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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church, People Moving Power. This tape includes the solo, "Forward with Christ," sung by Chris Lacona, and the reading of Scripture and a message by Reverend Mr. Bruce W. Thielman entitled, "Adam's Fractured Rib." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn to side number two for the remainder of the message.

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[Music] [Music] Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today. Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today. Who is among us the truth can say, Till he has passed through the narrow way? Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today.

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[Music] And Jesus said, Why call ye me Lord, Lord? And do not the things I say. Why call ye me Lord, Lord? And do not the things I say. He called me the way, and walk me not. He called me the life, and live me not. He called me master, and obey me not. If I condemn thee, blame me not. Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today.

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Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today. Know ye the Christ, and the life are one. Know ye the Christ, life has scarce begun. Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today. [Music] The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable. Gentle, full of mercy, and without hypocrisy.

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And he rebuked them, saying, Ye hypocrites, ye white, and self-full of curse, ye blind, leaders of the blind. He called me bread, and eat me not. He called me truth, and believe me not. He called me master, and obey me not. If I condemn thee, blame me not. [Music] Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today. Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today.

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Who then shall scorn who his name divide? Till his teachings the world has tried. Forward to Christ, holy people, March, march today. [Music] Let us continue in our worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the second and third chapters of the book of Genesis, beginning in the second chapter with the verse which is numbered 18.

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"Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him. So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

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And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed."

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Then follows the episode of the temptation by the devil and the fall, and then following that episode this narrative, beginning at the third chapter and the eighth verse. "And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

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And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, What is this that you have done? The woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle and above all wild animals. Upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

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I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman God said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.

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And to Adam he said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.

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You are dust, and to dust you shall return. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. There are three ways in which a person can engage in the work of theology. He can attempt to build a theology by patching together various proof texts which he has selected from the different pages of scripture. Or he can build a theology which is designed to defend to the uttermost the creeds and confessions which are part of his ecclesiastical tradition.

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Or, guided by both scripture and the confessions of his church, he may also seek to experience how God is moving in the now. That is, how God, by his Spirit, is moving in life today where the one thinking theologically is living. And he can attempt to build his theology out of that living experience, guided, as I say, by both scripture and his tradition. I am committed to the third of these procedures.

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Three years ago, when I became the pastor of this church, I made it very clear to the committee that called me, and to you, the congregation I came to serve, that I accepted this book as the infallible rule of faith and practice. I have not changed that commitment in any way. I told you when I came that I accepted the confessional position of our church, and I accept it as much today as I accepted it three years ago.

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But I also told you then that I did not believe that the mind of a minister should be closed, and that any man who is attempting to speak the word of the Lord must be sensitive to the word and the will of the Lord as it is being expressed in any given moment. I said that I thought the mind was like a parachute. It was worthless unless it was open.

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Now, I remind you of this now because what I am going to say from this pulpit this morning I would not have said three years ago when I came to be your pastor. As a result of the publicity that the Women's Lib Movement has received, I have become quite intrigued with it. I don't know whether that's because I'm a bachelor or because I was perplexed by the theological implications of the movement. There is much, of course, behind it, the social unrest in our time, the economic deliberations which are so much a part of this day,

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the searching for individual freedom, the exaltation of personal liberty. All of these things have contributed to the impetus behind the movement, and I'm sure that all of these things have contributed to my involving myself in a study of it and its implications in the light of Scripture and our confessions and what I think the Spirit of God is attempting to say to us today. Now, this interest in Women's Lib is not limited to myself.

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Every major denomination in America has engaged itself in the last years in a reconsideration of the place of women in society. And I might say that every major denomination in America has, in the last years, moved to a position in which they come to recognize more than they ever had before the place that woman is to occupy in our society. Even the Roman Catholic Church, which is the most male-dominated of our various ecclesiastical denominations in America today,

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even that church has begun to loosen up. And I affirm to you this morning that I'm very glad this is happening, because my study in the last year, my reading, my prayer, my sensitivity to the movements of God's Spirit, my conversations with others, all of these things have contributed to my being changed from the misogynist bachelor I was three years ago to what I hope is a Bible-based woman-liber today.

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I want then to consider with you the passages of Scripture which speak about the place of women in society. I want to go to the passages that are most often quoted by those who wish to argue that woman is somehow subordinate in society. I want to go to the texts which they advance in defense of their position. And I want to see if the Bible really says what those people have been saying it said,

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really says what I, for example, said it said up until just about a year ago. We begin then by going to the locus classicus of this consideration, and that, of course, is the creation of woman as it's recorded in the early chapters of Genesis. Now, the traditionalist, when he approaches this Genesis narrative, takes certain positions and argues his position in this way.

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He will say, for example, "It is obvious that woman is to be subordinate to man because man was made before woman." Now, if it is true that that which comes after is automatically inferior to that which comes before, if that is true, then it must also be affirmed that the animals are superior to man because man was made after the animals. No one of us would, of course, argue such a position.

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The plain fact of the matter is the Bible nowhere teaches that that which comes first is superior. There is no argument in Scripture which justifies the idea that that which is prior is automatically superordinate and that which comes afterwards is automatically subordinate. Joseph, for example, who contributed so much to the history of the Israelites, was the eleventh son of Jacob.

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David, the greatest king that Israel ever knew, was the last of the sons of Jesse. There is no particular blessing, Scripture affirms, in being first. This argument, then, carries no weight. Then the traditionalist says, "Well, woman is subordinate to man because woman was brought forth from man.

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She was made out of his rib; she is, therefore, inferior." Now the position is, you see, that that which is brought forth from something else is inferior to that from which it was brought forth. And, of course, if you accept that idea, then you have to say that man is inferior to the dust of the ground because he was made out of the dust of the ground.

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Of course, on the very face of it, that is absurd. And if you read the Genesis narratives, you find the whole concept of women's being inferior because she was made out of man to be equally absurd. Adam makes very clear that he understands his wife to be equal to him.

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She is "bone of my bone." She is "flesh of my flesh." In the first chapter of Genesis, it is asserted that God has created male and female, and they are both made in his image. There is no suggestion of subordination, whatever.

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Further, when Adam completes the narrative about the creation of women, he goes on to say that "a man shall forsake his mother and father and cleave to his wife." Now, in the Old Testament, the word "forsake" is usually used to mean he turns away from something which is inferior to something which is better.

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For example, we forsake false gods for the worship of the one true God. And the word "cleave" is almost always used to mean we attach ourselves to something that is better. We cleave to the Lord, our God. So when Adam says, "You will forsake, forsake, turn away from your mother and father,

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and you will cleave to your wife," he is using words which imply not subordination, but on the contrary, superordination or at least equality. There is nothing in the argument that a woman came forth from a man that implies that she is in any way, shape, or form second class.

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Then the traditionalist argues, "In the Genesis narrative, woman is described as man's helpmate, and the word "helpmate" suggests that in some way she is his assistant, and an assistant is not the same as the boss, and therefore she is in some way less significant than he is." Now, in point of fact, the word "helpmate" and the derivatives from which it comes,

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as it is used in the Old Testament, never refers to that which is subordinate. The word appears most frequently in terms of saying, "God help us," or "The Lord is our helper." Now, when you describe God as your helper, are you saying that God is in some way subordinate to you because he helps you? Not at all. Such a suggestion is blasphemous.

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The contrary is the case. Now, what is being said in the reference to the helpmate is that these two are to work together, and there is no implication in the meaning of the word which suggests that the woman is in any way to be number two. We have two number ones, and they are to become one flesh.

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This union, you see, is, like all marriages, the single instance in creation where one plus one equals one. That is precisely the relationship which is to exist between Adam and Eve, and the fact that she is his helpmate in no way changes that. They are in cooperation, and there is equality in their cooperation. Now, the last argument which the traditionalist builds upon the Genesis narrative is that woman is subordinate to man because it is man who names woman.

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Man names all the animals, and he names women, and in the giving of the name, he in some way assumes a prior or superior role. Now, in order to speak to this argument, I want to move a little head in the Genesis narrative to the passage which describes what God says to Adam and Eve after they have sinned. He curses them, as you remember. The curse has three parts. The first part is directed at the devil who tempted them.

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The second part of the curse is directed to Eve, and she is told that from that time on, as a result of her evil, there will be pain in her childbearing, but she will still desire her husband, and her husband is going to rule over her. Now, please bear in mind that everything I have said about the equality of women to this point is the state of women before the fall, before they have sinned. I am talking of women as she has been created.

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Now, at the time of the curse, God says that women will from this point be ruled by man. And then he goes on, speaking to Adam to say, "And you will become subject to the earth," in the sense that the earth is no longer going to yield to your every command. You're going to have to work, and you're going to have to work hard, and this is all a part of your bringing sin into the earth and therefore twisting and perverting everything that is. In other words, what God says is this.

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"Women came from man, so now woman is going to be ruled by man." "Man came from the earth, so now man is going to be," in some sense at least, "subjected to the power of the earth." This is the suggestion. Now, if what the traditionalist affirms is true, that a man was superior to a woman before the fall,

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and that this is evidenced by the fact that he named her, if that's true, then what sense is there in the curse which God visits upon women when he says, "From this point on, because of your sin, you will be ruled by man." If she was already ruled by man, what point would there be in God saying, "Now that you have sinned, you will be ruled by man."

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Obviously, she was not ruled by man before the sin, else there would have been no curse at all involved in God saying, "Now that you have sinned, you will be ruled by man." Therefore, I think we can throw this traditionalist argument right out of court. At the same time, I want to notice one other thing before leaving this passage, and that's this.

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The word for "rule," which is used here to talk about how the man is to rule woman as the result of her sin, is the mildest word for "rule" which appears in the Old Testament. There are five words for "rule." Four of them are very strong words, very vigorous words, words like a king who orders his servants around.

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There's one word that is far more mild and gentle, and that is the word which is used when it refers to how the man is to rule his wife because of the sin that has entered the world. Now, we're going to be returning to a consideration of the curse in just a few minutes,

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but hold that thought in mind as we go on to look at the next passage which the traditionalists advance in defense of their views. This passage is in 1 Corinthians 11. Here, Paul writes, "I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ,

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and the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and the glory of God, but a woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man;

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neither was man created for a woman, but woman for man. That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord a woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman. For as woman came from man, so man is now born of woman, and all things come from God."

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Now, in this passage, what Paul is saying is this. A man is to glorify God, and therefore he is to go without any covering. A woman is to glorify man, and therefore she is to go with the covering. Now, when you look at this parallelism that Paul is establishing,

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you immediately notice that somehow or other it's out of joint. If man glorifies God by being uncovered, how is a woman to glorify man by being covered? These should be the same.

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I think you come to understand what Paul means when you approach the significance of the veil as it was understood in the part of the world to which Paul was writing at that time. The veil was not something which was imposed upon a woman by her husband.

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A woman covered her head and wore a veil over her face, not because her husband said, "You will cover your head and wear a veil over your face." Instead, she covered herself to save her beauty for her husband. She did not reveal her beauty to others, but reserved it only for him as an act of love.

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And authorities are agreed this was a voluntary act on the woman's part. And like manner in Corinth at that time, a woman who went without a veil was generally considered to be a loose woman, a woman of the streets.

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And so if a woman would go without a veil, she would not only be advertising her wares, but she would be saying at the same time that her husband was married to a loose woman. Now what Paul has said begins to take shape for what he's affirming is this. A man is to glorify God by going uncovered.

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He is the image of God. Let him stand forth as that which has been made by God. But a woman, in the society of which we are a part, can best glorify her husband, and this she should be doing, by saving her beauty for him,

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and by asserting that she is giving herself totally to him. And in that day you did that by wearing a veil. Now you see, we can understand what Paul is saying. This is the best way that a woman could show her love for her husband.

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There's no implication of subordination here. Paul is saying that by wearing a veil, a woman is testifying to her love for her husband. And he goes on to develop the argument further. He goes on to say that a woman is to be the helper of a man,

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and we've already noticed there's no idea of subordination in that. And then he goes on to say that a man is not independent of a woman either. [Pause] Which implies that he is to be assisting her,

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because it's true, he argues, that the first woman came out of man, but it's also true that every man since has come out of a woman. We all had mothers. Everything finally, he says, comes from God, and we are to glorify one another in God.

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Now this point is underscored by Paul when he says that as Christ is the head of a man, so the husband is to be the head of his wife. To understand what Paul means here, you have to know what the word "head" means. When we think of head, we think that's the place where the brain is.

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That's the place that directs all of our activities. I move my hands because of thoughts that began here. But in the ancient world, the head was not understood to be the seat of direction at all. The heart was.

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"Out of the heart," the Bible says, "are the issues of life. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." It was the heart which directed, not the head. What then does Paul mean when he says that the man is to be the head as Christ is to be the head?

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Well, you look up the word "kephale," "head," as it was used in those days, and it's important to understand the word as it was used then. Just think, 2,000 years from now, somebody's all be digging around, and they dig up Southern California, and they pick up a piece of paper they find,

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and it says something about the California angels. Would they assume, therefore, that California was the habitation of celestial beings? They would, unless they discovered what we meant back 2,000 years ago, today, when we said "California angels," a baseball team.

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All right, now, just the same way, we have to know what a word meant when it was used 2,000 years ago. And the word "head" carried no connotation of rule or direction or overlordship. It meant source.

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It meant the place from which enabling power and strength comes. It meant the redeemer, the giver of those things that are good. That's what the word "head" meant. So what Paul is saying is this.

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As Christ is the source of the life of a man, as he is the enabler, the strengthener of man, so a man is to carry out that same role in the life of his wife. He is to be her enabler.

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He is to be the source of her strength. He is to be the one who builds her up. There is, you see, not the assertion of lordship or superiority here, but rather the suggestion that as Christ loved and gave himself,

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so a man is to love and give himself and be the source of great blessing to his wife, even as Christ blesses a man. This is the suggestion of the passage, and there's no implication in it of the inferiority of the woman.

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But on the contrary, there is the suggestion of mutual dependence and that the husband must be a source of strength, not a ruler, but a source of strength to this one he loves. Now we hurry on to 1 Timothy 2,

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which is another passage often quoted by traditionalists. And in this passage, Paul says some things about silence, which we're going to be noticing next week. Right now I want to skip over those and get to the meat of the passage.

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This is what he writes. "Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men. She is to keep silent."

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Now we'll notice that passage next week. Then he goes on. "For Adam was formed first and then Eve, and Adam was not deceived,

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but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children if she continues in faith and love and holiness with modesty." Now what is Paul saying here?

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Well, he says, first of all, that Adam is superior to Eve because he was made first. Now we've already noticed that that argument is not logical, nor is it built upon the teaching of Scripture.

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Paul is being inconsistent with the total implication of Scripture here, and, I might add, inconsistent with himself, because in Galatians 3 he affirms, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free,

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there is neither male nor female. We are all one in Christ Jesus." The climax of Paul's teaching, and the essence of it, I submit to you, is equality, not inferiority.

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And in this particular passage, when he goes back to that old argument about Adam being first, he is really slipping back into the rabbinic tradition of which he was a part. He was part of a tradition that taught

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that a man should get up every morning and pray, "O Lord, I thank Thee that I was not born a woman." That was the tradition in which Paul was brought up. Paul was brought up in a world, you see, which was still under the curse.

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And the curse did put a woman in a position of subordination to man. But Paul understood that when Christ died, the curse died. And now we're at the very center of things. What was that curse?

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That curse was a device that was designed to bring men to repentance and forgiveness. That curse was never intended to be eternal. If it was, why did Christ die upon the cross? The whole reason for Christ dying was to take us out from under the law

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and out from under the curse. If our sins were forgiven when Christ died, then all the sins of the world were forgiven, and that includes the sin of Adam and the sin of Eve.

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With the death of Christ, the power of the curse was broken. Now, Paul develops this whole argument in Romans 8. He says the whole world is groaning because of its sin. He asserts that in verse 20.

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He goes on to say it wants to be free. It seeks liberty. He explains that in verse 21. It's like a woman who's aching to give birth. This is what the world has described.

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She's in travail, says Paul, in verse 22. But God is moving. God is moving in all things, Paul asserts in verse 28. And He's moving for us.

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And the climax of His movement, and this is explained in verse 34, is the death of Christ. When Christ dies, all things are redeemed. The law is no longer effective.

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The curse has been removed. And this is done for us, and nothing can separate us, verses 38 and 39, from what has happened. Nothing can separate us from this loving power of Christ.

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And our task as the ambassadors of Christ is to go out and to announce to the world that the devil has been defeated at Calvary. Oh, his tail still swishes, but his doom is sure. That a woman has been taken out from domination,

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the promise of the curse, by the saving death of Jesus Christ, and that a man is no longer subject to the earth, but that instead the earth once more is subject to a man who has become a new creation.

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And our task is to go forth and to proclaim this, and that's what Paul means in this passage in Timothy when he says that a woman will be saved through childbirth, not by how many children she'll have,

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as our Roman Catholic brothers sometimes suggest. We know that's not right because there's another place very nearby where Paul talks about how spiritual certain widows who don't have any children are.

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So having children isn't what makes you spiritual. But Paul says by childbirth, by generation after generation of children, Christian parents having Christian children, and these children growing up and multiplying,

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and these Christians going out into the world and announcing what Christ has accomplished as the world comes to an acceptance of this, as the world comes to an understanding of the fact

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that the law no longer applies and the curse is dead, as the world comes to know that, then marvelous things are going to happen. The earth will be subdued.

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The earth will become more productive. It will bring forth, and of course we see this happening, particularly in lands which have been essentially dominated by our Christian understanding of things.

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And woman will be freed from the subjection under which she was placed at the time of the curse. Now this is what Paul asserts, that the curse is dead. It was nailed to the tree, and because it was nailed to the tree,

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women are no longer subject. And as generations after generations born of women come into the world, they will announce this is so. And Paul beats this same drum in Ephesians 5

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where he says, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ." "Wives, be subject to your husbands." And the word for subject here is in the middle voice. It is a voluntary act.

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It is not subject because your husband orders you to do so. It is a voluntary submission. And why does the wife joyously, openly, freely submit to the husband? Because, look at the next verse,

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"For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church." And remember what we said, "head" meant. The husband is the source by which the wife discovers that in Jesus Christ the curse has been killed.

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And even as Christ has freed men with his death on the cross, so the husband's task is to announce to his wife, not to number two, not to anyone who is subordinate, not to anyone who is less.

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His task is to proclaim to her, "You are freed by Jesus, even as I have been freed by Jesus." And we stand together. There is no longer any domination.

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The Jew does not stand above the Greek. The master does not stand above the slave. The male does not stand above the female. As you were in creation equal with Adam,

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so now in the new creation you are equal to your husband. And we are all one in Christ Jesus. The argument can be summed like this. Man and woman were made equal.

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The testimony of Genesis is to this. They sinned. As part of our sin and the punishment for it, Eve was made subject to Adam.

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This was the curse. And as you look through the whole Old Testament, you will find that women are there subjected to men. The curse was carried out throughout all that time.

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Many texts in the Old Testament teach the subordination of women in that day, and that was so. But then Christ came. And when Christ came, the law and the curse died on the cross.

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And when they died, it became our responsibility to go out and announce that anyone who is in Christ is a new creature. The curse no longer applies,

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and old subjections are done away. Eve was made from Adam's rib, and she was perfect. But when she sinned, the rib was broken. So God put a curse, a bandage on that rib

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to hold it tight in subjection. But then Jesus came, and he touched the rib, and it was healed, freed, made whole again. And that's the way a woman is today,

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freed and whole. She is liberated. She is equal. She is in no sense subordinate or inferior.

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And she is what she is by the blood of Jesus Christ. What does that say to us in the Church? Well, we'll talk about that next week.

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Right now we declare a seven-day intermission. Let us pray. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we rejoice in thy word.

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We rejoice in the truth that is manifested to us through it. We beseech thee to speak to us and to bless us men and women as one in Christ Jesus.

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The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you

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and give you his peace. Amen. Amen. Amen. [silence]