SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/9/2019 9:03 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The
Matter of Submission”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Eph. 5:22a
Message of the verses: “Wives, be subject to your own husbands.”
I
want to begin by looking at what John MacArthur writes about “Your own
Husband.” This “suggests the intimacy
and mutuality of the wife’s submission.
She willingly makes herself ‘subject’ to the one she possesses as her
‘own husband’ (cf. 1 Cor. 7:3-4).” (“3 The husband must fulfill his duty to his wife, and
likewise also the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over
her own body, but the husband does; and likewise also the husband does
not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.”) “Husbands and wives are to have a mutual
possessiveness as well as a mutual submissiveness. They belong to each other in an absolute
equality. The husband no more possesses
his wife than she possesses him. He has
no superiority and she no inferiority, any more than one who has the gift of
teaching is superior to one with the gift of helps. A careful reading of 1 Corinthians 12:12-31
will show that God has designed every person for a unique role in the Body of
Christ, and the pervasive attitude governing all those roles and blending them
together is ‘the more excellent way’ of love (ch. 13).”
I mentioned in our last SD that
there would be a lot of quotes from MacArthur’s commentary because it is
difficult for me to condense things from his commentary, and the fact that what
he writes needs to be read that is why I have chosen to do this in this
way. I want to say that all of what we
are reading about here has the key of being filled with the Holy Spirit as I
have mentioned in earlier SD’s. Being
filled with the Holy Spirit is probably the most important thing that a
believer can do, and as we look at the roles of the husband and wife, and as we
conclude that both are believers, then if both are filled with the Holy Spirit
then their roles will be worked out just as God as planned them to be worked
out.
“As with spiritual gifts, the
distinctions of headship and submission are entirely functional and were
ordained by God. As a consequence of
Eve’s disobedience of God’s command and her failure to consult with Adam about
the serpent’s temptation, God told her, ‘Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you’ (Gen. 3:16).
The desire spoken of here is not sexual or psychological, both of which
Eve had for Adam before the Fall as his specially created helper. It is the same desire spoken of in the next
chapter, where the identical Hebrew word (t’shuqa) is used. The term comes from an Arabic root that means
to compel, impel, urge, or seek control over.
The Lord warned Cain, ‘Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to
have you [that is, control you’, but you must master it’ (4:7, NIV; emphasis
added). Sin wanted to master Cain, but
God commanded Cain to master sin. In
light of this close context meaning of t’shuqa, therefore, the curse on
Eve was that woman’s desire would henceforth be to usurp the place of man’s
headship and that he would resist that desire and would rule over her. The Hebrew word here for ‘rule’ is not the
same as that used in 1:28. Rather it
represented a new, despotic kind of authoritarianism that was not in God’s
original plan for man’s headship.
“With the Fall and its curse came
distortion of woman’s proper submissiveness and of man’s proper authority. That is where the battle of the sexes began, where women’s liberation and male
chauvinism came into existence. Women have a sinful inclination
to usurp man’s authority and men have a sinful inclination to put women under
their feet. The divine decree
that man would rule over women in this way was part of God’s curse on humanity,
and it takes a manifestation of grace in Christ by the filling of the Holy
Spirit to restore the created order and harmony of proper submission in a
relationship that has become corrupted and disordered by sin.”
Spiritual meaning for my life
today: In order for me to be the
husband, father, and grandfather that God wants me to be I must continually be
filled with the Holy Spirit.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Continue
to study the meaning of being filled with the Spirit and thus be humble.
Today’s quotation
comes from John Harvard of Harvard University who states “Let every student be
plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well. The main ends of his life and studies; to
know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ
in the bottom as the only foundation of all knowledge and learning and see that
the Lord only giveth wisdom.”
8/9/2019
10:14 AM
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