Leadership and Motherhood
Both leadership and motherhood are grand ideas and undeniably the world would be a far different place than it is without them, but defining either one of them rests upon a big pile of assumptions. By assumptions we mean those underlying basics that are avoided or skirted or just plain assumed. One might well call them gratuitous assumptions, something that everybody already knows—if they follow our own way of thinking. But do we really know all the implications?Since all our thinking and planning should be in line with what the Bible teaches this is where any attempt to define or explain either one of these all-encompassing words will differ radically from what the worldly explanation is. To us God the Creator and Sustainer is the underlying assumption, while the materialist completely rules Him out, so we must be careful to refute their assumptions and carefully document what the Bible teaches. It cannot be assumed either with motherhood or leadership.
We can grant that like motherhood itself, leadership per se is good and necessary even when there are incidents of poor leadership and poor motherhood all around us. As we look at bad people and reflect that they are all mother's children we must admit that there are motherhood failures, although that was not the Creator's original plan when He created motherhood. Leadership failures also abound where both bad and good men fail, but none of these examples can deny the worth and value of motherhood or leadership. Both of these activities are God given and not evolutionary, that is something from nothing.
The materialist who denies the Creator cannot deny the first premise of motherhood, that it all starts with a father, he just deliberately omits mentioning it. But in God's account He includes fatherhood, not just as a pre birth thing but as a purposeful presence in the life and full development of every child, while the modern mother-only family will be the downfall of motherhood itself. For believers a sufficient illustration will be the life of Jesus Christ who had a father figure from before His birth up to almost the time of His ministry start. The Bible says that in all points He was like as we are. But this treatise is not about motherhood; it is about leadership so we must go on to show how leadership suffers from the same philosophical errors.
As the father is the sine qua non of motherhood so authority may be thought of as the fundamental basic of leadership. Although it is often noted that leadership is defined by the fact that there are followers, that is almost equivalent to saying that children imply mothers. That is correct in that it emphasizes that effects need a cause, but it evades the more important question of the causes that produce the effects. Without doubt the father is the first cause of the child being born, even so we are premising that authority is really the first cause of leadership.
As Bible believers we are convinced that there is no first cause ahead of God Himself. He ordained motherhood when He gave Eve to Adam, and He sanctified and ordered leadership when He told Adam that the entire created world was under his command to lead. Since He had the full authority by virtue of being the Creator He had the full authority to delegate some of His authority to Adam. That the no-God environmentalist has to deny this is understood but it is no credit to Christians that they follow his pronouncements instead of the Bible, for not only has God never rescinded the dominion covenant because of the fall, He repeated it right after the flood because He made man to lead and He made the creation needing a leader.
Therefore we see that a leadership vacuum never lasts very long. Someone quickly takes over and the results start to come in. These emergencies happen all the time, but they really are not supposed to last nor should they. We seek leaders who are prepared ahead of time for the emergencies, knowing how God wants them handled. And to find such men or better still to train them for this work we need to completely define even the normally assumed basics of the leadership work.
For us who are not materialists, who believe that the spiritual world exists and that the laws of the universe were made by the good Creator who Himself is separate and above them, it is important to start with His Word to us. That includes both His written word and His Son the living Word. We have already referred to the Jesus' father figure Joseph, who perhaps the boy and man Jesus followed more than His mother. That was about motherhood, and now we need to look at incidents in His life that shine on leadership.
To begin with let us start with the Trinity, the Godhead, our Triune God. God is a mystery, but it is very apparent that He wants us to learn and learn more and more of Himself, His Person and what He does. In the New Testament we learn that there is God the Father, and God the Son, Jesus, and also God the Holy Spirit. We are taught to think of God as three separate persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, three in one. So from this basic let us ask a question, "Does this three person statement imply that any one of these persons is better than another?" Absolutely not! Such a thought would violate the idea of One God. Yes, Jews and Mohammedans may accuse us of saying this, but they are wrong. Every person of the Godhead is equal in person, period.
And yet when we hear Jesus saying, "My Father is greater than I," we ask in what way? If not in person, then in what way? In that God the Father has a position above God the Son. The word position here is important and it is not synonymous with person. There is order in the Godhead, a good order, not a conflicting order or a competing order, but an agreeing, solidifying order. We are still mystified why such language is necessary to partly describe who God is, but we must admit that that is what the Bible teaches.
Since God authored mankind in likeness to Himself we are entitled to use His personality and His order to define leadership. Therefore axiom number one of leadership is that we must never, never, ever confuse person and position or person and privilege. They are different. And yet that is the assumption by the masses, and it is usually encouraged by the candidate too, that an elevated position adds to the personal worth of the candidate or the official. It reminds me of an admonition my mother used to have whenever I, as the oldest in the family, became bossy. It was this; "A man died of a fish he ate (officiate)." Perhaps she explained the meaning or was it through repeated repetitions that we finally caught on?
We know from what the Bible teaches that the human race was a worthwhile creation, that God made us intentionally, and that we were made to glorify God. Nowhere in the Record is the person of one human spoken of disparagingly by Jesus or as being less worthwhile. Definitely one person’s works and choices are better or poorer than another's , but not the person. Perhaps the hardest extreme for us to reconcile is that the person who has the most diseased and dis-formed body along with the weakest mind is as worthwhile a person as I am. He has no privileges compared to what has been given to me. He needs a leader, but not an officious (a fish-he-ating)one!