Order in the Home

by Elisabeth Elliot

[Editor's Note: The following advice was offered by Elizabeth Elliot on the Gateway to Joy radio program.]

Too proud to be just a man or just a woman. I believe it is the cause of all the misery in the world. It’s not a question of politics. It has nothing to do with rights. But the order that God has established in the Christian home is His design. It is His meant for harmony.

I think of my own parents. We never discussed the order in the home, because back in those days it was taken for granted, at least by Christians, that the husband is the head of the home. There was never any argument about it. I don’t remember ever hearing a sermon about it. The passage was there in Ephesians 5.
 
But in our home, I saw it visibly lived out day by day. When my father would come home from the office in the evening, I would hear first the squeak of the front door. The next thing that I would hear was the call of the chickadee. My father was not only a bird watcher, but he was a superb imitator. He could imitate to absolute perfection the calls of about 60 birds. He had assigned to each one of us a bird call, which was a wonderful way of getting our attention without getting anybody else’s attention. The average person does not hear birds. We could be in a crowded room or on a city street, and we would hear our own bird call and there my father would be, maybe on the other side of the Sunday school room or something. We would hear that and he would call our attention to something.
 
His call for my mother was the chickadee call. So I would hear the squeak of the door and then I would hear this tiny, high, chickadee call. Then I would hear my mother’s very imperfect response from the kitchen. She couldn’t do it as well as he could.
 
But I think of that as an illustration of the one who is responsible and the one who responds. Male and female—it was God’s idea. It wasn’t ours. Because I believe that everything in life is translucent—that is, this world and the stuff of this world is not opaque to me. I look through the material things to the light that shines beyond, to the invisible things, to the things that God created. From the things that God created to the things that faith sees—and I see the relationship between a man and a woman as being a visible sign of an invisible reality.
 
All Christians believe very strongly in visible signs of invisible realities, but we sometimes forget that it goes beyond the bread and the wine. Here is a visible sign of an invisible reality. When we give our tithes, for example, we give God ten percent. But that is only a visible sign of the invisible reality that everything we own belongs to God, not just ten percent of my money. And this beautiful choreography that God designed between a man and a woman is a visible sign of the invisible reality of the relationship of Christ and the Church.
 
Now in what sense was Christ the bridegroom? He chose us. He wooed us. He won us. He brought us to Himself. He gives us His name. He gives us His destiny and we accept Him. We surrender. We follow. We are the bride who is acted upon, the bride who loves, honors and obeys. He is the One who cherishes.
 
But in Genesis 1, we find that man and woman were both created by God. You might say that we were equal in being created by God. That’s the first equality. We were equal in being made in the image of God—the second equality. And we were equal in being placed under moral responsibility, because God’s first command was "Be fruitful and multiply," and it does take two to tango, doesn’t it? So both the man and the women were made by God, made in the image of God and placed under moral responsibility.
 
But in the second chapter of Genesis, we find some of those glorious inequalities. We find that the woman was made for the man, not the man for the woman. The woman was made from the man. The woman was brought to the man. Adam was not brought to Eve. Eve was brought to Adam. She was God’s gift to Adam. She was named by the man. In the Old Testament, the authority to name indicated the acceptance of responsibility. So Adam was accepting the responsibility to care for this woman, to husband her.
 
What is animal husbandry? Caring for animals. Protecting them. Providing for them. So the husband is meant to take responsibility. One of the breakdowns of marriage today is that many husbands have never put away childish things. They have never grown up. They have never taken full male responsibility.
 
Just recently my husband and I met a woman who was very deeply concerned because her husband is an absolute fanatic about golf. She said, "I’m a golf widow. I spend every Saturday and Sunday alone. Of course, I spend Monday-Friday alone, because he is working then. The days he is not working, he is on the golf course." I said, "Is he a Christian?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Do you think he has ever thought of this as being a hindrance to fulfilling his male responsibility as a husband?" She said, "No, I don’t think he ever has. But I’m doubly afraid, because my parents broke up for exactly the same reason. My father was a golf nut and my mother suffered from it, and eventually they split."
 
God’s order is that the husband is to provide for, to care for the wife. Now that’s one of the places where I find my understanding of the relationship between the husband and the wife. One is meant to be the leader, the responsible one. One is meant to be the responder.
 
Now don’t carry this to absurdities and say that Elisabeth Elliot says a woman is never supposed to initiate anything and that the husband is supposed to make all the decisions. Certainly not.
 
But let’s look at a second indication, a very visible sign of an invisible reality. The physical body. Look at the male body. You’ve got huge shoulders, by comparison with what women have. You’ve got upper body strength, which like it or lump it, cannot be denied.
 
I remember one of those humorous essays that occasionally occurs in TIME magazine. It was about an incident in New York City where 80 women had protested for equal rights to become firepersons. So the fire department decided that they would have to capitulate and take women as firepersons.
 
They administered exactly the same test to the women that they had administered to the men. How many people do you think flunked? 80. They don’t have the upper body strength. One of the things that they were supposed to do was to carry a 140-pound person down a two-story ladder. Well, they couldn’t do it. So what was the conclusion of these obviously feminist women? That the test was sexist. They were discriminated against. They wanted to be allowed to carry two 70-pound people on two trips down the ladder. So the writer of this article said, "From now on, all the fires in my house are going to be on the first floor."
 
You really wonder where people’s heads are at when you read stuff like this, and yet it is with the most round-eyed solemnity that our whole political system has accepted these outrageous, foolish doctrines. It was God’s idea to make two very different bodies, one of them to be the protector, the provider, the one that does the tough, physical work—most of it in certain forms.
 
Now it’s true that man works from dawn till set of sun, and woman’s work is never done. And any doctor will tell you that a woman has strength that a man doesn’t have. We don’t need to argue these points. They are provable from science.
 
But look at the reproductive system. Isn’t it clearly indicated there that one is the initiator and one is the responder? Women are made to receive, to bear, to carry, to nurture. I’m told that even our arms are hung differently. A man’s arms are made for the kind of physical work that farming and hunting take and for throwing spears and things like that. Women are created so that they can hold babies more comfortably than men can. Men don’t look quite as at ease when they try to cradle a baby, because their arms are made for different things.
 
Well, do we need to argue that point? There it is. The evidence is there. One is the leader; one the responder. One the initiator; and one the follower. Man’s obedience to this order is his freedom. Man’s disobedience to this order is his refusal to be human. That is the sin of Adam and Eve.
 
Before they ever ate that fruit, they decided they did not want to be human. They wanted to be gods. Satan came along and suggested they could upgrade their lifestyle. "Did God say that if you eat the fruit of the tree you’ll die? You won’t die. You not only won’t die, but you can upgrade your lifestyle. You’ll be like God." They refused their humanity.
 
Then each of them refused the particular glory of their sexuality. Adam was made to be the protector. It was his job to protect Eve from Satan’s suggestion. What happened? The roles were reversed. Eve decided to listen to the words of Satan. She went to Adam and initiated this idea that they should eat the fruit. What did Adam do? He was a wimp. He capitulated, instead of digging in his heels and saying, "Absolutely not! We are going to listen to what God says."
 
So the roles were reversed. Adam refused his divine assignment to be responsible. Eve refused her divine assignment to be the responder. We’ve been in a horrible mess ever since. Pride was the basic sin, wasn’t it? Too proud to be human. Too proud to be just a man or just a woman. I believe it is the cause of all the misery in the world, exactly as God said: "You will surely die."
 

Back to the Bible © 1999. Excerpted from a Gateway to Joy radio broadcast which aired February 11, 1999. Used with permission. www.BacktoTheBible.org.


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