It
will be interesting to see how many female friends I have left after
this hits the press in the newsletter. First of all, I am pro-woman! I
am comfortable talking to them and being around them. My mom was a
woman; I had three sisters,
and have been married to Dolly over 50 years. Probably the thing that
turned lots of men off women was the over-the-top feminist movement in
the 1960's. Some historians consider any effort to obtain equal rights
for women as feminism. If this is so, it started lots of years ago.
Plato argued for the political and sexual equality of women around 24
centuries ago. In more modern times, Florence Nightingale was convinced
that women had all the potential of men in the 1800's. In the late
18th century and early 19th century feminism focused on the right to vote.
What
brought this up was a sermon I heard Chuck Swindoll preach, where he
mentioned life in Eden. When God formed Adam and Eve "out of dust
of the ground" (Gen. 2:7), there is no mention of which one was in
charge. You get the impression they were co-equal beings, despite the
fact that Adam was formed first. This co-equal relationship seems to
have been verified by Eve being formed around one of Adam's ribs. The
couple was in fact called, "one flesh" (Gen. 2:24). This co-equal
arrangement came to a screeching halt in Gen. 3:6, when Eve picked and
ate fruit from the one tree in The Garden that God had told them not to eat of.
The often overlooked fact in this story is that Adam wasn't out in the
back forty checking on the livestock when this happened. A careful
reading of Gen. 3 indicates he was standing there watching the scene unfold; and did absolutely nothing to stop it. Granted, nowhere in chapters 1 and 2 are we told he was warned she might be a loose cannon.
What
Swindoll pointed out is that when God came looking for them He didn't
say, "Eve, where are you?" What Gen. 3:9 records is, "And the Lord God
called unto Adam, and said unto him, where art thou?" It's obvious that
God held Adam responsible for his wife. It was after Adam blamed God
then blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, and the serpent was turned into
a snake that Adam officially, by God's directive, became the head of
the household. God plainly told Eve in Gen. 3:16, "and thy desire
(longing) will be to thy husband, and he shall rule (have dominion) over
thee."
She was cursed by having a man rule over her (plus the childbirth
thing) and he was cursed by having to eke out a living by manual labor.
In
America, women get paid around 70% of what men get paid according to the
news. That probably makes sense in some manual labor occupations, obviously
it doesn't make sense in most professional fields (excluding sports).
Everything being relative, most of our women have it made when compared
with those in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries.
The
bottom line, however, is that God made the man the head of the
household. Unfortunately, I know women who have married men who
couldn't be head of the chicken coop. That's her problem for making
that choice, not God's: and as far as I can tell in the scripture, he
is still technically "head of the household."
