The Protestant church in America today is inundated by women who preach, teach, and exercise authority over men, and the men who enable this sexual rebellion. The rebellion is so broadly practiced and accepted that the church’s motto has become, “She is there, and she is not silent.”
In the more conservative Protestant churches, we are pharisaical in our practice of this rebellion. We keep women out of the pulpit Sunday mornings and only ordain them to church office as deacons, but then we deny the meaning of sex everywhere else. Parachurch campus ministries, mission organizations, publishers, conferences, schools and colleges, professional associations, Sunday school and midweek Bible classes, small groups, Sunday evening services, retreats; throughout our Christian businesses and organizations and in church anytime other than Sunday morning corporate worship, women teach and exercise authority over men.
Our good reader hasn’t noticed?
We have female authorities over publications, female authorities over Christian publishing houses, female national directors in missions, female campus directors in campus parachurch organizations, female administrators over seminaries, female chairs of departments in Christian colleges; and of course the mandatory female preachers and speakers at our religious celebrities’ conferences. These women all exercise authority over men. The practice has become banal. Nobody thinks anything of it.
We pay lip service to God’s Creation Order and commands, but then strip obedience down to almost nothing. Where is our Biblical commitment to confessing Christian faith concerning male authority, our Christian commitment to man being the glory of God and woman being the glory of man, our obedience of God’s command that woman not teach or exercise authority over man?
We scrupulously avoid confessing to our world of sexual anarchy that “it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve,” that “it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression,” and that “women will be saved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint (1Timothy 2:13-15).”
This is the order God created when He made Adam and Eve. This is the order He decreed by His creation, binding all men to to His Creation Mandate back at the foundation of man’s history still in the state of perfection in the Garden of Eden.
Before the Fall.
We make a show of agreeing with Him, then relegate His order and commands to applying only to Christians; then, even among Christians, only at church and home; then at church and home, only to the pulpit Sunday morning during worship and at home only when the husband can’t remember he’s to be a servant leader, so he uses his “male headship” to enforce what we have come to refer to as the husband’s “tie-breaking authority.”
Our confession of male authority and our obedience of God’s command that we not allow woman to exercise authority over man are the sort of slow and shambling, partial obedience that is no obedience at all. It’s reminiscent of King Saul who, after God commanded him to wipe the Amalekites out, obeyed partially while reporting otherwise. We pick up the story after the battle when the prophet Samuel entered King Saul’s encampment where the warriors were celebrating their victory:
Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, “Blessed are you of the LORD! I have carried out the command of the LORD.”
But Samuel said, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?”
Saul said, “They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and oxen, to sacrifice to the LORD your God; but the rest we have utterly destroyed.”
Then Samuel said to Saul, “Wait, and let me tell you what the LORD said to me last night.”
And he said to him, “Speak!”
Samuel said, “Is it not true, though you were little in your own eyes, you were made the head of the tribes of Israel? And the LORD anointed you king over Israel, and the LORD sent you on a mission, and said, ‘Go and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are exterminated.’ Why then did you not obey the voice of the LORD, but rushed upon the spoil and did what was evil in the sight of the LORD?”
Then Saul said to Samuel, “I did obey the voice of the LORD, and went on the mission on which the LORD sent me, and have brought back Agag the king of Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites. But the people took some of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the choicest of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the LORD your God at Gilgal.”
Samuel said, “Has the LORD as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and insubordination is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, He has also rejected you from being king.” (1Samuel 15:13-23)
What is a half-hearted mixture of obedience and disobedience? What is our reduction of male authority to male preachers Sunday mornings and husbands who practice servant leadership and tie-breaking authority—and of course, neither of these two limitations are applicable anywhere other than the private life of Christians?
God names such obedience “rebellion” and “insubordination.”
Some might want to respond:
But brother, it’s so much more effective to use women combatants today. When we put women forward, it shows we’re egalitarian. It proves we’re not sexist. Look how much more effective we’ve been using a former lesbian to preach to men about the sin of LGBTQism. Who can deny the success of using women for our dirty work!
Women are pretty. Women are nice. Women are tactful. Women are so much more presentable. Lesbianism is so much more accessible than sodomy as an entry point to loving gays and bis and those sorts of people. Can’t you see that? I mean, hello!
Yes, we all see that. But it’s wrong.
Not it’s not. It’s smart. She’s not a pastor.
So the Apostle Paul was only forbidding women from being pastors when he commanded, “I do not allow women to teach or exercise authority over men?”
She is teaching men—what the Apostle Paul said must not be allowed.
She demands submission from the men listening to her; she demands they obey the Scriptural commands against the LGBTQ abominations.
Change the medium and you change the message. Women speak womenspeak to women and men, with the result that men are forced to speak womenspeak to men, also. Our itching ears demand feminine tone and rhetoric from effeminate pastors, today, and legacy seminaries make their living providing such men to the churches who are their consumers.
Years ago, I was talking with a man who had recently repented and put his faith in Jesus Christ, and he was describing his background to me. In our nation of broken vows, marriages, homes, and children, it was typically sad.
He went on to say how thankful he was for his strong Christian mother and grandmother. Then, at one point in his story, he cried while recounting the memory of his father leaving his mother and children. For his community, it was the common story. His grandpa, married to his strong grandmother, was weak.
I don’t remember if it was then or during some later conversation that I said to him, “You know, your mother and grandmother get something out of weak and absent husbands. A pattern like this can’t repeat itself generation after generation without the women bearing a large part of the responsibility. This is not all about bad men.”
Brothers and sisters, if we are to reclaim true manhood, we must honor God’s commands in the main—not just the exception. We must honor God’s Order of Creation willingly, wholeheartedly, zealously, knowing that enforcing it as the Apostle Paul did when he declared women are not to teach or exercise authority over men will result in the sanctification of our wives and daughters; but also our mothers and sisters in Christ; then too, our neighbors and relatives who are intense rebels against everything God has commanded, and most particularly His commands concerning His male and female.
This is the light we must shine. This is the salt which must have its saltiness restored. This is the truth at the center of any true Christian confession of faith, today.
We can keep stripping God’s Order of Creation of all its authority and power as long as we want, but what will we do in the end? Dissimulations and equivocations added to bald-faced lies don’t add up to truth or obedience.
They add up to God naming us insubordinate rebels, and turning away from us.
