Sexual Complementarity - Lesson 2a — John Piper

The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God Ministries is available at www .desiringgod .org. Welcome to the second session now of the TBI seminar on sexual complementarity.

I'd like to pray as we begin and ask God's help. Let's pray. Father, these issues have been around for thousands of years. Manhood and womanhood has been here from the beginning of humankind and we praise you for it.

It's a high gift to the race. And we want to understand it. We want to honor it. We want to live it out, whether single or married, in a way that reflects what you meant it to be and brings glory to you and fulfills the deepest longings that we should have fulfilled through manhood and womanhood.

It has been distorted in massive ways in every direction imaginable. And none of us, I'm sure, claims to have arrived in our own experience of a perfect living out of what our manhood or womanhood should be.

But we long to, Lord. We long to bring our sexuality into conformity to your designs and purposes because we believe that you're good and that you have our good at your heart. And so I pray that with all the biases and prejudices and predispositions, good experiences and bad experiences that we bring into this room, you would now confirm the good and refine the bad and make us teachable before your word tonight.

We want churches to be stronger and more bold and more robust in worship and more effective in mission. We want marriages to be beautiful, harmonious, respectful, full of wisdom, full of tenderness, full of life and joy and creativity and sweet, multi-leveled intimacy and mutual upbuilding and respect and a kind of complementarity that reflects Christ and the church to the world that needs it so badly.

Biblical Complementarity and the Denver Statement

So, Lord, these and many more things you want to do tonight, I ask you to come in your mercy to do because we pray in your son's name, Jesus, our Lord. Amen. Last week was an introduction for reasons why this is an important issue and some of the rationale for why we think about it.

And I mentioned that I'm a part of a group and would recommend that you consider finding out about the group Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. You can find them at CBMW .org. Very simple. If you want to check them out, they also have a journal.

So you could subscribe to that if you wanted to keep up quarterly to what the thinking is on the issue of complementarity. If you want to check out the other side, CBE, and I think I looked, I found them on the web the other day.

I think it's Christians for equality. The whole phrase is what, what you .org. So that's the group that I find problematical in their understanding of, of manhood and womanhood. And so if you want to take your two evangelical groups and by evangelical, in this case, I simply mean those who exalt the Bible as their last rule and authority, the CBE group and the CBMW group would present the two alternative views.

The Denver statement that I began to read from last week was produced in 1987 in Danvers, Connecticut. That's the only reason why it's called the Denver statement. It has a rationale that we walked through last week, and then it has 10 affirmations.

And I was going to read all of these with you, but I, as I sat here thinking about this, I think I won't. I might read the first few because I really want to get into the Bible tonight and not just talk about the positions of groups or people, but this is, these are the affirmations of the Denver statement.

And I'll read just the first few, and then we're going to go to Genesis and spend our whole time tonight in Genesis one to five. There are big issues in society, like women in combat, for example, what, what would be your position on whether if we, if we re-institute the draft, would it be fitting, appropriate, just that 50 of the draftees be women and that half of those go to the front lines?

How would you, how would you go to Congress? If you were invited, I was contacted by a man in Washington to ask if I were willing to go just a few weeks, months ago, would I go to a committee in the Congress and, and witness as an outsider, why I thought women in combat was a bad idea.

And I said, I would be willing. I don't have a lot of time and I hope they don't ask me because I don't have, I don't want to do that sort of thing. But he said that just are almost nobody, nobody willing to stand up and give reasons for why that would be a bad idea.

So those are the kinds of questions we may get to. I don't regard those as the most important questions, though they do spin off from these other issues. The first affirmation is both Adam and Eve were created in God's image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood.

Number two, distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order and find an echo in every human heart. Three, Adam's headship in marriage was established by God before the fall and was not a result of sin.

That's what I'm going to spend almost the entire time tonight arguing for. So hold on. The fall introduced distortions into the relation, into the relationships between men and women. For example, in the home, husband's loving, humble headship tends now in sin in this world to be replaced by domination or passivity.

And I think this is the more common, although when it exists long enough and a woman gets frustrated enough, this lashes out. I thought when I came to the pastorate 18 years ago, the story I would hear from women, most whose marriages are hurting is abuse.

That is not what I hear most that is common and needs to be dealt with and is an ugly and wicked abuse of headship. But most women's problems are from passive lay down, do nothing, take no initiative, unspiritual husbands, the wife's intelligent.

Now, here's the other distortion. Not only do men either distort into domination or passivity, but the wife's intelligent, willing submission tends to be replaced by either usurpation or servility. So you can earn both ways here.

You can become a doormat, mindless, unthinking, or you can become aggressive, dominant, overbearing. In the church, sin inclines men toward a worldly love of power or an abdication of spiritual responsibility and inclines women to resist limitations on their roles or neglect the use of their gifts in appropriate ministry.

Redemption as the Remedy for Distorted Relationships

So again, in the church, it can cut both ways. Sin can do either of two things. It can produce an excessive thing or a passive thing, both for men and for women and. Redemption, I'll just give you one more point before we go to Genesis redemption in Christ, therefore. Is a removing of the distortions, and it is a remarkable thing to first read the distortions that emerge in Genesis three and then to read Ephesians five as remedy for the distortion, for example.

In the family, husband should forsake harsh, selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives. Wives should forsake resistance to their husband's authority and grow in willing, joyful submission to their husband's leadership in the church.

Redemption in Christ gives men and women an equal share in the blessings of salvation. Nevertheless, some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men. We'll get to that in two weeks when we take up first Timothy two.

Nine Evidences for Male Leadership in Genesis

So redemption in Christ is a rectifying of the distortions that have come into the church and into the family owing to sin. Now, if you have a Bible, you may want to open it, although I did put all the text that I'm going to use on overhead so you can just watch if you want.

But you might want to make marks in your Bible. I don't know. Here's what we're going to do tonight. We'll get as far as we can, and I don't know if we can finish this, but I'll go as far as I can. I have nine of these and what we don't finish tonight.

We'll finish, Lord willing, next week, nine evidences in Genesis one to five that man's leadership is or you could put headship in there and I'll try to move toward definitions as we go along. We want the Bible to do the defining here, not tradition and certainly not the distortion of sin, which is what some of you have cautioned me and I appreciate it to lift this yellow flag that buzzwords can work badly against you from your experience, right?

So you grow up in a church where I had a couple in my office one time and the relationship was so sick that she had to get permission to go to the bathroom. So if you've walked among people like that or been in churches where something like that without qualification may have been endorsed, then you probably bring a baggage into this room with the word head or leader that you're going to have to work real hard to overcome and all of us bring stuff like that.

On the other hand, a whole lot of you in this room are bringing heavy duty feminist baggage and you're going to need to work just as hard to give a hearing to what the Bible has to say. None of us comes without baggage.

We all need to work at our overcoming what would bring and try to hear the Bible. So my argument will be that man's leadership is an order of creation, not a result of the fall. I will try to show what does result from the fall and what does not.

All right. Evidence number one, the creation of man and woman equally in God's image, equally in God's image, but with a representative leadership function implied for the man. Let's read Genesis one, 26 to 27.

Then God said, let us make man is the Hebrew word for Adam. And the reason that's significant, and we've been rounding around this in recent month in the gender inclusive language debate in the Bible as to whether Adam is a mere non-male specific generic human or whether it has male connotations.

Well, let me just say here, Adam is the name given to the man and Eve is the name given to the woman or ish woman is the name. So the, whether Adam is generic or not, the word chosen for the generic inclusive is a male word.

It's the name of the man. This is highly offensive. This is highly offensive to feminists that the Bible did it this way. Then God said, let us make Adam in our image, according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

God created ha Adam was the article on the front of it. The man created man or human man with the male name in his own image, in the image of God, he created him. Oh, oh, a male pronoun male and female.

He created them a Tom and masculine, masculine, plural pronoun. So yes, it is inclusive of male and female. Adam includes male and female, but, and they are equally in the image of God, male and female women are not less in the image of God and men are not more in the image of God.

Rather, the reason that Adam is used, or let's just say a possible reason I won't build my case on this. I'll just say, this looks to me like a pointer that God was pleased to inspire in the first chapter, a male name to be used for the generic inclusive name of humankind seems to point towards a representative leadership.

Adam's Priority in Creation

Since the masculine word represents male and female, there seems to be a kind of representative leadership. Number two, man is created first and then woman Genesis two seven. Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils, the breath of life, and man became a living being.

And then down in verse 18, then the Lord God said, it's not good for men to be alone. I'll make a helper suitable for him. Paul in a first Timothy two 13 uses this as an argument for why a man should be the leaders that is the governors and teachers in the church.

The most common feminist objection here is that the animals were created before man. And therefore on this logic, animals should lead the church or should be the head of the home. Or in other words, it's reductio ad absurdum.

If you don't argue that animals are superior or should lead men, why do you argue that man being created first should lead woman? Now the problem with that response is that a Jewish reader reading this would hear that response and roll his eyes and say, that's like, that's like saying that the law of primogeniture, that is that the first son born in a family becomes the heir in a unusual way.

And then the next son's don't. That law is abrogated. If the father had cattle before he had a son, it's, it is ridiculous. It is just plain ridiculous to think that the humankind, the man and the woman are in the same category with the animals.

They, they would not compute that the animals are in the running here for how these two are relating to each other. Here's my second response to that argument. If God wanted to be clear about sequence having no bearing, he could have created them simultaneously and he didn't.

And third, my argument is an inspired apostle uses the priority of Adam as an argument for the leadership of man in the church. And I am slow to say, Paul doesn't know what he's talking about. Like Paul Jewett did in 1975, when he wrote man, male, and female, he said, Paul simply erred.

And he was one of my teachers at a seminary that had inerrancy in their statement. And they changed the word the year I left and Jewett led the way they dropped the word inerrancy. These are big issues at stake here.

So I think there is a pointer in the fact that God chose to create the man first and the woman second to say, go ahead, man. I mean, for you to take some responsibility here to take some leadership here.

And this should, this should not mainly offend the women in this room. This should prick the conscience of men in this room, that they should be getting out their Bibles at home. They should be getting on their knees at home.

That's what this should be communicating. Get with it. Men grow up. Don't yield by passivity. These things to your wife, who wants you to do this. Once you delete in prayer at the table, once you to say, let's have devotions.

Once you to say, let's go to church. Once you to say, let's talk about disciplining the kids. Once you to say, let's get the finances in order. She's sick and tired of having to take all this initiative while you just sit around and watch TV.

That's what you should hear. Not any right to tell her what to do. We're not talking rights here. We're talking burdens and responsibilities that millions of men are running away from. That was a little sermon.

Adam's Responsibility for Moral Instruction

That's number three. Man is given the moral teaching for governing the garden to pass on to the woman. Here's what I mean between the time that he created man and the time that he created woman. He said the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.

The Lord God commanded the man saying from every from any tree of the garden, you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

So he gives this man the massively important moral instructions for how to live in the context of a moral world. Then he creates woman and he does not repeat the instructions for her, implying this man is responsible to make sure everybody else knows this.

So I just underlined what I just preached, that this is another little pointer in the flow that says, man, I put you here first and man, I give you the guidelines first and man, you are responsible for your home.

Woman as Helper and Complement

Live up for this. Number four, woman was created from man and presented as a helper fit for him. Then the Lord God said, just to 18 to 23, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him for I'm sorry, not for out of the ground of the out of the ground.

The Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird in the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to every beast of the field.

But for Adam, there was not found, there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept. And then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

And the Lord God fashioned it into a woman fashion into a woman, the rib, which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. And the man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She should be called Esha because she was taken out of issue. It's the Hebrew words. So we have we have good English words there. We have we have built English words of woman and man. That's very much like what happens in Hebrew ish and Esha.

Now, the fact that she was taken from man's side and that the fact that she was presented to him as a a helper, I think suggests man is here to bear special responsibilities in this world for leadership.

And women are brought in with their manifold gifts and complimentary skills and abilities to help him realize that destiny together. Now, the the feminist answer to this is that God is called our helper several places in the Bible.

And since God is called our helper, I've heard I've heard some of them say, I can't quite tell whether it's tongue in cheek, that therefore the woman should assume the leadership role here because God assumes the leadership role when he's called the helper of us.

So helper implies. Leadership. I think I think mostly they're just trying to nullify the argument rather than turn the argument on its head, just nullify it and say, really, you can't base anything on the word helper here, because since God is greater and stronger and wiser and should be the leader of man and he's called a helper, you can't build anything on calling a woman a helper unless you want to say she should be greater and stronger and wiser and be the leader of man.

The problem with that is that the word is used both ways in the Old Testament. It's used as a loyal assistant who comes in alongside to help somebody who's doing job. And it's used of God. So it's not automatic, which means here you have to ask from the context, which is it me.

And I would argue that in the context, God was doing something very special here in that God knew beasts were not going to work. God knew that. But he he takes Adam through the beasts first. Why does he do that?

It's not good for men to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. So out of the ground, he's got all these animals wasting your time. You know what you're going to do. None of those are going to be suitable.

So why are you why are you sticking the animals in between them and the woman? Two reasons, I think. One to show the kind of helper he's talking about and the others to show animals will never, ever suffice.

She has got to be in a radically different class, namely from himself, like her bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. And yet, having come through the animals, you know, he's not talking about I got to find a God for him.

I got to find a helper in the category of God. So helper is being thought of that way by Moses when he writes this or God as he inspires this. Rather, he's thinking of a loyal assistant to come in alongside and help him get his garden work done with her unique gifts and his unique gifts.

She comes in alongside and supports his leadership. And together they make a great team and they get it done. That's a great marriage is like. So I think this sequence of thought here rules out the idea that God is thinking of a helper in terms of some great God that comes in beside him as greater than him or smarter than him or whatever.

And he brings in the beast to show and he says it very explicitly. But for Adam, there was not found a helper suitable for him. This will never do. And he goes through that to show it will never do. Less man could ever think that a dog could replace a woman.

Many men in bad marriages would prefer their dog because dogs who showed me this bumper sticker the other day to forgive is human, to err is canine. I mean, to err is human and to forgive is canine. Well, that's what my dog is.

My dog is the most forgiving, loving, loyal beast in the house. But Sable will not suffice as my partner and my assistant and my helper and my my alter ego that helps me in more ways than I can count.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon man and he slept and he took out a rib and closed it up and the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib and the conclusion is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh and a name woman here that is an expression of the same name man.

Naming as a Sign of Authority

So I think the word helper does imply a leadership for man and a high dignity as a human God's image for woman. Number five, Adam names the woman or man names the woman. The man said this is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

She should be called woman because she was taken out of man. So he he appoints, he says she shall be called woman. Now, the reason I think that is a pointer is because as you read naming through the rest of the Old Testament, it's a it's a it's a work of authority.

The Fall and the Reversal of God-Given Roles

It's a decision done by one who leads, not by one who follows. So the naming of the woman by the man is another pointer towards his appointed leadership. Now, number six is very, very, very important.

And we get into the because it gets very close to the apostolic argument in first Timothy two, the serpent in chapter three. Now we're moving to the fall and see my argument is the leadership of man is before the fall.

Everything the first five arguments have been pre fall, but now we're at the fall. We're coming into the text about sin, but the dynamic that we're going to see in the way the fall happens is an endorsement of what we've seen so far.

That's what I hope you'll see. So let's read the first six verses of chapter three. Now, the serpent was more. Well, let me read the title first. The serpent undermines the rules ordained by God and draws Eve and Adam into a deadly role reversal with God and then with each other.

Now, the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field, which the Lord God had made, and he said to the woman. Indeed, has God said you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent.

From the fruit of the trees of the garden, we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle, God did not say that. And it was not in the middle. In the middle of the garden, God has said you shall not eat from it, nor touch it.

He did not say that. And that is not true. The fall has already happened or you will die. The serpent said to the woman, you surely will not die. That's a half truth. For God knows that in the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be open.

And that's a half truth. You will be like God. That's a half truth. Knowing good and evil. That's a half truth. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, all of which was against God's will, she took from its fruit and ate.

And she gave also to her husband with her massively important. OK. What has happened here? What did Satan do? Satan arrives on the scene in the form of this serpent. And in order to undo what God has done in two levels, the God man relationship and the God woman relationship, he addresses the woman first.

That is no small thing. That is no small thing, especially in view of the fact that the man is with her. Now, lest you think I'm, I'm assuming too much there. There is no point where she runs to get him here as though Satan got her alone, worked her over and got her to eat.

And then there's a space of time. She goes to get him, brings him and then gets him to eat. There's nothing like that in the text. It's just he's with her. Lest you think that is an over-assumption. Let me put up 317 for you and listen to how God indicts the man.

What is God going to say to Adam in view of this fall? What's he going to fault him for eating the fruit? Then to Adam, he said, we'll come back to what he said to Eve in a minute. Then to Adam, he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife.

Now she didn't say a word to Adam in the text. So if you're going to assume that she went to get him and talked him into eating it, you got to do a just as big an assumption as my assumption that he's there the whole time.

And the Bible says he's with her, not that he went, she went to get him. So the criticism is he's been there since the get-go. So it's as though a chief with his braves rides up to the Calvary general, Custer or somebody, and to explicitly dishonor the chief and defile the relationships.

He ignores him and looks to the brave and says, do your loss say this and spikes the chief. That's what Satan did. And Adam bought it. They fell together here. The fall was Adam's failure to say, wait a minute, wait a minute.

I'll tell you about the tree. Don't you try to beat up on my wife here. I will tell you about the tree because God taught me about the tree and I will be the protector here. I will be the leader here.

I will be the lover here. And we will stand with God against you. And he didn't say a word and God didn't like it. And he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife. Now let me just point out something else here.

In the Hebrew, shema l 'kol, l 'kol to the voice. I did a little word search years ago on the combination, listen to the voice, to Hebrew words, l 'kol and shema. One other place in Genesis does this phrase occur.

Genesis 16 .2, where Abraham, when his wife says, take Hagar and bear me children. And it says, Abraham listened to the voice. It's translated obey everywhere else. Just about. It does mean obey because you have obeyed.

You have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree, which I have commanded you, saying you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you in toil, you will eat it all your days.

So my pointing out 317 here is simply that God was not happy that that Adam was passive here. He was passively with her listening. And not intervening and falling with her, just as guilty as her. So Satan sows the seed by first addressing the woman, ignoring the man, giving her the primary word when the man should have taken the primary word of leadership and protection, and then having done that and thus undermine the relationship already.

He now undermines the relationship with God by posing the question, did God say and she has already fallen? She's already begun to distrust father in heaven that he both set up a good thing between man and woman, and now that he set up a good thing in the garden and she lies twice, she distorts and the distortions are both indicators that God is a meanie.

God is withholding something from us. The tree, he said, the fruit of the tree, we may not eat that is in the middle of the garden. Nothing in the text says it was in the middle of the garden. You go back and read chapter two.

And he said, you can't eat from it. You can't even touch it. Where, where, where? She has already become an inditer of God because she has bought into the seed sown that maybe the horizontal relationship wasn't so hot either, and they've fallen.

It's over. It is over already. And so the way she sees the the fruit on the tree is so good that God must be wrong in saying not to eat it. And that sin, that is the essence of sin ever since presuming, and this really hits the road hard in manhood and womanhood debates today.

The essence of sin is distrusting the goodness of God in the way he sets up manhood and womanhood and God and man. They go very closely together. There's a lot of rebellion in the world today over this issue on both sides, either distorting headship into abusive or passive relationships or throwing out headship and calling egalitarianism the biblical ideal.

The Lord Calls Adam to Account

So I argue that the way the fall happened endorses the correctness of leadership, being a pre-fall gift of God to good man and good woman for their good, and Satan destroys it. Argument number seven.

We will not be able to finish. I'll just take. We'll stop here. I'll take this one and we'll stop. There would be two more. I'll tell you what the two are. What does it mean when it says a woman's desire will be for her husband, but man will rule over her?

Come back for that. That's really important because it really gets misused by chauvinists. And the last one will be from chapter five, but let's just take this one. Men listen carefully. Most of this I'm addressing to men.

If men did what men were supposed to do with the heart of Jesus, 95 of the problems between men and women would be solved. Genesis three, seven. Then the eyes of both of them were open and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God and the trees of the garden. Here's what happens.

Then the Lord God called to the man. Where are you? Why not call Eve? You jerk. Look what you did when Satan talked to you. That's God is not into talking to women like that. God comes to the man, the passive do nothing, sit there and listen to Satan and woman talk man and says, Adam, come here a minute.

So I usually apply this. And my argument is he is giving man a burden and a responsibility at that point. And the way it applies to you is this man tonight, 10 o 'clock squabble going on in the house, bad finances, children out of control, everything broken in the house or whatever.

Here I'm talking to married people, not single people. You knock on the door. God knocks on the door. Jesus knocks on the door and your teenager opens the door. You know what God's going to say? He's going to say.

Your dad home, father in heaven, I pray that dads would not be paralyzed by what I'm saying. Most of the dads that don't do what they're supposed to do are just paralyzed, hardly know where to start. I don't want to add to that paralysis.

I want to encourage them with a strong biblical exhortation that they are called to love, protect, provide, care for, build up, take loving initiatives. They're the ones who are to say, let's most often.

Let's talk. Let's go out. Let's cry. Let's get together and not be silent so that the wife has to constantly be saying, can't we? Can't we? Oh God work on the man and then let their flower in our church.

And the church is represented here and the marriage is represented here and the, and the single man and woman relationship that should have a form of this in its dynamic. Let them all flower. I pray so that we are biblically rich people.

Jesus name. I pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission.

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