Monday 8 November 2010

Adam's Role Towards His Wife Before and After the Fall

God commanded the man (Adam) saying that he should not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). It was only after that - beginning in the next verse (verse 18) - that we are told that God made a wife for the man. The Scripture doesn't say that God repeated His commandment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to the woman.

Presumably the man was meant to inform his wife of the Lord's commandment. And the man evidently did so faithfully, for when the serpent sought to find-out whether the man had done so, the woman was able to answer that God had indeed said that they should not eat of it. Her husband had told her.

It's a man's duty to shield his wife by furnishing her with the commandments of God. The tempter may test whether the man has done so. A wife may be vulnerable if she listens to a third party who causes her to question God's Word in the mouth of her husband and to act independently of God's Word in the mouth of her husband.

This is why Paul said he did not suffer (allow) a woman to teach a man (that is, her husband) nor to usurp authority over her husband - for the wife was first deceived, not the man.

That was the man's role towards his wife before the fall. Even before the fall, he was already called her husband - spiritually as well as naturally.

But after the fall, a consequence of Eve's behaviour was that aside from the man being her spiritual and physical husband, the relationship now bore the curse of a somewhat subject-ruler relationship. Thus by acting independently, Eve got the very opposite of what she thought she might gain.

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