The AMI QT Devotionals from September 4-10 are provided by Pastor Mark Chun of Radiance Christian Church in S. F. Mark, a graduate of University of California, San Diego, and Talbot School of Theology (M.Div.), has been married to Mira for 21 years; they have two children, Jeremiah and Carissa.
Devotional Thoughts for Today
Genesis 2:19-25
Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib x he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” 24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
In this passage, we see that marriage and family is the only social institution that was a part of God’s created order before the Fall—before the consequence of sin. Therefore, we are given a glimpse of what an ideal marriage should look like by God’s perfect design. We see immediately that the dignity and equality of the genders is never questioned in the Scriptures. It is simply assumed, and therefore, the inequality that we see in the world is not by design. I believe Christians should consider it to be injustice when women are paid less for doing the same work as men, when positions of power—whether it is in politics or the corporate world—are withheld from them. These types of social issues should be examined, but alongside it, we are seeing an increasing attack on the notion of God’s design for men as the head of the family.
The argument that I have heard on many occasions is that it makes no sense that a woman can be the president of the United States but in the home she has to take a demotion. In fact, certain schools of feminist thought consider traditional views of marriage and family to be the root source of our societal problems in gender equality. And I would agree to a certain degree because traditional views are not the same thing as Biblical views. In fact, I would argue that Christianity, even when it has often been improperly or partially implemented, has offered a much better solution for women than any other social construct.
Rodney Stark, in his book The Triumph of Christianity, has a fascinating chapter on why women in the Roman Empire converted at such high rates. Some of the archaeological findings show that in the catacombs under Rome, Christian women were nearly as likely as Christian men to be commemorated with lengthy inscriptions. Princeton historian Brent Shaw made this observation in regards to his discovery: “This near equality in the commemoration of males and females is something that is peculiar to Christians, and sets them apart from the non-Christian populations of the city.”
Another reason many women converted to Christianity was to protect their daughters. A common practice among Roman aristocrats was the taking of child brides. Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins calculated that many of the famous women in Rome were married before the age of 12, and nearly 50% of pagan women were married off before their 15 th birthday. In contrast, it appeared that among Christians, it was a growing practice to withhold their daughters from marriage until 18. Contrary to popular thought, it would appear that the notion of Christian marriage and gender roles furthered the cause of women and gave them a place of dignity, equality, and safety within the church in comparison to the oppression that was prevalent in Roman society.
Prayer: Lord, we place our trust in Your perfect design for our marriages. We intercede for our families, knowing that there are problems that sin causes. We pray that we would not simply accept the way the world defines the concept of marriage but look into the Scriptures. We also pray that You would protect our marriages and children, as well as our parent’s marriages. May we reflect the love that Christ has for His Church as we live in harmony with our spouses. Amen.
Bible Reading for Today: Isaiah 32
Most modern women have a negative reaction to being called a ‘helper’ of man. The reason for this is that we tend to impose our cultural bias and assume that ‘helper’ means ‘junior assistant’. The Hebrew word that is translated as helper in English is 
I think it surprises some people that the Bible has so much to say about work and how relevant it is to us today—even after thousands of years. From the very first pages of Genesis, we are told that God finished His work of creation and then rested on the seventh day. In most religious views of the world, work is something that is beneath the gods and reserved for lowly humans to undertake; but in the Christian worldview, God literally gets His hands dirty and forms man from the very dust. And you can see from today’s passage that the very first thing that God does for man is to share His love for work with him. Genesis 2:15 states, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” What should be readily apparent is that this mandate was given to humanity 
The biblical understanding of the Sabbath rest comes primarily from the account of the creation. For six days, God created the universe, and after its completion He rested on the seventh day. But consider this: God—who never tires, gets burnt out, or has need of sleep—decided to take a break. Many of us could only dream of having that kind of energy. If we were God, we would have worked that seventh day and made creation even better. But this is the motivation of God behind His decision to rest: He rested because He saw that everything He had done was very good. The reason why the majority of people are tired is not because of the physical work they do but because of the perpetual restlessness of their souls. They can’t look at anything in their life and say for even a moment, “That is good.” We never allow our souls to come to rest because there is no sense of contentment in what God has done in our lives. We constantly find ourselves striving to prove that we are good enough, smart enough, or capable enough.
Some years ago, I had a chance to go on a mission trip across the Western United States with a group of high school students; and we went on the streets of cities like Portland, Seattle, and Salt Lake City to share the gospel. One of the first stops during this trip was the campus of Cal Berkeley. After one particular session of street evangelism, we started to discuss our experiences. One student came back very troubled, because he had run into a homeless man who asked him a simple but very profound question: “If God created everything, then who created sin?”
In today’s world, creationism is dismissed as a myth or the wishful dreams of the uneducated. CS Lewis once observed that within the scientific discipline, biologists tend to be the most irreligious and that physicists are the most religious. The reason for this general trend is evident. Biologists tend to look at life as a closed system, that there is life and death, a beginning and an end. On the other hand, physicists ultimately have to deal with the mystery of ultimate beginnings and how the universe came to be. Any honest scientist has to confess that the idea of the universe being created from nothing cannot be intellectually satisfying.
The AMI QT Devotionals from September 4-10 are provided by Pastor Mark Chun of Radiance Christian Church in S. F. Mark, a graduate of University of California, San Diego, and Talbot School of Theology (M.Div.), has been married to Mira for 21 years; they have two children, Jeremiah and Carissa.
In this story found in Luke 9, Jesus gathers His disciples and does a few things whereby He sets a platform for them to have confidence to do His work. First, He commissions them by giving them power and authority, authorizing them. Jesus gives them simple commands—drive out demons, cure diseases, etc.—which seem very difficult to anyone. He releases them to demonstrate to others that the Kingdom of God was at hand and that Jesus had the answers to their sufferings, whether physical, spiritual, or emotional. Then, He also tells the disciples to take nothing for the journey. By this, He positions them to trust in Him for their provisional needs, setting them up to experience His power firsthand. Jesus wanted them to experience that God was not only capable but incredibly faithful. They were about to see that wherever they went, they would be carrying God’s very presence with them, and that God would always be with them.
The AMI QT Devotionals from August 28-September 3 are provided by Hee Jung Lee. Hee Jung, a graduate of Biblical Theological Seminary, serves at Catalyst Agape Church (New Jersey) along with her husband Pastor Sam Lee. They have four beautiful daughters.
When our oldest daughter Anna was two years old, I quit my job in hopes to have another child and be a stay-at- home mother. My husband and I thought that by the time we had our second, the kids would be three years apart, which seemed ideal to us. However, things did not go as smoothly. I was unable to get pregnant as easily as we had anticipated or experienced with our first child. But, whether the enemy intends for harm, or life brings us challenges to overcome, God will always use the situation for our good (Rom. 8:28).
Very recently, my family—along with many friends— watched a play called “Jonah,” at Sight and Sound Theater in Pennsylvania. Now Jonah is not necessarily a Bible figure that I personally admired, because he did not come across as one who was after God’s heart, like David, Daniel, and Nehemiah. However, as I watched the play, I began to relate with this character more than I had when reading through the book of Jonah.