Clough Divine institutions Lesson 6

Divine Institution #2, Long hair, Short hair – 1 Corinthians 11:7-16

 

We have been working through the various divine institutions, and we are in the second divine institution, the institution of marriage.  Each one of these institutions are fundamental building blocks in creation, and to destroy any one or to weaken any one of these ultimately destroys humanity. God has authorized this particular operation, the various divine institutions, for the preservation and spiritual betterment of humanity as a whole.  Therefore we do not refer to them as Christian institutions; they are divine institutions, meaning they are for all men. 

 

When I, for example, marry a couple I do not act as a Christian; when I marry a couple in the marriage ceremony I’m acting solely as the agent of the state and Christianity has nothing to do with it.  Actually there’s no real Biblical basis whatever for a marriage ceremony; the only reason why we have one is because in the 4th or 5th century it came into the Roman Catholic Church and Protestants never got rid of the thing so we have it.  But that’s basically the only reason for having a marriage ceremony.  The marriage ceremony is actually a state, not a church function.  So when you have a marriage ceremony you’re actually having a violation of the church and state because the state, the minister must act with two hats; he first has one hat that he is the pastor and yet at the other time when it comes down to the vows he must take that hat off, replace it and take upon himself the role of the minister of the state.  So you want to be clear about this, that marriage is not a Christian institution, it’s one that was designed and is promulgated under the laws of the state. 

 

Now God has a certain set behavior pattern, true; but as far as the legality of marriage and the formality of it, it is purely a state function, and if you want to save a lot of money, you girls that want to get married, if you want to save your father’s money just go ahead and you can have a quiet marriage ceremony in the pastor’s office and then you can take your money and blow it on the honeymoon and it’ll save you many hundreds of dollars and you won’t have half the worries of somebody with a wedding ceremony. 

 

But the marriage itself, the marriage relationship we defined as a personal relationship between a male and a female member of the human race which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers.  We’re sticking to this long, extended definition, because of its implications later on in the problems of marriage.  Again: the personal relationship between a male and a female member of the human race which typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers.  We said and emphasized last time in explaining this definition that it is a personal relationship, not an animal relationship.  And it must be between members of the human race, and it is not true of angels. 

 

The last one, it typifies the saving relationship between Christ and believers we broke down into three parts.  And these three parts are the three aspects to how the marriage relationship typifies the saving relationship between believers and Jesus Christ.  The first one is the grace/faith relationship.  This is found, and we went through this, in Ephesians 5:22, 25.  This simply means that the male and the female are cast in two different and distinct roles.  The male and the female have four different characteristics.  You could get more or less out of this but for convenience sake we limited it to four. 

 

One is that the male is the initiator, just as God is the initiator in the plan of salvation.  God loved us before we could love Him, and therefore the saving relationship between Christ and the believer means that one party, God, initiates and we respond.  And logically you must have the initiation before you can have the response.  So therefore that is one parallelism in the grace/faith relation­ship, that the male must initiate and the female must respond.

 

The second thing we found was that the male, acting as God does in the saving relationship, cannot coerce volition.  God never coerces volition in the process of evangelism.  God makes the issue clear and you can take it or you can leave it, but God never twists volition, influences it or something else.  He wins it and He woos it but he cannot change it and influence it.  To do this, incidentally, would destroy the first divine institution and you notice that all these divine institutions are interrelated; you can’t destroy by the next one on top of it.  And so therefore it is the woman who basically makes the decision to respond.  And it’s her choice at that point, just as it is the believer’s choice to respond to the gospel. 

 

A more important parallelism in this same aspect of grace and faith is that the man must act as a revealer of his own character to give the woman something to trust, for in the nature of Christ and the believer the object of our faith, the object of our trust is not some abstract thing, but it is actually the character of Jesus Christ.  Now we can’t trust in the character of Jesus Christ if we don’t know what that character is.  And therefore there must be a process of revelation through words and works.  And this revelation of character through words and works will result in a trust; so as Christ has revealed Himself to us through His works, dying on the cross and so on, and through His words, upper room discourse and His messages to the apostles, so the believer now trusts in this; not blindly, he trusts in a well thought out way.  And so therefore the female in this relationship is cast in the role of a truster. 

 

And then finally the male must have endurance and patience because God must have endurance and patience with believers and the woman has to have a period of growth.  And these are some of the characteristics, if you think about it you could probably enumerate a lot more characteristics of this one area of Ephesians 5:22-25, that aspect of the saving relationship dealing with the mechanics; grace and faith.  God gives the grace and we respond in faith.  So in the marriage relationship the man takes the role of grace and the female takes the role of faith.

 

We dealt last time with a second aspect of this saving relationship that’s typified by marriage and that is in the sense of purpose/design.  For this we went to 1 Corinthians 11:7-9 and we found out that the object of man was the plan of God, and so we have this equation: man + the plan, to which you add the woman to get the complete picture.  And that’s the way the Bible has it structured.  First, Adam, then God gives a plan to Adam, then He brings Eve along to fit to Adam. That’s why it says “a help meet.”  Now unfortunately because of the King James language we’re used to reading that as a helpmeet, one word, that’s wrong.  You read it as a help, especially fitted.  So here is the woman, she is to help; help him do what?  Help him accomplish the plan of God for his life; and how—because she is especially fitted.  And later on we’re going to get into the area of the right man, right woman, and we’ll see that God has picked out for each person a right woman and a right man, but this phrase, “especially fitted,” is the basis for that.  That is, that God, just as He designed Eve, with just the right personality and the right background to come to Adam, so He has in the marriage relationship designed it for the right man and the right woman. 

But you have first the man and the plan and then the woman.  Please notice, the compatibility surrounds the will of God for the male’s life.  And this is why Christian marriage from the outset is of fundamentally different character than all this jazz you read about in these marriage manuals about psychological compatibility.  You can be psychologically compatible with thousands of people but that’s not the point; the point is, are you spiritually compatible with one who has a plan that fits both the people.  That’s the point, not psychological compatibility; it’s spiritual compatibility, the plan that God gives the man with Eve.

 

Suppose, for example, God gave the plan to Adam and said Adam, I don’t want you to eat of this tree and I want you to go out and subdue this thing, be fruitful and multiply, and Eve said I don’t like that plan, I veto it.  Well, she wouldn’t be a help; now she wasn’t too much of a help as it was, but at least she didn’t have the rebelliousness from the beginning.  So now we have that second aspect of the marriage relationship and tonight we come to the third aspect of that relationship in Ephesians 5:28.  This is the third aspect of this relationship.  So we have these three parts of the marriage that typify the saving relationship: the grace and faith principle, the ultimate design, purpose, and now the concept of union. 

 

Ephesians 5:28-31, “So men ought to love their wives as their own bodies.  He that loves his wife love himself.  [29] For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord the church.  [30] For we are member of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.  [31 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.  [32] This is a great mystery but I speak concerning Christ and the church.  Nevertheless, so let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as he himself, and the wife that she reverence her husband.” 

 

Now Paul’s point here is that when you have the person of Jesus Christ, and we’ll put a “p” after Him to distinguish Him from the title “the Christ.”  Now when you see Christ with a little “p” after it, I mean the person of Jesus Christ.  So you take Him and you take the believers, which are defined in Ephesians to be the body of the Church, with a capital “C.”  You take the two together and the two together is greater than the sum of the part and you have something called “the Christ,” or the head and the body, together make something that is greater than the sum of the part. 

 

So here we have a very odd thing in Scripture, that out of the union of Christ and the believer comes something that is more than just simply [can’t understand word] addition.  It’s not just adding two to each other here, there’s something actually new created by this union and that is “the Christ.”  Now an analogy is made in the Bible, that’s why Paul says in verse 32, “this is a great mystery but I speak concerning Christ and the Church,” they’re linked together, there’s something new that has been created. So therefore we have the analogy back to marriage in which Paul is asserting that out of the union of marriage, out of the union of male and female, comes something more than just those two people, but an actual third entity has been created in this situation, the marriage.  The marriage itself is something that is greater than the sum of the part.  This is the thing that the apostles are talking about.

 

To see it more clearly turn to 1 Corinthians 6:13; we have Paul dealing with the problem…well, you might have guessed it, he was writing to the Corinthians and the Corinthians were known as the playboys of the ancient world.  There were two playboy types in the ancient world; one lived on Crete and the other lived in Corinth, and if you wanted to call somebody a playboy you either called them a Cretan or a Corinthian; that was just the standard name in the ancient world for playboy.  And sure enough, the Holy Spirit established two key and crucial churches with the playboys; one on Crete and the other in Corinth, and as you might have guessed it they had a few problems in certain areas.  In 1 Corinthians 6:13 we are introduced to one of the lines that the playboys were giving Paul.  “Meats for the belly,” or “Food for the belly, and the belly for foods; but God shall destroy both it and them.”  Now if you look at something in your King James before “but God” there is a colon; that colon completes something.  Everything before that colon is a quote from what these people were trying to teach.  And they were saying look, we have a physical appetite and what’s wrong with trying to fulfill it.  You’re hungry so you eat, and if you have sexual appetite you fill that up.  What’s the problem; it’s a natural desire to be filled as you would fill your belly with food when you’re hungry.  But Paul’s rejoinder to that position is, “God shall destroy both it and them.  Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.  [14] And God has raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by His own power.  [15] Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ?  Shall I, then, take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot?  God forbid.  [16] What?  Know ye not that he who is joined to an harlot is one body?  For two, saith he, shall be one flesh.  [17] But he htat is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.  [18] Flee fornication.”  And then he makes in verse 16 a very startling point: “Every sin that a man does is outside the body; but he that commits fornication commits sin against his own body.”  Why?

 

Well, what he is doing here is saying that out of the male/female relationship we have the concept of one flesh.  Something new is actually created that did not exist prior to this act.  Therefore from this moment on something actually has been created there that must be created whenever this occurs.  And so therefore when he talks about verse 16 he is saying that the “one flesh” concept of sex in the Bible means that regardless of whether this is conducted inside or outside of marriage, and whatever it means and we do not know exactly all of the physical and psychological details of this, we’re only beginning in research in this area to understand the problem.  But the Bible has dogmatically asserted that whether it’s in the marriage or out of the marriage, where you have sex in this situation you have generation of something new that wasn’t there before, one entity. 

 

Last time when we dealt with this in detail through Deuteronomy I quoted some of the research that’s been done in this area.  One hint that we have of just what it is that is created, in other words the sum of the male plus female equals greater than male plus female, the sum is greater than the sum of the parts, the whole there, what we have found, at least in some areas is that a man or a woman is designed at birth to respond to many different people.  They have, you might say, potential in 360 different ways.  In other words, they are designed with an inbuilt capacity for sexual response inside the marriage relationship.  However, research has found that once people begin to engage in sex outside of the marriage relationship, this pattern starts changing so you get a pattern like this: here are two people and these are the people, say here in Corinth in verse 16, this man has joined himself to a harlot, and now his response pattern is being shaped to respond to this person over here, this woman, and hers to him; it happens automatically, you have no control over it, that’s the way God made you.  Now what happens is he goes and maybe he marries some girl and so he has a pattern of response like this, and in this diagram she’d be located down here.  So the result is that he can no longer respond in the full amount to her because he’s already shaped his response pattern by this woman. 

Now this is why people who engage in a promiscuous in the Bible usually wind up as some sort of homosexuals or something else, or impotent, because they have lost their ability to respond.  Now this is a Biblical truth and this is why the Bible says it’s a no-no outside of marriage. The Bible is not trying to lay down some arbitrary rule and say you mustn’t do that, it’s very naughty-naughty and so on, and keep you from having a good time.  God is interested that you have a fantastic time and He’s not interested in slapping wrists and keeping people away from enjoyment.  But His point is that if you would follow His divinely authorized principles there you could have true happiness but you can’t when you break them.  In other words, the moral rules of the Bible are related to what actually is there.  These are not rules just cranked out (quote) “for the good of society.”  That’s a bunch of bologna.  The Bible never gives you rules because it’s for the good of society.  The Bible gives you rules because it’s good for you, never mind society.  So we have here then these principles that Paul is expositing and we went through these in detail in Deuteronomy.

 

But he’s briefly stated this third relationship that we discovered between the person, we’ve noticed the great faith relationship, the ultimate design relationship, and the union relationship and that is this: that in the union relationship between Christ and the believer you have something created that’s greater than Christ or the believer put together; you have something new entirely.  And so similarly in marriage when you have the male and the female unite sexually you have something new that is produced that wasn’t there before and is not part of either one of them; there’s something brand new that’s developed, the Bible labels this as “one flesh.”  And as yet we do not know physiologically and psychologically all the details.  There remains a tremendous amount of research to be done in this area as soon as the people that are in that field wake up to the fact that the Bible has something to say, they might find out.  Right now they’re too busy trying to disprove the Bible.  But when they come around and begin to do some research they will find, I am sure, that the Bible has some tremendous things to say behind this concept.  Paul does not develop the concept entirely here in 1 Corinthians 6, he develops it just enough to show you that there’s something here in the deep basic mechanics of the natures of the two people, male and female, that is changed by this act.  Therefore he says act accordingly.

 

Now we have dealt with these three aspects of the marriage relationship that typifies the saving relationship between Christ and the believer.  Now as always in these divine institutions I try to follow a pattern of presentation that will be the same for all four. We first define what the divine institution is; then we deal with the attacks that the 20th century is making against that divine institution.  So now we some to the various attacks that are being made to breakdown the structure of the second divine institution, and I will preface my remarks by the conclusion to my remarks. 

 

And that is that what I am about to say may sound strange but the overall thrust of the 20th century in the area of the second divine institution is to destroy the sexual differences.  Now this may sound very funny or very odd because you say wait a minute, that’s the whole problem.  Oh no it isn’t, not in the Bible sense of the term.  The world today in the 20th century is very against sex, very profoundly against sexuality.  It is concentrating on taking the male and transforming him into a female and taking a female and transforming her into a male.  Now that’s the thrust of the 20th century and that is the attack that we are being hit with today whether you know it or not.  And I’m going to give you three examples that every one of you face.  But we are, in the 20th century, being pressured in this area.  So therefore as Christians we must know the truths, the Bible truths of the second divine institution so that we can stand the ground against these satanic attacks.  What is the first area?  The first area may sound very trivial but turn to Deuteronomy 22:5.  Here we have the first attack and it’s in the area of clothing style.  It may sound strange that the Bible has something to say about clothing.  Yes it does.  So one of the first great attacks being made in this area is the style of clothes.  And I’m going to bring you to this passage because it is exactly opposite to what most people… usually you get some minister up in the pulpit and he’s worried about the short skirts.  Well, if you have to sit in front of a group of ladies short skirts can become a problem, I’ll grant you that.  But the Bible has something far more profound to say about clothing that short skirts and the length of hemlines.  The Bible has something to say about the form of the clothing because as I have said again and again, wherever you have apostasy you can generally summarize it by a simple rule.  Apostasy destroys form and order and produces chaos.  This is generally the rule, no matter what area it is.  Whatever doctrine it is, apostasy can usually be spotted by the fact that it destroys form and order and design and produces chaos.

 

Here in Deuteronomy 22:5 we have the statement made, “The woman shall not wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.”  Now why is this strong language used over apparently such an innocent thing?  Whenever in the Old Testament you have the word “an abomination of the LORD,” you can lay your last dollar on the fact that the author is pointing you to a breakdown in categories.  I checked the word “abomination” out one time and found that in every case the word “abomination” is used in a context where God is concerned with preserving the created order of the universe.  And when you have an abomination of the Lord you have man in his spiritual rebellion trying to destroy what God has designed. 

 

Now what happens here in the context; we dealt with this in Deuteronomy but basically what we said there was this: that in the context historically that the women at this point were exchanging clothes with men at the high places.  What were these high places?  That was the center of Baalism and they’d have these various parties and so on up on these high places and the various differences in the sexes would be masked by the costumes and the designs that they wore.  These were practices of the so-called Canaanite religion. 

 

Now what are we to make of this today, how can we apply it?  I know people that are saying that means that the ladies can’t wear slacks and so on.  That’s not the point.  The point of this passage in verse 5 is this: that there is a certain style of clothing that should set the female apart from the male.  In the ancient world this was done through a very interesting way.  They had various systems; for example, you look at an Arab man and an Arab woman and you wonder, how can you tell the difference because basically they wear the same kind of outside clothes.  But the difference was in various veils, was in the hair style and so on.  They were always careful to preserve the male/female difference.  Now that’s what the Bible means here in verse 5 by way of application, that, for example the style of clothing, and you know who usually designs women’s clothing, but those particular individuals hate women anyway and so they try to make them as ugly as possible and so they specialize in creating all sorts of oddball fashions just so the ladies can go out and spend the men’s money.  They design today something called unisex; now that I would say from the philosophical and theological point of view is a far more dangerous trend than any short skirt you’ll ever see.  Now most Christians will never catch this because any time they see something like that they froth at the mouth and roll down the aisle.  But they fail to realize that there are certain categories and the Bible has different rules that are quite profound and strong.  And when you have this tendency to go in this direction you are having and promoting a destruction, and this is an abomination to the Lord.  So therefore the Christian in a very true sense of the word will preserve sexuality in the manner in which he dresses, in clothing style and keep this difference clear. 

 

We find this, for example, in Romans 1, in which Paul says that one of the great signs of a negative volition is the breakdown and the confusion of the roles between male and female.  A result of negative volition is a switch in roles, and Paul brings this out, I believe it’s from about Romans 1:20 on where he points out that one of these results is that the women tend to act like men and the men tend to act like women; there is a complete breakdown in this area and this is a manifestation in behavior patterns of this negative volition. 

 

Now that’s one attack that is being made against the second divine institution.  We will go to a second attack and this second attack gets into a very controversial type area, and that is hair style, hence the title “long or short hair.”  First clothing style and then hair style.  Turn to 1 Corinthians 11:14; this shows you what I’ve been harping on in the last six months that there is no area of your life that’s neutral. Every area…and this shows you, even when you go down to the barber shop you can’t even be neutral.  Every area of life has some repercussions spiritually.

 

1 Corinthians 11:14-15, “Does not even nature itself teach you that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?  [15] But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering.”  Now what does this mean?  First in verse 14, let’s look at the word “nature.”  “Does not even nature itself teach you,” turn back to Romans 2:14 and you’ll see what Paul means by nature.  What is it, “nature teaches you?”  What nature?  In Romans 2:14 we have nature.  “For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.”  Now notice, “when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature the things that are in the law,” now what do you suppose “nature” means there.  It means this intuition, and it means basically related to God-consciousness.  Every member of the human race is God-conscious once they get to the age of accountability. 

 

And what he’s saying is that God-consciousness promotes a certain inner moral judgment.  There’s something innate… now be careful because as you can see in Romans 2:14 it’s not always effective, he says whenever they do it, sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t because sin has various relative degrees and is able to mask out and distort God-consciousness.  However, Paul says that God-consciousness has a moral component here in Romans 2:14. 

 

Now if you turn back, what he’s saying in 1 Corinthians 11:14 is that this same God-consciousness has a sexual component to it and that there is a certain innate way in which the male and the female will behave.  And he’s saying that there are certain innate things in the makeup of the person connected with God-consciousness that defines their roles.  Again, be careful of the word “nature.”  As in Romans 2, so here in 1 Corinthians 11 it doesn’t always work… it doesn’t always work; he’s not saying this, but he’s saying by and large God has given this to men and therefore it says this inner consciousness itself teaches you that “if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him.”  Now we’re going to get into how long is long in a minute, but first the principle.  “If a man have long hair, it is a shame;” it means [can’t understand word; sounds like: ought ten air] and it means it detracts from his glory as a man.  Now what does this mean?  This gives you a tip off as to what this innate knowledge is.  It is against his glory.  Now the word “glory” means his unique nature or his male-ness.  And what Paul says is that if you will relax and just consider yourself with an innate judgment, long hair detracts from the maleness of the man.  That’s what he’s claiming here; you can disagree with him but I’m teaching you what Paul said. 

 

1 Corinthians 11:15 we go to the woman; and he says, “if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering.”  Now that word “covering” is a wrapper and it was used by the women in the ancient world much like you’d use a shawl, it’s not something that goes on the head, it’s something that goes around the top part of the body, which gives you a hint of the length of the hair that he has in mind.   It is given as “a glory to her,” and the hair is given her, not “for a covering,” but the Greek is “instead of a wrapper.”  …instead of a wrapper, the hair is given to her instead of a wrapper, and by the laws of lexicography and so on we know this wrapper meant this thing that the women would wrap around themselves like we would wrap a shawl.  And he says this is the reason that it is given her for a covering, it is “a glory” to her.  In other words, it emphasizes her female-ness. 

 

Now we come to the obvious question, how long is too long?  Well, we can’t pinpoint it but we can give you some idea; turn to Ezekiel 44:20.  I think you will become aware after tonight if you haven’t before, that the Bible is very intent on preserving form, and this goes for the way you dress, it goes even in this area of hair and as we’ll see in a moment in the way you live.  In Ezekiel 44:20 we have instructions on the barbering for the priests in the temple.  This is not the temple in the Old Testament, this is the millennial temple; this is the ideal temple and here is the hair style for the priests.  “Neither shall they shave their heads, neither will they allow their locks to grow long; they shall only poll [trim the hair of] their heads.”  Now you wonder, what is the “poll their heads.”  That’s the good old King James meaning trim.  They will trim their hair.  Therefore this text means it is a medium between two extremes.  These priests will not be allowed to shave their head; this means literally shave it.  You see guys go in the service and get shaved; that’s what it’s talking about, “shave their heads.”  One of the greatest pleasures I can remember is when I was in cadet training and seeing some of these guys with long hair and watch that barber just go swoosh, right down the middle and they always used to do it, start right here and go right back and take everything off right down to the scalp.  And you ever saw something look ridiculous after that barber made his first sweep, came in a little like a bombing run, just went right down the middle and when he got through, of course the guy couldn’t do anything else, he just had to go along with the system, he had to get the rest of it shaved off.  Well, that was not permitted of these Old Testament priests. 

 

So we have something not bald.  Why?  Baldness also had a sign in the Old Testament, it gets kind of humorous and I’m not attacking any men who are bald, you are excused, it’s talking about artificial baldness that was due to pagan customs of shaving the men’s hair off.  Now why was this?  Turn back to Leviticus 21:5 you’ll see that there was a pagan meaning.  The ancient Canaanite priests used to shave their heads, all the way down to the scalp.  So you had the long hairs and the fuzz, but the fuzz weren’t the policemen.  Leviticus 21:5, “They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their bead, nor make any cuttings in their flesh,” now we don’t know what the first meaning but we know what the second and the third acts are in this verse, Leviticus 21:5.  We know the last two and they were associated with pagan forms of worship in which the men would cut and disfigure their beard and they would cut and disfigure their face, so by analogy what then do they think of shaving?  Disfiguring the man’s head.  And they conceived that shaving is a disfigurement and therefore disfigurement is prohibited by the Word of God and therefore it was not allowed for these priests. 

 

Now hair had a meaning in the Old Testament; it had a connotation of strength.  The man’s hair was a sign of strength, as of course in Samson and the famous case of Samson and he was a Nazirite and we’ll get into the exception there in a moment.  But hair generally connoted strength.  Turn to 1 Kings 2:23, this clears up for us a very obscure passage in the Old Testament, a passage which seems horrible when you read it, seems completely out of line with the spirit of the Word of God.  And yet in 1 Kings 2:23 we have a most amazing thing happen to Elisha.  Elisha is going along, “And he went up from there unto Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children [youths] out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.  [24] And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD.  And there came forth two she-bears out of the woods, and tore forty and two children of them.” 

 

Now you say what kind of behavior is this; why did this prophet react so violently just because someone was making fun of his bald head.  What’s the problem?  The point was that these children were not just making fun of his bald head; they were making fun of the fact that he was…they were calling him a Baalite, a Canaanite, they were saying that this prophet of the Most High God of Jehovah was actually a Canaanite and they made fun of him and they made fun of his garb by saying why don’t you go up?  Now who do you remember that Elisha knew who went up?  It was Elijah and Elijah went up and was called by the fiery chariot and so on, and he went up.  And what these kids are saying, why baldy, you Canaanite priest, why don’t you go up too.  And so it became a slam against the whole religious position, and of course, the discipline in verse 24 was immediately pronounced.  Prophets in the Old Testament were never permitted to allow people to mock their message.  It’s like in the service when you are an officer you are told one thing: somebody can come up to you and call you a damned fool to your face, but they better watch the bars on the shoulder and they’d better not refer to you as a damned captain or a damned major or something like that and if so they get it and they should get it hard and good and quick.  You never can allow someone to make fun of your position; personally, yes, they can call you anything they want to your face but you never can allow a person to make fun of your rank or your position. 

 

So here they were making fun of Elisha’s rank, but why the bald head.  Well here again we have this Canaanitish connotation of the fact that these Canaanite priests were disfigurers of the body.  They had various other things which we’ll not go into, ways in which they disfigured the human body and baldness was a sign of disfigurement. So we imply, then, that the reason why God did not want his men to have shaved heads is the fact that there’s a certain, form, order and decency about the male and his hair.

 

Now Ezekiel 44:20 said but don’t let the locks grow long, and in Leviticus 10:6 we have this repeated.  Leviticus 10:6 reads as follows: “And Moses said unto Aaron, and unto Eleazar and unto Ithamar, his sons, Uncover not your heads,” now that’s a wrong translation, he doesn’t say “uncover your head,” he means don’t let them loose.  And you say wait a minute, that sounds worse, don’t let your heads loose.  You’ve heard of people always forgetting something, it’s good their heads are tied on.  Is this what it means?  No, what he’s saying here is don’t let your head or your hair become loose, or out from under the clippers.  That’s the connotation here; in other words, don’t refrain from trimming it; that’s his point.  Do not allow the locks to grow long, do not allow this hear to become to a situation where it is not trimmed and clipped.  Now why is this? 

 

Well, we know that it has something to do with the form but we still haven’t satisfied how long.  We know now it’s at least between two extremes, it certainly doesn’t mean to shave the head, and it doesn’t mean on the other hand to let it grow.  Apparently, I am told by various medical authorities that the man, if he allowed his hair to grow it would eventually stop, whereas the woman’s would not.  There is a difference there, and so obviously what this is saying is the man cannot let his hair grow to the limits that his hormones and so on will allow it to grow.  This is not to happen.  Maybe we can ascertain something from the exceptions to the rules so let’s turn to Numbers 6; here we have the Nazirite oath which was the one exception in Israel to this rule.  The one exception, Numbers 6:5, the Nazirite oath, in which the man would give himself to God and allow his hair to grow until the end of the oath, period.  How long this was depended on the man.  Samson allowed his hair to grow forever, I mean, he allowed it to reach its maximum length and he went through life this way and this set him off as a Nazirite. 

 

In Numbers 6:5, “All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head; until the days be fulfilled, in which he separates himself unto the LORD, he shall be holy, and let the locks of the hair of his head grow,” and so on.  Verse 9, “And if a man die very suddenly” and he has defiled himself, “then he shall shave his head in the day of his cleansing, on the seventh day shall he shave it,” and he brings it to the priest and they burn it.  They take the hair and they burn it and they destroy it. 

 

Now this is the Nazirite oath; this was the one exception, which at least shows you something.  If the Nazirite oath was the exception, then however long the male, the general population, male population, let their hair grow it must have been distinguishable, very easily, from the Nazirites who had allowed their hair to grow.  So therefore we come to the conclusion that there is at least some hint in the length here because if the Nazirite must be set off by the length of his hair and he allows his hair to grow long, the other men can’t have long hair or the Nazirite wouldn’t show up.  So therefore theirs are at least shorter than the Nazirite.  Now we have one humorous exception to this a man who evidently wasn’t a Nazirite, but did let his hair grow and that’s in 2 Samuel in the case of Absalom.

 

Now Absalom was very interesting kind of person, he must have had a fight with his barber or something because he only went down to the barbershop once a year.  In 2 Samuel 14:25 here’s Absalom, here’s your first long-hair, he was a rebel and took over the kingdom.  “But in all Israel there was none so much praised as Absalom for his beauty; from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.  [26] And when he polled his head [cut the hair of his head],” that means trimmed, “when he trimmed his head, for it was at every year’s end that he trimmed I; because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he trimmed it),” in other words, the only reason why this man trimmed his hair was it got to heavy and so he cut it off, and “he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king’s weight.”  I don’t know what that last thing, “after the king’s weight” means but if it’s a normal shekel it means that his hair weighed between 3 and 4 pounds when he cut it off, so you can imagine what kind of a head of hair this guy had.  So he went to the barber and had it trimmed every year.  And if you want to see what kind of a character Absalom was, in the next chapter he led a revolt.  So you see the long-hairs and the revolters were the same then as they are now.  But Absalom was an exception.

 

But the thing that’s strange about this passage is a comment in verse 25.  Throughout Samuel and Kings you have these comments made in the text; those comments are prophetic comments, they are authoritative, and when these men comment it is to be taken seriously, and what is puzzling in this situation is that in verse 25 Absalom is praised for his beauty even though his hair is this long.  Therefore we can come to only one conclusion, namely that hair again in the Old Testament was a sign of strength, and in certain cases the people had a very liberal attitude toward its length, obviously because it’s not condemned.  But, the normal form from the Mosaic Law, which incidentally was not being well enforced at this time, was a kind of half and half.

 

What should we deduce from this?  The only thing we can go to is to the archeology and look at the frescoes and the pictures as the men really looked.  And if you take the human head, the hair on the man in these frescoes came down to about here in the back, usually.  Now the problem is in some frescoes you have these things that look like curls but most scholars believe that that is just the style of the man who made the frescoes, and the man that made the engraving has no meaning whatever as far as the hair style, that’s just the way the artist were picturing the men in that day.  So those curly-Q’s you can forget about; the average pictures that you see of the men they did have hair and it came down to the back of their neck which would be considered long by today’s style.  But the key thing is then to look at the same archeological pictures and ask yourself, in those same pictures what did the women’s hair look like.  Then you get a different story.  The women’s hair came all the way down, probably almost to the small of their back in these pictures.  So therefore under that kind of condition this hair, down to the back of the neck, was distinct, very clearly, from the women of that day for the women in that day had extremely long hair. 

 

To see this turn to Song of Songs, 4:1, we have various hints as to the women’s hair styles throughout Biblical times. And in Song of Songs 4:1 a comment is made that at least tips us off to the extreme length of the woman’s hair.   “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair.  Thou hast doves’ eyes within” or in the Hebrew, “behind thy locks;” which means that she had bangs which came right over her eyes, and it was extremely long.  If you look up this word you find that bangs or the hair on the front was extremely beautiful in their perspective and so on, and they valued it very much. 

 

We have another Biblical reference to the hair in Luke 7:38, here is Mary and Mary stands at Jesus, and she “stood at His feet behind Him, weeping; and began to wash His feet with tears, and wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet,” so Mary obviously had extremely long hair. 

 

What are we to conclude from this rapid survey of what the Bible has to say?  The Bible is interested in preserving the male/female distinction in hair styles.  The instructions to the priests prevented the priests from allowing their hair to grow to unlimited proportions as the women obviously did as we can tell from the Song of Songs and other passages, so that thee was a distinct line between the male and female in hair styles.  Now why it has become a problem today is the fact that the women have gotten shorter in their hair style and so therefore a man who would be, for example, legitimate in the area of Israel, who allowed his hair to go down the back, would be indistinguishable in our society from the woman. 

 

Now this is the problem, and I would say if we are to apply this as Christians basically it’s this; that a man’s hair can be as long as it can and still produce a sense of masculine difference from the prevailing female style at that time in history.  That’s about all you can say from Scripture; Scripture does not give you any more definite controls than that, but Scripture definitely lays down the reasons that there should be a manifest difference and so therefore we would say that you have to see the general cultural times in which you life and the male and the female hair styles must be relatively different…relatively different in that sense, men shorter than the woman.  And of course today as I said the great problem is that because of various reasons, some of them legitimate of course, the women have had to go to shorter hair styles which means, therefore, the men have to also go to a shorter hair style to keep the difference, and so we say this is not a trivial function of the Word of God, this is a testimony to the sexual differences that must be maintained to preserve the second divine institution.

 

Now the third attack that’s being made today, found in 1 Corinthians 11:3-7, and this… we have had attacks in the clothing style, we’ve had attacks in the hair style, and now we have attacks in the lifestyle.  Please notice, incidentally, that the Bible is always on the side of making differences clear.  Apostasy is always on the side of destroying those differences.  So in 1 Corinthians 11:3-7 we have this:  “I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.  [4] Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head.  [5] But every woman that prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is even all one as if she were shaved.  [6] For it the woman be not covered, let her also be shaved [shorn]; but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered.” 

 

Now what does this mean?  This means that there is a hierarchy in the created order which Paul means to be respected even in worship.  Now watch how these divine institutions come into play.  Remember divine institution one, volition; now we’re dealing with the second divine institution, marriage and sex.  Now no matter how spiritual the Christian forms of worship are in the New Testament, they themselves can never destroy these divine institutions.  In other words, which is logically prior to which?  The divine institutions logically precede even Christian worship.  So that for example Christian worship cannot violate your privacy by butting its nose into your business.  You have a right to make your choice, to reject or to accept without having everybody know it.  That’s your business.  And you do this before the Lord.  This is why I think all this business about keeping money records and who gave what, when, and where is a violation of privacy.  It’s your business, you know how much you gave and how much you didn’t, and that is your business, between you and the Lord and not between the church and you and somebody else, it’s strictly up to you.  So Christian worship can’t violate this first divine institution. 

 

Similarly, Christian worship shouldn’t violate the second. And so when Paul says in verse 3 that there’s a hierarchy he has something in mind like this: God, Christ, and the husband, here’s the husband now, husband, and wife; that is the hierarchy he has in mind, and he expects them to manifest in the form of worship respect for this hierarchy.  Let’s look at it further.  In verse 4, “Every man” or every husband, “praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head.”  Now we know from history at this particular point there was a problem in Corinth.  All of the Jewish services, the men worship with their head covered, as they still do in orthodox Judiastic circles.  Now he’s saying that is a violation of his maleness.  Why do they worship with their head covered?  Because they do not feel they have access to God’s presence.  This is basically why, even today in modern orthodox circles when the men worship you see these little beanies, Arnold had one when he came here, and there’s a reason for that, a theological reason.  They feel they are unredeemed and they have no right to approach into the presence of God and so they cover their head.  Paul said that dishonors the male’s head and refused to allow this Jewish custom to come into the church at Corinth. 

 

Now why did he do this?  Because the man takes his position logically under Jesus Christ.  Christ is his head and it is Christ whom he dishonors.  If a man, for example, a Christian believer in Corinth was a converted Jew and he wore his little beanie, here he comes into the temple with his little beanie on, now he is discrediting the work of Jesus Christ by wearing that because he’s saying I don’t have access to the Father, and therefore the work of his head, Christ, is not sufficient and legitimate.  So therefore it violates His work and dishonors his Head.  The last head in verse 4 doesn’t refer to his own head; it refers to the Head mentioned in verse 3, Christ’s. 

 

Now in verse 5, what about the woman; “Every woman that prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for it is even all one as if she were shaved.”  Now what does this mean?  In the time in which this was written the women who were shaved, under the code of Justinian, were adulteresses.  This keys us to what is meant, what these women were really saying in verse 5.  An adulteress, a woman who was not accepted by her husband within two years after the act could legitimately under Roman law have all her hair shaved completely off and she had to walk around with no hair, and it was blasphemous and they obviously did it to discredit her and so on, and to make everyone aware of her crime.  This was the crime of adultery in the ancient world.  The woman had to have all her hair shaved all the way down like a G.I.  That must have really looked like something but that’s the way they handled it. 

 

So when he adds this little phrase here in verse 5 it gives you a hint as to what he means by this act.  In that day all of the Greeks, you see, Paul had a problem, the Jews all worshiped with their heads covered and the Greeks worshiped with their heads bear.  But what he’s saying is that the Jewish men were wrong in covering their head because they dishonored Christ but this women that brought in their Gentile background and walked in with bear heads were saying in effect, at this particular time they were saying in effect that they were violating and were not recognizing their head, who was their husband.  Therefore the woman who would walk into the temple bareheaded was saying I can approach God directly without going through the husband. 

 

Now in a way this is true, that’s true.  A woman believer has direct access as a priest; she’s as much a priest as her husband, but in saying this she was, given the cultural form of the time and what it was saying, she was saying that I defy my husband’s authority and I will approach God independently of him.  In other words, she was breaking up that marital union.  In other words, we have the man plus the plan, plus the woman.  Now she was united to the man around the plan of God for their life and by walking in and saying this she was saying I defy the plan of God; I’m going to approach God independently of my husband, in other words, you just have two people worshiping but you wouldn’t have them worshiping as a married couple.  So therefore what Paul is saying here in 1 Corinthians 11 is that this style of life of the women of taking this authority upon themselves violates the second divine institution. 

 

We can see this more clearly if we turn to 1 Timothy 2:12-14.  This is important because Timothy is the last epistle Paul wrote; therefore it supersedes any other epistle he wrote.  This is the last view you have of Paul’s doctrine in this area.  “I do not allow a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.  [13] For Adam was first formed, then Eve.  [14] And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression.”  Now there are certain things said here that we want to carefully balance. What he is saying in verse 12 is that he did not allow the woman to teach because to teach she must have authority over those whom you teach, and so therefore he said I do not allow this.  I do not allow a woman to usurp authority over a man. 

 

But you say wait a minute, back in 1 Corinthians 11 wasn’t it saying that the woman was prophesying and praying.  How could she prophesy, which is the same thing as teach, and not be allowed to teach here?  What is the difference?  How do we reconcile 1 Corinthians 11 with 1 Timothy 2?  The reconciliation is this: that the woman can teach those who are children or other women, but it is not the New Testament norm for her to teach men because when a woman teaches a man it means necessarily as a teacher she has to have authority over those whom she teaches.  Therefore she is excluded from this by Paul’s doctrine here in 1 Timothy 2:12.  He instead says that she should [11] “learn in silence with all subjection.”  The word “subjection” is the very word used back in Ephesians 5, “let each woman be in subjection to her own husband,” and therefore he means that she should learn in subjection to her husband.  And in the given cultural form of the time we know a little bit how this went on, namely that it was the men who did the teaching in the early church, and the women would learn in subjection, it didn’t mean they couldn’t ask questions or anything but it just simply meant that they could not be in a teaching position over other men.

 

Now to some you, you say well isn’t this picayune, after all, you know, this the 20th century.  But notice Paul intends this to be a universal truth because in verse 13-14 he grounds the doctrine on the nature of the male and the nature of the female, and he says “Adam was first formed, then Eve.”  In other words, there’s a form of priesthood between the husband and the wife.  Here’s Adam, here’s Eve; now given the narrative in Genesis to whom did God give the plan?  Did He talk to Eve directly?  No, you can’t find God talking to Eve directly.  He talked to Adam and it was Adam’s job to communicate the divine truth to his wife.  And you ladies, you want to come back sometimes when your husband pulls Adam and the apple on you; just say well, if Adam had taught Eve something then she wouldn’t have done it.  So I’m giving you ladies a little ammunition to use on your side.  So we can’t tell from Genesis exactly who was at fault but somewhere they goofed; either Adam did not tell his wife or his wife just didn’t listen to what he told her.  But nevertheless whatever the result was the point is that it came from Adam to Eve.

 

And then Paul adds a second reason in verse 14, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman” was deceived, and he implies very definitely and it’s not just my implication you can see this in many scholars, particularly in the early church, that they viewed the Eve nature of the female as open particularly to deception.  And it’s interesting, if you’ll study some of the cults of how much they are done, run and organized and so on, staffed and so on by women; it’s very interesting and I’m not just thinking of Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy or whatever her name was. There are a lot of other ones than that.  And you have this strange trend where the women tend in Scripture to be open to deception whereas the men are not.  Now whatever the implications are we don’t know, but Paul grounds the doctrine on the permanent abiding nature of the sexes. 

 

But he adds something to balance so the women will not feel that they are neglected and they are the last wrung in the ladder and so on, and everybody’s walking over them.  He adds something that’s very interesting in verse 15, “Notwithstanding, she shall be saved in childbearing,” now this “saved in childbearing” is very interesting because it means that in the history of salvation how does salvation come?  Through the male or through the female?  It comes through the female and so the woman has an exalted position in that the male by himself can’t produce Messiah.  And throughout the Old Testament this is the honor that the woman had.  Every Jewish mother hoped that she would be the mother of Messiah.  And you remember when Arnold had his Passover demonstration here; do you remember what he said the woman in the Jewish family, even today does?  The Passover in the Jewish family can’t start without the woman doing one thing; she doesn’t do anything else but she has to start it; she lights the candle.  And the men of the house can’t do anything until the woman lights the candle.  The woman must bring the light into the world before the men can be saved.

 

And so here there’s a balance in the roles of the sexes that the Bible gives, but suffice it to say here in commenting on church life today and the lifestyle and so on, that the New Testament emphasizes there is a certain distinct authoritative for the man and there’s a certain distinct role for the women.  Now obviously there has to be some exceptions to this; we find one in the book of Acts.  You say wait a minute, I know some women who have had tremendous ministries as teachers.  Yes, but they have had their blessing and they have had their ministry as teachers because the men wouldn’t get out there and do their job for the Lord; that’s why they had to, God had to use the women.  And God has not hesitated to use women down through the ages to fill in the gap when the men have been sitting around. 

 

One case which you know from the Old Testament is Deborah. Deborah was a military officer.  Now that’s the height of humiliation as far as I’m concerned, to be in a military operation and have your general a woman.  But Deborah was considered a military authority in the book of Judges; all the judges were military people, they weren’t somebody wearing a robe around, some black robe with a gavel; that’s not the concept of Old Testament judge.  The concept of an Old Testament judge would be more like a guerilla leader, a man who was both the head of his group and also the military leader and the judge and everything else; that’s what a judge means in the Bible.  So when it says Deborah was a judge it means that God, because of the lack of trained men and the lack of men willing to fill in for God’s plan God chose Deborah for that role. 

 

We have another interesting case in the book of Acts, in Acts 18:1, remember Priscilla and Aquila, well every time that couple is mentioned from that point on in the book of Acts, Priscilla’s name is mentioned first.  And this is very unusual; in all other cases you will find the man mentioned first and then the woman.  So it’s evident even in this situation that Priscilla was a leader in the early church.  We know from the end of the epistle to the Romans that women were functioning as officers of some sort in the local church in the New Testament.  But to balance the picture, in the end Jesus Christ never allowed any women to be among the twelve apostles, even though it must have been very tempting for Him when faced with the contest between Peter, hoof and mouth disease, and the women who evidently saw very clearly what Christ was going to do, that He was going to die, He was going to rise from the dead and so on.  And it would have been very tempting to the Lord to say oh, Peter, would you get out of here and let Mary take over; very easy for him to do that, but He didn’t.  Why?  Because the norm, the biblical norm is that the male must have the authority.  You may disagree with it but that’s the Biblical norm and if you do disagree I challenge your presuppositions.  You have absorbed 20th century culture and you are absorbing an apostate lifestyle that does discredit both to the male and to the female and whether you disagree in the area of clothing, hair style of anything we’ve covered tonight the reason why you disagree is because you have subtlety and maybe unconsciously appropriated the apostate views of the 20th century.  We must, as Christians, get back to the Biblical truths and live out these things in very practical ways. 

 

This means, for example, in the local church level that as many men as we can have possibly trained to be the ones that do the teaching.  The women are doing a fantastic job, but they shouldn’t have to, the men should be doing it.  Now often times they can’t, but it is their normative role to do that job.  Sometimes again the women have to fill in.


Next week we will deal with finding the right man and finding the right woman.