Culturally Male and Female

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Don Filcek; 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 Culturally Male and Female

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his sermon series titled, 1
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Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in. Good morning and welcome to Recast Church.
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As Ben said, I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here and we are in 2023, I mean 2024.
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We're past 2023. We are in 2024. Can you guys believe it? Did it seem like, did it seem like it just went like a snap and here we are?
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It's pretty crazy. In this new year, my hope and prayer is that we grow together as Ben even mentioned, growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service.
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And as far as in our faith, we're going to be finishing 1 Corinthians here at the first start of the year, kind of hopefully kind of by winter on into spring a little bit, we'll finish 1
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Corinthians. And then I think we're going to go over to one of the Old Testament books. I'm kind of toying with the idea of Hosea, but I'm not 100 % sure.
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We'll see where God leads us. It's all God's word, so it's all good. So wherever we go, we're going to be in God's word.
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You can be assured of that. And so it's, we'll see where the Lord leads in this new year. The message this morning is what
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I've heard some pastors jokingly refer to as a space maker sermon. Now what's a space maker sermon?
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A space maker sermon is look around, there might be more empty chairs next week than there are this week, depending on how offended people get about the message.
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And I say that tongue in cheek because I'm convinced that you guys will at least follow what the word of the
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Lord says. I am not getting up here to try to make space. I am not getting up here to offend.
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I'm getting up here to declare and proclaim God's holy and precious word to us. And whatever we do with that is up to you.
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And so, but I'm going to be committed to this word. And so some people in our culture are very offended by the church's willingness to talk directly about God's word regarding gender roles.
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And I'm not ashamed of that in the least. And I don't give any caveats about that here. As we walk through the
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Bible, passage by passage, book by book, paragraph by paragraph, we will be forced to deal with sections of scripture that are cryptic, are directly confrontational to our culture, or are just flat out confusing.
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And I believe that this passage this morning ticks all of those boxes. But not only does it tick boxes, but it also ticks people, like it ticks off people.
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More than a few people. In the modern Western culture. As a matter of fact, on my passage, you can go back into the 1800s and find all kinds of stuff written about this.
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It was resolved what this passage meant. And then in the 1960s, there is an explosion of scholarship on this passage.
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There's probably more written since 1960 about this passage than there was in any generation prior to this, in part because people are ticked off that this passage exists.
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Do I have anybody's attention yet? They're like, what are we reading this morning? You'll see. Many who study this passage are tempted to give up on it.
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As a matter of fact, some more liberal scholars would say this obviously wasn't written by Paul.
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It takes a lot of work to understand it, and the little that we do understand seems to be more than a little abrasive to our culture.
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I'm going to read it, obviously, but as I read it, I'm going to encourage you to lean into some of the tough things that we see here.
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There's some tough things just in interpreting it. Paul uses the word head as a literal body part, like the part that's on top of your neck, and he also uses it as a figure of speech, and he goes back and forth between literal and figurative uses of that word, and that impacts the interpretation.
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Paul will state a lot of things that the Corinthian church understood from their cultural perspective in Rome that we just don't get.
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For example, what did a head covering mean in their culture? What did it mean for a man to have a head covering in their culture?
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It would really help if we knew exactly what the Corinthians were doing wrong that Paul sets out to fix. I think
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I've got an idea of what that is here, and I'm going to obviously be preaching that.
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More than only leaning into the difficulties of this passage as I read it, I want to consider what is obvious from this passage.
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This issue matters enough to take up Paul's time and attention, for the Spirit to reveal it to him and to the church, and for us to be reading about it in the
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Holy Scriptures this morning. And further, I would suggest to you that by identifying that this passage exists, by seeing it in here, relationships with people matter.
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Male and female relationships in the body of Christ matter, and they matter enough to God to speak into those situations.
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And as we live in a culture that can hardly define the word woman anymore, I am hopeful that some of what
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God says here in this passage will break in through our fog, creating some increased clarity from God's holy word.
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God has me speaking into the distinctions between male and female this morning, per his text, because he is the author of life.
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And this early church was confused about how they ought to be expressing themselves as male and female in the gathering. And from this perspective, this passage has a timely message to speak to us here in 2024, in an era of increasing confusion regarding gender.
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So, let's open our Bibles, your scripture journals, or your devices, to 1 Corinthians chapter 11.
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We're going to start in verse 2, and read through verse 16, that entire paragraph there.
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Again, recast, I want to remind you, this is God's holy word, this is not Don's word. I didn't say this. I didn't write this.
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This is what God desires to communicate to us this morning. Now I commend you because you remember me in everything, and maintain the traditions even as I deliver them to you.
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But, I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ. The head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is
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God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven.
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For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair, or shave her head, let her cover her head.
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For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God. But woman is the glory of man.
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For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
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That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the
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Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman. For as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman, and all things are from God.
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Judge for yourselves. Is it proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is a disgrace for him?
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But if a woman has long hair, it is her glory, for her hair is given to her for covering.
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If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God.
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Boy, do we need to pray. Father, as we come to a text that is so confusing to us just at first blush,
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I would guess that many of us in this room have read this passage. Maybe some of us many times have just breezed past it and gone, oh, there's the head covering thing again.
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Father, I pray that you would speak to us what you desired to originally communicate to your church through this passage, that we would strike all the cultural mess around us and just find what you have to say about the situation here.
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Father, you have had a glorious...you have created gloriously. You have designed the world.
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You have put structure in place, everything from laws of physics to the way that biology works to plants and animals and us.
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You are our creator. You are the designer of this place. You are the one who if things came with an instruction manual, you would be the one to produce it.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would guide us and direct us into these kinds of thoughts about how high are your ways, how lofty you are, how almighty you are in your creative acts and that you would allow us to peer into the structures to live in your world, to live and move and breathe in this place that you have designed and created for your honor and glory.
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I pray that you would allow this message to bring us deeper into your glory, deeper into your design, deeper into the way that you have made us, that we would flourish in this place because we see how you have designed it and what you desire for each one of us in our unique place in life.
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Father, I thank you for the cross. I thank you for the place where we have hope that this mess that we see around us is going to be fixed, where we know you created it good, we broke it, and we continue to break it day by day by our sin.
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You are putting it together through Jesus Christ, and we look forward to that day when not just humanity but male and female worship you in truth, in right relationship with one another and right relationship with you.
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Father, I pray that even now as our voices mingle, that sopranos and altos and tenors and basses and all the, and then those who don't even know what that means, all of us, our voices mingle together in praise and glory to you, our creator.
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In Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks to the band for leading us this morning, and I encourage you to get comfortable like I do every week and reopen your
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Bibles to 1 Corinthians 11, 2 through 16. Maybe more than any other, maybe more than normal,
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I want you to be able to look at the text with me and see that the things that I'm saying are coming from the text. I rarely do this, but I want to give a little bit of a caveat here at the beginning.
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I want to state at the start that I pray fervently, that I get the understanding right as I study.
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I do as much research as I can fit into a week, and this one pressed me pretty hard. And yet, it's wise for me to state at the outset here that I'm preaching this morning my own convictions about this passage after some pretty deep study this week.
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There are many, many, many, many, many opinions about this passage.
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There are many books written on this passage, and even the translation in English translations of this vary widely, so that if you have on your lap the new international version, the
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NIV, it's going to vary widely from the ESV that I'm using. Just to be aware,
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I'm preaching from the English Standard Version, so some sections might be hard to connect from your Bible to the
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ESV, and we'll talk through that, and hopefully by the end it makes a little bit more sense to you. This is because of some simple issues that you might not be aware of.
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So it's not just the cultural problems with this, that our culture doesn't like this passage very well.
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But it's not just that that we have to deal with. But the Greek language has one single word in Greek that means both woman or wife, depending on context, and it has one word in Greek that means either husband or man, depending on the context.
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So you see, gune means wife or woman, anere means man or husband.
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And so only the context will clarify which one, and so that becomes a little bit tricky in this passage.
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Are we talking about all men and all women? Are we talking about wives and husbands? The ESV happens to follow my understanding of the text as well, and that is that the husband and wife relationship is the central focus of the text, and I believe that to be the case by some of the cultural things that we see here in the text.
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Paul begins in verse two with a very rare commendation, so we'll start at the shallow end at least, and that is that there's at least a verse in here that's easy to understand.
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It's verse two. Most of this letter, though, and it's ironic that even that one is a little twisted up in people's thinking, because Paul has been really negative.
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How many of you have been through some of these messages on 1 Corinthians? So raise your hand if you've been here for at least a couple of them, and the funny thing is
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I see some of you that were here and you didn't raise your hand, and I'm like, maybe you just haven't showed up yet. But he's been pretty negative, and here he commends them, and he says, well, at least you pay attention to me and you follow my instructions.
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You're like, Corinth? What is he talking about? What's a very specific, narrow way of commendation here? Most of the letter has been negative and corrective to them, but here in verse two, he's glad that they remember him and continue to maintain traditions.
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I believe that the phrase there for traditions, it's likely that when it comes to the church meetings, when the church is gathering together in Corinth, they follow at least the loose liturgical formula that Paul left with them.
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What do I mean by that? As chapter 11 begins a section discussing the issue surrounding the gathering of God's people, the physical gathering, like when they get together, he is glad that they are doing the right things.
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They're doing the right things in their gathering. In other words, he's going to address communion next week. They are taking communion together.
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Here he talks about praying and prophesying. They are praying together. They are studying the word together.
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He's saying, I'm glad you're keeping up the traditions that I left you with. I left you with some instructions.
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I left you with some things to do, and so I'm glad that you're continuing that every Sunday in your gatherings, but, and here you go, here we go.
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It's the letter to the Corinthians. But there are some things about your gathering that need correction, he goes on to say.
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Of course, of course there's something that needs correction. This is Corinth. They're always going off the rails for our benefit.
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Does anybody have a sibling? It might have been an older brother, younger sister, might have been somebody who always pushed mom's and dad's buttons, and you got to see it and learn from them.
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So some of you had that benefit of being able to see that. Let's let Corinth be that for us, church.
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Let's let them be the brother who's always constantly pushing the buttons and is constantly showing us what not to do, because they have done a good job so far.
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So let me start by reconstructing what I believe, and I believe this firmly, that they are doing wrong in their gatherings so that we can then better understand
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Paul's corrective to them and start to make sense of this really tricky passage. Married women in the church who were coming to faith in Christ were in essence, now
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I say in essence because I'll mention here in a moment they didn't exchange wedding rings, but in essence what they were doing in the gathering is they were taking off their wedding rings as a sign or a symbol maybe of their freedom in Christ.
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We don't know what the motivation was, but the women in the church were beginning, those married women in the church were presenting themselves as unmarried, and I'm not exactly sure whether it was because of the freedom in Christ that they felt that they could do this.
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I'm speculating why, but they were doing it. They were acting unmarried, and it was sending very mixed signals out to a
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Corinthian culture that was already very highly sexualized as we could see in chapters prior to this.
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So this is kind of a tinderbox, oh gosh, this is kind of a,
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I did not even, that's not in my notes. That was completely off the, that's terrible. It was a tinderbox though.
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It was like that. I mean just in all the ways that you can take that. So yup, just like that. And so in that highly sexualized culture for the women who were in that gathering to present themselves as unmarried was a problem.
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And just as a side note, there's a bunch of potential reasons why they may have been skipping their quote unquote wedding rings in the gathering, and that could simply be that they met in homes.
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That's a possible reason why this is an issue. Women in that ancient time wore their symbol of marriage out in public, but took it off or never put it on while at home.
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And so they might have thought, well I'm at home, I'm in a house, I don't need to wear my head covering, not wedding ring.
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So it's all kind of confusing until you understand that husbands and wives did not exchange wedding rings in ancient times.
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Instead a married woman in the culture of this time would cover her head with a scarf or a shawl, went out in public to show that she was spoken for, hitched, unavailable.
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Interestingly and just neither here nor there, just a fact, I don't love it and I don't really get it, but men did not wear a symbol of marriage in that time.
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They didn't wear a head covering. They didn't do anything. They didn't have a ring. They had no demonstration of marriage out in public.
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But the women did. And so they would cover their heads as a sign of I'm taken,
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I'm spoken for. The hair and the head of a woman communicated a lot in that culture. There's a variety of different things that a woman could communicate by what she wore or did with her hair or head by going out.
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Head covered, married. Hair pinned up on the head, available but chased and respectable.
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Hair down running long over her shoulders, illicitly available and or a priestess of the mystery cults of Dionysius or Sybil, a priestess available for sexual liaison.
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Hair shaved, she was disgraced and ashamed. So understanding how this head gear spoke into their cultural context helps us a little bit in understanding what is going on here, at least gets us on a good trajectory.
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But understanding the nuance of how they wore their hair or what they did with their head doesn't clear up all of our cultural fog, not in a long shot.
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It will not mitigate offense from our culture that doesn't want to distinguish at all in any way, shape or form between men and women in or outside of marriage.
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How many of you know we live in a culture like that now? Doesn't even want to have any distinctions between male and female. But it will help at least to understand the head covering thing to know what we're reading here and understanding their culture.
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So Paul starts with a teaching he wants everyone in the church to understand in verse three. He starts with a statement to men.
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He addresses the men first. Likely, I mean, I think that by the words that are used here, likely married men.
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And he reminds us men that Christ is our head. Christ is over us.
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Married men in the room, speaking directly to you, we are not without a leader. We have a king.
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We have a Lord. We have a master and authority over us. And he is meek. He is loving.
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He is mild. And he is just and he is holy and he is worthy of our loving obedience.
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Amen? And he goes on to say that the head of the wife is her husband. And this is not to say that the wife has no relationship herself to Jesus.
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Of course she doesn't. Scripture bears that out in so many passages. You can't let this passage undo other passages.
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Of course the woman can relate directly to Jesus. But the husband here is not assigned a mediatorial role as if a wife needs to go to her husband and then her husband prays to Jesus on her behalf or something like that.
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That's not at all what's being taught here. I read so much about the way that this word though, head, is used metaphorically in ancient
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Greek. Chapters on this. And it is never far, the usage of this word as a metaphor is never far from the actual physical anatomical part of your body, your head, the part on top of your neck here.
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What is the head? What the head is to the body is what
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Christ is to the church, is what the husband is to be to the wife, is what
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God is to Christ. God is to Christ. In this passage,
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I have no doubt that this is a leading and a guiding and an empowering and yes, an authority role.
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How does God lead Christ? That's a good question. How does God, the Father, lead
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Christ? In love, by loving him, by endorsing him, by speaking, this is my beloved son in whom
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I am well pleased, speaking and uttering those kinds of words, by empowering him, by sending him with authority into the world, by the son of God, willingly submissive to the will of his father.
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All of those components in father and son. And often overlooked in this passage is the glaring fact that everyone, everyone, everyone except for God, the
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Father, has a head. Paul is here expressing the core of this passage, that if rejected, if verse three is rejected, it will render the rest of the passage incoherent.
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If you don't believe that Christ is the head of man and man is the head of his, husband is the head of his wife, then the passage isn't going to gel.
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You're going to be utterly confused the rest of this message. Either we accept that God has established the husband as the head of his wife or we will not grasp anything else.
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So Paul tackles what they're doing in their gathering that is going against the basic principle in verse three.
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He takes for granted culturally that if a man prays with his head covered, he is dishonoring his head. Who's the man's head according to verse three?
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Christ. He's dishonoring Christ. Some have done a deep dive into historical and cultural data to find what
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I believe to be the case here. Why is it offensive for a man to pray in that culture or to pray or to prophesy with his head covered?
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We have all kinds of statues of the emperors and people and soldiers worshiping the pagan gods and do you know the first thing that you notice unique about all of those statues as over and opposed to other statues that we have from Greek and Roman times?
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Their head is covered. The pagan practices of worship to the
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Greek gods and goddesses was to humble themselves to take a cowl and put it over their head, to take a hood and put it over their head, to take a scarf and put it over their head, to veil themselves from the gods to demonstrate some level of humility or something like that.
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I believe that it's offensive for a man to prophesy with his head covered because that was tantamount to the pagan practices of the time.
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We don't know and I want to be humble about this. We don't know that definitively. Now, I'm getting off into culture.
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I'm getting off into some different nuances. The Bible doesn't tell us why the average
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Corinthian would have gone, yeah, duh, of course it's offensive for a man to pray with his head covered. You see it in the text?
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The text doesn't tell us why. You have to do a little bit of digging to get down to what you think is the problem there.
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But it is a given to Paul and also he expects the Corinthians to agree with him wholesale that men should not cover their heads when they pray.
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We'll talk more about applying that later. But in verse 5, he gets to the heart of the matter. A wife who prays or offers her interpretation of Scripture in the gathering without her head covered dishonors her metaphorical head, which in the formula of verse 3 is her husband.
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And this dishonor we do know. This is quite direct and teased out in the text. How is she dishonoring her husband by not wearing a head covering in the gathering?
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Well, she's acting unmarried. She's presenting as available. I would be very ashamed.
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This illustration doesn't go like a one -to -one correlation. Giving announcements is not equivalent to prophesying or praying in the gathering.
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But I can tell you definitively that I personally would be very ashamed if every time that my wife got up here to give announcements, she took her wedding ring off and slammed it on the table and then gave announcements.
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How many of you just know that? That would be offensive. And how many of you might have a question mark over that act? Like if she came up and she did that every time, you'd just be like, wait, what?
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What are we doing here? Don, we needed to get together for coffee and talk. How are you doing? Yeah, no, that would not be good.
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Now, as ludicrous as that sounds, this is the equivalent to a woman in Corinth standing to pray with her head uncovered.
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She was going against the cultural expectations of her day. And this is important because it demonstrates a principle that we think about very little in the church, and we need to think of more.
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And it is this. We live in a society. We live in a culture.
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Our faith is expressed in a community of people, a context, which is
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America 2024, Matawan, Michigan, all of these things. We live among people who do things like wear wedding rings, people who do things like celebrate birthdays, people who do really fun things like watch football, right?
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Yeah, I almost heard a go blue there. I'm just going to pretend
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I heard it. But where are those cultural things that express God's values, where they come up against what
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God has ordained, what God has designed, his plan, his purpose, salvation, things like marriage, like sexuality, like gender, like worship, we ought to be mindful about what we're communicating, amen?
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Because we are communicating something. I have to consider and check on myself from time to time when
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I use slides up here, I use illustrations to consider what they mean. Some memes and cultural funnies will evoke sinful, there's
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Homer, sinful thoughts in some people. We live, move, and breathe in a culture full of meaning.
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I don't know if that even speaks to anybody. But when I was growing up, I was not allowed to watch Homer Simpson.
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So that was kind of like one of those things, it's like you throw it up there, but it's like I don't know what that communicates to people. A Christian has to be mindful.
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A Christian has to be thoughtful about what they're communicating. Is this passage saying thou shalt wear a wedding ring, is that the takeaway?
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Make sure you're wearing your wedding ring? I don't think so, but I do think it's saying thou shalt do whatever is culturally appropriate in your culture to not send mixed sexual messages, including your availability.
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Well, that comes down to modesty and all kinds of things. In verses 5 and 6, Paul uses an example from his culture that once again pertains to a woman's head.
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Praying with her head uncovered in their culture is compared to the cultural shame of an adulteress who would have her head shorn.
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And he is saying here, if you want to look the part of an adulteress and flirt with that lifestyle, flirt with that communication, why not go all in and shave your head?
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Paul is being, I believe, somewhat dramatic here, and he's speaking this way for shock value. I don't believe for a second that Paul has any expectation that a woman reading this letter is going to go make an appointment with her hairdresser and shave her head bald as a result of this.
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He's saying this is how extreme you look when you act unmarried. But now in verses 7 through 10,
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Paul supports the encouragement for married women to keep demonstrating their marital status. He says that men don't cover their heads because they in some way reflect the image and glory of God.
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The gathering is to be all about God, and this is indeed, I think, a compliment to man saying that God is glorified in man, and yet in a secondary way, the man is glorified in his wife.
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Man, this is a misunderstood verse, I think. I'm going to state what I hope is obvious to set the stage.
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I am not a woman. I hope. So I don't know exactly how this hits for women, but I hope to explain it in a way that adds dignity to it because I think the dignity is already in the passage.
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You see, in the very beginning of the Bible, speaking about our origin, speaking about our creation, and what we are therefore in our very beings, the story starts with our creation in his image, male and female.
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Different in roles, different in functions, different in glories, tied together in spiritual relationship to our creator.
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This passage does not disagree with any of that. It doesn't speak against any of it. Instead, Paul here is describing the logic of his culture as to why a woman covered her head as a sign of marriage while a man does not.
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This is not a sentence here in the Bible that denigrates my wife, but elevates her place in my life.
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You see, man was the original crowning created glory of God. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but there was a time in human history, a real time.
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We don't know if it was a day, a month, a year. How long did it take him to name those animals? But there was a time on planet earth when you would have looked to see what was the greatest crowning achievement of God.
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What had he created that most glorified him? And what would it have been? Adam.
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It would have been Adam. And he said he created it. Good. But we know something more that Paul is going to point out here in a second.
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There was something missing, wasn't there? There was something missing. He created it intentionally that way. The place that you can look to see the glory of God is in man.
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And I would even extend that word out to say mankind. Obviously, it's not long before male and female created in God's image.
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But he does that intentionally. He breaks it out into two parts. So where can you turn to see
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God's glory? Humankind, man specifically. But where can you turn to see the greatest glory of a man?
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Particularly a married man. I believe this passage is saying his wife. And even in a more generic sense, between the sexes, the glory of mankind is found,
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I believe, according to this passage, in the feminine. She is the beauty while he is the beast.
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I don't say this to appeal to some form of petty flattery or something, you know, just kind of like nuanced machismo, kind of like, oh, all the ladies are great or something.
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I say this to assuage female angst over this passage. And in the least, I think that verse 7 is saying something profoundly misunderstood.
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In the way that God made man at the end of his creative acts, as the culmination of glory, the feminine is the ultimate glory of a man.
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I can tell you this personally, and this is true, I think. And man, I recognize that there might be some men that this doesn't resonate for.
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And that's something you need to wrestle with. But I can tell you honestly that there's no more profound glory surrounding this man than my wife,
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Linda. There's no more glory surrounding me than that. And I think that is a pretty cool reality.
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I think that's a pretty cool reality. No amount of muscle, no amount of achievement, no amount of accomplishment matches the glory of the wife that God has given to me.
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I want to hear some amens among you married guys. I think it's true.
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The glory of the man is found. The glory of the husband is found in the wife.
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Paul backs up. Yeah, there you go. Paul backs this up from creation, saying that men were made out of mud while woman was made out of man.
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What is the greatest thing ever produced by man or out of man? Woman, an image bearer of God.
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Not kingdoms, not skyscrapers, not bridges, not ability on the battlefield or prowess on the athletic competitions.
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None of that matches what God did through man in taking his side and producing the woman.
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And she was made to feel something missing in him, the text goes on to say. In verse 9, it says, for man, for him.
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And that can sound possessive. Look with me at verse 9 real quick. Neither was man created, neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
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And that can sound really like a possessive, a possessive thing, but it need not be interpreted that way. She is not made for his possession, but in its original context, if we were to go back into the
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Genesis story, we would see she was made to fulfill a relational lack that the man had in the beginning. The only thing that was not good was that the man was alone.
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God performed an intentional two -stage creation in order to make sure that men know that our race is not complete without the feminine.
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So the same reasons that support a man not covering his head in the worship gathering is the reason a woman should cover her head during the worship gathering.
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The glory of God not to be veiled in the church, but the glory of man to be covered in the church.
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A wife is the glory of her husband. And when she presents herself culturally as unmarried, as they were doing in Corinth, it confuses the way that God has designed her to be the glory of her head, that is her husband.
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For this reason, Paul says in verse 10, a woman should have a symbol of authority on her head as she prays or prophesies within the gathering of God's people.
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And then he adds a mystical and confusing motivation. Something that really gets at scholars because of the angels.
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Any of you ever read that phrase in there and just gone, okay, I don't even know. I actually wrote in my notes earlier this week when
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I was going through my very first reading, it says under because of the angels.
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Can I skip this? I wrote that in there. I wrote that. Is there, do I have to address this? Because it's so confusing.
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Many commentaries are surprisingly even short on this point, simply because we lack the context to understand it.
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We don't know. They would have understood it. For some reason, Paul leaves that hanging. The Corinthians, obviously he believed and knew that by communicating that because of the angels, they would have gotten it.
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And so we need to look into how would the Corinthians have understood the angels. But here's my likely unsatisfactory answer to what the angels have to do with the proper relationship between male and female within the worship gathering.
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Significant Jewish traditions explain that the angels present at the creation of humanity are keepers of the hierarchy of created order.
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That's what a lot of Jewish scholars believed. And so some level of judgment is in mind here that is culturally lost on us, but at least still present by faith.
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Just trust that God has something going on here with the angels and our gathering that we don't fully understand.
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But I believe at the bare minimum, we should correct any notion that our gathering here is merely a non -spiritual, physical gathering of flesh and blood people.
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No, his holy angels are even present here with us today, joining us in worship and observing.
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That's a pretty amazing thing. So if we get nothing more out of the phrase, the angels, because of the angels, it's because the angels are seeing.
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The angels are observing. The angels know when a woman is getting up and acting unmarried. For whatever they do about that is unclear, but they're here and they're seeing.
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Now, one thing that needs to be addressed in this passage is the expectation that women should pray and prophesy in the church in Corinth.
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And Paul is here talking about proper ways to go about this. And there's going to be a bunch more, a ton more about prophesying in the coming chapters.
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1 Corinthians 12 -14 is going to really highlight spiritual gifts, and we'll get into it there. But I believe that I'm going to give you my hot take on prophecy here real quick, especially
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New Testament prophecy. I believe that New Testament prophecy has a tinge of application of spiritual truths, declaration of what is, we come to understand from what
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God has already revealed. So that brings it up to contemporary situations. Without getting too far into the weeds for now, a modern day equivalent of prophecy would be when men and women are gathered together in one of our community groups and a man or a woman speaks up and says what they think the passage means, or what it means to them, or how it's impacted their life, or how they intend to apply it, or what they, what the, you know, kind of the nuance of it.
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Now, how many of you know that's pretty common in churches? That's a big, that's a big time common thing. And this happens all the time.
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And it is open to being wrong. Any of you ever been in a community group where it's just like, oh, whoa, that's going off the rails quick, and you got to shut it down?
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Because what's being declared of God's word is not true. Well, we're going to see later in 1 Corinthians chapter 14 specifically, the instruction to test prophecies.
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Well, don't you automatically think prophecies are always right? They come straight from God. And so, nope, a prophecy is a utterance about God's word that we believe to be true, but it has to be tested.
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And so we'll talk more about that when that comes up. But women can do that in the church. And I mean, we don't have a context for that in our gatherings.
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That we do in our community groups, like they met in homes, and they would talk about the word, and they would teach it authoritatively.
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And then they would have a discussion about it afterwards or something like that. But let's take assessment about where we're at. Number one, in the church in Corinth, married women were acting unmarried.
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Two, Paul says that that's bringing shame on the husbands. Three, therefore, based on each of us glorified the head of us, we should act in accordance with cultural norms within the boundaries of God's design.
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But Paul in verses 11 and 12 demonstrates a concern that I think everybody probably gets to at some point when they read this passage.
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I'm so glad that Paul includes verses 11 and 12. I think that this verses 11 and 12 come from a place of concern.
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Has he overstated his case? Will women be looked down on as lesser than men because of what he said prior?
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Does it appear that Paul is establishing a hierarchy, or worse yet, the patriarchy? You know,
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God, Christ, husband with wife kind of trailing off at the end. No, not at all.
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And you can go back, and I encourage you to go look back at the structure of verse 3 to be reminded that he is primarily concerned that we all understand that we have a director we are responsible to.
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That's what verse 3 is all about. Everybody has a head. Everybody has somebody that they report to. But we can also find an answer moving forward in verse 11.
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Verse 11 is clear that Paul doesn't want to overstate his case to the detriment of women. In the
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Lord, in the church, among God's people, we live out the truth of God's word. A word that teaches us a mutual dependence between male and female.
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In the faith established by our Lord, we believe that woman, woman came from man, created from his side.
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And now every man comes from woman. To put this into modern terms, if I were translating the
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Bible, I'd say every extreme feminist has a dad, and every extreme misogynist had a mom. Is that not true?
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Are we not dependent on one another? Do we not need each other, church? Do not males need females?
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Do not females need males? Amen? We need each other. It's so obvious.
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But it's strange where our culture goes with this. We cannot get away from the reality that we need each other.
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But our culture is trying, desperately trying. When society becomes untethered from the truths that we see revealed about God's good creation of male and female, when it becomes untethered and the truth that we need each other starts to fall away, we find fractures within the fundamental foundations of our society.
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We cannot define a woman or a man, not for lack of biological study.
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That's not where we're at. It's not like, well, the science isn't in on that yet. We don't really know what a man is.
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Don't really know what a woman is. Study some science and maybe get there. No, we learn the differences between male and female in awkward scientific fashion, trying not to giggle.
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What was it? Sixth, seventh grade, fifth grade? I don't know what they're teaching it now. Probably third, second, I don't know. Yeah, snarky.
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But hear me carefully, church. I mean this sincerely. I genuinely believe this. Every adult on planet earth knows the difference between man and woman.
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When people stand up and testify in whatever Congress or whatever and say, I don't know. It just kind of depends.
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No, she knows. She knows. Come on. She's an adult. The reason, hear me carefully.
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The reason we refuse to define it in our culture has to do with an unwillingness to differentiate anything.
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We despise differentiation now in our culture. Our culture thinks that any differentiation will result in the follow -up question.
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And don't ask the follow -up question. The scripture doesn't care. Well, if we're different, what's the follow -up question?
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Can anybody produce it? I'm curious. Better. Then who's more valuable?
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Then who matters most? That's the follow -up question to differentiation. Then which one's better, right?
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Which is more important? God's answer is definitive. Different, but essential.
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Different, but equally loved. Different, both fully in his image.
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Different, but mutually interdependent on one another. Different, but equally valued.
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Paul concludes his argument with an appeal to their cultural expectation. They already know better than to have wives in public without their head covered.
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They know that it's generally disgraceful for a man to have long hair. On that one, you're going to go, hold on.
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I say generally because even Nazarite vows were acknowledged at making a man stand out. Let's just say, in all honesty, we know that there's a variety of different guys, hair lengths, different things.
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But we just have a general feeling in our gut. It's like, ladies have longer hair. Guys have shorter hair.
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It's just kind of in us. It doesn't really matter if a woman has shorter hair and a guy has longer hair or whatever.
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But we know, generally speaking, right? How many of you guys know what I'm talking about? Just kind of like the gut. Is it in there?
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Maybe it's just me. No, I don't think so. I think it's in us. We know that it stands out. So a
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Nazarite vow. One thing that's ironic is that some people who have pieced together Paul's timeline literally believe that as he wrote this with pen and paper, like at least at some point while he was visiting
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Corinth, he likely had at least shoulder length hair or longer, in part because he actually, it's declared that in the book of Acts, he took a
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Nazarite vow. What's a Nazarite vow? It's a chance for a guy to stand out.
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How does the guy stand out? To say, I'm dedicating my season, my life, right now, I'm dedicating it to the
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Lord. In the Old Testament, they would not shave their head. They would not cut their hair for a season.
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And then at the end of that vow, when the vow was fulfilled and the days were done and they hadn't drank alcohol and they hadn't shaved their head and they had prayed and made a more dedicated effort, then what did they do?
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They went to the temple and shaved their head. Went back to normal.
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That's the idea here. And here, he's using that as an illustration in verses 14 and 15, saying nature gives her a covering in some loose way, demonstrating her to be the covered one.
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In verse 16, he defends his position by appealing to broad church practice. All the churches of God are practicing a cultural expression of marriage and authority.
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Corinth, you should too. So, I think we did it. We made it through the text.
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Possibly not unscathed. I expect to get some questions this week. I'm hopeful that I can answer at least some of them satisfactorily, but probably not all of them.
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I've given you what I know to say about this passage here. But let me set some of your minds at ease.
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Don't worry, we aren't going to start having a ruler to check men's hair length or we're not going to be requiring hats or bonnets or doilies or prayer shawls for women.
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The issue at hand in the passage is cultural symbolism.
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It's about the culture. It's about the cultural symbolism of what did these things mean to their culture. A woman was shown to be married by wearing a head covering.
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Does any woman who wears a hat to church look married? You go, oh, she must be married.
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She's wearing a hat. No, of course, it's not our culture. That's not where we're at. And she was shaming her husband in Corinth by not doing so.
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Head coverings, of course, carry no such connotation in our culture. But a couple of applications here might help us to gain perspective on why this passage exists for us to still read today.
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Well, what can we do about it? The first is simply to just lean into honoring God's design.
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Honor God's design. He has made each person for his purposes with his own intentions in mind.
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The single guy or the single girl has a role to play in the church and society. The married man has a role to play in society.
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The married woman has a ministry and a role to play in society and service to fulfill within the church.
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We are all called to be thankful for his design of us. Amen. He has not designed us, of course, in any way, shape, or form to sin.
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I don't accuse God of any of my sinful temptations, my sinful bent. But rather,
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God has designed us to honor him within the culture where he has planted us. So the first is honor
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God's design. Second is a little bit more pointed, and that is honor your head.
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It depends on who you are, who your head is. But let me start with the men, especially married men.
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Oh, buddies, your head is not some effeminate, weak pushover. He will not come to just kind of like kid -glove you.
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He will come with eyes of flame. He will come with a flaming sword to devour those who would abuse their roles. He will come to avenge those who have been kicked down by oppressors.
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Even a wife languishing under a petty household tyrant, he will avenge. Or a wife striving under a man who refuses to lead.
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Honor him, men. Honor your head by first believing the gospel. That's where it starts.
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You're not going to be able to do this on your own. Honor him by believing the gospel. Honor him second by living out that gospel, a gospel of love, loving your family, loving your wife, laying down your life for her, serving her by keeping your nose in God's word so that when you have to make tough decisions,
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God's ways flavor all that goes into your decision -making of the way you lead and guide and direct your family.
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Wives, lean into your call to honor your husbands. As self -serving as it might seem, being a married man up here telling women to honor your husbands, your honor to Christ will indeed be impeded by setting your jaw against your husband.
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You cannot honor God while rejecting your head. I know there are a lot of complexities in relationships, and I know a lot of your personal stories, and I know a lot of where you're at right now, but God has designed husbands and wives to mutually be interdependent on one another.
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This is the general way of things. Please, please, please don't be quick to think that you are the exception.
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You know what I'm talking about? A lot of times we can just be moved pretty quick to be the exception. Yeah, but you don't know my marriage.
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Yeah, you don't know my situation. You don't know what I've endured. We can talk about that.
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We can talk about that. Don't be quick to knee -jerk reaction. It's all of us. It's in all of us.
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We're really quick to think that we're the exception. Lastly, cling to God's future restoration.
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Church, this is where we've got to land. We've got to land here. It isn't exactly from this text, but I think it's appropriate to tether this passage to the gospel of hope.
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You guys good with that? Think that's a good place for us to land? Because all of us have experienced varying levels of brokenness between the sexes.
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We have not experienced as ideal for us. Whether it is our own selfishness or the selfishness of another, we have been both abused and abuser.
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All of us. But a day is coming when men and women in Christ will be what we were made to be.
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Hallelujah. The image of God together, worshiping him around the throne in the new
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Jerusalem for eternity. Think about the tangle.
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You wouldn't have to pull many threads to find the tangle in your life. Of this subject. Broken relationship with mom.
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Broken relationship with dad. Broken relationship with people in college. The way that you express your sexuality.
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All different kinds of things. It doesn't take long for us to get to the end of the tangle of the brokenness between the sexes.
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Abuse at the hands of a man. Abuse at the hands of a woman. Whatever it might be. And so then it just spirals out of there.
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How is this tangle going to be restored? How is this tangle going to be fixed?
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Come to the tables this morning to remember the fix. The son of God crucified for the sins of men.
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The son of God crucified for the sins of women. There he bought back sons and daughters.
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There we have been adopted into a new family. And if you belong to Jesus Christ by faith, and if he is your king, then
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I encourage you to come and drink the cup of juice in remembrance of his blood shed for us. And take the cracker to remember his body broken in our place.
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And then let's go out from this place this morning, eager to lean into his good design for our relationships this week.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your good design.
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This passage, I hope that it makes a little bit more sense to people as a result of this message. But I ask most that you would help every person, male and female in this room, to lean more on Christ, to lean more into the hope of the resurrection that is to come, to lean more into the power of the gospel to transform our day -to -day walk.
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Many of us feel deeply the sense of our unworthiness. Many of us feel in our hearts a deep sense of how we wrong others, how we don't measure up to the standard, and it weighs on us.
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I pray that you would help us to leave that in your hands, to seek your forgiveness as we come to these tables.
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And then there are some here, I'm guessing, there are some here who in their pride think they've got it all figured out.
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They're doing pretty good, and you're pretty lucky to have them. I pray that you would meet them in a place of humbling, a place of drawing them deeper into the recognition of their sin and their need for a savior, and that they would come to these tables humble before the crucified.
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I ask that you would go with us throughout this week and be in our unity, be continuing to help the church to stand against the tide of a culture that has just gone bonkers on the subject.
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Help us to be a shining examples in our marriages of what it looks like for husbands and wives to live together in unity.