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About twelve days ago, uh, Dave Shira asked me to speak this morning, and I agreed and began to, uh, think about the topic I should choose. Uh, nothing struck me that evening. A few days passed, and I pondered again what I should speak upon. And as I scraped old paint off my house, I waited expectantly for a sign, uh, a voice from heaven, perhaps, to supply me with a message. Still nothing. Paint scraping must not be conducive to contemplation and receiving what the Lord, uh, would have me to, to say.
Paint scraping gave way to painting. Perhaps now the word would come. Nothing. Several days of painting produced only a different shade on my house and speckles of green and brown on me. I tried a different tack. I got away from the house and the paint and went to my office. Surely here I would get the inspiration to put together a message. Tuesday had become the following Monday, and I still received no message. Tuesday passed, nothing. Wednesday, Thursday. Certainly, I thought at the Wheaton College faculty retreat, some glimmer of a message will emerge from the discussions, the presentations by various inspiring speakers.
Dr. Armourding's always stirring address to the faculty before we immerse ourselves in the new academic year. Total silence, still, regarding what I should discuss. Well, then I thought, maybe if I attend a good old fashioned Scottish fish boil Friday night, I'll receive a sudden insight. There was good fish, make that excellent fish, for those of you who made it to the Keats. Good fellowship, but no word yet as to my topic. Saturday was uneventful on that score as well. It's this morning.
We're on our way to the breaking of bread service. Maybe a suggestion will burst forth from one of the many Sunday morning radio preachers. No. The first service begins. Worship, praise, but no revelation of a message for today. The service is over. Coffee and donuts downstairs. Fellowship, discussions. Surely now the Lord will speak the word I need. The organist plays. The eleven o'clock service begins. Still no word. Suspense is killing me.
The opening hymn, of course. This must be the instrument the Lord will use to give me the message for today. No. Prayer, announcements, another hymn, still nothing. This is really cutting things a little close. The special number must be the key. Grace played. Certainly a, a word from the Lord will come now. Still nothing. Just now, as I stood to speak to you, a voice finally spoke inside, and it said, you're not prepared. One of the problems with beginning like this is that you may remember the introduction, but nothing that follows.
Uh, that's the case for the speaker who, at the College Chapel, opened his address similarly last year. I remember his opening remarks very well, but not the substance of what he said thereafter. In fact, I do have a subject today. Steve Austin, TV's six Million Dollar Man, can run as fast as a cheetah. He's stronger than ten men, he can see with an eye sharper than an eagle's, and he can perform feats of physical strength and speed unmatched by ordinary people. Now, you all know the reason for that, I'm sure. It's because he he's bionic. That is, he has some spare parts, uh, developed by sta- space age, space age technology, which allow him to perform with machine-like quality.
Interestingly, the success of the fictitious six million dollar man is nearly matched by today's real bioengineers. Some of you may have seen, uh, an article that I'd like to quote, uh, or read to you, uh, in part this morning. It was in, um, the Chicago Tribune last week. Uh, the title of the article was Science Tries to Do What Nature Can Do Best. Let me read a, a few, uh, little pieces from this article to you. Suppose you get inspired by the six Million Dollar Man and decided to build a bionic creature. With a little shopping around, you'd find that physicians and scientists have the following artificial parts on hand or in the process of development.
Hip, knee, elbow, ankle, toe, shoulder, wrist, knuckle, electric arm, tooth, intestine, ear, eye, kidney, liver, artery, pancreas, skin, breast, cornea, jaw, larynx, tendons, blood, and heart. Don't get carried away by this bionic man business, the author goes on, uh, they're saying. Artificial organs won't allow you to leap tall buildings or see through brick walls. Most man-made spare parts aren't as good as the ones you were born with. As William Dobell, who is developing a wide range of artificial organs, says, Mother Nature is far more ingenious than the best bioengineering team.
Last year alone, an estimated eighty thousand artificial hips were used to replace destroyed joints. Before the arti- artificial hip came along, many of those patients would have been stuck in bed or in wheelchairs. The list of other artificial joints begins to get monotonous. Ankles? Yes, if you want them, but it's easier to fuse a faulty ankle joint, and there's not much loss of function. Elbows? A few, but the elbow is a highly mobile joint, and a satisfactory replacement hasn't come along. Shoulder, coming along, but the relatively small size of the shoulder bone complicates the job of cementing in the replacement. Knuckles, several thousand installed last year to restore some movements to hands crippled by arthritis.
Toes, yes, a few. Hundreds of myoelectric arms were fitted for amputees last year at VA hospitals and medical centers. Powered by batteries, the arms work by picking up electrical signals from the nerves in the stump. You literally think the arm into motion, a remarkable idea. There are other miracles, less routine right now, artificial intestines that keep people alive when their own fail, artificial livers which have succeeded in saving a few lives by tiding patients over a temporary failure, and artificial pancreas, still in the research stage, which would use a computer to monitor and release insulin into the blood as needed. There are others, I could go on.
These accomplishments, as well as the TV bionic man, bionic woman, and I understand this fall bionic dog, uh, underscore the machine-like qualities of the human body. The fact that man is a series of mechanisms. At Wheaton College, I teach human physiology. In my courses, our students preparing for careers in medicine, dentistry, other health professions, biomedical research, teaching, and other fields. My message to you this morning grew out of my participation in a seminar on the integration of faith and learning last summer at Wheaton.
In that seminar, we struggled with how to mesh our discipline and all of its cognitive, factual, rational aspects with our Christian faith. What I want to share with you this morning is my attempt at integration of physiology, a part of biology, and Christianity at this stage in, in my life. I'd like, um, Norm and Tom, if they would, to distribute to you, uh, an outline. This is not an exhaustive, um, outline such as the one you got from Dr. Goddard, but it will give you some feel for how I want to discuss the topic.
Mechanical Man, a Christian physiologist's dilemma. Mechanical Man, a Christian physiologist's Dilemma. This will allow you to, um, follow me as I go along, and, uh, you'll see the end approaching, which always is good for a congregation.
I want to say before I, I get into this, that, um, in no way do I pretend that this will be the final word on the subject of integration of physiology with the Christian faith. We learned early on in our seminar that integration in the first place is a process. We may only begin, we never arrive at integration. But with the outline before you and, uh, perhaps, uh, thinking now about some of the things that we said in the introduction, I'd like to talk to you, first of all, a little bit about the nature of physiology, uh, which is my discipline.
The science of physiology seeks to explain the underlying machinery of the life processes of the organism. Thus begins the first chapter of a famous physiology text called The Machinery of the Body, that was written about thirty years ago. The view of the human body as a machine is stated even more explicitly in the opening chapter of a current excellent undergraduate physiology text. It's held in very high esteem by all physiologists. It, it goes like this: The mechanist view of life holds that all phenomena, no matter how complex, are ultimately describable in terms of physical and chemical laws, and that no, quote, vital force, unquote, distinct from matter and energy is required to explain life.
Man is a machine, an enormously complex machine, but a machine nevertheless. Well, the hallmark of the study of physiology is the unraveling of the how of the operating parts. The physiologist strives to explain in physical and chemical terms the mechanisms that operate in the living world. The field of contemporary physiology is therefore a mechanistic one. Physiologists reject as unscientific the tenets of vitalism. Those of you in college now probably have run across this, perhaps in a philosophy class.
Vitalism. Vitalism said that phenomena are only partly controlled by mechanical forces. They're in some measure self-determining. Vitalism ascribes the functions of a living organism to a so-called vital principle, distinct from chemical and physical forces. If we look at the development of medicine and physiology from a historical standpoint. Perhaps it will give us some idea of, of why physiology is the way it is today. History's very first biologist, and perhaps its greatest philosopher also, was a nam- man named Aristotle.
He was a vitalist, but he had a, what I would call a mechanistic streak. He analogized the source of motion, or prime mover, as Dr. Hawthorne mentioned in the first service, with energy, and he placed form and matter in constant interaction as a mechanist might. At the same time, Aristotle's vitalism was etched in his belief in causes in nature, including the final cause or purpose in which the, the ends are actualized or a potential is achieved. You, some of you know that this so-called doctrine of final causes, part of vitalism, is known as teleology.
So the roots of vitalism as well as mechanism can be traced back to the Greeks. Little was done in biology during the Roman period and the Middle Ages. Vitalism was the predominant philosophy during this time. With the coming of the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press, the works of Aristotle resurfaced, and they were among the very, the very first to be printed and distributed throughout the continent of Europe. Aristotle's influence was formidable. He was a systematist. He tried to explain everything. He believed that the Creator, whom he referred to as the unmoved mover, made nothing in vain, and that everything had a purpose which could be discovered and explained.
The adoption of Aristotle's methods characterized the medieval spirit. During the Middle Ages, there was an attempt to synthesize the rational with the Christian, or at least the theistic perspective. Uh, they would say something like this: if man is rational, it's because God is rational. Aristotle's explanations took the form of sweeping general theories. Sometimes they had no connection whatsoever with experimental verification. In fact, never did they have, uh, that kind of connection. And his theories were very strongly put. Consequently, as time passed, what started as theoretical explanation came to be accepted as proven fact.
And this was the horrible consequence of a highly theoretical approach. Conjecture became dogma. Replacing the philosophy of Aristotle with empiricism was a most difficult task for the men of the scientific Renaissance. The Belgian André Vassal dissected the human body, and in fifteen forty three he described this formerly for- forbidden machine with an unprecedented thoroughness. In the seventeenth century, William Harvey used a very clever combination of observation and reasoning to argue that the blood actually circulated through the body.
Quantitative biology was born when, when he measured the cardiac output in animals. According to a writer I consulted, because of Aristotle's strong influence, scientific investigation's pendulum swung radically to the opposite extreme, and the emphasis in Aristotle's time upon systematic theory be- became replaced now by a very strong emphasis on experimentation. This writer says that possibly the swing has been too extreme, allowing the emphasis on experimentation to remain in excess to this very day.
Descartes, whom the philosophers know as a dualist, in the mid-seventeenth century went beyond Harvey's contention that the heart was a mechanical pump, forcing blood through the conduit vessels of the body. Descartes believed that the whole animal body was a machine, but that the human was more than an animal machine because he had an immortal soul. Descartes is credited with being the founder of mechanism in biology. He was a dualist, as I mentioned. He believed that man had both a physical and a spiritual nature, and he separated mind from matter. So man was actually living as two persons.
La Mettrie, a complete mechanist and materialist of the early seventeen hundreds, completely rejected the immortal soul of theologians and the vital force of life in his work L'Homme Machine, the human machine. Perhaps the best example of an intense interest in experimentation is Claude Bernard, whom a few of my biology majors that I see here this morning, I have heard about. In the mid-nineteenth century, he described the importance of the concept of the constant internal environment. He's known as the father of experimental medicine.
He fought systematic philosophy, pointing out that sweeping generalizations void of any verification were totally valueless. He emphasized careful observation in both the clinical and the laboratory settings. Most importantly, he distinguished between observation and experimentation. In the latter process, an inve- an investigator, uh, repeatedly produces some disturbance and then expects to find a consistent response. Before, before Claude Bernard's time, the life processes were thought to be fragile and composed of fleeting manifestations, somehow controlled by mysterious vital forces.
Bernard believed that a given stimulus would always produce a given response, and therefore he emphasized the value of laboratory experimentation and verification. As we come to the twentieth century, the first name that, that really grabs us and that has stayed with us, uh, for seven decades now is a man named Walter Cannon, who taught at Harvard University. He extended Bernard's concept of the constant internal environment. In a probably his most famous work called The Wisdom of the Body, Cannon stressed that life is possible because stability is maintained by regulatory mechanisms.
He gave us a most useful and significant conceptual term, still the keystone of today's physiology, when he wrote this: The coordinated physiological processes which maintain most of the steady states in the organism are so complex and so peculiar to living things, involving as they may the brain, the nerves, the heart, lungs, the kidneys, the spleen, all working cooperatively, that I have suggested a special designation for these states, homeostasis, which Dr. Hawthorne will recognize as a good Greek word, remaining the stain- remaining the same, homeostasis. Now this quick survey of the history of physiology and medicine has traced contemporary physiology's legacy.
What does a physiologist do? Based upon what's currently known about the natural world, he asks, how does a muscle cell shorten? How does a neuron conduct an impulse? How does the ear or the brain hear? Beyond these considerations, in which the physiologist is acting as a splitter or a dissector or a, a peeler away of the covering in order to get to the underlying, he is also a synthesizer. As he studies the mechanisms of life, he perceives that they're not isolated and autonomous.
There is a relatedness among those mechanisms and among the organs and systems in which they're found. There's feedback, there's control, there's preservation of constancy within the body as its mechanical components interact. So to the present day physiologist, the human body is a magnificent machine. Dean Wooldridge probably states it as succinctly as anyone in his book Mechanical Man. He says this, thus we have failed to discover any aspect of life, whether related to the origin of organisms or to their physical properties, to behavior, to intelligence, or to consciousness, whose explanation appears today to lie beyond the ultimate capabilities of physical science.
We seem justified in the broadest possible application of what may be called the central thesis of physical biology, that a single body of natural laws operating on a single set of material, material particles completely accounts for the origin and properties of living organisms, as well as non-living aggregations of matter and man-made structures. Accordingly, man is essentially no more than a complex machine. That states it for physiology today. Next on the outline, we will look very briefly at the nature of biblical theism and try now to compare these two.
Every person has a Weltanschauung, a worldview. In James Sire's words, in his book The Universe Next Door, which I heartily recommend to you, a worldview is a set of presuppositions which we hold about the basic makeup of our world. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the theistic worldview was dominant. Arguments and debates in philosophy and science were conducted within the framework of theism. Pertinent propositions of the theistic, or we could say Christian worldview, are these.
God is infinite. He is prime reality, as the philosopher says. He is beyond measure. Secondly, God is personal. He has personality. Thirdly, God is transcendent and immanent. He is beyond us and our world, yet at the same time he is with us. God is omniscient. He is all-knowing. He's the source of all knowledge. God is sovereign. Nothing is beyond his authority and control.
God is good. Goodness is the essence of God's character, expressed in holiness and love. God created the cosmos ex nihilo, out of nothing, to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system. Man is created in God's image. He therefore has personality, intelligence, morality, creativity. History is linear, a meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfillment of God's purposes for man.
So, Christian theism maintains that the universe was created out of nothing by a personal God who is good, who is all powerful, and all knowing. It is he who formed man to have God's image, and therefore to have intelligence, personality, and morality. This brings you to the next point on the outline, which is obvious, I think, at this stage. A Christian who is a physiologist has a dilemma. The theistic worldview was jolted with Copernicus' discovery that the Earth, and we could say here man, was not the center of the universe.
Medieval reality was simply overturned. Newton showed that there were certain forces which governed the motions of particles which make up the universe. The mechanical nature of matter was quickly applied to man himself. In a book called The Broken Image by Matson, the author says, the Copernican revolution dislodged man from the center of the universe. It remained for the Galilean Newtonian revolution to remove him from the universe altogether. And so, for purposes of science, man was removed, except as insensitive body, or more accurately, as mechanism.
The consequences of this displacement have not yet, after three centuries, fully run their course, unquote. A Christian theist believes that God created an, an ordered and orderly universe and created man in his own image to function as a person. Contemporary natural science views the cosmos as an intricate mechanism of cause and effect, a vast perpetual motion apparatus devoid of all purpose. And current physiology considers man to be an enormously complex machine, but a machine nevertheless.
It is at once obvious that a person claiming to be a Christian, to accept and to believe the essential tenets of biblical theism, will experience tension, a genuine tension, if he is also a physiologist, and I do. Can he be genuinely true to his faith and to physiology? Is resolution of this kind of dilemma possible? The next little point in your outline reads a resolution, not the resolution. This is where I am. The naturalism of contemporary physiology claims that matter exists eternally and is all there is.
God does not exist. Man is a complex machine. Personality is an interrelation of chemical and physical properties we do not yet fully understand. Rhodes lists the names of the great men who gave birth to and nurtured the rise of modern science. This reads like a hall of fame of science. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, Faraday, Dalton, on and on and on. And he points out that all of these men were devout Christians. He believes that the original dependence of science on Christian theology is illustrated in an examination of the presuppositions of, of modern science.
That is, what do we hold, um, what are our presuppositions, um, as we attack our science? They believe, and we believe, in an orderly, regular, rational universe, that this orderliness is intelligible to the scientist, and that human reason is reliable. Rhodes says that these men justified their assumptions on the basis of their belief in a personal, rational, and dependable God. Now, with a background like this, it would appear strange that modern science is so closely allied in the public mind with atheism or agnosticism.
Rhodes believes that the change came about as a result of the popularization of science by literary people in the eighteenth century, not the scientists themselves. Rhodes continues. He says, many of the scientists of the seventeenth century had been pious Protestants and Catholics, a skepticism which really had a literary genealogy combined to give the results of the seventeenth century scientific gen- uh, movement a bias which was rarely seen in the scientists themselves, and which Descartes, for example, would have repudiated. Well, I believe it's debatable as to who first promulgated the new religion of scientism.
Scientism is the belief that all truth is scientific truth, and that the sciences give us our best shot at knowing how things really are. However it began, scientism is with us today, and it's espoused by a very significant majority of, uh, physiologists and other scientists. You may recall about a year ago, there was a man here named Dr. Donald Mackay. He attended one service here in Bethany, and he spoke briefly to the congregation. Dr. Mackay is a neurophysiologist, and he is a Christian, and he has written a book that I really can recommend to all of you who want to investigate the subject of, um, science and Christianity.
It's called The Clockwork Image, published by InterVarsity Press. I've listed it on, uh, your paper. Uh, and I'll quote a couple of things from that as we, uh, wind up here. In The Clockwork Image, he states, our working hypothesis is that the brain is capable of being studied as a mechanistic system. In order to explain human behavior, chains of cause and effect can legitimately be sought and found in terms of physics or physiology. The last thing I want to suggest is that there is anything improper about a mechanistic approach as such. However, a mechanistic approach adopted for scientific purposes is being abused if it leads to what he calls machine-mindedness.
So a danger with scientific models is their univers- their universal application to explanations of everything. This is called scientific reductionism, and it presupposes that the scientific model can be universally applied. Mackay has an interesting term for this. He refers to this debunking of alternative explanations as nothing buttery. It's characterized by the notion that by reducing any phenomenon to its components, you not only explain it, but you explain it away. For example, he says, Christians believed the world was created by God.
Science with a capital S showed that really it was nothing but a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Christians thanked God for sending rain and daily bread. Science explained the agricultural cycle as nothing but the workings of an intricate physical mechanism. The fallacy of nothing buttery or scientific reductionism, is illustrated in a famous way by Mackay in his book. He says, suppose an electrician were asked to describe an electric advertising billboard. He proceeds to give a thorough description of the electrical circuitry so that his listeners understand precisely how each light bulb, uh, is activated.
But then somebody says to him that his technical description is incomplete because he didn't mention the message of the advertisement. Mackay's point is that the electrician's account, in its own terms, is complete. What he has not accounted for is the thing as a whole. This is outside of the electrician's term of reference. Mackay says, to me, this is a helpful picture of the kind of connection that there is between the scientific description of the universe and the Christian description. He says, as a scientist, I have the job of helping to build in scientific language at the scientific level as complete a description of the pattern of physical events as I can, regarding no accessible events as exempt from examination.
As a Christian, I find that the very same pattern of events can bear an additional and vital significance as part of the activity of God himself. Science, including physiology, may be regarded as the investigation and communication of natural revelation of God. Dr. Richard Bube, who is a Christian physicist at Stanford University, does not consider science to be an independent method of knowing God, but rather a valid instrument in interpreting revelation, and Mackay agrees with this.
He says, science is not an alternative to God as the source of truth, but it's a specialized way of gathering and discovering patterns in data, which Christians believe to have one and the same source with a capital S. The discipline of science is autonomous in the sense that we need not have explicit theological convictions in order to practice it. Whether it be true or false that all natural happenings have a mechanistic explanation, the notion says nothing, absolutely nothing, either for or against their continual dependence on God in the sense implied by biblical.
You have to go to other portions of scripture for this. Neither does he consider mixed marriages where one person is saved and one isn't. I assume that when Paul's talking here in, in Ephesians, he assumes that everybody is a Christian. You could hardly tell, uh, an unsaved, a boy of an unsaved girl of an unsaved father, a drunkard, to honor your father. It'd be rather difficult to do in any real sense. And so he just assumes that everyone is a Christian and in the normal family relationship. And so he starts off here in the fifth chapter of, pardon me, not the fifth, but the third chapter of Colossians, if you'd like to turn with me to the text of the evening.
Starting at the fourth verse, pardon me, it's, it's, it's, yes, it's, it's three eighteen. Keep getting this mixed up with something. Three eighteen. Uh, Colossians three eighteen. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as it is fit in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and be not bitter against them. Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged. Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye service as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God. And whatsoever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto man, knowing that of the Lord you shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for you serve the Lord Christ.
That he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done, and there is no respect of persons. Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Continue in prayer and watch in the same with thanksgiving, with all, praying all for us, that a God would open unto us a door of utterance to speak the mystery of Christ for which I am also in bonds, that I may make it manifest as I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward those that are without, redeeming the time. Let your speech with be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man. I'm not going to read the fourth chapter, which he sends some greetings to the assembly.
We'll have a word to say about that later. The first admonition here is to wives, and it is to wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as it is fit in the Lord. I think today in many circles, instead of accepting the scripture at face value, such as a passage like this, that people begin immediately to bend every effort to get around the plain teaching of the passage. And I want to go at this, uh, in a little way I never have before. Some time ago at the Institute, Moody, the student council asked my wife and me to take part in a program at nine o'clock at night, after all classes were over, having to do with women's place in the church.
And the format was to have another couple from another school to present more the women's liberation side, you might say, and my wife and I were supposed to present what they called the conservative position. Well, we knew what they meant by that. They meant the position that the assemblies have held down through the years, and most conservative Christians. And so, the way we were to do this, each couple was to have thirty minutes to speak. The wife speak fifteen minutes, the husband fifteen, and then the other side would speak fifteen each, and then we would have about an hour for questions.
Well, we let the other couple speak first, and the wife spoke first, used up her twenty five minutes, and then the husband spoke. Well, when it came our time, I spoke first, and, uh, the students appreciated that, they told me later, and then I let my wife contribute her part, which was probably the best. But I'd like to tell you what this other couple said, the five different arguments that they brought forth to try to get around the plain teaching of scripture that women are supposed to be subject, subject to their husbands and keep silence in the church and, and not teach and all of that.
And I want to show you that that's what people still say today, and I want to answer these arguments. The first thing that they said, that is this other couple, was that women are just as smart as men, they are in no way inferior, and therefore they're equal. And so they went through the annals of history and pointed out great women like Sarah and Hannah, Lois and Eunice, right on down. Well, the answer to that is no one ever questioned the greatness of women, and I think one of the greatest difficulties that we have that we cannot disassociate from our minds, that to submit yourself is somewhat an admission of inferiority or civility.
Of course, it isn't. For a wife to submit herself to her husband and to be submissive in the church is in no way an admission that she is in any way inferior. And just to prove that, you just have to go to another passage where it says that our Lord Jesus Christ submitted himself to the Father. Certainly we know all he wasn't inferior. He is God. I think sometimes we think that a woman that's in submission to her husband is a nobody that sits at home with folded hands, waiting for her husband to come home and give her some orders as to what to do.
And when he says frog, she's not only supposed to jump, she's supposed to say how high. My friend, if you think a virtuous woman is a nobody, you ought to read the thirty first chapter of Proverbs sometime. I was just rereading this the other day to see what a virtuous woman really is. Notice this, she seeketh wool and flax and works willingly with her hands. She's like a merchant ship that brings her food from afar. Does that sound like a wallflower? She rises early while it's yet night and gives meat to her household. She considers a field and buys it.
She's an investor. She's buying property. She stretches out her hand to the poor. She's generous. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness. She looks well to the ways of her household and eats not the bread of idleness. My friend, this is not a nobody. This is quite a woman. And yet it says her children rise up and call her blessed, and they do. Her husband also, and he praises her. And so, our opponents in that debate wasted about ten minutes because we have just as high an opinion of women as they did.
Secondly, they tried to point out that not only does the Bible tell us that women are supposed to be subject to their husbands, but the Bible says all of us are so- supposed to be subject one to another. Well, that it happens to be true because Paul says in Ephesians five twenty one, submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of the Lord. There is a sense in which every Christian is to have a submissive spirit. But I wonder, my friend, if they never noticed that the same man that wrote Ephesians five twenty one, just a little, the next verse says, wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands. And so the apostle evidently didn't consider that mutual submissiveness to be, take the place of what he says later when he says, wives, you be in subjection to your own husbands.
It's in the very next verse. All right, the third effort that they tried to put forth was to show that in the church, all external differences disappear and that we're all equal. And so they clo- quote a verse from Colossians. Therefore, in Christ Jesus, there's neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision, uncircumcision, Barbethean, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, but Christ is all in all. Well, once again, nobody questions that. There is a sense in which everyone is absolutely equal in Christ. Women have their own priesthood.
They can come boldly to the throne of grace. They have access to God. They have benefits of all the privileges, and as far as spiritual privileges are concerned, they have all of them. We never questioned that. But did you notice again that the same man that said that we're all one in Christ and equal in the book of Colossians, seven verses later, quoted the verse that I'm just now discussing, where he said, women, wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands. And so Paul evidently didn't consider the fact that we're equal in Christ to contradict the fact that women are supposed to be in subjection to their husbands.
All right, the fourth argument they put forth, and this is the main one, and this is the one people put forward today, that this whole idea of submission, and may I just add, not to be, uh, crude or harsh or insult anybody, the idea that a woman should have a covering on her head when she comes into the service of the church, they try to show that this was a purely a cultural thing, and that it's not binding upon us today. Now, you know, it's very common to try to argue that about a head covering, and they say, well, in Corinth, the, if a woman didn't wear a something on her head, she was put in the class of a prostitute, which may have been true.
And then they say, well, that isn't binding upon us today. Well, down through the years, the assemblies have held that it is binding. But then they go a step further. If that's not binding, then the whole idea of submission, they say, was a cultural thing, and that we're in a different society and different times, and therefore it's not binding. Well, I'm going to answer that just in a minute. But then the fifth approach they made, the man knew a little bit of Greek, so he spent most of his time using the Greek language to try to get around the plain teaching of scripture.
And you know, that's a very subtle thing to do today. Most people don't know Greek, and so you say, now this is really what the Greek word means, and then read your own meaning into it. Well, I happen to know those Greek words, and they didn't mean what he said they meant. And so you see, he just used the Greek to evade the plain teaching of the scripture. The, the knowing the Greek language adds absolutely nothing to this verse. If you read it in the Greek, you would not learn one single thing. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands. It's just as plain in English as it is in Greek. But I want to go a little further with this cultural thing.
The idea that all of this thing of submission and having a sign that you're under submission was a cultural thing. I'd like to show you that in every passage of scripture where the scriptures teach the position of women, the reasons are eternal. And they're just as binding tonight as they were when they were given. They're not cultural reasons, they're eternal reasons. If you would like to look at some of these, I'm, I'm gonna, I've got them written out, so in First Corinthians, for instance. What is the reason that Paul gives for the position of women?
Well, he says in 11:2, I would have you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of every woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. Now, would you not agree that that is an eternal arrangement? It's based upon the divine order that God has established and never has changed, nor could he change. Would you say tonight that the head of every man is not Christ? Would you want to reverse that or do away with it? Would you say that the head of Christ is not God? Well, those still are binding, aren't they? And then they pick the one out that the head of the woman is the man and say that's cultural.
It is not. There is a divine order that God has established. At the head is God the Father. Christ is subject to the Father. The man and the church are subject to Christ. The woman is subject to her husband, and the children are subject to their parents, and the whole thing stands or falls together. You know, tonight, if you don't think a woman should be in subjection to her husband, well, then neither should children obey their parents. It's the same, part of the same divine order. All right, secondly, in sec- in 1 Timothy, where Paul says in verses eleven and twelve, let the woman learn in all silence with all subjection, but I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
Now, this is more in the assembly. Paul says he does not permit a women- woman to speak. She is to keep silent, and she is not to usurp authority. I heard a person the other day said that that meant that women wouldn't- weren't to holler to other women across the aisle and disturb the service. Well, as far as I know, men shouldn't do that either. But that isn't what he means. He means the women should not take places of authority and do the teaching. Well, someone says that's cultural, and listen to the reasons. For, said Paul, Adam was first formed, then Eve, the order of creation. Has that changed? Did someone suddenly discover that Eve was created first?
The very fact that Adam was created first shows that he is to have the dominant position. Secondly, the order of the fall. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being utterly deceived, the Greek says, was in the transgression. The nature of the fall, has that changed? Has someone suddenly discovered that it wasn't Eve that was first tempted, that really Adam fell? No. And so this principle of woman's place is based upon the nature of creation and the nature of the fall, things that have not changed one bit. Thirdly, in Ephesians five twenty four, therefore, as this church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be subject to their own husbands in everything.
My friend, would you suggest that the church shouldn't be subject to Christ? Isn't that still true? Well, then the other is true. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so women should be subject to their own husbands. Paul says in First Corinthians, and I hope no one will be offended by this, for a man indeed not shouldn't cover his head when he comes into the service because he's the image and glory of God. Has that changed? No. But the woman is the glory of the man, and because the woman is the glory of the man, she is to veil her glory when she comes into the presence of the Lord. For this cause, the woman ought to have power upon her head.
The word power means authority. She should have upon her head some symbol that she's under authority. And Paul says this is because of the angels. Did you know, my friend, that angels look down and watch our worship services? And they note whether we're following the divine order or not? That's just as true today as it ever was. Someone says. this was a local custom. Paul said at the end of this message to the Corinthians, if any man seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.
He means no such custom of arguing about it. But he says, so I ordain in all the churches, not just at Corinth, but in all the churches. Well, enough of that. But I thought I would like to present it that way. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands. Why? Well, it's fit in the Lord. It's the proper thing to do. It befits your position as a Christian woman to be in submission to your husband.
You notice the ad- admonition to the husband is, husbands, love your wives and be not bitter against them. I'm sure you know that this is that highest kind of love that is in a measure subject to the will. It can pick its object. It's not that type of love that is spontaneous and you really don't have any control over. It's agape love, the highest kind of love, the love that God had when he gave his son. Husbands, love your wives. It has an element of the thought of respect in it, but not, not omitting affection. The duty of the husband is to love his wife, and don't think that I'm belittling that commandment.
And I'm quite sure that in most families, if the husband would love the wife as he should, that he would probably find she would have no trouble in being in submission. I think most women would gladly take that position. It's rather strange here that Paul says, be not bitter against your wife. I asked a group of students at Moody, is it customary for a man to get bitter against his wife? Some of the married men said, yes, it is. To get that attitude of bitterness, uh, overly critical, nothing pleases them, saying hurtful and harmful things. I suppose all of us are guilty of that.
Be not bitter against them. You notice here that the duty of children is to obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing to the Lord. The book of Ephesians says that obey your parents because it's right. Well, naturally, if it's right, it pleases the Lord. Ephesians has that passage that says that this commandment to honor your father and the mother is the first commandment that has a promise attached to it, and you read the Ten Commandments, you'll find that's true. The promise back there was that you might live long in the land which the Lord thy God gives you. He doesn't have that here, just simply honor your father and mother, obey them, for it's, it's, it's pleasing to the Lord.
Someone as well said, if children are in a Christian home where the father is living as he should, the wife is mother as she should, there should be absolutely no exceptions to this. A child should obey his parents in everything. They have the experience, they know what is best, far better than he does. It's only natural that they should be obedient. Notice here, fathers, don't provoke your children to anger, lest they be discouraged. Ephesians doesn't say lest they be discouraged, it says bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I think fathers and parents, in general, discourage their children by being too demanding, too severe, expecting too much.
And as one of the commentators that I was reading said, if a child finds that nothing he does wins his father's approval, he can never fit really do anything that he approves of. He quits trying. One time I was driving my car as a school bus in the Panhandle of Texas. Let me advise you people, don't ever do that. I wore out a brand new car for practically nothing, driving through those snow drifts and everything else up there. But I gained some experience. There was a young man that I was picking up. He was a boy of about fifteen, a bright young fella. One day he showed me his report card.
He had about a ninety five in a subject. I said, that's fine. I'm sure you're glad to go and show this to your dad. And he looked rather depressed and he said, no, he'd want to know why I didn't make a hundred. Well, that's exactly what this means, don't you see? Don't provoke your children to anger and discouragement because you can be too demanding. You know, some of these things we learn when it's too late. Most of my good advice is when my children are raised and gone. I wish I had a lot of things to do over, but it's too late. Just trust the Lord will make up for some of these lacks. You notice here, servants, obey in all things your masters.
Rather interesting that the longest section of all of this is given over to servants. And let me say that a servant in that day was a slave. He was not like somebody working for wages today. Sometimes we bring these things about master and servant and apply it to management and labor. Well, the parallel is there a little bit, but not very much. A slave in those days was a slave. He was the absolute mercy of his master, who could do anything he wanted to him. If he ran away, the master could have him actually put to death. And you'll get what Paul says. Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye service, not just when they're looking, not as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, that is, with one motive, fearing God.
And notice, whatever you do, servants, do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men. I think it's sad in our country that years ago people used to take pride in their work, and they put something out and they wanted it to last. They wanted it to be r- made right. Today, it seems that the quickest way you can put it out and get it on the market, the better. You don't want it to last. You want it to wear out, so they'll have to buy another one. The story is told of an old shoe cobbler in olden days. It was beating by the hour upon a pair of shoes, the soles, and someone said, you don't have to do that.
You could put half the labor in and get the same price, and he remarked that he was doing it for the Lord. And you notice here that he says that whatever you do, and these are servants, hardly what we would call full-time Christian work, whatever you do, you shall receive a reward of the inheritance. That means connected with the inheritance. And so not just what we would call, uh, spiritual service get a reward, but even that secular labor, if done conscientiously, will get a reward. Some time ago, I made the sad mistake of signing up to deliver telephone books.
Now let me tell you, don't ever do that either. Drive a school bus in Texas before you do that. Well, I had no idea what was involved in delivering these telephone books, but the ad in the paper looked pretty good. I had a couple of children, David and Janice, they were going to help me. And so we went down and picked up the telephone books. There must have been two hundred of them. And so about the first hundred and ninety we delivered real fast, but you know, we could not find that last ten. And I drove up and down that highway for hours, and they said, let's go home. I said, no, we're going to deliver these telephone books. We took the job, and we're going to deliver them.
And we stayed with it, and I think we delivered all but one of them. Yeah, we could have... When I got home, I think we got paid twenty dollars for that. And David said, well, he thought he ought to have ten of it. Jana said, well, if he gets ten, I ought to have ten. And so I ended up giving them nine apiece, and I ended up with two dollars, and my expenses were about five dollars, so that ended my experience of delivering telephone books. But the point I'm making is that, you know, if I take a job delivering books, I want to deliver them, don't you? I want to deliver all of them, not take ten of them back and say I couldn't find it. We can find it if we look long enough.
We found most of them. Well, a final word here is to masters. Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal. Be fair, because you're not the final authority. You have a master in heaven. Someone has said you can judge the character of a man by how he treats his servant, how he treats those under him. There's something to that. I'm going to very briefly touch these last two points. I think that in the next verses we have somewhat our relationship to the world, and I think it is continuing in prayer, walking in wisdom, and witnessing in word.
You notice in verse two, continue in prayer and watch in the same with thanksgiving. We live in a sinful world, and we need to pray. And Paul says two things, continue in prayer, that's persistence, but also watch in the same. I think that means to be awake and to be alert and to be urgent. Did you ever go to a prayer meeting where it lasted for any length of time? Sometimes we have days of prayer at Moody. We've had them in other places. Wheaton probably has them. Did you ever sit in a room and listen to people pray for an hour? Well, about after ten minutes, you'll probably find your mind wandering.
After fifteen, you'll probably drop off and catch a few winks of sleep, and the rest of it, you'll sit there in a semi-daze. Well, that's hardly what it means when it says to watch in prayer. It means to be urgent. You know, if you had a child that was at the point of death, and you're praying for that child to get well, you don't sleep, you get in, in business then. James says the fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much, a fervent prayer. Continue incident in prayer, watching in the same, and then walk in wisdom toward those that are without, redeeming the time.
Those without are the unsaved, outside the pale of the church. You say we don't have any responsibility to them. Yes, we do. Walk in wisdom toward those that are without. That means to live a life that's orderly and upright, such it will not bring any reproach upon you or the name of Christ. So live that your unsaved people can have a certain respect for you. You won't turn them off, as we say, and then you'll have a chance to properly witness to them. And he says, redeeming the time. Redeem means to buy up the opportunities. Take advantage of every opportunity to witness. Buy up the opportunities.
Finally, he says, let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man. Witnessing in word. Let your speech be with grace. Let your speech be gracious, but let it be seasoned with salt. I've given quite a bit of thought to what this means and read a lot of commentaries on it. I think it means this, that salt does two things. It makes food more palatable, and it preserves from corruption, as you know that. But salt is rather sharp. It's bitter, is it not?
If you get too much salt on something, it rather ruins it. And so the apostle says, in dealing with people, let your speech be gracious, but don't let it become insipid. Don't be so gracious that you don't say anything for fear of offending somebody. Let it be seasoned with salt that it might help somebody. When I had ministry in Memphis, Tennessee, it was about the time that there was a great deal of persecution of the Jews throughout the world. And so a certain woman in the church made the suggestion that my church write a letter to every Jewish synagogue in the town and tell them that we had a high regard for the Jews and we w- did not join in this persecution.
Well, it fell to my lot to write the letter, and so I did. And so I said a few gracious things. I said, we realize the contribution of the Jewish people to our great country. Uh, we know this and that, and we want you to know that we are not in favor of this anti-Semitism. But as I about got ready to mail that letter, I said, you know, I shouldn't just send this insipid letter. I'm giving the impression that these people are one with us, and I ought to get in a word of testimony. And so I added a paragraph. Nevertheless, in spite of all of this, if you do not receive Jesus Christ as your savior, we believe it's your loss.
I put it as graciously as I could, but I got that word of testimony in. Well, I submitted my letter to the board of elders, and lo and behold, they took out every bit of the salt. Any word of testimony that might have done some good, they said, we better eliminate this, we're going to offend these people. And so the insipid, saltless letter went to the synagogues, and I'm sure it did not one bit of good. Yes, let your speech be with grace. You don't have to be offensive. Some Christians think they're supposed to offend people. No, it's the gospel that's supposed to offend if there's any offense, not you, not me.
But let it be with grace, seasoned with salt. The last chapter of this book is not really our life in the assembly. It's sort of a misnomer, but Paul just sends greetings to some people. I'd like you just note some of these. He says in verse seven, all my state shall Tychicus declare unto you. Now, Tychicus is the one that took this letter to the church at Colossae, and along with it he took the book of Ephesians. He was the messenger, Tychicus. And then you note down in verse nine, Onesimus. Now, Onesimus is that runaway slave that Paul was sending back to his master Philemon. He was mentioned here.
Notice he mentions in verse ten, Marcus, that's John Mark, who Paul wouldn't take on his second missionary journey. Mark was with Paul. Then he mentions some other people, but you, he says in verse, uh, 11, all of these people that I've mentioned so far are of the circumcision. Now that means they were Jews. This is interesting. But later on, down in verse fourteen, he says, Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas greet you. That would lead us to believe that Luke was not a Jew. If he had have been, he would have been listed with those that he calls the circumcision. Don't you see? Having listed all of those, these are the Jews, later Luke.
If that is true, and I assume that it is, Luke is the only Gentile to write a book of the New Testament. All the rest of them were Jews. But then you notice he says Luke, the beloved physician. Luke was a doctor. That Luke was living in the city of Troas. And when Paul came through on his second missionary journey, he joined Paul, left his practice, I would assume, and became Paul's private physician the rest of his life. Rather a sacrifice, wasn't it? So from that time on, he's with Paul right up to his death. He says in verse fourteen, Demas greets you. No other word said about Demas.
Maybe already he had begun to backslide, and so Paul's going to say a few years later, Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world. He salutes various people, Laodicea, Nymphas, but notice verse sixteen: When this epistle is read among you, that's Colossians, you cause it to be read in the church of the Laodiceans. You see, these are circular letters. You read this letter, Colossae, and then you take it over to Laodicea. And then he says, and that you likewise read the epistle from Laodicea. It's not to Laodicea, it's from there.
And some have thought, and I think with good reason, that that might well be the book of Ephesians. That these letters are sort of circulating in opposite directions. And so the Colossian church takes this letter over to Laodicea for them to read and picks up that message from them, which would probably be the book of Ephesians, and then they take it back and read it. It says in verse seventeen, t- tell Archippus to take heed to the ministry, and then this rather sad verse, the salutation by the hand of me, Paul, remember my bonds. And I think maybe as Paul reached to take that quill, for he signed his name in all of his letters so they'd know they were genuine.
As he took the writing instrument to sign his name, he noticed that chain, and he so he said, remember my bonds. Grace be with you, amen. And so Paul concludes the great book of Ephesians, and so do we. Book of Colossians, that's right. Well, any further comment from anyone? Ready to dismiss? Thank you. It's a great letter.
It's a much needed letter today because if there's anything we need to know, it's the person and work of Christ, who he is and what he's done. We need to know the position that we have in this dispensation, complete in him, and therefore we need, then we need to know how to practice these things in our personal life, in the family, in our relationship to the world, and then something about in the assembly.