Sword & Trowel 2020: Issue 1
days of thy life; thorns also and this- tles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ Adam will have to suffer toil and bitter frustrations and difficulty, so both are punished. The reason why Eve is now subject to a form of ‘rule’, is not because she sinned more but because that is the portion of punishment that falls to her, having sinned first. Adam for his part has the toil and the frustration of hindrances. But in each punishment God provides an everlasting reminder of the Fall. He wrote into human life things which affect every man and every woman in every land through all generations to remind us of the Fall. Man must toil and labour for his provision, and women must know pain in childbirth and obedience to the husband. You could say that the punishments contain a great kindness. It is an im- mense blessing that there are things written into human life which remind us of the Fall, because the Fall must never be forgotten. It is the founda- tion of everything we need to know. The Fall of man is the cause of our greatest need. We cannot under- stand our predicament before God or feel our need of salvation without the doctrine of the Fall. We cannot understand ourselves. Even after con- version we cannot embark upon the work of sanctification without under- standing depravity and the Fall. We cannot understand society, or how or why people think and act as they do, without the doctrine of the Fall. So God has seen fit to so order the punishment of men and women that
there is a perpetual reminder of the Fall.
Why must women in marriage and in the church be subordinate to men? Because they are inferior? No. Because they sinned more than men? No. They both equally sinned, one first it is true, but they both equally sinned. Then for what reason does the woman bear her particular pun- ishment and the man his? Because it is the message of the Fall. Up until about AD1900, almost eve-
ryone in the British Isles understood the Bible’s teaching that subordina- tion in marriage arose from the Fall. It was the mark of the Fall. Equally every man knew that his labour was the mark of the Fall. They may not always have believed it, and may often have been outraged by it, but all knew it. In a sense, every woman in childbirth was preaching the Fall. Every man working was doing the same.
One of the great campaigns of the devil has been to get rid of the Fall, often by massive attacks upon the Word of God. In the 19th century there arose one of the most vicious of all, the movement for Higher Criticism. This was designed, like a computer virus in a way, to get right into the thinking of theologians, min- isters, and Christian people, so that the Bible was undermined and no longer thought to be reliable. You could no longer believe in a literal creation account in the book of Genesis. It became described as poetry, as myth, and so on. If Satan could get rid of creation in the book of Genesis he would destroy the doctrine of the Fall. It became, may we say, a
Biblical Roles of Men and Women page 9
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