I'm gonna try to give you a different angle on the head covering. It'll take a couple of weeks to get through this, two or three, but I hope that this is useful to you. So about 12 years ago, Laura can correct me later. I was at work and my wife called me in tears. She was at the gym. I think she was on the treadmill or on the elliptical machine. And she called me because she was reading her Bible as she was exercising and she came across 1 Corinthians 11.
And she was crying as she was calling me and it was very difficult to console her because she was saying," I'm not doing this." And I don't know what to do with this passage. Now I'm a radical person. So if you know me, I'm a radical person. I've always been on the edge of all the groups that I've been at. But she said that and I said," Whoa, like this is a little radical even for me here." And so we decided to go to the Harvard Divinity School Library, which I might add is a dangerous place to go to.
So we went to the Harvard Divinity School Library, and we got a whole stack of books, and we just started reading through what all the different commentaries and books had to say on the subject. And mostly what they said, in fact, I think nearly all of them said that basically it was just something for that culture. They would talk about it and they'd say," Oh, that's nice," but it was just for that culture. Well, my wife, though, was not content with that. She didn't feel that made sense with the passage.
She didn't feel that was what she read here. And so she decided that even though that's what all those books said, that when she read the Bible, she read something differently, and so she decided to start wearing a head covering. She was the only woman in our church to do this. And it was scandalous, and it actually caused a lot of people to disagree with us, argue us, and believe it or not, it actually ultimately led to a split just because she decided to do that. It was very painful.
But there was something in her heart of hearts. By the way, your heart of hearts, the best definition of your heart of hearts, is the part of yourself you can't lie to. It's the part of yourself that's the deep part of you that you know what's true and what's not. And I think both of us realized in our heart of hearts, we couldn't read the Bible and walk away with a different conclusion. And so the question that I have for us is how do we have a confidence to do this?
Because all of us know, husbands and wives who do this, you will incur a lot of shame, a lot of insults from friends, from family. How do you do this? Well, the best way to get that confidence is simply by going through the Word of God very slowly, very carefully, verse by verse, line by line. And so we're gonna do that. It's gonna take us a while, like I said, we won't get through it today. But we're going to go through this passage here and let the Bible speak for itself.
And I think if we do that, we will come to a place where our heart of hearts speaks clearly. And we have to read this with a childlike attitude. I don't mean a childish attitude, a childlike attitude. Not a proud attitude, but a very humble one. You know, a child will believe what the parents tell him or her to believe, even when it doesn't make sense.
Just the other day, John, who's sleeping here, he's our four-year-old, I was talking to the boys about bringing their things from outside and not leaving them outside. And I was joking, and I said to the children, I said," If you leave your things outside, they're going to explode." And John, he couldn't tell that I was joking. And he just had this look on his face. And then he came to me later," Dad, they're really gonna explode.
We gotta get them in." He was completely convinced that their toys that they left outside would explode, um, at four years old. He, he believed that. And, um, obviously I was joking. We all know that. But there's something to be said about a heart that will take what the Word of God says, which always speaks truth, and simply receive it and believe it. Now, sometimes we want to know why, and we'll try to get at some whys. But I want us to try as best we can, as best we can, to read this with a childlike heart.
Like the four-year-old listening to their father describe the true reality, not joking, but the true reality. You know, one of the things that we're seeing right now, especially in politics, it's a sad day of politics, I think we would all agree, that people will justify amazing things, things that I'm shocked that professing Christians will justify because they want it to be true. You know, what we're seeing now with immigration, with very scandalous lives, and people rallying to support this.
You think like, how is this possible? How is it possible that well-meaning people, five years ago, 10 years ago, that would never be okay with these kinds of things are okay with it today? Well, it's because they want it to be true. They lose good judgment. People lose good judgment because of what you want to be true, right? Isn't this just common? You know, I've said this many times. I don't do it anymore, but I used to be an avid professional sports watcher many years ago, 20 years ago.
And I would go to basketball games in LA and we'd watch the Lakers play. And it never ceased to amaze me how when that ball landed on the line, how if it was in favor of your team, it absolutely went a certain way. If it was in favor of favor against your team, it absolutely went the other way. I mean, people would just be utterly convinced because of what they want to believe to be true, right? You know what I'm talking about here, right? If you want something to be true, you can make anything to be true.
So we gotta get away from that. All right, so what I want you to do is turn with me to 1 Corinthians 11, and we're only going to have time to look at a couple of verses today, the first three. It'll be more foundation laying. But I want to read the whole passage. It's only 16 verses. And then this is going to be laying some groundwork, and we'll get into a lot more of the meat in later weeks. Okay, 1 Corinthians 11 verses 1 to 16. I'm reading here from the New King James.
I'm actually going to, from time to time, quote the King James as well, because actually the King James does a good job on this passage. All right, 1 Corinthians 11:1 to 16. Imitate me just as I also imitate Christ. Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I deliver them to you. But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.
Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. For if a woman is not covered, let her also be shorn. But if it is shameful for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered. For a man indeed ought not to cover his head since he is the image and glory of God. But a woman, but woman is the glory of man.
For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man. For this reason, the woman ought to have a and notice this is an italics because it's not there in the original symbol of authority. King James says power on her head because of the angels. We'll come back to that verse, not this week, in a later week. Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman nor woman independent of man in the Lord.
For as woman came from man, even so, man also comes through a woman, but all things are from God. Judge among yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him. But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her. For her hair is given to her for a covering. But if anyone seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God. All right, let's pray.
Father, I pray that as we study this passage that I think for many of us is familiar, you would open our eyes to see new things. Open our eyes, Father, to understand the beauty of this passage and why we should be excited about it, why we should not be ashamed, but why we should embrace your word. And I pray that we would all be able to read this as best we can with childlike hearts that believe you, that believe your word. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
So there was this comic that I saw, this must have been at least 10 years ago. I think it was the far side. And some of you know the far side, it's kind of it can do a lot in one picture. And this Far Side comic had this picture of two mechanics, and these mechanics were working at a terminal, an airplane terminal. And one of them picks up a bolt and says, huh, I wonder what this is from. And then in the background, there's a plane in the air that's breaking apart in two, as it's in the air.
And it's obviously trying to get a little joke in there about these clueless mechanics. But it raises an obvious question, which is that in a plane, which bolt, which screw, which joint matters the most? Well, I would say it's the one that's the loosest, wherever that happens to be. Which bolt matters the most? Whichever one is the loosest. And there was a very insightful observation. How many people here know the author, Francis Schaeffer? Many people? So a few people know Francis Schaeffer, yeah.
So he was no longer alive. He was a Christian apologist who a brilliant thinker who wrote these words in 1984, so 34 years ago, he wrote a book called The Great Evangelical Disaster. That's the title of the book if you want to look it up. And there's a section in the book called The Feminist Subversion. And I'll read to you portions of this section. 1984, keep that in mind. There is one final area that I would mention where evangelicals have, with tragic results, accommodated to the world spirit of this age.
This has to do with the whole area of marriage, family, sexual morality, feminism, homosexuality, and divorce. The key to understanding extreme feminism centers around the idea of total equality, or more properly, the idea of equality without distinction. The world spirit in our day would have us aspire to autonomous absolute freedom in the area of male and female relationships, to throw off all form and boundaries in these relationships, and especially those boundaries taught in scripture. Listen to the sentence.
Some evangelical leaders, in fact, have changed their views about inerrancy as a direct consequence of trying to come to terms with feminism. There is no other word for this than accommodation. It is a direct and deliberate bending of the Bible to conform to the world spirit of our age at the point where the modern spirit conflicts with what the Bible teaches. Okay, so did you hear what he said?
He said that people who once were believing in the Bible, who firmly held the Bible, no longer believed in the inerrancy of the Bible because of this issue. It's a very important point, but basically what he was saying is that, and I've read this many times, many authors, and there's a whole book about this that Wayne Grudem put together, many authors, they read something in Paul that they don't like, and they say," Ah, well, that can't be true.
The Bible must be a mixture of human wrong ideas with divine correct ideas." There's a whole bunch of authors out there who have come to this view. I'm sure some of you have read some of these authors. And so if you can get people to buckle on this issue, it's actually a great Trojan horse. You all know the Trojan horse metaphor. This horse that gets into the city that has the soldiers in it that are ready to ransack the city.
That if you can get people to question there's a whole cluster of passages, 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Timothy 2, Ephesians 5. There's a bunch of passages that relate to this. Then all of a sudden they start to say," Well, is the Bible really true in its entirety?" And all of a sudden, the whole thing starts to come down. It's a very powerful, very insightful observation.
My wife even has often said that she was not raised in this kind of a faith, that she did not like Paul for many years and had her Bible underlined in red with like all these passages like wrong, wrong, you know, Paul's not right about this. So yeah, that's where we're at. Now, one of the other reasons why I want to talk about this issue now is that I actually think we have an incredible opportunity in front of us, a huge opportunity.
So as some of you know, I've been on this little travel circuit the last month or so. And every time I go travel, I get all these ideas, and I get all charged up about something, and I feel like I have to come back here and discharge to you. So that's part of my ulterior motive here. But when I go around and speak, you know, I meet all these different people and groups, and I have to say, this is an amazing moment in history. So on the one hand, you have the whole Zer movement. Y'all know this, right?
So basically, now we're at the point where there's non-gender binary, gender fluid, and people are advocating to change the English language to change our pronouns. So instead of saying he and she, we should make up a word called Z. And Z is not a real word, but it refers to just a person devoid of any gender. And there's a guy, Jordan Peterson, a famous person who's gone viral now, because he's refusing.
He's a professor, not a Christian, who's a professor in Canada, saying," I don't want to use these made up words that are dumb words." And it's going viral. There's lots of people who are getting interested in that and hearing a voice there. And then on the one hand, I've just been at a lot of plain churches and baptist churches. And there, you know, it's really interesting.
The head coverings, they tend to usually get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until they're like about this big, maybe a little bit bigger than a half dollar. I still remember the first time we went to one of the first times we went to Lancaster County, we decided we didn't know anybody there. And so we rented a bed and breakfast place online. And we were so excited to go there. We were actually going to hear Pablo Yoder speak, who you're gonna be meeting soon.
And so we go there, we show up, we pull up at this house, and this lady runs out. She's wearing shorts and a t-shirt. And she was the person who was renting out the thing. And it must have been, like, this big, her head covering, and it was, like, right on the back. Like, it was impossible to see from any other angle. Even from the side, you couldn't see it. If you were looking dead on the back, you could see it. And, um, and obviously, there's a lot of shame.
Like, a lot of, especially plain people, I think they feel shame. And you can see this inexorable trend where people are ashamed of what they have, and it becomes these doilies. I'm very proud of our sisters here. I think we have an amazing group that we have found a lot of just, I think you all are, all of our sisters here are, in my opinion, heroes,' cause the way you conduct yourselves is very admirable.
But what you have now is you have these evangelical groups that are realizing, wow, the way the world is going is not good. They see all this gender confusion, and they're thinking like, what's the answer? The GLBT issue has almost worked its way through the evangelical churches. And if you go to younger groups like InterVarsity, very few of them will stand up for traditional beliefs there. You have a lot of plain people saying like," Oh, what's going on here? This doesn't seem to work for us.
What's going on here?" And so how do we speak into this moment? And then you have the whole gender, non-gender binary world going on. So you have like all these forces that are in play now in ways that weren't the case even a couple years ago. So as I said, I think the solution, the main solution is to start with God's Word. And you know we have to remember this, that Satan loves confusion. He loves confusion. From the very beginning, you remember what he said in the Garden of Eden?
The very first question that he asked to Adam and Eve? What was that question? Did God say? Did God say, you know? And there's a very interesting insinuation, we can call it, which is basically, God is not a reasonable person. That's underneath that question, right? Did God say he's not even a reasonable God? He has these ideas that are just crazy. And he doesn't have your best interests at heart. And on this issue today, you know, the academic world doesn't help us.
I was talking, I was doing an interview for Sattler, and I was talking to a prospective faculty member. And he said, yeah, the whole academic world, especially in the humanities, it's all about making things complicated and confusing. To read a book, you can't just believe what the author said. Like there's this multiplicity of meanings, and Wittgenstein, and all these people who say like, the text has no meaning and celebrate all the lack of meaning. It's just like garbage, right? It's like nonsense.
And this is where the world has gone on the academic side. So we have a very interesting situation here. I'm going to read you a quote just to prove to you this is not some male chauvinism or male domineering from a woman. She's actually a woman who I think is written beautifully on the subject. Elizabeth Elliott. A lot of you know Elizabeth Elliott. She worked in Ecuador for many years. I think she sums it up so well.
Throughout the millennia of human history, up until the past two decades or so, people took for granted that the differences between men and women were so obvious as to need no comment. They accepted the way things were. But our easy assumptions have been assailed and confused. We have lost our bearings in a fog of rhetoric about something called equality so that I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to belabor to educated people what was once perfectly obvious to the simplest peasant.
I think it's a good summary that simple things that we all took for granted for like thousands of years, now you have to have like a PhD thesis to try to prove something that most people say don't even see this at just first glance. So what I wanted to do is, in particular, look at the first two or three verses in this of 1 Corinthians 11.
So in 1 Corinthians 11, verse 2 says," Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I deliver them to you." Okay, so we need to talk about this word traditions. Paradosis is the Greek word. And the word traditions or paradosis is probably translated tradition in your Bible, except for the King James, which uses the word ordinance.
OK, so one of the first things that we have to answer here is when a lot of people hear the word tradition, they think like, oh, it's my family's tradition. We have pizza every Friday night, right? That's what we tend to think about when we hear the word tradition. Or in my culture, our tradition is that in January, we all have the festival or something like that, right? We use the word tradition in a very weak way. And I think that's why the King James translators chose the word ordinance instead.
But I want you to hold your finger in 1 Corinthians, and you got to look with me at just two other verses here. It's the exact same word, paradosis that's used at 2 Thessalonians chapter two. And then we'll define it after I show you this. But it's the exact same word just to get a sense of how the same author is using this word in a different context. Second Thessalonians 2:15. It's pretty interesting, I think.
So he says this," Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle." Epistle means letter. So basically he's saying," You gotta stand in these traditions and these ordinances that you were taught either verbally or by letter." Now flip the page, same book. Look at 2 Thessalonians 3:6. Same exact word. Again, I'm reading from the New King James.
I think the ESV and other translations read similarly." But we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition, paradosis, which he received from us." Okay, so did you see how strongly he uses the word here? This is not like," Hey, this is like, take it or leave it, optional. Flip a coin if you want to do it." No, he doesn't say that.
He says," If somebody is not walking in this tradition, you're supposed to withdraw from them." And do you see how he said that?" In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I command you," he says." I command you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. You withdraw. You do not walk with people who don't live out these traditions which came from us." Okay, so these are a big deal. Now, what is a tradition? I'm gonna try to give a good working definition for us here.
So some of you have taken our Greek class, so you'll know these words, but the word paradosis is the word for traditions. There's a cognate verb, paradidomi. So we all know the word didomi to give. So paradidomi is to hand over or to deliver something like that. So that's the verb form. Paradosis is the noun form. And it's a little bit like the sense of somebody bringing something to you from the outside, something external. So I'll use a trivial example.
So if you order food in your house tonight and somebody delivers it to you, well, you didn't make that food there. It was brought to you from the outside. If you order pizza or Chinese food or something like that, it comes from the outside. Now, these traditions or ordinances are things that come from beyond just our reason. It's a very important point. So most religions, in fact, maybe even nearly all religions, have a core of commands. Don't lie, don't steal, don't murder.
You'll find that in Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and Christianity, Judaism. They all have that, right? And I think all of us can just kind of sitting around, figure out that that sort of makes sense, right? Those are derivable conclusions that come from just thinking about humanity. And we don't need anybody outside to tell us that, right? So there's this core that kind of all religions have about basically treating other people well.
But what these traditions or these ordinances are, they're things that you can't figure out just by sitting around reasoning. It's revelation. It's something that comes from the apostles, from the outside, that you can't derive just sitting in a room, you know, like in math. If you're smart enough and you start with axioms, you can prove calculus if you're smart enough to do that. You don't need anybody outside to do that. But these traditions or these ordinances are external inputs that come into our lives.
They're handed over to us by the apostles, by Jesus. Is that clear? All right, so let's make a mental list here. This is the list that I came up with. It took me five minutes to do this. If somebody has any I missed, you can yell it out. But I thought of what are things in the Bible, in the New Testament, that feel like there are these ordinances, these traditions, that you can't just figure out sitting in a room by yourself. So I came up with foot washing.
I came up with raising holy hands, the holy kiss, head covering, the Lord's Supper, baptism, and maybe marriage. There's a debate on marriage. Is that a universal, did we figure that out, or is that something that's externally revealed? So maybe we'll set that one aside. But my core list was foot washing, holy kiss, head covering, Lord Supper, Baptism. Oh, and raising holy hands. Did I forget any? That are not things that you could just figure out just by reason? Anointing of oil, that's a good one. Thank you.
Anointing of oil. So there's a, that actually makes it seven. So there we go. Boom. Boom, good number. All right, so now I feel complete. I think we got it. Nobody out anymore. All right. All right, so those are all things that we wouldn't figure out on our own, right? These are things that we need revelation to understand.
So the first thing to ask, and this is an interesting question, how many church groups can you think of that if you go through that list, raising holy hands, that's 1 Timothy 2, anointing of oil, that are good at all these ones, that check this list. Raising holy hands, anointing oil, foot washing, holy kiss, head covering, Lord Supper, Baptism. Forgiveness. Oh, forgiveness, yeah. Although that is in other religions too, but yeah. It's not easy though.
So I would submit to you that very, very, very, very few groups actually do well on all of those in aggregate. We need to do better at raising holy hands. I've been pushing us a little bit on that. And yeah, we do it once or twice a year, but we need to do it more often. So it's like pretty demanding, right, to think about whatever church background you're from, and to ask that question, like, how are we doing with respect to these? Now, why is that?
I mean, I think it actually makes sense, because these, this list of seven things, thanks to Matthew's addition, is they're all countercultural. They're all things that you can't just figure out on your own. And if you practice a generic religion, a generic religion that just comes from whatever you want to do, you're not gonna do all these things naturally. And certain ones of these are gonna feel like especially unnatural, right? I mean, I think this kind of makes sense.
So this is why, you know, there's different names for this list. Traditions, ordinances, sacraments, these are sometimes called. I submit to you as well that the church is supposed to be the bearer of revelation. It is supposed to be conveying mystery as well as what is strictly derivable by reason. And that's a good thing, and that we should celebrate that and delight in that. And that we are appointed by God to bring revelation to the world. It's a supernatural revelation.
It doesn't contradict reason, but it supplements reason. Okay, now notice this key point here in verse two. Does Paul say this? I praise you for keeping the culture of Corinth. Is that what he says in verse 2? I praise you, brethren, that you keep that culture of Corinth. Go. No. That's actually the opposite of what he says. He's praising them for keeping this tradition, which did it come internal? He actually says where it came from. Where did it come from?
Did this practice the head covering come from just their culture, what they were doing? He says very clearly where it came from in verse two. It's not hard. Yeah. Say it louder. Delivery. And who delivered it? Paul. Paul. So it says," Keep the traditions just as I deliver them to you." Does everybody see this? So this, this whole tradition thing, this is not something that was just existing in Corinth. Paul delivered it to the Corinthians there, okay?
So one of the most important arguments that you hear, and I'm gonna try to tear down every argument in the next couple of weeks on the head covering, the most common argument that you hear is like, oh, this was just some cultural thing. This is the number one argument. The number two is about something about long hair. And the number three will be about praying and prophesying and when does that occur and all that. So we'll, we'll talk about all those in our turn.
But the number one most common argument that you hear about why not to do this is this is just cultural. Like that was just for the Bible culture. Like the Corinthians, that was just what they did that fit in their little time and space. But right at the outset, in verse 2, Paul says," No, I praise you that you kept these traditions, ordinances, these paradosis that I delivered to you that came from the outside." Paul's not a Corinthian. He came from Tarsus, which is in Cilicia. It's not even in Corinth.
Okay, so hopefully that's clear. Now, I want to prove to you, and I want this never to be on any of our lips, that this is not the case, that this is the head covering is a cultural practice. And I'm going to pass around two pictures. So there's actually a bunch of pictures that I could have printed out, but these two are the best that I could find. So there's two aspects of this teaching. The first aspect is that Paul says the men should have their heads uncovered, right? We read that.
And the second one is the women should have their heads covered while praying and prophesying. And again, we'll talk about that in a later session. So two pieces, right? Men have to have their heads uncovered. Women have to have their heads uncovered. So I'm going to show you two pictures here. This is the first one. This is a statue in Rome. We were just in Rome, some of us a few months ago. But this statue is in Rome, and you can Google it. It is called the Villa Labicana Statue of Augustus.
And the statue is called the Pontifex Maximus. Okay, now who here knows Latin and can tell us what Pontifex Maximus means? Maximus is highest. Good, Fred? Chief Priest, very good. High priest. So Pontifex Maximus was one of the titles of Caesar. He was both the ruler in a civil sense and also in a religious sense. And so this here is a celebration of Augustus. This is from about 12 BC, so a little bit before this was written.
And you can see here very clearly that Caesar himself, Augustus Caesar, does everyone see that his head is covered, right? It's very easy to see this. So when he was engaged in priestly duties, he would cover his head. This was the norm. This was the cultural norm for Rome. So I'm going to pass this around. I'll show you another picture. There's actually four that I found, but like I said, these two are the clearest. This one is a little bit after the time of Paul. This is from another emperor.
His name is Marcus Aurelius. And you can also look at this up online. And it's him at the Temple of Jupiter. Now, he is the one, he's kind of the, he's this one here, if you can see where I'm pointing at. He's actually the one who is about to I'm not sure what he's doing with his hands, but he's about to do something in the sacrifice. But can everybody see? I'll pass it around if you can't see it. But here's Marcus Aurelius, again, at the temple of Jupiter. I think they're getting ready to kill this bull.
And can everybody see, if you not, I'll pass it around, that his head is covered as well. Maybe you can't see in the back. I'll pass it around. There's actually, like I said, four pieces that we have of art from that time period, where the men, when they're doing religious duties, they cover their head. So clearly, this cannot be something that is just some cultural norm that they're fulfilling there. All right, what about in the Old Testament?
We're not going to look up this passage, but we know, and this is in Exodus 28, it's actually a bunch of times described in the Old Testament, the priest would wear a turban on his head, okay? Yeah. And the men still do today, yeah. They wear the yarmulke, exactly. So in Judaism, the priests would wear a turban. And like I said, if you want to look it up, look at Exodus 28. So in Judaism, the men would cover their heads. In the Greco-Roman culture, the men would cover their heads.
And Paul is saying, don't cover your heads if you're a man. So this is clearly countercultural. So anybody who ever tells you that Paul is saying something that's just fitting with a culture, it's just ridiculous. It doesn't fit at all the evidence that we have. If you want a scholarly paper that goes into this, it's a secular paper, but I actually have a copy of it. It's by Richard Oster, O-S-T-E-R, and it's called" When Men Wore Veils to Worship." And it's a survey of all of the major cities of the first century.
And it looks at the practices of men. I just gave you two pictures here. It looks at the practices of men at the major cities of the Mediterranean, around the Mediterranean. And he concludes that it was the dominant norm of men. These are pagans, obviously Greco-Romans, but they would wear head coverings when they worshipped in any kind of spiritual idea. All right. So hopefully the train of logic here is obvious.
But if head covering was countercultural, you know, in the sense of men I didn't even mention women yet. Let me talk about women before I mentioned this statement. So you can look this up. Richard Oster talks about that. Ben Witherington has an excellent piece on this. But the evidence on women is actually very interesting. There's a lot of coins and pictures from even Corinth itself where the women have their heads uncovered. And so, you know, we can't just say this is some cultural idea, okay?
So like I said, Richard Oster, Ben Witherington are the two people who have done a lot of scholarly work on this. And the conclusion is that if head covering was countercultural for them, how can we dare suggest that we just need to fit into the culture? It doesn't even make sense. The argument is a complete non-sequitur. Okay, so that's verse two. You can see why it's going to take a while to get through all this. All right, let's go on to verse three.
So verse three of 1 Corinthians 11 says," But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God." So this verse here is a verse that describes a so-called headship order. And I want to spend the rest of our time talking about this particular verse. So I have to admit that I have had a fascination for many years with companies that have grown from very small numbers, very small revenues to become very large very quickly.
So this is companies like Amazon and Google and Apple, and not that I agree with what those companies do or what they sell, but I'm fascinated by the fact that those companies, out of the ocean of companies that they compete with, have grown so rapidly. And being in the business world, I read a fair number of books on the subject of organizational theory and leadership.
And I am 100% convinced that what sets these companies apart from other companies is their organizational structure, their leadership, that their leadership is their differentiation, that the leadership there has set a culture and a way of organizing themselves, a way of defining a vision and executing that has made these companies great.
I want to plant in your mind the idea that the Bible is basically a book where in the New Testament we have God laying out a vision and an organizational plan for us to have the church ultimately spread out over the whole world and become far greater than any of those companies. So this is critically dependent on leadership, on this headship ordering, on having the right people in the right roles.
If you were to take one of those companies and scramble, just randomly scramble the jobs there and have the cook be the CEO, have the janitor be the programmer, have the CFO be responsible for HR. I think everybody would acknowledge these companies would be a failure, but they've got the right people in the right roles, and that's part of their greatness. So similarly, what we have in 1 Corinthians 11 is at a high level, a definition of these roles and a way of representing these roles to the outside world.
I want to read to you another quote from Elizabeth Elliot. She's got a great understanding of a lot of the core principles that are behind the biblical idea of gender. So let's start with this foundational concept.
She says, this arrangement, talking about the universe, is a glorious hierarchical order of graduated splendor beginning with the Trinity, descending through seraphim, cherubim, archangels, angels, men, and all lesser creatures, a mighty universal dance choreographed for the perfection and fulfillment of each participant. I love that idea. The whole universe is basically this perfectly ordered system with the Trinity, God at the very top.
Then seraphim, cherubim, archangels, angels, us people, then lesser creatures, animals, and then plants. And when we are operating rightly, it is this mighty universal dance where everything is choreographed for perfection and fulfillment of each participant. So in this frame, in this way of thinking about things, every single one of us has a role. Every one of us has a unique role in this dance. So one of the things I want to first recall is the very first commandment in all of the Bible. So this is in Genesis 1.
So if you remember in Genesis 1, the very first command given to people is a commandment to be fruitful and multiply. So this is Genesis chapter one, verse 28," Then God blessed them." And he said to them," Be fruitful and multiply." This is hopefully obvious, but the command to be fruitful and multiply does not work if you say that just to a man or just to a woman. It is a joint command. It takes two people. It takes the man and the woman to come together to fulfill this command.
Obviously, this is just a basic truth from biology. A corollary of this, and I think it's fairly obvious, but it's very clear from Genesis 1 that we are made in the image of God. Humans are made in the image of God. But men and women, we uniquely image different attributes of God. And we'll get into what these different attributes are as we progress through this chapter. One of the things that I think we naturally have a problem with, especially our society, is they hear the word headship and they want to throw up.
They don't like this idea at all. And they revolt and just struggle mightily. It sounds very domineering and very chauvinistic, this idea of headship. But one of the things that we first want to remember, and I want to give credit to this, to John Chrysostom, who wrote this in the fourth century, he says that, note here that Paul does not draw on the image of master and slave. That's not the metaphor that's used.
Even though I think for a lot of us, and I have to admit, even for myself, when I read these passages, I tend to inject that picture into the discussion. I tend to think about master and slave, not this picture of head and body. And yet, head and body is a much different picture, isn't it, than master and slaves? So when I think of head and body, I think of an organic union of working together and cooperating in a much more beautiful, holistic way.
So I don't think of my head in competition with my lungs or my heart somehow being jealous of my head. We're operating together. And yes, my head in a sense is on the top, and it has the brain, which is obviously, in a sense, the essence of who you are. But nonetheless, it is a beautiful picture that Paul will draw in the next chapter as well of the whole church functioning together.
Now, in this idea, one of the things that I believe is crucial about verse three, that it's easy to read over, is the order in which he lists the different members here. So did you notice the order? It's not the order that most of us would do. So most of us, if we were writing this passage, we would say, oh yeah, I'm going to start with God is the head of Christ, and Christ is the head of man, man is the head of woman. That's not how Paul does it. Notice how he does it.
In verse three, he says, I want you to know the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. So he doesn't go in the normal order. And while I can't prove this to you formally, I think it's a reasonable inference that in this sequence, when he describes the head of woman being man, he wants us to remember that this is not some position of unique inferiority, that he reminds us that Christ Himself has a head who is God.
Okay, so this really leads to us being able to draw a picture here, which I find very useful in understanding this whole passage. So this picture has God here and God is the head of Christ. And then man is over here, and man is the head of woman. Of course, Christ is also the head of man. In this arrangement, the key observation is that there's really an analogy.
So if you go back to thinking back in high school when you had to do analogies with vocabulary words, in this analogy, God is, or sorry, man is analogous to God, and woman is analogous to Christ. And Paul is going to sustain this analogy in later verses, as we'll see, because just as Christ covers his glory, so woman should cover her glory as well. So this is the basic picture I think that we should hold as we contemplate this chapter here.
The reason I believe that even the practice of head covering begins is that when Jesus comes, when the fullness of revelation comes about who God is, now we have a much clearer idea about who God even is. And we understand that God is one God, Father and Son, and Spirit. And as the revelation of the Trinity is unfolded before our eyes through the revelation of Jesus Himself, now that changes the way that we engage with the broader world. Well, why is that?
When the world looks at us, it's supposed to see a picture of God. It's supposed to be seeing a winsome, attractive picture of God in His fullness. Well, now that we understand with the coming of Jesus more about the nature of God, our relations to the world insofar as what we represent about God also is expanded and modified. And basically, this whole chapter is, in a sense, a Trinitarian expansion of how we are to conduct ourselves before the world. We need to remember this.
It's a big idea in scripture that this is one of our mandates. We as Christians, we as priests of God are supposed to represent God before the world. This is a big theme of really the whole Bible is that the role of humanity is to image God, to represent God before the world, and to show the world what God is like. And so the practice of the head covering is our way to teach the world and even the angels about who God is. And we're going to come to this idea in much more detail later on.
All right, one of the other ideas that I think we need to immediately rebut when we think about this picture is a lot of us have a very coercive, ugly picture when we think about headship. I think a lot of us, if we're honest, again, we think about the master whipping the slave. But two phrases have been proposed that I think are very helpful to much more accurately capture this dynamic. And the two phrases are loving authority and then glad submission.
Okay, so let's use that first with understanding God the Father in Christ. So I think we would all agree that the Father loves the Son and His authority over the Son is not a tyrannical reign. It is not a coercive, ugly authority, but it is a loving authority. And for a lot of us, because we have this very gentile worldly idea about what authority looks like, it's hard for us to understand that.
And then similarly, when we look at Jesus and his submission to God, we don't picture, hopefully we don't picture Jesus gritting his teeth saying like, oh, I don't want to be here. This is miserable. I hate this role. I just want to get back to my heavenly throne where it was a lot better so I can just kick back and relax. No, we find all throughout the New Testament, all throughout the gospels and the epistles this idea that Jesus gladly, joyfully emptied himself, made himself a man, and suffered on our behalf.
So this is the basic picture that we need to reframe our thinking around about what headship even really means, about what this really means. And this is more accurate even for our body, right? I mean, when I think about my brain and its relation to the rest of my body, I think of loving authority and glad submission. I don't picture an ugly relationship there. And this is basically the picture that we should be striving for as man and woman.
Now, we need to acknowledge, and I think all of us would easily do this, that our world today suffers from a problem of disorder. We live in an environment where all these relationships have gone topsy-turvy. We have just utter chaos. We have families that are broken. We have men that instead of exercising loving authority in their own homes, they're off playing video games and chasing girls and foolish things and cars.
And we have women who are not embracing their role and who are abandoning mothering for, say, career pursuits. And so in this disorder that's happened, the church can't thrive. It can't thrive because you fundamentally don't have that right organizational structure that we so need. I mentioned that those secular companies, they have. They figured out how to operate well there. They figured out what it is to have an organizational structure that's healthy.
We in the church need to have an even more healthy structure there. The problem is, the basic problem is, is that when these discussions come up, we basically revert to language and fundamentally, I think, heart issues that is about power plays. And it's about people jockeying for this number one role. And I can tell you that I feel like one of the diseases of our world is that everybody wants to be CEO of a company. Everybody wants to be the king.
And this is, again, precisely what we see Jesus trying to get his disciples out of. He says things like," Hey, the Gentiles, they lord it over one another, but it shall not be so among you." So what I want to do is I want to spend the last few minutes just talking about, in particular, this arrangement from the perspective of the woman.
And I recognize that in our culture that is so power, authority, hungry, and in a course of unhealthy sense, that it's easy for this to feel like the position of incompetence, the position of denigration. Well, hopefully this analogy even where Christ is the analog of woman, God is the analog of men. Hopefully that dispels some of that. But I want to more directly speak to these issues of biblical womanhood.
And again, I want to try to use the perspective of a woman, Elizabeth Elliott, who I think has spoken brilliantly to this issue. This is a quote that when I first read it, it floored me. She says," It is my observation, and I may add my experience that Christian higher education trotting happily along in the train of feminist crusaders, and listen to this, is willing and eager to treat the subject of feminism, but gags on the word femininity." I love that.
The Christian world tends to treat the subject of feminism, especially Christian higher education and forces there in, but gags on the word femininity. Maybe it regards the subject as trivial or unworthy of academic inquiry. Maybe the real reason is that its basic premise is feminism. Therefore, it cannot, therefore it simply cannot cope with femininity. That quote floored me when I first read it because I thought, wow, that's absolutely right. You hear that word feminism all the time.
But at the same time, this gagging to use that vivid picture on the word femininity, that in a sense, there has been a recasting of feminism as about a power play as opposed to embracing femininity. Isn't that sad? Well, what is femininity as at its core? Well, I think femininity at its core, and particularly when we understand it in this biblical context, is best understood as surrender. It is at its core an attribute where the woman, the mother, she gladly lays down herself.
She gladly lays down her life, whether that be in the context of laying down her name and marriage, whether that be laying down her body physically and childbearing, whether that be this relationship of glad submission. And all of these, there's an overarching theme of surrender. And hopefully that's not an ugly idea. Because again, when we think of Jesus, I think of him as the ultimate picture of godly surrender. I mean, here is a man who surrendered his rights.
He surrendered his privileges for the sake of serving others. And I'm going to read you another quote here on femininity that I think Elizabeth Elliott nicely captures. I'm going to read you two quotes, two more quotes from her. One is that femininity receives. It says," May it be to me as you have said." Hopefully you know that quote. That quote comes from Mary. Maybe to me as you have said. It takes what God gives a special place, a special honor, a special function and glory, different from that of masculinity.
Meant to be a help. And listen carefully. In other words, it is for us women to receive the given, as Mary did, not to insist on the not given as Eve did. Okay, I love that idea that the femininity at its core is this surrender and this willingness to receive the given, as Mary did, not insist on the not given. It's a powerful idea.
I think if we reflect for a moment on this, this is precisely why so many of us, as we reflect on our own mothers, why most of us would attest that we have a special place in our heart for our mothers because our mothers at their core have given so much of themselves, not to puff themselves up or to advance themselves, but to give for the sake of the family.
And I think most of us, if we examine our heart of hearts, we will acknowledge that that essence of femininity, that surrender, that giving spirit that our mothers capture is precisely why our mothers are so endeared to us. We recognize a beauty and a strength there in our mothers that is so winsome and endearing. Basically, what the head covering is when the woman adopts it is she says, I embrace this role. I embrace my place in this choreographic role. I believe in the Genesis account.
I embrace my God-given image that he has vested to me. And I am willing to embrace surrender. I want to close again with this quote by Elizabeth Elliott, who I think largely captures what I'm going for here at a foundational level to understand this key idea of 1 Corinthians 11. So we've talked about this idea of this God-given order where each part, the man and the woman, images a different attribute of God or a different set of attributes about God.
And we're going to unpack that in later weeks about what exactly those attributes are. But as I said, at its core, I think with femininity, it's about this glad submission, this surrender. And it's a big idea that we're going to spend a lot of time on. But listen to what Elizabeth Elliott says. She says," The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment.
If a man will let himself be lost for my sake, Jesus said, he will find his true self." A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate, humble obedience.
But that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated, but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested. What a beautiful thought, isn't it? That together, we as complementary men and women image God.
And basically the head covering represents this outward witness, this outward testimony to the world about the fullness of the attributes of God. What could be more beautiful and courageous in our world today? Let's close in prayer. Father in heaven, we thank you for your word.
And I pray that by your spirit, you would speak to our heart of hearts and give us a joyful, glad, obedient spirit that will embrace these teachings for both men and women that we will image you faithfully to a world that is so disordered, to a world that is so broken, and that we will call the world to the wholeness and the abundant life that is found in walking in your ways.
Father, we need you to do this to help us, to give us more of your Holy Spirit to be able to live in this posture of a joyful and overflowing obedience. Please help us, Father. We pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
