History has proved that when God’s laws are being kept and when He is pleased with His people, one of the resulting blessings from God is that the man who leads His people is, in fact, a man. God has at times chosen women to occupy positions of authority over His people, and sometimes they have been sincere and faithful (e. g. Deborah), but never has He done so when His people were walking in the way He commanded them to walk. It is not woman’s place to rule over men any more than it is man’s place to rule over Christ Jesus, or for Christ Jesus to rule over God. Paul wrote, “I would have you to know that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God” (1Cor. 11:3).

Having God’s divine order in one’s life is not something that we accomplish; it is God’s reward for obedience to His will. In other words, we reap God’s divine order in our lives when we obey His commandments. Under God’s Old Testament Law, when a man brought a sacrifice to God’s altar, he did not actually offer the sacrifice. Everyone on earth except God’s priests were forbidden to approach the holy altar of God. An ordinary Israelite’s part in the sacrifice of an animal ended when he killed his animal before God’s priest. From that point, the priest himself did all the work. Nevertheless, the man who killed his animal according to Moses’ instructions reaped the blessings of the sacrifice as if he had done it all.

In this New Testament, the man cannot be the head of the woman by his own will any more than children can be the head of the parents by their own will. When parents do the will of God, then God sets their house in order and their children are submissive to the authority of God that flows through the parents from God. It is the same in the family of God. As with everything else in God’s kingdom, positions of authority over God’s sheep are not obtained by the will of man; they are filled only by the will of God. None of us can make ourselves occupy our places anymore than we can make ourselves receive the Spirit of God. None of us knows how to put ourselves in our place. Our part is always only to obey the revealed will of God; He takes it from there, and order in our lives is His reward for obedience.

When Moses was giving Israel its instructions for life in the Promised Land, he told Israel that they were never to choose a Gentile as their king (Dt. 17:15b). Moreover, they were forbidden to choose even an Israelite as their king if God did not approve. God said, “Be sure that the man you choose to be king is the one whom the Lord has chosen” (Dt. 17:15a). When people choose their own rulers, they always choose the wrong one. And even if it is the right man, it is the wrong way and/or the wrong time (e. g. Jn. 6:14-15). The best that we can do is to obey God’s commandments day-by-day and trust Him to give us what we need: our food, our shelter, our livelihood, and our rulers. This is precisely what Jesus advised us to do when he said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”

When we see our brothers and sisters looking to leaders who do not know God, men and women who in many cases do not even have the Spirit of God, and who certainly are not anointed by Him for the good of His sheep, we may know that God has been greatly displeased with us and has cursed us with divine disorder so that we might seek His face again. Christianity is God’s curse for disobedience. It is a prison, a foreign country into which the children of God have been taken captive. If we will cry out to Him, and turn with all our hearts from our own thoughts and our own ways, He will have mercy on us and will raise up for us shepherds like David, men “after His own heart”, who will feed God’s people with knowledge.

The secret way out of Christianity is obedience to the will of God. May God help us do our part, which is to obey the will of God that is for us, so that we may be an example to our brothers and sisters still behind the whitewashed walls.