Men, if you think of yourself in terms of a knight in shining armor, you are serving a pagan god.
I’m not going to drag this out; it will be condensed. When the German hordes invaded the Roman Empire starting around 400 AD, the Roman Church was the one strongest and most stable institution left of Roman Civilization. At that, the Roman Church leadership had long compromised with civil government and was hardly the same as the New Testament churches. But this same compromised worldly church then intentionally perverted the doctrines of the Bible so that they conformed to the expectations of the barbarian German mythology. By this means, they sought to “Christianize” the invaders and convince them to respect the Church.
A critical flaw in Germanic tribal mythology was that women were closer than men to the spooky unknown realm of things invisible to the naked eye. This superstition resulted in a whole range of social perversions so that, for example, the weregild (death indemnity) for a woman was twice that of a man. Men ruled, but only insofar as women permitted it for survival purposes.
The Bible has long prophesied against this, saying flatly the women are subject to men in part by design and in part as His remedy for the Curse of the Fall. Now men, this has nothing to do with how women tend to commune with the Holy Spirit as with a divine mother figure. That’s a reflection of human limitations; the real truth of God’s nature simply cannot be known until we die and see Him face to face. But in this world, the Father and the Son are portrayed as masculine, while the Holy is more ambiguous for a reason — male and female are incomplete without each other. But in practice, within our fallen existence, men lead in matters of moral decisions.
It’s not a question of moral superiority; it’s a matter of divine appointment for ineffable reasons. And if you take the time to actually let the Bible speak to you, particularly in the Old Testament, you’ll see a strong undercurrent of warnings about letting women become the gateway to meeting with the divine. All priests must be male for as long as there are rainbows in the sky anywhere on earth. This business of Mariolatry arose from the Germanized religion of the European Middle Ages. It’s blasphemy; God does not have a mother.
Go back and review the second part of this series; don’t read into it Medieval chivalry. That was a myth in its own time; it’s an even greater lie today. So for example, you shouldn’t hold the door open for a lady, but you should walk in before her to ensure her safety — make sure there’s nothing to threaten your shalom. She’s not too holy to grab the door handle for herself. Your woman is your greatest treasure, but she is not your goddess. Granted, our society would never understand that kind of behavior, and would consider it rude. Still, this is a tiny sample of how perverted our Western society is against biblical morals.
So while you may keep on pretending outwardly depending on the situation, inside your soul you must utterly reject the heathen society in which we live. That means you must deconstruct the Medieval knight in shining armor and replace it with the shepherd warrior of the Bible. You must move yourself closer to the Ancient Hebrew model of manhood.
Love your woman; don’t idolize her.
As a woman, I can tell you that I have never liked having the door opened for me; not because of some feminist “I can do it myself” idea, but because I feel weirdly vulnerable being the first to walk into a restaurant or out onto the street. And here I thought I was just being “silly”.
Somehow, the word “silly” seems to me the last adjective I could possibly apply to you, Sister.
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