The Husband’s Call to Love Is A Call to Rule

[windblown]

@windblown, I really want to give you a fair answer here, but I'm confused, because I think the paragraph you quoted is pretty self-explanatory. In addition, the matter has been addressed repeatedly throughout this thread, so I'm at a bit of a loss. Take a look at this post and let me know if you still have a question: The Husband’s Call to Love Is A Call to Rule

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Your position "love not rule" is very clear, yes. That was not my question. You keep reiterating your take on Gen. 3, but to what end? How does that support your position? (I don't mind finding quotes, if that would help clarify my confusing question.)

Here's your position from the beginning:

Gen 3:16 teaches us pretty squarely that the rulership of the husband over the wife is an artifact of the curse of God on Eve for her disobedience—"from the beginning it was not so".

And here in a little more detail:

for Gen 3 I'll simply repeat my assertion that future tense means future tense, which means it will happen in the future. Gen 3:16 says he shall rule over you, not he "will continue" to rule over you. Future means future..............Bottom line is: Woman is one half of the "mankind" that God said He would make "in our image and likeness", and was created from the very substance of man to be his partner in having dominion over the earth. Then she screwed it all up, one of the consequences of which was that "he shall have power over you".

So we know you believe rulership is part of the curse. Got it. But where are you going with this? We are kinda stuck with these curses, no? (Am I the only one flashing back to the whole "God created Adam and Eve not Adam, Eve, and Stacy" rhetoric...?)

Now we possibly start to see a glimpse of what might be your bigger point here:​

Fortunately for us, that's not the end of the story. Jesus comes along a few millenia later, becomes the ultimate remedy for our sin problem, and unleashes the Holy Spirit to fill and empower believers, then His apostle Paul comes along and teaches us how we're supposed to treat wives, emphasizing again the essential "one flesh" unity of the man

Oh and here's maybe another clue:

I still see Gen 3:16 as curse stuff. I think the grammar is pretty clear about that, and I'd like to officially dial 1-800- @IshChayil to see if we could get a ruling on the Hebrew grammar in Gen 1, 2, & 3...............So the only thing I would concede here is that man 'has the rule over' or 'has power over' the woman as a result of the fall, which is congruent with Jesus's teaching (cited by both myself and Samuel) that the Gentile rulers lord it over their subjects and "exercise authority over" them, but for those of us following Christ's example it should not be so. Rather, we are called to serve/minister and lay down our lives for those we love even as Christ did.

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And here's more requests for clarifying tenses (must be pretty important for your mysterious big point?):

What can you say about that future tense verb from the Hebrew grammar? I see a Greek OT text that has a clear future tense, but I don't have the tools or experience to speak to the Hebrew. Is that a clear "this will happen from now on" future tense, or is it some kind of "this will keep happening the way it has been" construction that I'm not familiar with?

So, again. What difference does pre-fall or post-fall rulership make? Does Jesus and the Holy Spirit now cause the ground to effortlessly burst forth with bounty? While breaking the curse of sin and death, did He also enable snakes to grow feet? Please tell us the ways in which the curse is not in effect or how we should somehow strive to live pre-fall...I've got a birthing coming up that could be vastly improved with this pertinent information!

 

[rockfox]

I think I've already established that I view the philosophies behind postmodern feminism to be insidious, as I've made numerous comments along those lines in threads here on Biblical Families, but one still has to be careful about not extending an argument too far. In this paragraph above, you assert that the idea that men should rule over their wives would rarely have been questioned just 200 years ago, but then you go on to remind us that Isaiah 3:12 provided a warning of imminent ruling of men by women, so this problem wasn't unknown except just in recent times. I do, though, like your emphasis elsewhere on the true problem being the males (beta or otherwise) who knuckle under to female control (rule or otherwise). It is our responsibility to be the heads of our families, so no matter what the philosophy is that we use to justify abandoning our responsibility, we still, as men, remain responsible for the outcome.

Ya it's not a black and white thing. The roots of this problem are in female nature and the curse; it has been ever with us. There have always been bossy wives and weak men and we can trace the beginnings of feminism going back centuries. Isaiah is prophecy; so it is future looking, not necessarily speaking of things that where known. Yet such prophecies also sometimes have multiple fulfillments and what we see with the rise of feminism seems to be a common path that civilizations take in their waning years.

But it is worth noting Isaiah doesn't just speak of women ruling, but children too. We've all likely seen that happen around us; grown men publicly bested by a 2 year old who can't even talk in complete sentences. Now that, that is unheard of in history to my knowledge!

It is hard for us to understand how dramatic social attitudes have changed in the last 100 years. Many avowed anti-feminists often hold viewpoints and assumptions indistinguishable from those advocated by the suffragists. Feminism is the water we mentally swim in; it provides the default assumptions for all of our thinking whether we agree with it or not. It's even hard to talk about these things because the very words we use have been corrupted.

For example, this is how we used to deal with hen pecked men who 'lost a quarrel' with a wife or put up with 'scolding, beating, or other abuse' from her and this and this is what they did with nagging wives. Now days? Church leaders advocate such tactics for wives (re: tactics - I mean the wifely behavior once punished). And obviously false accusations by women are levied by society to destroy innocent men without even a pretense of due process.

Frankly things like that or this tell me those societies had recent memory of what happens when women are not ruled; things we forgot to our detriment.

 

[Keith Martin]

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We are kinda stuck with these curses, no? (Am I the only one flashing back to the whole "God created Adam and Eve not Adam, Eve, and Stacy" rhetoric...?)

What difference does pre-fall or post-fall rulership make? Does Jesus and the Holy Spirit now cause the ground to effortlessly burst forth with bounty? While breaking the curse of sin and death, did He also enable snakes to grow feet? Please tell us the ways in which the curse is not in effect or how we should somehow strive to live pre-fall...I've got a birthing coming up that could be vastly improved with this pertinent information!​

Believe me, I am not in any way making light of what you have facing you in the birthing realm, @windblown. I'm a firm believer that bearing a child is an accomplishment that exceeds anything any man can do. And I was actually thinking of you specifically when I asked @andrew (and everyone else) something last night. Kristin had all four of our children by natural childbirth, and I was present in 1978 when my first son was born by Caesarian section, so there's no doubt in my mind about how much suffering can be involved. But I do quite sincerely have the following questions: given that the Hebrews almost exclusively avoided speaking in terms of forever, what were the time boundaries of The Curse(s)? And . . .
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How do we know that the curses God put on Adam and Eve were permanently attached to not only Adam and Eve but to all their descendants? How do we know that those curses weren't meant just specifically for Adam and Eve?

You made me laugh when I read,

While breaking the curse of sin and death, did He also enable snakes to grow feet?

,

but I do still sincerely wonder if some or maybe most of the Fall Curses were only temporary (with varying expiration dates), with the greatest tribulations limited to punishments for the actual guilty parties: Adam, Eve and the Adversary. No, snakes don't have feet (although some of their less-ancient reptile relatives do), but it clearly stopped being the case that all men are required to eat their bread by the sweat of their brow (Gen. 3:19), so we can assume that the curse was far more burdensome for Adam than it is for A.D. humans. Correspondingly, while present-day birthing is no picnic, how do we know that it wasn't far, far worse for Eve?

And if that is the case, it certainly provides more than enough justification for contemplating as Andrew has suggested not only when the curses began but what God's original (and perhaps eventual) intentions were for human existence. In addition, are we required to resign ourselves to requiring no more of ourselves and our treatment of each other than we would require of the naive first human being(s) who got to live in Paradise and talk with God but had the ignorant and ungrateful audacity to disobey the one thing they weren't permitted to do? Doesn't God, in His Divine Word, pretty clearly indicate both pre- and post-Fall what His higher expectations are for us?

More in a subsequent response to @rockfox . . .

 

[Keith Martin]

@rockfox, what you wrote today was one of my favorite posts from you. I repeat that I see a lot of overlap in your and my views about postmodern feminism. However, I want to question a couple things you wrote . . .

Isaiah is prophecy; so it is future looking, not necessarily speaking of things that were known . . . But it is worth noting Isaiah doesn't just speak of women ruling, but children too. We've all likely seen that happen around us; grown men publicly bested by a 2 year old who can't even talk in complete sentences. Now that, that is unheard of in history to my knowledge!

Actually, as I'm sure is no surprise to you, Isaiah combines [future] prophecy with [past and present] commentary. What you've just mentioned happens to have been addressed in the first half of Isa. 3:12 we referenced last night. The KJV comports with the vast majority of English-language translations by stating, "As for My people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them!" So clearly what we're observing today is an example of what you referred to as multiple fulfillment.

this is how we used to deal with hen pecked men who 'lost a quarrel' with a wife or put up with 'scolding, beating, or other abuse' from her and this and this is what they did with nagging wives. Now days? Church leaders advocate such tactics for wives (re: tactics - I mean the wifely behavior once punished). And obviously false accusations by women are levied by society to destroy innocent men without even a pretense of due process.

Frankly things like that or this tell me those societies had recent memory of what happens when women are not ruled; things we forgot to our detriment.

I'm going to copy and paste something I wrote in a response to @windblown, because I think it applies here. Yes, wives these days have a tendency to falsely claim the mantle of authority while giving themselves permission to be ruled by hormones and engage in indulging their least-mature impulses, but does that provide evidence that reintroducing the shivaree, the shrew's fiddle or any other form of painful public humiliation would advance the general state of affairs between men and women -- or get us brownie points from Big Papa? Would we label those devices designed to fix pesky bitches as technological advances (even during their reign) just because they were invented after the birth of our Lord and/or by figures of mainstream religion? I think it would be a mistake to use that as a standard. The Roman Church is famous for having introduced a whole host (no pun intended) of such instruments of punishment and humiliation, but that was the opposite of spiritual progress, as perhaps also were some of their other innovations -- maybe even including the codification of non-scriptural creeds and the doctrine of Original Sin, a concept in play in this discussion?

Are we required to resign ourselves to requiring no more of ourselves and our treatment of each other than we would require of the naive first human being(s) who got to live in Paradise and talk with God but had the ignorant and ungrateful audacity to disobey the one thing they weren't permitted to do? Doesn't God, in His Divine Word, pretty clearly indicate both pre- and post-Fall what His higher expectations are for us?

And would we, as men, be supportive of similar standards being imposed on us men that we may wish hadn't been discontinued for women? How about stocks or stonings? Waterboarding? Being tarred and feathered?

Is it possible, too, that handling the other gender that is ruled by hormones and engaged in indulging their least-mature impulses by taking the brakes off our own hormonal urges and/or indulging our own least-mature impulses just might be a hypocritical even if more convenient option?

It may be just me, but I'm wary of justifying master-slave dynamics within marriage. I recognize (believe me, I do recognize, given that I'm flat out in the middle of it myself right now) that patiently standing firm in expectations that everyone in one's family display the differential levels of respect that are proper within families (which, in my humble opinion, does include having clear authority over one's minor children and limited clear authority over one's adult children who choose to continue living under one's roof) is more difficult and requires far more contemplation and creativity than would being a ruler or bringing down the hammer -- but it also aspires much more effectively to the pre-Fall and post-Resurrection expectations that are so eloquently articulated in That Book we all claim to be the one and only pure source of wisdom.

 

[FollowingHim]

Please, anyone, hear this loud and clear, though: I have no personal foolproof evidence that I will, in the end, successfully establish the headship in my own family, after having been an ineffective Sensitive New Age Guy in my marriage for decades. I work on it, and it appears progress is occurring, but the two-steps-forward-one-step-back occasionally involves some tremendously monumental backwards one-steps .

I love your honesty. It's so easy to talk like we've got it all together here, when in reality every one of us is a work in progress.

No, snakes don't have feet (although some of their less-ancient reptile relatives do), but it clearly stopped being the case that all men are required to eat their bread by the sweat of their brow (Gen. 3:19), so we can assume that the curse was far more burdensome for Adam than it is for A.D. humans.

I would disagree. The environment is just as difficult to grow food in, in many ways it is getting worse. However man, through his ingenuity and unfairness, has managed to create an economy where many of us Western men are insulated from this fact and get to live in a fantasyworld where food appears on your plate without much sweat. While many men in other parts of the world have to put their wives and children to work also, and still starve. Just because we're sitting in a comfy chair doesn't mean God's reversed the curse, it just means that people are unevenly distributing the responsibility for dealing with that curse.

 

[windblown]

while present-day birthing is no picnic, how do we know that it wasn't far, far worse for Eve?

There is only one way to naturally birth a baby. Women face drastic consequences for themselves and their babies when they try to avoid pain in childbirth.

 

[FollowingHim]

...but it clearly stopped being the case that all men are required to eat their bread by the sweat of their brow (Gen. 3:19)...

Actually, another thought on that, have you read Thelyphthora yet? In there the author comments that although man was told to go forth and multiply to fill the earth, surely that commandment must no longer be applicable as the earth was already full. That was in 1780, when the entire global population would have been <1 billion. But, in the limited locality that the author could see, and with the food-production technology of the day, the world looked full. He just didn't have the full picture.
We can't look around ourselves and decide that a command, curse or otherwise of God must be ended simply because it looks that way to our perception. We are most likely completely wrong, even though we may have no idea how we could even be wrong.

 

[steve]

Just an observation, when a judge hands down his decision it is called a ruling. He isn’t the king, he isn’t the ruler, but he has ruled.
When a husband makes a decision, he has ruled on the question or problem.

If Adam had spoken up and said “No, hunny. We are not going to try that experiment.”, he would have ruled his family correctly, pre-fall.
(Many scholars agree that in the Hebrew he was standing right there observing the interaction. She gave him to eat, she didn’t go find him and give it to him.)

 

[Keith Martin]

Just an observation, when a judge hands down his decision it is called a ruling. He isn’t the king, he isn’t the ruler, but he has ruled.
When a husband makes a decision, he has ruled on the question or problem.

In our system of government, the ruling class is spread out into a wide variety of authorities, all of which rule over us, to one degree or another. In point of fact and more so in regard to actual function, the Congress as a whole, the President, and the judiciary have theoretically equal shares of that rule. Judges do in fact rule us, because they don't just hand down a decision; they have the force of the whole law behind them, and refusal to comply with a judge's ruling will generally get the gears of law enforcement grinding away at the one who refuses to comply or demonstrates contempt.

As husbands, we do not have a police force, an IRS, the CIA or the FBI to enforce our supposed 'rulings.'

 

[Keith Martin]

I love your honesty.

Thanks.

Just because we're sitting in a comfy chair doesn't mean God's reversed the curse, it just means that people are unevenly distributing the responsibility for dealing with that curse.

As Rush Limbaugh would say, hunger still exists in the world because of an unequal distribution of capitalism.

But my point up above was not to debate distribution of resources. The point is that only getting bread by the sweat of one's brow is no longer a universal curse, and, in actual fact, the fact that the majority of people get their food without breaking a sweat -- even in the work they do to earn the money to buy food -- does not somehow mean that the remaining people have to sweat 5 times as much to get their bread.

What I'm really waiting for is something outside of writings of Early Church Fathers or papal encyclicals that demonstrates where in Holy Writ exists an explanation that the curses placed on Adam, Eve and the Adversary were actually curses, permanent or otherwise, on the rest of humanity to come.

 

[Verifyveritas76]

Gen 8:21. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake;

 

[andrew]

Your position "love not rule" is very clear, yes. That was not my question.

I just made the mistake of glancing at this thread instead of closing the tab when I got on the compy to do some accounting, and I won't really have time to say anything tonight or for the next couple of days, but I think there's a miscommunication here.

Did you click on the link? It points to a very specific post that covers all this ground pretty completely. I don't know why the BBC code that the software provides for the link I gave you uses the title of the thread as the text for the link, it just does. That's a bit misleading, but if you click that link I think you'll find your questions answered. If not, PM me and I'll come back and respond to your reply to my question. I don't want to leave you hanging after asking you a question, but I don't want to repeat myself either.

In the meantime, if my fast skim is not misleading me, Keith may be raising some similar questions around Gen 3:16.

And I guess I'll mention one other thing. This isn't my deal. It's a response to the claim that "patriarchy existed from the beginning so men are supposed to rule over women forever and ever amen" argument. It's just not that simple, for a bunch of reasons, at least some of which are discussed in that post I linked to, and in my questions to IshChayil about the Hebrew in Gen 1, 2, & 3. I'm not trying to build a big argument of any sort on Gen 3:16; it's part of a rebuttal to a different argument that's being made by others.

 

[andrew]

Gen 8:21. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake;

Mind. Blown. So much to think about in ONE verse....

Peace out.

 

[FollowingHim]

Good point @Verifyveritas76

 

[Keith Martin]

I'm working the polls today so will be entirely out of pocket until after 9pm, but I'll return here tonight.

 

[Pacman]

Gen 8:21. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake;

I always thought that meant no more global disaster (for instance a worldwide flood) and not a lifting of the "original" curse.

 

[Pacman]

Genesis 3:17-19
[17] And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; [18] Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; [19] In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art , and unto dust shalt thou return.

Notice the ground is cursed not Adam. His punishment was that he would have to work with cursed ground. Many men have found ways to avoid working with the ground and still survive. Thereby reducing the direct implications of the curse in their life. But the ground is still cursed. As is the serpent.

Actually the word curse isn't even used when the punishment is given to the woman (later named Eve.)

 

[Pacman]

(Many scholars agree that in the Hebrew he was standing right there observing the interaction. She gave him to eat, she didn’t go find him and give it to him.)

I have seen this brought up before. But it's an assumption. The language is not clear enough to extrapolate either way. Remember we know that Adam was not deceived (1 Timothy 2:14) so if he was standing right beside her then he must not have cared about her very much knowingly allowing her to be deceived and eat something that would ultimately kill her.

 

[Pacman]

My concern is that, as I see it, something changed with Gen 3:16. "He shall rule over you", not "he will continue to rule over you". The argument is made that "patriarchy existed before the fall", the truth of which depends on what you mean by "patriarchy" in that context. Clearly the man had some kind of priority and authority over the woman before the fall, but that "shall rule over you" bit appears in 3:16, not before, so "ruling like a king" appears to be a change of state.

I don't really disagree with you here. As indicated by my earlier posts:

So while Genesis 3:16 clearly indicates something changed with regard to a husbands ruling (my hypothesis is this change is because of the fact that he now has to deal with her sin nature) I don't believe that is where it started...
Nor do I believe that ruling her is "being the curse of God in her life."

I stand by my statement that something changed. And yes the verse seems to indicate that ruling began with the curse. Again remember that before the curse sin was not an issue, so what exactly did Adam's headship look like before the curse? Was it simply leadership without authority? If sin nature wasn't present then leadership would not need authority. Because the sin nature would not be tempting her to reject his leadership.

explanation of the terms for clarity sake:
In these posts I was assuming that we were defining leadership as not necessarily including rule. And defining authority as including rule.

One thing we know for absolutely sure is that when they ate the fruit the addition of a sin nature is what changed. So why is it inappropriate to assume that part of the woman's consequences now include her husband's need to rule her because she now has a sin nature?

I guess I view it as needing to make a lot of logical jumps to get around the husband's necessity to rule his wife.

Before the curse his leadership did not need to rise to the level of rule. After the curse it is now necessary because she now has a sin nature.

 

[steve]

I have seen this brought up before. But it's an assumption.

I won’t further discuss it in this thread.
But I will say that if your assumption is correct, he still had the obligation to choose a righteous response to her actions which would have changed history. And, btw, further established his leadership/rule.