The Kingdom Order in the Home, Part One

The Bible speaks about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the devil. As unbelievers, we were in the kingdom of the devil, the kingdom of darkness. But God in Jesus Christ rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son. And we are to be regulated by God’s kingdom order in every aspect of our lives, starting with our homes. To do so, we must first   understand the order before the Fall of man; then we must understand the order after the Fall; and, finally, we must understand and practice the order in redemption.

May God help us to be filled with the Holy Spirit so that we might render obedience to Jesus Christ and love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.

The Order before the Fall  

In Genesis 1, we read that God created Adam. Because it was not good for man to be alone, God “built” (that is the word in the Hebrew) a woman, whom Adam named Eve, the mother of all living. She became his complement, the one who gave him completeness. She was his helpmeet. Adam was to rule over all the earth with the help of Eve, his wife. Adam was to render to God perfect obedience. So the order of authority before the Fall was God over Adam, and then Adam over Eve.

The Order in the Fall

But in Genesis 3 we read that the ancient serpent, the great dragon, Satan, the devil—a fallen angel—became the authority for Adam and Eve in place of God. The devil deceived Eve, and she ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that she could become like God—a self-determining, independent being. That was the lie of the devil. Eve led Adam to eat also. In this situation, Adam failed to rule, as he had been appointed by God to do. He failed to obey God, and he failed to drive out the devil. He failed to shield his wife from being deceived by the talking serpent. In Genesis 3, we see the devil speaking and we see Eve speaking, but Adam, the ruler, is silent as he takes all humanity into sin, misery, and eternal death.

Adam was not acting in behalf of God. Instead, he became passive and was acted upon. Sin brought enmity and disunity, not happiness, in the home. In the Fall, the order of authority became Satan over Eve, and then Eve over Adam.

Order in Redemption

When God redeems us, he restores his kingdom order in our homes. Now everyone is to honor and obey the Lord Jesus Christ. May God help us to practice this in this new year!  The Lord will command, and we are to hear and do what the Lord Jesus Christ says, putting into practice what Jesus said in Matthew 7:24. The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer is, “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” This should be the goal of every Christian.

Thus, in the redemption order, the husband is the head of his wife under Christ. He is the one who governs and provides. He is to be a prophet, priest, and king in his home and live in accordance with the teaching of Ephesians 5:18–6:4.

To the degree we are sinners, God’s redemptive order will suffer, and we will suffer with it. But we must keep in mind that the kingdom of God is righteousness—doing what is right in the sight of God as revealed in the holy Scriptures—and that righteousness will issue in peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. So when we sin, we must repent immediately and do God’s will. We must do what is right in his sight, and do so gladly.

Obedience brings unity, joy, and blessing in the home. This is the order of redemption: God over the husband, and then the husband over his wife. May God help us to practice this in this new year.

The Birth of Feminism

However, God’s redemption order is not the prevailing view in today’s world. The prevailing order today is feminism. Feminism is as old as the Fall, as we read in Genesis 3:1–7.

The real cause of feminism was the failure of Adam to rule for God with the help of his God-built, God-given wife Eve. Adam became a rebel and an enemy of God in his failure to rule and in his failure to love and shield his wife from the seduction of the devil. In this passage, we see that Eve was deceived by the devil, who appeared in the form of a very crafty talking serpent.

Feminism is a total reversal of the order of the kingdom of God, the divine order that God gives us in his word. God is the head of man, and man is the head of woman (1 Cor. 11:3). That has been the divine order from the beginning. In this passage, though, we see Satan acting as the head of the woman, and the woman as the head of Adam, even though woman was created after man, from man, and for helping man in his rule of the earth for God (Gen. 2:20–23).

As we noted before, in the Garden of Eden, we do not hear the voice of Adam. We hear the voice of the devil, and we hear the woman responding to the devil. We hear the serpent questioning and injecting doubt into the heart of Eve: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1). Notice the lie of the devil. God had been very generous with Adam and Eve. They could eat from any tree except one—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There was only this one prohibition, and it was given to demonstrate who was the sovereign. Man is a creature, in spite of all his fantasy of deification. And after Adam sinned, man remained a creature, but now he was a fallen, sinful, dying creature under God’s wrath.

But where was Adam? Was he not also in the garden while the serpent was tempting Eve with these questions, demonic declarations, and nullifications of God’s word? Indeed, he was there. In fact, we read, “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (Gen. 3:6). So Adam was present, but he was silent. He was passive. He had abandoned his post as the head and ruler.

We do not hear Adam rebuking the serpent. It was Adam who had named all the livestock and wild animals, as well as the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. This meant Adam possessed authority to rule over all the living creatures, including this strange, speaking serpent. He was also the one who named Eve. So in God’s order, Adam was the head of the woman, and she was his complement. Adam, therefore, had the primary responsibility to rule in behalf of God. He was supposed to deal with the devil and cast him out of the garden.

Adam was tested in the most favorable circumstances, yet he failed the test. It was this failure that gave rise to feminism. Feminism is not seeking equality with men; it is seeking headship of woman over man and God. In opposition to God’s order, under feminism, man is to be subject to the woman.

So we must ask, as God did in Genesis 3:9: Adam, where are you? Why were you not at your post, governing and ruling? Why was your voice not heard, though you were with your wife all along? Why did you ignore the sovereign God and his gracious word to you?

God created man and woman as equal in their persons and dignity, even as all the Persons of the Godhead, in the essential Trinity, are equal in glory and power. Man and woman are also equal in their salvation. Their role differences exist only in this life. In heaven, they will be like angels (Luke 20:36). The subordination of woman to man, therefore, is applicable only in this age. In redemption, the order at the beginning is restored. So if you are redeemed, then understand that man is the head of the wife, and Christ is the head of man.

Let us, then, consider certain propositions from Genesis 3:1–7.

1. In this passage, we see that Adam became a rebel. He was not deceived as Eve was. He sinned deliberately against God.
2. Eve was deceived by the crafty serpent. The devil is a liar and the father of all lies. Any negation of the word of God comes from the devil himself. Look at the history of interpretation of the Bible. Liberal churches abandoned what the Scriptures teach. We are in this morally terrible condition at this time in this country because of the failure of churches that rejected the authority and truthfulness of the Bible.
3. The devil appears as a fallen angelic being because he was acting as an enemy of God. So we may conclude that prior to man’s fall, the devil and his demons fell from their state of innocence.
4. Eve was to function under Adam as his helpmeet, which means as one answerable to Adam. But she acted independently of her husband and ruled over him. The tragedy today is that modern husbands have become very happy in a similar role of being passive.
5. Adam obeyed his wife as her subordinate, but he did not obey God.
6. Adam and Eve saw God as their enemy, and the serpent as their friend, benefactor, and authority.
7. God’s authority always unifies the family. But the devil’s authority results in disunity, depression, and divorce. Where there is devil worship in a home, everyone is miserable.
8. There are only two wills in this fallen world: the will of God and the will of devil, under God’s sovereignty (see Job 1–2). Therefore, there are only two peoples: the people of God and the people of the devil. (PGM) Within the same home, we can find the people of God and people of the devil.
9. Obedience to God results in blessing, that is, in righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Slavery to the devil results in misery, fighting, and eternal pain.
10. God’s word is truth because God is truth. God’s word always proves true in life.
11. The devil always negates and nullifies God’s word. He told the woman, “You will not surely die” (Gen. 3:4), although God had said, “You will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). And the great Hebrew scholar, Edward J. Young, said that in the Hebrew it is, “Dying, you will die.” In other words, it is very certain. And Adam’s sin brought about death, just as God had threatened. Paul speaks of this, “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12).
12. Sin brought guilt, fear, flight, shame, anxiety, death, and hell to all humanity. Yet people like to sin because of there is pleasure of sin for a season.
13. Adam and Eve failed to confess their sin when they were given an opportunity to do so (Gen. 3:12–13). Instead, they blamed God and others, shifting the blame.
14. Adam and Eve resorted to self-atonement, covering themselves with self-made fig-leaf contraptions.
15. After eating of the fruit, Adam and Eve did not become like God, as Satan had declared they would. Rather, they became fallen and dying creatures. They became non posse non peccare (that is, they could only sin). They became enemies of God. They became fools.
16. Adam and Eve had sought to gain wisdom through transgression. But true wisdom causes us not to sin. The fear of God will keep you from sinning (Exod. 20:20; see also Job 28:28).
17. After they fell, all Adam and Eve’s fantasies of becoming like God ended, and reality came. They were expelled from the garden as fallen humans; they had not become self-determining, self-sufficient gods.
18. When Adam and Eve sinned, they lost their glory. Their nakedness was shameful
19. Adam, the silent husband, saw and heard and agreed with the counsel of the devil. He ate what his wife gave him, and they both died. He was not ruling, as God intended. Rather, he was sleeping. He was passive. He was ruled over and acted upon.
20. Consider the comments of two scholars on Genesis 3:6. Raymond C. Ortlund says:

Eve usurped Adam’s headship and led the way into sin. And Adam, who (it seems) had stood by passively, allowing the deception to progress without decisive intervention—Adam, for his part, abandoned his post as head. Eve was deceived; Adam forsook his responsibility. Both were wrong and together they pulled the human race down into sin and death.[1]

George W. Knight speaks also on Genesis 3:6:

It is obvious from the text that Eve encouraged wrongdoing when she gave Adam the fruit. It is equally obvious that she takes the leadership role in that activity and that Adam simply follows her leadership. She allows herself to be drawn into the role of spokesman by the serpent. She does not turn to her husband, from whom she had received God’s command, to ask him about what God had said and meant by His command, but rather acted unilaterally in opposition to the command that her husband had given her. . . . The fact that Adam was following Eve’s leadership and not simply being deceived is borne out by Paul’s inspired evaluative statement in 1 Timothy 2:14 that “Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived.” Thus it seems appropriate to say that God’s first comment to Adam, [which was] “because you listened to your wife” (Gen. 3:17), is [God’s] rebuke to Adam for his failure to carry out his God-ordained leadership role.[2]

21. The only hope of Adam and Eve, and of all fallen humanity, is the promised Seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), the Son of the virgin Mary, who could clothe them with his own righteousness instead of their humanly contrived fig-leaf contraptions. He alone was able to crush the head of the devil by his own atoning death on the cross. Paul says, “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal. 3:27). It is my prayer that all of us will repent of our sins and trust in Jesus Christ alone.

Summary      

In conclusion, consider the following points about feminism. If you are a feminist, God is asking you to repent and begin to implement God’s kingdom order in your life. Repent today, and he will forgive your sins.

1. Feminism is anti-God and anti-Scripture.
2. Feminism is not new. It is as ancient as the Fall in Genesis 3.
3. Feminism is due to the failure and rebellion of the man
4. In redemption, the pre-Fall order is restored. Man is under Christ; he is to rule in sacrificial love and be accountable to Christ. And woman is to submit to her husband in the Holy Spirit.
5. The Christian family is to function under God’s constitution as found in Ephesians 5:18–6:4.
6. The truth is, in many homes, even Christian homes, the man is virtually absent. He is passive. To such men, God asks, “Husband, where are you?”
7. Do not judge the word of God as the serpent did. Obey the word. God’s word is truth; it is absolute truth. “Let God be true and all men liars” (Rom. 3:4).
8. Feminism glories in abortion.

May God help us to hear and do his word and be blessed.

[1] Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., “Male-Female Equality and Male Headship,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, John Piper and Wayne Grudem, editors (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1991), 107.

[2] George W. Knight, “The Family and the Church,” Recovering, n. 6, 529.