Being a Daughter of Eve in a Ruling Household

This is the eighth part of Chapter 2 in the unfinished Book: The Ruling Household.
Here are links to The Intro and the seventh part of Chapter 2.

The Female Battle with Deception

OK, here we are.

I’ve been dreading writing this section ever since I saw it in the outline.

In the past, I found ways to conveniently bypass speaking too directly on issues related to women. “I only write to fathers.” I say, “What do I know about being a woman?”

But this project is about going step-by-step through each Scriptures relevant to the household so it’s time to jump on the landmine lurking in Genesis 3.

What is that landmine?

It’s the original sin of the woman and its aftermath.

We’ve looked at the passivity and abdication of responsibility of the man and now we need to look squarely at what the story tells us about the pattern of sin women are uniquely vulnerable to.

Keep in mind that Scripture is not prematurely casting a sentence on every individual woman. But the Bible is pointing out a chink in the armor that is significant enough that our households must be designed to defend against this problem.

And that problem is that our Enemy is an expert at deceiving women.

Eve had a conversation with a serpent and bought what the serpent was selling.

And in case anyone thinks the Genesis 3 narrative is just telling us about the struggle of one woman instead of women in general, we know that Paul used this theme in the story as part of the curriculum he used to train churches. 

He reminds Timothy of this point when he made the statement that may be the hardest one for our Western ears to hear, “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.” (1 Timothy 2:11-15 ESV)

Our purpose here is not to attempt an exhaustive study of each Greek word in this passage or to consider the implication for church offices. We are here to understand the implications for a ruling household and in that consideration there is one word I’d like to quibble with: the translation of the word “woman”. 

In Greek, the word “woman” (gyne) is the Greek for “wife”. When translators are not sure if the context is wives or all women they tend to choose to err on the side of translating the word more broadly.

Now, I don’t know what was in Paul’s mind here but the illustration he used to underscore his point was not about women and men generally but about a specific wife and husband (Eve and Adam).

So we are going to consider what this passage means in the context of family.

The idea that wives should be in submission to their husbands and should not exercise authority over them is consistent throughout Paul’s teaching and is explicitly stated in Genesis 3 as a response to Eve’s deception, “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16 ESV)

We know Adam was standing there when Eve ate the fruit and that according to Paul, Adam was not deceived. Why then did Adam choose to sin? We can only speculate but one possibility that must be considered based on God’s response and the lesson Paul is taking from this event is that Adam wasn’t entirely clear whether he had the authority to stop her and that this confusion caused him to choose to join her.

God even says to Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree” (Genesis 3:17 ESV). God expected Adam to not listen to her or follow her into sin. He was supposed to stand up to her. He needed to know he was responsible to lead her and that this responsibility necessarily included the authority to lead his family. So God clarifies the nature of the husband and wife relationship and gives explicit authority to the husband specifically for those occasions when her desire is contrary to his.

The purpose of this authority is rooted, not in the fallacious idea that men or husbands have more value than women but in the mandate given to the husband to protect his wife and his family as a whole from the deception of the Enemy.

There are two tools that Scripture explicitly prescribes to respond to this problem: studying the Bible with your spouse and childbearing.

Tool: Study the Bible with your Spouse

What does it mean to be a husband?

One of the things I love about the Bible is that we can get authoritative answers to these critical questions.

Listen to how Paul answers this question in his letter to the Ephesians, 

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:25-28)

We love to talk about love. We think we know what love means. Here we’re given, not only a command to love but also a detailed description of what love in the context of marriage looks like.

Christ loves by giving himself and by cleansing his bride through “the washing of water with the word”.

Is that a normal part of marriage?

We talk about these love languages: serving, gift giving, quality time, words of affirmation, and physical touch but what groom is prepared on day one to begin the process of washing his wife through the word?

This appears to be a command to husbands to study the Bible with their wives.

Have you ever heard of this command being enforced in the church?

Is there an obvious expectation among the Christian married men in your circle that they are initiating Bible reading and study with their wives?

How can we help fathers fulfill this command?

First, husbands must strive to stay a step ahead of their wives in their understanding of Scripture. We do this, not by keeping our wives back, but by participating in a special Bible study led by teachers designed to equip fathers.

In our community, there’s an expectation that fathers participate in a separate Bible study that over time will give them a comprehensive understanding of the whole scope of the Scriptures. This began for us when we took seriously the command Paul gives to “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Timothy 4:13 ESV)

In the first century, and in Orthodox Jewish circles today, men are commanded to gather for the public reading of the Torah on the Sabbath. This must have been the reading Paul was insisting his churches remained devoted to. It’s this reading and the open discussion (what we call midrash) that follows that serves to level up the fathers so they are increasingly prepared to lead their families in Bible study and to “wash their wives through the water of the word”.

Last Winter we were hosting five families in an Orlando home and when the Sabbath arrived all the men gathered in the front driveway for the public Scripture reading and discussion. At the same time, in the homes all around us, Jewish men were gathering for their Torah reading. It just happened that a Jewish group was hosting an annual gathering in the houses of that same neighborhood. On that block, there must have been over a hundred men studying the Scriptures in different groups. There wasn’t a female in sight but what was being done was for the sake of our wives and children. We get up early and study the Scriptures as fathers so we can become better and better at fulfilling our responsibilities to lead our families in studying the Word.

Tool: A Wife-Oriented Toward the Home

Another way for the daughters of Eve to overcome the deceiver is through a homeward orientation.

But our culture has a growing hatred for the home.

One of the weirdest policy debates happening in recent years is the drive to make paternity leave equal to maternity leave.

Now let me say that if your workplace offers lengthy paternity leave please take full advantage of this perk.

But no one who takes the Biblical design of the household can think they are the same.

I coach fathers who own their businesses and in this context, I encourage fathers and mothers to have very different orientations toward the newborn season.

Husbands must be available to care for their wives as she recovers but in an ideal world, a new mother would be transferred to the care of her mother and sisters while the husband goes out to expand his family’s footprint financially especially now that his family has grown numerically.

Every time one of our children was born my wife and I had opposite reactions in terms of our orientation. 

She wanted to nest, I wanted to build.

The reason a husband experiences even more motivation to provide as his family grows is to ensure his wife can have the freedom to fully focus her attention on the home.

Our modern world pits husbands and wives against each other assuming both suffer from a lack of individual identity that must be fulfilled through career success outside the home. The ancient household was exactly the opposite. In the ancient household both the husband and wife rooted their deepest identity in their familial roles and sought to maximize living through their family identity.

But part of what it means for a husband to serve his wife is to allow her the ability to fully live into her family identity first both for her sake and for the sake of their young, vulnerable children.

One of the consequences of preparing for and then living into this homeward orientation is her narrow focus which is part of what makes her more susceptible to deception.

Once the family is blessed with children fathers must go out to where provision for the family can best be secured and then work his way back closer to the home as he succeeds.

The sheer amount of time he spends in the broader world makes him more immune to deception. He simply has had more practice.

Mothers move in the opposite direction. They begin cultivating the household from the center of the home out and as the kids grow especially as the youngest children enter adulthood she moves outward where the mother and father meet and spend their final decades working in sync to strengthen the expanding family. (see diagram below)

What this means is that fathers and mothers mature and are discipled by different elements of household building.

Fathers primarily learn through their struggle out in the world to provide for the household.

Mothers primarily learn through their struggle to bear and raise young children for the household.

Thus Paul’s statement, “she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control” (1 Timothy 2:15 ESV). The word “saved” I take to mean the saving process of sanctification. Paul is taking this principle from Genesis 3:16 “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” The repeated process of having children is her pathway to growth.

To the husbands God gives work as the way of his growth, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:19 ESV).

Both the husband and the wife must accept the challenge God has provided for our transformation without comparing or envying one another’s growth path.

But this homeward orientation given to mothers requires training. We shouldn’t expect a new wife and mother to magically understand how to handle all of these challenges and so Paul commands, “Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.” (Titus 2:3-5 ESV)

The outward-in movement of the father and the inward-out movement of the mother provides the perfect balance to build the kind of household God has designed.

One of the challenges, however, is that while the wife and mother is focused on household building the enemy will try to deceive her and her vulnerability to these attacks is due in part to her lack of experience with the ways of the world. The Deceiver may hijack her maternal compassion to cause her to develop views that work great within the scale of a household but backfire when applied to a large, disconnected population.

Media platforms, political campaigns, and widespread social movements have conspired in recent years to weaponize maternal compassion to acquire more power.

This has created a vicious cycle where certain special interest groups depend on deceived women and so they attack motherhood to grow their female-dominated activist base of power.

But God’s design was to cover areas of female weakness with male strength and areas of male weakness with female strength.

As long as these roles are honored within a united marriage it’s a win/win.

C.S. Lewis wrote about the implications of female homeward orientation in Mere Christianity, 

“The relations of the family to the outer world - what might be called foreign policy - must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress?”

I don’t want my wife to be objective. I want my wife to be free to be 100% for Team Pryor. This then gives me the freedom to go out into the world and maximize the effectiveness of our ruling household.

(Painting Credit: Adam and Eve 1928 Edvard Munch)