Mans fall.... Covenant responsibilities

 

Like women today, women in the patristic age worked outside the home—Lydia was a Gentile seller of purple; the wife of Proverbs 31 ‘considered a field and [bought] it’ and ‘perceives that her merchandise is profitable’. Nonetheless, since women didn’t enjoy the same economic and social independence they do today, they were dependent on their male relatives to provide the necessities of life. Provision fell to fathers, husbands, and eventually sons to ensure that those in their households had food to eat, a home to live in, and clothing to wear. To willfully neglect this God-ordained responsibility was to effectively “deny the faith and become worse than an unbeliever” (v. 8), because even unbelievers possessed sufficient common grace to know that they’re obligated to care for the vulnerable and dependent. If the unbeliever knows that, how much more should those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit? In his letter to his fellow Jews, James writes that, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (Jam. 2:15-17). To profess faith in Christ while refusing to care for those in need, especially one’s own relatives, is to show a ‘dead’ faith; essentially denying the faith and showing oneself to be less virtuous than an unbeliever.

Why is provision a man’s unique responsibility and not a woman’s? The answer takes us all the way back to the Garden, when Adam was created. Even before God brought his wife to him, Adam was given work to do; specifically, naming the animals and tending the Garden. Eve was created as his necessary helpmeet in that work, but the ultimate responsibility was Adam’s. Paul emphasizes this in Ephesians 5:23, when he says, “For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church…” Authority and responsibility go hand-in-hand—Adam’s authority over Eve was not for his own self-indulgence or pleasure, but for the glory of God and their mutual good. ‘Provision’ is not simply defined in terms of material necessities—a man who supplies social and economic security for his family does very well, but that’s not the sum total of his biblical duty. Husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies and as Christ loves the church, and fathers are not to provoke their children to anger, but to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. If men are called to imitate their Lord, then part of that example and path is to provide for one’s household the way Christ provides for the household of God.

On the heels of a serious recession, when many young families are struggling to make ends meet, the burden of this responsibility can be crushing. There are many God-fearing men who work faithfully at honorable jobs who are still unable to make ends meet—what do we make of them? Are they denying the faith and worse than a non-Christian because their wives must work outside the home, as well? It’s clear from the context of the passage that Paul is not instructing Timothy to address such men as unbelievers, but those who know of their family’s hardship, have the material means to help, and still choose to disregard their needs. Those Christian men who aspire to live quietly, mind their own business and work with their hands but still struggle to provide for their families should find grace and support in the local church through the diaconal fund.

When we see standards given to Christian men in Scripture, it is easy to be tempted to despair. Many recognize just how far short they’ve fallen in this area. We’re called to provide for our wives’ physical needs (1 Tim. 5:8), to live with our wives in an understanding way and love and care for them as we would our own bodies (1 Pet. 3:7), and to raise our children in the discipline and instruction in the Lord (Eph. 6:4). Many of us know we’ve not lived up to these standards but, instead of looking inward to all our failure, we must lift our eyes to the hills, from where our help comes: Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. He has come as the perfect provider, doing for us what we can never do on our own. He’s provided us His very own perfect life, His sacrificial death, and His triumphant resurrection from the dead. What we needed to stand right before God, He came and provided on our behalf. It is by turning away from our own sinful self-sufficiency and placing our trust in the One who is sufficient in Himself that we find the freedom to rest in Him and then, out of a loving and humble gratitude, to follow our great Provider as we provide for our own households.

Furthermore, the language of “primary” is important to note as well. Eve participates significantly in safeguarding the well-being and God-glorifying direction of the family (see Proverbs 31!),even as Adam has a special responsibility to make sure these things come to be. She is created to be his “helper” (2:18; cf. 1 Cor. 11:7-8), to support and join him in his mission to glorify God and see others blessed by God’s goodness.

With regard to the first, the curse means that the physical pain of childbirth was magnified. Down through history, many women have died in childbirth. In spite of modern techniques, childbearing involves pain. One reason God may have increased the woman’s pain in childbearing was to give us an object lesson of the pain which God would now endure in order to bring forth spiritual children. His own Son, the second Person of the Trinity, would have to go to the cross and suffer not only the physical pain of the crucifixion, but also the indescribable agony of separation from the Father as our sin-bearer.

God mercifully tempers the pain with the great joy which children give. As Jesus said, “Whenever a woman is in travail, she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she remembers the anguish no more, for joy that a child has been born into the world” (John 16:21). The most joyous moments of my life have been the births of our three children. Children who grow up to follow the Lord are a great source of delight to godly parents. But as any parent knows, you open yourself to great risk of pain when you enter into the God-given miracle of bringing a child into this sinful world. Because of the fall, you can’t have the joy without the risk of pain.

The curse as applied to the woman not only affected childbearing, but also her relationship with her husband. The last half of verse 16 is difficult to interpret. Two views are the most likely. The first is that in spite of the woman’s increased pain in childbearing, she would continue to have sexual desire toward her husband. Sex was not cursed by God. The woman has as much right to enjoy sex in marriage as the man. Two things commend this view. The word “desire” is used in Song of Songs 7:10 to refer to the desire of a lover for his beloved. And, the woman’s pleasure in sex serves as a gracious blessing to offset the preceding curse of pain in childbirth. Just as God curses the ground, but graciously allows it to yield sufficient produce; and, He curses work with toil and sweat, and yet work also is a blessing in that it forces us to discipline our unruly fallen nature and it yields the sustenance we need; even so, God ordains pain in childbirth, but graciously allows the woman to enjoy the act that leads to conception.

The second plausible view is that “desire” is used in the same sense as Genesis 4:7 (its only other occurrence in the Old Testament), meaning the desire to dominate. The woman who usurped authority from her husband by eating the fruit is cursed with the inclination to dominate him, but he is ordained to rule over her. The strengths of this view are that it fits in with the last phrase of the verse and it uses “desire” in the same sense it is used a few verses later. If this is the correct view, it alerts us to the inherent tendency of the fallen nature of each sex: of the woman to dominate her husband; of the man to dominate his wife. Both militate against the beautiful “one flesh” relationship that existed before the fall (2:24). Thus as Paul ordains (Eph. 5:22-33) that to recover that intimacy, the wife must submit to her husband, and the husband must tenderly love and lead his wife.

I find it hard to decide between the two views because both have their strengths and both express truths taught elsewhere in Scripture. If the second view is correct, it does not justify the abusive dominance of men over women; nor does it lend support to the egalitarian view, in which it is claimed that there are no gender-based role distinctions because Christ overcame the curse. It means that godly women must now fight the tendency to dominate their husbands, and godly men must fight the tendency to dominate their wives. Both must learn to love one another in the context of the proper roles ordained by God.

B. THE CURSE AS APPLIED TO THE MAN (3:17-19).

Adam sinned not only by eating the forbidden fruit, but by allowing his wife to have dominion over him. God says, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife” (v. 17). Sometimes listening to the voice of your wife is the wisest thing you can do! But it is wrong to listen to your wife when she contradicts God’s word. Adam abdicated leadership to her, deliberately disobeying God by setting his wife above God. God holds the man accountable for the direction a family goes. Many Christian men are passive with regard to the family. They don’t take responsibility to train the children. They focus on their job and leave the home to the wife. When problems come, they blame her. It is not wrong to delegate things to your wife, but there’s a big difference between delegating and dumping. When you delegate, you retain final responsibility; when you dump, you abdicate responsibility. Scripture clearly holds the man responsible for his wife and children.

The curse on the man covers two areas: the ground is cursed; and physical death is mandated. Just as the curse on the woman also affects the man, so the curse on the man affects the woman. The curse on the ground meant that man would have to toil to bring forth the crops to survive. I understand the curse to be much wider than just the thorns and thistles mentioned here as representative. As Paul explains in Romans 8:20-21, the whole creation was subjected to sinful man. An unfallen creation could not be ruled by a fallen lord. So everything in creation which is now opposed to man--from mosquitoes to viruses to natural disasters--stems from the fall. All suffering and pain ultimately can be traced back to the first sin.

The second part of the curse as it applies to the man is the affirmation of physical death. Our bodies will return to dust. Since the fall, death is the enemy of every person. We can spend our lives working toward certain goals, and yet be struck down any day by the most trivial of accidents. Death is no respecter of persons: young and old, rich and poor--all must face death. But as terrible an enemy as death is, even it has its side of blessing: It forces us to come to terms with God and eternity. Very few of us would do that if we didn’t recognize our mortality. Death shouts at us that we desperately need to be right with God.

So the curse shows us that God allows us to suffer consequences for our sin. Sometimes those consequences are directly related to some sin we have committed; at other times we just suffer the consequences of living in a fallen world. While God graciously tempers the severity of the consequences with glimmers of grace, the consequences are real. They remind us that with the holy God, sin is serious. But God’s grace triumphs in that He doesn’t leave us to suffer the ultimate consequences of sin:

2. God provides salvation from sin’s ultimate consequences: The covering (3:20-24).

At first glance, verses 20 and 21 seem out of context. But they fit in perfectly.

A. SALVATION IS THROUGH FAITH IN GOD’S PROMISE (3:20).

After the morbid words of verse 19, you would expect something like, “Now Adam called his wife’s name the Grim Reaper, because she was the mother of all the dying.” But instead of the Grim Reaper, Adam calls her “Eve,” which means “life-giver.” And even more strange, she has not yet had any children (see 4:1).

What does this verse mean? It is Adam’s response of faith to God’s promise to send a Savior through the seed of the woman (3:15). Adam heard and submitted to God’s penalty of death (3:19); but he also believed God’s promise that there would come forth from the woman one who would bruise the serpent’s head. And so by faith Adam named her Eve, the mother of all living, before she had conceived.

Salvation is now and always has been by faith in God’s promise. Before Jesus Christ came into the world, a person’s faith looked forward to the promised Savior. Since Christ, faith looks back to the Savior who came. But God always has granted salvation in response to a person’s taking Him at His word. It has never been based on keeping the commandments or on balancing out a person’s good works against his sins. Adam took God at His word. At that instant he was delivered from the ultimate consequence of his sin: eternal separation from God. God responded to Adam’s faith by providing a graphic object lesson of salvation:

B. SALVATION IS THROUGH GOD’S PROVISION (3:21).

This verse shows how God met the practical need for clothing. But obviously it goes far beyond that. Just as man’s nakedness (3:7) goes beyond the physical and points to the nakedness of soul which resulted from sin, so God’s provision of clothing goes beyond the need for garments. It is a beautiful illustration of what God would do through the Lord Jesus Christ to provide salvation for all who stand before Him, naked due to their sin. This verse shows us four things (I have adapted the following four points from James Boice, Genesis [Zondervan], 1:189-192):

(1) Man needs a covering for his sin. The thought of standing with our sin exposed before the light of God’s presence should be more intolerable than the thought of going stark naked for a job interview at the White House. We all need some sort of covering for our sin.

(2) Man’s attempts at covering himself are inadequate. Adam and Eve’s fig leaves wouldn’t do. Man often tries the fig leaves of good works to make himself presentable to God, but God cannot accept that. All the good works in the world cannot erase our sin, which is the problem.

(3) Only God can provide the covering we need for our sin. He takes the initiative in properly covering man. He strips off the fig leaves and clothes Adam and Eve with animal skins. Adam and Eve did nothing; God did it all. We cannot receive God’s salvation as long as we offer Him our fig leaves. We must let Him provide everything, as He has in fact done in Christ.

(4) The covering God provided required the death of an innocent substitute. If, as I think we can assume, Adam and Eve witnessed the slaughter of these animals, it must have shocked them. This was the first time they had seen death. As they saw the animals (perhaps lambs?) having their throats slit and writhing in the throes of death, they must have gained a new awareness of the seriousness of their sin and of the greatness of God’s grace in providing for their sin. They learned that without the shedding of blood, there is no adequate covering for sin, but that God would accept the death of an acceptable substitute. Of course the blood of animals cannot take away our sin, but only the blood of Christ, to whom the animals pointed.

You are either standing before God clothed in the fig leaves of your own good works, or clothed in the righteousness which God provides in Jesus Christ. The only way you can hope to gain entry to heaven is to accept the covering God offers through the death of the Lamb of God.

C. SALVATION IS FROM THE ULTIMATE CURSE (3:22-24).

Having clothed Adam and Eve, God expels them from the garden. Art Linkletter saw a small boy drawing a picture of a car with a man in the front driving, and a man and a woman in the back. When Art asked who was in the car, the boy replied that it was God driving Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden. That’s not quite how it happened!

First God states the problem: “the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil” (3:22). By eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, man had become like God in the sense that he related good and evil to himself. In the case of God, this is right, because He is the only perfect One who is the measure of all things. But in the case of man, it was sin. Now man knew evil like a cancer patient knows cancer, whereas God knew evil like the cancer surgeon knows cancer. The implication of God’s unfinished sentence (3:22) is that if they had stayed in the garden and eaten from the tree of life, they would have lived forever in their sinful bodies. So God banished them from the garden and Paradise ceased to exist on this earth.

But even this penalty contained a blessing. As Donald Barnhouse observes, “How often it is necessary for God to drive us out of an apparent good to bring us to the place of real good!” (Genesis [Zondervan], p. 28). Once sin had entered, to live forever would have been hell on earth. To set us free from sin and death, the Savior had to come who could rightly claim, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies” (John 11:25).

Conclusion

Barnhouse also tells the story of Sir Edward C. Burne-Jones, a prominent 19th century English artist, who went to his daughter’s home for tea. During the tea, his little granddaughter misbehaved, so her mother made her stand in the corner with her face to the wall. Sir Edward did not interfere in his granddaughter’s discipline. But the next day he arrived at the house with his paints, went to the wall where the little girl had been forced to stand, and proceeded to paint a number of pictures that would delight a child--a kitten chasing its tail; lambs in a field; goldfish swimming; etc. If his granddaughter had to stand in the corner again, at least she would have something to look at (Let Me Illustrate [Revell], pp. 145-146). Judgment was tempered by grace.

Because of the fall, we are all under the curse of sin. But while God allows us to suffer the temporal consequences of sin to warn us and to turn us from sin, He also paints a picture of grace by pro

viding the covering we need to protect us from sin’s

In teaching us about authority in marriage, God’s Word does not only invite us to look to creation. We’re also told to look to the redemption we have in Christ. This shouldn’t surprise us, as Adam and Eve’s marriage in Eden was meant all along (just like all subsequent human marriages) to point beyond itself to the ultimate marriage of Christ and His church. It’s a profound mystery now revealed: the divine design of marriage, found in Gen. 2:24, refers to Christ and the church (Eph.5:31-32). As in creation, so too in redemption – complementarianism in marriage is affirmed. Husbands have a unique authority in marriage as head, following the pattern found in the Garden of Eden and found in Christ’s relationship to His bride, the church.

The Nature of a Husband’s Headship

Ephesians 5 is the main portion of Scripture that teaches how complementarianism in marriage is redemption-shaped. Wives are called to submit to their husbands as head, as the church does to Christ. Husbands are called to love and lay down their lives for their wives, as Christ does for the church. In keeping with the twofold nature of Adam’s authority explained above, husbands are called to nourish and cherish their wives (Eph. 5:29). Being one-flesh with her, the husband is called to attend to his wife’s needs and hurts and desires as if they are those of this own body(Eph. 5:28-29a). The husband should love his wife especially by pursuing her spiritual well-being, just like Christ does (Eph. 5:25-27) for the bride that he counts as his own body (5:28-32).

There is one way that Ephesians 5 goes beyond the paradigm we have in the ideal marriage of Adam and Eve, though it is the logical post-Fall application of that design established in Eden. Following the pattern of Christ, husbands are called to love their wives sacrificially, as Christ “gave himself up for” the church (Eph. 5:25). This means husbands pursue the health, happiness, and holiness of their wives at the expense of their own health and happiness, if necessary. I assume that kind of sacrifice and tradeoff would never have been necessary in the bliss of Eden. But in a fallen world, where there is often suffering and shortage (of various kinds for various reasons), a husband may need to lay down his life, in a sense, and sacrifice himself in various ways for the nourishment, cherishing, and sanctification of his wife. This comes at his expense in one way or another, but it is his burden to bear as the loving head. Of course, a godly wife will desire to sacrifice in various ways for her husband’s good (cf. Eph. 5:1-2), but he is responsible in a primary way to ensure that all the others in the family are provided for, protected, and flourishing, as much as he is able.

Thus, there is a special crown that the husband wears as the head of his wife, but it’s not a crown worth coveting; it is a crown of thorns.8If he is called to love, nourish, cherish, sanctify, and spiritually beautify his wife after the pattern of Christ, who “gave himself up for her,” then his call as head is to take up a cross and lose his life for her sake. He pursues her welfare no matter the personal cost (and it will cost), even unto death. The biblical picture of the husband’s headship is not sitting on a throne over his wife; it’s hanging lifelessly on a tree for her, because he loves her.

Complementarian Co-Regency

When God creates a new heavens and a new earth, a marriage will take center stage, just as it did when He created the current heavens and earth. God will once again bring a bride to a man, the second Adam (Rom. 5:14,17-19), the Last Adam (1 Cor. 15:22, 45), as the church takes her place at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:1-6). Wondrously, in keeping with the pattern of Genesis 1, Christ graciously enters into a kind of co-regency with his bride, as his people are made to reign with him (2 Tim. 2:12, Rev. 5:10, 20:4,20:6, 22:5; cf. 1 Cor. 6:2, Dan. 7:18, 27, Mt. 19:28). Of course, this does not cancel out or put an end to the church’s submission to Christ as her loving head (Col. 1:18, Eph. 1:22-23, 4:15, 5:23, etc.). May it never be! Christ will continue to bear the burden of responsibility to lead his people in a God-glorifying direction and secure their well-being for all eternity. But Christ is not the heavy-handed kind of head that treats his bride like a footstool, a fate reserved for his enemies (Ps. 110:1). Christ is the kind of head that invites his bride to sit with him on his throne (Rev. 3:21) and share in his rule (Rev. 2:26-28 with Ps. 2:6-9). In this ultimate one-flesh relationship of Christ and the church, complementarianism continues on for eternity. For endless days, then, we will see the wisdom, beauty, and glory of God’s design for authority in marriage – one-sided headship and joint rule – as it was in the beginning.

Conclusion

We have looked to creation and redemption to see the Bible’s teachings on authority in marriage. Until our lives and earthly marriages are over (Mt. 22:30), husbands and wives are called to relate to one another in ways that reflect this glorious design. Husbands are called to lead, love, and sacrifice for their wives as loving head. Wives are called to submit to their husbands’ leadership and support their endeavors to live for God’s glory. Each one does this as they strive to rule over their “world” together, in joint submission to God, playing their small part in the glory of God covering the face of the earth as the waters cover the sea. A husband must learn to exercise headship over his wife maintaining this posture: sitting enthroned beside his wife over the “world” God has assigned to them, and bowing the knee beside his wife before the throne of God.

1. Readers who are interested in learning more about that topic can find teachings on this website that explain and defend the biblical view “complementarianism” against it’s challenger, “egalitarianism.”

2. This explanation of male headship is adapted from Ray Ortlund’s definition: “In the partnership of two spiritually equal human beings, man and woman, the man bears the primary responsibility to lead the partnership in a God-glorifying direction.” Ray Ortlund, “Male-Female Equality and Male Headship: Genesis 1-3,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991), pp. 86-104.

3. Too often, husbands can feel self-satisfied in their headship simply because they go to work and successfully “provide” financially for the family. This isn’t enough. If a wife is well fed and warm, yet is miserable and spiritually floundering under her husband’s leadership, he is falling far short of God’s plan for male headship. If a husband does not return home after his paying job, and then work for his wife’s happiness and holiness at home, then he may need to rethink whether or not he truly works at his job motivated by her well-being. Does it make sense that the only expression (or even the main expression) of a husband’s love for his wife are those times when he is away from her, “working hard” for a paycheck?

4. Roberts goes on to say: “Notice also that on both occasions when God subsequently speaks of the law concerning the tree (3:11, 17), he addresses the adam in particular, speaking of it as a law both delivered to him alone and as a law concerning him most particularly and the woman only by extension. The difference between the adam and the woman here helps to explain how the woman could be deceived, while the man was not (the serpent plays off the information the woman had received first-hand in 1:29 against the formation she had received second-hand from the adam).” Alistair Roberts, “Man and Woman in Creation (Genesis 1-2),” in Complementarianism: A Moment of Reckoning, 9Marks E-Journal, Dec. 2019 edition, p.37.

5. “While [Eve is] assigned to the man as his helper and thus placed under his overall care and responsibility, the woman is the man’s partner in ruling the earth for God.” Andres and Margaret Kostenberger, God’s Design for Man and Woman: A Biblical Theological Survey (Wheaton: Crossway, 2014), 36.

6. The Greek expressions beneath the English “manage household” in 1 Tim. 3 and 5 are not exactly the same, but both clearly communicate an exercise of authority. The Greek word under the husband’s “management” of the household in 1 Tim. 3 is proistemi, which means “to exercise a position of leadership, rule, direct, be at the head of” (Arndt, W., Danker, F. W., & Bauer, W. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 870). The Greek verb under the wife’s “management” of the household in 1 Tim. 5 is a compound of “house/household” and “lord/master.” The noun form of this verb means “master of the house,” as in Mt 10:25, 13:27, 13:52, 20:1, 21:33, 24:43; Mk 14:14; Lk 13:25.

7. Again, the distinctions in God’s words to Adam and Eve in Gen. 3:16-19 point us in the right direction, to begin sensing God’s intended complementarity in how the two could fulfill the Gen. 1:28 commission in a differentiated and interdependent manner. (The differences between men’s and women’s bodies suggest these things as well). Alistair Roberts’ article, referenced earlier in this article, is a worthy read along these lines.

8. I take the picture of the husband’s headship as a crown of thorns from C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves. Lewis uses this imagery powerfully: “The sternest feminist need not grudge [the male] sex the crown offered to it…in the Christian mystery. For…[it is] of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands may grasp [it] too eagerly; but that they will allow or compel their wives to usurp it.” I found this quote and imagery of Lewis as it was used and developed in Christopher Ash, Married for God: Making Your Marriage the Best It Can Be (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016), 85-