Scripture:
the Ultimate Rorschach Test
(An excerpt from the book The Divinity Code)
Wives, submit yourselves unto
your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife,
even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their
own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also
loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse
it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a
glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it
should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their
own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated
his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:
for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause
shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and
they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning
Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love
his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.
(Ephesians 5:22-33)
Starting a book on
gender with these verses is very risky. Some readers may have already applied
their assumptions and put it down. They are thinking, “Oh, I know where this
discussion is going. I have heard that all before and I am tired of hearing it.”
But, maybe you do not know where this book is going. So, if I may ask you a
question? After reading these verses, what do you see? What stands out in your
mind as the high points of this passage? Like a Rorschach Test,[1]
what one sees in Scripture says more about the reader— particularly his heart
toward God— than perhaps any psychological test.
Think about your
favorite make and model car. Isn’t it beautiful? When thinking of it, what do
you see? Do you see a conglomeration of nuts, bolts, grease, oil, metal, paint,
cloth or do you see the finished car standing there, just waiting for an
aggressive drive on a winding country road? Obviously, any pile of nuts, bolts,
tires, steel, and engine parts could be just about any car, even the proverbial
1952 “Get Out and Push.” If you see only the mechanics (requirements) in these
verses: “submit to your husband, love your wife, etc, etc,” you may be missing
the whole point. Seeing only the “nuts and bolts” of marriage is like only
seeing the nuts and bolts of the Ferrari (or was it a Corvette) that is
pictured in your mind. Ok, let us put aside our preconceived ideas about what
is here, step back and take another look.
Read the verses
again. What do you see? Do you see the romance? Yes, these verses are about
romance and not just any romance, but the romance upon which all other romances
are based. It is the romance where heaven kisses earth. Yes, passion drives the universe, and it is
behind the meaning of everything; there is no practical reason for the
existence of anything without romance. A self-existent God does not need,
neither does He desire, anything for purely practical reasons. We could ask
(tongue in cheek) what do you give the God who already has everything? There is
only one thing He wants: you. All of you. And not because you can fill some
void, but because He is full of passion for human kind.
All commandments
and all rules are about forming the
cosmic romance in the same way that nuts, bolts, tires, cloth (or leather), and
electronics make up the Ferrari (or the Corvette). To focus on the constricting
nature of nuts and bolts is to lose the greater picture of the end of all
things: romance. On the other hand,
to toss out any nuts and bolts
of romance is to compromise the whole, in the same way removing the lug-nuts
from the wheels cause the wheels to come off. No intelligent car owner despises
the lug-nuts because they, in themselves, are not romantic, but he understands
they contribute to the romantic experience (love affair) he has with his car,
and for that he values them immensely.
The mystery of the universe is about experiencing God’s
largess, His goodness, and His love, but that cannot happen unless we perceive
it.
The light of the body is the eye:
if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if
thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matthew
6:22-23)
Here is where our
hearts are revealed, this is the Rorschach Test: that if we only see the
severity of the commandments in Scripture and think them restricting or
laborious, we totally miss God’s heart and fall for Satan’s trap, as Eve had
done! And we miss the whole point of God making a man and gifting him with a
woman to marry in the first
place. As the Scripture says, “if the eye is evil” (to look on disparagingly)
then you have nothing but darkness. Commandment is not an end in itself,
but a means to an end. Commandments are integral parts of a much bigger picture
and that portrait is what nearly every classic western movie portrays: romance. All of God’s commandments are to preserve and
facilitate all types of relationship, including romance. They are the
components (nuts and bolts) that come together to structure a romantic
relationship between Christ and His Church. To be clear, the commandments of
God are holy because they issue from eternal realities in God and are in essence
part of His very nature, but we must never separate God’s commandments from
God’s heart. When you misjudge God’s motives, then you misjudge the meaning of God’s
laws. God’s commandments are a part of the romance in the same way that the vows
spoken at weddings— “forsaking all others”— allows for true romance to blossom.
Law is the nuts and bolts of love
because it preserves relationship.
Where did this
romance begin? In the Garden of Eden. With the staging of this divine romance—between God and Man— in the Garden of Eden, not everyone was
happy about it. There was one, the quintessential anti-romantic, who seeks to
destroy all romance by deconstructions of every kind. He is the killjoy, the
spoilsport who seeks to wreck the story for all romantics. He disassembles the
Ferrari and forces it into dysfunction and malfunction at every turn. As a
culture, we are viewing all of the parts spread out over the garage floor, with
no idea where to start putting it back together. Some are picking up a single
piece of romance (sex) and they are pretending that it is the whole car. This
only leaves emotional carnage, disappointment, and disgust.
Before getting
into decoding gender— finding its meaning and origin— as we set out to do, let
us first draw a picture of what is the state of things now, not from the close
up point of view, there are many books that do that, but from the cosmic
perspective.
[1] German
psychologist Hermann Rorschach created a physiological test in 1921 whereby
patients were diagnosed based on the patients’ descriptions of what they saw in
random inkblots.
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