The second thing Paul talks about is this matter of the length of hair. At one of the Philadelphia Conferences on Reformed Theology, Dr. R. C. Sproul was dealing with the differences between male and female because we were treating the subject of utopias. And one of the things that is done in classical utopias, and which can be observed in modern times as well, is to attempt to eliminate the differences between men and women. Sproul said that here in 1 Corinthians is a case in which Paul says that it is a disgrace for a man’s hair to be long, and it is a disgrace for a woman’s hair to be short. He talked about that in terms of the struggle that many parents have had with their children, especially the boys. Parents have had these great battles over the length of hair.
A further difficulty comes when you start to handle the question of how short or how long. The Bible obviously does not give the proper length in terms of an actual measurement. As Sproul observes, length and shortness are relative terms. What is the comparison to determine if one’s hair is too long or too short? What standard is Paul using? Well, he is using the standard of men and women. A man’s hair should be short in relationship to the length of women’s hair, and a woman’s hair should be long compared to that of a man. Sproul went on to point out that in the 1960’s, as men were growing their hair down to their shoulders, women were growing their hair down to their hips. And in the decade before that, when Audrey Hepburn was popular with her cropped hairstyle, that was at the same time the age of the crew cut for men. I am not sure that this is absolutely the final answer to what Paul is talking about, but it does seem to illustrate the basic point he is making about even nature showing us what we ought to do in this area.
Nevertheless, our culture does try to deny the distinctions that God has built into things. But regardless of what they do, those distinctions remain because they have come from God and are therefore good differences that are to be maintained. Those differences also show that men and women need each other, and each is not meant to be independent of the other. It is a sad thing when men and women act to the contrary and think that each can get along just fine without the other. To illustrate this point Paul goes back to creation. He says in verse 12, “For as woman came from the man, so also man is born of woman.” At the creation Eve was made from Adam, but afterward, in the natural process of birth, men would go on to be born of women. There is a mutual interdependence among men and women, even as there are differences that are reflected in the matter of authority within the church of Jesus Christ.
What does all of this have to do with freedom? Freedom, as I said at the beginning, is the ability to live in a way that fulfills our destiny, that for which God made us. The problem we have is that in ourselves, none of us has that ability. We are sinners, and that sin keeps us from doing what we ought to do. Consequently, between men and women, where there should be mutual harmony and beauty, instead come strife and competition, producing what we call “the battle of the sexes.” And those areas of eating, drinking, and doubtful things, where we should willingly and joyously seek to glorify God, instead become subjects over which Christians wrestle miserably with how much they can get away with without breaking God’s moral law.
Jesus spoke of Himself as the one who gives freedom, and it is the freedom that comes in the Gospel, of which we read in the written Word of God. As Jesus said in John 8, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (v. 32). The truth of God is what we find in passages like these, where we see that we will not be free when we say to ourselves, “I must be able to do what I want to do, and whenever I want to do it.” Rather, true freedom is found when we can say, “I want above all things to have God glorified in my life.”
