Biblical Equality: A Fresh Look at Women's Roles

What do we do when we get to the parts of the Bible that they don't just seem weird, but they do.

They seem anti women, right?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, in 1st Corinthians, chapter 11, paul says a woman has to keep her head covered when church gatherings are happening.

None of you guys got the memo.

I guess we should have given out hats for Mother's Day, right?

No, so what do we do with that?

Ephesians 5, 24 says that a woman needs to submit her to her husband and everything.

Is that true?

Do we need to submit to our husbands?

Paul writes in 1st Timothy 2, 15 that a woman needs to have a baby in order to be saved.

Okay, so there's these weird, hard to understand passages.

We're like wait, that's in that, that's in the Bible.

And yeah, I think I don't know if I gave the references, but those are in the Bible and we can't ignore it.

Like you can't ignore, you can't be a critical thinker here today.

And just when you're reading your Bible and you come to this passage and you're like Woman needs to submit to her husband everything.

Well, I don't like that and Read something else, just I'm just gonna skip that.

You can't do that I mean you could and, let's be honest, a lot of us do do that but that's not faithful to the text.

I mean, what's going on here?

What is going on?

If this is, this is the word of God, god's speaking to Paul and it's authoritative in our lives.

And if Paul says to do this, well then perhaps we should, unless, as we've found out throughout this entire series, there's a lot going on anytime we come up to one single Bible verse, and so that's again what we're gonna talk about today in our series how not to read the Bible, which is based on the book by Dan Kimball really good book, would encourage you to go out, buy it.

A lot more information than we're able to cover in 30 minutes here.

How not to read the Bible by Dan Kimball.

And of course, of course I just feel like I gotta say it it's also based on the Bible, right?

We're not just doing a book study on Dan's book.

We are looking at the Bible and today, if you want to follow along, you can try.

You can try to keep up, but I do have over 30 verses that I'm going to use today, so this might be one of those.

Two weeks ago we started and I said just go to the table of contents and and Jotson notes.

This might be the opposite of that, which is, go to the end of your Bible, where they have a few blank pages, and Just try to write as fast as you can.

When I'm throwing out these verses, because this is a subject in which the Bible speaks a lot to and unfortunately, what happens, what happens, and this happens All the time but what happens is we find one or two Bible verses or theologians have, or pastors have one or two, and then they kind of cancel out all the other ones.

They said well, I know that this was said and I know that this was said and I know that that was said and I know that this happened, but there's this one verse and this is also not a faithful reading.

We can't do that.

You can't take one verse that maybe particularly you like and just say we don't need all these other ones.

And so today we're going through a ton of verses because, yes, there are a couple Bible verses that are really weird when it comes to women, but there are a whole lot of other verses in the Bible that deal with the exact same thing.

I hope this series is helpful, honest, I know it's challenging because we're coming in here and perhaps some of the things that you think or believe are being challenged.

I want to first state that you don't have to agree with me on everything.

That's the great thing about coming to our churches.

You don't have to agree with me on everything.

My theology isn't your theology and your theology isn't mine, but I here's what I do believe.

I believe that when we come together in community like like Christians have for thousands of years that we come together and we make ourselves better, we ask good questions, we challenge one another and we grow.

And so if you're a follower of Jesus, I bet that you're reading the Bible more and you're starting to get some questions that come up, and so that's why we're doing this series.

Perhaps Someone you know or love you're like man, I really, you know I'm praying for them.

I wish they would have a relationship with God.

I know I've got family in my life that I do that with.

I'm pray like I hope that they they connect with God.

But there are things about the Bible that they're like well, I'd like to believe in God or I'd like to be a part of Christian community, but what do you do with this in the Bible?

And a lot of times we just don't have the answer right.

And, in case you didn't know, like Well, you just got to read it, believe and have faith.

That's not going to cut it with the people you're praying for, okay, it's just I'm gonna save you a conversation.

They're not gonna believe it.

Perhaps you're new to faith, you're watching online.

You're new to faith, you're just exploring church and spirituality.

You've got questions about this book.

You've seen memes on Facebook or Instagram and you're like wait, dude, dude, is this really what Christians believe?

Is this really what I believe?

And so, throughout this series, in regardless of where you're at, I hope, I hope, I hope that we can be clarifying to you throughout this series on these subjects.

And so this series, like I said, is going to be challenging, because the Bible is a collection of books 66, as we've mentioned a few times, 66 books written over the course of 1500 years, over 40 authors and three different languages that people do not speak today and now Translated to English.

So, of course, it's gonna be hard and difficult to read.

That doesn't speak anything bad about your faith.

As a matter of fact, if you think that reading the Bible is easy, I would suggest that maybe you haven't gone far enough.

And if you're in the room and you're like man, reading the Bible is hard, I would say, yeah, you get it, you're starting to get that challenge of it.

And even what you bring to reading the Bible affects how you interpret it.

How you grew up, whether that was in the church or not.

In the church, your family thought about God, whether they had any thoughts about God or a lot of thoughts about God.

We bring all of that together, and it's not just us, it's not just lay people, it's not just pastors.

But I was reading a book by NT Wright, who's a scholar, just a prolific scholar, and in the start of his book on how to read the Bible he says hey, I just got to acknowledge I have a bunch of presuppositions about this.

I have my own history, I have my own experiences and this affects the way that I read the Bible.

But the answer isn't to ignore those, it's to acknowledge them.

It's to acknowledge you have a history.

It's to acknowledge you have a bias.

It's to acknowledge that you have a political leaning, whether that's to the left or to the right, and that we bring all of that baggage when we read the Bible.

And that just makes it even more difficult.

Because even if we could just walk up to the text objectively without any of our experiences, it's hard enough as it is.

And so, as we dive in and talk about women, rules in the household, rules in the church, I want to remind you of the two things we've been talking about every week.

One remember that the Bible is written for us and not to us.

It was written for us, not to us.

There is not a letter to the Matasonians in your New Testament.

If there is, I'd love to see your Bible.

I mean, I'm just out of curiosity, I would just love to see it, but it was written for us, not to us.

And then the other one was you just can't read a single Bible verse.

You can't read one verse and then say this is it because every verse is a sentence within a paragraph, within a chapter, within a book?

So we have to understand the full context.

Now to begin with our talk on women in ministry.

And is the Bible anti-women?

We're going to go right to the very beginning Genesis 1, 27 and 28.

This occurs before the fall, before sin has entered the world.

God has created everything.

It's all good.

And this text are two people on earth, and it's written.

God created human beings in his own image and the image of God.

He created them, male and female, man and woman.

He created them and God blessed them and said be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it.

Rain over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky and all the animals that scurry along.

And we can leave that up.

What I want to point out is just by reading the very first time we're reading in the Bible like God creates people.

God creates a man and a woman, god blesses them.

And it seems that while they're distinct, there's a man and there's a woman, distinct in creation, they're equal.

Because when we read this, god blessed them, said be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it.

He's talking to both of them.

He's not saying you, man, you get to govern it and you, woman, you fill it.

He says to both of them hey, people, humans, fill the earth, govern it.

Rain over creation.

There existed right in Eden.

When we've started each week of this series by talking about what was God's ideal, we get this glimpse in Eden.

We see in Eden, perfect harmony.

We see a delegation of responsibilities.

They have a good relationship with God, with each other.

There's no indication that there's any sort of hierarchy.

Without hiding this from you, you can read Genesis 1 yourself.

People weren't identical.

They weren't identical.

God creates them distinct, but they were equals.

But again, we don't want to just read 1 Bible verse or even 2, especially when it's not the only one that speaks to men and women in the creation account.

So throughout Genesis 1, we're told God creates this, and it's good.

And then God creates that and it's good.

We get to a point where God actually in Genesis 2, declare something isn't good and this is before sin.

Okay, so God has created this perfect world that people are living in and God figures out that something isn't right and again, it's not sin.

This is very interesting.

And Genesis 2, 18, the Lord said it is not good for the man to be alone.

It is not good for the man to be alone.

Let me point out that at this point in creation, god has created a perfect world.

There's no sin, there's no evil, there's no good things that we talked about last week.

There's God and there's the first person, and God says something's not good.

God says something's not good.

The man had a relationship with God.

Most of you in the room would say well, that's good, and there's no sin in the world.

That's good.

But God when he first declared something isn't good it's that the man doesn't have a relationship with other people, it's that he's lonely, it's that he's isolated, it's that there's not another person.

God finds this unacceptable.

He said this is the first thing in all of creation.

That isn't good, that he is alone.

God says I will make a helper who is just right for him.

Now, this word helper okay, we got to talk about this word helper because in theological circles you might read that and you might read God created an assistant, god created a secretary.

That is not true at all.

That's a very poor understanding.

There is this Hebrew word A-Z-R, e-z-e-r, a-z-r and A-Z-R appears in the Old Testament 22 times.

22 times, okay, only one time is it referring to a person, and it's Eve one time.

The other 21 times is referring to God.

So if you were in this room going to say, well, god created Adam a helper, a little servant, a secretary, an assistant, then that would mean that any time that word is used, that man is greater than whoever it is used to with.

So when we're talking about God being our helper in the Psalms, which occurs quite a bit these other 21 times where God is your helper, that'd be like saying God's your assistant, that God submits to you and you in the room if this isn't your first Sunday, and it's okay if you are but for those of us in the room who, like God, has authority, god doesn't submit to man.

Man submits to God.

For us to stay in tune with the true meaning of the word, azer, we see a helper, not someone who submits necessarily.

Like you're my boss, I got to do what you say.

You're the man, but we see an equal.

We see somebody who is the other side.

It's like two sides Of a tower.

Right, I mean, we need four walls for this to be a room, and that's what we're talking about.

We're talking about a helper.

Now, in Genesis 3, we're moving right along.

We read about the fall.

Out from the fall, woman and man make a bad, selfish choice we all have, okay, we all have and sin Enters the world, and what we begin to see unpacked in chapter 3 is the curse.

God is describing the curse.

I think that sometimes we read it and we think that God is giving the curse, but when we read it carefully, god is explaining what's happening.

Now.

I mean, that's what he's doing.

When we read Genesis 3, he says serpent, this is what's gonna happen.

Man, this is what's gonna happen.

He's saying these are just the consequences of you breaking the world.

This is why we can't have nice things, and with the woman he does.

He says that your desire is gonna be for your husband and what we see is a result of the fall, the result of sin, is, all of a sudden, there's gonna be a struggle for power and control in the world.

That's the first thing.

God goes to.

The woman says now that the world's broken, there's gonna be a struggle for power and control.

Polygamy is gonna become Prevalent.

There's gonna be a shift in your quality.

It's gonna change your relationship.

Not because God wants it to, not because God wants it to.

God is saying because sin is in the world now, because selfishness is in the world, this is what's going to happen.

Does God allow men to marry multiple wives?

Does God allow men to take on multiple concubines for their sexual pleasures?

Does God allow men to treat them as property?

And the answer is no.

You know, you can read Genesis through Revelation.

Just read it word by word.

And there's never a passage in which God does the feel, thumbs up and endorses it, says this is good.

Dan Kimball writes we see the rise of misogany, patriarchy and inequality, and it surfaces in many ways in the Bible.

Just because it is recorded in the Bible does not mean God agrees with it, nor did he create it.

This is really important when we're reading the Bible old in New Testament.

Just because it's recorded in there doesn't necessarily mean that God created it or endorses it or even agrees with it.

God is speaking matter-of-factly in the case of the fall.

This is what's gonna happen.

Life's gonna be a whole lot harder now because you did this because of sin, not because God wanted it to be.

We know what God's intentions were.

In Genesis 1 and 2 he states this is what I want.

And in Genesis 3 it states this is what's gonna happen.

Now and and again, it's not necessarily because God's cursing them, but he's saying this is what's gonna happen.

And despite the sad and horrific results of the fall and of sin, we see we don't see that God ever abandons women.

We see men try to rule over women.

We see that undoubtedly.

I'm not arguing that, but we don't see God ever take that posture.

We still see.

We still see, despite all of the problems in the Old Testament when it comes to women and in the cultural patriarchy that Existed, we see God still use plenty of women in leadership over men and women, miriam along with Moses and Aaron.

We talk about Moses and Aaron all the time, but Micah likes to point out that it was also Miriam, their sister, who led the Israelites out of Egypt.

Deborah is a prophet, she's a judge, and a prophet is someone who speaks on behalf of God.

God chooses Deborah and says you're gonna be my mouthpiece to men and women.

He never clarifies you can just talk to the women.

He says you're gonna be my Prophet, you're gonna speak, and she was also a military leader.

Hold up is a prophet, second Kings 22.

And it's really, really important that today that we don't overlook these Old Testament examples.

Despite the world falling down, despite the brokenness, the sin, the corruption, the power struggles that are going on, even in the Old Testament, that's described in the Old Testament like Solomon having hundreds and hundreds of concubines.

Even though that's described, we don't see that God is saying it's okay, and he's quite counter cultural in the sense he's still choosing women to speak on his behalf.

Now we go to Jesus, fast forward to his time, jewish rabbis.

They were encouraged to not teach or speak to women.

You were Jewish rabbi, you were the man.

Don't talk to women, it's a waste of time.

What does Jesus do?

He does exactly what we come to expect.

Jesus does the exact opposite of what the religious elite of his day would have liked him to do.

Jesus travels with women and I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, but these women were also the ones who were funding his ministry.

That's in Luke 8 3.

The reason Jesus had money to eat, to sleep, to travel around, was because the women were the ones footing the bill.

There Jesus compares God.

I know we get a lot of father god language in our prayers.

We talk about God a lot in the male Sense and pronouns, but Jesus not Steven, I didn't write Luke, okay.

Jesus Compares God to a woman.

In Luke 15 he compares God to a woman when he says there's a woman who lost the coin and she's looking in the house.

That's a comparison of God to an elderly woman who has lost the coin.

Jesus compares himself to a mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wing.

So again, I know, I know that in the Bible prevalent is the male talk, but Jesus uses a couple of female analogies when describing him and God.

Jesus appears to women.

This is probably the most profound and important one.

Jesus first appears to women after the resurrection.

After the resurrection is recorded in all four gospels.

He appears to women first.

Why is this a big deal?

One, they were the apostles.

To the apostles we talked about Peter, james and John, and we're like high five and and those are the dudes right, remember where they were at?

They bailed all of them.

Jesus died, we saw him died.

They're lamenting all weekend Like boy, we wasted a ton of time, but it was the women who were still going to the tomb.

It was the women who first found out that Jesus wasn't there.

It was the women who first found out he was resurrected.

It was the women who first told him.

And let me tell you why.

This is an even bigger deal than you might think.

You're like oh, that's cool.

Jesus chose women.

This was a liability.

This was a liability Because if you were a woman and you witnessed the murder in the street and you were the only one who saw it, your testimony wouldn't count.

You weren't allowed in that law, in that era, in that culture, you were not trustworthy as a woman to testify in court.

You just couldn't.

And so this is why it's a liability, because you couldn't even go to court.

And Jesus comes back from the dead, and who are the first people to tell him?

The people who aren't even allowed to go to court?

Jesus entrusts the mission of God.

Jesus trusts this good news of Easter that we just talked about a few weeks ago to women, and they become the apostles to the apostles.

But it doesn't stop with Jesus.

In Romans 16, phoebe is a deacon in Rome.

She is the church leader in Rome.

She deacon translates to overseer.

We have overseers at Madison Church.

They're my boss, okay.

And Phoebe is a deacon of the church in Rome.

Not only that, but because she was the deacon, she would have been the one to read Paul's letter to the Christians in Rome.

Remember, they were illiterate, right?

So anytime Paul sends a letter, we have to imagine that they're not passing it around reading it, but they gather like this, and then Phoebe would come to the front and say hey, we got a letter from the apostle Paul and here's what it said.

So the first time anyone heard Paul's words in Romans, it was read by a woman.

Priscilla was a traveling church leader, just like Paul.

Priscilla was a church planter, she was in Corinth, she was in Ephesus, and then she ends her ministry in Rome.

Junior was an apostle.

Paul calls her an apostle.

And another interesting point here we read in Acts that Saul is going around and he's killing Christian leaders and he's killing men and women.

It's pointed out.

This only makes sense, I'm telling you, it only makes sense culturally, as if the women were seen as leaders and influencers.

We see, kind of.

I mean so we were looking at what's going on in Ukraine right now and it's horrible, right, and it's horrible.

But what adds to the terror of this, and why, in addition to just being all sorts of evil, is when we hear about the women and children being killed.

When that comes on the news now we're talking.

War crimes Like this is really bad.

They're killing women and children.

Why?

Because they're innocent.

Leave them alone.

That's the rationale.

Right In places like Syria, iraq, just leave the women and children alone.

These are going to be guys.

Well, if they were targeting women, it's because the women had to be seen just as dangerous as the men were.

It's logical, it's reasonable, it's right in line with how we expect culture to be too so that we read in Acts that women were being martyred and persecuted.

It's because they had power and influence that scared the Roman government.

Rodney Stark he's a sociologist writes this prolific book called the Rights of Christianity.

If you like history, you got to read this book.

He says that Christianity was unusually appealing to women because within the Christian subculture, women enjoyed far higher status than women in the Greco-Roman world at large.

So in the world at that day, if you were a woman and you wanted to experience kind of like progress and power, you went to church.

You were part of Christian community.

You weren't going to get it out there.

Politically, they weren't going to give it to you.

Culturally they weren't going to give it to you.

But, man, you went to church because in church, in God's community, you were seen as an equal.

Your gender wasn't held against you.

But we do OK.

So that's a lot of verses, genesis through Revelation, that's a lot of it.

But we do still need to deal with a couple passages that, at face value, really do seem to tell women to sit down and be quiet, and so one of those is in 1 Corinthians, paul writes that women should be silent during the church meetings.

It is not proper for them to speak.

They should be submissive, just as the law says If they have any questions they should ask their husbands at home, for it isn't proper for a woman to speak in church meetings.

This is one of those verses that perhaps somebody builds an entire theology around, says women can't be pastors, women can't be elders because, look, paul says that they're not allowed to speak at church.

We're not going to read just one Bible verse, though.

That's what we've said this entire time.

What was going on in Corinth?

That's the question.

Why do we have a letter to Corinth First in your Bible it's called 1 Corinthians.

You can read in the first couple of chapters this is actually maybe the second or even third letter Paul has written them to.

It's the first we have in our Bible, so it's properly titled 1 Corinthians.

But within the text we read that they've already been having a back and forth, paul and his church.

And what's going on?

They're having these church gatherings, like you and I are today in Madison and they are messed up.

I mean, it is a circus, it's a show.

We've got one guy.

At some point Paul says the guy's having sex with his mom Like you gotta kick him out.

They hadn't yet, they were just like it was cool, it's fine.

And Paul's like no, he's gotta go, you just gotta turn him over to the devil and let that work out, because he can't be there.

We have people who are abusing spiritual gifts, somebody who would stand up and be like I am a prophet of the Lord and here's what the Lord is saying.

And Paul's like but they're not.

But every week you let them stand up and claim that they're speaking on behalf of God and they're not.

And so what we have here?

When we read this passage, you can't just say, oh, this is what Paul wants, forever and always.

In any church meeting we have to say what was going on that he would say this why did he say all of these other things?

Their church gatherings weren't helpful to anyone.

Paul goes off on several tangents in Corinthians, talking about how the outside world sees them.

He says you know, you're just confusing all of these people who we want to reach.

You're confusing them all and then on top of it, they were doing things like they would have communion, which is more like our newcomer's lunch, where they would sit down after church and they'd all share a meal.

And this was communion.

And what they would do is they would let all the rich and wealthy people eat first and they would take all the food and they'd eat it, and then there would be a bunch of hungry people who were still hungry and Paul says stop doing that.

This is a terrible witness to your faith.

Paul writes this entire letter to the Corinthians because he's like the church meeting this body of believers that gathers.

This is about being a bright light to the world and the way that you do church is what Paul is saying.

The way that you do church is actually turning people who are far from God away, and that's a problem.

Paul calls out sin in the church and obviously they don't change, because you can go to the next chapter or the next book in the Bible and see that it's second Corinthians.

So they obviously they don't figure it out, but Paul is saying what the real issue here is that your church gatherings are confusing, they're disorganized, they're actually unhelpful and they're leading people who are curious about God away from God, and that is a central issue.

So should women not speak in church?

Well, no, in this case, in Corinthians, it was contributing to the confusion.

You never go into a restaurant and it's really loud and you wonder at what point did it get loud?

Did the first people who were sat when they opened?

They're screaming at each other.

You know that's not how it works, right.

What happens is you sit down and you're having a nice conversation, but then they sit someone else down and they're having a nice conversation, but then they sit a third person down and somebody laughs really loud.

Now you got to talk a little louder because they're laughing and they're having a good time and then eventually you're yelling at each other from across the table and everybody's doing it and the story in speculate.

That's what's going on in Corinth.

It's confusing.

We have someone over here standing up and prophesying.

We have someone over here stealing the food.

We have this guy over here who's sleeping with his mom.

It's confusing.

And then what's happening is you're having the women in the church are just like this is weird, and they're talking and it gets louder and Paul is trying to create a sense of just organization.

He says let's just get this organized so that people can hear the message of Jesus.

So that's Corinthians.

The second one I wanted to talk about is also Paul writing, and this is to Timothy, and he says women should learn quietly and submissively.

I do not let women teach men or have authority over them.

Let them listen quietly.

Now this is to Timothy, and I'm going to just a quick geography.

Timothy is the pastor in Ephesus.

So you have a letter in your New Testament to the Ephesians Timothy is the pastor there.

Okay, the church of Ephesus is where Timothy is.

Now, you probably don't know this.

I don't know why you would know this, but there's this ancient wonder of the world called the temple of Artemis, and the temple of Artemis is right there in Ephesus and what this is is like it is the most extreme version of feminism, religion that you can ever begin to like.

Just imagine, I mean just that female priests.

Females are higher than men.

Men are kind of like the scum of the earth.

They have these weird sexual rights in terms of like their acts of worship.

It's really weird, and this is what Timothy is doing.

This is where Timothy is doing ministry.

Is that the biggest church in his town is the temple of Artemis, that the biggest religion in his town are the people who follow this God.

And so Paul is instructing him.

Because what's probably happening is that you do have these women who are coming in and their backgrounds are well, we grew up going to the temple of Artemis, good old mom Paul bringing us there every weekend.

But now I'm checking this out because this seems kind of different.

What's going on here?

And then they come in and what happens is, in their culture and their religion they're like we should be held to a higher, like we should be held higher.

We're more important.

And Paul is countering that.

And T right, that theologian I told you about earlier.

He said that it would be the right way for you and I to understand this passage today would be if Paul wrote I don't mean to imply that I'm now setting up women as a new authority of men, in the same way that previously men held authority over women.

It's an equalizing passage.

Paul is just saying, hey, women aren't here and men aren't down here, they're here, we're equal, just like in Eden.

Remember how that started?

We were just equal.

And then what happened?

Because we misinterpreted the stacks, a lot of pastors, church leaders over the years.

What did we do?

We had women up here and men down here.

And Paul is trying to get you to even.

But because we took a literal reading and we didn't understand the culture, we committed the same sin, just in the other way.

I said, men are up here and women are down here.

So if there was a church, to the church in Madison of Madison, paul would probably write the opposite.

As he tries to equal us out yet again, he'd be like hey, I know you got to read my letter to Timothy and you guys didn't understand that and what I was saying was that people should be equal and you guys kind of messed that up.

But now let me try to say it again in the other way.

So when we read in this passage in Timothy, we should read it as an equalizing passage.

Scott McKnight, another biblical scholar, writes Paul's two comments on silent are actually consistent with the story and plot of the Bible.

Women, who have always been gifted by God to speak for God and lead God's people, were doing those things in Paul's churches.

But women had not yet learned the Bible or theology or had learned to live a Christian life and they were not to become teachers until they had learned Orthodox theology.

Again, it's an equalizing passage.

Paul's saying I know that this is the culture and some cases women are lower and some cases they're higher, but we're supposed to be all things equal.

Let's go back to Ephesians Again.

I know I'm throwing a lot, I am winding it down here, okay, but we go back to Ephesians, which is where Timothy is the pastor.

I want to point this out because this is important and it's why we don't read one Bible verse.

Paul writes there are spiritual gifts.

Now this is really cool.

There's spiritual gifts, the gifts that Christ has given the church.

Notice he doesn't say men or women.

You notice that right?

There are apostles no men or women.

There are prophets no assigned gender.

There are evangelists.

There are pastors and teachers.

Their responsibility is to quit God's people to do His good work and build up the church, the body of Christ.

And they will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God's Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.

Does Paul contradict himself?

He writes to Pastor Timothy and says I don't let women speak.

But as he writes to the church.

He writes to Timothy's church and he says men and women, you can be apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and shepherds.

So either Paul contradicts himself either Paul contradicts himself because he's telling Timothy one thing and he's turning around telling the church another thing, or Paul meant that we are all gifted in Christ the same way.

And in Timothy, your context, we're trying to equalize out this men and women in leadership thing.

So when we get to these verses that read the Bible is anti women and other people might bring that up oh well, you're a Christian, so you don't, you know, so you're kind of oppressive toward women.

It's just because they don't understand the complexity of the Bible.

So let's help them understand that.

Let's help them understand that in Eden there was equality.

That was God's ideal for the world.

There was equality, and with sin, and with sin that equality was broken.

That's the result of hell, that's not the result of heaven.

And even so, even in the midst of the world falling down, god calls women to lead in both the old and new testament, and the two passages that people will cite most often as to why women shouldn't lead in the church are riddled with cultural considerations.

I mean just riddled with them.

They are the exception.

I presented 30 passages of women leading and two where it seems like they're saying no.

And so what do you do with this information?

Keep coming back.

We're gonna talk next week about science in the Bible, because that's kind of the next one that comes up.

I want to encourage you to read the Bible.

Definitely be reading it this week, not just the verse, but the chapter, the paragraph.

Get a Bible.

If you need one, you can take one or download the app.

I want to end with this note If you're a woman, lead boldly.

Lead in the ways that God has gifted you to lead.

That's okay.

You're calling your purpose the way that God has equipped you isn't based on what I say.

It's not based on the person you're sitting next to.

It says.

It's not based on what some other pastor somewhere else says.

Your giftedness and your calling your purpose your power.

It comes from God.

He's given it to you based on who he is, not who you are.

And men.

I want to explicitly state it is in my belief that, as followers of Jesus, we are to add our support, out of love and justice, to affirm women's rights to equal respect, value and worth.