Service: Women and the Work of God

Women and Ministry — At Least that’s What My Mother Always Told Me!

In our last exercise, Service: Interrupted…By Devilish Design, we learned how Satan, in his drive to establish his kingdom’s rule over the earth, has been at work trying to prevent the establishment of God’s Kingdom on the earth. We discovered that from the beginning of human history to the present time he has…

Grown his kingdom by alienating people from God, taking and keeping them captive through sin;
Limited the growth of God’s Kingdom by keeping those under his dominion ignorant of God’s goodness, as well as the freedom they could be enjoying as members of His Kingdom; and,
Hindered the advancement of the Kingdom of God by means of an on-going war aimed at disrupting the Service of its citizens—namely, those liberated from Satan’s kingdom of darkness and death through the freedom of faith found only in Jesus Christ.

We also learned that Satan has enjoyed a considerable amount of success in this war simply by keeping those in God’s Kingdom…

In the dark as to their true mission in life and ignorant of the resources available to them for successful living, merely by limiting their knowledge and understanding of the Bible;
At odds with one another by stirring up misunderstandings, envies, and petty offenses among them; and,
Battle-fatigued, or frustrated, discouraged, and completely worn out from all the conflict.

These aren’t the only tactics he has used to good effect, though. Through his exploitation of the conflict between the sexes, a by-product of man’s fall from grace, he has been able to sideline roughly one-half of the workforce in God’s Kingdom, thereby greatly reducing the amount of Kingdom Work being done in the world. These workers, whose God-ordained right to serve has so often been denied, are none other than the female members of God’s Family—the very ones (as we learned in Service: The Church as the Family of God) who were meant to serve as pictures in the flesh of the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

For us to better understand how this situation came to be, we’ll need to revisit the story of Adam and Eve. This time, instead of focusing our attention on the pattern of seduction used by the devil to ensnare our ancient forbearers, we will be approaching the story with an eye to understanding God’s purposes for the Man and Woman, as well as the ways in which sin has affected those purposes.

God’s Purpose for the Sexes

As we have mentioned more than once during the course of these exercises, God’s purpose in creating Man was to provide Himself with a Family to love, both now and throughout eternity. As a Family of Beings bearing the image and likeness of the One who was giving them life; and, since…

…God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth (John 4:24) …

…it was essential that the members of God’s Family also be Spirit Beings. As the late Dr. Myles Munroe explains in his excellent book, Understanding the Purpose and Power of Woman…

…when God made man, He essentially drew man out of Himself, so that the essence of man would be just like Him. In this way, the receiver could be just like the Giver, and could reciprocate His love. Since ‘God is spirit,’ He created man as spirit.

So man—the spirit-man—was created as a result of God’s love. Note carefully that, at this point, we are still talking about man, the spirit. We are not yet talking about male and female. Whom did God create in His image? Man. Man is spirit, and spirits have no gender. The Bible never talks about a male or female spirit. God created the spirit-man without a gender.[1]

Thus, when the time was right for His Family to come into existence, the first thing God did was create a Spirit Being whom He called Man…

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27).

Once this Spirit had been created…

God took this spirit-man, and He placed him in two physical forms: male and female. The spirit-man is neither male nor female. However, to fulfill His eternal purposes, God used two physical forms, called male and female, to express the one entity of man. Therefore, the essence of both male and female is the resident spirit within them, called ‘man.’

Whom did God call man? Both male and female.[2]

With God’s “eternal purposes” being the creation of Family—and a family being the product of the sexual union between Male and Female—God took the Spirit-Man and placed him in separate physical “houses” or bodies; bodies differing from one another because of the unique roles or functions they were designed to perform. In the role of the Male, Man was intended to demonstrate the love, leadership, strength, guidance, provision, and protection of God the Father, and to be the Giver of the Seed of Life; while, in the role of the Female, Man was intended to demonstrate the love, respect, wisdom, care-giving, gentleness, grace, empathy, and sensitivity of God the Holy Spirit, and to be the Receiver and Nurturer of the Seed provided by the Male. Through the coming together of the Giver and Receiver, the life shared by them would then be reproduced over and over and the Family of God would grow.

In keeping with His divine order of creation, God built the house for the Male first, as He…

…formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7).

Once the Male had become a living being, God placed him in the garden home He had created for him and, after instructing him as to his responsibilities and the rules by which he was to live, God set about completing His final work of creation, with this pronouncement…

It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him (Genesis 2:18).

Turning His attention to the construction of the house for the Female, He…

…caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed its place with flesh.

And the rib that 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 (Genesis 2:21-23).’

Here in this special construction of the Female’s house, we see how God, in the same way that He had taken Man out of Himself to be someone He could love, took the Woman out of the Man and gave her to him to love.[3] Here, too, we have Man’s acknowledgment that the Woman, having been made of the same stuff as he was, was his equal and partner in the work of God. With His creation then complete…

…God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’… And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good (Genesis 1:28, 31).

So, here at the beginning of things and in keeping with the purposes of God, in Man—that is, the Spirit-Man created by God for relationship with Himself—there was no Male or Female. It was only in the human body that sexual distinctions were made—distinctions determined solely by the part each sex was to play in the creation of God’s Family. Here…

Both Male and Female were equal in the eyes of God;
Both Male and Female were given the task of stewardship over God’s creation;
Both Male and Female were blessed by God…

…and, as far as God was concerned, it was all very good!

God's Creation is Good — It Was All Good

God’s Punishment on the Sexes

With so much good going on in the Garden, it seems a shame that Evil had to rear its ugly head and spoil it all. And yet, for Man to truly be a son of God, it wasn’t enough for him to be…

An eternal spirit, like God;
A rational being, like God;
An emotional being, like God;
A willful being, like God; or,
A moral being, like God.

He would also have to be Holy, like God. Before this could happen, though, he would have to do what was right in every situation, just like God. But at this point in Man’s brief history, he was still living in his original state of innocence, for his righteousness had yet to be proven through testing.

People have often wondered why a Holy God would allow Evil into the world without taking into consideration that for Man to truly be like God, he must want the same things God wants and love God enough to do what He says. For Man to be free to choose God’s way, there would have to be an alternative from which he could choose—with Evil being the only other option to God.

Of course, Evil in this case did not look like Evil…

…for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14).

Instead, it came packaged as a rational self-interest and an appealing religion of works and was presented in such a way that it would overturn God’s established order of creation, inverting His authority structure in the process. Like it or not, God’s order and authority structure for Creation was this…

God First,
Then Man,
Then Woman,
Then the Animal Kingdom.

We’ve already established that, up until this time, Man and Woman were…

Equal in their position before God;
Equal in their call to the work of God; and,
Equal in their blessing by God.

But for the sake of order, God created Man first, placing him as Head over his wife (and eventual family); a position in which he would be held accountable for everything that happened in his family. However, this position of Headship was never meant to be a mark or measure of his superiority over the Woman. If it was, then we would have a serious problem with the following verse…

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God (1 Corinthians 11:3).

If being the Head indicated one’s superiority over another, this would mean that God the Father was and is superior to God the Son—and we know from the Scriptures that this just isn’t the case. For…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1-3).

I [Christ] and the Father are one (John 10:30).

This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God (John 5:18).

He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God…for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell… (Colossians 1:15, 19).

From these verses, it is easy to see that although God is the Head of Christ, Jesus is still equal to God. That being said, what are we to make of this statement by Jesus to His disciples on the eve of His crucifixion?

You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I …I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father (John 14:28, 31).

In this case, is God being “greater” than Jesus an indication that He is somehow superior to Jesus? Or, in doing what the Father has commanded Him to do, has Jesus’ equality with the Father been diminished in any way? No, not at all; for in His Person and in His Power, Jesus remains equal to God; it is only in His Position as Leader that God is greater than He—with this assumption of Leadership being solely for the sake of order. In other words, for the sake of fulfilling the Father’s Kingdom Purposes, Christ Jesus…

…who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped…emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:6-11).

So, although He was equal to God, Christ willingly chose to submit Himself to God’s Leadership so that the Plan of Redemption needed for God’s Kingdom purposes and the creation of His Family could be realized.

Headship, then, was and is a good thing and remains an essential and powerful component in the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth. However, it was not the only component that would be needed; if it had been, then God would never have created Woman. For in His creation of a Helper for the Man, God provided the Man with a power to help get the job done which was lacking in himself—that being, the subtle yet dynamic power of the Woman’s suggestion, encouragement, and Influence. Had the Man been left in charge by himself, his way of carrying out God’s Work would have primarily been through fiat–an effective though not necessarily a pleasant way to lead. The Woman, on the other hand, as a picture or type of the Holy Spirit, could help him accomplish things that he couldn’t do by himself through her powerful leadership gifts of persuasion.

So, being fully aware of the limitations of Man’s “Position Power,” God fashioned a partner for him with the “Influence Power”[1] needed to complement or complete him, and to assist him in accomplishing God’s Kingdom Work.

…and, that the union of the Male and Female was considered to be the reunification of their one soul?

In order for us to more fully comprehend the Fall and its effects on the Male-Female relationship, it is vital that we first understand God’s Purposes for Man, along with the system of order and authority He instituted within His Creation. To be sure, Satan was well aware of them for when he bypassed the Man in his Position Power in the Garden, and approached the Woman instead, he did so with the intention of using her Influence Power to achieve his Evil end of overturning God’s Kingdom, so that he could advance his own.

Because we have already covered a lot of important information in this exercise—information which no doubt will take some time to digest—and because there is still much more to come, I think it would be wise for us to divide this exercise into two parts and take a break for reflection at this point. Having laid the groundwork for our discussion of the role of Women in the Work of God in the first part of this exercise, when we return for part two…

We will learn how Satan’s manipulation of the Woman’s Influence Power led to the forfeiture of Man’s Position Power, and the consequences of that debacle;
We will learn how Woman’s Influence Power was checked during Old Testament times, and compare that to what is intended for women in New Testament times; and,
We will briefly discuss two of the most troublesome Scripture passages dealing with the role of Women in the Work of God…