Check out Part 1 of “Easily Deceived Eve”, in which I discuss why God chose to hold Adam, not Eve, responsible for the sin of mankind.
Easily Deceived Eve.
What a moniker. What a shameful blow.
Imagine the worst dumb blond joke you can think of–Eve ups the ante.
“So a serpent walks up to Eve and says, ‘Hey, if you eat this fruit, you’ll be wise like God.’ She looks at the serpent, looks at the fruit, and says ‘You’re right! This is good fruit. So she takes a bite.”
I mean, hello!?! Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to listen to just any old snake-fruit salesman?
But Eve falls for it. She’s one gullible gal.
Yet Scripture seems to suggest that not only Eve but all women are prone to Eve’s naivete.
I Timothy 2:14 gives Eve’s “easily deceived” nature as a reason (apart from the created order of male headship) that women should not teach or have authority over men.
The implication is that a woman, being easily deceived, might unknowingly lead into falsehood if men were under her spiritual authority.
I Corinthians 14 affirms that women are not to teach or have authority over men–but takes it one step further by saying that women should keep silent in the churches, not being permitted to speak.
Of course, one must realize that the “church service” in Corinth looked quite different from ours today–the order of service in which “each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation” would make it very difficult for a woman to speak in church without teaching or having authority over a man.
Regardless, women are encouraged to learn in silence with submission, asking questions of their husbands at home rather than disrupting the service for their questions–or worse yet, than interrupting the service for a misguided teaching.
At various times, I’ve chafed at this command.
In my remarkable humility (Hah!), I recognize that I have a high IQ, a great deal of education, and a natural aptitude for teaching. Why should I not use the gifts God has given me?
My pride (while inexcusable) is not without cause. Many within the church and without have confirmed that I am intelligent, well-read, and highly educated. They agree that I teach with passion and ease. When I teach, people learn. When I explain, they understand.
But God would protect me from what I, in my pride, consider beneath me.
I think I’m too smart to fall for deception. I think that somehow I can escape Eve’s vulnerability. But I cannot.
If Eve, with a mind uncorrupted by sin, as a woman who had experienced unbroken fellowship with God, could be deceived–how much more can I, with my sin-twisted and sleep-deprived mind and my through-a-glass-dimly view of God?
I am Eve, easily deceived.
God knows it–which is why He has placed this protection over me. James 3:1 says that teachers receive a stricter judgment. God would keep me from this stricter judgment by not having me teach or have authority over a man.
God would protect me by placing me under the headship of man (today, as a single woman, under Christ and my father; someday, Lord willing, under Christ and my husband.)
When I do teach–and I do, using my giftings to teach women and youth spiritually and people of all stripes in my secular area of expertise–I teach under the authority of my father, who offers me good counsel and brings correction when I am in error.
As I teach under the authority of my father, I am protected. My father, to whose authority I submit, is held responsible for error that he sees but fails to correct. This guards me against teaching out of deception.
At the same time, since I am teaching those who are also under authority (women and youth), I have an additional protection. These who hear my teaching are under the authority of husbands and fathers who can correct deceptions that I have unknowingly passed along.
God, recognizing in me Eve’s weakness, chose to protect me from myself by restricting my ability to self-destruct. To rebel against His protective structure is not wisdom but madness.
If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, take a look at my thoughts on why God chose to hold Adam, not Eve, responsible for the sin of mankind. And stay tuned for part 3, which should be posted on Friday.
To say that Eve was easily deceived is a true statement. To say that I am easily deceived is a true statement. But one may also truthfully say that Adam was easily deceived and that any one of a million men is easily deceived. The problem is when statements of fact are extrapolated out into comparisons. Because I (a woman) may be described as easily deceived does not mean that all women are easily deceived, nor does it mean that any individual woman is MORE easily deceived than any individual man. And certainly it would be poor logic to go even further and say that women, in general, are more easily deceived than men and therefore God excludes them from leadership roles. One could as logically say that Adam was easily led astray by Eve, therefore all men are easily led astray by women and that’s why God gave men the job of leading the church. But I don’t hear many people saying that, even though the logic is as sound as the generalization about women, which I do hear people saying.
To me, it’s inescapably true that every sin, whether it’s the sin of being easily deceived or the sin of being a wimp or the sin of lust or the sin of laziness, applies to every human, so it is impossible to say that God’s assigning of roles is a result of a particular package of sins or strengths unique to one class of humans. The temptation is to assume that God makes his choices based on our characteristics. An example of this is when people say that God chose Abraham because Abraham was a righteous man. Not so! Because God chose Abraham, Abraham was a righteous man. Likewise, I personally don’t think God’s choice of men to lead and women to listen (within the formal worship structure) is because of any characteristics unique to either group. Or that his choice to make man first was because there was something innately more leader-like about men. I think he made his choice based on what he wanted to do, unrelated to the “fitness” of the individual for the task he would assign. His MO is more often to give the assignment and then, through it and the impossibility of doing the task in one’s own strength, to show himself in a mysterious way that makes no sense and throws the whole notion of “fitness” out the window. He might even show himself more through the failure of the individual to fulfill his or her role well than through doing it all “right.”
I think you come to the only defensible conclusion–that when God speaks of a sin of any sort or a role of any sort, our job, whether we are male or female, is to examine our own hearts to see if he’s describing us and to seek his mercy when we find out he is. It’s in that place of receiving and being dependent upon his mercy that we are ready to take up whatever role-related action he has for us. Strangely enough, from that place of humility, roles have a way of working themselves out without much of a fuss, and I wonder whether God even wants us to make unilateral, preemptive declarations of a person’s (or class of persons) “place”–maybe he wants us to arrive at his truths about who we are and how we are to interact through a long process of action/correction/repentance/restoration instead of “figure out how to do it right and then guilt or train everybody into doing it that way.” I’m rambling now, and not so much even speaking to what you wrote as to various assertions I’ve heard throughout Christendom in the past 30 years, but thanks for the thought-spurring! You know I like that. ;-)