HOW TO HONOR OUR HEAD – 1 Corinthians 11:2-16

Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on June 2, 2019 under 2019 |

Bethany Bible Church Sunday Message; June 2, 2019 from 1 Corinthians 10:23-11:1

Theme: We must honor the Lord’s pattern of headship in the way that we worship in His household.

(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).

The Lord Jesus said something remarkable about Himself in John 5:30. And we need to allow it to sink deeply into our hearts before we can really understand and live out His call upon our lives. He said;

I can of Myself do nothing. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is righteous, because I do not seek My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me (John 5:30).

Think of that, dear brothers and sisters! Our Lord and Master—our glorious Savior—the King of kings and Lord of lords—was consciously submitted to the Father’s will. Even though He is the Second Person of the Trinity, and is co-eternal and co-equal with the Father in divine essence and glory—and even though He is, as the Bible tells us, the Creator and Sustainer of all that is—and even though it is to Him that every knee will bow, and Him that every tongue will confess as Lord—He did not seek or do His own will. He was submitted to the will of the Father. We owe our salvation to the fact that the Lord Jesus was faithfully submitted to the Father’s will and did as the Father told Him. It was in the garden—just before going to the cross for us—that He prayed to the Father and said, “not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).

There exists, then, an eternal pattern of divine ‘headship’ within the relationship of the Triune Godhead. The Father is eternally the authoritative ‘head’ of the Son; and the Son is eternally submitted to the Father’s ‘headship’ over Him. And our Lord Jesus never objected to this. He never spoke against it. He never resisted it. He never declared Himself to be liberated from it. Rather, He faithfully and willingly submitted to this order of headship. He is now—and ever will be—lovingly submitted to His Father as His divine ‘head’.

And in this, our Lord Jesus sets the example that is to be followed by you and me in His household of faith—He, whom the Bible tells us is “head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22-23).

If we want to live as He wants us to live—and if we wish to worship in His household in a way that will please Him—then we must keep ourselves in submission to our position in the divine order of ‘headship’ that His Father has ordained, just as Jesus Himself is.

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Now; this—it seems to me—is what stands behind one of the most controversial sections of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. But if we keep our love for the Lord Jesus first in our heart, and keep the example of our Lord’s submission to the divine order of headship always in our mind, then this passage will become far less of a struggle to us.

The apostle Paul had been writing to the Corinthian Christians about many of the problems that they were having in their life together as a church family. And in Chapter 11, he took up a new subject and wrote;

Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you. But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. For if a woman is not covered, let her also be shorn. But if it is shameful for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered. For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man. For this reason, the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman, nor woman independent of man, in the Lord. For as woman came from man, even so, man also comes through woman; but all things are from God. Judge among yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him? But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given to her for a covering. But if anyone seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God (1 Corinthians 11:2-16).

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Now; there are many aspects of this passage that are bound up in a particular situation in Paul’s time. And I don’t believe it would wise to be too dogmatic about some of the details. But I think that there are some general things about it that we can be sure of.

First of all, we can be sure that it is not a passage that is meant to teach—in any way—the superiority of one gender over the other. We know this from verses 11-12; where Paul makes it clear that man is not independent of woman, nor woman independent of man “in the Lord”. Just as Eve was made from the body of Adam, so is every man—from then on—made from woman. And so is every woman, by the way! And all are made by God; so that all stand of equal value before Him and before one another as made in the image of God. We all—women and men—must personally trust the Lord Jesus in the same way; and we are all equally saved by faith in Him.

Second, this is a passage that assumes the full truthfulness and reliability of the story that is told to us in Genesis 1-2. It is in those first few chapters of the Bible that we’re told about the beginning of humanity, and about humanity’s essential nature. It’s there that we’re taught that humanity is—by God’s design—an interdependent duality. When God said, “Let Us make man in Our image”, the result of His creative act was not one being but two. “In the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” In order for humanity to be truly ‘humanity’, it must be composed of both ‘male and female’—both in distinction, but both in mutual dependency. It can’t be that one is essential and the other merely optional. The two go together equally to fully constitute humankind.

But what Paul wrote in our passage this morning will not make sense to us unless we also remember the Genesis story of how God went about forming the two. First, He formed Adam from the dust of the earth, and breathed life into him. Then, He brought all the creatures that He made to Adam so that Adam could name them. Adam had to have been a man of great genius in order to be able to look at each creature, understand its essential nature, and capture that nature in a name. But as he examined and named the animals carefully, the Bible tells us that none of them was found to be ‘a helper comparable to him’. It is my belief that God allowed this so that Adam could search and feel a deep sense of longing within himself—as if half of himself was missing. And I believe that once Adam was fully aware of this painful lack in himself, it was then that God caused a deep sleep to fall upon him, and God took one of Adam’s ribs and formed the first woman—Eve. She was not taken from his head to be over him, nor taken from his foot to be under him, but taken from his side to be the perfect complement to him.

And she was indeed the perfect complement to him! She was the half of him that was missing. When God brought her to Adam, Adam declared,

“This is now bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23) …

and as the original language suggests, he was very excited when he said this! It was his favorite of God’s creations to get to name! Can you blame him?

Now; these things need to be kept in mind when we read our passage from 1 Corinthians. And I’ll add one more thing. This passage requires that we be the best ‘detectives’ we can be when we read it. Paul was dealing with a specific problem in it; but he didn’t come right out and say what the problem was. I believe, though, that there are some clues. You see one clue in the fact that he talks about the ‘traditions’ or ‘teachings’ that he had passed on to them; and also in the fact that some were being ‘contentious’ about some of these traditions or teachings. You see another clue in the fact that he wrote quite a bit in it about how there were certain outward symbols of ‘headship’ that were not being observed or respected in the public worship of the church—in times of prayer or in speaking forth God’s word. And I think you see yet another very important clue in what he says in verse 13; “Judge among yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?” And when we put it all together, I believe we see that the problem was that some of the women within the church family were rejecting the concept of ‘headship’; and were expressing this rejection in the church by stepping forward to pray and to prophesy without regard to the outward symbols of that headship.

It is my personal conviction that the main issue is not the symbols themselves. Such things as the length of hair, or the covering of heads, were culturally determined symbols for that time; and they vary from one culture to another. But the real issue was the rejection of the idea of humble submission to a divine order of headship in the household of faith—however that headship may be culturally symbolized. In another time or place, it may be that ti was symbolized by the covering or uncovering of the head. In our time and culture, it may be symbolized by the wearing of a wedding ring, and by the wife taking the last name of her husband.

But I believe that the main point of this passage is that—whatever the temporal, outward symbols of that headship may be—we must honor the Lord’s pattern of headship in the way that we worship in His household of faith.

We must always be careful to honor that divinely appointed order of headship from out of a reverent love for and submission to our Lord; because as we saw at the beginning of our time together this morning, our Lord Himself did so faithfully.

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So then; with all of this in mind, let’s look again at this passage. First, we see that Paul spoke in verses 2-3 of the principle of headship itself.

Paul began by saying something very encouraging. He wrote, “Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you” (v. 2). By and large, the believers in Corinth were being faithful to the things that he had passed on to them. In many of the things they dealt with as a church family—and in many of the patterns of church life they followed—they remembered Paul and the things that he had taught them. But it seems that not everyone did so. There were some who, apparently, were resisting the things he taught and the practices that he passed on to them. And so, he went on to affirm certain timeless truths behind those practices; “But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God” (v. 3).

What exactly does the word ‘head’ mean as Paul is using it here? I believe that we can get a good idea of it from what a literal head does to a literal body. It is that part of the body which provides leadership and direction. It is that which gives life and nurture to the rest of the body. Many people have suffered the loss of every other part of the body you can think of, and yet have gone on to live meaningfully. But no one can live meaningfully—or in any other way—after the loss of their head.

And that helps us understand what Paul means by the ‘head’ is in a figurative sense. It is that which provides life, and leadership, and direction to something or someone. The greatest example is Jesus Himself. The Bible teaches us that Jesus is “the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:18). It is from Him—as its head—that “all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God” (Colossians 2:19). We can never thrive spiritually if we are separated from our precious, divine head! And did you know that as its head, our Lord Jesus would now never be complete without the church? He has so submitted Himself to the Father, and has so united Himself to His redeemed people, that He has now been given “to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all things” (Ephesians 1:22-23). The church—His body—is now the fullness of Him who is its head!

Did you know that the relationship between the husband and the wife is designed by God to be a picture of the greater reality of our Lord’s relationship with His church? Listen to what Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:22-33;

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband (Ephesians 5:22-33).

So; Paul wanted to make sure his readers knew that the head of the Lord Jesus is the Father. And the head of every man is the Lord Jesus. And the head of the wife is her husband. I believe if we all faithfully keep this divinely-given order of headship in mind—and if we are careful to imitate our Lord Jesus in our submission to it—we’ll never have a problem with what Paul went on to say.

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So; looking again at this passage, what did Paul then go on to say? He next presented his readers with how that principle of headship was to be carefully practiced and expressed in the worship of the church family. In verses 4-6, he wrote, “Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. For if a woman is not covered, let her also be shorn. But if it is shameful for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered.”

Now; I happen to believe that it is still a culturally proper thing for a man to remove his hat during times of prayer or times of reading the scripture. But what about women? Are we going to pass out scarfs in church? Of course not. I believe that it would be a very serious mistake to try to impose such rules upon a church family living in our time and in our culture. But I believe that there is a timeless principle being taught to us; and that principle is demonstrable respect for God’s design for headship. When a man worships in the household of God, he should do so in a way that meaningfully honors the headship that the Lord Jesus has over him—however that honor is culturally displayed. And likewise, when a woman worships in the household of God, she should do so in a way that meaningfully honors the headship role that the Lord Jesus has given to her husband over herself—however that honor is culturally displayed. The man should not dishonor his spiritual head in the household of faith, nor should the woman dishonor her spiritual head in how she worships.

Now I believe that this passage teaches us that a woman may freely pray or read the Scriptures in the gathering of the God’s people—so long as she does not do so in a way that violates God’s appointed order of headship. But what do we do with that strange statement about how a woman uncovering her head is like a woman who’s head is shaved? Here again, I believe we’re looking at a culturally meaningful symbol for that time. For a woman, in those days, to shave her head or closely cut her hair was a radical act that symbolically defied the differences between men and women. And I think that what Paul is saying here is that if she is going to throw off the symbol of her husband’s headship, she is heading down a road of shame and might as well go all the way with it. But however we understand this, the main point remains the same. We should not cast off the meaningful symbols of headship; but honor God’s appointed roles for us in His divine order of things—and especially do so when we worship in His house.

And then, notice how Paul went on to point to the theology that stands behind all this. He took his readers back to where we went earlier—back to Genesis 1-2. In verses 7-9, he wrote; “For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man.” God created humankind as both male and female; and so both are made in His image, and both are of equal value in His sight.

This should never be misunderstood as a question of worth; because as Paul stressed in verses 11-12, “Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman, nor woman independent of man, in the Lord. For as woman came from man, even so man also comes through woman; but all things are from God.” But a reverence to God also needs to include a reverent respect for the ordered way in which He made the first man and the first woman—not as a matter of worth, but as a declaration of obedience. The man ought to keep his head uncovered in order to honor the fact that he was made in the image of God; and the woman, in the same spirit of reverence toward God, ought to bear the symbol of her husband’s headship over her—and all because Jesus Himself honored the Father’s headship over Himself.

And notice verse 10. Paul wrote, “For this reason the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.” I believe that what Paul is reminding us of here is that the angels of God are charged with the awesome responsibility of watching over and protecting the worship of God. They themselves worship Him; and they are very much interested in our worship of Him too. We are a small country church; but I believe that when we gather together for worship, angels are present and observing what we do. That’s a remarkable thing to think about, isn’t it? The Bible tells us that they are “ministering spirits sent forth to minister for those who will inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14). So, no doubt, they seek to fulfill that ministry in our times together for worship.

Did you know that the Bible even tells us that the angels cover themselves when they appear before God in worship? In Isaiah 6:2, the prophet Isaiah was given a vision of the Lord in His heavenly temple; and he said that the angelic beings around the throne had six wings each; “with two he covered himself, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.” They reverently express their submission to God in His presence. No wonder, then, that Paul stressed that—whenever a man or a woman stands up to pray or prophesy—they too should bear the symbols of submission to God’s order of headship. To defy that is a horrible thing to do in the house of worship; and especially when such holy beings are present to observe that worship.

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Now; in this passage, it seems that Paul wrote with particular emphasis on how the women are to do this. And I believe that this was because—in this particular situation—a certain number of women in the Corinthian church were particularly resisting the headship order. And that’s why Paul wrote in verse 13, “Judge among yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?”

Paul was calling upon the Corinthian believers to honor God’s order of headship in the gathering of worship. And so, he calls upon them to consider the evidence for why it was proper that they do so. He first wrote in verses 14-15, “Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him? But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given to her for a covering.” There is, of course, a certain amount of cultural standards involved in this. What constitutes the culturally acceptable length of hair for a man in one time period is different in another. (Just go back and look at your high-school yearbook sometime, dear brothers!) And likewise, what constitutes culturally acceptable short hair for a woman in one time period is different in another. But generally speaking—and even throughout the centuries—long, beautiful hair has been considered the property of a woman, and not of a man.

I don’t believe that Paul was laying down what is or isn’t acceptable hairstyles; and I certainly don’t believe we should ever try to do so either. Rather, Paul was saying that our natural convictions about this are pointing to an eternal principle; and that we should honor the spirit of that principle. The man honors his head by being uncovered and the woman honors her head by being covered—and both out of reverence toward God. Hair is just one way this is demonstrated. When we’re gathered together in the household of faith, we should always be faithful to remember and respect that headship order—however that headship order is culturally symbolized. And he closes with this in verse 16; “But if anyone seems to be contentious, we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God.” What such custom? The custom of throwing off the outward symbols of that headship.

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We live today in a time when all such concepts of ‘headship’ and ‘distinction’ are being rebelled against and self-consciously cast aside. But let’s not be like the unbelieving world in its rebellion against God’s design. Let’s always remember the reverent behavior of our Lord Jesus. He was faithful to honor the headship of His Father; and to submit to the divine order that the Father established.

Whenever we come into His house of worship—whenever we pray together to Him—whenever we join together in taking up His holy word—let’s make sure we do just as He did.

EA