John MacArthur - Divine design: Gods complementary roles for men and women

DIVINE DESIGN

Published by David C Cook

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David C Cook U.K., Kingsway Communications

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All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes,

no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form

without written permission from the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible , Copyright 1960, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com; and KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. (Public Domain.)

The author has added italics to Scripture quotations for emphasis.

LCCN 2011933707

ISBN 978-0-7814-0588-1

eISBN 978-1-4347-6674-8

1994, 2011 John MacArthur Jr.

Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates, Inc.

First edition published by Chariot Victor under the title Different by Design in 1994 John MacArthur Jr., ISBN 1-56476-247-5.

The Team: Alex Field, Nick Lee, Jack Campbell, Karen Athen

Cover Design: Amy Konyndyk

Cover Photo: iStockphoto (6860808)

Third Edition 2011

Contents

: The Attack on God's Design

Creation to Corruption

The Case for Authority and Submission

: God's Design for Marriage

Marriage as It Was Meant to Be

The Excellent Wife at Work

A Different Place in God's Plan

: God's Design for the Church

The Church's Leading Men

God's High Call for Women

The Character of Service

For the Sake of the Kingdom

INTRODUCTION

The fact that men and women are different by design is no surprise to those who are committed to reality or familiar with the Bible. It is a great surprise, however, to many who, over several decades, have engineered, vigorously endorsed, or passively succumbed to the social experiments that deny or attempt to alter that design. The experiments have failed and have destroyed our culture in the process. And in the last twenty years, a plethora of astute, honest, and brave observers have started speaking up.

Example: In the former Soviet Union, where radical social experimentation with male-female roles has been occurring since the early part of the last century, many Russian women see true freedom as the ability to be full-time wives and mothers, according to a front-page story of the Los Angeles Times . That traditional option was long denied Russian women, and both men and women are beginning to sense that this denial was never right.

Public opinion polls show that many Russians, men and women, feel that if they could have the choice, most women would not work outside the home while raising their children.

Lyudmila is one girl who has already decided that she does not want to repeat the double-duty life of her mother, who has toiled full time for 20 years in a candy factory while, like many other Russian women, being solely responsible for the household. She gets no satisfaction from her work, said Lyudmila. I dont want to work after I am married. It takes too much time from your family. Most of my girlfriends feel the same way. The majority of younger women think its better if women are at home, said Valentina V. Bodrova, a sociologist at the All-Russian Center of Public Opinion and Market Research, a leading polling organization.

Example: The cover of one TIME magazine reads, Why are men and women different? It isnt just upbringing. New studies show they are born that way. That title has the aura of a shocking revelation, but it really is common sense to objective peopleas demonstrated by the opening illustration of the lead article:

Many scientists rely on elaborately complex and costly equipment to probe the mysteries confronting humankind. Not Melissa Hines. The UCLA behavioral scientist is hoping to solve one of lifes oldest riddles with a toy box full of police cars, Lincoln Logs, and Barbie dolls. Hines and her colleagues have tried to determine the origins of gender differences by capturing on videotape the squeals of delight, furrows of concentration and myriad decisions that children from 2 1/2 to 8 make while playing. Although both sexes play with all the toys available in Hines laboratory, her work confirms what most parents (and more than a few aunts, uncles and nursery-school teachers) already know. As a group, the boys favor sports cars, fire trucks, and Lincoln Logs, while the girls are drawn more often to dolls and kitchen toys.

During the feminist revolution of the 1970s, talk of inborn differences in the behavior of men and women was distinctly unfashionable, even taboo. Once sexism was abolished, so the argument ran, the world would become a perfectly equitable, androgynous place, aside from a few anatomical details. But biology has a funny way of confounding expectations. Rather than disappear, the evidence for innate sexual differences only began to mount.

Another generation of parents discovered that, despite their best efforts to give baseballs to their daughters and sewing kits to their sons, the girls still flocked to dollhouses while the boys clambered into tree forts.

Example: A book on brain physiology, provocatively titled Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women by Anne Moir and David Jessel, details the empirical evidence for innate differences between the sexes. Moir acquired her interest in the topic as a postgraduate student working for her doctorate in genetics at Oxford University in the radical feminist atmosphere of the 70s. She noticed that some scientists seemed afraid of their discoveries about male-female differences, downplaying their significance over concern about what was politically correct. But Dr. Moir followed the mounting evidence through the years and shared her findings with a reporter. The book that emerged from Moir and Jessels joint effort has this significant introduction:

Men are different from women. They are equal only in their common membership of the same species, humankind. To maintain that they are the same in aptitude, skill or behaviour is to build a society based on a biological and scientific lie.

The sexes are different because their brains are different. The brain, the chief administrative and emotional organ of life, is differently constructed in men and in women; it processes information in a different way, which results in different perceptions, priorities and behaviour.

In the past ten years there has been an explosion of scientific research into what makes the sexes different. Doctors, scientists, psychologists and sociologists, working apart, have produced a body of findings which, taken together, paints a remarkably consistent picture. And the picture is one of startling sexual asymmetry. It is time to explode the social myth that men and women are virtually interchangeable, all things being equal. All things are not equal.

Example: Another popular book on this general topic, which spent over two years on the New York Times best-seller list, is You Just Dont Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Dr. Deborah Tannen. A previous book Tannen wrote had just one chapter out of ten on gender differences, but 90 percent of the requests she received for interviews, articles, and lectures were from people wanting to know more about male-female differences. She decided she also wanted to learn more. Tannen wrote:

I am joining the growing dialogue on gender and language because the risk of ignoring differences is greater than the danger of naming them. Sweeping something big under the rug doesnt make it go away; it trips you up and sends you sprawling.