Head Coverings and Other Biblical Commands We Don't Obey Anymore

Head Coverings and Other Biblical Commands We Don't Obey Anymore

6/28/15  Pastor Allen Snapp

For our guests, we are working our way through the book of 1 Cor. and this morning we are looking at the first half of 1 Cor. 11, but before we read I feel like I want to give a warning, especially to anyone visiting us this morning. The passage we will be studying contains things that are difficult to understand and to know how to correctly apply, so this is going to be a little different kind of message than I usually preach, and - here's the warning - if you're really into being politically correct or you are really NOT into being politically correct, there's a high potential that something I say is going to offendyou. So with that being said, let's buckle our seat belts and jump in.

1 Cor. 11:2-16

I mentioned that this passage is a difficult one to understand or apply but actually, on the face of it, it seems very easy to understand: women are supposed to wear head coverings in church. And yet, as I look around, very few - maybe none - of the women here are wearing head coverings. So, again on the face of it, the application of this passage would seem simple enough: women, you need to start wearing head coverings to church. Amen, end of message, let's pray, have a good week.

But that's not the message I'm going to preach this morning, and the question is, why not? We are a church that claims to believe the Bible as God's word and inerrant, and yet we are ignoring this command. And we're not alone. Most churches today, even churches that are conservative in their beliefs, churches that believe the Bible is the word of God and is inerrant and to be obeyed, aren't obeying this passage. Why is that? The question goes beyond head coverings. There are other commands and directives that we're ignoring too. 

Title: Head Coverings and Other Biblical Commands We Don't Obey Anymore (let's pray)

Why do we obey some parts of the Bible and not other parts?

Let's consider a couple other commands that many churches today are disobeying:

The holy kiss - BothPaul and Peter command believers to "greet one another with a holy kiss" (Rom. 16:16, 2 Cor. 13:12, 1 Pet. 5:14). And yet, if our welcome team stood at the front door kissing everyone who came in, we'd probably see a steep dropoff in the number of visitors we get (definitely a dropoff in second time visitors). I went with a YWAM team to the Ukraine some years ago, and we were ministering in an orthodox church one night,  and there was a guy there who was walking around giving everyone - guys and girls - kisses. I spent most of the night trying to avoid him!

On Long Island, there was a kind of kiss that a lot of people gave each other (although as I think about it, it was mostly a greeting between men and women, not men with men or women with women). It was a real skill. You pretended to kiss the cheek, but you actually kissed the air to the side of the cheek and made a weird kissing noise as you bent in: "muwaa". Now a lot of people did this but not everyone was a kisser, so you had to know what category each person fell in: this person is a kisser. That person is a hugger. That one is a hand-shaker. Complicated. Sometimes it was hard to remember, "is this a kisser or a hugger?" so you watched nervously trying to read for signals. Are we going in for a kiss or a hug? Oh, a handshake! It was tough to keep it all straight. 

Paul keeps it simple: everyone - brothers and brothers, sisters and sisters, and brothers and sisters -should give one another a holy (non-sexual) kiss. Why don't we do that anymore?

Footwashing - in John 13 Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and then commanded, in verse 14 that they should also wash one another's feet. I was wrapping up a prayer meeting (again in the church on LI) when a sincere brother pulled me aside and told me he felt the Lord wanted us all to wash one another's feet. I wrestled with that one. On one hand, if the Lord is leading us I want to be open to it. But I saw a logistical nightmare getting it all set up, especially since there were about 25 or 30 people there and frankly people just aren't comfortable with footwashing anymore. It would freak a lot of people out. I thanked him for sharing his impression with me but decided not to do it. 

Baptism for the dead - later in this book, Paul will talk about people being baptized on behalf of the dead. That's one that hasn't really caught on in the church! We want to plan another baptism soon, but if you tell me you want to stand in for your late Uncle Louie I'm really not going to know what to do with that.  

Repenting with sackcloth and ashes - Is. 58 says that the fast that God accepts is to repent with sackcloth and ashes. Over and over again repentance is expressed with sackcloth and ashes, and yet we don't do that anymore. Why not? Can our repentance be acceptable to God without it, when He declares that it is a part of the fast that He approves of? 

Five commands that we just don't obey anymore. Why not? Why is it we believe that some directives in the Bible are timeless and for everyone, and other directives don't apply to us anymore? And how do we tell which are which?

John Piper mentions four helpful ways we can determine if something is a universal mandate extending for all time, or a passage containing directives that are culturally irrelevant, or at least culturally adjustable, for us today?

1.  To the degree that a stipulation is rooted in creation, to that degree it has abiding value. So marriage, gender, and relationships between men and women are  huge in that regard because they are rooted in creation.

2.  To the degree that it is commanded across the whole terrain of Scripture—Old, New, Epistles, Gospels—it has high level abiding validity. When something is mentioned only once in Scripture it doesn't mean that it's unimportant, but it is definitely going to be easier to be misunderstood and misapplied.  The concept of people being baptized for the dead is only mentioned once and so we are right to be careful about how we try to apply it in the life of the church. There have been over 40 different interpretations about what being baptized on behalf of the dead means over the course of history. I think we can be confident that if God intended that practice to be an integral part of Christian practice, He would have said more about it and made it clearer.

3.  To the degree that it is related to the gospel and close to the gospel it has ongoing validity and staying authority. So, for instance, communion is mentioned many times in the NT, and it also has a powerful and clear connection to the gospel, so it is a practice/command that is religiously observed today. 

So practices like footwashing, greeting with a holy kiss, repenting with sackcloth and ashes, and head coverings, seem to embed universal principles into specific cultural practices and in these cases, I think we can hold to the universal principles without preserving the cultural practices. So, for instance, we can truly repent today without wearing sackcloth and ashes. To wear sackcloth and ashes today would say something different to our culture than it did to a Jewish community in 600 BC. Washing feet was a common practice back then, but it is not something people do today. So we are to express the universal principle of humility to one another that Jesus is modeling, but we don't have to use the cultural practice that that principle happened to be embedded in back then. We can greet brothers and sisters affectionately and with love today without kissing everyone. By the way, there's nothing wrong with doing these things and some churches/Christians do. I'm just saying that we don't have to keep the cultural practice but we do need to keep the universal, biblical principle.

So what about head coverings?

So let's get back to head coverings. The question is what did head coverings symbolize back then and the answer is we don't know for sure. But in some way they seemed to be a symbol of submission to appropriate authority and, maybe more importantly an expression of a woman's femininity. When a woman went to worship, she didn't need to wear a head covering, but when she was about to step into a role of authority such as public prophesying or praying in the service she was to wear what Paul calls a "symbol of authority on her head" in verse 10.  In the culture of that day, the head covering represented an appropriate distinction between men and women and their relationship to each other. So Paul goes further and says that long hair on a man spoke certain things and short hair or a shaved head spoke certain things about a woman. In that day, a woman with a shaved head was either a slave or a prostitute.

None of this applies today. A woman wearing a hat or not wearing a hat says nothing about their femininity or their posture towards their husband's leadership. Women wear short hair and men wear long hair and it doesn't carry any of the cultural statements that it did back then.

Let's consider another application that will help us grasp this. A woman walking into a church 100 years ago wearing pants would have been guilty of disregarding conventional cultural standards and would have been making a shockingly masculine statement. That's not true today. Women wearing pants says nothing. But…if one of you guys decided to wear a dress to church, a lot of us would probably have a problem with that. A man wearing a dress still has some cultural statements attached to it. Maybe in 10 years men will be wearing dresses. I hope not, but it's possible. But, before we condemn that possibility as definitely wrong, remember that Scottish men have been wearing dresses for centuries. Tell William Wallace that kilts are feminine and he'd cut your head off. Now a guy wears a floral print and pumps and they’ve lost me!

The meaning of certain practices shifts over time and from culture to culture. If a practice in the Bible isn't rooted in the creation event or gospel meaning then it's a matter of biblical indifference whether we keep it or not as long as we keep the universal principles that are embedded in that practice. 

The principle embedded in the practice

So what's the principle embedded in the practice that Christian women should still follow? I think the 

primary principle doesn't so much have to do with authority or submission (though that's in there) as much as it has to do with preserving and celebrating the beautiful and complimentary differences between men and women, reaching back to God's original intent in creation. 

God created men and women different from each other. The feminist movement has done a lot of good in my opinion. It is a good thing that women have equal job opportunities and it's absolutely right that women receive equal pay for equal work. In many healthy ways it has helped women to step forward and realize their God-given potential across the spectrum of society, including positions of influence, leadership, and power. I don't think that is an unbiblical thing. In the Bible, Deborah was a strong leader and a judge (or ruler) of Israel for a time, and it is totally a positive thing for Israel. There were many bad male leaders of Israel, but Deborah was a good leader and led Israel and the military well. History is full of some great women leaders. Golda Meir was an amazing and courageous leader of Israel during the 70's and Former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion called her the "best man in the government". Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady" was the longest serving Prime Minister of Britain from 1979-1990. In my opinion, these are not aberrations or unbiblical and unblessed positions women to hold. If the right woman was running for President, and I thought she was the best person for the job, I'd vote for her!

But  I fear that there are elements of the feminist movement that have an agenda that wants to undermine and destroy God's beautiful creative design in making man and woman. There is a move to undermine and erase any distinctions between men and women and that won't end well. Satan hates God and mankind and he knows one way he can destroy us and hurt God is by defacing what God has created. 

God didn't design men and women to duplicate each other - we aren't the same - but to compliment each other. Men and women are created equal but different. God has called men in general and husbands in particular to be loving and humble leaders, serving and laying down their lives for their wives so that their wives flourish and thrive as women and daughters of God, and the man who is domineering, rude, oppressive, controlling or selfish in his leadership (whether of his wife or anyone else) is a weak and lousy leader and isn't really being a man. In the same way, God has imparted a beauty in a woman's humble disposition to follow the leadership of her husband. Not mindless obedience, not welcome-mat weakness, but strong, intelligent, partnership with her husband, but with an inclination to follow, not buck, her husband's leadership. She is made stronger by helping make her husband stronger, and ironically she will diminish her strength and beauty by trying to usurp and demean her husband's leadership. 

Paul is saying that as a woman steps into a posture of authority (prophesying or praying publicly), there should be an appropriate symbol that she is under authority. It would take another message to dig deeper into that, but that kind of submitted posture towards God-ordained authority is an inseparable part of strength and leadership. Christ isn't somehow weaker or inferior because he is submitted to God His Father. As Christians we all want to walk in an appropriate submission to the authority God has put over us. It's not a sign of weakness, but of strength and humility. 

Paul's statement in verse 7 that man is the glory of God and woman is the glory of man contains a beautiful universal principle woven into God's creation of man and woman. We know from Genesis that man and woman were both made in the image of God, but there is a way that man is the glory of God - which means in some way we make God look better. But God didn't create woman from the dust of the earth, like He did Adam. He took a rib from Adam's side and created Eve. And so woman, being taken from man's side, makes man look better, she is the glory of man. When Adam saw Eve he exclaimed, "woh-man, look what God created from my side!" The length of hair or head coverings aren't the issue, preserving and appreciating the complimentary distinctions between men and women is the issue.

Women have an inner and outer beauty that men don't have (sorry guys). That beauty is the glory of man - it makes men better men. Women, you also have an inner and outer strength that men don't have. There are ways that you are strong where men are weak, just as there are ways that men are strong where you are weak. Complimentary, not duplicates. But your beauty, women, isn't in crushing and beating a man, but in complimenting a man's strength, providing strength where a man is weak, and weakness where a man is strong. 

We don't obey certain biblical commands anymore because they are connected to cultural mores that have shifted and changed, but by the grace of God we want to hold to and obey the timeless and unchanging commands and design of God even when society makes it unpopular and seemingly ignorant and out of touch to do so. Cultures come and go, fashions fade with time, popular opinion shifts from year to year. But God's word and His authority are forever. Let's pray.