Dennis Tuuri

laid his hand on the man of might, the Lord Jesus. And he has then laid his hands on his ministers to bring forth his word in spirit and in truth to those of us his sheep. I’ll ask Reverend Tuuri to come forward and bring us God’s word this morning. Sermon text is Genesis 3:9-13. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou was naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat. And the man said, The woman who thou gavest be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.”

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your spirit. We thank you for the work of your son. On the basis of that work, the gift of your spirit to us to illumine our hearts to understand and apply your scriptures, your word. We pray that spirit, Lord God, would do his job now. That our hearts would be open to your word that we might after hearing your word be contrite and repentant where called for and rejoice in the salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ and the empowerment of your Holy Spirit according to your word. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

The first word on my lips this morning when I woke up was hallelujah. And I wish I could tell you that was always the case with me, but it is not always the case. This morning though, I woke up fully cognizant of the tremendous blessings of God given on the basis of our savior’s work. We awoke in our new house and we awoke this morning because many members of this congregation and a couple of other folks outside of the church as well, the Samsons and Janet Spears with a couple of the boys from the Seattle church also came down and assisted us the last three or four days as we prepared for our move and then actually accomplished it.

And I certainly rejoiced in the house that God has given to us. But much more than that, I rejoice in the house that Christ is building at Reformation Covenant Church and, as I said, these several other churches that were represented as well.

In the scriptures, the temple, the tabernacle, the house of God is a picture, I believe, of the people of God gathered around him to worship him and serve him. So I don’t think I’m beyond what the scriptures would teach, drawing a correlation to the joys of the house that we’ve entered into being seen basically on the foundation of the joy of the house that God has placed us in—the local manifestation of the temple of our Lord at Reformation Covenant Church.

Our house itself—it’s interesting because it’s kind of a long narrow lot and you have the house and then there’s a fenced front yard and then beyond the front yard another front yard. And it’s—I mowed yesterday and when I mow I think. And I don’t have much time to think because it’s a much smaller place to mow, but it reminded me of the temple because the temple has an outer courtyard and inner courtyard and then the temple itself with that same kind of architectural structure. So God has given us a house that we can always look at and I’m going to be able to use to talk to my boys in charity about the structure of the temple and the various things that it meant.

And I just wanted to use this opportunity to talk about how grateful I am to those of you who helped and those of you who couldn’t make it as well. I know there it was a very busy weekend for many people and I just praise God for the great manifestation of the love of this congregation toward myself and our family in this selection of this house and the move of it. Tremendous answers to prayer. I could not be more pleased and delighted with the move than I am with this one. It was just a delight and you people made it a delight. God working through you as your secondary means as well as his gift of the house.

Of course, houses burn, houses fall down, houses won’t be there, but the house of the Lord stands forever. His people in congregation around him and in ministry to him and to one another. So I give you my sincere and heartfelt thanks on behalf of my family.

Now, I also thought something else in terms of this move and the house. I thought about how, you know, the house is—we love it and it seems perfect to us and I know that many of you are in houses and particularly when you first moved into your house that seem perfect to you as well and you were delighted and thrilled with it. I want to draw a correlation between that and what we’re talking about in this series through Genesis which will go on for quite some time: the marriage relationship and then as a result of the marriage relationship, families. But particularly marriage relationships.

And I thought about how we move into a house and I know, you know, right away we’re going to start finding things wrong with it. We may find major things wrong with it. I don’t know how much we’ll find wrong, but there’ll be things. And I want to impress upon my family, upon myself, and encourage you all as well to remember that we receive these with thanksgiving from God and that means with thanksgiving for the problems as well as the blessings of houses and other things in our life.

The Lord’s supper is a thanksgiving and it’s a reminder to us to give thanks to God in all things. I thought about how well suited we are with this house and how it’s an amazing thing in the providence of God how millions of people become well suited with houses that they purchase and it’s like a compliment to them. You can see where I’m going. Lots of men and women in the world. But when God has you marry a woman or marry a man—when you marry each other, it’s your compliment.

Now, the house isn’t quite that. It’s an analogy and it’ll break down. But you understand what I’m saying, hopefully. I want you to remember when you first got married as we remember the thrill of this new house and the demonstration of the love of the congregation. I want you to remember when you first got married and remember that there are times in which you’ve left your first love—now ultimately Jesus, but then reflected in your love for your spouse.

And after you got married, you began to see things in each other that weren’t obvious maybe when you got married, as with the house. But we receive things in thanksgiving. God has brought you into covenantal union with your spouse. And God intends you to be in that relationship until somebody apostatizes, if that happens, of course. But for the most part, for the rest of your life, he wants you to receive the relationship with thanksgiving. He doesn’t want you to start looking at the faults and focusing on those things. Doesn’t want you to ignore them. He wants us to pray and help each other change to become more godly. But it’s all in the context of love and thanksgiving.

There’s a rock singer named Jackson Browne, and I’m not sure if these are the right lyrics or not—these are by memory. I haven’t looked them up—but he wrote this. He said, “When you see through love’s illusions, there lies the danger. And your perfect lover just looks like a perfect fool. So you go running off in search of a perfect stranger and the loneliness seems to seep from your life. It’s like a fountain from a pool.”

Well, I think that happens to people. Now, we wouldn’t say love’s illusions. We would say love’s reality because the reality of the love between a man and a woman bound together in covenantal marriage in the sight of God is a perfect love that is good and it’s not an illusion. It’s based upon covenantal realities. But we can in our sin and in our failure to give thanks for relationships to each other and our failure to trust that God indeed has brought us together in him. We can start to look at our mates as perfect fools. It’s an easy thing to have happen. The serpent wants us to see things that way. And I want to encourage you all to forsake those sorts of sins.

I want to talk today about this judicial inquiry. But I want to kind of first review some of the material we talked about last week. And the whole point of this is to return the love that was shown by you if you participated in the move or in your prayers or just in knowing you if you weren’t able to come and being part of this church—to return the love that you’ve showed to my family and I by ministering to you spiritual things from the word of God. And I think that’s my job and I think God has called and equipped me to do that.

I’m going to say some things again today as I did last week that may be painful to you, that may be convicting, and may not agree with all of them. That’s okay. But just want you to understand my intent is not to, you know, whip you. My intent is not to hurt you. My intent is not to make you feel bad. My intent is to love you and to bring you to a more perfect union with your mate and for that relationship to develop and grow in the context of what the scriptures tell us about.

So that’s what I want to do today is continue to work through what the scriptures have to say about the relationship of husband and wife. We talked last week from the center section of the text of Genesis 2 and 3 and Adam’s sin being the central act of that sin and that is certainly true. And today we move on to the judicial inquiry. But I want us to remember the context for this being what the sin of Adam was and what the sin of Eve was as well.

So we want to move then through a review again of some of the things we said last week, spend some more time on the two definitions that I got from Mr. Piper that we talked about last week. I had several questions particularly from women about the definition which we didn’t talk about at all. And I want to flesh that out a little bit using his work. And then go briefly through the judicial inquiry when God comes and questions Adam and Eve and make a final point of application: that when we fall in our marriage, we move as Adam did from poetry about our mates to accusations relative to our mates.

The pagan Jackson Browne would see that as seeing through love’s illusions to see our lovers as perfect fools. But we would say that what we have done is sinned and not giving thanks for the relationship when we see these negative things in our spouses and then allow our love to grow cold. So we want to have some correction applied to this in the context of today’s talk.

And as I said, please remember that what I’m trying to do here is to help you to understand your role biblically as a husband or a wife and children to help you prepare for that because that’s really much of who you are. And in that relationship it can bring you great joy as our house is bringing us, or it can bring you great trials and tribulations. And really the difference is how you receive those things with thanksgiving or with a sense of ingratitude.

Now roles are very important in the context of this text. When God finally comes—as we’ll see in a couple of weeks after the judicial inquiry and then makes pronouncements—his judgment against Adam is preceded not just in relationship to his taking of the fruit and eating it, but he says: “Because you listened to the woman and took and ate the fruit which I commanded you not to eat. Therefore…” and he gives the penalty, gives the correction to him.

So role reversal is absolutely critical to this text. Okay. Now the central act of disobedience by which all of man fell into transgression covenantally was the taking of the fruit by Adam and eating it. But the context for that—God wants us to understand very clearly—is role reversal. And we talked about that several times. We’ll talk about it more before we’re over. But it’s very important to see this.

In a book written by a fellow—I don’t remember his name precisely. It’s an odd name and I didn’t bring his name—but let me just read this quote. He has a chapter on the breaking of the covenant and he’s talking here about, you know, what’s really focused here? Adam or Eve? Who’s the victim, who’s the innocent party? And he says this:

“If the man had taken the initiative in the transgression the woman would have appeared to be a victim. If the woman’s offense had been the fatal point of rift the man would have appeared almost innocent. But the way [it happened] and the man took the determining decision within the responsibility conferred on him by the covenant. Each in turn seems more guilty than the other. If they put the blame on one another, they only make their situation worse.”

And his point is that the way God portrays this incident for us—the sin of the man and woman—is in such a way as to balance things, as it were. Now, Adam is centrally responsible being the man, but it’s not like the woman is innocent and it’s not like the man is innocent. There’s a sin is on both parts. I don’t want to leave the impression that because Adam was covenant head that the woman was not responsible for her sin. She surely was and we’ll talk more about that in a little bit.

Okay. So now let’s get to the outline where we talk about review and comments. First of all, we said last week that covenantal headship is a reality. You know, you cannot—it’s very important that you get this point down in your marriages. If you’re married, you are no longer what you were before you were unmarried. You are now part of a covenantal union. The Lord God has made you one flesh. It is a reality now that you must live with. And if you try to ignore it, as I know some of you do—I know I have in the past—if you try to ignore that relationship because there’s trouble involved with it right now or difficult communication and just sort of go off and do your own thing, you cannot do it.

It’s like dragging around a dead person alongside of you, though they’re not really dead. You see what I’m saying? It’s a reality, this oneness of the relationship. It’s a covenant. And God has judicially declared it such. And he will not allow you to contradict his reality without dire circumstances. You are one with this person now. He’s not going to let you just walk away from it without major effects, trials, and tribulations in your life.

And in the context of that covenant, man is clearly involved in the covenantal headship of this act. I use the illustration of you several illustrations last week about the covenantal headship and the importance of it. But just briefly, we said that the central act of Adam’s act and the literary structure shows us that his act is the most important if you want to look at it that way in terms of the fall. Romans tells us quite clearly that through one man’s transgression all men fell into sin. And as well when God comes to do this inquiry, as we just read in the text, he comes first to Adam, not to Eve.

All these things point to the centrality of Adam as the covenantal head. And also when we get to the punishment phase, we’ll see that Adam is addressed last because of his major responsibility. Again, he starts with the serpent and then leads up to Adam. So he shows the headship of Adam.

Now it’s quite important. In the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus chapter 25:24, this is what it says: “Woman is the origin of sin and it is through her that we all [fall].” In Judaism, many Jews do not believe in the covenantal imputation of sin at all. And those—many of the other Jews, the Orthodox Jews—believe that it was from the woman’s transgression that this sin all came. They don’t accept the importance, the centrality of Adam’s act.

Judaism is not a biblical faith. There people are involved in Judaism are in radical rebellion against God. And it’s manifested either through a denial of covenantal imputation or through a twisting of the whole thing to turn the Genesis account into an anti-woman account and to lead to more woman-hating and woman-baiting. It’s a terrible thing.

But the scriptures tell us quite clearly that Adam is the covenantal head of the race in this act. He’s the covenantal head of the covenant with his wife that he has involved with his wife as well. So covenantal headship is a fact.

And then I talked about what covenantal headship isn’t. And I talked about Ezekiel 18 and it doesn’t mean that because Adam didn’t do his job correctly that Eve is off the hook. Ezekiel 18 says that you can do everything right with a son and still he may end up reprobate. You know there’s a case of this I think given to us in scripture. I could be wrong and if I am please correct me after the sermon. But as I read the account of Samuel I do not read explicit statements by God that Samuel did not do well in raising his children.

Now, I know that people have said, “Well, he was traveling over the country. He probably didn’t attend to his family well enough.” I don’t read that in the text. That’s something that people read into the text with a presupposition that Samuel must have done something wrong if he ends up with children, sons who do not walk in the faith of Samuel. But I don’t think the scriptures tell us that. I think the scriptures tell us that Samuel is a pretty dedicated, consecrated man, certainly with sin.

I think Samuel is a case we can look at as perhaps an example of Ezekiel 18 where the father does what’s right and the children do what’s wrong. And when the people reject Samuel’s judicial headship over them and ask for a king like the nations round about them, God says they’ve rejected me. They use the sons as an excuse and the sons were awful of Samuel. But you see, we want to be very careful that we do not go further than what God’s word says. And so we don’t want to say that covenantal headship of the man caused the sin of the children or the sin of the wife. We’ll leave it at that. The covenantal headship of the man caused that to occur, his sin. That isn’t what God says.

Now, frequently, we obviously know that the great bulk of biblical evidence says that if you’ve got problems in your life with your children, younger children particularly—I don’t think older children—or if you’ve got problems in the context of the wife, the man has to see how well he has done in guarding the wife from sin, nurturing her, leading her. And the same with the children. I don’t want to take away that, but I want to say stay within the bounds of what the scriptures clearly tell us and not go one step beyond and begin saying things that are unbiblical.

And then we talked about what covenantal headship actually is. And we use these definitions and I’ll return to this now and spend a little bit of time here. Don’t worry, we’re going to go through the judicial inquiry quite quickly. We’ll spend a lot of time right here. When we get to the actual text I just read, we’ll spend a little bit of time going through that and setting up the next couple of sermons. That’s what we’re going to do.

So now we’re going to on in terms of the review and comments we’re looking at point number three: covenantal headship—what it is. And I’ve repeated on this week’s outline the definition that Mr. Piper uses that I think is pretty good and much of what he writes in this matter is excellent as well and comports with scripture. So let’s remind ourselves of some of the things that he has told us and we’ll go on to new material then by developing some of these other points.

And I’m going to pick up with this statement: he says that at the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead. Okay, so it’s at the heart of this. It isn’t comprehensive. This statement isn’t meant to be comprehensive about everything that a man does as a covenantal head. But at the heart of what you are as a man—and he’s talking about mature masculinity, that’s developed and been matured by God—and he says it’s a sense of something rather than just the actions. As I said, you can’t do the things you’re required to do. Sometimes you’ll fall short. But the idea is to have a sense of biblical masculinity in the context of your relationship to women. And this is a sense of benevolent responsibility. We don’t believe in tyrant leadership.

Our savior said that’s what the Gentiles do. They lord it over people. Our leadership is benevolent toward our wives and our children. It is kindly. It is firm, but it’s firmness and tenderness at the same time. Firmness with the smile is the way I like to think of it. Now, you don’t always smile. God scowls at us sometimes and it’s not inappropriate when it’s done deliberately and not out of petulence or anger. Fathers and husbands, it’s okay to scowl sometimes and raise your voice. God raises his voice, but it should always be with an intent to be benevolent toward those that we’re in leadership of. We’re trying to help them. We’re not trying to use them for our purposes. And this benevolent responsibility, he says, has three factors: to lead, provide, hide and protect.

And if you’ve been here at all, you’ve heard me go over and over and over that the husband’s job for his small garden—[unclear]—is to guard her and to nurture her. And the same with his children. And he adds here to lead, which is quite important.

Now, in leading, I want to read several quotes from his definition of leadership that we did not get to last week. And he says this: “Mature masculinity does not have to initiate every action, but feels the responsibility to provide a general pattern of initiative.”

Okay. So when he says that a man is supposed to have a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, it doesn’t mean we do every action but it means we have a sense of leading or initiating the direction in which our family, our wives or our children go. You’re supposed to take responsibility in general to initiate and carry through the spiritual and moral planning of family life. Now, how this works out in each particular situation differs. It doesn’t mean that the wife waits on everything for the husband to tell her specifically what to do. That’s ridiculous, of course. But it does mean the man sets the pattern and feels the responsibility for setting the pattern involving the entire home.

Now, much of the domestic duties of the home and the raising of the smaller children particularly may be actually carried out by the wife. But the husband shouldn’t see that as something that he’s not responsible for. His leadership extends to every part of his family. And his leadership extends to all the general direction in terms of that he sets for the house.

The wife may well do all kinds of planning and initiating but—to quote Piper—there is a general tone and pattern of initiative that should develop which is sustained by the husband. Okay. Jim Dobson—he quotes from Jim Dobson here in this point of his article. And Dobson says this: James Dobson—a Christian man is obligated to lead his family to the best of his ability. If his family has purchased too many items on credit, then the financial crunch is ultimately his fault. He oversees it, you see, should be involved. If the family never reads the Bible or seldom goes to church on Sunday, God holds the man to blame. If the children are disrespectful and disobedient, the primary responsibility lies with the father, not the wife.

In my view, Dobson writes, “America’s greatest need is for husbands to begin guiding their families rather than pouring every physical and emotional resource into the mere acquisition of money.”

And we know these things in our congregation, but we need to hear them again and again and again that we’re to lead our families. Piper goes on to say this. He says that mature masculinity accepts the burden of the final say in disagreements between husband and wife but does not presume to use it in every instance. In other words, at the end of the day, if there’s disagreements between the husband and wife about what happens, it’s the husband should rule. The husband should decide what the end result is going to be. But he doesn’t exercise that authority to make that decision in every case necessarily. In other words, there are matters that may not be sinful at all. If they are sinful, he cannot allow his wife to make that decision. But there are other matters where if the wife wants something, the husband would just as soon go a different direction. The husband should on occasion and maybe fairly frequently let the wife move in that direction rather than impose his will.

She’s a compliment. You have a weakness, man. You have a need. You have a need for your wife. And if at the end of every decision, you end up making your choice the rule as opposed to ever yielding to her, you’re doing something wrong because you don’t recognize that she’s given to you by God to help mature you in areas. Okay? We had an example of this in the move. One of the ways this move will be remembered by me is the move of the old couch.

And those of you who were there remember the old couch and the garage at our old house. And it was there when we moved in twelve years ago. It was already old then. And there had been mice and rats and who knows what out in our garage at that old house. And that old couch suffered for it.

Now my wife has a plan for that couch. She’s had a plan for twelve years. And the plan is to take what is the basic framework of that couch and she likes the size. It’s an old couch, solid frame, which you cannot find with most new couches. And she wants to remake or restore that couch. And so we had a great amount of discussion the men did about whether we should take that couch or not. And if it went to me, I would have said, “No, we’re not going to take the couch.”

But my wife has a plan for that. She’s got a goal. And it was loving, I think. Sounds like I’m commending myself. I’ll get immediately. As we start to leave the house after we’ve loaded the couch, my wife backs the van up and gets it stuck. And I could have done it as well. I got upset with her. Wrong on my part. So I’m not trying to commend myself to you, but I’m saying in terms of the couch, I think I did the right thing in saying she wants to do this. I would have made a different decision. I’m going to yield to her on this matter.

You see, my oldest son, quite proud of him, goes out there and hauls the couch out by himself because he know mom wants that couch even though it looks a mess. So it’s an example to you men. Very important you understand this. Being leader of your home doesn’t mean the imposition of your will in every matter that comes along. It means yielding to the wife and maybe frequently giving her honor and glory and weight and recognizing your own need for completeness through the wife.

So I think Piper’s right. I think Piper’s right. Let me see if there’s other things he said that I think—here’s one. A mature masculinity recognizes that the call to leadership is a call to repentance and humility and risk-taking.

It should go without saying, but obviously as we recognize what mature masculinity is according to the scriptures, we recognize that we come short. And that means we have to have humility before God in learning from our wives as they learn from us in knowing how to go about leading biblically and not according to the Gentile rule of lording it over people.

And that calls for humility on our part before our wives. And I’m convinced that one of the reasons God gives us spouses is to show us the defects in our relationship to God. Because you know, it’s easy to say, “I love God and I don’t love my neighbor.” But the scriptures say in First John, you can’t say you love God if you hate your neighbor. You haven’t seen God; you’ve seen the image of God on your neighbor. And if you hate your neighbor in this church, then you really are demonstrating a hatred for God.

And if you have a lack of humility to your wife in reference to her opinions, her views, her decision-making abilities, if you’ve got a lack of humility in that relationship, it’s because you’ve got a lack of humility before God. And wives, the same thing applies to you. If you don’t humbly submit to the leadership of your husband, even if you think he’s made bad decisions, your problem ultimately is not your husband. Your problem ultimately is the Lord God in heaven. So humility is required underneath all this.

Now I want to go very briefly and quickly through the definition. Oh, a couple more things. Well, I won’t mention that—rather obvious, I suppose, in the definition of male headship that we’re to lead, we’re to provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships.

And what that means of course is, you understand the need to provide. If your family, it doesn’t mean that women can’t ever work. The Proverbs 31 woman worked. But it does mean if your family doesn’t have enough food, if you don’t aren’t able to put a roof over the house and clothes on the kids, it is the man’s responsibility. It’s not the wife’s responsibility. It’s very dangerous to let the wife step up and take over those areas because it can pervert the relationship. It’s fine for her to help, but you should recognize when you get into a position where the woman is helping to provide for some of the household that there’s a temptation for man—being as sinners we are—to let her do more and more. And it’s our responsibility. If the kids don’t have enough food at the end of the day, it’s our responsibility. We can’t blame God, can’t blame our wives, blame ourselves because we haven’t done what God has told us to do.

Same thing is true in guarding our families. We have to guard our wives. And if our wife ends up sinning or if our children end up sinning, you don’t want to think about Ezekiel 18 every time, kind man. You want to think, what did I do wrong with the boy? What did I do wrong with the daughter? What did I do wrong with my wife? What didn’t I see that could have helped her to mature in the Lord Jesus Christ so that she perhaps wouldn’t have fallen into a particular temptation to sin.

And now he goes on to say, “Provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships.” And the point of that is just this. When we talk about male female relationships based upon the Genesis account, it’s a pattern from creation, okay? Not from the fall. And the woman doesn’t receive a name, interestingly enough, until after the whole thing is over. And then in chapter 4, he gives her the name Eve, mother of all living. It’s a statement of belief at the end of chapter 3, beginning of four.

The point is that I think we have described for us here not just the relationship between a husband and a wife, but there’s a sense in which men in general are called to guard and provide for the culture of women. So we don’t want women going out to combat. The biblical model is men. That’s why the men went out in Israel and not the women because men in general are to see their responsibilities to all women, to guard them and to help provide for them and to lead them as a group. Okay?

Young boys, you should be training yourselves now to think differently about girls. That’s why your dads tell you don’t hit girls. And it don’t make any sense to you when you’re that little. You don’t make much of a difference between girls and boys. But believe us children, it’s important. It’s important that the men in this church—little boys, teenagers—begin to develop a sense of caring, providing, and protecting all the girls in this congregation. Okay? Opening doors, giving deference. If there’s not enough seats, men or young boys, get up and give the seat to the girl. Give the seat to the older man. Deference is what the scriptures call for.

That’s why he has this definition in terms of a broader definition than just husband-wife relationships. Okay. Now he goes on to give us the definition of femininity. And again he says: at the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition.

So we’re talking about the heart. It’s not limited to what’s said here. It’s mature femininity again. And it’s a freeing disposition. Now the world in which we live says to be free, you want to cast off all restraints. You want to cast off law. You want to jump out of the plane with no parachute. That’s freedom because the parachute’s an incumbrance. But we know that biblical freedom is when you have the parachute so you can pull the cord when necessary to prevent yourself from being killed.

Biblical freedom involves submission to God’s authority. And that makes us truly free in the Lord Jesus Christ. So the idea here women is that when he gives us this definition—if you have this disposition to affirm male headship in the culture, it is a freeing thing for you because it allows you to act in the context of the role that God has created you to fulfill. So it’s freeing to you. And it is a disposition is the word that Piper uses. Again, it’s not simply related to the actions. It’s the attitude—submission to God ultimately behind the actions. So it’s a disposition to do particular things.

To do what? To affirm, receive and nurture and strengthen leadership from worthy men. So you want to have a disposition to yield to men is the idea. Okay? You want to have a disposition to say, “Yeah, husband, what you want to lead me in—that’s the way I want to go.”

Now, it’s got to be a disposition as opposed to an absolute requirement because he may ask you to sin. And if he wants you to get drunk with him, your answer is to be no. Because your submission to your husband is ultimately submission to God. And if your husband or the civil state—we could say—or the church would require you to do something against God’s law, then the whole basis for the submission, which is to learn submission to God and his hierarchical relationships, is broken down. You see, if you follow your husband in sin, then really you’re sinning because you’ve thrown off submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. So it can’t be an absolute requirement to do these things. It is a disposition to want to do them.

It wants to say the house looks a little leaky. It’s got these problems and these problems potentially, but I want to affirm this house as the house God has given to us, and I ought to be thankful for it. And if there’s leaks, I want to help patch them up. And I want to affirm the husband that God has given to me. And if he’s got problems, I want to pray for him. And I want to try to help him to be strong so we can do what’s right. So there’s this disposition to affirm, to say, “Yes, husband, I want you to lead. Yes, men in the church, we want you to lead as women. Yes, civil rulers, we want you to lead us and guide us.” Okay? To affirm their headship, to receive and nurture strength and leadership—to receive it, but also have a responsibility to nurture up the strength and leadership that you receive from your husband, from the civil magistrates, church magistrates, men in general in the context of the culture.

A disposition that is freeing to affirm, receive, and nurture strength and leadership. Nurture it. Remember, you’re both married to each other. And then go back to the marriage illustration because you have needs. You’re a compliment to your husband. And so the idea is to strengthen and nurture him just as you’re strengthening and nurture you.

Now, there’s a hierarchal responsibility, but there’s a mutual submission that Ephesians talks about. Yeah, before he gets into the wife submitting to the husband, he talks about we are to mutually submit to each other in Christ. This mutual building up and the wife and women in general should have this disposition to nurture strength and leadership in the context of the culture.

Now, the qualifier he puts on is from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships. And again here he writes it so it’s broader than just husband-wife. And he says that women—your identity in the culture is related to your sexual identity, which is that you’re a woman. And you want to affirm, build up, nurture to whatever degree you can the strength and leadership that men in the culture, in the church, in the home should show in the context of guiding the culture along.

Now another—so I hope I’ve explained why he makes it outside of just marriage. One of the things he talks about here, and I won’t get into this at any kind of length, but it is an interesting thing to think about and applying some of this. He talks about he uses two words: personal and directive.

Personal. You have relationships with men, women, and men have relationships with women that some are personal and some are impersonal. If you’re a traffic cop—now let’s make it different. Let’s say you’re a police sergeant and you’ve got other policemen reporting to you. That’s a personal relationship. You see their face, you talk to them. Okay? So that’s personal.

If, on the other hand, you’re a traffic safety engineer and you design traffic lights to control the traffic flow in your neighborhood, that’s an impersonal thing. You don’t personally see those people. You’ve created a structure that’s impersonal. Okay? See the distinction? Personal, non-personal in terms of how we relate to people, different callings—directive and nondirective.

And what he says is that if you’re involved in a personal relationship—woman, for instance, to a man—then you want to back off from being overly directive. You want to make appeals that are not direct statements to the man. If you find yourself in a position of being, for instance, you’re a manager—maybe you’re—let’s use the traffic—the police sergeant again. And let’s say it’s a woman. Whether she should be there or not, just for the sake of the illustration, what I’m trying to get across. She’s got men reporting to her. Personal. When you’re in a personal relationship to a man like that, you want to back off from being overly directive. You want to do things through nuance, requests, appeals to authority. Abigail—the story of Abigail and David, which we’ll get to in several months from now—she makes appeals to David that are appropriate to her understanding of who she was as a woman and who David was as a man. And of course he’s king also.

So in your relationship with men—women in general in the culture—if it’s—if you’re involved in personal things, you want to be nondirective. On the other hand, if you’re designing systems or structures such as the traffic lights again, you can be more directive in what you end up doing because it doesn’t challenge the authority of the man. And so this is a way to think about how to affirm masculinity and femininity to for us in these opening chapters of Genesis in a broader context than just that of the marriage relationship.

And I think those two terms—it’s helpful to think about them and how they can work themselves out in a variety of relationships. Here at church, if you’re involved, for instance, in doing something in ministry at church as a woman and you’re working in the context of a man, you want to understand that you’re in that kind of relationship. It’s kind of personal. So as you bring suggestions for things to do in that ministry, you want to be careful not to be directive and not to exert authority or headship over the man. You see, that’s the point here.

And men, you want to be careful that you don’t fail to lead in the context of these relationships in ministry as well. So it’s a broader concept than just the marriage relationship. But our primary concern is for the marriage relationship today. So let’s get back to that and let’s move on now then to the judicial inquiry itself. Okay.

So the next point of the outline—the judicial inquiry. And what we’re going to do here is set up just basically go an overview of the text, draw one specific application out, and then at the end of that time, we’ll be prepared to move the next two weeks into two other sermons based on this particular portion of the text.

Now, remember where we’re at here. We are. We’ve gone through four stages in this description of the Genesis account in chapters 2 and 3. Remember, in chapter 2, God makes mankind outside of the garden, puts him in the garden. Okay? And then the next section, he provides a helper for him to guard, until he—to do his work in the garden. And then in the third section, along comes the serpent and has a dialogue with the woman. And the fourth section we talked about last week, the man sinned. Okay, now we’re in section five and we’re coming back out of the center of this activity.

And what we see ourselves in here—on your outline, you see this? It’s a dialogue outline. God, Adam, God, Adam, God, woman. And you remember the last time we had one of these outlines was from the section where the serpent tempted Eve. Serpent, Eve, serpent, Eve. And then Adam does the pivotal act of taking of the fruit. So we’ve got a dialogue here in the context of this structure that images, as it were, the improper dialogue of the serpent.

Now, God comes and he’s going to enter into proper dialogue in discovering what is going on with his creatures. Not discovering, but helping them to see it. Okay? So and notice, and the reason I bring that up is the serpent in the dialogue starts with the woman and God in the dialogue starts with the man. Okay? And I think, you know, this is a model for us. Once again, in the interpersonal relationships between men and women in the context of the church, you want to be very careful how you approach someone else’s wife. Men, you probably don’t want to do that. You probably want to talk to the man and enter into the dialogue that way. God shows us the right way to enter into the dialogue relative to the situation. The serpent showed us the wrong way.

Remember the serpent? He was real abstract. His words could be taken a lot of different ways. And he challenges the doctrine of God as being father as well as sovereign. And notice that the text tells us in verse 9—immediately the text tells us that it is the Lord God who does this. Verse 9: “The Lord God called unto Adam.”

So here in contrast to the serpent, we have the reassertion that this is not just sovereign judicial inquiry. This is Father Sovereign Lord God who’s coming graciously to call his children to repentance. And he is not equivocating. He does not use ambiguous language. His word is sure. His word is right to the point as we shall see as this outline develops. And it’s a model for us is what I’m saying. We want to be clear. God’s word is clear. It is a sure word and it is a word that is always pertinent. And look at the great pertinence of God’s word as he comes to Adam.

So number one on the second part of the outline: Father Sovereign’s gracious query. The Lord God called unto Adam. So we call this a judicial inquiry because he’s calling, he’s summoning Adam to come before him. He’s going to enter into a summons and a dialogue that’s going to have a judicial end to it. Okay? So I don’t want to—I don’t want to take the judicial part of this out of it. I want to leave it in there.

The Lord God calls unto Adam and said unto him, “Where are you?” Now, God said it to him. God knew where Adam was. I mean, we don’t need the text to tell us that. But the text even points that out to us. He says it said to him, God knew where Adam was. So what God is doing is he’s driving home Adam’s self-consciousness of his sin. But he’s doing it in a way that draws Adam out.

Father Sovereign is driving home guilt and shame in the context of Adam. Remember—well, you not remember, but later in chapter 4, the Lord God will use the same technique as a model for us to use when he talks to Cain. After Cain kills Abel, God comes to Cain. Where is Abel? He uses inquiry. You see, he uses a question, not because he doesn’t know the answer, because he does know the answer, but he wants Adam to think about what he’s asking him about. So he draws him out.

God’s first words to fallen man bear all the marks of grace. He is drawing Adam to an understanding of his sin. That is grace. It’s a question since to help him—he must draw him out rather than drive him out of hiding. That’s what Kidner in his commentary says. That God intends to draw him out of hiding instead of drive him out of hiding. Okay.

Now, this could be counseling 101 for us. This could be how we deal with our children and how we deal with our spouses and how we deal with each other in the context of our interpersonal relationships. Not the only way God deals with people—this one here—but it is primordial. It’s right there in the beginning. It’s very important to see this. And with our children, husbands particularly here—you know that our tendency is to bellow and command and exert authority, same with our wives. But God doesn’t do that. He draws him out. He speaks in a way that is gracious to Adam, bringing home a realization of Adam’s sin.

Delitzsch in his commentary says it was God the creator who now as God the redeemer was seeking the lost. How does Adam respond to this though?

Adam—I’ve described his response in Roman numeral 2 as a pathetic diversionary answer. And he said, “I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.” See, he doesn’t…