The Adornment of a Christian Woman
Excerpt
Peter in verses 1 and 2 exhorts these Christian wives to win their husbands to the Lord by pious living. In this verse, he forbids them to depend upon outward adornment in their effort at gaining their husbands, and not only upon outward adornment as such, but upon worldly adornment, the kind which they wore before they were saved, immodest, gaudy, conspicuous. These women were making the mistake of thinking that if they would dress as the world dressed, that that would please their unsaved husbands, and they would thus be influenced the easier to take the Lord Jesus as Saviour. It is true that they would be pleased, pleased because the appearance of their wives appealed to their totally depraved natures, and pleased because the Christian testimony of their wives was nullified by their appearance. They would say, “What you appear to be speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you are saying.” It is not true that that would help win their husbands to the Lord. These wives could hardly have made a greater mistake.
The word “adornment” is the translation of the Greek word kosmos (κοσμος) which was used in classical Greek to refer to the adornment or the ornaments worn by women. The word in itself refers to an ordered system, namely, a system where order prevails. The word in the Greek opposite in meaning to kosmos (κοσμος) is chaos (χαος), which comes into English in the word “chaos,” and which means “a rude unformed mass.” Kosmos (Κοσμος) is used in the New Testament to refer to the original, perfect creation, a system where order prevailed. Here the word refers to the adornment of the woman, and the genius of the word speaks of the fact that that adornment should be that which is fitting, congruous, not diverse from one’s character. That is, the adornment of the Christian woman should be in keeping with what she is as a Christian. She should not be a Christian at heart and her adornment be that of a person of the world.
Then Peter not only forbids worldly adornment, but says that the adornment of the Christian woman should not be mere outward adornment as against that which is from within. This he further develops in verse 4 where the principle is brought out that the adornment of the Christian woman should proceed from within her heart, not be put on from without. But before he enunciates that principle, he speaks of the way these Christian women were adorning themselves, and forbids the same.
Wuest, Kenneth S. Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament: For the English Reader. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Print.
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