http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16574274/your-apostle-and-high-priest
Part 1 Episode 221
Why does it matter that Jesus is called both the apostle and high priest of our confession? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper turns to Hebrews 3:1–6 to show how these two titles meet our two greatest needs.
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Is Complementarity Merely Functional?
Audio Transcript
Andrea, a podcast listener in Jackson, Mississippi, writes in. “Hello, Pastor John! Thank you for your books and particularly your new book on providence. It has proven to be life-altering for me. Thank you! I was wondering if you could take a moment to address an entirely different topic — a marriage question. I have started to notice an emerging view of ‘complementarity’ online, and in my own circles, which seems a little off to me. It’s called complementarity and holds to the idea that the husband and wife take on different roles in the home, roles that mostly do not overlap. But to me it often sounds like simply a functional idea. So if the wife is a better teacher, she teaches the children the Bible and the husband doesn’t. Or if the wife makes more money, the husband takes the primary role in
caring for the daily needs of the kids.“It’s called complementarity in the sense that each spouse is not duplicating the role of the other. Each complements what the other is doing. But I don’t know what else to call it except to say it feels like a genderless complementarity. The husband and wife do not overlap duties out of efficiency, not from deeper convictions. In fact, gender, rarely, if ever, is brought in to define which roles the man has that the woman does not, and vice versa. Do you see this functional ‘complementarity’? If so, how do you respond? And what roles in the home are most gendered? I would love your thoughts on this.”
I suppose it’s inevitable that the longer a label is used — like complementarianism or complementarity — the easier it is for the label to replace the reality. The label complementarian, as a designation for how men and women relate to each other, has been around for about 35 years. I would want to stress that labels are only valuable if they capture and communicate reality. It’s the biblical reality that we really care about, not so much the label.
Distinct by Deep Design
Now, I think Andrea is right that the label today is less clear and less precise in the reality it refers to than it used to be. She’s pointing to a particular use of the label where the reality behind it seems to have more or less vanished. People are calling themselves complementarian without any serious reference to what the essence of manhood and womanhood really are and what that essence calls for in life.
“Underneath these distinctions in roles are profound differences in the very nature of manhood and womanhood.”
From the beginning, in the late 1980s, the term complementarianism included, not just the biblical conviction that men should be the elders or pastors of churches and that men should be the heads of their marriages or homes, but also the conviction that underneath these distinctions in roles there are profound differences in the very nature of manhood and womanhood. Those differences in the unique essence of manhood and the unique essence of womanhood were designed by God in creation and were the foundation for why God assigned the differing roles that he did. What we are by God’s original design in making us male and female has always been the foundation for God’s design for how men and women relate to each other and what roles we take.
So, I would say it’s a fundamental mistake for husbands and wives, or men and women in the church, or men and women in general, to define our roles and how we function in them without any reference to the deeper design of God and who we are as male and female.
Male and Female in the Beginning
Let me try to show what I mean by referring to a couple of Bible passages. For example, 1 Timothy 2:12–14: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”
Then he gives a foundation, an argument, a ground, that goes all the way back to creation and the ruin of that creation in the fall. He says in verses 13–14, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”
I take Paul to be arguing something like this: the authoritative teaching role in the church — that is, the role of governance and teaching, the role of an elder — is to be filled by spiritually mature and gifted men because God established, in the first two chapters of Genesis, a peculiar responsibility and leadership for Adam as part of God’s design for manhood and what it means to be male in his family and in the world.
Deceiving Eve
Now, we can see this design for man’s peculiar responsibility in leadership confirmed by the way it falls apart in the moment of Satan’s temptation and the way God follows up with Adam and Eve after the fall. Genesis 3:6 says that Adam was with Eve at the temptation; he didn’t show up later. But Satan, being subtle and deceptive, totally ignores the person that God had made responsible for the life of the garden — the man. Thus, Satan attacks at this very crucial moment. He attacks and undermines God’s design and turns the woman into the spokesman and the leader and the decision-maker for humanity.
Now both Adam and Eve fall for this. Adam remained totally silent when he should have stepped in and taken responsibility for this horrifically dangerous moment. Eve willingly assumes the role of responsible leader, and the result is a catastrophic failure to be obedient to God for both of them.
Now when Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:13, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor,” I don’t think he intends to say Adam is guiltless. We know that from Romans 5, where Adam’s disobedience in fact is the decisive disobedience that brings down the curse on humanity. The point, rather, of saying “Adam was not deceived” is that Satan undermined Adam’s leadership role by not targeting Adam for deception, but rather the woman. He made her the leader at the moment of deception. The point, in the context of 1 Timothy, is this: when the roles of men and women are reversed, at the very point where leadership matters most, things go very badly for families and churches and societies.
Where Is Adam?
Now God confirms that understanding of what happened by the way he calls the couple to account. A few verses later, God comes to find them in the garden. Genesis 3:9–11 says,
The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?”
Now, why didn’t God seek out the woman first since she ate the forbidden fruit first? Because God made man first and built into him a God-given sense of sacrificial responsibility for leadership and protection and provision. He is responsible for what just happened. That’s the price of leadership.
Male and Female in Marriage
This kind of built-in, creation-based leadership for man is confirmed in Ephesians 5. This is the second text I’m looking at: Ephesians 5:23–25, 28–29.
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.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . . . He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church.
“How the husband and wife relate is to show the covenant love between Christ and the church.”
Paul describes the relationship as irreversible. The roles are not interchangeable. Christ and the church don’t get interchanged. They are the meaning of this relationship. How the husband and wife relate is to show the covenant love between Christ and the church, and Christ as the leader, savior, protector, nourisher, provider.
Paul roots those roles in the original pre-fall creation account in Genesis 2:24, which he quotes now in verse 31: “A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Then he applies it like this: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it [that is, the meaning of manhood and womanhood in marriage] refers to Christ and the church.”
That’s the meaning of male and female in marriage: male and female modeling Christ and the church in roles of headship and submission that cannot be reversed any more than Christ and the church can be.
Restoring the Foundation
I conclude from these two texts — 1 Timothy 2 and Ephesians 5 and others that I’m not mentioning — that the very nature of God-designed manhood and womanhood is the foundation of the roles we are given by God. A complementarianism stripped of its foundation in the God-given essence of manhood and womanhood is a label that has lost its reality.
When it comes to the hundreds of activities in the home and who does them, that will be sorted out best where husband and wife agree biblically that the man bears a special God-given burden of responsibility for leadership, for protection, for provision in the family — all carried out in the pursuit of the amazing model of Christ’s love for the church and the church’s glad submission to Christ.
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A Friend on the Trail of Tears: How a Baptist Missionary Became a Cherokee
Evan Jones, a Baptist missionary to the Cherokee Indians, was one of the most steadfast missionaries in American history. Though largely forgotten today, the legacy of his labors through incredible turmoil and danger deserves a place among the annals of Baptist missionaries.
Born in Wales in 1788, Jones spent his early years as part of the Methodist Church. In 1821, however, he immigrated to Philadelphia, and soon after his arrival, he adopted Baptist principles and eventually became a teacher at a Baptist mission school among the Cherokees in North Carolina.
Inspired by the work of British Baptist missionary William Carey in India and the American Baptist Adoniram Judson in Burma, Baptists and other evangelicals began sending substantial numbers of missionaries to Native American groups in the 1810s and ’20s. Missionaries focused especially on tribes such as the Cherokees who showed interest in English-language education.
Jones took up this missionary endeavor, in 1824 becoming the leader of the Baptist mission to the Cherokees, a position he would hold for forty years. He soon found, however, that ministry to the Cherokees was complicated by cultural and political conflicts between the US and Indian tribes.
Friend of the Cherokees
Jones and his coworkers were appalled at the violent racism of whites in North Carolina and Georgia toward the Cherokees. Many local whites vehemently opposed efforts to educate or evangelize Indians, believing that Native Americans were incorrigibly dishonest and brutal. Typical of the era, Baptist missionaries had their own cultural biases. They often assumed that the Cherokees needed not only the gospel of salvation through Christ, but also “civilizing” in order to live decently as Christians.
Many southern whites opposed the mere notion of Indians becoming Christians. Jones claimed that some whites went so far as to tell Cherokees that the gospel of Christ was untrue and had nothing to do with Indians. Whites spread horrible rumors about Jones and his family whenever possible. Jones also met resistance from traditional Indian “conjurers” who warned the Cherokees not to betray their traditional animistic beliefs and rituals.
In contrast to his white detractors, Jones showed exceptional confidence in Cherokee assistants. Cherokees who became Christians helped him translate sermons and the Bible. Some of them became licensed Baptist preachers themselves. A key Cherokee pastor was Jesse Bushyhead, who converted to the Christian faith in 1829. Bushyhead, fluent in both Cherokee and English, became the pastor of a Cherokee Baptist church in 1831. In 1832, Jones met Bushyhead and was highly impressed with his aptitude for ministry. Jones convinced the national Baptist mission board to put Bushyhead on a regular salary as a missionary and evangelist.
Against Jackson
The conflicts between the US and the Cherokees culminated in the 1830s. In 1830, Baptists and all denominations serving among Native Americans began to confront the threat of Indian removal. President Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, had fought Indians in the southern states as a military leader in the 1810s. He was determined to have all the remaining tribes in the southeast removed beyond the Mississippi. Proponents of Indian removal, including a number of white Baptist leaders, argued that whites and Indians could never live in peace, so it was better for everyone if Native Americans were moved to Indian territory (in Arkansas or Oklahoma).
The expansion of the southern Cotton Kingdom increased pressure to make all farmland in the Deep South open to white farmers and their enslaved African-American laborers. Most leaders of the Cherokees, headed by Principal Chief John Ross, opposed removal. Ross, Bushyhead, and Jones became close allies through the removal crisis. But even some Christian (though not Baptist) Cherokees believed that removal was inevitable, and that it was better to cooperate with the Jackson administration rather than risk violent removal.
Jones adamantly opposed the Jackson administration’s schemes. As a matter of Christian conviction and simple fairness, he believed that the Cherokees had a right to stay on their land. The number of Cherokee Baptists was growing rapidly in the early 1830s. Most white missionaries to Native Americans had seen only a few converts, but the Baptists saw the total of Cherokee converts grow from 90 to over 500 between 1830 and 1838. Jones not only worried about the physical danger to the Cherokees posed by removal, but he feared that it could devastate the burgeoning Cherokee churches.
Trail of Tears
A small group of compliant Cherokees signed the notorious Treaty of New Echota in 1835, committing the Cherokee nation to removal. Jones saw the treaty as a fraud, and he was briefly arrested for refusing to cooperate with federal officials sent to the Cherokee nation to arrange for removal. Jones and Bushyhead kept preaching to the Cherokees and baptizing dozens of new converts, even as government agents and militia moved in to orchestrate the deportation.
By spring of 1838, it was clear that forced removal was going to happen. John Ross reluctantly began to divide Cherokees up into regiments to make the deadly trek west. He chose Jesse Bushyhead to lead one of the contingents and made Jones the assistant commander of another. In June 1838, Jones wrote that government troops had dragged Cherokees from their houses, had rounded them up at detention camps, and had given them no opportunity to take anything but the clothes they wore.
Jones also reported that Cherokee believers were going on with their “labor of love to dying sinners,” continuing to baptize new Christians on the eve of deportation. Jones estimated that 175 Cherokees received baptism at the pre-march detention camps alone. The Baptist Missionary Magazine related that due to a “sudden outpouring of the Spirit,” Jones and Bushyhead baptized 55 converts on just one day during this scourging time.
Jones was one of a few white missionaries who accompanied the Cherokees on the forced trek to Oklahoma, which became known as the Trail of Tears. Bushyhead and Jones kept track of the Baptist Cherokees along the march and did their best to hold regular worship services. The fifteen thousand Cherokees forced to move to Oklahoma had disastrously poor supplies, and more than four thousand of them died on the Trail of Tears.
Scripture in Cherokee
In 1839, federal officials expelled Jones from Indian Territory due to renewed complaints and rumors about him spread by pro-removal Cherokees. But the indefatigable Jones successfully petitioned to return to the Cherokees after a two-year absence. Jones proved to be one of the most successful white missionaries ever to work among Native Americans, with some two thousand Cherokees joining Baptist churches under his ministry across the decades.
Bible translation into native dialects had long been a hallmark of Protestant missions. Jones and his son John translated the Bible into Cherokee using the new Cherokee alphabet developed by the linguist Sequoyah in 1821. As the Bible translation developed, Jones insisted on using the Cherokee version instead of the King James Bible in his mission schools, despite some opposition from Baptist missionary officials who thought it better for Cherokees to learn the Christian faith in English.
This openness to the Cherokee language was a key reason for Jones’s success. His translation of the Bible into Cherokee was a landmark of Cherokee linguistics and evangelization. John Jones had sufficiently mastered Hebrew and Greek to be able to translate the Bible directly from those languages into Cherokee, which removed much of the influence of English prose on their Cherokee translation. The Joneses also sought input from Cherokees to use Cherokee terms that best captured the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew words. Unsurprisingly, most Cherokee Christians were delighted with this work.
Bearer of Light
The last great controversy of Evan Jones’s career was over slavery and the Civil War. The Joneses came from the generally antislavery milieu of Northern Baptist life. In the 1850s, they appealed to Cherokee Baptists to oppose slavery and, where applicable, to free their slaves. (A number of wealthy Cherokees owned African-American laborers.)
Slave-owning Cherokees came to see the Jones family as troublemaking abolitionists, and they had John Jones expelled from Cherokee territory. Evan Jones, fearing for his safety, eventually left the Oklahoma territory again for the friendlier climes of Kansas. The Cherokees split over the Civil War, and the Joneses worked to support pro-Union Cherokees. Astoundingly, despite failing health and limited financial means, Evan Jones came back yet again to the shattered Cherokee nation once the war was over, laboring to restore and strengthen Cherokee Baptist churches.
At the end of the Civil War, Unionist Cherokee leaders took the unprecedented step of making Evan and John Jones full citizens of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees noted that the Jones family had served among the Cherokees for forty years. “When the Cherokees were poor and covered with darkness,” the Cherokees’ decree read, “light with regard to the other world was brought to us by Evan Jones.” Jones died in 1872, and was buried in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.1
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Do Not Fear to Leave This World
Perhaps you will feel the same discomfort I felt overhearing saints of old speak of death.
“He who does not prepare for death is more than an ordinary fool. He is a madman,” began Charles Spurgeon.
“Agreed,” said the good Doctor Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Men seem to ignore the plain fact that “the moment you come into this world you are beginning to go out of it.”
But this fact need not spell doom and gloom for the Christian, Spurgeon responded. “The best moment of a Christian’s life is his last one, because it is the one that is nearest heaven.”
“I concur fully,” Richard Sibbes chimed in. “Death is not now the death of me, but death will be the death of my misery, the death of my sins; it will be the death of my corruptions. But death will be my birthday in regard of happiness.”
“When Christ calls me home,” Adoniram Judson added, “I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from school.”
“May I also interject?” asked Calvin. “We may positively state that nobody has made any progress in the school of Christ, unless he cheerfully looks forward towards the day of his death, and towards the day of the final resurrection.”
“This strikes me as true,” said Thomas Brooks. “It is no credit to your heavenly Father for you to be loath to go home.”
“And why should we hesitate?” Samuel Bolton questioned. It is the “privilege of saints, that they shall not die until the best time, not until when, if they were but rightly informed, they would desire to die.”
“Exactly.” For the child of God, “death is the funeral of all our sorrows,” reasoned Thomas Watson. “Death will set a true saint out of the gunshot and free him from sin and trouble.”
“Indeed,” John Bunyan added, “death is but a passage out of a prison into a palace.”
As I listened, I overheard the most disquieting questions. “Has this world been so kind to you that you would leave it with regret?” C.S. Lewis posed. “If we really believe that home is elsewhere and that this life is a ‘wandering to find home,’ why should we not look forward to the arrival?”
“Hear! Hear!” exclaimed William Gurnall. “Let thy hope of heaven master thy fear of death. Why shouldest thou be afraid to die, who hopest to live by dying?”
“I am packed, sealed, and waiting for the post,” cried John Newton. “Who would live always in such a world as this?”
Even snippets of their prayers issued a subtle rebuke. I could not help but hear one George Whitefield plead, “Lord, keep me from a sinful and too eager desire after death. I desire not to be impatient. I wish quietly to wait till my blessed change comes.”
This proved the final blow. These men anticipated death, viewed an early departure as a “promotion.” I lowered my gaze. I rarely think this way, rarely feel this way. Do I really believe in heaven? Do I really love my Lord?
Snuggled in This Life
My squeamishness, flipping through an anthology of Christian quotes, helped me realize that my discipleship has slanted too American, too shortsighted, too this-worldly.
“Are you packed and ready to go?” Well, I was hoping to set sail several decades from now, so —
“Has this world been so kind to you that you would leave it with regret?” Well, I wouldn’t give it a ten-star rating, but it certainly hasn’t been half that bad (yet). So yeah, maybe —
“Nobody has made any progress in the school of Christ, unless he cheerfully looks forward towards the day of his death, and towards the day of the final resurrection.” Well, that’s intense.
“It is no credit to your heavenly Father for you to be loath to go home.” I see — worthy point. No credit to Jesus either, I imagine.
“These men daily lived awake to the truths I daily profess to believe.”
These men daily lived awake to the truths I daily profess to believe; they inhabited them, longing to fly away and be with Christ. Although they loved families, enjoyed things of earth, and did good in this world, they nevertheless were unafraid to dive headfirst into those cold waters of death at the first moment their Master allowed. They believed, with Paul, that “to depart and be with Christ . . . is far better” (Philippians 1:23).
I discovered then just how snuggled by the fireside I had become in this world. A place I too readily felt to be home.
Epitaphs of Exiles
My heart can live too much here, too little there. “My life is hidden with Christ,” I must remind myself (Colossians 3:3). As this world seeks to entice my affections to linger in its marketplace, I desire to be more of a heavenly disciple. And if you love Jesus but think too little of the life to come, I know you will agree. Oh, that this might be a true inscription over our graves, and all the more since we live after the coming of Christ, and the down payment of the Spirit:
These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.
For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13–16)
Abraham, by faith, left his home in Mesopotamia, not even knowing where God was leading him (Hebrews 11:8). He lived in the promised land before he could call it home, dwelling there as a foreigner. Isaac and Jacob, heirs with Abraham of God’s promise, lived in tents of temporality; their home was not yet (Hebrews 11:9).
“Once God saved them, they refused to unpack their hopes again in this world.”
Abraham’s eyes were elsewhere. “He was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10). And he and his sons bore the heavenly insignia in their speech: they acknowledged, to anyone who cared to know, that they would live and die on this earth as exiles and sojourners (Genesis 23:4; 47:9). Once God saved them, they refused to unpack their hopes again in this world. The land far-off — big as God’s promise, sure as God’s word — held their allegiance. They made it clear that they sought a homeland not built by human hands.
As the world tried to tempt them back, the bait remained on the hook. Better to live in a tent in this world with a heavenly city before them than to dwell in the tottering kingdoms of men. They desired a better country, a heavenly one. And God is not ashamed to be called “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). He is not ashamed in the least to be the one they so hoped in, for he has prepared for them a city.
Still at Sea
So, is your mind mainly set on this world or the next?
This world is not our home, precious saint. We are not yet in our element. We fling open the window and send our dove about this earth, finding that it returns to us having found no homeland within this watery grave. But this world will be drained soon enough. The swells of judgment shall intensify and then subside. The new heavens and new earth shall arrive, and our Mighty Dove shall descend with a sword in his mouth for his enemies and an olive branch for us.
Until then, keep waiting, keep hoping, keep acknowledging, keep living in tents, longing for that moment when we can bound away from this world as the Father calls us home.