Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
To turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians, chapter 11. If you don't have a Bible and you're visiting with us, awesome. We always have Bibles at all the entrance points across all of our sites. So at Surrey, at Coquitlam, Langley, North Langley, South Calgary, always there are Bibles on your way into those different sites. And so please grab those. Or you can download an app, the U version of the Bible or whatever, have it on your phone, bring your iPad or whatever. Take notes. Especially on a day like today.
Mark Clark [00:00:31]:
Today gets a technical. It's a crazy passage. And so it's gonna blow our minds a little bit, especially if you're kind of visiting and exploring Christianity and you have no understanding of kind of the Bible or what it talks about. This text today says some crazy, wacky stuff. So we're gonna get into. I'm gonna read it to you, and then I'll try to explain it to the best of my ability. I've literally read hundreds of pages of commentary this week to figure out what Paul's actually talking about. Cause is he actually saying what it sounds like he's saying? If is he actually saying.
Mark Clark [00:01:05]:
So anyway, hopefully you're ready and you got coffee in you and whatever, and you're not all, you know, mopey Canadian nonsense. Okay, First Corinthians, chapter 11. Let me read the whole text for you, and then I'll explain, kind of some setup and then get into it. So he says this chapter 11. So we only got five chapters left in First Corinthians. Masterclass. Amazing. He says.
Mark Clark [00:01:25]:
Now, I commend you starting in verse two, because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I deliver them to you. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven. For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it's disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he's the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man.
Mark Clark [00:02:21]:
Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head. Because of the angels, huh? Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman. For as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. Thanks, Paul. Contradicting yourself in four verses. Love you, and all things are from God. Judge for yourselves.
Mark Clark [00:02:50]:
Great. Is it proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered? All right, so what in the world is going on? Here's the thing before you leave, all right, before you just get up and stomp out of church and go, I thought Christianity was gonna. Just hear me out for a second. Because sometimes we do that, right? We rush to conclusions. We kind of. We rush to things too quickly. We jump the gun on stuff in life in general. I was out with a couple.
Mark Clark [00:03:15]:
My wife and I took a couple out we'd never been out with on Friday night for dinner. We're hanging out, having dinner, and I was getting along with them. They were great. The first few minutes were great. Having some laughs, just getting along. And then like, an hour in, I'm like, we should go to napping together. All right? And all of a sud. My wife's like, dude, chill out.
Mark Clark [00:03:32]:
Like, bring it down. And the whole kind of conversation stopped. Like, wow, this guy is, you know, really jumping ahead of the gun here. We don't even know each other, and all of a sudden now we're vacationing together. So that can happen. All right? We jump the gun. And here's what we gotta understand. Don't jump the gun.
Mark Clark [00:03:46]:
Hear me out. Hear out the text. And maybe by the time we're done, we can understand a little bit of what the Apostle Paul is trying to deal with. So let me set the context this way. First time I ever walked into a church, of course, I was to actually attend and start going. I was 19, as I've shared with. But when I was about 10 years old, someone had invited me into a church service, and it was the only one I'd ever gone to before. I ended up going to church when I was 19.
Mark Clark [00:04:10]:
And I remember walking in and there were this kind of woman's section, man section. And all the women had these head coverings on and weren't really talking. They weren't saying anything. And I was like, why are they wearing head coverings? This is crazy. And I got scared, and I never went back. And so there's this question. I look out here and I see none of the women have head coverings on. And.
Mark Clark [00:04:29]:
And so there's this question we have to deal with. Have we become kind of liberal and lax and compromised with culture and, you know, we're not. Because we're not being biblical anymore? Or is it legitimate that you actually don't have head coverings on because there's some other things going on in the text? So that's what we're gonna talk about. And so let me set the stage by giving you a bit of context, because almost. Here's the problem with this passage. Almost every verse of it is controversial, which is why I had to read hundreds of pages of commentary to figure out what the heck's going on. Almost every verse the Greek is controversial. Let me give you a couple of examples, just so you can understand.
Mark Clark [00:05:04]:
He says in verse three, but I want you to understand that the head, right, he uses this word. It's the word kephele. In the Greek, the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. So he uses head, head, and. Okay, kephele. So here's the problem. Greek scholars point out that kephele could mean authority or ruler over, as you would kind of expect it, or it could mean source of. It could mean not necessarily kind of an ontological rulership or authority, but a chronological source of this came before that and gave birth to that.
Mark Clark [00:05:41]:
Well, obviously, then that changes the meaning. Another example. Cause the Greek word kephela can have, you know, four different meanings. This phrase, okay, all the way through it, he uses this phrase here, wife. Okay? So he talks about wife, and then he talks about husband in the Greek. Okay? So the problem is, in the Greek, this is the word ande, and this is the word gune. Now, what you bump into is gune. And ande could mean wife and husband, or it could just mean man or woman in general.
Mark Clark [00:06:14]:
You have to decide what the Greek word means based on the context. So in this passage, of course, it changes the meaning. Is he talking about women in general need to in some way look at men in general as a kind of authority, as people have interpreted. There's a very traditional version of the interpretation of this passage that basically says that women in general need to kind of walk around and be author, which to me, it seems. I mean, I've been in seeing churches, I worked at a church years ago, where they talk about a guy who came in. He was the guy who wrote a lot of commentaries. And he came in and he came into staff meeting, and he said, no, all the women in the staff meeting need to leave because they can't hold any kind of leadership in a church or whatever. And so literally, they can't have any kind of authority over me as a man in general.
Mark Clark [00:07:00]:
So literally, those are just two of literally probably eight different things in this text that are problematic. What does he mean by covering? Why one minute does he argue in the whole passage that women need to have head coverings in church? And then at the end of the passage of verse 13, 40, 50, 16, he says, by the way, your hair is your covering, so don't worry about it. What? All right, so we have to try to get into all the. And I'm gonna try to not get too technical with you, because here's what one person said. He said, this is the most complex, controversial, and opaque of any text in the New Testament. I love my job. All right, okay, great. So I'm dealing with one of the most difficult texts in the whole New Testament, and I gotta do it in 37 minutes.
Mark Clark [00:07:46]:
All right, so welcome to Village Church. Glad you're here. I'm about to say some crazy things. First off is context. Okay? So we have to understand context. What Paul is about. What Paul is doing in this text is he is. There's no way around it.
Mark Clark [00:08:01]:
He is calling out women. Now, the reality is it's really weird to read texts to call out women because we don't tend to call out women. All right? In our modern context, we're afraid to call women out for a plethora of reasons. But we tend not to. Like, the Bible has all these moments, and the church has these moments where they call men out, right? Which we'll do in a few minutes, which is legitimate. We need to call men on the table. Repent of sin. Stop.
Mark Clark [00:08:25]:
Knock off your nonsense. Da, da, da, da. You're being a joke. You're being a gog show. You need to get some responsibility. We do all that all the time. That's every third week in Village. But we tend not to, in our modern culture, call women out for their stuff.
Mark Clark [00:08:38]:
But we really can't get around it. This is what the Apostle Paul is doing. It is a corrective text. Now, what I mean by that. And sometimes. And you can interpret as you want, whether Paul overcooks the correction or not, but he is correcting them. And so that's why he's so jacked up. He's not just coming in and saying, let me give you theology and doctrine in a vacuum.
Mark Clark [00:08:57]:
It would be like, so if I was to sit my daughters down, I got three daughters, 12, 10, and 8, if I was to sit them down and talk about boys, here's how we're gonna find function with boys, girls. And I was doing it totally hypothetical, just in a vacuum. Let's go through some doctrine about how you're gonna function with boys. It would have a particular tone, it would have a particular angle. It would have a particular strength to it. Here's how you're gonna function with boys. Now, if, on the other hand, I came home one day and there was a boy in my house that I did not approve to be there, all right, that's gonna be a corrective conversation. It's gonna be like, here's how we function with boys.
Mark Clark [00:09:33]:
All right? It's gonna be different, right? Same words. Here's how we function with boys, or here's how we function with boys now. All right? And then the lists of hat. Because I'd be correcting a mistake that they made, which is what literally is what Paul's dealing with. He's not just giving vacuous doctrine. He's actually correcting something that they had done wrong. Now, what were the things? Why does he spend the time correcting? Because of two things. Cultural understanding.
Mark Clark [00:10:00]:
We gotta understand the cultural context. The first understanding is this culture worshiped a female goddess. It was in Corinth. And they had. Imagine in your brain. You live in Corinth. It's a city. And instead of masculine deities, instead of a whole movement of men who have power and authority, you have women who have power and authority.
Mark Clark [00:10:22]:
They worship the goddess Isis at a temple. And you go in and you worship her. And there's sex cults around her. And everything is about the female movement and progression. And there was a movement of female power and authority where women started to actually leave their families, leave their children, leave their husbands. Say, we're not having sex anymore. We are going to leave all of our responsibilities. Nobody has authority over us.
Mark Clark [00:10:49]:
We can just live these kind of esoteric lives and do whatever we want. And what they were doing is I was seeping into the church, so much so that when they started speaking, they would just start going, we don't care about any kind of authority. We don't care about people telling us what to do. We have no respect or honor for anybody. We'll just say whatever we want. And they started prophesying in the church. And so it would be like me talking right now. And all of a sudden, a woman stands up, she goes, hey, Tom, I think God's telling me you should leave your spouse and actually go to Another spouse and another woman.
Mark Clark [00:11:20]:
Yes, yes, yes. And there's four women who kind of got it. And then they sat down. And then I said, okay, thanks. Chill out. We'll talk about that later. And then I started talking. And a minute later, another woman, hey, Joe, I think you should sell your Porsche and give it to the Village 2021 campaign.
Mark Clark [00:11:33]:
I'd say, yes. Amen. All right, that's great. This lady's legit. All right. That's what I. That's what. And then, and then, and then, and then someone else would pop up to me and say, hey, Sarah, I think you should leave your job as a nurse because the Lord told me that you need.
Mark Clark [00:11:46]:
This is what was happening. It was disrupting everything. Which is why later in chapter 14, he has this crazy passage where he says that women can't speak in church. And the point of that is not some general principle that women are not allowed to speak in church across the ages. In 2019, in every church in every country, he's saying, in Corinth, ladies, cut it out. Stop the yapping. Shut your mouths. Because what are you doing? You're going.
Mark Clark [00:12:13]:
Yeah. You're creating chaos and disorder. You're prophesying all over the place. You have no authority, no respect for anybody. You need to calm down. So understand. He's trying to correct something that they've actually done wrong. Now, here's the other thing that was wrong.
Mark Clark [00:12:29]:
There was something called an over realized eschatology, what scholars call eschatology, which the word eschatology means end things, the study of last things, or end times. And what they thought was because Christianity was true and because the Holy Spirit had arrived, that meant that it was basically like everybody was already in heaven. It was like we were angels, ergo. And this is a very kind of cultural modern point that we'll talk about at the end. They thought, let's just deconstruct all genders. There are no genders anymore. There's no male or female in Christ Jesus anymore. Everybody's the same.
Mark Clark [00:13:02]:
There's no roles anymore. There's no distinctions between gender. It just is what it is. Because heaven's arrived, the Holy Spirit has arrived, Christ has set us free, and so all of us are free just to be and do what we want. And Paul writes into those two contexts to say, no, no, no, no, hold on. You can't just be yelling and screaming. It's like when he gets over the next month, we're gonna be dealing with some very interesting things. This summer's gonna be crazy.
Mark Clark [00:13:24]:
Because now he turns in chapter 11 to all this prophecy, supernatural healing, tongues, all this crazy stuff. And spiritual gifts is part of that. And what he's trying to do is people are like, well, I have a spiritual gift. I'll just use it whenever I want. And he's saying, no, there's order. Even in the context of the gathering of the church, there's order. You can't just. Because, like, I've been preaching before, and people have gone, I'm a prophet and I have a word for the church.
Mark Clark [00:13:48]:
It's like, dude, shut up. I'm doing that right now. People, just because you have the gift of giving doesn't mean you run up during the 30 minutes I'm talking and start throwing money. I mean, I wouldn't mind it, but start throwing money on the stage, all right? It's like, have a place of order for your gifts. Just because you have the gift of helps doesn't mean you start coming up here, putting chairs down on the stage. In this 35 minutes that I'm talking, there's order, there's humility, there's respect for what's going on in the context of the service. And those are the two things Paul's trying to hit. He's trying to say, let me correct something that has become chaotic in your church.
Mark Clark [00:14:24]:
So you've gotta know that as you go into this text. Cause he's not just explaining. Explaining stuff for the sake of explaining it. Okay? So he's dealing with this chaos that has come from the dissolution of genders and from the female worship. Now, how does he then argue? He wants to say, be humble, realize it's a cultural norm. So he's gonna argue from culture, and then he's gonna argue from the Bible. So verse four says this. First thing we gotta understand.
Mark Clark [00:14:49]:
Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven. Now, here's the beautiful part about this. Every wife or woman, however you interpret that, I'm gonna go with wife. Cause I think it makes more sense, the context. I'll explain in a second. Who prays or prophesies? Right there. This is beautiful.
Mark Clark [00:15:10]:
The fact that Paul's affirming in a culture where women had no education, where women were seen as sex objects, wives to produce babies or prostitutes. Those were your two options. He looks at them and says, how brilliant is this? Women in Church can pray and prophesy. They are gifted as leaders and they have prophetic vision and they can hear from God and say, this is what I have for you. This is what the Lord's saying. He's looking at them. This is the beautiful progression in a culture, in a patriarchal culture that would have just said women aren't allowed to do anything in the context of church. He's saying you can pray and prophesy.
Mark Clark [00:15:52]:
You can. This is brilliant. My wives, My wife. Not my wife. Sorry, all right, my wife. That would be a lot of work and very confusing. My wife and my daughters, they speak this kind of stuff into my life all the time. Dad, this is what God has for you, all right? This is what God's telling you.
Mark Clark [00:16:13]:
This is what you should do, Hun, they prophesy into my life all the time. It's brilliant. My wife actually has this gift. She can discern spirits, discern people out, and then speak into their life with only spending a few minutes with them. She can sense, she knows she has this gift. All right? We share this gift. I have this ability as well. This is why.
Mark Clark [00:16:31]:
How many times have you come to church, heard me speak on something and say, actually God was speaking directly to me. How many times does that happen to you in church? It's because there's a gift set called prophecy, where you're not foretelling the future. You're forth telling the word of God into people's lives and saying, here's what it has to do with you. My wife, if you get around her, she can exegete you in five minutes. She knows this man. I'm sure he did this. This woman, she's hiding this. Don't look my wife in the eye, bro.
Mark Clark [00:16:57]:
I'm just telling you she will pick your life apart and tell me later and two years later it will come out as true. Guaranteed. Right? This is just who she is. It's beautiful. So I have wives, wife. I have daughters and a wife. Sorry, I got Mormonism on my brain. I'll explain that in a second.
Mark Clark [00:17:15]:
I have all. So you got these women who can actually do these awesome things, speak God's word. And he's saying the reality is genders. It's not about one gender being better than the other. He says that in verse 11 that all genders are equal, which was crazy in that culture. Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor man independent of woman. For woman was made from man. So man is now born of woman.
Mark Clark [00:17:40]:
And so he's basically saying we're not dependent. We're not interdependent. We're actually interdependent. We need one another. There's total equality. And it's beautiful when women in the context of the church, do their thing. Okay? That's issue number one. It's beautiful.
Mark Clark [00:17:55]:
It sets people free all through history. So when skeptics push back on Christianity and they say, I can't believe how negative on women they are, you look back to the culture and you gotta understand they have liberated women in every culture that they've actually been in, including our own, and continue to all around the world. It affirms. It's Acts, chapter two. The Spirit drops of Pentecost. And it says, your young men and young women will dream dreams. They will prophesy, they will speak, they will do amazing things. This is the point.
Mark Clark [00:18:24]:
And he's saying men and women together actually accomplish this. Okay, second major issue, come back to the question of the wife and the. And the headship. Okay? But I want you to understand that the kefele of every man is Christ, the kefele of a wife. So I think, first off, we gotta deal with this question of a woman or a wife. What does he mean? And I think what makes most sense is he's talking about wife. And that's how esv, the Bible we use, they translate through the passage. They translate a wife instead of woman in general because.
Mark Clark [00:18:59]:
And it makes more sense of what Paul's trying to say, because he's not trying to say that women in general have to have as an authority over them or a headship over them. Men in general. That becomes weird. It means my daughters and wife need to be. Honor every man in culture, which is great. They can honor them, but they don't. Those men don't have a third authority over them. The only time that actually happens, if it is the case is in the context of marriage.
Mark Clark [00:19:24]:
So I think wives are the better way of actually talking about this. It's a husband and wife issue. Now. People later on say, well, no, he can't be talking about husband and wife. He's talking about men and women in general because he says, he keeps using this. He keeps using Adam and Eve for man was not made from woman. And he's going, adam and Eve, Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve. Which means he's talking about men and women in general because Adam and Eve were the paradigmatic man and woman.
Mark Clark [00:19:50]:
That's not true necessarily. It's that Adam and Eve were also the paradigmatic what? First married couple. Right. So Adam was the first husband, Eve was the first wife. And so what he's trying to do is he's trying to say, and now here's. Here's what I think is a more clear way of understanding why I think this is marriage and not women and men in general. Head coverings were a sign that you were making married in first century Corinthian culture. So what you had is you would either have long hair or shaved hair that was down and no head covering as you walked around, or you, or you went to worship services and pagan religions or whatever, you would walk around town and when you got married, you'd wear a head covering.
Mark Clark [00:20:31]:
It was a sign that you were off the market. It was a sign that you were married and that you had a husband and that you weren't looking for a husband. So here's what one writer says. A married woman who uncovered her head in public would have brought shame to her husband. The action may have connoted sexual availability or may simply have been a sign of being unmarried. So that's the idea. So bottom line is, do women have to wear head coverings in the church in 2019 in Canada? No. Yay.
Mark Clark [00:21:03]:
Praise God. You're all in the will of God. Why though? Why? Because head coverings in a culture that don't, they don't mean that you don't need to wear them. So now ask the question. Okay, but what's a similar principle to today's culture? And what it would be, is a wedding ring, for instance, or acting in such a way that when you get married, you actually show that you're married, that you're off the market, so that when you gather in the church, you're actually showing, hey, I have fidelity in the context of my marriage. I'm not just out there acting like a single person. It would be like this, Listen, my wife gets hit on by guys, okay? It happens. And when it happens, there's one of two things she can do.
Mark Clark [00:21:45]:
She can do what she does, which is, ha ha, comes home, tells me about it, we have a good laugh, we move on with life. But what if my wife, when she got hit on by a guy, is like, just put. Takes her wedding ring off and hides it and just goes, hey, don't worry. We just flirted a little bit, we hung out, I gave him my number, it's all cool. Don't worry about it. That would be dishonoring to me, her husband. And so he's saying, women who have overcooked this feminine worship, you are beginning to act like you're not even married anymore. You're beginning to act like you don't have kids.
Mark Clark [00:22:18]:
And you're bringing that into the church. And you're beginning to say, hey, nobody can tell me what to do. I can do whatever I want. I can leave all my responsibility. And so he says, no, no, no, no. The freedom in Christ that you have in Christ in the Spirit, doesn't let you be whatever you want, Be whoever you want to be. Which is why we've already heard this in chapter one, in chapter eight and nine, he says, you can have knowledge. That's great, but love is what matters.
Mark Clark [00:22:39]:
Which is why First Corinthians 13, the passage we read at weddings all the time, is gonna come right in the heart of this passage. Cause he's saying what matters in the church is actually loving, not just saying, I have some liberty. I can do whatever I want. Which is why already in chapter seven, he has said, a woman does not even a man does not have authority over his own body. The minute he gets married, his wife owns his body. And then he also says, women do not have authority over their own body. The minute she gets married, the husband owns her body as well, which is beautiful. So our culture goes, oh, my goodness, I can't believe someone would say that.
Mark Clark [00:23:10]:
And all the men in our culture goes, thank God that's in the Bible. Because when you get married, there's something about you that dies. Your pure autonomy dies. And now you exist to love and serve the other person. So I think my deduction is, after studying this all week, is I think wife is a good translation. I think he's talking about the family relationship, not women and men in general, because head coverings were a sign that you were married. It wasn't just a generic sign of going about life. It's a marriage thing.
Mark Clark [00:23:45]:
And he's saying, be very careful to make sure that you show the world that you're married and that you're actually faithful to your husband in the context of life. Now. Now we get into something that's a little sketchy. He says, the kephele. The head, the head, the head. Okay, so what does this mean? It could mean source of meaning. Adam kind of was the source of Eve, and Eve came out of his side, which I think he's talking about Adam and Eve, and he's using it to apply it. But I actually think, as I studied this, it probably does mean authority over.
Mark Clark [00:24:16]:
And the reason I say that is because there's 50 examples in the Greco Roman world, all Greek Literature that use the word kephele and every single time, it never means source of, it always means authority over. Colossians chapter two is an example. Christ is the head of the church. He's the kefele of the church. It's not just the source of. He's actually the authority over. There's a rulership. And so I think what He's.
Mark Clark [00:24:42]:
We'll park here for a sec. Because literally what he's saying is that wives are to be under the authority of their husbands. Now, why is he saying this? For a couple reasons. The first one is less popular, so we'll get it out of the way, which is this. God designed the family for this. He designed it like this. That men, that husbands, not men in general, but husbands, would have authority over their families. Now, you could interpret that as 51, 49%.
Mark Clark [00:25:14]:
You could say, great, you can be the head, I'll be the neck. I'll turn you however I want. Whatever you wanna do with that. The reality is people don't like that teaching. I understand people would leave the church, maybe over it. That's fine. Listen, my job, at the end of the day, I need to be. It is more important to me to be faithful to God in the best way that I can understand the Scriptures than to have a big church, period.
Mark Clark [00:25:39]:
It's more important. And so as I read the text, I begin to realize there's this principle that God built the family. And he says in the context of the family, there needs to be leadership, even if it's 51 49%. And so he says the husband plays the role of the kephele over the wife or the family. It's not a distinction. In essence, it's not talking about a husband is smarter or better or that's dumb. That's never what it meant. Never talks about essence in the same way that Christ.
Mark Clark [00:26:09]:
He's talking about the head of Christ is God. Well, we believe that Christ, in regard to essence, is equal with God. It's talking about different roles. He's not saying Christ is less than God in some kind of ontological way, some metaphysical way. He's talking about the fact that in the context of roles, there's a headship that happens in the context of the home. That's how Aaron and I work. The end of the day, my wife's smarter than me, stronger than me, better at me than most things. But at the end of the day, Even if it's 51, 49%, she looks at me and goes, look, at the end of the day.
Mark Clark [00:26:44]:
Your responsibility for the Lord, for our family, man. Like, if you say, hey, God's calling me to do this or do that, or move there or move here, whatever you're calling me, then that's what happens, all right? And you're responsible. So here's what the text is trying to say. It's beautiful. Cause it looks into the culture that would let all of you guys just stay addicted to porn, watch Wedding crashers all day, abuse your families, have no contribution to society at all. Just remain in your PJs till you're full 40, living at home, and it looks at you and goes, prepare yourself for leadership. Because when men, you gotta. You gotta lead your families.
Mark Clark [00:27:22]:
You gotta show your kids that you pray. You gotta pray for and with your kids. Study the Scriptures in front of your kids. You need to show your kids that you give, that you're generous, that you serve, that Jesus matters to you. And every psychologist on the psychological planet will tell you that for good or ill, the role of the father to their children and family defines so much of whether a kid survives and flourishes or not. So what he's saying is, husbands lead well, be ahead well, instead of being lost, instead of being starved, instead of being straying, instead of being lazy. And so he calls. Now in verse 8 and 9, he has this weird thing that he says.
Mark Clark [00:28:12]:
For man was not made for woman, but woman for man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That. What? Okay, so people go, look, look what he's saying. He's saying men, women in general, are made for just, you know, hanging out with men. And for. So what he's saying, he's going back to. To Adam and Eve, and he's saying, the man, singular, Adam, the woman was made for the man.
Mark Clark [00:28:37]:
Not every woman is made for every man in general. That's how people have stupidly translated this, said, look, women are made. Get this. That's not what he's saying. He's still in the Genesis story and he's saying, the man Adam, and the woman Eve, she was made for him. Which is what Genesis 2 talks about being a suitable helper in order to what, God makes the world. He makes Adam, and he says it's not good for man to be alone. So he makes Eve.
Mark Clark [00:29:02]:
Why? To complete Adam. And then say, you're gonna go out and do the mission. You gotta take my glory and you gotta go out as regents in the world and spread my glory to the chaos of the world. And you need a wife as a companion to do it. That's the point. There's a. It's like in my life, Aaron, as my wife completes me, as Tim Keller says, she fills out my portfolio in a sense, and I fill out hers. I'm far better.
Mark Clark [00:29:27]:
I mean, we were out with people the other day and they were asking us advice on what to do. They're like, what should we do with this person? We got this situation. And I'm just looking at them and I'm being me. So I'm like, you sit them down, you go, you better change. Or these are. And there's consequences. And you just assert them and you tell them. And my wife's like, or you could care about their feelings and you can tell them this, and you could nuance it this way.
Mark Clark [00:29:51]:
And what if you got to the same end but you came? And I'm looking, I'm like, she is better at this than me. She fills out. This is what the image of Adam and Eve is all about. It's not women were made for man. It's that Eve was made in the context of Adam and Eve. That's his point. And it's a good word for our modern culture because you look at the husbands, the men of our culture, and they have no vision at all. I read a story last night of a guy who was in Princeton and some Princeton student who killed his father.
Mark Clark [00:30:22]:
He just got put in jail for 30 years or whatever last night because he killed his father, because his rich dad cut off his allowance. This is the kind of men our culture produces. And the church is afraid to get up and call them to anything. Bunch of losers who have no capacity to lead anything, even themselves in their own life. Imagine. I mean, you guys know my story, my friends. My father, a drunk, left my mom when I was nine. No, I got me and my brother.
Mark Clark [00:30:56]:
Imagine he had had a worldview, a foundation, a vision, a biblical one, that instead of being scared to call him out, looked at him and said, hey, you got two sons. Pull your stuff together and lead. Well, you think any woman in my orbit would have gone, oh, I can't believe that sounds anti woman. They would have said, no, that's what you're called to do, man. Here's the whole point. Ephesians 5. Christ is the head of the church, the kefele of the church. And he says, husbands are to be the head of the church, like, or head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church.
Mark Clark [00:31:31]:
You're supposed to lay down your life, your desires, your wants, your pleasures, your delights. That's your calling as a husband. And so what Paul's doing is, he's not. He's saying, this is the reality. Because when you have men who are on point leading their families, women flourish, families flourish, cultures flourish. And when you have men who abdicate that responsibility, drug wars happen, abandonment happens, abuse in the home happens. This is even true religiously. Think about the context of religion.
Mark Clark [00:32:07]:
You can do any sociological study. If the husband and the father is leaning into Jesus, leaning into church, leaning into prayer, leaning into giving, leaning into showing faithfulness, then the family kids, 20, 18, 20, 25, they still remain in church. Every stat tells you that. But if it's just the wife who attends church and is interested in it, by the time the kids hit 16, they leave the church because daddy doesn't go. He. He's golfing on Sunday, he sits home doing nothing on Sunday, he watches football on Sunday. That's what I wanna do, Mom. Right.
Mark Clark [00:32:41]:
That's the reality statistically, all across it. And so what you see is this. Can Christianity get the husbands to do what they're gonna do? But Christianity so often is scared to call them out to do anything, which is why you look at religions. This is why I'm thinking about my wife. Like Mormonism, it's growing among men. Islam is growing among men. Why? Because their messages are fight, die. And what is Christianity? Hey, everyone, how you doing? I'm afraid to say anything to you that might offend you, but hopefully you're good.
Mark Clark [00:33:16]:
All right. It's like, I'm not dying for this. What am I getting up at 7 o' clock in the morning drinking mediocre coffee for this? For Mormons, you can have hundreds of wives, you're gonna end up having tons of different planets and planetary sex with whomever you want, having babies. Islam, you get 40 virgins. Christianity, you dress up in a white dress and float around. Sign me up. There's no vision for this. There's just, hey, hopefully you'll hang out.
Mark Clark [00:33:54]:
But if there was, if we weren't afraid to lay it out, even in the context of the question of hierarchy, people say, well, the concept of hierarchy, the concept of a cafele in any context is wrong. That's the classic modernistic approach, right? But the reality is, of course, science and sociology tell us hierarchies exist everywhere. Hierarchies aren't inherently wrong. That's what post modernity wants to talk about, right? Hierarchies in every form. If something is above something that's inherently wrong, and we need to dissolve Every form of hierarchy. But then you look at every context of nature, every animal, every mathematical equation, the way the universe functions, the laws of physics, hierarchies are literally built into the way things function. Because that's actually better. It's like this week I came home, okay? So.
Mark Clark [00:34:48]:
And I walked in the door and my children have constructed this monstrosity, all right? It's this rope thing that's attached from my banister in my stairs that goes all the way down to my couch. And it's got some baby on it and some basket and some lever, and then there's a skateboard on the ground. And the place is chaos. And so I come in and I decide to bring about order, right? So I'm like, you guys all need to clean this up. Daddy. Now I'm saying clean it up. She talked back to me a bit. I said, you go up to your room.
Mark Clark [00:35:26]:
You know, do you think that my daughter looked at me and said, hey, listen, this father daughter thing, this is a socially constructed reality. You have no authority over me. Like, imagine she said that. I would have gone medieval. Don't project your socially constructed realities of fatherhood and daughterhood over me, bro. Listen, I'm a human, you're a human, we're the same. Now in that moment, is she saying that I'm saying I'm ontologically or from an essence standpoint, better than her? No, it's that we have different functions, we have different roles. And so the reality is you look at animal kingdom, you look at the laws of the way the universe actually functions.
Mark Clark [00:36:04]:
This isn't a bad thing. This is actually the way things work. And so Paul is saying, be very careful to think that all hierarchies have been dissolved because you're over realized eschatology, because you think that heaven's already here and that we're all like angels, we're androgynous, where there's no more structure anymore. There's just everybody's the same, Everybody does the same thing. Richard Hayes, who's a scholar at Duke University, he says these words. Paul gives his teaching about head coverings for women not in order to restrict their participation in prayer and prophecy, but rather to enable them to perform these activities with dignity, avoiding distractions for people whose sensibilities were informed by their culture. That's his point, is he's saying, listen, the culture already agrees with the head covering reality to show that you're married, to show that you're off the market. And now I'm coming into the church and you wanna reach me for Jesus, but I'm trying to figure out why none of you wear head coverings.
Mark Clark [00:37:05]:
And you're all just doing whatever you want and you're throwing things around. Is it because you don't think order matters at all? And he's saying it's gonna be confusing. So keep the head coverings. Cause your culture already agrees with that. And then reach them for Jesus and help them understand. It's an incarnational missiological impulse that he's trying to get them to do rather than abandoning it because they think they've arrived in some way. He's saying, we're not in heaven yet. That's not the reality.
Mark Clark [00:37:30]:
These things are to be retained. There's still a humility. Don't just go around and do whatever you want. Respect the church. Respect your family. This is what he's talking about. Now, some of this might feel weird and it might feel odd to have to be, in a sense, listen to the scriptures, talk about these kind of things. But there's lots of things the Bible talks about that are weird and that are hard to get into a modern context.
Mark Clark [00:37:51]:
The Bible comes at you and tells you, you're, you know, we're such individualists. We're such great capitalists, right? We're like, my time is my time. So. But the Bible goes, no, your time's not your time. Your money's not your money. Your stuff's not even your stuff. There's two things that die in the presence of the Gospel. Socialism dies, right? Socialism dies culturally because it says in the end you're gonna stand before God.
Mark Clark [00:38:14]:
And there's a whole bunch of responsibility that you have as an individual, not the culture. You will be judged by your life, so take responsibility. Socialism dead. Here's what also ties capitalism. Read Acts Chapter two. See, some of you go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Acts chapter two goes. They had everything in common and they shared all their possessions.
Mark Clark [00:38:32]:
See, in the face of the gospel, capitalism dies. Because all of you go, yeah, but I worked hard for this. It's. It's. I love. It's my car. And the gospel goes, no, no, no. Hey, I'm talking to you.
Mark Clark [00:38:41]:
It's my car. Your car's my car, by the way. Read Acts chapter 2. Your possessions are mine. I need to borrow it. We share our possessions because that's the image of the church. Socialism dies. Capitalism dies in the face of the Gospel.
Mark Clark [00:38:58]:
All these things are hard to follow. All these things are weird to listen to. This is why it's hard to go okay, what is the cost of discipleship to understand? But the reality is this is for the cost of human flourishing. The last thing to mention then is this question of gender distinctions. They believed that genders were over. And here's what Paul talks about. He talks about the fact that there's a wife, he talks about the fact that there's a husband, he talks about the fact that there's women, and he talks about the fact that there's men. And his whole point is, don't dissolve the genders, retain the genders, because genders, male and female, all the way from Genesis 1, it says God made them in the image of God, male and female.
Mark Clark [00:39:37]:
He. He made them. And so the idea of male and female is actually what reflects back out into the world about what the image of God is. It's what the Catholic Church looks at when they talk about marriage as a sacrament. It's like when people are married, they reflect a picture back out to the world that says, here's God's presence, here's how God functions. Here's a picture of the Gospel, Jesus and the church. It's a sacrament. And in the same way Paul's saying you have to retain genders.
Mark Clark [00:40:04]:
And so just time travel forward to modern day. Here's what it would be like, he's saying, and this is what Richard Hayes says. He's saying this, men should come to church not wearing dresses and women shouldn't come to church topless, especially married ones. That's what the modern day context of what First Corinthians, chapter 11 is trying to say. Don't dissolve the genders, retain them because they reflect the glory of God. And don't act like you're not married and dishonor your husband or dishonor your wife by playing a game like you're not in a context of covenant in the context of your marriage. Now, even though we're culturally removed by 2000 years, you can kind of understand where he's coming from. You might disagree with it, especially if you're a skeptic and you hear it.
Mark Clark [00:40:54]:
Explain, it's fine. I'm just trying to explain the text that Paul lays out. But even imagine you invited me over for dinner, all right? And an hour in, I'm like, we should travel together. All right, so imagine you invited me over for dinner and everyone is dressed up and they had their nice jacket on and the nice pants or whatever, and I showed up and I was wearing a baseball hat. You would probably go, wow, this guy's class level is low. If I was even standing up here wearing a baseball hat, he'd probably be like, why is he wearing a baseball hat? It's just kind of like weird. He's like, way too kind of calm and chill, like baseball hats. Like, I remember my dad, he was 20 years older than my mom, so my mom married him.
Mark Clark [00:41:33]:
He passed away when he was 76. So I was young and he was 20 years older. So he was always kind of older. And I remember no church or anything. And we would sit down for dinner and I'd come in with my baseball hat and he'd knock it off my head and I'd pick it back up and I'd be, you knock it off. Like it's the same kind of thing. It's like there's a way the culture responds to things. And Paul's saying, don't be such a progressive that you throw everything out.
Mark Clark [00:41:58]:
There's some things that have to be retained for the sake of the glory of God. So here's what Hayes says. The created distinction between men and women should be honored in the church. Gender bending actions in which women and men seek to reject their specific sexual identities are a sign not of authentic sexual spirituality, but of adolescent impatience with the world in which God has placed us. We are not disembodied spirits or androgynous beings. Maturity in Christ will mean becoming mature men and women in Christ alongside of all of what those differences mean. The reality is this, even from a biological standpoint, men and women are different. There's no dissolution of genders.
Mark Clark [00:42:39]:
We can try to get there because philosophically you might wanna go there. But Paul, even from. I mean, it's very interesting as a culture who loves science, that elevates science, that says science tells me everything about everything, rejects it when it comes to this question, because this question, science says biologically, physiologically, there are men, there are women in two ways, there are men and women. I was reading an article this week. They were talking about biology and culture. Men and women are defined by biology and culture. The article said this. Men are always in every culture, take a large swath, are less agreeable, they're more competitive, harsher, tough minded, skeptical, unsympathetic, critically minded, independent and stubborn.
Mark Clark [00:43:23]:
This is in keeping with their proclivity. Also documented cross culturally to manifest higher rates of violence and antisocial or criminal behavior, such that incarceration rates for men versus women approximate 10 to 1 in every culture across the board. 10 to 1 ratio in regard to men in prison versus women. Women are higher in negative emotion or neuroticism, they experience more anxiety, emotional pain, frustration, grief, self conscious doubt and disappointment. This seems to emerge at puberty, biologically, over and over. Any psychologist, any biologist is gonna tell you it's just different. The wiring is different culturally. The article goes on to say this.
Mark Clark [00:44:06]:
Gender differences have grown rather than shrunk as cultures have become more equal in social policy. Despite its apparent logical impossibility. People say we must redouble our efforts to socialize little boys and girls in exactly the same manner, rendering all toys gender neutral, questioning even the idea of gender identity itself. And they believe that such maneuvering will finally bring us to the ideal utopia, where every occupation and every strata of authority within every occupation is done by 50% women and 50% men. But why should we launch such large scale experiments aimed at transforming the socialization of children when we have no idea what the outcome might be? Why exactly is it a problem if women and men, freed to make the choices they would make when confronted with egalitarian opportunities, happen to make different choices? Policies that maximize equality of opportunity make equality of outcome increasingly impossible. The doctrine, even more radically and loudly insisted upon by the politically correct that gender differences are only socially constructed is wrong. No amount of postmodern suggestion that social science is a patriarchal construction is gonna make the ugly truth disappear. Men and women are similar, but they are importantly different.
Mark Clark [00:45:11]:
And at the end of that article, he goes on to list the jobs in the cultures that try to dissolve gender differences. And he says 99% of construction workers, 99% of steel workers, 99% of bricklayers, plumbers, military are men, and 99% of kindergarten teachers, nurses are women. There's even if you give them all the options in the world, in these cultures, sociologists are telling us, people choose the ones that you would naturally think they were at the extremes. Now, all that to say this? Paul's dealing with a lot of things and in the modern cultural context, they create tensions. But here's the thing, you and I, whether you agree or disagree with what Paul's trying to argue, and I'm just giving you what he's trying to argue, what's important is what's behind it is how he started the verse that the head of Christ is God. Who is this? Who is this Christ? This one who gave up what he thought, gave up how he felt in heaven, and came down and submitted himself, gave his life as a sacrifice for sin for those of us who sometimes abuse leadership in any way, or we go and do what we want and Think people need to adjust to us. We don't believe in order, so we do what we want. We don't listen to anybody around us.
Mark Clark [00:46:33]:
Jesus came to die for those sins that destroy life, family, society. And he gave us a new vision. Jesus, I pray the reality of what you did on the cross and the resurrection might empower us to live out lives that actually show the beauty of the differences, to show your image, to show your glory in the world that people would feel. You as we talked about last week, versus us and our opinions and the way that we think things should function, we come under you as you tell us, here is what is good for your joy, here is what is good for your flourishing. And we do our best to understand it and live it out under the grace of Jesus. And I pray that if there are people here right now holding on to things, sins, maybe even stuff like this, and these conversations about gender, like, well, I'm not going to become a Christian because of this, that you would. That you would. You would blow through that if.
Mark Clark [00:47:31]:
If it's simply kind of the thing behind the thing, if it's an actual excuse versus a legitimate thing that they hold that you would be present with them, close to them, Holy Spirit, you would speak and recognize the beauty of what you did in the gospel, that you created a reality for men and for women that is a liberty to live out something that they never had before. That you would do that work among us as a church that as Paul gets to in 13, that love would then become the ethic, so that there is no division and disagreement. But ultimately, whatever we believe about one thing or the other, love stands in the center and destroys arguments. I pray that you do that with work among us as we seek to serve you in Jesus great name we pray. Amen.