Jamin Bradley

Elaine A. Heath rightly declares that patriarchy is “the first systemic evil found in the Bible.” Men weren’t made to rule over women. Women weren’t made to serve men.

After God had created the world, the only thing in the whole of creation that was identified as “not good” was that man was alone. Since goodness was the primary quality God sought to instill in all created things, he set out to fix the situation.

God didn’t take Adam’s rib to make Eve—he took Adam’s side. The picture is of a man split into two equal halves, both empowered by God with the same authority and mission. When God called Eve a “helper,” he did not mean that she was subservient to him. The word does not imply rank. Indeed, God himself is also called a helper in the Bible.

This coequal partnership between women and men is the world that God intended. But sin had a different plan for us.

After Adam and Eve sin, the first thing they note is their sexual differences. Not long after, God informs them of how their gendered interactions are going to get twisted from the original design: “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Or as Heath rephrases, “The consequences of their alienation would now include a male drive to dominate women, and women’s struggle with enmeshment and fear.”

Much of the Bible is the story of how this systemic evil has played out in lives across generations, and we have made the grievous error of reading such narratives as righteous living rather than as sin. Our understanding here has been crooked since the beginning, and every woman can testify to this particular sin’s mark on their life in some way.

As Bible scholar Carolyn Custis James says, “Jesus was on a mission to restore the world God created and loves deeply. He didn’t come to make slight adjustments to the way things work in a fallen world. It was not his intention to offer men a kinder, gentler patriarchy. His mission was to turn this fallen world right side up.”

Christians, let’s remember that we have the ability and the mission to overcome sin. There are so many ways that sin twists our world systemically. To follow Jesus well, we will often find ourselves walking against the flow of everyday life. May we always do so with the fruit of the Spirit.