Equality
and Subordination
1 Peter 2:18–23
Open your Bibles with me to 1
Peter, Chapter 2. We are continuing our study. Actually, this section begins in
verse 13 of Chapter 2, and it extends down through at least the end of Chapter
4, and then we get to a conclusion of the Epistle.
It begins by focusing on the
issue of submission in many different areas. But everything in this area is
couched in terms related to our understanding of who Jesus Christ is and what
He did on the Cross. Again, we have to learn to think biblically. Whenever we
are thinking about conflicts, whether we are talking about arguments over
political policy, or whether we are talking about principles governing personal
relationships, we always have to go back, ultimately, to understanding Who
Jesus Christ is in terms of the hypostatic union. The union of humanity and
deity in the Person of Christ, as well as the work of Christ, and, ultimately,
the Trinity—it always starts there.
Our focus tonight is going to be
on understanding what the Bible teaches about equality and subordination. This
is an issue that just isn’t going away in our culture. We have to think a
little bit more precisely about it, because you have one political party, and
one philosophy, that just seems to focus the spotlight on women’s inequality
and continuing to bring that out and make an issue out of it—as if the last
hundred years haven’t happened at all.
There is a failure to
understand, biblically, that there are distinctions between men and women. You
would think it was obvious physically, but obviously, it’s not so obvious. Most
people in Western civilization still believe that, and they are trying to act
as if that is not true in many, many different areas of life.
There are some things that are
true of women that make them better at some tasks than men, and the opposite is
true. But it’s important to understand that how you view the role of men and
women is directly related to how you view the Trinity, how you view the
hypostatic union, and ultimately, how you view creation.
Ultimately, this is where
origins come into play, and it’s crucial. There is a foundational difference
between pagan views of origins, which includes Darwinian evolution and biblical
creationism. All that comes into play. So we will look at that. That’s really
the presuppositional background for what both Paul
and Peter teach in this area of submission and authority.
We have seen in the flow of the
argument here that we are to submit ourselves to every ordinance of man, or
every created institution of man. The context is talking about authority, so it
is often thought of as ordinance; but it’s really more precisely understood as
the created institutions within human societies. “Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s
sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent
by him [by the governors] for the
punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good.” It’s this
word HUPOTASSO,
which means to submit, or to subordinate one's self, to their authority.
The basic problem, as we’ve
seen, is our own sin nature. We are born spiritually dead. We are born with an
inherited principle of corruption, a capacity that is ours, inherited from
Adam, because of sin. This is important to understand.
We engage others in
conversation. Maybe they are untaught Christians on the one hand, or they are
not Christians, and they tend to have a view of man that treats him more highly
than he ought to be treated; they fail to understand that man is inherently
corrupt. If man is not inherently corrupt, and man is basically good, then what
flows from that, logically, in terms of the history of ideas, is that man is
perfectible if he is basically good.
Man is perfectible. If man is
basically good, then a society of human beings is basically good and is
perfectible. Therefore, a utopic or perfect
environment is possible. This is why you have a lot of the problems today.
Because within the framework of progressivism, which had its birth out of 19th
century liberalism and it is blended with ideas of socialism and Marxism, all
have as their basic idea of the perfectibility of man and the perfectibility of
society.
This is an idea that is sort of
borrowed—or stolen—from Christianity and Karl Marx, actually. I’ve told you
this before, but you’ve probably forgotten it. He was more than likely a
believer. John Hintz, who is pastor of Tucson Bible Church, has a paper he can
no longer find, in his files, that was written by Karl Marx on justification by
faith alone when he was in high school.
When Karl Marx was about 14
years old, his father converted to Christianity. For a period of about four
years he was a Christian, and he wrote a high school paper on the doctrine of
justification by faith, which was biblical and Lutheran. That means it was
correct, because Luther had it right. Then he rejected Christianity and went
down the road of so many into apostasy. He had a Christian biblical
influence; of course, we will never know until the Judgment Seat as to whether
he believed that or not.
He had enough of an influence
from the Christian environment of England in the 19th century. In
England in the 19th century, the Anglican Church dominated. J. C.
Ryle said that well over 50% of Anglican priests in the 19th century
were pre-millennial. They were fairly biblical. This is the group out of which
British Restorationism for Israel and Christian
Zionism derive. They were pretty solid until they got turned, by the late 19th
century, by liberalism.
You have these philosophies from
Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and others, that perverted a
Christian idea. So they took this idea of perfection, or a future kingdom, and
they brought it over into their ideology—that man could do it on his own. By the time you get to the late 19th
century and early 20th century, in liberalism they have taken the
idea of the Kingdom of God and they have perverted it into this utopic reality. They are postmodern; so man in his society
through government can bring about this Kingdom of God on the earth, and then
Jesus will come. But they sort of do away with the idea of Jesus, and they are
just left with this idea that you can bring in this perfection.
Most of that idea got pretty
much hemorrhaged out on the fields of Flanders in World War I, but the residual
of Marxism stayed with it. But the Bible teaches that as a Christian we look at
these things differently. We look at relationships differently. We look at the
relationship between human beings differently, the relationships in families
differently. We look at the relationships in the workplace differently. We look
at the relationships between the governing and the governed, because we
understand that both the governing
and the governed are corrupt. So, you
don’t want to bring power into one person or one group because absolute power
corrupts absolutely. And man is inherently corrupt. So we have this basic
problem.
The basic orientation, as I’ve
said, of the sin nature is that we are self-absorbed. Whenever we are put into
an authority situation, everybody has a problem dealing with somebody over them
that they disagree with. They may disagree strongly with somebody, but if
you’re not the boss, then there’s a problem. We have to understand that, and
that’s learning authority orientation.
We are seeing a whole situation
now where these young people haven’t been taught respect for authority, haven’t
been taught personal respect for property; in fact, they’ve been taught a lie
in terms of so many of the divine institutions. Then, when they don’t get their
way, as happened in this presidential election, they start throwing all these
little temper tantrums, they start whining, and they go through personal
meltdowns because there’s nothing to give them stability.
One of the things that has really
been a part of my thinking for quite a while—but in the last several months
it’s been a little more focused—is asking the question, “How do we, as
believers, engage these young people evangelistically?” We will get into this
in a minute, but you can’t start at the surface of social issues or political
issues, because the underlying issue is more fundamental, and that is their
spiritual beliefs and their relationship to God.
But how do we communicate?
Because unless the heart is changed—and that can only be done through the Holy
Spirit and through the Word of God— then it doesn’t matter who we elect into
office, it’s not going to last. The potential for a recovery is there, but the
problem in this country is not a political problem, the problem is an ideological
problem that grows out of human viewpoint. Until that’s changed, nothing else
is going to solve the problem.
But this is the problem. This is
why we have problems with rebellions and rebellious teenagers and rebellious
wives and rebellious husbands and rebellious employees, because there is a
failure to be grace oriented, to understand grace, and to understand authority.
In this first section as we
study, Peter applies this to servants; literally, it is “slaves.” We can’t
minimize that term; we can’t sanitize it; he is talking about slaves. Slaves
were the lowest rung in the culture, in the society;
they had absolutely no rights. And neither Paul nor Peter come along and say,
“We’ve got to end slavery.” What they talked about was what has to happen to
change people from the inside out—knowing that if people came to Christ and got
submitted to God and to His Word, that eventually it would change the society
and change the culture.
You can’t change it by
legislation. This kind of change can’t be legislated. This kind of change
doesn’t come from shifting political parties. This kind of change only comes
when there is an internal shift that is spiritual. When our verse talks about
the fact that we are to submit with fear, that fear must be understood in the
framework of Scripture—that it is the fear of the Lord.
We serve our masters because we serve the Lord. We are
submitted to whomever we are to submit to because we are submitted to the Lord.
It’s not related to that individual. We are to show respect and submit to the
governor, even if the governor is a loser, even if the governor is a failure,
even if we disagree with him completely.
We are to submit—not because we
are submitting to him—but because we are submitting to the Lord. That is a
difficult thing to grasp. That’s what genuine humility is all about. It is why
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
But fools
despise wisdom and instruction.
You see the same things—I talked
about this before—going on. Titus 2:9, “Exhort
bondservants [or slaves] to be
obedient to their own masters.” Titus
3:1, “Remind them to be subject to rulers
and authorities.”
Ephesians 6:5–8 is where Paul develops this even more in the Epistle to the
Ephesians. “Slaves, be obedient to those
who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in
sincerity of heart, as to Christ.” It always comes back to Christ. Human
relationships must ultimately be patterned on Christ and on the relationships
within the Trinity. We don’t start with creation—we start with God.
Ephesians 6:9, “And you, masters,” they are to treat the
slaves with respect. We will get to
why in just a minute.
1 Peter 2:19 goes
on to say, “For this is commendable.”
I disagree with that translation; I think that is confusing. The word there is CHARIS, which should be translated “grace.” Peter is saying,
“This is grace.” Submission to an unjust authority is grace. Grace means that
we are kind even when the person isn’t worthy of it, when the person doesn’t
deserve it. That’s what grace orientation is.
So you submit to the authority
that is unworthy, because that’s
grace! That’s being kind—undeserved,
unmerited favor towards this idiot, this loser, this failure, this person who
doesn’t understand anything because he is a stupid idiot with a block of mud
between his ears. You’ve probably said it worse than I did.
“For this is grace, if because of conscience toward God [our norms
and standards change as believers] one
endures grief, suffering unjustly.” And people say, “I’m not going to be
treated in an unjust manner!” Well, that’s arrogance! Does that mean that you
don’t take somebody to court? Not necessarily. Does that mean that you don’t
call law enforcement to deal with some criminal activity? Certainly you do
that. It means that you personally are not going to get your knickers in a knot
over somebody’s unjust treatment of you; you can have a relaxed mental
attitude.
Friday night when I go to
Country Bible Church to be the evening speaker, my Psalm is going to be Psalm
37. Psalm 37 begins, “Do not fret because
of evildoers.” That word that’s translated “fret” four times in the text
doesn’t mean simply, “don’t worry.” The people demonstrating this are those who
voted for Hillary Clinton, who woke up Wednesday morning going through emotional
meltdowns. That’s what fretting is. This is an intensive word in the Hebrew,
and they are fretting.
People who look at changes in
politics and it ruins their life—those people are fretting. People who get up
in the morning and their kids make decisions that they don’t like and they fall
apart—that’s fretting. It’s anxiety and worry on steroids.
What the Scripture says is, “Don’t fret because of evildoers.” Get
the long game into your head that God is going to bring justice and
righteousness. Don’t worry if you’re being treated unjustly and innocently. We
are going to see that in our study of Psalm 59 on Sunday morning.
So Peter says, “For this is grace, if because of conscience
towards God one endures grief [or sorrow], suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you are beaten for
your faults, you take it patiently? But when you do good and suffer, if you
take it patiently …” Some translations translate “grace” as “favor.” This
finds favor with God. I think it’s “grace.” This is grace before God—grace in
action in our lives. We are treating people who don’t deserve it better than
they ought to be treated—just like God treated us better on Tuesday.
I believe that God graced us out
and withheld what I think will eventually come in this nation to give us an
opportunity to straighten out spiritually, to get involved in evangelism. The
only thing that is going to change is if evangelicals who know the truth of
God’s Word get involved personally in evangelism with those who need to know
the truth.
The only thing that is going
change this country is going to be the gospel and the Word of God. Fortunately,
the evangelicals came out. Seventy-nine percent of all evangelicals voted
against Hillary; they voted for Donald Trump. Eighty-one percent of white
evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
If you remember, not too many
months ago in my analysis of this, I said evangelicals failed to come out and
vote in the 2012 election because they didn’t want to vote for a Mormon.
Evangelicals also failed to get out in 2008. But in 2016, the highest
number of evangelicals came out and voted on Tuesday (and in the two weeks
before in early voting), more than any election prior in this country, at least
in the 20th century. In the 19th century almost all
Christians were evangelicals.
The evangelical vote came out!
And it made a difference. One article I read said that what got Trump over the
top was the evangelical vote and the conservative Catholic vote; that’s what
won it. So it is those who have a belief in eternity and in absolutes in the
Word of God that made a difference. They got out, and they voted.
But what this verse is saying is
that if you reap harsh consequences for your own bad decisions, then that’s
what you deserve. But if you do good, if you’re innocent like David in Psalm
59, if you’re innocent and you take it patiently, then that’s grace before God.
Then in verse 21 Peter says, “For to this you were called.” This is
your calling. Stamp it on your head, tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids:
You are called, as a believer in Jesus Christ, to suffer unjustly. That’s part
of what we should expect living in the devil’s world.
“For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us.”
Not one of us is any better than Jesus. He is perfectly innocent: no taint of sin whatsoever; no personal sin, no
inherited sin from Adam, no sin nature. He did not deserve any suffering, whatsoever, and He took our suffering on Himself on
the cross. That is the pattern. To understand everything the New Testament says
about this difficult topic of submission, you have to understand the Person of
Christ.
Then Peter begins to quote from
Isaiah 53:9, “Who committed no sin, nor
was deceit found in His mouth.” This is the called the doctrine of the
impeccability of Jesus. It’s a quote from Isaiah 53:9, which in the last part
of the verse says, “Because He had done
no violence.” Literally, the Hebrew means “no wrong.” “He had done no wrong, nor was any deceit found in His mouth.” He
was perfectly sinless.
That’s then described in the
next three verses. This is where we stopped the last time. “Who [referring to Jesus], when He was reviled, did not revile in
return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed …” When He was
reviled it was totally unjust. He was not worthy of being reviled. He was not
worthy of suffering. He did not threaten.
But He committed Himself to
whom? He turned it over to the Supreme Court of Heaven. He put it in the hands
of the Lord. Later on in this epistle, Peter is going to say, “Cast your care upon the Lord.” That’s
what Jesus did. That’s the pattern. That’s the example. He “committed Himself to Him who judges
righteously; who Himself [referring to Jesus] bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to
sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.” Another quote from Isaiah 53.
“For you were like sheep going astray,” another quote from Isaiah
53. Why does he go to Isaiah 53? Because in Isaiah 53 Jesus is presented as the
suffering slave, the suffering servant. Who is he talking to here? He is
talking to slaves. “Slaves, obey your masters.” So he’s talking about Jesus as
the ultimate slave who is without sin and who suffers for all of us; and He
submits Himself.
“For you were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the
Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” We are going to come back to the
details of those three verses, but I want to go to another section in
Scripture, in the New Testament. I want you to turn with me to Philippians 2.
We always want to focus on
exceptions. “Well, what about when …” Then we come up with circumstances and
situations when somebody tells us to do something, asks us to do something,
wants us to do something that we don’t want to do. “Am I not justified in disobeying
them?”
We are going to understand this
more fully if we look at Philippians 2. We are going to look at Philippians
2:8, and we are going to think about this a little bit.
Philippians 2:8, talking about
Jesus, says, “Being
found in appearance as a man.” Now that doesn’t mean that He just
looked like a man, but He wasn’t. That was called Docetism—that
it was like He put on a cloak, a disguise of manhood. But this doesn’t mean
that. He becomes a man is what it says; we will look at the details later.
“He humbled himself.” Now how does He humble himself? How do you
exercise humility in Scripture? You humble yourself by being obedient. If
you’re disobedient to authority—whether it’s God, whether it’s a husband,
whether it’s parents, whether it’s a boss—if you don’t submit, then you’re not
humble. By definition you’re arrogant.
We have to think about that. “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to
the point of death.” Elsewhere in Scripture it says, “Have you suffered to
the point of bloodshed?” Most of us haven’t even suffered to the point of
thinking about bloodshed. The writer of Hebrews says, “Have you suffered to the
point of bloodshed?” Paul says, “Have you become obedient to the point of
death, even death on a cross?”—one of the most
horrific, torturous, horrible deaths conceivable.
Let’s think a little bit about
this whole topic of how do you communicate in a very pagan environment that has
a very distorted view of what submission to authority is. Let’s think in terms
of maybe two or three different pagan environments. One of the most horrid ones
is Islam. In Islam, women are just marginally above animals. I mean that’s
their theology. Women are not equal to men. That’s one option within the many
options in the world around us.
Let’s take Islam and push it back just a little more. Islam has kind of a strange
doctrine of creation. You have man created, but it’s not in the image of God
like it is in Scripture. So you don’t have an equality of person in Islam.
Let’s think about other forms of
paganism. Whether you are talking about ancient paganism or modern paganism,
neither have a view of man that elevates him much above primordial slime. Look
at the ancient myths. For example, we’ll take a Babylonian myth; the Egyptian
myths were pretty much the same. Matter is eternal, and it’s personified in the
gods and goddesses of their pantheon. The way the universe gets created is
usually along the lines of two gods or goddesses having a battle royal, one of
them kills the other, and from their body the universe is created.
So matter is really eternal. It
just goes back—the gods and goddesses are part of the creation. From that you
find the gods and goddesses creating man, not out of nothing, but they create
man from whatever is there. It’s a primitive view that is very, very similar to
modern evolution.
In modern evolution, you start
off with matter. It’s really interesting. “We don’t know the process. We don’t
know when it began. We don’t know how it developed. We don’t know how long ago
it happened. And we don’t know what the mechanics were. But we do know it
happened that way.” Isn’t that interesting?
You take all these statements,
“We don’t know this. We don’t know that. We don’t know this. We don’t know
that. But we do know it happened that way.” That doesn’t make sense.
In macroevolution, man is the
product of an evolutionary process that took billions of years and lots of
infinitesimal changes took place that ultimately brought inorganic life to
organic life to intelligent, sentient life.
What is the basic mechanism of
Darwinism? Survival of the fittest. But the problem
with survival of the fittest is that it doesn’t explain the arrival of fittest.
And in the survival of the fittest, the basic mechanic is struggle and fight so
that one species is going to destroy and replace another species. One creature
is going to destroy and replace another creature. Violence is the modus operandi of evolution. Without
violence and without one creature asserting his superiority to destroy another
creature, there is no advance. So evolutionary theory is based on creaturely
dominance and destruction of lesser creatures. That’s the metaphysic there.
Let’s plug this into an image.
Here we are going to use this iceberg image. I have used this before. In an
iceberg we only see 10% or so of the iceberg above the surface. What’s below
the surface is invisible to the eye; it is not readily apparent. When we talk
about ideas, we see ideas at the surface. But ideas are the product of a lot of
other assumptions that are below the surface. So there’s a logical sequence
that’s going to go from the bottom up. Remember, good ideas produce good
consequences; bad ideas produce bad consequences. Any idea is grounded on
previous ideas and assumptions and presuppositions.
So it starts from the bottom up.
The foundation of all thought is what is called, in philosophy, metaphysics.
“Meta” means beyond; “physics” means the natural world, or the physical world.
So it starts with something that goes beyond the physical world. In other words,
how you view ultimate reality. Metaphysics is your view of what is eternal. Is
it God? Is it matter? Is it energy? Is it nothing?
Evolution says that nothing
developed something. How can something come out of nothing unless there’s some
external force or intelligence base that is putting the information into the
system to create that? But they ignore that.
So you have metaphysics and then
once you get the idea that there is something, and the basic philosophical
question that came from Jean-Paul Sartre, I believe, was the basic question in
life is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” That’s the question.
Once you establish that, there
is something and what that ultimate reality is then you have to ask the
question, “Well, how do you know that?” Is it true? How do you know truth?”
That is the area of epistemology: How do you know truth? How do you determine
right from wrong, or just from the unjust?
Once you decide these questions
as to how you determine the difference between right and wrong and just from
the unjust, this is what develops ethics. Ethics is the area of philosophy that
talks about what is right, what is wrong, what is
good, what is bad. Social structures and organizations, such as politics, which
deals with justice and right and wrong, comes out of that, and so this is what
you get at the upper level.
At that upper level you have
what we talk about—political, national, or individual decisions. Right now we
are engaged in this debate about different policies related to foreign policy
decisions—the Iran deal, foreign policy decisions related to NAFTA and trade, and all these other things—and we argue at
this upper level. But everything that we talk about is dependent upon a presuppositional ethic, which is dependent upon a presuppositional epistemology, which is dependent upon a presuppositional metaphysic. That’s where the discussion
needs to take place.
As we get into the pressures of
life, we are forced to think about things rather than just at the surface
level, and so that drives us down to ultimate reality. It’s only when life gets
really tough that we start asking the question, “Why am I here?”
I was talking with someone
recently, and they were discussing a situation with an individual who had been
brought home by his girlfriend to meet her parents. Her father sat him down,
getting to know him, and he said, “Tell me about your relationship with God.”
This young man had never even thought about it. He had no concept of what God
was, and they ended up spending two or three hours, the afternoon, just having
that discussion and taking a long walk. And when the kid, who was a PhD
student, came home, he realized that there was a whole dimension to life and
thought that he had never, ever considered. So the pressures of life drive us to
think about these questions of ultimate reality.
What I have on the slide is that
this is the area where we talk and argue, but the real issues are these issues
related to ultimate reality and epistemology. When we talk at the level up
here, we are asking the question, “How do we submit to authority? Why should we
submit to authority? Why should we submit to an unjust ruler? Why should we
submit to an unjust husband, or unjust parents?” As I have nuanced this in the
past, we are not talking about somebody who is telling us to do something that
is prohibited by the Bible. We are talking about somebody who wants us do
something we just don’t want to do.
We have to understand in the
area of submission to authority, God, is what functions at the ultimate level
of metaphysics. You can’t talk about authority and submission to authority
without talking about God; if you do not talk about God you can understand the
concept.
We are going to go to a
different slide here, and this is a slide that is going to help us understand
the basic nature of God. God is eternal, and God eternally exists as three
distinct Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In the early church they really
wrestled with how to express this concept. Are we talking about three gods?
Well, that would be what’s called tritheism—tri,
meaning three, and theism, meaning gods—that we are worshiping three gods.
Or, are we worshiping a God who
just puts on different masks or appears in different modes? That was called modalism. For a while in the Old Testament, God appeared
with the mask of the Father. Then He shows up 400 years later and He’s got on
the mask of the Son. Then the Son leaves, and He puts on the mask of the Holy
Spirit. You’ve got one Person, one essence. He just puts on different
costumes. That’s called modalism.
What came out of that as the
Council of Nicaea finally defined it in 325, is the doctrine of the Trinity. In
the doctrine of the Trinity, what we see is that the Father is God, one in
essence, the Holy Spirit is God, one in essence, and the Son is God, one in
essence. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each equally divine; they have
equal essence. One is not greater than the other. One is not more powerful. One
does not have more knowledge. One does not have more wisdom. One is not more
righteous. One is not more loving than the other. They are equal in every
single area of essence; they are essentially the same.
However, the Son is not the
Father; He is distinct in His Person. He is a distinct individual. The Son is
not the Father, but He is perfectly, absolutely, eternally equal with the
Father. The Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Son.
They are distinct Persons, but they have the same essence. And the Father is
not the Holy Spirit. They are three distinct Persons with one essence. They are
absolutely, totally equal with each other.
Now that’s a big issue today.
It’s a big issue in politics. We want to be equal. We want to be egalitarians.
Part of the French Revolution is égalité —we want to
be equal. Okay? We don’t want to be treated less than anyone else.
Ultimately, in Christianity, the
bottom line is that we are patterned after a God Who is three in one. He is
equal in essence, so that the Father equals the Son, the Son equals the Holy
Spirit, and the Holy Spirit equals the Father. So They
are ontologically equal, metaphysically equal; They are equal in their being.
See, if you look at Islam, you
just have one god, a singular monotheism. He’s not equal to anyone—just
himself. When he creates, he creates only creatures who
have a hierarchy but no equality, because there’s no plurality in Allah. He’s a
singularity; he is a monadic god. I’m using a lot of big words, but that’s the
language of philosophy; it helps you think through these critical issues of
equality and subordination.
You see,
the Son obeys the Father. A wife obeys her husband, but biblically, in
Christianity, she’s equal to him. The Son is equal to the Father. To say that
it’s wrong, existentially wrong, to make a woman submit to a man is to make a
theologically blasphemous statement because it implies that subordination means
inequality. And biblically, subordination does
not mean inequality, because eternally in the Trinity, the Son is submitted
to the Father and at the same time is totally and absolutely equal to the
Father.
The only reason that
subordination manifests as inequality is because of a little three-letter word.
What’s that word? Sin! But if you live in a culture that rejects the notion of
inherent sin and corruption, then you can’t even talk about this anymore,
because, as far as you’re concerned, in a perfect world ….
Oh, we are not in a perfect world, are we? But they don’t have a basis for
talking about that; as far as they’re concerned, when they deny sin, they are
denying reality.
The Son not only obeys the
Father, but the Son and the Father send the Holy Spirit. So what we see within
the Godhead is that there is total equality in terms of essence or being, the
fancy word is ontology or metaphysics. There is total oneness, total equality
in essence, but they have different roles.
Think about a football team. You
have two or three different athletes on a football team. I know you have higher
numbers of players, but we are just going to talk about three of them. They may
be considered to be virtually equal in their abilities as athletes, but one’s a
tight end, one is a defensive tackle, and the other is a quarterback. They are
equal in terms of members of the team and in terms of athletic ability, but
they have different roles and functions on the team. That doesn’t mean one is a
better person than the other, or one is a worse person than the other.
So you have these role
distinctions in the Godhead. So let’s summarize this.
There is nothing that would make
one superior to the other.
Because they are of metaphysical
unity, each is involved in the work of the other one. This is referred to as
economic distinctions. So they are—are you ready? Ontologically equal or
essentially equal, but they are distinct in role. That’s a pattern that you can
apply to the home. Every person in the home is in the image and likeness of God
and deserves respect and deserves to be treated as an image bearer, but each
was designed by God to play a different role and to have different functions.
The same thing applies to
government. You go to government, and government is designed to carry out
certain rulership functions, organizational
functions, and judicial functions, but it is not to be treated and abused so
that one person or one group is treated more equal than another. When you get
into elitism, which is where we have come in this country and many other
countries—this is what we got away from in the 1600s and 1700s. When you pass a
health law that applies to all the citizens, if it doesn’t apply equally to
every member of the government then you have an elitist government. And that
violates the basic principle of the Constitution.
There are clearly economic or
functional distinctions between the members of the government and citizens, but
they are to be treated equally. You don’t have a basis for that,
metaphysically, in Islam, so you’ll never, ever, be able to export Western democracy,
which grows out of this Christian idea, this idea of the Trinity.
You’ll never be able to export
that to a Muslim country. It will never, ever, ever work! It is ideologically
impossible and logically irrational. George Bush, after 9/11, said, “We are
going to export democracy to the Middle East.” I knew right away, “This man is
a fool, an absolute idiot, and he is going to do nothing but cause more
trouble,” because a bad idea has bad consequences. And that’s what we saw with
all the wars and all the problems in the first part of the 20th
century.
This is what happens, because of
sin, in marriage. You have one person who wants to dominate the other person.
The Son is submitted to the
Father. The Holy Spirit is submitted to the Son and the Father.
We look at Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image; in the
image of God He created him; male and female He created them,” so that they
are equally in the image of God. That means, in essence, every human being is
equal to every other human. That came across in the Declaration of
Independence. We are endowed by whom? By nature? We are endowed by the
government? No. We are endowed by our Creator “with
certain unalienable rights.”
If you take away the idea of a
Creator who endows rights, then you cannot talk about equality anymore. Because
when you look at the pagan mythology, whether it’s ancient Greece or Rome or
Babylon or Egypt, or whether you are talking about the modern origin myth of
Darwinian evolution, you don’t have a tool to give equality. In evolution you
don’t have equality, you have dominance; it comes out of the existential
principle of evolution, which is survival of the fittest.
It makes everything a struggle,
and whoever can dominate the other wins. We have seen the outworking of
Darwinian evolution and ideology with social Darwinism. That gave us those
wonderful people in the black uniforms and the death’s head insignia and the
death camps. They gave us the death camps in Poland and the murder of 6 million
Jews plus the Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses and a number of other political
dissenters—Polish and Russians as well. That is social Darwinism.
Since the Holocaust, Western
societies rejected social Darwinism, but there’s no logical rational
ideological basis for rejecting it. Other than—oops—it produced a bad
consequence! Well, that’s because the bad idea of Darwinism is what produced
it, not social Darwinism—that’s just the application of it. But what it tells
us is that if you take God out of the equation, and you remove the Bible, then
you don’t have a basis for talking about equality.
So when you are talking with
somebody, you say, “Well, okay. You want to talk about equal rights for women?
Okay, let’s just talk about that. Where does that concept of rights come from?”
It comes from the Declaration of Independence. Well, where did they get their
idea? Well, from the Creator. If you take away the Creator, and you take away
the Bible, where do you get the idea of talking about rights?
What’s the foundation for
talking about the fact that I have certain rights? Well, then you have to say
that they come from the government. Uh-oh, now we have a real problem, because
the government can’t be the source of our rights. Because if
the government is the source of our rights, then the government can take the
rights away from us. Now we have a real problem.
We have to talk about this and
help people think through by asking questions. That’s what Jesus did. He asked
a lot of questions. Help them think it through. Don’t just tell them what the
answers are—bang them over the head with them—but ask them questions, help them
go through the process of self-discovery. “Where do you get these ideas? Where
does that come from?”
In Christianity you have men and
women who are equal in being, essence, personhood, and humanity. But God
created them with different roles; He created them different.
The woman was created to be a
helper to the man; she has a distinct role. He’s created first; he’s the one
who is given the cultural mandate before
Eve is created. He’s the one who is told to go out and to take dominion over
the creation. So God says, “I’m going to make a helper.” Well, modern feminism
comes along and says that is a demeaning role—to be an assistant, to be a
helper; she should be the main person.
Now you have another theological
problem, because the word “helper” is not ever used of the man, but it used
many times of God. For example, Deuteronomy 33:29, “Happy are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord,
the shield of your ETZER” [the shield of your help]. God is the helper. Only the
wife and God are given that great title of being an ETZER,
a helper.
That term shows up in 1 Samuel
7:12, “EBENEZER.” EBEN is the word for stone; ETZER
is the word for help, “the rock of help.” It was a monument. When the
Philistines attacked Israel as they were having a meeting at Mizpeh, the Lord defeated them in a mighty, miraculous act;
to commemorate that, Samuel erected this stone between Mizpeh
and Shen and called it Ebenezer, which means “the
stone of God’s help.” It is a reminder that God is the One who helps us.
Psalm 70:5, “But I am poor and needy; Make haste to me, O
God! You are my help [ETZER] and my
deliverer; O Lord, do not delay.”
Psalm 121:2, “My help [ETZER] comes from the Lord.”
Our help, ETZER, again, or some form of that word. These are different
forms. Psalm 124:8, “Our help [ETZER] is in the name
of the Lord, Who made heaven and earth.”
Psalm 146:5, “Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his
help [ETZER], whose hope is in the
Lord his God.” So again and again and again we see this principle.
That’s the basis for respect and
good manners. Etiquette didn’t just pop out because it was a good idea. If you
read the origin of these things, it was designed for two things. Number one: to
give people self-discipline and restraint for the sin nature; two: to show
respect for others who are in the image and likeness of God.
So if you’re going to take the
Bible out of the classroom and out of the university, then you also have to
take out of the classroom and out of the courtroom and out of the university
everything we get from the Bible—respect for authority, individual civil
rights, rights of submission, rights of leadership; all of these things. You
can’t even talk about those things. Take everything with it—it’s okay to
murder, it’s okay to have multiple wives, it’s okay to gossip and slander, it’s
okay to be a false witness—because the only reason you can say that you can’t
do those things is because of the Bible.
We have to hold them to be
logical. Take out the Bible, take out everything you get from the Bible—from the
culture, from the courts, from law, everything else—and we will descend into
absolute anarchy.
I thought we’d get there
tonight, but we won’t. We will come back and look at this next time, in
Philippians 2.