It’s 7.36 am and my daughter is probably getting ready to
make dinner in Lithuania. I sit in Bakersfield, California, wondering why I am
up so early. Yesterday, she sent me a picture of “Pesto noodles with
cauliflower” that she made. We were both very proud. Her brother Keaton is the
chef of the family, but she’s doing very well.
Her Lithuanian adventure enters its fifth week today. This
past Christmas vacation, I spent my time nearly literally dying as she prepared
to travel across the planet. She had never traveled this far. She had never
traveled at all without me or her mother or her grandparents, so obviously I was
terrified. I survived, thankfully.
A week or so before she left, I asked my children,
specifically thinking of my sons, if they ever had the urge to “just fight
someone”. It seemed like a good question. Conversation topics with teenagers
are not my strength. My 17 year-old son replied, “Yes”, and so did Liesl, as
she added, “with you.”
“Ha ha ha what?” I thought to myself. Then I remembered a
conversation we had some time ago about the New Testament course she was taking
at the expensive Christian college I wish I could afford.
“Do you believe women should submit to men? Do you really
believe women should be silent in church?”
“Isn’t that what the Bible teaches?”
“My New Testament teacher says that that is just a cultural
thing. She said that it only applies to the church there.”
“So, only that verse applies to only that church? What about
the rest of the book? How do we know what to keep and what to toss out?”
We disagreed, and the whole conversation disturbed me. We
disagree on comic books (these infidels like DC and I like Marvel), on
television, on food, and video games, so disagreement itself wasn’t the
problem. It disturbed me because my daughter was being taught Selective Bible
Obedience, and because she is my daughter.
The reality however, is that she is far from the only daughter learning that
there are parts of Scripture that we can toss out because they make us
uncomfortable, or because they don’t fit nicely into our modern culture.
Scripture does not exist to make us comfortable, and it
definitely and defiantly does not exist to fit nicely into modern,
anti-Christian culture. Submission is not comfortable, not because God or Paul
or Alejandro are patriarchal chauvinistic bastards, but because we have all
been conditioned this way, and also because of sin.
The point in all this, is this: men lead and women submit. This is not ancient, irrelevant, backwards Greek culture that we can toss. This is Scripture. This is God’s way. He has made men and women to be this way from the beginning, and
at no place in Scripture has he indicated that anything has changed, modern,
easily-offended culture be damned.
