that those pastors, counselors and psychotherapist who seek to advise young couples who come to them for premarital counseling read the 350 plus page book written by the Kostenbergers. It is Biblically and theologically forthright.
Defying the authority of God is a sin we are born with. Told to not eat fruit from the tree of life, Satan talked them into defying God’s command. But God had indeed told Adam and Eve that they should not eat from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and if they did they would surely die.” Once they had listened to Satan everything became corrupted–morally broken and humans were left to their own crafty purposes. And nothing is more destructive in a marriage relationship than that. At least some brides-to-be have honestly told me they refuse to say yes in the marriage ceremony if asked to be obedient to their husband-to-be. Defiance is disobedience wherever it is lived out.
Defiance on the part of the church to refuse to accept the Word of God as the final authority on the lives of believers endangers their eternal lives.
In their book, God’s Design for Man and Woman, the Kostenberger’s are mindful of this. One of the singular results that came from their extensive study is what God teaches all of us: the importance of the complementariness of the nature of manhood and womanhood. That is to say, serving to complete or enhance something beyond each of them. One might think of this something in terms of a mutuality that forms a harmonious whole which either of them could not attain on their own.
If you are a Christian and are considering marriage, before you even consider what Paul writes about marriage in the 5th chapter of Ephesians, I strongly suggest that you as a male consider with your female partner-to-be whether or not you believe in the Word of God’s teachings concerning The Fall of mankind. A good starting point is to read together the account of The Fall in Genesis 1-3. If you do not come the conclusion that by virtue of The Fall you are both sinners in need of forgiveness, scrub “the God thing.”
But in the event that you both see yourselves as sinners and have come to the “Jesus thing” [coming to believe that Jesus is the Son of God and founder of Christianity and that He died for your sins and rose again that you may dwell in heaven with Him when you die] then go on exploring together what the Apostle writes about concerning male and female in the entire 5th chapter of Ephesians. There you will find that holiness shows itself to the other in each assuming responsibility to Christ who has ransomed each of your lives. With this mutual obedience to God in mind hear what the Word of God says.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansingher by the washing with water through the word,and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body.“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:21-33
