Women In The Ministry #9

 By: General James Green 

WELCOME. We are currently in the midst of an enlightening and liberating Bible study called “Women In The Ministry.” Jumping right into our primary text, let’s go to 1 Corinthians 14, verses 34 and 35. It says, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

     We have studied these Scriptures extensively in previous messages and we are absolutely sure, we are convinced, and the Bible backs it up, that these Scriptures were actually rephrased questions that were written to Paul, asking him to clarify certain traditions which the Jews were trying to bring into the early Church and force the new converts to accept. When Paul was writing verses 34 and 35, he was not laying down unchangeable doctrine for us to follow, he was restating the questions that had been written to him so that he could answer them properly and in order.

     The common misconception we are facing today is that many people believe that when Paul wrote verses 34 and 35, that he was establishing doctrine for the Church, yet what he was really doing was refuting false doctrines that were trying to establish themselves in the Church. Somebody else was forbidding the women to speak in the churches, not Paul. Somebody else was bringing in the idea of male superiority, which brings us back to the Orthodox Jews who were continually stirring up trouble for the early Christians. We have been studying their customs that were handed down by the rabbis and that have been collected in the sacred volumes called the Talmud. The Jews consider these “traditions” the highest authority, even above the Word of God, and they emphatically teach the superiority of men and the inferiority of women.

    Now let’s turn to 1 Timothy chapter 2, verse 9. It never fails that if you are a woman being used of God that you will have all kinds of people come along and throw these Scriptures in your face, trying to convince you that God won’t use women, even when the anointing of God is obviously upon you. I know many fine women that can teach and preach and prophesy, and they are anointed of God. But yet we have men so dogmatic and ignorant about the Word of God that they refuse to listen to what the Spirit is saying. They’re not really studying like they should be in order to find out what the Word of God actually says, but instead they turn it into dead letter by their “traditions.”

     First Timothy chapter 2, verses 9 and 10, say, “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or with gold, or pearls, or costly array. But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.” Then it says in verse 11, “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. [12] But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Now notice, Paul made it very plain when he said, “I suffer not a woman to teach.” This statement gives the reader the impression that Paul himself was saying this. I’m going to stop here and look at a few points.

     Going to verse 12, if you look up the word “teach” or “teaching,” [you find] they appear 119 times in the New Testament. If you look up all those occurrences in the Greek, you will find only one time where it pertains specifically to women. Why, after all the other occurrences of the words “teach” and “teaching,” did Paul suddenly come up with the idea that women couldn’t teach? You might think he was backing up what he said in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. Yet that’s not the case. He is actually talking about two different things.

     Alright, let’s ask a question: When Paul wrote this Scripture in 1 Timothy, was he talking about all women? Was he talking about wives only, or was he talking about unmarried women [too]? Who was he really talking about here? This is an important point to consider. We already know what Paul said in 1 Corinthians. We found out in our previous studies that women could pray and prophesy, right? If you look up the word “prophesy,” you’ll find that it refers to both men and women, and you will discover that it is a form of teaching. Did you know that prophesying is really teaching? What does God do when he prophesies through a vessel? Obviously, he is relaying a message, or teaching, to another vessel. And if you go back to 1 Corinthians chapter 11, you’ll find that it says they [men and women] should prophesy one by one that all [including men] may learn. So obviously, prophecy is a form of teaching, and Paul said that women could prophesy.

     In fact, in the book of Acts, there was a prophecy that related back to the book of Joel which said that God would pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, and that the men and the women would both prophesy. We can recognize that prophecy is a form of teaching and we can also keep in mind that Paul gave his approval for both men and women to prophesy.

     So what is Paul talking about when he says women are to “remain silent” and not “teach”? We need to ask another question. Do we have proof in the New Testament that women voiced their opinion and taught? Do we have any Scripture that shows they ever did these things?

     If you read and study Romans chapter 16, you can make a list of women that Paul used in the ministry. By looking up the names in the Greek, you can tell if they were male or female and what their position was. We need to find out if they actually taught or had any share in the Gospel.

     Many people agree that women worked in the Gospel helping Paul, but yet they occupied only the “low positions” like cooking and cleaning and waiting on him. Well, they are wrong. He said they helped him in the Gospel, and if you go back and study what was meant by “the Gospel,” you’ll find out it had to do with teaching, preaching and prophesying. You can’t get away from the fact that God used women.

     [Again,] if you go back and make it a point to study Romans chapter 16, you’ll find out that Paul saluted the women for working and laboring with him in the Gospel of Christ. The main point I want to get at in this message is that there was a reason that Paul was rebuking the women in 1 Timothy.

     Let’s now go to Revelations chapter 2 and start reading in verse 18. It says, “And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God...” Notice this is Jesus speaking here: “...who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass; [19] I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first.” In these verses Jesus was talking to a church, a fine church. He was commending them on their works, their charity, their service, faith and patience. Then he goes on in verse 20 and says, “Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach [note this word -- a Prophetess teaching!] and seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.” This is a key Scripture in the understanding of the entire women in the ministry teaching.

     Jesus pinpoints the problem: it’s Jezebel! He was not talking about Ahab’s wife either. He used the name Jezebel because it goes back to the story of Jezebel and Ahab in the book of 1 Kings where Jezebel usurped the authority and corrupted the morality of Ahab. Now notice, He never rebuked the church [for the “sin” of having a woman teacher,] and he didn’t rebuke Jezebel for being the female teacher of that church. Obviously, the church at Thyatira had a female leader who prayed, prophesied and taught them, yet He was not rebuking her for praying, prophesying or teaching; He was rebuking her for what she was teaching. She was teaching them to commit fornication and eat things sacrificed unto idols. Jesus was rebuking her for her immorality—not because she was a woman.

     Now in the light of this information, if you go back to the Scripture in 1 Timothy, you can begin to get a better idea of what Paul was talking about when he said, “I suffer not a woman to teach.”

     If you go back and begin at verse 9 [in 1 Timothy], you will see that Paul starts out dealing with the apparel of the women. He makes the point very clear that women should adorn themselves with all modesty, “...not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array...” What this seems to imply is that there was a problem with women dressing in a worldly manner with intent of seducing the men. I am trying to establish the relationship between the spirit of Jezebel which Jesus was rebuking in Revelations, and the problems Paul was facing with the women in the churches under his command.

     To add more insight to this situation, I want to bring forth some information on the gnostic cult which was another important influence on the early Church. Next to the Jews, the gnostic church represented a real threat to the early Church, a threat that Paul had to deal with. Both the Jews and the gnostics were motivated by powerful demonic forces whose intentions were to infiltrate and destroy the early Church. Both the Jews and the gnostics had their traditions and sacred writings that were considered the highest form of knowledge or [Gk.] gnosis. We have already considered many Jewish traditions that directly affected the role of women in the ministry. And now in 1 Timothy, it was time for Paul to deal with the spirit of Jezebel, the gnostic teacher. The following passage is from The Early Church, by Henry Chadwick, and it gives a very clear description of who and what the gnostics were. Please note the bottom of the passage where he mentions the immorality of certain gnostic sects and how they used Paul’s teachings to justify their sins.

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     “The term Gnosticism is derived from the ordinary Greek word for knowledge, gnosis. The second-century sects claimed to possess a special knowledge which transcended the simple faith of the Church. But in fact their knowledge was not of a philosophical or intellectual character, but rather a knowledge of the nature and destiny of man, especially Gnostic man, based on a grandiose revelation about the origin of the world which explained how evil had come into being and how one should act in order to get deliverance from it. What they claimed to know consisted of a myth about the creation as the result of a pre-cosmic disaster which accounted for every man’s lot, and about the way in which the elect few may be redeemed. Concerning the elect few, they believed there was a form of divinity that had become imprisoned in matter or flesh and had lost its memory of its true, heavenly home. The content of the Gnostic gospel was an attempt to rouse the soul from its sleep-walking condition and to make it aware of the high destiny to which it is called. The present material world the Gnostics regarded as utterly alien to the supreme God and to the goodness, and as therefore the creation of inferior powers, either incompetent or malevolent. The natural order of things reflected nothing at all of the divine glory and of the matchless heavenly beauty, and towards it the Gnostic initiate was taught to acknowledge no responsibility. His ethic was to be one of complete freedom from any constraint and responsibility or any obligation towards society and government, regarding that which he entertained the most pessimistic opinions.

     The world was in complete control of evil powers whose home was in the seven planets, and after death the elect soul would be faced by a perilous journey through the planetary spheres back to its heavenly home. Much time was therefore devoted to learning the correct magic passwords and the most potent amulets, which would enable the delivered soul to force the monstrous powers barring the ascent to open their doors and allow him to pass onward and upward to the realm of light. The rival sects, which hated one another as much as they hated orthodoxy, used to offer different sets of names and passwords to be learnt, each group claiming to possess the authentic forms, with which alone the soul’s ascent could be successful.

     The details of the myths of the various sects were widely divergent. But the basic pattern can be seen to be constant. The Gnostic ethic, however, could take one of two forms, both based on the estimate of the natural order as wholly alien from God. The majority of the sects demanded an ascetic life with rules for the mortification of the flesh and a special prohibition on marriage or at least on procreation, so that the divine soul might be liberated from the bonds of sense and bodily appetite and assisted to turn itself towards higher things. But some groups drew the opposite conclusion from the basic premise, and became notorious for their orgies of immorality. (In the New Testament, the epistle of Jude warns against some Gnostic group which was exploiting the agape or ‘free-love feast’ and turning it into riotous license.) The latter type liked to appeal to Paul’s doctrine that the Christian is free from the law and lives under grace as a son from the kingdom, and (so far were they from being uneducated crudities) subtly justified their eroticism by appeals to the Symposium of Plato as teaching that love is a mystical communion with God” (emph. added).

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     Now going back to Revelations chapter 2, if we examine this passage closely we can read that Jesus was rebuking Jezebel for seducing the servants. She was teaching things which were seducing them to commit fornication. Notice, [again,] He didn’t rebuke her because she was teaching, He rebuked her because of WHAT she was teaching.

     We should notice that He did not condemn the church entirely; in fact, Jesus listed their good points. Obviously, if the entire church was teaching heretical doctrines, Jesus would have condemned them as such. Yet he didn’t even call her a false teacher [meaning she should not have been teaching at all ], did He? No, Jesus criticized her for her immorality and for teaching his people to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

     Going on to verse 21 it says, “And I gave her space to repent of her fornications; and she repented not.” Notice [further] that He gave her space to repent of her fornications. [And Jesus said nothing about her stepping down from her position as teacher if she did repent, but rather made it sound like she could continue as a teacher if she did repent!]

     The fact is that we are dealing with a woman leader of the church of Thyatira, so obviously women were teaching in those days. The problem that Paul was dealing with in 1 Timothy, and which Jesus was confronting in Revelations chapter 2, was basically a question of content. When Paul says, “I suffer not a woman to teach,” he was actually saying, “I suffer not a woman to teach the wrong things to God’s people.” All teachers are capable of being demonically infiltrated, whether male or female, and it was Paul’s responsibility to monitor what was being taught.

     We have to stop and think about this. If it were really true that women are not supposed to teach or have any part in the ministry, that would constitute a major point of doctrine, and I believe that Jesus would have mentioned it at least once in the Gospels, but He didn’t. Also, surely Paul would have gone into more explanation and detail on such an important subject that would affect so many of God’s people.

     Today in America we have the same type of demon infiltration facing the church of Jesus Christ. Almost every week you hear of some strange doctrine being taught by “born again Christians” or “Charismatic Christians.” [Years ago, we] heard about a new teaching where Christian couples would swap mates and stare deeply into each other’s eyes. Next you dance with the new person and possibly even have sex, all in the name of Jesus. It’s the same spirit of Jezebel, teaching God’s people to commit fornication. [Now we have L.G.B.T.Q. Persons.]

     Many Christians have misconceptions about the spirit of Jezebel. They most often think it means some woman beating all the men into submission and usurping authority. But that is not always the case. In many instances, Jezebel is very subtle and will control and manipulate entire groups into false doctrine and immorality through trickery and deceit.

     What Jesus was saying in Revelation 2 was that His servants were being deceived and seduced. They were Christians, they were sitting under a teacher who was teaching both Christ and secret “revelations,” and that teacher just happened to be a woman. It could just have easily been a man.

     Both Paul and Jesus were dealing with a particular type of woman and what she was teaching. They never intended to say that “No women are allowed to teach,” yet unfortunately that is how it has been interpreted. I may not be a Hebrew or Greek scholar, nor am I some overeducated Bible school theologian, but I know one thing for sure: God has a mouth and He can speak to His people, leading and guiding them into truth. I thank God for the truth because the truth is liberating.

In closing, let me tell you how this whole study got started. I received a letter from a man who had read some of the messages my wife had taught. Well, he wrote me a letter in order to tell me that women aren’t supposed to teach, according to “Scripture,” and he proceeded to quote me the very same Scriptures we have been studying. He was manifesting the very spirit of EGO and PRIDE that I’ve been talking about: the demonic spirit that tries to kill the Spirit of God. This guy was a perfect example of the kind of man that God will never use. God will never use a person like that, because they are full of envy, strife and jealousy and hatred for the female sex.

The truth is that a lot of men don’t have anything to say. Many times women are more open to the Spirit and can get into the Spirit quicker than men. My wife is a good teacher and she is also a good preacher. God uses her as a prophetess and she is anointed of God. Many women are fine teachers and gifted preachers, and it’s only a man’s pride that makes him deny it.

IT’S TIME FOR GOD’S WOMEN TO RISE UP AND REVOLT AGAINST THE SIN AND INIQUITY THAT SEEKS TO DESTROY US ALL. A WOMAN WALKING IN THE POWER AND HOLINESS OF GOD IS A THING THE DEVIL GREATLY FEARS AND DESPISES. One thing is for sure: the call has gone forth and God is anxiously awaiting those women who will lay down their lives and join the SPIRIT REVOLUTION!  Amen.

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The Bible says there is neither male nor female in Christ — Galatians 3:28.