Last week I touched on how God created men and women as equal image bearers of God in their essence. This week I want to go into the distinct roles God, in His wisdom, has assigned to men and women to showcase His glory. My aim for this post is not to dig into what duties and responsibilities come with those roles; that is going to be touched on in my next entry. Today I simply want to show the Biblical grounding of the roles themselves, and Lord willing, give you more tools to answer the people who dispute them. May you get a glimpse from these next paragraphs of the beauty of God’s design and His fatherly care for men and women in the roles He gave them, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph. 2:10). As Nancy Pearcey says in her book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, “An important implication of Genesis is that the two sexes need each other to fulfill their mission. The cultural mandate is not divided by sex.” (30).

So, reader, which roles does God assign strictly to men? One of the most debate-sparking would have to be their role as head of the house. “For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body.” (Eph. 5:23). In Scripture, the doctrine of male headship is rooted in Christ and His headship of the church. Pastor Raymond Ortlund well defines the doctrine of male headship when he writes, “In the partnership of two spiritually equal human beings, man and woman, the man bears the primary responsibility to lead the partnership in a God-glorifying direction.” Along with being head of the house, men are exclusively given the office of pastor, elder, and deacon in the church. God makes this abundantly clear in two ways. The first is the qualifications laid out for those offices, where God says the person must be “the husband of one wife.” (1 Tim. 3:2). The second is the simple example from Scripture of only men being ordained and given those positions down through the ages, particularly in the apostolic era (Acts 6:6, 1 Tim. 4:14).

Now where do the women come in? Between the pages of Scripture are found the beautiful roles of wife and mother that us women have been given. Genesis 3 gives us the initial institution of the marriage covenant, and the first use of the word mother in verse 20, and both are aspects of God’s creation that are good and holy. Proverbs 31:10 says, “Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies.” And verses 28-29 of the same chapter, “Her children rise up and call her blessed; Her husband also, and he praises her: ^“Many daughters have done well, but you excel them all.”” For those of you who have been told that your dignity is diminished or your liberty taken away if you become a wife and a mother, I want to tell you that God says otherwise. The marriage painted for us in Proverbs 31 dispels that myth instantly. In God’s Word, the woman’s place in the world is only ever valued, promoted, and safeguarded. There is a reason the only religion protecting the dignity and safety of women has been historically proven to be Christianity. Being a woman, and in His providence, being a wife and mother, is uniquely beautiful in God’s plan and I hope to go into that in more detail next week. My prayer is that this week’s merely bird’s eye view of this doctrine is an encouragement to you and leads you to want to study it in more detail, as it did for me.