Biblical Womanhood in Five Minutes
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | Pastor John, if you're up for it, give us a theology of biblical womanhood in five minutes.
00:00:11.000 | I would start with where God starts in Genesis 1, where he says that God
00:00:17.900 | created man, male and female, in the image of God. He created them, not just the man.
00:00:26.060 | And so I would start with the massive, and I mean immeasurably massive truth,
00:00:32.640 | that men and women, and we're talking about women here, are created in the
00:00:38.520 | image of the Creator of the universe. This is simply stunning. It means that
00:00:43.480 | every woman you look at on the street, or every woman you relate to in any way, is
00:00:49.360 | a potential queen of heaven, because she's created in the imago dei. She's in
00:00:58.240 | the image of God in the same way that the man is in the image of God, having a
00:01:04.720 | human nature which mirrors the very nature of God. That's where I'd start.
00:01:11.360 | Secondly, I would draw attention to the fact that her worth, therefore, when you
00:01:16.040 | talk in terms of dignity or worth, is the same as man's. In fact, I would say both
00:01:23.720 | male and female are essential to the full revelation of God's glory. He didn't
00:01:32.120 | just create man. When you get to the second part of the story, where man
00:01:36.160 | is created first, which I think is significant, and then woman is created, it
00:01:40.880 | says it wasn't good. It just wasn't finished. It wasn't good, until this woman
00:01:45.240 | who came from his side. No animal would do, because no animal was created in the
00:01:49.560 | image of God. She must be of his nature, and thus of the nature of God. So she's
00:01:55.440 | of an equal worth, and both together, then, are the fuller revelation of God's
00:02:00.960 | glory. And then I would say that she has unique, special capacities, both
00:02:08.120 | physically, mentally, emotionally, that are different from men. And we should
00:02:13.800 | celebrate the differences between manhood and womanhood, and stress that
00:02:20.000 | those differences are meant that when we're together, both as singles, I would
00:02:24.480 | argue, there are cultural dynamics for people who are not married, and then
00:02:28.120 | there's cultural dynamics for people who are married. When you're together,
00:02:30.840 | something more beautiful is shown of God than if we were all in our little silos
00:02:35.940 | of individuality. And the last thing I would do is draw attention to what we
00:02:39.680 | mean by complementarity, and say that one of the unique things about women is that
00:02:45.560 | they are ordained by God, called by God, to receive honor, I mean, to receive from
00:02:55.080 | man, and honor man, and support the leadership, and the protection, and the
00:03:00.640 | provision of godly men according to those appropriate roles. And the reason I
00:03:09.120 | say that last little phrase is that as a woman navigates her life, if she's
00:03:14.640 | married, she's got a husband, she's got a pastor, she's got male friends who are the
00:03:20.960 | husbands of her female friends, she's got maybe colleagues at work, she's got the
00:03:26.800 | mailman who comes to the front door, perhaps, she has the mechanic at the
00:03:32.200 | precision tune, and so on. All these males fulfill very different roles in her lives,
00:03:38.200 | and I don't mean that she receives and honors and supports leadership,
00:03:43.000 | protection, and provision from all of them in the same way. It's the dynamic
00:03:47.120 | and the dance of gender relations are different for every relationship, but
00:03:52.760 | there is something that God has put, I think, into men to be leaders and
00:03:58.040 | protectors and providers, and women to love that, delight in that, honor that,
00:04:03.400 | come alongside that, use all their manifold gifts to advance the cause of
00:04:07.960 | Christ through that, so that when they're together, they are complementing
00:04:14.120 | each other and the beauty of God is displayed more fully.
00:04:18.440 | Do you suspect that gender role differences will carry over into eternity?
00:04:23.880 | Yes. Yes, because I think, even though the Bible says there'll be no marriage or
00:04:29.720 | giving in marriage, we won't have children in the age to come, I think that
00:04:35.040 | our personhood is so wrapped around our gender, or you could say our gender is
00:04:43.760 | wrapped around our personhood, that if we were stripped of our maleness or
00:04:49.960 | femaleness, we would be unrecognizable. I think Jesus is a man today in heaven. He
00:04:56.880 | is Jesus Christ, the same as He was here, well, He was glorified, and I don't think
00:05:05.440 | we should think of Him in some androgynous way up there, or ourselves,
00:05:10.000 | entering into a kind of existence that has no correlation to the male and
00:05:14.760 | female that we had here, and it's going to be utterly, utterly beautiful.
00:05:20.120 | There, all the sinful dimensions of manhood and womanhood will be taken away.
00:05:25.920 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Send your
00:05:29.320 | questions to us via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please
00:05:33.040 | include your first name in your hometown. You can find thousands of other
00:05:35.360 | free resources online from John Piper at desiringgod.org. I'm your host, Tony
00:05:39.400 | Rehnke. Thanks for listening.
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