Men, Women, and Marriage, yeah, AGAIN

This year has been inundated with learning about God's design for men and women. At church, we studied John Piper's "What's the Difference? Manhood and Womanhood Defined According to the Bible." in Sunday School for about six months. I read Tim Keller's The Meaning of Marriage. I also read Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship and Life Together. This summer, I read Girls Gone Wise in a World Gone Wild by Mary Kassian; this was for a youth girls bible study. Finally, now, I'm studying True Woman 101 by Mary Kassian and Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

I'm not going to lie. The fact that I'm studying these topics over and over is starting to get a little old. I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about how God designed us as men and women, uniquely in our sexual identity, and how we were created for relationships. I've thought about how marriage is a picture that represents the trinity in a uniquely special way. But at the same time, I'm not weary of it. I've never heard this stuff before. I grew up in a household where I understood the physical differences between girls and boys, but my Dad never implied we were less than boys. In fact, I felt like I could do whatever I wanted to do, have a career in whatever I pursued, and not be limited by my feminine status. So it was almost a feminist household. The only weird thing was that my mom was really my servant. She did teach me that I wasn't supposed to flirt with boys and that I wasn't supposed to even look at boys. I might as well have worn a burqa. It was a childhood that was strangely patriarchal in some ways, but strangely feminist in other ways.

In the True Woman lesson last week, we talked about Proverbs 7 and Proverbs 8 where it lists the qualities of a woman who is foolish, and then the qualities in wisdom. Compare:

With much seductive speech she persuades him;
  with her smooth talk she compels him.
All at once he follows her,
  as an ox goes to the slaughter,
or as a stag is caught fast
  till an arrow pierces its liver;
as a bird rushes into a snare;
  he does not know that it will cost him his life.
(Proverbs 7:21-23 ESV)

Take my instruction instead of silver,
  and knowledge rather than choice gold,
for wisdom is better than jewels,
  and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.
(Proverbs 8:10-11 ESV)

Mary Kassian and Nancy Leigh Demoss discuss how much they disliked God's design for womanhood earlier in their lives. I wonder, for those that proclaim Christianity later in their lives, how do they embrace these types of ideas - that woman is created to be a helper (Gen 2:18)? That woman was created to complement man, and that's why she was created out of Adam's rib (Gen 2:22-23)? That man was the leader, and we know this because he was the one that named all of the animals, and he was the one that received the instruction from the Lord on which tree to avoid (Gen 2:16, 2:19) I know that I have softened towards the idea of women being uniquely created, for a purpose, to complement a man (her husband). I am starting to soften towards the idea that the feminist movement really goes against God's design. This is in spite of the fact that  I do believe that there were a few good things that came out of the feminist movement - like the ability for woman to be able to vote and the ability for a woman's ideas to be heard. But as in many other movements, once an idea bears fruit, it also gets turned into something more than it ever intended to be. These wacky ideas include: women should be allowed to sleep around with any man (from Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl); women were unfulfilled in their roles as wives and mothers (Betty Friedan); and that women should really become the man they want to marry (Gloria Steinem). These ideas come from what we used to refer to as the women's lib movement. Now it's called feminism.

My friend Dana said this amazing thing, and I'm paraphrasing: "Rather than embracing the idea that our status as women is because of the sin of all of us, we fell prey to sin and blamed the opposite sex for all that ails us." Ultimately, I think how we feel about these truths from the Bible comes back to how God has softened our hearts to hear His word, and how much time we really spend studying it, praying about it, and fellowshipping with others about it.