1 Timothy 2:9

I desire therefore that the men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath and doubting; in like manner also, that the women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly clothing, but, which is proper for women professing godliness, with good works. Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.

Approaching one of Scripture's hardest passages with the conviction that a good God has written it for our good.

A Broken World and a Coming King

For my entire adult life I've had the privilege to live and work in an environment with co-workers seeking to live their lives in line with the Scriptures. None of us do that perfectly; we all aim at the target and miss it. But as much as we can, we seek to live after the pattern of the Scriptures, treating each other as brothers and sisters. We work here at the church in a bit of a sheltered enclave, because the rest of the world is not as we have it here.

What we've seen in the news this last month—workplace harassment, sexual harassment, mistreatment due to gender—is something I've thankfully never had to work around. But I'm not naive. That is the experience of many people. What I've experienced as normal is not normal to our society. The hashtag movement online, MeToo, is a sad and shameful testimony to our culture. We've made huge strides over recent decades, yet we have a long way to go. I never want my daughters in a situation where they would feel they'd need to put #MeToo on anything.

My wife works in a secular corporate hospital environment, and she's shared experiences that certainly would be classified as harassment. Too often such things are laughed off and shrugged at, because people say, "Well, it's just the way it is." That's a sad reaction. When we see these things, two considerations come to mind. First, just as the Bible says, we live in a world broken because of sin—we see it clearly from Genesis 3 onward. But second, in light of that brokenness, there is hope: there is coming a day when the King of righteousness rules and reigns with true justice. We should all look forward to that.

Our Assumptions About the Bible

It just so happens we've arrived at this passage at this time in our culture, which makes studying it all the more difficult. There is a vocal, though perhaps minority, group who look at this passage—and others like it in 1 Peter 3 and Ephesians 5—and say this is the reason we have such mistreatment. I would push back. Even in places where the Bible has no dominant influence, you still find mistreatment and indignities. The Bible is not to blame.

When we approach a passage like this, we bring assumptions, and they fall into four basic categories. First: the Bible is good, and any disagreement I have is based on a misunderstanding or misuse of the text. Second: the Bible is mostly good, but the writers were overly influenced by their culture, so we can throw some parts out—a dangerous place into which many in the church today fall. Third: the Bible is just an ancient understanding, mostly unhelpful for today. Fourth: the Bible is wrong and even dangerous, and we've progressed beyond any need for it. Richard Dawkins, the atheist, holds that the Bible is so dangerous that teaching it to your child should count as child abuse.

My assumption is the first: the Bible is good, the message of a good God written for our good. So any disagreement I'd have stems from misunderstanding or misuse. We must honestly acknowledge that people throughout church history have misused passages like this, out of ignorance or malice, to mistreat certain groups. But objectively, where the Bible has gone over the last 2,000 years, it has predominantly brought freedom, liberty, and the leveling of races, classes, and gender. This reveals an important point: nothing good can come from a bad heart. A person with wrong motives and an untransformed heart can take good Scriptures and twist them. That's why the gospel's work matters. As God said through Ezekiel, "Behold, I will give you a new heart." Jesus by His grace transforms us from the inside out.

The Context: Conduct in God's Household

Second, we need the context, found in chapter 3, verses 14-15:

These things I write to you... so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.

These things are written so that we would know how to conduct ourselves in the church when we gather as God's people. So far in 1 Timothy we've seen Paul telling Timothy how to set in order a church at Ephesus that was out of order: a priority of teaching sound doctrine in chapter 1, a priority of prayer in chapter 2, and proper conduct for men in verse 8. The principle there is that the godly conduct men have in the church should be the same conduct they have in the workplace, marketplace, and home—no duplicity, no hypocrisy.

Now Paul turns to women, specifically "women professing godliness" in verse 10. This is a message for any woman saying with her lips, "I'm following Jesus." And it brings us to a point that applies to men as well: we seek to please God more than ourselves or our society. Before you were a Christian, your desire was to please yourself. But with a new heart come new desires—chief among them a desire to please God. We don't always fulfill it; that's why Paul cried in Romans 7, "O wretched man that I am!" Our culture's drumbeat, especially in Southern California, is that your whole life is about making yourself happy. But the Christian's aim is to please God more than self or society.

Inward Beauty Over Outward

In like manner also, that the women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly clothing, but, which is proper for women professing godliness, with good works.

Paul begins with "in like manner." Men, conduct yourselves as God's people; women, in like manner, do the same. Why write this? Because when Paul visited Ephesus, he found the women not walking in godly conduct or modest apparel when they gathered as the church. So his desire is that women professing godliness come with modesty, propriety, and moderation.

Those three words beg a question: where in 21st-century culture is there any place that values modesty, propriety, or moderation? That's just not the culture we live in—and it was not the culture of first-century Ephesus. We tend to think they were repressed and oppressed, but that was a very free society. Study the history of first-century Rome; just about anything goes. Philosophically, their worldview was much like ours. The only thing out of bounds in 2017 Southern California is to say something is out of bounds. Everything else is free—"I'm free to do what I want," as the song says, even borrowing "I'm a new creation" out of 2 Corinthians 5:17 to mean "no restrictions." Go listen to Elsa's "Let It Go" in Frozen: "no one's going to hold me back, I'm going to do my thing." My five-year-old was singing it in the back seat, and I thought, maybe I should rethink this song.

This brings us to a third point: godly women are more concerned about inward beauty than outward—especially when we appear before God in His church. This is not to say godly women cannot care about outward beauty. Our God is into aesthetics; look at creation, at the sunsets in Maui. Godliness does not equal ugliness; holiness does not equal homeliness. Some Christian traditions have wrongly said a godly woman cannot look pretty. That's not Paul's point. I think my wife is a righteous babe—and she reserves her babeness for me. The point is that you should spend as much, if not more, energy on inward beauty as on outward. If you spend more time on makeup than on God's word, it will show.

Appealing to Creation, Not Culture

The immediate objection is that Paul spoke out of his own cultural repression. But historians tell us the first-century Ephesian world highly exalted and revered women. This was the culture out of which the legendary Amazon women came—and Amazon women aren't girls who shop well online. The most dominant structure in Ephesus was the temple to Diana, to Artemis, and all the overseers of that pagan system were priestesses. So "it was just a repressive culture" doesn't fit the history.

What is Paul doing, then? He's speaking to a culture that had thrown off all restraint, with zero moderation, and saying that among God's people there should be a difference. He said the same in Ephesians 4: "you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles." Your conduct should be different from the world—both men and women. The cultural norms of Ephesus are not normative for God's people. As he told the Corinthians, "Come out from among them and be separate.... you were once darkness, but now you are light. Walk as children of light." So your adornment should not be purely external—gold, silver, pearls—but the adornment proper for women professing godliness is good works.

There's a certain decorum for those who follow God. Five years ago I did a wedding in Ireland and stayed at Ashford Castle. The groom and I were pulled aside at the restaurant: "Where is your dinner jacket? You cannot come in without it." They lent us blazers, we walked thirty feet to the table, and then the hostess took the jackets off and folded them over our chairs. There's a certain dress required for that place. The gut check here is our motivation: are we seeking to direct attention to God or to ourselves? When God's people gather before Him, there is an adorning—with good works—that is proper for women and men professing godliness.

Learning in Silence and Submission

Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.

A little Emeril Lagasse there—"kick it up a notch." That's the verse that makes our culture say, "Are you kidding me?" So let's break it down. He says, "Let a woman learn." That's intriguing. The Babylonian Talmud, from when the Jewish people were exiled and began gathering in synagogues some 2,500 years ago, said a Jewish woman could come to hear the reading of the law but could only listen—she could not learn. Paul says the opposite: godly women are learners of God's word and ways with men. That doesn't cause a problem; it's a good thing, and it's what most of you women here do.

But he goes on: "in silence with all submission"—the two S-words our culture hates. When we come before God's word as learners, men and women alike, one thing we learn is that our God is the Creator who established a created order. He ordered how the home is to be governed and how the church is to be governed. One of the adorning good works for women in the church is that they willingly subject themselves to that order.

We can acknowledge this is difficult. Our fallen nature doesn't align with God's created order—that's the whole reason we're fallen. So we fight against our nature and against our culture, which is itself fighting against God. First, acknowledge the difficulty. Second, come to this believing that God is good, and that His word, being from a good God, is for our good. Can you accept that the cultural philosophy you've been pressed into since birth may actually lead to more bondage and death than God's philosophy, which says, "I came that you may have life, and that more abundantly"? Where is the cultural philosophy leading—to a wonderful utopia, or to devastation and chaos? Read the rise and fall of the Roman Empire; left to its own run, it descends toward chaos.

Peter says a very similar thing in 1 Peter 3: wives, be submissive to your own husbands, and "do not let your adornment be merely outward... rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God." The holy women who trusted God adorned themselves this way. So submission is a beautifying characteristic for a godly woman.

The Office Reserved for Men

The hardest part: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence." If there ever was a fight in the church, this is it. GotQuestions.org, one of the largest Christian websites, reports that over the last five years their number one question concerns women in ministry.

There are different views, and we'll see more when we get to chapter 3, which goes in context with this. But parsing 1 Timothy alongside other passages, I believe Paul means that teaching and having authority go together. There is one office in the church reserved for men only: the office of the overseeing elder, those who teach and have authority together. Paul is not saying women never teach, nor even that they never teach over men; he's saying they don't occupy the office of teaching and having authority within the church. That's why our position at Cross Connection is complementarian: all ministry is open to all believers except for the office of overseeing elders, because we follow the created order God has given.

This brings us to a fifth point: godly women yield to God's ordained order as an act of worship and good works. Ephesians 5:22 says, "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord." Submission in the household and church is worship offered to the Lord—and worship is offered willingly, not forced. Notice, too, that Paul does not appeal to culture. Verse 13: "For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into transgression." He appeals to creation—exactly as Jesus did when teaching on marriage, and as Peter does. My fallen nature may fight that order, but if I believe God is good and writes for my good, I can step out in faith and say, "I'll trust You, God."

"Saved in Childbearing"

Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with self-control.

This is considered by many the hardest verse in the whole Bible. Get the top 25 commentaries and you'll likely get 50 opinions—very little dogmatic agreement. Let me give the two most common interpretations.

The first refers back to Genesis 3:15, the very first prophecy of the coming Savior, who would come from the seed of the woman. The salvation God desires is impossible without the seed of a woman—without childbearing. So Paul speaks of a salvation that comes ultimately through the line of a woman: Jesus would come.

The second, and the most common, is that while women are not called by God's created order to be overseeing pastors and teachers, this desire is in some way satisfied or "saved" in the area of motherhood and childbearing. Here it's important to point out a sad reality: in 21st-century progressive culture, motherhood has been diminished and treated as a detriment to a woman's potential. That is not what the Bible says. Children are a heritage from the Lord, and motherhood is an honorable, high, awesome calling. Many Bible teachers think that in motherhood there is a satisfying of this desire of leading and overseeing for which women are especially gifted. I see it in my wife. She's especially gifted to be a mom. I'd be a horrible Mr. Mom—the kids would starve and the house would fall apart.

In God's created order, there is one place set aside for male leadership—the office of overseeing teaching pastors—and one area set aside only for women that no man will ever do: childbearing. Both are honored positions and should be lifted up. And here's the upside: because you're not called to the overseeing position, you don't have to receive the emails about this message.

Is this a challenging passage? Yes. But God has called and gifted all of us to serve within the body. There is just one area He has set aside in His created order for male leadership; everything else is open for women to serve in every capacity. We live in a culture that has a problem with this, but this is an issue of worship as we are learners of God's word and ways. So may we take the step of faith and say, "God, we trust You. Though we may not perfectly understand all things, we trust You have our good in view, and we seek to follow You by faith."

Closing Prayer

God, we read in Hebrews that Your word is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, and that it cuts deep and is challenging. This inspired Scripture was given for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness, that the man or woman of God would be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Lord, sometimes when we are challenged, rebuked, or corrected, it's hard. But I pray You'd help us approach Your word—this passage and every other—with the mindset that You have written it for our good, that we would know You and Your ways and live in a way that honors You and is most satisfying for us. Give us humility in approaching Your word, and teach us by Your Spirit, that we would know You more fully and walk with You as You have ordained. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.