Monday, December 31, 2012

Male and female: Divine Comedy or Brilliance?


Talk to the most happily married couples or to the best of friends and they will tell you that sometimes they do not “understand each other,” “he does not listen to me,” or “I just do not understand her.”

If this sounds familiar do not fret as it is to be expected and even normal. The female and male brain is different and the two brains process information differently. The good news is that with some conscious effort communication can be enhanced between the brains and frustrations lowered.1

Many of the problems we face are not problems between individual couples, but between men and women in general. They are problems that arise because we are either too lazy or too selfish to get to know our spouse well enough to understand how different from us they really are!

 

Let us look at this article from a Biblical perspective.  Gender somehow reflects something about God and His glory. A man reflects something about God’s character that is different from a woman and vice versa. Let me start with a question; “why do we struggle with being men and women?”

 

God’s enemy is Satan, and he wishes to destroy glory and since he can not destroy God, he wishes to destroy the reflection of God, man and woman. Satan’s prime way of attempting to destroy God’s glory and image in ‘man’ is to make it too frightening to be truly man or woman and to offer ‘counterfeit’ routes to live out our gender. What does it mean to be a male and female? What does it mean that God made Adam and Eve to work together? How do we work together as husbands and wives to fulfill the creation mandate to fulfill, subdue and rule creation?

God created Adam for relationship, and He mad a woman from the rib He had taken out of the man, and brought it to the man; Gen: 2:18; 21-22. The force of the point here is God, made another person who was neither his master nor his inferior, but his equal. “Eve was not made out of his head to top him, not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him” –Matthew Henry. God knew that without intimacy with an equal, Adam was lonely, even with the creation and the Creator. God could have exclusively filled Adam’s heart, but in His Divine brilliance, He did not do that! This was staggering humility on God’s part to make ‘something’ that was not to be fully satisfied with the Creator and the creation and definitely this is incomprehensible for us!  

To understand the uniqueness of males and females we have to ask 3 exegetical questions.

  1. Why did God make Adam first and give him the prohibition about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil before He created Eve?
  2. Why did God have Adam name the animals without Eve and realize in the process that Adam needs a helper suitable for him?
  3. Why did God bring different curses on man and woman?

Adam has more of a direct role in subduing and bearing responsibility for the direction of the Kingdom and this does not mean that Eve was not responsible for her sins, and that she has no role in subduing and directing their activities in the Garden. Adam was built with the physical and internal makeup to ‘enter, create, and shape form out of chaos’. The curse given to Adam involved his work and all his shaping of chaos would be fraught with futility. He would succeed but not without sweat, blood and sorrow and even his success would be a trial.  The curse was meant to punish and to provide the humbling context for ‘Redemption’.

A woman’s role as a helper does not mean that she is weaker or stronger. She is a ‘helper’ who is jointly to engage creation and enter into relationship to bring glory to God. Her primary calling is one of ‘warrior of relationship’ guardian of truth in relationship, and one who is made to uniquely reflect God’s heart for relationship. The curse given to Eve involved relationships; and all her birthing of life would be laced with pain and loneliness. This means that Eve would bring forth life with sweat, blood and sorrow and she would be in conflict with her husband; Gen 3:16.

To extrapolate it further, in her loneliness, the woman will desire to absorb, to swallow the man to fill her emptiness, and he will fail her with base withdrawal or violent assault….SAD! This readily seems to imply that Eve was created with the physical and internal makeup to receive, gestate, and shape relationships out of the beauty of form.  Here again the curse was meant to punish for disobedience and to provide the humbling context for ‘Redemption’.

Sexually, a man plants his seed, and a woman slowly incubates the mysterious union of egg and sperm; and together they create a human being. A man is a planter, pursuer who is to enter the world with a strength and courage that form a new being. This tells us that human strength is an analogue of God’s love of order, righteousness and wrath.

 A woman is a nurturer, who brings creation to life through the tender interconnectedness of her body and soul with the unborn child. This tells us that human tenderness is an analogue of God’s love of mystery, tenderness and mercy. A man courageously creates, and a woman creatively shapes his creation into a lovely, relationally enhancing beauty! One without the other is a grave-distortion- male moving to violence and female gravitating to absorption. Order without mercy is authoritarian; mystery without form is hedonism. In other words male and female operate in a precious balance between life and death.
[What does love mean?

Many people are surprised to learn there is not a single word for love in the Bible, there are TWO words! And only two words.

 
The Hebrew word for maleness love means: The "strong person in the home"

The Hebrew word for femaleness love means:The "strong person in the home, (with his) Person behold!"

Really folks, does this surprise you? A family home with two sources of love. Both different. Yet complimentary. This the true picture of LOVE in the Bible. We hear people speak of "agape" as some kind of supreme godly love.

Yes, it is important, but not complete. Agape is a Greek word translated from ahab, the Hebrew word for maleness love. In the Bible, GOD is a FAMILY of members, each with distinct and complimentary personalities of love expressed. May God bless our relearning of His love.]2

Scientific studies indicate that men are more perverse and violent than women. Sexual abusers are mostly men, and mostly perpetrated by men. Women are most likely to be depressed and struggle with bulimia and codependency. What does all these symptoms, point to? Nothing but the emptiness and absorptive tendencies and even with the symptoms of sin men and women differ greatly. 

A strong husband will generally draw forth the strong tenderness of his wife, and a tender wife will birth the tender strength of her husband. This is suppose to be so, when husbands and wives labor to grow into the likeness of God. They will equally grow and shape the other, and as a result will fill the earth and subdue the earth to God’s character. Together they bear a splendour that can not be found in either person alone. Their relationship dispels loneliness and offers the one and only truly equal relationship found on earth.

The splendour of maleness and the beauty of femaleness are provided in Psalm 45. Gender is the revelation of God, who is also protected by mystery, and they are created in the image of God. The image of God is particularized into gender, and His character can not be captured by His human image bearers. In other words, each gender typically accentuates certain aspects of God’s character. God is King which highlights strength, but also mother which emphasizes His compassion; Ps: 131; Isa: 66:13.

As males and females we are significantly and intriguingly different….The differences invite fascinating, unending exploration.”3
“We have a choice: We can either delight in diversity or destroy distinctions.”4

Marriage is the first Divine institution and God in His brilliance made it between a male and a female in order to reveal and accentuate His character.  Husband’s strength helps him resonate God’s strong qualities, and he can help his wife understand that aspect of God more clearly, even though he does it imperfectly. In a similar fashion, a woman’s tenderness and compassion can increase her husband’s awareness of God’s mercy; 1 Pet: 3:1-2. We have an awesome God, great designer of the universe and gender, made us male and female to have communion with Him, so we can try to understand this unfathomable mystery of gender!

God is the author of relationship and He in His brilliance made the gender, male and female, wired so different, yet in His image to revel in His love. Nothing, absolutely nothing is more important in this world than to have a beautiful relationship with the Living God, and to find our identity in Him and through Him. I could never even imagine for a minute that the creation of male and female were Divine comedy, but indeed it was Divine brilliance. It is our lack of understanding in our fallenness we make gender as a Divine comedy!

Notes:

www.fitbrains.com/blog/2008/10/.../the-malefemale-brai... - United StatesCached - Similar

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by A Schaffer - Related articles
21 Oct 2008 – He and his colleagues sampled speech from male and female college students, who ...... translator of Dante's Divine Comedy from Italian into English verse. ... background with Lewis in terms of class and intellectual brilliance, ...


spiritualsprings.org/ss-16.htmCached

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Strong's Number or Single Word Search. Spiritual Springs: File z = 16. Hebrew, letters, love, maleness, femaleness, ahab, ahabah, agape ... This is the Hebrew word for femaleness love. The "strong... May God bless our relearning of His love.

3, 4. Allender, Dan and Tremper Longman III. Intimate Allies. Carol Stream, Illinois; Tyndale House publishers, 1995.pg: 144, 158, 159

Book References:

1. Thomas Garry. Sacred Marriage: What if God designed Marriage More to Make us Holy than to make us Happy. Toronto: Harper Collins Canada, 2002.

2. Claire Smith. God’s Good Design, What The Bible Really Says About Men and    Women. Kingsford, Australia: Matthiasmedia, 2012, pgs: 105-155.

3.  Allender, Dan and Tremper Longman III. Intimate Allies. Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House publishers, 1995.

Website Reference:


www.fitbrains.com/blog/2008/10/.../the-malefemale-brai... - United StatesCached - Similar

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

by A Schaffer - Related articles
21 Oct 2008 – He and his colleagues sampled speech from male and female college students, who ...... translator of Dante's Divine Comedy from Italian into English verse. ... background with Lewis in terms of class and intellectual brilliance, ...



spiritualsprings.org/ss-16.htmCached

You +1'd this publicly. Undo

Strong's Number or Single Word Search. Spiritual Springs: File z = 16. Hebrew, letters, love, maleness, femaleness, ahab, ahabah, agape ... This is the Hebrew word for femaleness love. The "strong... May God bless our relearning of His love.

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