The Battle of the Sexes

A little girl had just heard the story of Snow White for the fist time at school one day. Bursting with enthusiasm, she ran home and retold the fairy tale to her mother. She told her mother how Prince Charming had arrived on his beautiful white horse and kissed Snow White back to life. Then she asked her mother, “And do you know what happened next?” Said her mother, “Yes. They lived happily ever after.” “No,” said the little girl, “they got married.”

Someone has said “All marriages are happy. It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.”

More and more people today are like the man who walked into the marriage counselor’s office and said, “When I got married, I was looking for the ideal. Then my marriage turned into an ordeal. Now I want a new deal.”

Why is it that men and women can’t live without each other, but they can’t seem to live with each other, either? The answer is found in a little word that describes a large problem - sin.

Review: The consequences of sin - Genesis 3. Sin brought

1. Shame, which led to attempt to cover-up. Relationship w. Self

2. Fear, which led them to hide from God Relationship w. God

3. Guilt, which led them to pass the blame Relationship w. Others

In Genesis 3, we find three more devastating consequences of sin…

Pain in…

1. Childbirth, for the woman. This affected the woman’s primary area of fulfilment - the family. The area of life that was meant to give her the greatest pleasure and joy would now become a source of deep pain for her…

- Not just pain in the act of giving birth, but pain in raising children

- Now that sin was in the race, every child born was a creature who saw himself as the center of his universe. (If you don’t believe that, I’ll let you spend a day with my two year old!) This would lead to incredible pain and heartache for his parents in attempting to raise him.

2. Labor, for the man This affected the man’s primary area of fulfilment - his work. He would feel pain in the area of life that was meant to give him the greatest fulfilment and joy. Nothing would come easy in work.

- Adam had been created to be the lord and leader of creation

- Now that he had sinned, it was as though creation would no longer accept his leadership. It would rebel and protest, and it would only be through toil and sweat and pain that he could get it to produce anything for him.

3. Pain in marriage and the relationship between the sexes.

GEN. 3:16 Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

Some people say that this verse is about how a woman will love her husband and he will be her leader. That is absolutely wrong. This verse is talking about another consequence of sin. It’s bad; it’s painful. What exactly does it mean? We need to find out what the word “desire” means. Fortunately, God has given us some help in a nearby chapter. Look at ch. 4…

Genesis 4:6-7 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.

The word “desire” in 4:7 is the same word that is used in 3:16. What does it mean?

Sin wanted Cain. It wanted to control him. It wanted to be his master.

Desire = Urge to dominate, desire to control. Take that meaning and put it back in ch. 3:16. God was saying to Eve that one of the consequences of sin was that…

GEN. 3:16 You will want to control your husband

Sin created a leadership crisis. Adam and Eve didn’t want to follow God’s leadership.

We’ve seen that creation would no longer readily accept Adam’s leadership.

Now Eve would not want Adam to be her leader, either. From here on in, she would try to overthrow that authority. She would try to become the leader.

One of the consequences of sin is that the woman, created to be man’s companion and helper, begins to see herself as independent and autonomous from him. She no longer is happy with him to be the leader. Instead of having him as her head, she wants to be out from under him. She wants to be the leader in the relationship.

But God goes on to say to the woman…

he will rule over you.

Adam wasn’t about to take this lying down! Faced with a threat to his leadership, he reacted. He was going to rule over her by any means necessary to keep her in line. He would dominate her - that’s what the word “rule” implies, and since he was the physically stronger, he would use force if necessary. This marked the beginning of the oppression of women by men. For much of human history, men have put women down. They have treated women as second class citizens, as not much more than property. Gen. 3:16 is the reason why.

Marriage, which was meant to be a relationship of loving and cherishing, instead became a relationship of desiring and dominating. This was the beginning of the battle of the sexes.

Now the tragedy of all this is that God created men and women to complement each other - to work as a team in the marriage relationship. But sin makes teamwork difficult to achieve.

Recently, the NY Mets changed managers. The team had been doing very poorly - not playing up to their potential. The players were unhappy. There was a lot of backbiting and dissension on the team. Some of them announced that next year, they wouldn’t be back.

But then the old manager was fired and a new one took his place. Suddenly the team began to do better on the field. They racked up several wins in a row, and began to make a run at first place. The change in the clubhouse was interesting to see. The players began to act like team-mates again. They were congratulating each other instead of criticizing each other. They began celebrating each other’s strengths, instead of harping on each other’s weaknesses. The differences in skill and ability and personality which had previously pulled them apart now began to fire in synchronization to draw them together and help them to win.

That’s a good picture of the way God designed marriage partners to work.

Have you ever noticed that men and women are different? I don’t mean they just look different - they are different. If you didn’t know better, you would almost conclude that men and women are two totally different species! Sometimes it seems that they don’t even inhabit the same planet.

God created men and women with fundamental differences that go a lot deeper than just the plumbing system. And he created these differences in order for men and women to work together as a team. But because of the consequences of sin, those fundamental differences tend to pull us apart instead of pulling us together.

The consequences of sin are to a marriage like a losing streak is to a baseball team. It poisons the atmosphere and sours the spirit.

Let me illustrate what I mean. One of the fundamental differences between men and women is in…

1. The way they relate to the world around them. The way that they perceive things and focus on things is different.

Did you ever see the movie King Kong? You have a huge gorrilla who goes through the jungle stomping on trees and animals and villages because he’s got the hots for Faye Wray. Nothing stands in his way. Not even the Empire State building. His mission in life is to have her. That’s his only focus. King Kong is a typical male.

That’s the way men relate to reality. A man goes through life with a very narrow-focus beam of concentration. It’s like a laser beam. He focuses in on one thing - whether it’s a job he is doing, or a baseball game on television, or the Wall Street journal - and he tunes out everything else. The house could be burning down, and he wouldn’t even know it. A man’s brain is like a radio that can only receive one channel at a time.

Women are totally different in the way they relate to the world around them. If men are like laser beams, women are like floodlights. A woman has the ability to focus and concentrate on a lot of different things simultaneously. Her brain is like a radio scanner that sweeps back and forth across the spectrum picking up all kinds of signals. She can process input from a lot of different sources simultaneously.

When I come home from work at diinnertime, I have to step out of my single-channel world into my wife’s multi-channel environment. I have been at my desk studying - focusing very intensely on a message I’m preparing. It’s quiet. There are no interruptions. Then I walk into my wife’s head office and it blows me right out of the water. Dinner’s on, the telephone is ringing, the baby is fussing, Tommy is falling off the back deck, somebody’s friend is ringing the front doorbell. My wife is processing all this and functioning effectively in the midst of it. I’m in there for about thirty seconds and my circuit breakers stop to pop. Smoke starts to come out my ears.

Studies have shown that little boys daydream far more than little girls. Why? Because little girls’ brains are picking up so much information from the world around them that they can’t just shut down and daydream about only one thing the way that little boys do with their single-channel brains.

This is what make a woman more able to handle interruptions than a man. When a man is concentrating on something, an interruption comes as a great annoyance. Because an interruption to a man is like radio interference, static on the channel he’s listening to. It takes a tremendous amount of mental energy for him to change his focus. Ladies, this is why your husband is so grouchy when you try to talk to him while he’s watching the ballgame. You have become an interruption.

Now when you take two people who have such fundamentally different ways of perceiving the world around them, and you put them together into a marriage, what do you get? You get friction, you get conflict.

I heard a story about a man who took his wife deer hunting. Now the essence of deer hunting is that you go out in the woods, you sit down quietly, and you wait for the deer to come to you. You shoot ‘em. Then you go home. Simple.

They’re sitting there in the woods, and she’s looking at the trees and listening to the birds and admiring the scenery. She sees some pine cones that would be good to use in crafts. She wants to talk. He’s sitting there waiting for the deer to come, and she’s doing all these other things. And he gets mad at her because he thinks she’s not paying attention. And she gets mad at him, because he seems to be deliberately ignoring her. Their differences begin to drive them apart.

This is just one of the fundamental differences between the sexes. God intended that these should help us to complement each other. But a consequence of sin is that these traits often set us at odds with each other.

2. Another big difference between men and women is in the way we communicate.

Let me share with you some interesting findings:

Research has shown that from the earliest years, little girls talk more than little boys. Even in the hospital nursery, little girls had more lip movements than little boys.

The Harvard Preschool Project wired a playground for sound and recorded every sound that came out of the mouths of several hundred preschool children. They found that virtually 100% of the sounds coming out of the mouths of little girls were audible, recognizable words. The girls each spent a great deal of time talking to the other children, and nearly as much time talking to themselves.

The boys, in contrast, were found to produce audible words only 68% of the time. The rest of their sounds were one syllable sounds like uhh and umm, or sound effects - noises of jet engines, machine guns, animals, etc.

An amazing nine out of ten speech pathology problems involve males.

The Annals of the NY Academy of Science recently published a study which found that the average man speaks approximately 12,500 words a day. The average woman speaks over 25,000 words a day.

Communications researchers who analyze the content of human communication have found that men tend to center their conversations on facts. Women tend to place a lot more emphasis in conversation upon feelings

In conversation, men tend to engage and disengage much more simply than do women. A man will pick up the phone to his friend, say “Hi. We still on for lunch today? Ok. I’ll see you at 12:30. Good-bye.”

A woman communicates much differently. She engages and disengages much more elaborately. It takes her longer to open and close a conversation, because she is looking at the process of communication itself as being a worthwhile activity. Men see communication as a means to an end. Men communicate to achieve a certain result. Women communicate for the sake of the process. Women see the process of communication as an end in itself.

Men are result-oriented. Women are process-oriented.

Men are task-oriented. Women are people-oriented.

Women are relational beings. Have you ever gone to a party and noticed how quickly the women seem to gravitate to one another and quickly get into conversation with each other? The men are hanging back in ones and twos. To the extent that the men talk, they talk about trivial matters - sports, cars, computers, the weather. Meanwhile, the women are into deep stuff. They are revealing their deep inner feelings to other women they may have just met. Women are like fish that swim in a relational sea. Men are like little boats that just bob around on the surface.

God made these differences for a reason. If the whole world were populated by men, it would be a pretty lonesome place. Everyone would be going about their business, getting their jobs done, and that would be it. There would be no warmth, no nurturing, no caring. That’s why God gave Adam a woman named Eve. God looked down at what He had made and saw that Adam was alone. He said “this is not good” because God foresaw the kind of world that would develop with only men. Not a pretty picture. So he made woman. And he made her different to make up for the weaknesses in men.

But the differences that God built into the man and the woman became points of contention once sin entered the world. Because sin isolates us. Sin sets us not only against God, but against each other. Sin makes us believe that our way is the best way, indeed the only way.

We’ve seen that sin is like a centrifuge. It drives us away from the center, where God is, and in the process, it drives us away from each other. Sin exerts a powerful centrifugal force on marriage. It isolates us. It puts distance between us.

How do we deal with this? Well, God doesn’t take away the consequences of sin once you become a Christian. He takes away the penalty of sin, but we still struggle with the consequences of sin.

There is a very important verse in Eph 4:32…

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

I am convinced that the single most important thing you can do to cultivate a successful marriage is to develop the ability to say to each other “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you”. Those statements, truly spoken from the heart, spoken with God’s help, counteract the centrifugal force of sin in marriage. They exert a centripetal force, which is the opposite of centrifugal force. They bring us together, and they bring us back to the center, where God is.

God conquered sin by sending his son to pay the penalty and by saying to us “I forgive you.” In marriage, we will conquer sin’s consequences by saying the same thing to each other.