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The next thing that I found particularly fascinating about the role of the sexes in the Old Testament narratives is how the husband and wife treated each other. Specifically, recall the passage in Hebrews where it said that Sarah called Abraham her “lord.” This is quite different today.
Today we live in a society that has done two things to marriage. They’ve made it “all about love” so that if you’re no longer “in love” why be in it? The other thing is that they’ve made it more about expressing my individuality than about being a unit.
We have people justifying marriage because of the money that it will save. They state that they have rights in marriage. Or they just decide to live together. This is a foreign concept to the biblical marriage system.
First, the wife was defined by her husband– he provided for her, he took care of her, and she was free to be herself inside that relationship. The Proverbs 31 woman was anything but a wallflower. She purchased land, made her husband look good, and took care of her family. It was published today on Salary.com that a stay-at-home mom should make over $100,000 for all the work she did if she didn’t do it at home!
Second, the wife respected her husband. She followed his lead, where he went she went. She wanted to please him– physically and emotionally. One of the problems in the multiple marriage situations that we talked about last week was that the wives constantly had to compete to gain the husband’s affection. She wanted children so that she could raise a name for him.
This woman was no doormat. She was not a slave. What she was was a human being whose desires were her family and her husband first and foremost. She knew that her greatest achievement was to make the family a wholesome and thriving entity.
Now we have different entities striving in the home. Different and sometimes secret bank accounts. Especially when women work outside the home. Then we have the greatest and probably most severe form of “outsourcing” that Americans are doing– the outsourcing of child raising. Take away a caring mother with attention to her own children, and thrust them into the hands of a willing humanist school system or even a daycare, and you won’t get your values and beliefs, but the world’s.
Look at yourselves, your spouse, your girlfriend, or your boyfriend, and consider what it means to be married. Pray about it, and search the Scripture!
Marriage and family are so devalued today. Here’s what one of my college teachers told us today: ‘Educated women get married later and have fewer children. Therefore, to promote women’s education, we should encourage them to get married later and get fewer children.”
Do you see the logic here? “Educated women get married late. Jane got married early, therefore she is uneducated.” To educate women, we shouldn’t EDUCATE them – no, we should make them forget about having a family! How ridiculous! Of course, if we are flooded with secular education and it’s pretty much the only thing that’s available in most cases, NO WONDER women look down upon marriage.
… Oh, and what about the women who got wonderful home education? Since they didn’t go to college, they probably can barely read, of course…
*huge snort*