http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14852835/honor-women-like-our-lord-does
As discussion about women in the church lingers online and in the minds of congregants, I wonder if some sisters today feel that their churches debate their proper callings more than they delight in them as one of God’s best gifts. The conversations about what women can and cannot do in the context of the church are poignant in this particular moment. Can they preach, teach, or lead a co-ed Bible study? These conversations matter because the Scriptures speak to them. Yet the church’s public discourse about women, when healthy, is marked most of all by celebrations of women as faithful saints.
Women across continents and denominations report their local-church participation often leaves them feeling overlooked and undervalued. What a sad reality that our mothers and daughters often feel that Christ’s very own bride holds them at arm’s length, even if unintentionally.
We are right to aim for theological precision in all matters, including the callings of men and women in the church. But we would also do well to ask, Does the way we talk about women reflect the way the Scriptures celebrate them?
Introducing Eve
Recall man’s first words in Scripture. After God created the world and everything in it, the narrative sings with the rhythm, “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). But then suddenly, God declares, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). And so, God makes the woman — the helper fit for the man. And as a father would usher the bride to her expectant husband, so God “brought [the woman] to the man” (Genesis 2:22).
“Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.”
What follows are the first recorded sentences from human lips in Scripture. Upon seeing the woman, Adam explodes with delight: “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” (Genesis 2:23). Remarkably, the first words a woman heard from a man announced the joy he took in her being.
At that moment, the woman hadn’t yet done anything except exist by the power of God. Yet her very existence leads Adam to rejoice. Without any further instruction, he understands that the woman is an extraordinary gift to him. He had known life in God’s world apart from her, and, once with her, he immediately loves her and knows how essential she is to God’s mandate that humans should take dominion and multiply (Genesis 1:28).
Without Eve, Adam cannot fulfill God’s calling. Without the woman, the story stops. In the very good beginning, God puts his wisdom on magnificent display in her creation. And as the story of the world progresses, God puts front and center the essential part women will play in his redemptive plan.
Book of Heroines
The Scriptures brim with narratives that underscore the essential and exalted place women hold in God’s economy. From Rebekah, whose Abraham-like faith compelled her to leave her home for a place and people she did not know (Genesis 24), to Ruth the Moabite widow, whose conversion to Yahweh led her to become part of the Messianic line, the Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.
In the ancient world, women were far more vulnerable than today, in part because they did not enjoy the same legal rights as men. Yet in that very context, Scripture celebrates women by repeatedly placing them in the stream of God’s redemptive plan, where their fidelity to God often throws into relief the disobedience of fallen men. We know many of their names: Sarah, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Esther, Elizabeth, and Priscilla. Four women even appear in Christ’s genealogy, including Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary (Matthew 1:5–16).
“The Bible’s story cannot be told apart from the lives of faithful women.”
Yet there are many others whose names are known only to God: women who received back their dead by resurrection (Hebrews 11:35); the widow of Zarepath, whose son was raised (1 Kings 17:17–24); the industrious godly woman extolled in Proverbs 31; the widow who offered everything (Mark 12:41–44); the sinful woman whose lavish care for Jesus in washing his feet with tears exposed the hypocrisy of the religious elite (Luke 7:36–50); and the Canaanite woman whose faith was answered with her daughter’s healing (Matthew 15:21–28).
Great Commission Women
Unbridled faith in God marks all of these accounts, and continues to encourage believers today. You can’t read your Bible without discerning the honored role God assigns women at every point in his story. Just as God gave Adam a mandate to multiply on the earth, so God gave the church a mission to multiply disciples. And so, just as Adam marveled at God’s creation of the woman, so the Bible teaches us to glorify God for the incredible gift of women who are in Christ.
Our sisters have been wonderfully indispensable to the church’s work of bearing witness to Christ and making disciples. God used Priscilla to sharpen and instruct the preacher Apollos in the way of God (Acts 18:24–26). Apart from the fervent prayers and godly life of Monica, the church may not enjoy the treasures of her son, Augustine.
Who can know how much eternal fruit the sacrificial labors of Lottie Moon and Gladys Aylward bore through their long ministries in China? Or through Amy Carmichael’s lifelong ministry in India?
Of course, we don’t just praise the Christian sisters whom we know by name. There are countless names we have not yet heard whom we will honor in the age to come. They are steadfast mothers and wives who pray down heaven while giving themselves to their family from dawn to dusk and even through the darkest nights. They are single women who joyfully content themselves in God while the world constantly tempts them to believe their faith is folly. My own experience living overseas testifies to the truth that far more young unmarried women cross oceans and borders for the sake of the gospel than men.
Honoring the Women Among Us
In the church, as in the garden, it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). In a day in which popular culture has muddled the lines between men and women, Christian men today have an opportunity to give fresh evidence for how much we admire women and value womanhood. Created in God’s wisdom and by his power, the church’s mothers and daughters are not second-class citizens in the church.
God presented the first woman to the first man as a gift, and he continues giving women as blessings to his church today. And just as the woman knew the man’s joy in her immediately, so too it would be fitting for Christian women to regularly hear how much of an asset they are to the church, both locally and globally. Adam could not multiply and take dominion without the woman (Genesis 1:28). And without Christian women, we the church will not be able to fulfill our mission to bear witness and make disciples (Matthew 28:18–20). The whole of the Scriptures and church history bear witness to this fact.
Every day, women advance the mission of the church by demonstrating the matchless worth of Christ. We cannot afford to overlook these sisters in Christ — neither the God of history nor God-in-the-flesh overlooks them.
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What Old Testament Promises Are for Me?
Audio Transcript
Today’s question I can relate to. I read my Bible in the morning. I come across a promise or a text in the Old Testament. I write it out in a notebook. I take that text or promise into my day. But later in the day, when I return to the text, I’m left wondering if I lifted the verse out of context. Maybe it doesn’t really apply to my life like I first thought it did. Many texts feel more and more remote to me as the day goes on. Has that happened to you?
Well, it has certainly happened to me, and it has happened to Maureen. She writes in to say, “Pastor John, thank you for the Ask Pastor John podcast! How do I know which Old Testament verses are for me, as a Christian today? Sometimes I select a verse that is meaningful to me from my Bible reading in the morning. But then later in the day, as I further reflect on it, it feels like I’ve lifted the verse out of context and misapplied it to myself. How do I know which Old Testament promises are for me?”
Even though I know it’s an oversimplification, I’m tempted to say, “All of it. All of it is for you. All of the Old Testament is for Christians.” Romans 15:4 says, “Whatever [underline that word] was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” All of it.
Then there’s 2 Corinthians 1:20, “All the promises of God find their Yes in [Christ].” And Jesus said in Matthew 5:17–18, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” So, even though it’s an oversimplification, it’s true, in a wonderful way, that all of the Old Testament is for those who are in Christ Jesus.
He came to confirm and fulfill all of it for his people. Second Timothy 3:16–17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable [that’s important — it’s all profitable] for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” It’s practical and profitable.
From Israel to the Church
But the reason it’s an oversimplification to say that it’s all for us is that some profound changes in the way we use the Old Testament Scripture took place when Jesus came into the world, was rejected by Israel, established a new covenant by his blood (which was different from the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant), and said, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). He did not say, “I will restore Israel.”
Maybe what would be helpful for Maureen, for me, and hopefully for others too is to list the differences between the people of God (the church) today and the people of God (Israel) in the Old Testament, as well as how God relates differently to each. These points can then function as a kind of filter.
At least, this is the way I function as I read the Old Testament. I have a filter, and I put things through this filter to know how I should embrace them, how I should apply them in my life. This is what I hope will happen now as I walk through these points of difference between Israel and the church. Because we are the church, we need a filter to know how to make proper use of Old Testament teachings.
1. Israel was an earthly nation.
Israel was an earthly, political nation-state among other political nation-states, but the church is not. It is a people whose citizenship is in heaven and who are sojourners and exiles here, scattered among all the nation-states. Christians are not first citizens of earthly nation-states, but only secondarily citizens of nation-states. We are more closely related to Christians of other political countries than we are unbelieving fellow citizens in our own earthly country.
2. Israel was a theocracy.
Israel was an earthly government authorized by God as a theocracy to carry out God’s punishments for those who broke his law, including capital punishment for idolatry and various other sins. The church is not a civil government and is not authorized as a church to carry out God’s punishments. Excommunication from the church through church discipline replaces execution through the judicial processes.
3. Israel was one ethnicity.
Israel was basically one ethnicity, the Jewish people, but the church is made up of all ethnicities. The kinds of practices that were designed to separate Israel from the surrounding peoples and ethnicities, like food laws and circumcision, have been done away with as requirements for God’s people.
4. Geography mattered for Israel.
Israel had defined geographic borders and a geographic religious center where the tabernacle or the temple was. The church has no geographic borders or religious center. Where the people of God are gathered in the name of Jesus, there is the center. There is Christ in the midst.
5. People were born Jewish.
People were born into the Jewish people, but people are born again into the church. The new covenant is entered by the miracle of God’s forgiving sins through faith and through God’s writing the law on our hearts (Jeremiah 31:33–34). That’s the new covenant.
6. The Great Commission came later.
The Old Testament religion was mainly a “come and see” religion, while the New Testament religion is mainly a “go and tell” religion. There was no Great Commission to go reach the nations in the Old Testament. God’s focus was on blessing Israel among the nations, so that the queen of the South came and had her breath taken away by Solomon’s wealth (1 Kings 10:4–5). God never said to Solomon, “Use your wealth to evangelize the nations,” but that is precisely what he says to us in the New Testament.
7. Israel used a sacrificial system.
The people of Israel maintained their fellowship with God by regular sacrifices, ministered by a select, Levitical priesthood, but that entire system was done away with when Jesus fulfilled it by becoming the final sacrifice and by acting as the final High Priest. In the new-covenant people, we get right with God and maintain our fellowship with God by trusting the substitutionary work of Christ and by depending on his daily intercession for us in heaven.
8. The Holy Spirit had yet to come.
Finally, though the people of God in the Old Testament did experience the working of the Spirit of God, they did not experience or know the Spirit as the indwelling Spirit of the risen Christ. Today, we know the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ. He works in his church, therefore, in a way that he did not work in the Old Testament because the church is his body, the body of the risen Christ.
Every Text Ours in Christ
My hope for Maureen and for all of us is that with this filter, with these eight points, we can take any text in the Old Testament and make it our own by treating it as fulfilled in Christ, with the necessary changes implied by these points.
For example, consider the end of Psalm 51. It’s a surprising end to a psalm that we love — until we get to the last paragraph, which goes like this:
Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; build up the walls of Jerusalem;then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar. (Psalm 51:18–19)
So, we come to the end of Psalm 51 saying, “This is exalting. This is mine, and this is mine!” And then we read those words and say, “What? What am I supposed to do?” What do we do with that? How are we to embrace that text as ours?
Zion was the geographic center of God’s people, standing for the presence of God among his people. Today, we would embrace that commitment of God to his people and say, “Do good to your church, O Lord, wherever it is gathered in your holy name. Build up the body of Christ, and make your presence felt everywhere that your people are centered on you.”
Then we would come to the end, and we would conclude by praying, “Oh, how I delight in the one, great, final sacrifice for sin that your Son offered. We glory with you in that final fulfillment of every bull that was ever offered on your altar, and we give ourselves to you as a living sacrifice for your glory.”
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Political Flag-Waving Isn’t Enough
Audio Transcript
Welcome back to the podcast. We regularly take up questions on things like church-state separation, on political activism, on Christians and patriotism, on US flags in the sanctuary — things like that. Here’s another question on this theme from a listener named Matthew in Cincinnati.
“Pastor John, hello to you. Years back, you posted a tweet online that I printed out, kept, and would like you to expand on now. You posted the following on April 17, 2021, starting with Mark 6:18: ‘For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”’ A very bold text of John speaking truth to power to confront Herod’s adultery. Then you said this: ‘By all means be willing to lose your life to speak the truth to power. But always keep in mind the vast difference between this and political flag-waving.’ Can you expound on this? What marks this vast difference between speaking the truth to power and political flag-waving? What factors distinguish the two, in your mind? And is this mainly an unseen heart issue we must be warned about?”
Let me begin by giving six descriptions of what I mean by “political flag-waving” that should be avoided, and then turn and try to say something constructive about speaking truth to power.
Don’t Wave That Flag
So, in the tweet, I said, “By all means be willing to lose your life to speak the truth to power. But always keep in mind the vast difference between this and political flag-waving.” And here’s what I mean by “political flag-waving” in that assertion.
Keep in mind that I’m treating political flag-waving here as a bad thing, even though I know that there is a definition of political flag-waving that’s not a bad thing. I’m not talking about that. So, to make that clear, I’m going to use the word bad to designate the political flag-waving I’m talking about. And I’ll describe good political flag-waving in just a minute. Here’s what I mean by bad political flag-waving.
1. Bad political flag-waving means waving the flag of partisan loyalty — that is, party loyalty — as a final allegiance and ultimate allegiance. That’s bad.
2. Bad political flag-waving means asserting a moral or social position without making a clear difference between standing for the position and standing for the party that may also stand for the position. Are you standing for the position, or are you standing for the party? Make the distinction.
3. Bad political flag-waving means expressing an undue hope for the common good in the strategies of partisan politics. Now, there are aspects of common good that can indeed come through partisan politics. Yes, there are. But there’s also an undue, unwarranted level of hope that is to be avoided.
4. Bad political flag-waving means grounding moral stands in partisan platforms rather than in a biblical worldview.
5. Bad political flag-waving reflects a mistaken conviction that moral change will come to a population through political action or partisan advocacy. It won’t.
6. Bad political flag-waving means foregrounding partisan politics in settings where they do not belong — for example, in Christian worship. Making the case for a party’s political platform belongs, for example, at the national convention of the party. That’s where you can wave your flag properly, but not in Christian worship.
So, that’s some of what I wanted us to avoid when I said, “By all means be willing to lose your life to speak the truth to power. But always keep in mind the vast difference between this and political flag-waving.”
What Separation?
Now, what about truth to power? At this point, it seems to me we really need to clarify the phrase “separation of church and state.” Wherever you say, “Speak truth to power,” people wonder if you’re trying to establish your religion as one that the government should get behind with force and with the sword. Is that what you’re doing when you say, “Speak truth to power” — trying to insert your own religion as a religion that the government would use its sword to establish or defend?
“Speaking truth to power in a truly Christian way is always a call to repent and trust the forgiving grace of Jesus.”
So, we need to clarify the phrase “separation of church and state.” And it seems to me that this phrase is surrounded by confusion today. I think it’s always been surrounded by confusion, and I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault in particular. It’s just one of those American shibboleths that is intrinsically ambiguous. So, when we have a phrase like that — and there are lots of them — those who use them (like me right now) have an obligation to give some guidance as to what they mean by that phrase. You can’t just sling it about as if everybody knows what you’re talking about.
Last June, I published an article at Desiring God called ‘My Kingdom Is Not of This World’, in which I tried to give a careful, biblically argued statement of separation of government force and religious establishment, which I think is right at the heart of the issue. Here’s the thesis — I’ll just read it.
The thesis of this essay is that Jesus Christ, the absolutely supreme Creator, Sustainer, and Ruler of the universe, intends to accomplish his saving purposes in the world without reliance on the powers of civil government to teach, defend, or spread the Christian religion as such. Followers of Christ should not use the sword of civil government to enact, enforce, or spread any idea or behavior as explicitly Christian — as part of the Christian religion as such. . . . It is precisely our supreme allegiance to the lordship of Christ [not owing to any kind of secular neutrality] that obliges us not to use the God-given sword of civil government to threaten the punishment, or withhold the freedoms, of persons who do not confess Christ as Lord.
So, the implication of that is this: no human government should ever use its biblical right to wield the sword to enforce a religion or to oppose a religion as such. And the reason I used the phrase as such is to distinguish that bad action of forceful establishment or forceful maintenance of religion from the good action of creating laws that might fit the morality of a religion but not at all be part of prescribing or proscribing a religion as such.
Truth to Power — and Weakness
With that background in place, I say again that it is not only a Christian’s right but a Christian’s calling to speak truth to power and to speak truth to weakness and to everybody in between.
We should tell the president of the United States, and we should tell the panhandler on the street, “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved’ (Acts 16:31). If you don’t believe, Mr. President, Mr. Panhandler, you are under the wrath of God. Stop killing babies in the womb. Stop doing drugs on the street. ‘Do justice . . . love kindness . . . walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6:8).” We should say that and a hundred other things. We are the voice of Scripture when we faithfully read and speak what the Bible teaches.
Even though the kind of obedience that pleases God is only possible in the power of the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ, nevertheless, we call everyone — believer and unbeliever — to the highest biblical standard of attitude and behavior, because we call everyone to repent and trust Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit. We don’t just isolate behavior and pray that presidents and panhandlers would do right behavior. We want them to believe and to be full of the Holy Spirit, and then act that behavior in a way that pleases God through faith. Speaking truth to power in a truly Christian way is always a call to repent and trust the forgiving grace of Jesus.
Christians know that the greatest problem to be solved in every person’s life — from the president to the panhandler — is the problem of God’s wrath against them in their unforgiven sin. Therefore, the main thing that Christians speak to power is Romans 3:25: the propitiation of God’s wrath by the blood of Christ received through faith. So, I’ll say it again, just like I did in the tweet: By all means be willing to lose your life to speak the truth to power and weakness. But always keep in mind the vast difference between this and political flag-waving.
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How Do I Handle My Disordered Desires?
Audio Transcript
To be a Christian is a wonderful thing. The greatest thing, in fact. To find forgiveness in the cross of our Savior, to be united to Christ by his Spirit, to have the Father as our own Father, and to commune with him as his child — these are the greatest gifts a creature can receive. And so, we give thanks. And yet we also look forward to our resurrection, and to new bodies that will enjoy God forever without any sinful impediments to our giving God all the glory he is worthy to receive from us — and by it, experiencing the fullest possible joy we can experience in ourselves. Can’t wait!
But for now, we wait. For all the incredible gifts and blessings we now have in Christ, to be a Christian in this life doesn’t mean we are free from our disordered loves. We’re not. Every Christian feels an ongoing civil war on the inside, in our twisted loves and longings. We both love God and find in us the remains of a treasonous impulse against the God we love, in our attraction to sin. The Bible explains this civil war. Arguably, Romans 7:14–25 makes the point. Less arguably, Galatians 5:16–17 makes the point too.
So then, what do we Christians — redeemed by Christ’s blood, sealed by the Spirit, adopted by the Father — what do we do with the disordered loves that we find still at work inside of us? Pastor John explained at the end of a sermon on Romans 7, preached in 2001. Here he is, drawing out pastoral application.
“We should not be surprised when we meet in ourselves some really excessive and distorted bodily desires.”
In view of all that the Bible says to us about our condition, our fallen condition with this body of death, and our sinful condition with the body acting in treason to join forces with the power of sin to tempt us — in view of the fact that there’s a law of sin still active, and there’s a body of death — we should not be surprised or thrown off balance when we meet in ourselves, and our children and our spouses and our loved ones and our colleagues and our roommates and our neighbors, some really excessive and distorted bodily desires.
Let me give you some examples, and then say how I think we should respond.
Excessive and Distorted Desires
Remember, we are being redeemed in stages. Guilt is taken away right now. All your sins are forgiven right now. The Holy Spirit is dwelling in your life by faith, if you’re a believer, right now. No condemnation is hanging over you at all right now. And yet, we wait for the redemption of our bodies, and those bodies are bodies of death, and places where sin sets up a base of operations often, and tempts us with excessive and distorted bodily desires.
For example, we see excessive desires for leisure, tempting us to laziness and sloth. We see excessive desires for food, tempting us to gluttony and all of its damaging effects. We see excessive desires for drink, tempting us to alcoholism. We see excessive desires for sex, tempting us to lustfulness and fornication and adultery.
And on top of all of those excessive desires, this law of sin operating in our members produces distorted desires. That shouldn’t surprise us either. The whole world is bent out of shape under the fall. That’s much of the point of Romans 1–3. It’s much of the point of part of Romans 8.
For example, we see distorted desires for food. My father-in-law treated people, before he died, who had this incredible hankering for gray river clay in Georgia. They ate clay until it filled their bowels and they died. He would warn them not to take laxatives because it would kill them. Why would anybody want to eat clay?
Or the whole issue of binging — bags of cookies and so on. Those are distortions of a good thing called appetite, desire. Or we know about distorted desires of sex. The desire to have satisfaction with one of your own sex, whether homosexuality or lesbianism or bisexuality, is one of many kinds of fallen distortions. Another example would be the distortions of desire for pleasure, a kind of high, and people resort to marijuana or speed or cocaine or LSD.
Why? What are these distortions, these artificial ways of getting some kind of satisfaction and happiness? The world is just shot through our bodies. These bodies of death are shot through with excessive desires and distorted desires. There’s not a person in this room who doesn’t have one of those.
Who Will Deliver Me?
Now, what do we do? I’m calling you, pleading with you week after week for a biblical realism in Jesus Christ. In Christ, by faith, we are united to him. Before any of this is fixed, hear this now: by faith we become united to Jesus. Faith alone! We are united to him, and his purchased pardon becomes perfectly ours, and his perfect righteousness clothes this excessively desiring, distortedly desiring body first. This is the gospel.
“Will you make war all your life until your body is finally redeemed at the resurrection? That’s the issue.”
Now, what’s the issue then? The issue in your life, believer, is not, Do I have excessive desires? Do I have distorted desires? I say it with joy in my heart for those of you who struggle with homosexuality or with eating disorders or with drugs or with laziness — I say it with joy in my heart: The issue is not whether you have those excessive and distorted desires. The issue is, will you say, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” and look away from yourself and your resources and say, “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ, who gives the victory”? And will you not make peace with the law of sin and find yourself at home in the body of death, but rather make war all your life until your body is finally redeemed at the resurrection? That’s the issue.
So you walk up to me at the end of the service in five minutes and say, with trembling, “I’d like you to pray for me because I’ve never told anybody, but I really struggle with homosexuality.” I’m not going to be surprised. Happens a lot. You say to me, “Nobody knows what I’m doing with food. Nobody knows.” I’m not going to be surprised; nothing surprises me anymore.
But I will call you to a massive hope that through faith, there is justification, and through faith, there is forgiveness. And then, by that same Christ, comes incrementally — sometimes in leaps and bounds, and sometimes through long, agonizing wrestling — a triumph that will be secured in the last day because of the blood of Jesus.
