Women in Authority

John Ritenbaugh, referring to Jimmy Carter's decision to leave the Southern Baptist Church based on its teaching that Eve was responsible for original sin, asks if we really believe God. The erroneous understanding cited that women are inferior to men is nowhere stated in the Bible. When God presented Eve to Adam in the Garden of Eden, Adam immediately recognized that she was the perfect complement to him. God gave man authority, not superiority. Satan attacked Adam and Eve together, but when he detected that Eve desired to eat of the tree, he attacked the woman first. Both Adam and Eve caved in to Satan's subtle strategy. The failure to do righteousness in the time of need is sin. Adam obeyed Eve rather than God and therefore violated the First and Second Commandments. He knew Eve was wrong, and yet he remained quiet.

John Ritenbaugh maintains that becoming equipped for leadership requires that we discipline ourselves in following God's way of life, allowing the mind of Jesus Christ to be in us in order to please and glorify God. As we are imprinted with the character of God the Father and Jesus Christ, we become a beacon and positive help for others. A covenant is an agreement between two parties in which the solemnity of God's presence is invoked and those who make the agreement do so voluntarily, aware of the responsibilities either implicitly or explicitly entailed in the covenantal relationship. Though they seem complex, covenants impart unambiguous instructions. Of all the biblical figures, aside from Jesus Christ, no one exemplified faithfulness to God's covenants more than Moses, faithful as a shepherd, military leader, governor, statesman, minister, and negotiator with God. Moses also proved the humblest of any other human leader. Leadership requires faithfulness, not only hearing but doing, receiving the implanted word and acting upon its prompts. The Edenic Covenant, a universal covenant, was made with all mankind, a covenant displaying the awesome gifts of the Creator, including the marriage covenant, the building block for the family. Man and Woman (together designated as mankind) were both created in God's image, both incomplete without each other and meant to complement what the other lacked; she was Adam and he was Eve. Husband and wife are to cleave or cling to one another, providing a model or type of our desperate need to cling to and to become one with God the Father and Jesus Christ.

The quality of human life on this earth has in large part been determined by the character of its leaders. In the Bible we have a record of both good and bad leaders, and it provides a repetitive principle that "as go the leadership, so goes the nation." John Ritenbaugh begins a new series that links leadership to the various scriptural covenants and their success or lack thereof.

Ronny Graham, acknowledging that very few prophecies have occurred the way any of us had speculated, advocates that we take a balanced, far less dogmatic approach to prophecy, realizing, of course, that a full one-third of the Bible is prophecy, the majority of which has not yet been revealed, much less fulfilled. One prophecy which seems to be rapidly unfolding before us in the recent years is the one in Isaiah 3:12, warning of children as our oppressors and women as our rulers. During the past year, assessing the mayhem from the riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Cleveland, we acknowledge the oppressors to be mere youths, born into families in which the fathers have run away or have been driven out. Mothers of criminal youths cannot believe "why their babies have been shot." The liberal media characterize young shoplifters and thieves as 'protestors.' Tragically, in the black community 7 out of 10 youths do not have a father; 72% have been born out of wedlock. In the meantime, weak-willed and compromising men have abandoned their leadership roles in government and the church, and radical feminist women have rushed in to fill the void created by this 'leadership drain.' In our nation today, gangs (unsupervised young boys and , increasingly, girls) are responsible for 50% of all crimes, and the frustrated police are rapidly losing control. Political parties quarrel on trivial issues, and only a fraction of the current political leaders want to trust and acknowledge God for anything. Anyone with eyes and a modicum of common sense can see the prophecy of Isaiah 3:12 unfold before us.

Martin Collins, cautioning us that radical feminism has deteriorated and compromised all human institutions—from governmental, educational, corporate, religious (including certain segments of the greater church of God) right down to the family structure—charges that men have abdicated their God-ordained leadership roles, producing chaos and confusion in the wake of this abandonment. The family structure, with assigned orders of responsibility (not orders of importance implying superiority or inferiority), is paramount to God's plan. The Bible contains the domestic history of the family, receiving blessings or cursing according to the success or failure of the father's leadership. The family structure was intended to mirror the Divine spiritual structure with Christ submitting to God the Father and the Church submitting to Christ. In the family, the husband submits to Christ and the wife submits to her husband. As Christ loves the Church, the husband is commanded to love his wife as he loves his own body, sacrificing for her and protecting her, regarding her as co-regent and chief counselor, delegating essential complementary duties to her. He is prohibited from being a pompous tyrant (intimidating her and provoking his children to wrath), but he is enjoined to provide leadership and make decisions, mirroring Christ's relationship to the Church. As men assume their roles as leaders of families, this also extends into the church and into the community. As men abdicate this responsibility, women have been forced to fill the leadership vacuum, contrary to God's intention. As we fulfill our God-ordained family roles, we qualify to become joint heirs with Jesus Christ, ruling over the entire universe.

Richard Ritenbaugh, describing the development of the Feminist movement from its beginning in England, France, and later in the United States, suggests that the strident demands for abortion and in-your-face demands for 'equality' have led to high degree of social chaos. Some of the grievances feminists have expressed were legitimate, but the support of mass murder (abortion) as a "woman's right over her body" has side-tracked and obscured the legitimate concerns. Spiritually, male and female have equal potential and should have equal rights under the Law. But rights and legalities are far less important than spiritual development, subject to God-ordained gender roles. Together, men and women are made in the image of God; God was the template for all humanity, producing clay models which would serve as prototypes for permanent, spiritual beings. God gave humankind His attributes and abilities, having dominion over the earth, but not over other people. God made humanity in two flavors, but they are both in His image, dividing His traits equally between them. Men and women mutually excel each other in their God-ordained roles. Each gender complements the other as one flesh —one whole unit unified by marriage, an institution hated by radical feminists and homosexuals alike. Marriage is a God-plane relationship, prefiguring God's family (a reproducing of the God-kind), made possible by being fruitful and multiplying—the ultimate human good. Adam and Eve's sin complicated, but did not stop, God's ultimate plan for mankind. Sin destroyed our first parents' innocence, making them susceptible to shame and guilt, separating themselves from each other, fracturing (but not destroying) the one-flesh principle, sowing the seeds for a perennial battle of the sexes, bringing about drudgery and hard labor for both women and men. If women put down their desire to control their spouses and men really love their spouses, it will begin to reverse the consequences of the judgment oracles (stated in Genesis 3:16-

"Gnosticism" sounds like an old and very dry Greek philosophy, the subject of a somnolent college lecture. Not so, says David Grabbe. Gnosticism is very much in vogue today in books and movies—and in the belief systems of a great many people who profess to be Christian.

With the publication of a new "gender-neutral" version of the New Testament, David Maas asks if God has something against women. On the contrary, the sexes are equal, and such distortions of Scripture are entirely unnecessary.

Boys are getting a bad rap in America these days. Richard Ritenbaugh shows from the Bible that the Old Testament prophets predicted just such a trend at the end time.

The second part in this series of three deals with God's curse on Eve for her part in the sin in the Garden of Eden. In this curse lies the beginnings of both women's difficulties in childbearing and the battle of the sexes. The effects of this curse are still being felt daily!

It is no longer primarily a man's world, and God's Word has a great deal to say about a society when this happens. Richard Ritenbaugh summarizes the history of feminism and the affect it is having on us.

The book of Amos is an astounding prophecy, closely paralleling the conditions in modern Israel today. This first part deals with introductory materials, Israel's covenant responsibilities, God's judgment and how unrighteousness affects society.

John Ritenbaugh reiterates that the "favorite-son status" of Israel was conditional, based upon accepting the terms of their covenant with God. Unfortunately, both ancient and modern Israel have placed their trust in wealth or material things rather than God. God's anger has been aroused as a result of Israel's physical and spiritual defilement—refusing to become sanctified, separate from the ways of the world. God's holiness sets Him apart from everything else, and like Him, His people must become totally different from the world. Instead, our defilement, stemming from our desire to please the self at the expense of others, separates us from Him! The root of sin or immorality lies in man's desire to live his life in self-centered independence from God. We must enlist God's Spirit to kill our self-centered ego, yielding to God's transforming power.