Rose

Hi everyone. I’ve really enjoyed reading through your blog Cheryl, and hats off to you. I think you do a great job. I guess you can say that I’m in the middle of the road. I have very “old-fashioned” beliefs as far as being a Christian is concerned. I believe the Bible is the perfect, inspired Word of God and I do believe that Jesus is the one and *only* way to the Father in Heaven and that you can only be saved and have eternal life through Him alone. A lot of my other beliefs tend to be strongly “conservative” I guess you can say. I’m strongly anti-abortion and I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman, etc. *But,* I also tend to be a real outsider in a way because even though I do have these strong beliefs, I do *not* have a lot of the traditionally comp beliefs that most others with these same beliefs tend to have. I do believe that Phoebe was very likely a deaconess in the early church and I do believe that Priscilla was a pastor of a home church, facts that a lot of comps like to try and sweep under the rug and overlook to suit their own purposes (which of course is what they accuse egals of doing, but I think the comps are a lot guiltier of it than they realize. I think that Deborah is a very strong example of God putting a woman in a position of spiritual authority over His people, and if God would do that in the stricter Old Testament days then why wouldn’t He do it in the New Testament days and the Age of Grace, right? I personally think that the thought of women being able to think and do things like earning degrees and having careers and being doctors or microbiologists or — gasp!– even ministers of churches, in *addition* to the fact that we have the ability to carry and give birth to children and bring forth new life, really intimidates the heck out of men, so they want to try to take our mental capabilities away from us and restrict them to crocheting and learning new recipes (*rolleyes*). If only more of them would remember that God made them physical protectors and gave them more physical strength than women and the fact that they have their unique gifts from God as well so there’s no reason for intimidation, but…oh well, we do live in a fallen world, *sigh.*

Anyway, I just wanted to introduce myself. I’ve been a lurker here for quite some time and I really love your blog, Cheryl. It’s a great place for someone “in the middle of the road,” I guess you can say, whose opinions of theology don’t seem to fit in too many places in the Church nowadays. It seems that the churches who do hold to truer Biblical beliefs are chauvinistic as heck when it comes to women being in positions of leadership, especially within the church, and the churches who *do* treat women as equals are apostate as heck and ridiculously liberal in their beliefs! *Facepalm!* So yeah, it’s really hard for somebody like me to find a place in the Church where she feels like she belongs. So thanks so much for this blog!

Okay, now that I’ve made proper introductions, I have a couple of issues about God supposedly preferring males over females that I really want to ask you guys about and find out your opinions, if you all can help me with this. As a woman, I’ve struggled with questions about these two things for a while now and have sort of wondered if God didn’t prefer males to females. The two things I want to ask about are:

1.) Whenever angels appeared in human form on earth, they always assumed male form. A certain minister I like to listen to (even though he’s strictly comp) does like to harp on this sometimes, I think when he’s speaking out against homosexuality. I think he says that Satan has had a lot to do with how “effeminate” pictures of angels have become nowadays and that that’s because Satan is trying to take away masculinity from men or something like that. It’s always bothered me that angels have always taken male form in the Bible when they’ve appeared to human beings. If females really *are* equal to God in His sight, why are there no female angels? When God talks about the angels appearing before Him in Job, why are they “the sons of God”? If God loves women equally to men, why can there not be angelic “sons AND daughters of God”? That kind of suggests to me that women are second-class citizens in God’s eyes, but I know that cannot be the case, so somebody please help me there!
2.) Whenever there were births announced by angels, why is it always the birth of *males*??? Why didn’t God ever send angels to announce to Mary’s parents, for example, that they would have a daughter who would be that one special woman that *every* Jewish woman wanted to be, who would be the mother of the foretold Messiah? John the Baptist’s birth was foretold. Most importantly, Jesus’s birth was foretold. Why couldn’t Mary’s birth have been foretold? Why was it always male babies that got to be foretold? That, too, kind of suggests that God doesn’t consider female babies to be as important as male babies.

Many thanks for your patience with the lengthy post!

Rose (BTW, “Rose” isn’t my real name; I’m just uncomfortable sharing my real name over the Internet and I love roses so I chose the nickname “Rose” is that’s okay.)

Much love to all my brothers and sisters in Christ here! 🙂