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A GOOD DEAL FOR WHO?

How do you know when something is a good deal? When someone calls you on the telephone and offers to sell you a timeshare in a condo, how can you crank your way down through the fine print and know if it’s of benefit to you to take the plunge?

Back in June of 1998, there were many unhappy campers in the Southern Baptist denomination. They had just held their convention, and somewhere along the way in the proceedings this just-voted sentence got handed out to the press:

“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

And those 25 words — many of you recall the furor — stirred up quite a hornet’s nest. A number of people in the denomination disavowed the party plank. The media had a field day with it. And you can imagine that comedians on all sides of the aisle lit up at the opportunity. “‘Wives, submit to your husbands’? I don’t think so” was a very common response. One comedian sadly posted on his web site: “My wife has always submitted to me — she submits instructions at the beginning of each day and especially on the weekends.” When a group of Baptists threatened to opt out of the entire Southern Baptist Convention, someone put this little poem in the Internet:

“The Baptists have made it their mission, To advocate wifely submission. In Texas the wives Said, ‘Pistols or knives?’ to husbands who want such conditions.” Then the “rest of the story”: “The husbands then went to their preachers, And told them that they were quite eager, To renounce such condition Of wifely submission, To keep them from pulling the trigger.”

Well, friend, it’s always nicer when Internet battles involve some denomination other than your own . . . and I dare say, my own church has had its fair share and then some. But there’s one reality that Christians on both sides of the Southern Baptist statement have to concede: those 25 words come directly from the plain Word of God. “Submit” and “leadership” aren’t new words for the 21st century; they come right from the transcript of Ephesians chapter 5. Here’s the original:

“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

Period, case closed, film at 11. Once it’s in holy writ, there’s not a lot you can do to get out of it. I’m very thankful that in my Adventist denomination, and in our Discover Bible Course, we try so diligently to let the Bible have full authority over us. If it’s in the 66 books — that pretty much settles it.
So what do we want to do with this hard piece of Scripture? In a sense, there’s really not much “point” in a denomination voting this — it’s there in Paul’s handwriting whether we vote or not. But how do we react to these words to the saints in Ephesus?

There are a couple of realities that need to emerge as we prayerfully think about this. And this very ministry, the Voice of Prophecy, is a good example of one of them. Even in an organization made up of equals, someone needs to lead. That’s simply an organizational reality. Ten people may sit around a board room; all are relatively equal in wisdom and stature and the pay scale and so on. But when it’s time for a meeting, you always begin with the same thing: electing a chair. Somebody who may be your peer in every way is chosen to hold the gavel and interpret Robert’s Rules of Order.

We started to look at a passage yesterday from the Tyndale New Testament Commentary, and we didn’t quite finish with it. Here’s the rest of what Francis Foulkes has to say:

“The ethics of Christian relationships within the family are clear when once it is seen that difference and subordination do not in ANY SENSE imply inferiority. The submission enjoined upon the wife is of the kind that can be given only between EQUALS, not a servile obedience, but a voluntary submission in the respects in which the man was qualified by his Maker to be head.” And here’s a restating of the point we just made: “Every community must, for purposes of organization and existence, have a head. . . . This principle of submission is permanent, but its specific application may vary from age to age according to custom and social consciousness.”

A David W. Neuendorf, part of the Missouri Synod Lutheran church, wrote on the Internet in response to the 1998 controversy to defend the biblical stance taken by the Southern Baptist Convention. First of all, because these words are from the Bible. He reminds us that back just one verse, to Ephesians 5:21, husbands and wives are actually taught to submit “to each other” — I’ll read this carefully – “wives through obedience, husbands through loving their wives ‘like their own bodies.’” Then he adds this:
“They are merely passing on God’s words about how He designed the family to work. Every body needs a head; every organization needs someone who has the final authority to make decisions. In God’s plan for the family, that person is the husband and father. The husband is to model his role after that of Jesus Christ, the head of the Church. That means leading in humility, making decisions with love as his only motivation, even to the point of willingness to give his life for his family.”

There was a marvelous story in the recent Christian bestseller, The Footsteps of Jesus, written by Hollywood actor Bruce Marchiano. He played the role of Jesus in a four-hour film production back in 1993, and some of the insights he gained are just incredible. Marchiano actually walked in these Bible land settings; the actors and extras looked about like the peasants and shepherds and children did 2000 years ago. And he describes, for example, how much courage it took for Jesus to say, in that male-dominated culture, that their casual, toss-women-aside divorce rules were simply unacceptable. In the time of Christ, men could discard a wife for just about anything they pleased. “It was a convenience that more or less reduced women to a status lower than livestock,” he writes. And then he concludes:

“Along comes Jesus, who blows their self-serving hypocrisy out of the water by looking them in the eye and basically saying, ‘No, you can’t do that anymore.’ He was taking a radically unpopular stand on a sizzling hot issue, risking their misunderstanding Him to undermine the Law, saying that women are people too and that the Father loves them as much as He loves anybody, and you just can’t treat them like that and get away with it.” Then he adds this marvelous little P.S.: “Can you imagine the shock waves He must have caused that day? Can you imagine the silence that must have fallen over the crowd? Can you imagine the tension at many a supper table that evening as husbands sat stewing while their wives sat across from them grinning? Ah, what a day it must have been for the ladies!”

Much later, toward the end of the film shoot, with Calvary looming, Marchiano has a chapter titled very simply: “What a Guy!” Here the scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites were all lined up to stone a woman “taken in adultery.” You can buy the movie screenplay or you can just read the tale in John chapter 8. She’s lying there in the dust, half-dressed, ashamed, fearing for her life. Everyone is scorning her, picking up rocks. Who is it that steps in to defend? Not the man she’d been to bed with. Not a brother or a father or a friend. No.

“There’s Jesus,” Bruce writes, “a REAL man — standing heroically between that woman and the mob that wanted to kill her, with nothing to gain and everything to lose — shielding her, protecting her, loving her — being a Man to her.”

Then on the cross, with nothing but pain and hurt and rejection in His heart, what does Jesus take time to do? With almost His last gasp, He turns to His disciple John, “through the blood in His teeth,” and gives a final instruction: Take care of My mama. And Marchiano quietly concludes: “What a Guy.”

I want us all to notice that Jesus wasn’t just a chivalrous first-century gentleman who said to ladies, “Bless your heart, honey . . . let Me get the door for you.” All through God’s Word, we find Him expressing equality for both women and men, spiritual growth for both, opportunity for both, full and equal rights for both. The Adventist Bible Commentary for Ephesians makes this suggestion:

“Distinctions of sex, class, or race are not found among those who are ‘in Christ’; nevertheless, the different sexes, classes, and races each have their peculiar contribution to make to each other and to society by virtue of their differing qualities.”

Friend, may God forgive us if we’ve ever said to someone, “There’s no room for you here. No room for your talents and unique abilities.” God forgive us if we’ve ever had a low or godless concept of this ideal of “submission.”

So is God’s plan, expressed here in the fine print of Ephesians, a good deal? For the men and for the ladies . . . yes. It’s the best offer you’ll ever get.