This is where it began, my journey with God into his view of women and the church.
What do you do when you’re seeking the Lord – learning to know him and to move in sync with him – and he waylays you? He reveals what you had not sought. He answers what you had not asked.
Maybe you hadn’t sought this revelation because you thought you knew God’s mind on the matter.
Maybe you didn’t ask because you already knew the accepted answers in your particular church culture – and you did not want to risk excommunication. Maybe watchdogs in your culture make no distinction between heresy and mystery.
Still, God shows up – to answer what you had not asked, to give what you had not sought. He tells you something entirely different from the cultural norm – and expects you to act on it.
What do you do? Stick your fingers in your ears? Assume, “This cannot be God”?
Or do you humble your soul, quiet your fears and press in to know the Lord?
The man
When Jesus called, Peter followed. For three years, he trained as a disciple. Then, on the eve of Jesus’ crucifixion, Peter failed his first test of faith. Forgiven and commissioned anew, Peter stood among the disciples when the risen Christ “opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45).
Filled with the Spirit on Pentecost, Peter preached to thousands and saw multitudes respond in faith. He confronted the lie of Ananias and Sapphira when they sold a piece of land and kept back some of the proceeds. He confounded religious leaders who commanded him not to teach in Jesus’ name, telling them, “We must obey God, rather than men!” He rebuked a Samaritan named Simon for trying to buy spiritual authority.
Peter had such power and authority that people were healed and delivered when his shadow passed over them. Shortly after he healed a paralytic named Aeneas, Peter raised a woman named Tabitha from the dead.
Peter knew the Lord and sought to move in sync with him. Indeed, Peter the respected apostle might have assumed that he clearly understood God’s mind on all important matters. Yet shortly after Peter performed the most amazing miracle of his life, he went to a rooftop to pray – and God waylaid him.
The means
On that rooftop, Peter “fell into a trance” (Acts 10:10). If the word trance sounds like something you’d connect more with a séance than a divine encounter, consider the Greek word it translates. Ekstasis means “a displacement of the mind, i.e. bewilderment, ‘ecstasy.’”1
Whoa. That sounds scary. Definitely suspect. Would God communicate in such a way?
While in ekstasis, Peter “saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, ‘Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.’
“‘Surely not, Lord!’ Peter replied. ‘I have never eaten anything impure or unclean’” (Acts 10:11–14).
Obey a vision and a voice that contradicted the clear commands of Scripture? Even in a trance, Peter knew better than that! “Absolutely not!” he cried. “I obey the Word!” Yet, in the same breath, Peter acknowledged who had spoken – not the devil, not his own hungry stomach, but the Lord himself.
“The voice spoke to him a second time, ‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.’ This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven” (vv. 15–16).
Taught by Jesus, filled with the Spirit, Peter knew exactly what this vision meant, right? Wrong. He “was wondering about the meaning of the vision” (v. 17) when God spoke again, this time through the arrival of three men and through the Holy Spirit.
The men told Peter, “We have come from Cornelius the centurion. He is a righteous and God–fearing man, who is respected by all the Jewish people. A holy angel told him to ask you to come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say.”
The Spirit told Peter to go with the men, “for I have sent them” (vv. 22, 20).
Red flags! Red flags! Red flags! How could the prompting to go with Cornelius’ men possibly have come from the Holy Spirit? How could any of it be God? We know it was the Spirit because Scripture says so. But how did Peter know?
Let’s recap: Peter had entered an ecstatic state. He’d seen a vision. He’d heard a voice. Now, supposedly, an angel had spoken (in a vision, no less) to a man who was not a Jew, and knew nothing of Jesus. The man had not gone to Peter himself, but rather had sent his servants to tell Peter the angel said to come.
How could Peter believe that the God he knew intimately and served faithfully had endorsed a message sent by such an unlikely route?
Hadn’t God told the Jews to stay separate from other nations? (Peter knew chapter and verse.) Didn’t every tradition of Peter’s culture forbid him to enter the house of a non-Jew?
Ah, but because Peter did know his Lord and did recognize his voice, Peter humbled his soul, summoned his courage and went with the men. By the time Peter reached Cornelius’ house, he understood what God was saying.
The message
“Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: ‘You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.’”
He continued, “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right. You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all.”
While Peter proclaimed, “Jesus is Lord of all,” God confirmed it: “the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message” (Acts 10:27–28, 34–36, 44).
Peter recognized the voice of God and received the word of God, even when the Lord revealed himself in startling ways, even when he challenged Peter’s previous understanding of Scripture.
Thus, Peter saw what he otherwise would not have seen. He saw the value of all people in God’s eyes. He saw that the blood of Jesus cleanses everyone who believes in him and promotes all to the status of sons.
The muddying
Like Peter, the early church understood this astounding truth and acted on it. But before long, Greek men of influence who came into the kingdom tilted their teachings toward their own cultural bias. Being Gentiles themselves, they agreed that we “should not call any man impure or unclean.”
Ah, but they did not agree that the same applies to women.
Brace yourselves.
Tertullian (A.D. 155–220), early church leader and prolific author, told women: “Do you not know that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil’s gateway: You are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the Son of God had to die.”2
Origen (A.D. 185–254), one of the most influential of the early church “fathers,” said, “Men should not sit and listen to a woman … even if she says admirable things, or even saintly things, that is of little consequence, since they came from the mouth of a woman.”3
Augustine (A.D. 354–430), whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity, wrote, “By herself woman is not of the image of God. The man, on the other hand, alone, is the image of God.”4
Another early church father, Jerome (A.D. 342–419) said, “Woman is a temple built over a sewer. It is contrary to the order of nature and of the law for women to speak in a gathering.”5
A temple built over a sewer? Jerome’s thinking regarding women’s immutable impurity carried incredible weight, for his Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, was the official translation used by the church for 1,000 years. It was the translation read by Martin Luther and other fathers of the reformation, who in turn still influence us today.
Martin Luther taught, “Women are ashamed to admit this, but Scripture and life reveal that only one woman in thousands has been endowed with the God-given aptitude to live in chastity and virginity. A woman is not fully the master of herself.”6
King James (who commissioned the King James Version) said, “To make women learned and foxes tame has the same effect – to make them more cunning.”7
Has this gender bias, grafted into the church so long ago, influenced English Scripture translations? Yes – and to a stunning degree.
Look again at what Peter taught at Cornelius’ house. According to the 1984 New International Version quoted above, Peter said:
God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean (Acts 10:28).
I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right (Acts 10:34–35).
Yet this popular English translation does not accurately convey Peter’s words.
Two Greek nouns are most often translated “man” in English New Testaments. One word, aner, denotes a man, as distinguished from a woman; a male, as opposed to a female. The other word, anthropos, denotes a human being of either gender. Aner (man/male) is used eight times in Acts 10, but it is not used in either of the two quotations above.
Many English translations – including King James, New King James, New American Standard and all but the newest version of the NIV – have failed to clearly communicate what Peter announced in verse 28:
God has shown me that I should not call any person [anthropos] impure or unclean.
In verse 35, neither the Greek word for “man” nor the Greek word for “human” appears, but rather a gender-inclusive pronoun. As the New Living Translation correctly indicates, Peter announced:
In every nation he [God] accepts those who fear him and do what is right.
The mandate
What do you do when you’re seeking the Lord – learning to know him and to move in sync with him – and he waylays you? He reveals what you weren’t seeking. He answers what you weren’t asking.
God waylaid Peter because the apostles’ failure to understand the new covenant’s impact threatened to deny whole nations the full redemption Jesus offers to all.
Peter humbled his soul, quieted his fears – and saw the truth!
Many sincere God-seekers today think they know God’s mind on the matter of women. They can quote Scriptures to support their stance. Yet, they do not see how much the teachings of Greek church “fathers” have influenced both Bible translation and the beliefs of the Western church.
Some of the most influential of those early church leaders did exactly what God told Peter not to do. They labeled all women both “unclean” and “unable to be cleansed” even by Jesus Christ, the Lord of all.
And so God waylays us. He shows us highly contemptuous statements about women made by truly devout men. He charges us: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
He confronts us with a question many Christians really want to ignore: Has a failure to understand the new covenant’s impact denied a whole gender, for centuries, the full redemption Jesus purchased with his own blood?
Frightened by the risks of probing such a question, we can stick our fingers in our ears. Convinced our view of Scripture is the correct one, we can assume any voice challenging our beliefs cannot be God’s.
Or, like Peter on that rooftop, we can humble our souls, quiet our fears – and give our Lord permission to reveal whatever he wants to reveal, in whatever ways he chooses to reveal it.
“Waylaid by God” is chapter 1 of What About Women? A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé.
Image by maximiliano estevez from Pixabay
See also
- Truth, desperation, spirit, life
- Don’t be afraid to look
- Adulthood and the church
- Case of the battered boundaries
- This girl is a woman now
- Bucking the system: Shunning, submission and Jesus
Footnotes
- Ekstasis (NT:1611): Biblesoft’s New Exhaustive Strong’s Numbers and Concordance with Expanded Greek-Hebrew Dictionary. Copyright © 1994, 2003, 2006 Biblesoft, Inc. and International Bible Translators, Inc. ↩︎
- J. Lee Grady, 10 Lies the Church Tells Women (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2000), 118 ↩︎
- Grady, 50. ↩︎
- Gene Edwards, The Christian Woman … Set Free (Jacksonville, FL: SeedSowers Publishing, 2005), introductory quotes. ↩︎
- Edwards, introductory quotes. ↩︎
- Grady, 136. ↩︎
- “Overview on women’s education in England and in the United States 1600–1900,” http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/articles/WL.html. ↩︎
