What He Must Be… If He Wants to Marry My Daughter
What He Must Be: …If He Wants to Marry My Daughter
ISBN-10: 1581349300
ISBN-13: 9781581349306
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 224
Expected: Feb 28, 2009
All parents want their daughters to marry godly young men. But which qualities, specifically, should they be looking for?
What will you say when that certain young man sits down in your living room, sweaty-palmed and tongue-tied, and asks your permission to marry your daughter? What criteria should he meet before the two of them join together for life? What He Must Be… If He Wants to Marry My Daughter outlines ten qualities parents should look for in a son-in-law, including trustworthiness, a willingness to lead his family, an understanding of his wife’s role, and various spiritual leadership qualities.
Author Voddie Baucham follows up on his popular book Family Driven Faith with this compelling apologetic of biblical manhood. By studying the principles outlined in his book, parents who want their daughter to marry a godly man—as well as those who want their sons to become godly men—will be well equipped to help their children look for and develop these God-honoring qualities.
Can Women be in Authority over Men in the Local Church?
This is a simple question that requires a biblical answer: Can a woman be in authority over a man in the local church? For in this question, the purity of the local church is revealed in how it is answered. Whether or not a church truly permits women to be in authority over men is seen through the actual function and structure of the church itself.
In recent years, the church in the west has answered this question in ways that contradicts the whole council of God in his Word. From a standpoint of supposed biblical equality, women have been given authority over men in the local church. The positions, roles, and functions of women in the church has found its birth not in the local church per se, but at home and in the level of the family. We ought to be attentive to such trajectory of our own local church, and the direction of our denomination at large. We must keep a close watch at where the evangelical church is going in this day and age. As we do so, what we find may surprise us, if not frighten us to the very core of our faith.
Numerous so-called evangelical churches today have women in the Elder Board. In these churches, the Elder Board does not function like a “council of elders” as commanded by the Bible — with men exercising spiritual leadership and being gifted to teach — but rather as an administrative board that follows worldly, unchristian business models of organization and structure. Some Baptist churches also have women pastors on their paid staff, and even more significantly, some congregations have ordained women as “Reverends“, as well as inviting women to be guest preachers for their Sunday Services.
Other Protestant churches who desire to be more biblical may not have women in such authoritative positions or formal teaching roles, but they do allow women to be in other teaching (and thus, authoritative) roles. Women are Sunday school teachers, teaching hermeneutics or books of the Bible over younger Christians — which inevitably include men. And further, even many young girls in their teens and early twenties are leading Bible study over other Christian guys. Or maybe the girls are very skilled and trained musically, leading worship music for fellowship gatherings and Sunday services.
These are but a handful of examples where I’ve heard of many congregations falling away from a biblical understanding of leadership and authority in the home and the local church. Many of these areas of ministry described are at their foundation shepherding responsibilities that have a pastoral emphasis. But despite the fact that many women in these examples are not “pastors” or “elders” in local churches, these roles and functions are all being done by women, and in essence the women are exercising authority over and teaching doctrine to many men in the local church in varying degrees. Women in many Christian homes and churches are not only taking care of servant tasks in the household of the family and of the church, but they are exercising authority and spiritual leadership over men
Whether this be an organized authority or simply something that “just happened,” this has in many places become the accepted norm, and thus is now something that regenerate church members of both genders accept and do not even argue about. Maybe you’ve heard similar words like these: “There’s wrong with this — it’s just the way things are done in my home and my church! I think the Bible promotes equality between me and my husband. I should be allowed to teach Bible lessons at church as he does!” (more…)
How does Marriage reflect Gospel proclamation?
I’ve never thought too much about the relationship between a rightly structured marriage and effective evangelism. Thus, I was quite intrigued when I read the the Editor’s Note of the July/August 2008 eJournal by 9Marks:
Can a man with a good but wrongly structured marriage have a faithful evangelistic ministry? This question was posed to me recently. The answer seemed obvious—”Look, it may not be ideal, but if a person is out there sharing the gospel…”
I then presented the question to a pastor whom I respect tremendously. I was amazed when he said that he was unsure whether such a man could. His rationale: “A rightly ordered and healthy marriage is that close to the heart of the gospel, and an unhealthy marriage teaches a wrong gospel.”
Wow. I hadn’t thought about that. But it makes biblical sense, doesn’t it? Analogous perhaps to the gospel witness we might attach to caring for the poor (a popular topic, and easier to talk about)?
Consider one of the first consequences of the fall—the marriage of Adam and Eve is cursed with a distorted relationship (Gen. 3:16b). Consider also one of the best pictures of Christ’s redemption—marriage (Eph. 5:22-33). Consider Paul’s requirement that a pastor have a rightly ordered home before he thinks of leading the church (1 Tim. 3:4). A rightly ordered and healthy marriage displays or pictures the gospel. It’s a symbol or a type, like caring for the poor (2 Cor. 8:9).
As society moves further and further away from the biblical practice of marriage (think of the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to allow for homosexuals to marry), it will become that much more critical for rightly ordered and healthy Christian marriages to comprise the backdrop of gospel proclamation, again, like so many are saying about caring for the poor. Neither of these matters are the gospel, but both present a kind of picture of the gospel; both are powerfully redolent with the gospel’s love and forgiveness.
How crucial then for pastors to attend to their own marriages, as well as the marriages in their churches. This issue of the 9Marks eJournal on marriage hopes it can help our brother pastors do just that, if only in a small way.
–Jonathan Leeman
What It Means to be a Human Being
God is very funny sometimes.
I came across the following last night, while reading for my Systematic Theology II class:
To be a human being is to be directed towards one’s fellowmen. Again we go back to Genesis 1. Note the juxtaposition, in verse 27, of “in the image of God he created him” and “male and female he created them.” More than sexual differentiation is involved here, since this is found also in animals, and the Bible does not say that animals have been created in the image of God. What is being said in this verse is that the human person is not an isolated being who is complete in himself or herself, but that he or she is a being who needs the fellowship of others, who is not complete apart from others.
This point is made even more vividly in Genesis 2, which describes the creation of Eve: “the LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him’ ” (v.18). The Hebrew expression rendered “a helper suitable for him” is ezer kenego. Neged (the word translated “suitable for him”) means “corresponding to” or “answering to.” Literally, therefore, the expression means “a helper answering to him.” The words imply that woman complements man, supplements him, completes him, is strong where he may be weak, supplies his deficiencies and fills his needs. Man is therefore incomplete without woman. This holds for the woman as wellas for the man. Woman, too, is incomplete without the man; man supplements woman, complements her, fills her needs, is strong where she is weak.
Hoekema, Anthony A. Created in God’s Image. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994. (76-77)
Hoekema goes on to clarify that marriage reveals and illustrates more fully than any other human institution the polarity and inter-dependence of the man-woman relationship, whilst reiterating that it does not do so in an exclusive sense. For even the ideal man Jesus never married and there will be no marriage in the life to come.
Nevertheless, it is interesting… ironic even, to read this in one of my theology textbooks. What God is saying is clear as mud 
