You can tell a lot about a person, a country, or an organization by how they treat women.
To be a woman is to inhabit a sometimes touchy world of extremes. For instance…
Why does the concept of acceptable feminine beauty become so intense that it can destroy the psyche of women?
How do the rights of Iranian women stack up to those that belong to the women of Denmark?
Are the statistics that women typically make less money than men in the same jobs actually true?
How seriously does this or that church treat Paul’s admonition in 1 Timothy to not let women teach or have authority over men? Some churches completely disregard Paul’s words and are pastored by women, and some, conversely, are so intense about heeding Paul’s words that their women can’t even teach Sunday school because they’d be teaching young males (true story).
I once heard a mildly well-known conservative church leader say that young Christian women who want to go into the military should be pulled aside and exhorted to abandon their plans to enlist because their presence in the military would be them committing a sin (this Christian leader referenced a single verse in the Old Testament to justify his logic here).
And, of course, there’s the cringe-worthy stuff that’s been going on over the last few years in earnest about biological males who wish they were women competing in women’s sports… the Supreme Court justice who refused to comment on what she believed a woman actually is… Just your usual intelligent, normal, totally-not-warped societal issues we are facing in this day and age surrounding the existence of women.
Sigh.
Despite being 50%ish of the world’s population, a lot of times it is unclear what our churches, societies, and male counterparts are supposed to do with us. We are a charged, polarizing subject.
Lucky for you, despite my mentioning these modern issues surrounding women, I’m not going to go into any of this in this post. Not what our role in the church, the world, or our family units should or shouldn’t be. None of it.
I’m not going to talk about this stuff because, for one, it results in too many fights. It’s not worth it. The problem with being a woman is even we ourselves have the potential to get nasty towards others over… the “problem” of being a woman.
Secondly, I’m no theologian and many, many other more capable thinkers and writers have tackled this subject.1
Thirdly, what I want to talk about in regards to this overall subject is, at least to me, more important than what our role in society or church or the family should be. This is because what I want to talk about is how God sees us—how He relates to us. How He holds an opinion about us and how that opinion is both extremely unique to our gender (“No boys allowed!” as the hand drawn-sign on my daughter’s bedroom door reads) and totally healing in its air-clearing simplicity.2
“In God’s sight”
Here’s the verse we’ll be working off of:
But let your adorning [that of Christian women] be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious. -1 Peter 3:4, ESV
Ok. I need to be honest. This verse has always been a bit depressing to me. I picture Amish women with their bonnets and their one-style-fits-all monochromatic dresses sitting piously in church with their heads bowed, forever. So gentle and quiet. So lost in the ether of all things holy. Essentially, I picture a woman I cannot relate to (nor particularly want to relate to, no offense) when I read this verse.
Plus, if you follow the logic of the verse out, that’s when the depression hits because if “gentle and quiet” is valued by God, what happens when I realize that I can’t claim to possess any mastery over those particular traits? I mean, have you ever met Cas Andersen? Does this woeful lack of “gentle and quiet” within me mean God sees me as a lesser woman? A not-as-precious woman?
First of all, the answer to that question is a simple no. God doesn’t play favorites (Romans 2:11).
Also, this verse in Peter is meant to be an exhortation—an appropriate encouragement—on how to best spend our energies as women. This verse is a goal post, not a guilt-trippy measuring stick. It’s something to shoot for; something we need instruction in—and that means all of us, Amish females included.
So let me share what my Word Studies from the Greek New Testament book has to say about this verse:
The Christian woman should depend upon an adornment that proceeds from within her inner spiritual being and is truly representative of that inner spiritual life. The words, “the hidden man of the heart [KJV]” refer to the personality of the Christian woman as made beautiful by the ministry of the Holy Spirit in glorifying the Lord Jesus and manifesting Him in and through her life. Peter describes that personality briefly in the case of these [women] as a meek and quiet spirit which is in the sight of God of great price.
Ok, here’s where it gets really good:
The only self-description our Lord ever used of Himself as reported in the Gospels is found in the two words “meek” and “lowly” (Matt. 11:29).
WUUUUUUUTTT.
Do you see what just happened? Wuest (the author of this Greek word study book) is connecting Jesus’s only known self-given description of His character with the vision that God has for the character of His daughters.
No wonder a “gentle and quiet spirit” is precious in God’s sight—because it reminds Him of His amazing SON. Think of the honor God has just bestowed on our gender in challenging us toward these character traits.
Suddenly 1 Peter 3:4 doesn’t make me think of perfect Amish women that I can’t relate to. It makes me think along completely different terms: the terms of the gorgeous and noble temperament of Jesus Himself.
So I did a little Greek word hunting of my own to see how close of a connection Wuest is making here.
The words Peter uses to describe what we should be aiming for as Christian women are “gentle” (in the Greek praos) and “quiet” (which is heyschios).
The Greek words used in Jesus’s description of Himself are “meek/gentle” (praos—yep, same as in 1 Peter!) and “lowly/humble” (tapeinos).
I’ll go into further detail about the shared word praos below, but for the sake of showing where Jesus’s description of Himself and Peter’s admonition differ slightly, here are the definitions of heyschios (1 Peter) and tapeinos (Matthew 11:29)-
1 Peter, heyschios: quiet, tranquil, still, undisturbed and undisturbing, peaceable [NOTE: keep this word in your back pocket because we’ll reference it at the end!]
Matthew 11, tapeinos: lowly, of low degree, humble, not rising far from the ground
So Jesus’s word about Himself, tapeinos, has to do with the sort of personality we will be encountering when we come to Him as “weary and heavy laden” people, and Peter’s word, heyschios, describes the enviable state in which the Christian woman’s heart exists—one of stillness and quiet and peace.
Meek
So the word meek (praos) is the same in the two passages. What does praos mean though? Hold onto your knickers ‘cause it’s about to get intense. Here’s the definition of meek/praos from Thayer’s Greek Lexicon:
Meekness toward God is that disposition of spirit in which we accept His dealings with us as good, and therefore without disputing or resisting. In the OT, the meek are those wholly relying on God rather than their own strength to defend against injustice. Thus, meekness toward evil people means knowing God is permitting the injuries they inflict, that He is using them to purify His elect, and that He will deliver His elect in His time (Isa 41:17, Luk 18:1-8). Gentleness or meekness is the opposite of self-assertiveness and self-interest. It stems from trust in God's goodness and control over the situation. The gentle person is not occupied with self at all. This is a work of the Holy Spirit, not of the human will (Gal 5:23).
If that doesn’t make your butt pucker up a little bit, I think you’ve fallen asleep or your kid must be distracting you or something.
Meekness, despite its completely obsolete use and unfortunate similarity to the word “weakness,” is no soft, fuzzy, forgettable character trait. Rather, it is indicative of immense strength—strength that comes from a faith so strong that it has set the meek person free from self (“meekness is…the opposite of self-assertiveness and self-interest…not occupied with self at all”).
In other words, you and I know probably very few truly meek people. This is upper-echelon spirituality right here. Meekness is the special forces of faith-induced character traits. Think Navy Seals or Army Rangers. Not just soldiers, but soldiers.
Meekness means you trust God so much that when bad things happen, you aren’t sitting there stressing about it. You aren’t obsessing about what you might lose in this life or what pain you might have to endure due to circumstances because you are in the habit of not thinking of yourself at all in the first place. Instead, you are seeing trials and annoyances and persecutions for what they are: the hand of God to better our lives. This places you leagues above the situation—you have transcended it. You are so far above it that you don’t feel the need to fight for things to be different. So you rest. Picture Jesus asleep on the boast as it was tossing and turning in the storm. Meekness is miraculous, supernatural rest in the soggy, storm-battered boat of your life.
My youth pastor in high school used to loosely define meekness as “power under control,” meaning you could do something about the things you are going through, but you choose not to. And, most importantly, you choose to not interfere with your circumstances because of your faith in God. Picture Jesus on the cross: He could have rescued himself at any moment, but He chose not to because of His faith in His Father.3 Think of what He said to Peter after he tried to defend Him from the soldiers on the Mount of Olives: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels [to deliver Me]?” (Mat. 26:53, ESV). Jesus could have asked for deliverance at any time, but He didn’t—He surrendered to God’s will to the point of a horrific death—and that is meekness.
Outside of Jesus, the best example of meekness in the Bible I can think of is when David cut the corner off of Saul’s robe. David, as usual and along with his motley crew of rebel fighters, was hiding in a cave in the desert of En Gedi because Saul was actively pursuing him with 3,000 warriors in tow.
Saul halts his manhunt to go take a whiz in the privacy of a cave and he walks into the exact cave David is hiding in. David’s men are like, “David! God has just handed Saul into your hands! Get him!”
But David hesitates, and, undetected due to the sound of Saul’s falling urine, gets close enough to his enemy-king to cut the corner off his robe, which he later uses as physical proof to show Saul how vulnerable he was during that little bathroom break. Go read the whole story in 1 Samuel 24—it’s so good. The meekness in this story is seen in how David could have easily taken things into his own hands and killed Saul at that moment, but he chose not to because of His trust in God. David didn’t know how he would ever end up king with a tyrant like Saul around, but what he did know was that God was going to handle that tyrant, not him.4 That is meekness.
Fast forward to David’s distant Grandson, Jesus (as I mentioned above), who chose over and over again to let His Father handle His life and not Himself.5
Fast forward again to God’s blood-bought, adopted daughters who live and breathe today and we see God asking us, “Are you willing to to be meek? Not weak—quite the opposite. Are you willing to become so strong in your faith that you have become meek? Meek like Me?”
So that’s intense by itself.
But here’s where this gets crazy. Remember, we are talking about God speaking through Peter specifically to women. Because meekness involves leaning fully on our trust in God’s goodness over any situation that comes our way, God, in exhorting us toward meekness, is trying to help our gender with one of its most common downfalls: the tendency toward anxiety and depression.
Who struggles the most with anxiety and depression (A & D, for short) and lack of heart-peace?
Women do.6
Literally most of the women in my life, myself included, either have been on psych meds for anxiety/depression, are currently on them, or should be on them and we’ve chosen to manage our brains with adaptogenic herbs (ashwagandha, anyone?) and/or exercise and/or a glass or few of wine throughout the week.
When God mentions meekness as a goal that He would like His daughters to adorn their inward beauty with, he is not placing us in a box and asking us to resign ourselves to oppressive, mindless passivity.
Instead, he is asking us if we’d like to be whole.
He is asking us if we would like to be healed from the torture of our minds. He is asking us if we are done carrying the immense burden that is the female self.
“Are you willing to trust Me so much that all your anxiety that you’ve held onto your whole life just falls away?”
Why does God want us to be meek? Because meekness is the best thing that could ever happen to us.
Meekness is a first-class ticket out of depression and anxiety.
Meekness is a trust in God so strong that you transcend life’s circumstances and all the flaming poo bags the enemy leaves on your doorstep. Meekness renders us unstoppable. It takes us from vulnerable to invincible. Meekness places us completely outside of the tyranny of circumstances. Remember that Greek word above that I told you to hang on to? Heyschios? Quiet, tranquil, still, undisturbed heart-peace. That’s what meekness will do to your soul.
Meekness is ultimate faith which means it is ultimate peace.
This 1 Peter verse is not a guilt trip to turn us into mild, passive, one-style-fits-all Amish women (amazing as they are): it is the way out of the prison of our suffering minds: our particular, uniquely female suffering minds. It is a way out of the tortured tendencies passed down to us from eons of grandmothers.
“But it’s not that easy, Cas…”
So up to this point, we’ve made a connection that goes something like this:
Jesus called Himself meek → God encourages women, specifically, toward that same powerful meekness → the presence of meekness in our lives will make our heads and hearts easier to live in because meekness only occurs in the presence of immense faith.
What we need to not forget, especially with the tendency of blog writers like myself who make grand, sweeping, unintentionally reductive statements about complicated matters like anxiety and depression, is that none of this is meant to overwhelm us. It is not God’s heart for us to trade one overwhelm (anxiety/depression/self-dependence) for another (i.e. “just” be meek even though it feels and is impossible for you to do so).
What I love about the definition of meekness cited above is the all-important last line:
This [meekness] is a work of the Holy Spirit, not of the human will (Gal 5:23).
Your flesh and the effort you think you can put into your spiritual life will never take you spiritual places, at least not good spiritual places. You cannot fight flesh with flesh.7 You cannot just decide that you’ll really focus on being meek and then it will happen and all your mental health stuff will be magically healed.
You must not forget that you are absolutely powerless to make yourself meek, ye prized daughter of God, but the Spirit inside you is not powerless, and this is very good news.
It comes down to yielding and time.
Yielding, because the way this whole thing works is through surrender—surrender to the Spirit’s voice every time He tells you to trust instead of fret, and surrender to the circumstances of your life in full faith that God is lovingly allowing them and will bring good from them someday.8
Time, because the Spirit’s work of making you meek is also called sanctification, and sanctification is a process that cannot be rushed.
So please don’t get all head-trippy about any of this. Once again, you cannot fight flesh with flesh and a head trip has “flesh” written all over it.
Here’s the risky part where I’m going out on a limb with all of this though.
Let’s assume that the connection I’m making between God’s heart for the inner tranquility of women and the power of meekness towards that end is true. If the meekness we are encouraged to “adorn” ourselves with effectively neutralizes A and D (with all of us knowing that some anxiety and depression is legitimately based on hormonal or chemical imbalances), then we are faced with a responsibility to ask the question whether the lack of peace in our hearts and brains comes from our own unbelief or not.
This is a painful thing to be confronted with, but it’s also a healthy way to view our mental instabilities. While none of us likes to be reminded of the need for personal responsibility toward our pain, without asking ourselves if these problems stem from our own weak and/or misguided faith muscles, we will just blame everything and everyone else for our problems and thus never come to a point of healing.
Put plainly, I’m NOT at all saying that all A and D is from a lack of faith but I would venture to say that some of it, if not a large portion of it, does find its source in lack of trust toward God regarding certain parts of our lives.
Yes, our particular lives and the circumstances surrounding them are personal and complicated. It goes without saying. No, I am not trying to use the Bible to minimize or gloss over legitimate mental suffering. I have been a recipient of my fair share of A and D problems myself, so I get all the horrific pain and murkiness that attends these things.
At the same time, do you know what has helped me heal the most from anxiety and depression? Allowing the Spirit to grow my faith in God (i.e. meekness). The more radical I become in what I truly, actually believe about God—that He is good, that He loves me, that everything really is under His control—the more I walk in freedom from my mental demons. This has taken years of practicing but it is real.
This brings up an important question: do those of us who don’t hold psychology degrees even have a right to talk about this stuff?
Yes, we do. Why? Because the Bible talks about it, and if the Bible talks about it then so should we. God placed these things in His Word so that anyone who wanted to could find healing. God’s advice about how to recover from the intensity of existing as a human should not just be kept for those who have psych degrees or the money for extensive therapy. It should be open to all of God’s children.
And in the meantime, yes, there is a slow, annoying, unfortunate slog to the finish line of better mental health and more meekness. In the meantime, yes, the work the Spirit is trying to do in us involves suffering, mental or otherwise. Unfortunately, pain and slog are the best things with which to grow faith, which means God is not afraid to allow them into our lives.
We need to keep in mind that the point of all these mental health challenges that seem to be the hallmark of our gender, ironically, goes back to the meaning of meekness, that:
God is permitting the injuries they inflict, that He is using them to purify His elect, and that He will deliver His elect in His time
Does God permit the injuries A and/or D inflict on us? Meekness says “Yes.”
Does He permit them just to mess with us or to take us down? Meekness says, “No. The opposite. They are meant for our good.”
Do you think God will work His will through these difficult things and one day deliver us from them? Meekness says, “Heck ya. Hundred percent. And because of this, I can endure my trial with peace.”
Semi-practical next steps
I’ve presented you a ton of info in this post, so here’s a recap.
-God cares about women. He knows our strengths, He knows our weaknesses. He knows these things because He invented them. Lesson number one from all of this should be that whenever the Bible starts to talk about women, we need to not let our pride get in the way so bad that we can’t hear God’s heart in what He is trying to say. To use the example from way above, God is not trying to turn me into an Amish woman. Rather, He is trying to set me free—to slay the dragons specific to my situation as a woman. The Bible does not put women down: it vies for their health and shows them how to escape the unnecessary plundering of their spirits. I can’t think of anything more loving or elevating than this.
-Because God speaks from a place of utter love for us, we need to do the uncomfortable thing of facing our mental diseases as honest participants in them, not blameless victims. Sometimes A and D really are hormonal or genetic or due to past traumas. I’ve been on the receiving end of all three. But the Bible is not a psychology textbook, it’s a sharp scalpel meant to slice into your heart and show you what it finds there so that you can know God and live in the freedom of His love. This means it can go deeper than hormones and trauma to show you the state of your soul itself and how that state influences your current reaction to your life.
-Since I’ve written this out (it has taken several days), this is how I’ve begun to view my stress as it relates to Peter’s encouragement towards meekness.
A lot of things surface every day in my heart and mind that present themselves as problems for me to worry about. Sometimes they are small (people driving under or dangerously over the speed limit, Gussy whining for the 800th time today), and sometimes they are huge (What if my children die before me? What if inflation never ends? What if I fail as a parent and my kids grow up to be reprobates?). The way I am trying to see these things is that they are a gym floor that the Spirit wants to use to grow my meekness muscles. Every time one of these things comes up, and, yes, I can feel myself stressing about them, ruminating about them, trying to control or even take the situation into my own hands…
Every time I get there the Spirit is like, “Hey—can we talk about this? Don’t kill your proverbial Saul right now. Don’t take this into your own hands or upon your own shoulders. Are you believing the right things about God and your struggles? Are you believing that both are on your side?”
I then do my best to lean into whatever current uncomfortable thing God is asking me to relax about, basing it on my faith that He will figure these problems and trials out, not me, and I then choose to emotionally and mentally rest from my worries as much as I can.
This repetitive, Spirit-fueled-and-directed process happening over and over, year after year, is how God grows meekness, patience, love, or any other spiritual trait in us. The best way to climb a mountain is one foot in front of the other, and the best way to grow in Christ is one moment of intentional surrender after another.
One more thing
Let’s not forget the unique way Peter talks about this process of Christian women growing into the people God always envisioned them to be.
In the verse before he says, “Do not let your adornment be merely outward…”
But let your adorning [that of Christian women] be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious. -1 Peter 3:4, ESV
The word adornment there is the word kosmos, and in its most general sense was the word the Greeks used for the beautiful order they could see in the universe. The word means “an apt and harmonious arrangement, the arrangement of the stars, ‘the heavenly hosts’, as the ornament of the heavens.” The Greeks looked up at the sky and saw the stars as orderly, fitting ornaments for such an expanse—earrings on the already beautiful face of the universe.
Peter knows women have a deep desire to represent the Beauty that created them, and he’s like, that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with being the more beautiful sex of the two. Girl, be you. Be a human female unapologetically. But don’t let the draw for beauty stop there—make sure you are also investing in how your soul or your inward person sees and reacts to the life God has given you. The beauty waiting for you inside a soul surrendered to the Spirit is a beauty that is peaceful and cosmic, like the ornamental ordering of the stars—it is right and good and a delight to those who can see it. That beauty won’t fade, ever, similar to how the same stars that shined down on Abraham or David or Jesus or the sailors that used them for navigation hundreds of years ago still shine on us today. They remain tucked up in the safety of the heavens.
That inward beauty is very different from the outward in that a lot of our outward attempts at beauty are meant for other people. For example, when all I do is stay home all day, I don’t go beyond dressing myself in an oversized sweater and some leggings. No one will see me that day, so who cares? The effort isn’t worth it. But the inward beauty has this really cool blessing for the woman wearing it: she has peace. Tranquility. Restful sleep in the belly of the tossing boat that life can sometimes be. Mental health that is stronger than her peers. The beauty of the inward man is God’s gift to her. It is Him making her soul gorgeous. It is Him showing the world what happens when the most vulnerable gender chooses a radical trust in Him. And just like all real beauty, the women we become when we make that inward beauty our priority draws people in, and, in our case, points them to Him: the One who takes such immaculate care of us.
You can tell a lot about a person, a country or an organization by how they treat women, and you can tell a lot about God’s heart for you by looking at His vision for how you experience this day-to-day life.
His vision is that you’d be free.
Totally, utterly, powerfully…
Free.
They’ve probably done a good job, too. If I was interested in reading more woman identity stuff, I’d probably know they’ve done a good job. Out of all the things I have a tendency to overthink, I just don’t have the time to add this subject to that mix.
I’m obviously joking here. God wants boys to be meek, too. Meekness is a fruit of the Spirit so it is meant for everyone. But I love that God calls out this specific trait as His heart for women.
“who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously;” 1 Peter 2:23
David says in 1 Samuel 24:6, “The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my master [Saul], the Lord’s anointed, to stretch out my hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the Lord” (NKJV). David was the anointed of the Lord too. But David had enough trust in God to wait for that crown to come to Him in God’s timing and way, and not in his.
Time fails to tell of all the many times this happened
“About twice as many women as men experience depression.”
“Our results showed that women are almost twice as likely to suffer from anxiety as men, and that people living in Europe and North America are disproportionately affected.”
-see links in the words “anxiety and “depression” in the above sentence for sources.
“Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” -Galatians 3:3, ESV
Kenneth Wuest, speaking of James 4:5-
The mere indwelling of the Spirit does not guarantee the full efficacy of His work in us, since that indwelling is not automatic in nature. God’s ideal for the indwelling of the Spirit is found in the word translated “caused to take up His residence.” Its root word is in the word “home.” The Spirit was sent to the believers heart to make His home there. That means the Christian must make Him feel at home. He can do that by giving the Holy Spirit absolute liberty of action in his heart, the home in which He lives. This means the believer is to yield himself, all of himself, to the Spirit’s control, depend up on the Spirit for guidance, teaching, strength. Then will the potential power resident in the presence of the Spirit in the heart of the believer be operative in his life. -Untranslatable Riches from the Greek New Testament, p.83