“I Hate What God Wants to Make Me” (1st Peter 3:3-4)

The radical feminist movement, which dates back some 50 to 60 years, has so thoroughly brainwashed succeeding generations of women, that many now hate the very virtues that make them pleasing to God.

Many career oriented, upwardly mobile women, can never see themselves in the beauty and spiritual simplicity in which God desires to see them. Children of this age, and I say “children” because everyone who is not in their late 80’s or 90’s has been nurtured on the teachings of this age. This makes us “children” of this age.

Women of this age, for the most part, have decried the very godly virtues that would identify them as being feminine. 1st Peter 3:6 reads that “Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him ‘lord.’”

Women of this age would call Sara a “fool” and say that she must have been from “way back in the woods somewhere.” Others would argue that the Bible is showing its age; it is no longer suitable for modern consumption.

What is not argued among women in our day, is that far from being palatable, the attitude and demeanor with which Sara addressed Abraham is just plain unacceptable. After all, women reason to themselves, “we make our own money” and we “have our own minds.” This ‘self-sufficient,’ ‘independent’ mindset may need to exist, and probably should exist, in an age where many women are single and have had to learn social survival skills.

Yet the social paradigm of a ‘self-sufficient,’ ‘independent,’ and “strong-black woman,” runs counter to the plan that God has for womanhood and femininity. Consider the following three points from the passage under our consideration.

1. What the world wants to make a woman and what God wants to make a woman are totally opposite.
2. a. Christians are told by Paul in Romans 12:2 to “be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
3. b. Satan, who is the god of this world (2nd Corinthians 4:4), has, through the radical feminist movement, so thoroughly brainwashed women that they now hate the very things that make them pleasing to God.
4. i. For example, God is not exactly happy with women whose natures are “loud” (Proverbs 7:11); any more than He is happy with a man who is effeminate (1st Corinthians 6:9).
5. ii. This passage in 1st Peter is replete with words and concepts that modern womanhood has learned, over the years, to despise, such as “subjection” and “obey” in 1st Peter 3:1.
6. To be saved, a woman must repent from the world’s pattern of womanhood.
7. a. Salvation requires that we choose the road less traveled, not well traveled (Matthew 7:13-14).
8. b. The New Testament Greek word for “conversation” in verses 1 and 2 is “anastrophe.”
9. i. This word means “a turn” or even a “turning upside down.”
10. ii. The meaning is that your conversion to Christ ought to be so significant and so dramatic that your conduct and way of life as a woman has totally changed.
11. God wants to put the new you on display.
12. a. This is the point of verses 3 and 4. Verses 3 and 4, the same as verses 1 and 2, should be looked at as a couplet. These verses contrast a woman’s outer appearance versus what she is on the inside.
13. b. Let’s look at verse 3.
14. i. Women, do you place too much emphasis on the outer accoutrements of womanhood and femininity?
15. ii. The examples given in verse 3 are clothes, jewelry and hair. Grammatically, these three items are governed by the word “adorning” which comes before them.
16. 1. The word “adorning” in New Testament Greek is ‘kosmos.’
17. 2. This is the same New Testament Greek word from which the English word “world” is also translated. The meaning is, again, that Satan uses the adornments of outward appearance or the love of attention (in a worldly sense) to give women a false impression of what it means to be a woman or even what it means to be “somebody.”

“Christ First, Christ Only, Christ Always”