Man Buns: Doesn't the Nazirite Vow Free Men from Paul's Puritanical Preferences Permitting Men to...

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Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

Listen and enjoy this installment of Iron Sharpening Iron, as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions.

Here's Pastor Tim. In this episode of Iron Sharpening Iron, we will be answering the question, Doesn't the

Nazarite vow free men from Paul's puritanical preferences, permitting men to proudly display that coveted man bun?

Now, the most common question that we've received in response to our episode on man buns is the question, How do we harmonize

Paul's instruction on appropriate hair length for men and women with the Nazarite vow, particularly as it relates to Samson?

As we've discussed, in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul says that long hair in men is shameful, and short hair in women is shameful.

But then a thoughtful reader of the Old Testament will realize that there was such a thing as a Nazarite vow, where individuals were to pursue a special devotion to the

Lord, and allow their hair to grow out longer. And then with that kind of vow, there's maybe the most famous example of someone pursuing that vow with Samson, who was a

Nazarite from birth, who obviously ended up having exceptionally long hair. What do we do with that kind of thing?

How do we harmonize Paul's prohibition against long hair in men with the intentional pursuit of the

Nazarite vow? What do we do with that kind of thing? Now, one of the things to realize is that there's two basic approaches to apparent contradictions in the

Bible. There's what you might describe as the liberal approach, or the antinomian approach, which is essentially the kind of approach where an individual comes to two passages of Scripture, they appear to contradict, and so then the assumption there is that it is a genuine contradiction, and generally that assumption is made on the basis of a certain view of Revelation, that this is just a book that was written by man over many different centuries and millennia, and so what do we do with that?

Basically, there's obviously going to be contradictions there, so let's just recognize that the

Bible is a book that's filled with contradiction, and when you come to contradictions like that, that is just a sign of the fallibility of the book in general.

Now, the antinomian is going to look at the Bible, and they're going to basically think that typically they're not going to be saying that the

Bible is not authoritative, but then they're going to look for examples of contradictions in order to keep the Bible fuzzy and vague, so they don't have to do anything that it actually says.

Now, the conservative or the faithful or the biblical approach to these things is to realize that God is a God who's not a liar,

He's not going to contradict Himself. If you ever in your reading of the

Scripture come to two types of passages which seem on the surface to contradict, then the problem is not with God's communication,

His communication is perfect, the problem is with your understanding, and there certainly is some sort of explanation to be found as to how these things relate, and it may be that based on your own knowledge and understanding of the

Scripture, it may be difficult for you at times to figure out what that is, but the basic assumption that you should have is that God is smarter than you, and that He knows how these things relate, and that maybe you should give

Him the benefit of doubt as if that's something that you could actually do. But here's the thing.

As you read through a passage like this, there is a legitimate question, well, how do we harmonize

Paul's instruction in 1 Corinthians 11 with the presence of the Nazirite vow? Now, in order to answer that,

I want to point out a few features about the Nazirite vow that most people might not realize. The Nazirite vow is a vow that both men and women would make, and it's described as a particularly difficult or hard vow in general.

Now, in Numbers 6, 1, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the people of Israel and say to them,

When either a man or woman makes a special vow, the vow of a Nazirite, to separate himself to the Lord, that word special vow there is the

Hebrew word palah, which indicates a hard or a difficult vow. It's an unusual vow.

This is not an ordinary vow. It's a hard or difficult, unusual kind of vow that an individual would make.

And often when people realize the three prohibitions of the Nazirite vow, we put a lot of emphasis on the prohibitions, but we don't often put emphasis on the actual purpose of it.

And so this was a hard or difficult or unusual vow that was made that was supposed to produce an unusual level of devotion to the

Lord. Now, the features of the vow were, in the first instance, a disavowal of ordinary pleasure, which is symbolized in the rejection of wine.

So the individual who is pursuing this disavowal of ordinary pleasure, they're not going to drink wine, as is

God's gift to the sons of man, to gladden the hearts of sons of men. As you read the Bible, you're going to find that wine served that purpose.

And so the Nazirite was freeing himself up from this specific means of ordinary pleasure.

And then the Nazirite was also disavowing ordinary personal care or hair maintenance.

Many scholars, as they think about the prohibition that's happening here, where individuals are instructed to grow their hair out longer than what it was, they see in that more than just a simple let it grow out longer.

What they're seeing is that this probably had something to do with a disavowal of ordinary hair maintenance.

In other words, just let your hair grow unkempt, essentially. Now, one of the things to realize about the vow itself is that it was made for a particular time frame.

Samson is the only recorded individual, perhaps maybe John the Baptist, but there's a big debate on that. Samson is the only individual we know who was a

Nazirite from birth and whose Nazirite vow did not have any particular time limit restriction on it.

But the ordinary and the standard person who's going to pursue a Nazirite vow, there would be a defined time period because it was considered to be a particularly hard or difficult vow and it was to be an unusual act of devotion.

So there's these three features. First is the disavowal of ordinary pleasure, wine. Second would be disavowal of ordinary personal care or hair maintenance.

And the third would be a disavowal of ordinary obligations. In other words, do not go near a dead body. Now, with those three elements, one of the things to realize as you read through Judges, there is no king in Israel.

Everyone does what's right in their own eyes. And Samson seems to violate the vow at every single conceivable level.

So there's that. But then the purpose of the vow itself, it was to be a supreme act of total devotion to the person and the work of the

Lord that would override certain normal and expected patterns of behavior. So the purpose of the vow was it was going to be unusual, hard, or difficult vow.

Now, you know, considering that this is a vow that both men and women would take, if you ask a woman to basically not take care of her hair for a defined period of time, no matter what, every woman would know that there is no such thing as a beautiful bedhead.

Most women would understand this to be a difficult, hard vow to make, just to let your hair grow unkempt and disorderly as far as that goes.

Now, as I said, part of the feature of the hair portion of it was you're going to let your hair become unkempt or grow longer.

But then at the end of the vow, and this would be particularly difficult for the women taking the vow, all of the hair on your head would be shaved, and then the hair would be offered as a sacrifice to the

Lord. And so when you think about what's actually happening here, this vow is a vow that was subjecting both men and women to shame in different ways.

So for the man to just let his hair grow out longer, he's subjecting himself to shame because it's shameful for a man to have long hair.

And for the woman to shave her hair at the end of it, she's subjecting herself to shame.

Because it's shameful for a woman to shave her head, as Paul says. So this is an unordinary or unusual or difficult or hard vow or palah that was being made there.

Now, just to think about how this thing might work, I can give you a non -exact parallel that's found in a movie that I watched decades ago.

There was a movie that came out, V for Vendetta, and the protagonist in the movie, essentially, in order to wean

Natalie Portman from the fear of man and free her from the concerns of care about what others might think of her, he ended up shaving her head.

And this was a traumatic moment in the movie, and I don't remember much else in the movie, but I remember that. But it was a traumatic moment for her because, as we've noted in our podcast, long hair in women is a universal sign of femininity, and any woman who has their head shaved or loses their hair in some unwilling way knows exactly the shaming effect that that might have.

Now, his purpose was to shame her so that she would be free from the concern about what other people might think about her, to free her from that fear.

But then this vow functions in a similar kind of way. If you just let your hair grow out long and unkempt, people are going to make certain assumptions about you on the basis of what you're doing.

When you see a person going out in public in their pajamas with hair that's all a mess, you typically make certain uncharitable assumptions about them in general.

And then there are assumptions that you make if you have a biblical worldview about a woman who has exceedingly short hair, and there's typically assumptions that you're going to make about men who have long hair.

These things in a Christian kind of society are meant to be shaming acts, and then part of the purpose of this vow is going to be to subject the person making this vow to public shame.

And because they're making a disavowal of normal, ordinary care for themselves, pursuit of pleasure, and pursuit of normal obligations, this is the kind of thing that is attempting to encourage a purer devotion to the

Lord as far as that's concerned. And so as you think about this issue in this kind of way, one of the things you realize is that there's no contradiction to be found there.

What you have in the Old Testament is an act of shaming that is being performed in order to teach a greater lesson.

Now, when you come to the New Testament, there is a New Testament kind of equivalent to this thing, which is essentially to present yourself as a living sacrifice to the

Lord, wholly acceptable to Him as your reasonable service, just like the Nazarite's hair was to be offered up to the

Lord as an act of devotion. The Christian himself should consider his own life, all of his life, a supreme act of devotion to the

Lord. But we understand that with a situation like this, it really isn't all that complicated to figure out how this vow can somehow harmonize with Paul's teaching.

There's no reason to pit them against each other and then to act as if they don't harmonize or there's no purpose or intention.

Now, one of the questions you might ask is that why would God encourage individuals to go about pursuing rituals like this that are in some sense shaming?

Well, that issue is very easy to understand if you understand

God's typical pattern in interacting with the prophets. As you read through the

Bible, one of the things you'll say is that God once commanded a prophet to cook his food on human dung.

That would be an act of shaming that was instructive in a particular way. God encouraged

Hosea to go out and to marry Gomer, and that would be something that would be considered shameful, but then it had a purpose.

Now, anyone who thinks about that example of God encouraging Hosea to pursue a prostitute, to do the shameful thing, to pursue a prostitute and go and love her, one of the things you would never draw from that kind of illustration is some sort of principle that says that the best way to get married is to go out and find the first prostitute you can find and clean her up and turn her into an honest woman.

That kind of thing would be a rejection of wisdom. It would be a rejection of everything that you're going to find in the book of Proverbs.

But at the same time, God has often raised up prophets that He was asking to do things that were considered shameful in order to teach a greater lesson.

In the Act of the Nazarite, this is a vow that was intending to teach a greater lesson that we find fulfillment in the

New Covenant. So, one of the things to realize about this vow is that it had a lesson that was behind it, and part of that lesson is to expose oneself to public shame in order to secure a greater devotion to the

Lord. Now, the issue with how that relates to the idea of man bonds and long hair in men and women today, nothing fundamentally has changed from the

Old Testament to the New Testament. There's nothing fundamentally changed. For a man to have long hair, that's considered shameful.

For a woman to have her head shaved or short hair, that is going to be considered shameful.

It's always been shameful throughout the whole entirety of the history of the human race. And if there are cultures that have come along and basically intentionally pursued shame as a sign of virtue, those cultures are bad cultures that we shouldn't follow after.

Christians shouldn't intentionally pursue habits or practices that are shameful just for the sake of being shameful.

We shouldn't be the kind of individuals who are rejecting wisdom, rejecting the light of natural revelation, just for the sake of rejecting the light of natural revelation.

But there's no problem with God commanding Samson to grow his hair out long in order to accomplish his redemptive purposes as far as that goes.

And when you think about the example of Samson in particular, where he was clearly, as a man, going to have exceedingly long hair, over and against the standard

Nazirite whose hair is just going to be a little bit longer. One of the things that you're going to find with someone like Samson is that the example of Samson is given to us in the book of Judges, which the continual refrain is, there's no king in Israel and everyone's doing what's right in their own eyes, and that kind of arrangement.

Every single deliverer that the Lord raises up is an example of something that on the surface is unexpected.

So God uses a woman to be a judge over Israel. Many people have looked at that and basically said, well, because he did it that time, that means that God's plan for the world is to raise up female political leaders.

And I would just say, well, why don't you read the clearer passages of scripture, which are telling us that it's a shame for women or infants to rule over a society.

There are times when God will do something shameful in order to accomplish his purpose. The fact that Honeybee Deborah and Barak Lightning are in the

Bible in the way that they are, and Barak refuses to go to battle unless Honeybee Deborah is present, is a situation which should shame the

Israelites into realizing that they need an actual king and that they need a king to help them to be devoted to the law in a more full way.

So God can have purposes in these sorts of things, and he can have purposes in raising up unlikely deliverers like the coward

Gideon or the long -haired, unkempt, profane

Samson. God can have purposes in doing this that go beyond just giving us immediate examples that we're supposed to follow.

So in order to figure out whether or not these examples we find are examples that God wants us to follow or examples that we want to avoid, you have to think through the more direct statements of scripture so that we can interpret these kinds of things.

This has been another installment of Iron Sharpening Iron. As always, if you would like to have your question included in one of these midweek episodes, email us at BibleBashedPodcast at gmail .com.

Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Gab. Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.