Submission Part Five

This series has gotten quite spread out and I understand that it is probably hard to follow. Most of you probably didn't realize I was doing a series at all. Well this is the last post on this series and I promise that the next one I do will be more organized. Hopefully this will make sense to you even though the thoughts in this post will come from several different directions and are rather disorganized. I thought it would only be fitting for such an unorganized series to have an unorganized last post.

As we have talked about before the Bible tells us in Ephesians 5:21 that submission is something for every one. We are all required in one way or another to submit. For some this is in the family, for some this is in government. We all submit to God. Some people are even called to submit by leading. God is so organized that He showed us exactly what various people are supposed to do to submit

Wives are supposed to be under the authority of their husbands
Husbands are to love their wives
Children are to obey their parents
Parents are not to provoke their children
Slaves are to obey their masters
Masters are not to threaten their slaves

The Bible also gives some organizational outlines in the Bible for the church. We are told how elders and deacons are supposed to live their lives, by leading their family well, and being self controlled. We are also shown the role that men and women play. One highly debated sections in the Bible is about the role of women when it comes to teaching and preaching...or the lack of their role

1 Timothy 2:11-12 Let a woman quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

I have been told that this section of the Bible is completely ridiculous because that word quietly actually means silent and therefore it would be a sin for a woman to sneeze in church and certainly unacceptable for her to sing hymns and praise songs. But as the Bible Knowledge Commentary shares with us this same word is used other places in the Bible to mean calm or peaceful. The women are to remain calm. It is commonly thought that there were women in the church that Timothy was pastor of who were controlling the church by their arguing with the teaching that was going on. They were not peaceful as God is commanding through Paul and Timothy.

One difficult area of the Bible to accept is the command for a woman to submit to her unsaved husband.

1 Peter 3:1 In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives.

There are several women that I know who are married to ungodly men. It is very hard to me to accept that they should submit to them. Yet here Peter is commanding this as the way they are to win their husbands souls. The Bible really does not give an excuse not to follow the role models set in Ephesians 5 and 6 There may be some cases because of great sin that it is not possible to follow these commands. However, the Bible does not seem to show an example of when this is. As we well know those things which the Bible does not give explicit commands about are the hardest things in live to deal with normally. Yet God does give us principles to follow and is our duty to learn how we are to follow these principles.

Well I've come to the end of my series. It was stretched out and long thank you for your patience. Perhaps I'll write more posts on what I find on the topic of submission and obedience and how they obtain to our lives. The thing that I learned most about submission and obedience is that they were created for order. Our God is not a God of disorder but of order.