Dennis Tuuri

We return once more this morning to 1 Peter 3. We’ve been here for a couple of weeks now. Hope you’re not growing tired of the passage. I think that it’s good for us to continue to read these passages of scripture that are intensely practical for us and to meditate on what they mean week after week and to think it through, to kind of work it over to make sure we understand everything that’s in the passage and not just move on briefly from it.

We’ve been talking about the relationship of husbands and wives specifically in the marriage context. For the last two weeks we have talked about the fact that the wife’s characteristic is to be one of submission and following from that submission, an inward acceptance of God’s order and God’s ordination of her in a specific relationship to a covenant head—obedience to that covenant head. He said that Sarah gives us a good example, really, of the whole picture of marriage, the wife and the husband.

Here you have Sarah being submissive to her husband Abraham. So submissive. She becomes an example to the godly wife in 1 Peter 3. That submissiveness is not just an internal attitude. It’s external actions as well—and her obedience to him and her using her tongue and her thoughts to say that he is her Lord. So we have Sarah imaging, as it were, the correct bride and her husband imaging the correct husband.

He is called by her Lord. And you remember last week we said that the English word “lord” comes from two Old English words: hlāf and weard. Hlāf became “loaf,” referring to bread. Weard became “ward,” or a guardian. So you had “loaf-ward,” which was then later contracted to “lord.” And so the godly wife is in submission to a husband who is a lord. He is a provider of bread. He nourishes his wife in all things—and bread is just a symbol, of course, of all of life. It’s the staff of life.

And then he’s a guard to her in all things as well. The same way that Adam was to till the garden and to guard it. So the godly husband develops his wife, bringing her to the image of Jesus Christ the way he is being brought to the image of Jesus Christ also in the relationships he has—and he guards her in that process. It’s interesting that in Psalm 45 we see a picture. We’ll return to this later as our final scripture reading when we move toward the end of the service, but I just wanted to read a couple of verses out of it now.

Psalm 45:10-12. We read: “Hearken, O daughter, and consider and incline thine ear. Forget also thine own people and thy father’s house. So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty, for he is thy lord, and worship thou him. And the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift. Even the rich among the people shall entreat thy favor.”

It’s another picture of a godly wife. Now, obviously there the primary reference is to the church being married to Jesus Christ as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and we worship him.

It’s interesting. I was reading from a volume on the complete works of Augustus Toplady. And by the way, I didn’t plan this, but we’ll be singing one of his songs as we move toward the conclusion of the service—”Rock of Ages.” A great song. And he has an extinguishing engagement with Arminianism and Calvinism. He was a Calvinist. But he also has a short little half column in there on part of the Anglican wedding ceremony at the time that he lived in the late 1700s in which the husband pledged—or the wife rather pledged—with this body I, the worship. And he was talking about whether that was appropriate or not in the context of a marriage ceremony. And he said it really was, because the word “worship” there didn’t mean in the sense of her seeing him as ultimately God, but her seeing him as a representation of God and God’s order in her life. And so a proper word—you know, to call him Lord again, or to reverence him, or to adore him, in a sense—certainly not as God would be idolatry.

But there is a proper sense in which wives’ submission and obedience should be in seeing their husbands as lords. I mentioned before, but I’ll mention it again—probably mentioned it many times the rest of my life—when we saw a presentation on public TV about the time of Oliver Cromwell and the attitude of children and the wife to the head of the household. He would enter the household and they would bow down before him. This was common in that period of time to have that kind of respect—recognizing what you’re buying down to is not the God of all creation, but he is a representative of God’s order and God’s authority in that household.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you all go home and bow down to your husbands. But I’m saying that in your mind, you should have that kind of apprehension of the importance of the covenant head that God has placed you under.

This is particularly true because we live in a day of rampant egalitarianism. It’s a big word. Egalitarianism means everybody should be equal—equal rights. That egalitarianism that is in our nation is not just in terms of essence but in terms of function. Remember, we’ve talked about the Trinity, and there’s a functional subordination of the Son to the Father in the Trinity in terms of what he does. He came to speak the things of the Father. There’s an ontological equality—in terms of Christ’s essence, he’s equal with the Father, of course—but there is a functional subordination, the same thing as what’s being taught here in these verses that we’ve been reading week after week about the husband-wife relationship—a functional subordination.

I might add, though, that in light of this rampant egalitarianism, the mistaken way to combat that is with an attempt to combat it with an anti-egalitarianism of essence. What I mean by that is: as wrong as it is to say that husbands and wives are to be identical functionally and men and women are to be identical functionally in society, it’s just as wrong to say that husbands and wives are not identical in terms of essence or in terms of quality, in terms of their importance in the scheme of things as God’s creation. They’re equal in that way.

And 1 Peter 3 goes on to tell the husband to treat the wife as a partner in the gracious gift of life, okay? Full partnership is what we’re talking about there. That’s the balance.

It’s interesting that the passage I read from Psalm 45 just now talks about the supposed loss of the person calling the husband Lord then resulting in her own exaltation. And I think that’s another constant theme in these First Peter passages—that for one to accept to be submissive to God’s order and to walk on the basis of that in terms of subordination of function and various callings, Christ then exalts people.

Jesus is the example of that in 1 Peter 2. He submitted himself ultimately to a just God who cared for him, and God then highly exalted him, giving him a name far above all other names. And Sarah is the same thing. Sarah was obedient to a man who caused her to go into very compromising situations. But God exalted her for faithfulness and for her obedience, and she became the mother of the faithful the way that Abraham was the father of the faithful, according to First Peter 3.

I thought one way to review what we said last week would be to get Robert Jones’s ears up here. You probably don’t know what I mean by that, but it turns out while we were talking last week about obedience being coming under the hearing of God’s word with a view to obey it, Robert was downstairs with the children in Sabbath school. They have a little group assembly first, and then they go to their separate classes. In the group assembly he was talking about the great Shema in Deuteronomy 6, “Hear, O Israel.” And Robert’s real good with visualizing things. And he had a pair of big ears, I guess, that one of the children got to put on. See, and he was trying to remind them: “Get your ears real big when you hear the word of God.” And that’s really all we were saying last week. I thought about wearing those ears up here this morning, and I thought, well, I won’t do that. But it’s a good thing to keep in mind—that example of what obedience is. It’s hearing the word of God with the view to obeying it.

Even Jesus himself was in subjection to his own parents. We’ve talked about that—after he was found by them. It says he became submissive to his parents, or he was submissive to his parents, and he obeyed them. The Son of God, obviously not equal with his parents in terms of essence but far greater than his parents in terms of essence—he’s God. They’re his creatures. And yet he, in terms of the functional subordination that God gave to him, became subordinate to parents, to those who were his inferior in terms of essence. And so there’s another good example for us: Jesus Christ.

But this morning we’re going to talk about clothing. Clothes are real important. I don’t know how it would be interesting, I suppose, to figure out how everybody in church picked out their clothes this morning. Might think about how did you pick out the clothes you’re going to wear to church this morning? How much preparation for Sabbath worship services did you engage in in terms of the putting out of clothes as opposed to preparation to hear the word and to respond to that word with songs of praise? Might think about the time involved in those two things. How much time did you take preparing your hair, for instance, as opposed to how much time did you spend this morning thinking about the fact that you’re going to partake in the Lord’s supper this afternoon and affirm your covenant continuity with God?

Clothes are interesting, and Sunday is a good day to talk about clothes because a lot of us put on our Sunday best. I think there’s a reason for that. Some people think that the tradition probably started with the fact that we come to church clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Some people have kidded around and asked if I’m going to wear a robe when we marry Steven and Marge. I won’t be wearing a robe. Robes are a somewhat controversial thing in some churches. My guess is that if I were to begin wearing a robe, what I’d like to see happen is that we have robes for everybody. And historically in the church, that’s happened. There have been churches where when people would come in the front door of the church, they’d be handed a robe and they would put the robe on and then they’d come into holy worship and come before God with a special garment—a robe that was provided to them by God.

Now, again, that’s symbolic. What it’s talking about is the fact that we need clothes. We need a robe of righteousness to come into God’s presence. After we hear the call to worship in the morning, what do we do? We pray and we say, “God, we’re sorry. We’ve sinned. We broke your law. We’ve transgressed your word, and we plead the blood of Jesus Christ and we plead his righteousness imputed to us. We’re wearing his righteousness to come into holy worship before God.”

And you always do that—whether you pray at home, whether you pray here. When you pray to God, you come clothed in Christ’s righteousness. And so robes are indicative of that need for clothing and robing themselves began with sin. Remember Adam and Eve. It wasn’t until they sinned that they needed clothing provided by God. And God, in the providing of that clothing, taught them with that first clothing the necessity of blood sacrifice to make that righteousness and clothing for them.

God, with that clothing, began to give them their first example—their first lesson in redemptive history. And he gives us that first lesson as we begin at the Bible reading of Genesis and we come to that clothing of them, and we see then the beginning of God’s redemptive history, which is then carried out throughout the Bible till we come to the coming of Jesus Christ and the giving of his robe. We need clothes to come before God. We need a multicolored robe, whatever that was that Joseph had. We know it was a special robe and it was made by his father, okay?

And when we come before God, we need some kind of multicolored special robe of righteousness that we can’t make—that only God can make with his Son Jesus Christ and robe us in. So clothes are important. That’s what we’re going to talk about this morning: the adornments, the clothing of a godly wife.

The first point I want to make about adornments is that they’re not to be externally extravagant, okay? We get that from when we go back and forth between 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Peter 3. I hope that doesn’t throw you off too much, but I thought these two passages fit together pretty well. In 1 Timothy 2, verse 9: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety.”

We’re going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. But what God is telling us here in 1 Timothy 2 is that our adornments, the adornments of the godly wife, the women, are not to be externally extravagant. They’re supposed to be modest, okay?

Now, adornments are clothing themselves. I’ll talk a little bit about what that word means. The word here for adornment is the same as a root word of “cosmos,” which we find in 1 Peter 3. So back in 1 Peter 3, we read in verse 3: “Whose adorning, let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair.” That word for adorning in 1 Peter 3 is “cosmos,” which you could probably figure out real quick-like. Usually it’s translated in the Bible as “world,” okay?

And in fact, the specific word “cosmos”—not its variations—we find in 1 Timothy 2, but the specific Greek word “cosmos” in 1 Peter 3 is, as far as I can tell, the only occurrence in the entire New Testament where it’s translated by some word other than “world.” So it’s very significant.

What “cosmos” means is to be in order, and people think—commentators have said, and I think correctly—that the old meaning of “cosmos” is here returned to in 1 Peter 3, and that meaning was “order.”

Now it’s significant, and here in the 1 Peter passage particularly, to think about God’s order being the basis for this word “adorning” because we’ve been talking about God’s order for the last two weeks, haven’t we? God orders the universe through various authorities, and then he tells us to get under those authorities, to order them, and not to try to kick off the order that God has given to us. And so he tells slaves to be obedient to their masters. He tells men to be obedient to the civil authorities. He tells wives to be obedient to their husbands. He tells husbands to be obedient to God in 1 Peter 3, recognizing your wife as a full partner in the great gracious gift of life.

And so God’s order is prevalent in this whole thing. And so it’s interesting that the word here for adorning is that same word meaning God’s order. It’s interesting too that the word for “order” became then later translated and understood in terms of “world.” The word for “order” is the word that became translated “world” in the rest of the New Testament.

Now that’s interesting because we’re given a world, a cosmos, a created order here over which we were given dominion. We’re to take that world and exercise dominion, order it more correctly according to God’s image in heaven as he wants that to be on earth. And so the word for “world” itself means an ordered environment, one that becomes more orderly. And it becomes more orderly as we preach the gospel of Christ and how it applies to that world. And so the whole world then becomes reordered.

I guess what I’m saying here is that this term for “cosmos” takes the order that’s being spoken of in 1 Peter 2 going into 1 Peter 3, which is a macrocosm—okay, looking at the big picture of God’s order and these various authorities—and now he takes that same concept of order and begins to talk about the microcosm of the individual woman herself, and it begins to talk about the qualities in her that will find expression as being God’s adornments, okay?

So we’re going from macrocosm to microcosm. God’s order extends not just to relationships with authorities, but it pervades our whole life and it pervades our internal being as well. What we are should be an ordered existence under God. And so we begin then with external garments, and they are not to be externally extravagant, as we read in 1 Timothy 2.

Now, Isaiah 3:16-26 has some very harsh words to say about people that rely upon external extravagant ornamentation in terms of clothing. Going to read it first. Isaiah 3:16-26. Listen to this:

“Moreover, the Lord saith, because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walked with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet, therefore, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion. And the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day, the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, the bracelets, the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils. And it shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell, there shall be stink. And instead of a girdle, a rent. And instead of well-set hair, baldness. And instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth, and burning instead of beauty. Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gate shall lament and mourn, and she, being desolate, shall sit upon the ground.”

Very harsh words about those who would rely upon external extravagances for their righteousness and their beauty before God.

Now, don’t get me wrong: external adornment is not a bad thing. We’ll read next week in Proverbs 31:21 and 22 that the godly wife adorns her household with scarlet, and her covering is fine linen and purple. So clothes aren’t a bad thing. But when somebody goes to the extent of wearing these various apparels that we’ve just listed in Isaiah 3, it’d be real interesting to go through that and try to construct a model with all these things on—all this jewelry and everything. I suppose all you have to do is go down to Portland. You can find people like that. Come to think of it.

But the point is, when you start getting extravagant in your outward adornments, you’re misplacing your sense of worth. You’re misplacing your time and what you do with yourself, and your timing, and how you’re to see yourself before other people. You’re misplacing that in terms of your external adornments.

There’s many warnings in God’s word upon looking upon your outward appearance with pride, okay? But there’s also warnings in God’s scripture about looking upon other people in terms of judging their apparel. So you don’t want to have your own sense of well-being tied to your apparel. And you also don’t want to judge somebody else’s sense of well-being on the basis of their outward apparel.

James 2:3. “You have respect to him that the gay clothing and say unto him, ‘Sit thou here in a good place,’ and say to the poor, ‘Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool.’”

You see, we can’t evaluate ourselves. We can’t evaluate other people on the basis of how they dress. And we certainly cannot partake in extravagant ornamentation, okay? God’s word says specifically: don’t do that. Our world, our cosmos, our order, our adornments are not to be centered around externals, okay? Your ordering or dominion of yourself is not to take place in the exclusive arena of outward appeal to other people or to your husband.

Now, if we start by saying that your outward appeal shouldn’t be like this, then what do we have to replace it with something positive? And so God, in 1 Timothy 2, says don’t let it be extravagance that you take your pride in. But what does he say about our outward apparel? He says first of all it has to be modest.

The word “modest” there comes from a Greek word with its root being “disciplined,” okay? And as a result of being disciplined, moral and respectable, okay? And the word “modest” is “kosmios,” which is the same root word as “world” or “order,” okay?

Other translations use the term “becoming,” “seemly,” “suitable,” “orderly,” “appropriate,” or “proper.” The idea here is both conveying order and orderliness to your outward appearance, but it’s also conveying a sense of morality, okay? So it’s ordered, and as a result of that, moral and responsible.

I guess one way to think about this in a very vivid illustration here is that women—and that’s the context we’re talking about right now—shouldn’t look like prostitutes on one hand because that would be not being moderate in the sense of morality. And then you also don’t want to look like punk rockers on the other hand because that presents a disordered perspective of life.

Your adornment is supposed to be orderly and, as a result of being orderly and under control, disciplined, and moral and respectable.

Secondly, your outward adornment is to exhibit shamefacedness. Now, this word for shamefacedness is “aidos” in the Greek, and it’s linked with sobriety, which we’ll discuss in just a minute. The word has been translated as “modesty,” “modestly,” “quiet,” “bashful,” and it has within it the idea of a fear of breaking certain structures that God has placed upon you in terms of relationships to other people.

It’s having a sense of self and the possibility of shame of self—not putting over-reliance upon self—and then how that works out in terms of other people. It’s the same word that in Hebrews 12:28, or at least in some manuscripts of Hebrews 12:28, is translated as “reverence” for God. And you have reverence and fear of God because your God is a consuming fire, okay? It says to serve God with reverence because he’s a consuming fire.

And so there’s a reverence is an idea of fearfulness of breaking over the boundaries that God has established for us. I thought perhaps maybe a word here would be “self-respect,” but really a better term might be “other-respect,” okay? So your adornment, what you put on, should have a sense of respect for what other people, your interaction with them, and how they’re going to perceive you, okay? And this is based upon your relationship to all other things.

Another way to think about this word is the opposite word. The opposite word in the classical Greek was “hybris.” And it’s still a good opposite word today. The word is “hubris” today in the English. And that word means a want of insolence or arrogance resulting from excessive pride or from passion, okay?

Now, I said there’s another word hooked to this, and this will help us to understand the meaning of “aidos” a little better as well. And that word is “sobriety.”

The text goes on to say that your garment should be moderate and that they should exhibit this “aidos” and also sobriety. The word “sobriety” is a word that would transliterate into “soundness of mind.” Combining the word “mind” with “good” or “sound”—soundness of mind is what sobriety means. Other ways it’s been translated are “soberness,” “self-restraint,” “discreetly,” “prudently,” “refined,” “sensible,” “serious.” You get the idea there.

Now, in classical Greek literature, these two words—soundness of mind or sobriety and “aidos” or shamefacedness—these two words are linked in classical Greek literature. As an example, in Homer’s Iliad, Apollo refused to fight with his uncle Poseidon. And commenting on this in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament by Kittel, he says that if Apollo in this tale of Homer’s Iliad—if Apollo, as “sophron,” as being sound-minded, okay, being right-minded, does not accept battle with his uncle—it’s because of his “aidos,” his sense of shame, his sense of understanding that he has to be within structures in terms of relationships to other people, and specifically here with his uncle, okay? This indicates that proper conduct is rooted in “aidos.” It’s rooted in that sense of understanding your relationships to other things, to God, and then to the rest of the created order as well. And proper conduct is marked by restraint or modesty, expressed primarily in relationship to somebody else, okay?

So if you have a proper sense of your relationships to your fellow man and to God, that should affect how you dress, and you’ll have consideration for your other relationships to God and to fellow man as well. And that will result in being sound-minded in your appearance. And so if you’re not sound-minded in your appearance—if you look like you’re crazy in terms of being either a prostitute or a punk rocker, okay, to use two examples—then it implies that you don’t have a proper sense of your relationship to God and also vertically to other men.

So your clothing should exhibit that. It should exhibit both those ideas—your understanding of relationships and your understanding also then of being sound-minded in terms of those relationships. And having that understanding of relationships fences you in terms of what you will wear. Again, “hubris” is an antonym of the word “sobriety” also in Greek literature.

And again, in the tale of the Iliad, “hubris” against the gods leads to man overstepping the boundaries which have been set for him and which he ought to know and observe, okay? So you’re supposed to understand the bounds, walk within those bounds, and your clothing should reflect that. We dress in the context of relationships first to God and then to man. We don’t dress in a vacuum or for ourselves, okay?

If we reject a proper sense of relationships, then we’ll have no soundness of mind when it comes to apparel. And this will be reflected either in an immoderate, immodest apparel in terms of looking like, you know, arousing sexual desires in other people, or the sense of being completely disordered in our external appearance, okay?

So there should be consideration for others in our dress.

Secondly, now the external adornments of a godly wife then are not to be extravagantly external. They’re to be under control. They’re supposed to be based on proper understanding of relationships. They’re supposed to be sound-minded then and modest in that sense. But secondly, the adornments of a godly wife are not to be a facade.

Now, 1 Peter 3 says basically it says that whose adorning, let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair and of wearing of gold and of putting on of apparel. You can almost get the sense here of an external-internal dichotomy being set up, and I don’t think that’s what’s going on. And we’ll explain that in a few minutes.

What is going on, though, is that your external adornment should not be a facade. It should not be a cover that doesn’t reflect what’s inside of you. Your external should be related to what’s internal to you, okay? And the wearing of fine clothes for acceptance with your husband or with God or with other people is a facade. It doesn’t reflect what’s interior to you.

And it become clearer as we go through the correct relationships. Remember, the context of these epistles in Rome at this particular time was that outward appearance was becoming extremely important in that society. Women spent great amounts of time and great amounts of money on hair—on tremendously elaborate hair designs and coiffures—on jewelry, on apparel. Sounds kind of like today, doesn’t it?

All these things were a continuous waste of time for the women of Rome. They were becoming externally oriented; the whole society was. And the same thing is happening in our society today. We’re becoming more and more a culture that is concerned about appearance and about face and not about reality anymore.

And so for instance, you have men who live in very good neighborhoods, very expensive homes, drive very expensive cars—up to their eyeballs in debt. But the appearance is what’s seen as important. You have those sorts of individuals. You have specters of even people within the Christian camp of having those sorts of external adornments that look great—sharply dressed, sharp hair—and yet doing bad things, terrible things, rotting out of the inside, even as one maintains, tries to maintain an external of cleanness and appropriateness. We’re becoming a world of externals more and more.

Matthew 23:25 says it’s the Pharisees who wash the outside of the cup, okay? Now, what that means real practically is when you get up in the morning and you take a shower or a bath, you wash your face, whatever you do, you brush your teeth—remember this. Remember that it’s good to wash the outside of the cup. It’s good to be orderly in our appearance. But if we don’t address the interior, we’re like Pharisees.

And as much time as you spend washing, you ought to be thinking in terms of asking God again to bring the awareness of your sins to you, that you accept the shed blood of Christ. It’s Christ’s blood that washes us from those sins internally. And so remember that when we wash, we must wash the inside of the cup. And that’s been accomplished through Christ giving us his blood and our confession of our sin and turning from it and a desire not to do it anymore.

Another way to look at what’s being said here in 1 Peter 3 is to see if 1 Peter is stressing metaphysical relationships or ethical distinctions. Big words, right? Again, metaphysical just means the essence of somebody—who what you are, okay? It refers to being. Ethical refers to what you do. And as Peter’s saying here, is it more important what you are or what you do? Well, he isn’t really saying either. That’s a false dichotomy to bring to this text.

What he’s saying is they should be a union. And again, that’ll become clear as we go along here. But to focus on external appearances only—the plaiting of hair and the wearing of dresses—is to stress what you are or what you claim to be apart from ethical distinctions, okay? Apart from what you do. And that’s what he’s addressing here in a negative fashion: don’t do that. Don’t stress appearance. Don’t stress who you want people to think you are as opposed to the relationships, the ethical relationships that God has called us into, okay?

Beauty, Peter is going to tell us here, is ethical. It has to do with what we do—based, however, on the new creature in the hidden man of the heart, the phrase that 1 Peter uses. Beauty is as beauty does is what Peter’s going to tell us here. It’s kind of like what we talked about in terms of repentance.

A real easy way to remember what we talked about in terms of repentance is “sorry is sorry does.” And I’m sure many of you parents use that with your children. Easy for them to say sorry. Let’s see some actions to indicate whether they’re really sorry. Easy to say that we have a beautiful wife and easy to affirm that we’re beautiful people, but let’s let our actions testify to that beauty and not some sort of external appearance apart from ethical distinctions or what we do, okay?

Okay. Let’s turn to the positive. The adornments of a godly wife are first of all to be internal.

Point number three. We get this from verse 4 of 1 Peter 3. What are the adornments if they’re not to be these external adornments that are facades that belie the internal reality? Verse 4 says:

“Let it be that hidden man of the heart, internal, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.”

So he’s talking about the adornments of a godly wife are first of all to be spiritual. Now, I say that because some commentators—Kato, for instance—said that those anxiously engaged in adorning the body neglect the adorning of the mind. And commentators quote this favorably, and even Calvin did, saying that what we need here is an emphasis on mental qualities instead of physical qualities.

But see, that’s really another false dichotomy to bring to this text. God isn’t saying your mind’s important and your body isn’t. What he’s saying is your spirit is important. The inner man of the heart is not your mind and what you think, necessarily. What you think has to be subjugated to the new inner man that God has created in Jesus Christ. And so it’s a spiritual distinction, not a physical or mental one.

And again, it becomes ethical.

Secondly, we’re to have meek hearts. That hidden man of the heart, which indicates it’s a spiritual adornment, is characterized as having two things: a meek heart and a quiet heart. Now, this phrase—meek, as I said—is linked to quiet. We’ll talk about that in just a minute. But another couplet that I want you to keep in mind as we go through this is Proverbs 31:25.

Proverbs 31:25 says that strength and honor, or strength and dignity, are the clothing of the Proverbs wife. And if we’re talking about clothing then in Proverbs and clothing in the New Testament, and we believe in continuity, then these two things should correlate to each other. And they may not seem like they do, but they will.

It’s interesting to try to think: well, now, Dennis, you might say. Proverbs 31 says the first thing is strength, and you just said the first thing is weakness, and meekness is weakness. So how can weakness be strength? It can’t be the same thing. God must be telling us two different things here to the two different types of godly women. But if we think through this a little bit, we’ll see that isn’t quite the case.

We want to review meekness for a couple of minutes here. In Matthew 11:29, we’re going to let the Bible tell us what meekness is, right? Matthew 11:29. Jesus says that he is meek and lowly. Okay? “Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, Jesus says, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls.” Jesus says, if you’re going to be meek, take my yoke upon you.

And so meekness is a desire and a willingness to accept the yoke that God puts upon us. Now, that’s real important for the 1 Peter passage, isn’t it? We’re talking in the context of relationships. We’re talking about a wife that’s been yoked to a husband. And Jesus is saying, if you’re going to be meek, accept the yoke.

And Jesus’s yoke for the wife is obedience to the husband in submission to him. Meekness, as other people have said, is essentially being broken to the master’s yoke, okay?

Now, the ox is a strong beast. Jesus wouldn’t want an ox that was out there plowing in the field, yoked and weak. Because of the yoking, the ox is just as strong after he wears the yoke as he is before. And in fact, he’s stronger because now he’s more directed, and his energies are directed toward a task. Well, the same thing is true of the godly wife. She’s not to be weak. She’s to be meek—under control, under Christ’s authority, under her husband’s authority—and as a result, focused in what she does and strong as an ox.

I hope your wives are strong as oxen.

Matthew 21 is another example of meekness. In Matthew 21, we have what some people would celebrate in two weeks from today—Palm Sunday celebrates this—the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. And Jesus—it says in the scriptures that he comes meek and lowly on a donkey, on a colt, okay, on a foal of a colt.

Now, this is interesting, and I want to just talk about this for a couple of minutes. Deuteronomy 17 forbids the multiplying of horses for kings. And the context of that is that when the people get into the land, they’re going to want a king like the other nations around them. And God says, “No, you can have a king. King’s okay. But it can’t be like those kings. Got to be my kind of king.” And one distinction that God gives them here is that the kings around them all rode big horses. They were weapons of war. That’s what horses were. They were like tanks back then, okay?

And so God says you can’t have a horse and be offense-oriented. You have to be meek. You have to be riding donkeys or something else.

Now, this is pointed out, for instance, in 2 Samuel 16:2. Ziba, the servant of Mephibosheth, comes out to greet David as David is coming back in to continue his reign. And he brings with him a couple of saddled donkeys—not horses, but donkeys—for King David’s household, okay? King David was to ride on donkeys. And King David’s sons, who start to go astray—and notably, for instance, Absalom—we find him later on in the scriptures riding upon a mule.

Now, a mule is a combination of a horse and a donkey. And so a mule is like a halfway step toward this “multiplying of horses” thing, okay? And all of Absalom’s men, I think, also rode mules. And a lot of times you’ll find rebellious sons of David riding these sorts of animals.

Now, I bring this up because when it says in Matthew 21:5 that Christ comes on a donkey and is meek, it’s quoting Zechariah 9:9. Zechariah 9:9 says that the king comes on the foal of an ass, or on the foal of she-asses. Some people say this is in the plural. Commentators Grotius and Newcomen, for instance, take this to mean that what we’re talking about here in Zechariah 9:9 is what the king will be riding: an ass. And in fact, it’s the offspring of two she-asses, okay? Not the offspring of an ass and a horse.

So there’s a twofold witness here, both in terms of the name used—ass. Then we also actually have the genealogy traced back far enough to know that it’s two she-asses that produce this ass, okay? So the point is this king is obedient to Deuteronomy 17. He doesn’t multiply horses for himself. He rides the meek donkey—instrument of work, not an instrument of lording it over other people.

He puts his strength not in the horses, okay? And to remind himself of that, he rides a donkey to remember that he puts his strength and hope for the nation that he commands unto the King of Kings. It’s Jesus in the book of Revelation that rides the white horse, not man. See, he’s the one that gets the horse.

Now, it’s beautiful here to see this—that the king’s meekness was a willingness then to be broken, to be meek to the King of Kings’ harness, and ride on a relatively lowly donkey instead of a powerful, charging steed. And in Matthew 21:5, when Jesus says, “I’m meek,” he himself—the King of Kings, who properly belongs on the white horse in Revelation—it tells us that he consents to again give us an example of perfection and meekness in which he himself, normally seen on a horse, is seen on a colt in terms of meekness, telling us this is how the king should ride.

And if you’re a king in your household, you should have that attitude of work and service and not an attitude of lording it over the people under your charge. That’s meekness, okay?

And meekness is not weakness. Meekness is strength. Jesus came in to do the work of the Father—that week in the triumphal entry—and he did it. And in doing it, he crushed Satan and defeated him.

David was meek, okay? David went out against Goliath because he wanted to make sure that the honor of God and the people of God were not taunted by an opponent. David went out under God’s harness, okay? But he went out to be strong. He went out to conquer and defeat Goliath.

Meekness speaks to our relationship to God—being under his yoke—and then also to the other relationships God has put us under. Meekness in a wife is being under her husband’s yoke. Meekness in an employee is being under his employer’s yoke. Meekness in a citizen is being under the government’s yoke. Now, as I’ve said, there’s limitations to that. They can’t cause you to break a command of God. Then you have to be—because what you’re doing here is imaging God’s yoke. And if these guys are going to cause you to throw off God’s yoke, you can’t obey them. You got to obey God instead of men.

But meekness that’s called for here is harnessing yourself to God and to his authorities. Lensky said that paganism despised the people—in terms of Rome now—that we’re not masterful, who do not assert their own will and make others bow to it. Christianity sees meekness as God sees it—as a mark of inner spiritual strength, not of weakness.

I had a conversation when I used to work at the graduate center—couple of years ago. I had a conversation with my boss. We went out to lunch, and we used to talk about various issues and topics. And this one time we got talking about abortion, I think, and homosexuality. And he would engage in those conversations as long as we wanted to talk. It was really fun. But boy, when he really got upset—when he could not continue the conversation any longer—was when I tried to get him to see that he was pitting his mind against the word of God.

When I said that I believe this, not because I think it’s right, because the word of God tells me it’s right. He said, “I don’t want you to tell me the word of God. I want you to tell me what you think. And if you think this about abortion or homosexuality, well, that’s great. I can talk about that. But when you reference an external standard”—pagan man hates that.

See, and us in our inner man and our fallen nature hate that as well. And that’s why it’s tough to be meek, to hook yourself to somebody else’s commands and dictates, God’s, and then the authorities that he’s given to us. But that’s what God calls us to do.

Secondly, you’re supposed to have a quiet heart. This is really an emphasis of the meek—meek and quiet is a doubling here. We see this in the responsive readings of the psalms we just read, for instance, where there’s an emphasis through a two-fold repetition of basically the same thing. There’s a little bit of difference.

Whis translates this “quiet heart” as being tranquility arising from within. Stibbs, in his commentary, says it’s to have no sign of rebellion or resentment, fuss, or flurry. Now, the word here has its roots in two words meaning “to have” and “to sit.” To be steadfast, in other words, is what this is talking about. A quiet heart is not one that is not vocal. It’s one that is steadfast—sitting, as it were, in state in place like a rock. In other words, unmovable, relying upon God, exhibiting, as it were, God’s immutability.

Quiet confidence that can only come from being in covenant with the Creator who is the sustainer of the entire created order and to whose command all the created order moves. That’s the kind of quiet confidence that’s talked about when we speak here of the quiet heart being the adornment of a godly wife. He loves us, and that’s a blessing, isn’t it?

Now, we’re going to speak here in a couple of weeks, and I mentioned it several times over the last couple of months, that we are in the context of judgment in this nation, and you’ve got to know that. And we’re going to take a couple of Sundays out, probably, to talk about that. But we are in that context. There’s a great shaking happening, and everything that can be moved is—what gets shaken out of God’s garments, as it were.

But if you have a quiet heart, you’re not shakable. You’re rooted not in your externals, but in God himself, the provider and sustainer of all creation. And so you remain steadfast in the midst of that shaking. That’s an important thing to hold on to in the days to come. That shaking is going to happen all around us, and maybe even inside the walls of the church here.

The point is that we’ll be steadfast if we have this quiet heart, immovable, resting in God.

Now, I said that this was related to Proverbs 31:25. He said that strength is akin to weakness. In the first half of Proverbs 31:25, it goes on to say that the godly wife in Proverbs 31:25 is clothed with honor. And the word there comes from the root word meaning “to swell” and—by the way—to have strength meant to be heavy, okay? And this word means to swell. I like these uses of terms that God gives us here.

And if you’re maybe not quite the ideal, really thin gal today, maybe you should like these words too, in their root meaning, to have some stability in your, in who you are. But of course, the stability here is stability in God. It’s the same word that’s used to talk in the book of Proverbs about the honor of old men—is in their hair, their stability, their steadfastness. The old men is seen in their gray hair, okay? Their honor.

He cares for us. God cares for us. And so we can cast all our cares upon him when the storms and the winds come.

I thought about this yesterday. I was, you know, you probably noticed I’m walking a little funny today. And I’ve had an increasingly sore back for the last two weeks. Every day it gets worse. And yesterday I had to lay down most of the day. I couldn’t hardly walk around. And I was thinking—that I was remembering—that when I went to high school and after high school, I remember that’s really the last clear memories I have of who I was as a person.

And I was a sullen, morose fella. I’d come home, sit in the rocking chair, and just scowl at everybody and bark at every—I was a very unhappy person. And to see what God has done with me now, and I’m not trying to make this sound like any big deal, but it’s just that in the context of back problems yesterday and other problems we have—and seeing, knowing that this country is coming in for judgment, that it’s going to affect us all financially and in many other ways—we have problems here in the church. We’ll talk about that a little bit later. They’re not insurmountable if there are a few little problems.

In spite of all the problems that one might have today and that we are daily encounter in our lives, we can be happy, joyful people because our steadfastness is in God and is in his immutability and his sovereignty. And we know that he loves us, that he’s in control of all things, and that he cares for us. And the basis of that—1 Peter later says—to cast all our cares upon him because he cares for us.

We move in the midst of a creation that moves to the obedience of God for his glory and for our well-being as well.

Correlate these two words again—a quiet heart and a meek heart. Then Bengel, in his commentary, says a real good thing. He says quiet is that attribute of the character that does not cause disturbance. Meekness is that attribute that bears with serenity the disturbances caused by others. It’s a real good way to sum it up.

And so when you hear about women having a meek heart and a quiet heart, don’t think that means weak and never saying anything. It doesn’t mean that at all. It means to have a steadfastness and to have a submission to God and to his authorities, and as a result of that to be strong wives.

The quiet wife then is not one who never says anything but one who trusts in God and whose life is not marked, as a result of that, by anxiety. And if your life is marked by anxiety and concern over these things, you’ve got to get back to the scriptures. You have to begin to look at God’s providence in the world—that he will see his people through whatever comes to pass in their lives.

Now, Calvin, after noting these two attributes of the meek and quiet heart, said that nothing more becomes their sex—the female sex—than a placid and sedate temper. And just so you know, I don’t always agree with Calvin.

First, I don’t think those two characteristics really catch the meaning of meekness and quiet. Maybe they did when he wrote them. But the other problem I have with that quote is that saying that the female sex should be—ideally marked by—this meekness and quiet of heart. The problem I have with that is that these characteristics we’ve been talking about this morning—all of them—are also required of men.

You see, when we say that the wife is to dress in moderation, moderation is a specific character quality required of elders in 1 Timothy 3, same word, moderation.