Think of times of war and the military. You will get a senior general in command of a whole theatre of war, and he has got his staff officers. Now, they may have various ranks. He may have a brigadier; that's the very junior general in his staff office. He'll have a colonel, and a couple of majors in there. They are all inferior to him in rank and lower down. But hopefully they are able and clever men. In fact, sometimes much cleverer than the senior general. Particularly today, with some of the high-tech instruments of war. Some of the staff officers will be experts in them, and they can do fare more with them than the general in charge. So it's not a question of superior, inferior, intrinsically. Some of those staff officers that serve the general will be equal to him in brains, and in many other ways. But he has the ultimate decision to make. If he is wise, he will lean on them, and he will know how to make the most of their information, and their input. If he is arrogant, the general officer commanded, he will ride over them, and because of that, he will make many foolish mistakes. God has distributed roles. The man is the leader and the teacher. The woman is in the supporting role. It doesn't make her less intelligent. In fact, there are wives more intelligent than their husbands; that's common, and the husband, if he's got any brains, will listen. He will respect and acknowledge the intuition and the wisdom and counsel of his wife. He will be humble enough to sometimes be corrected by her. So this isn't superior, inferior. These are the offices that the Lord has given to us.
Elsewhere Paul adds the converse truth: ‘Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. 12 For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman (1 Corinthians 11:11-12). While God has made the man first and the woman for the man, yet he has made them completely interdependent. The man is in his term is derived from the woman, and but for the woman the human race could not be perpetuated. The whole order is actually a masterpiece because while first came the man, and second the woman, yet to prevent the man from getting too heady, he in his term is dependent upon the woman. He is not to get an inflated ego with regard to these things, but there is an order in society and we read about this particularly in Genesis.
We need to understand because there is another problem that some people raise. They say, what about the prophetesses of the New Testament? If the women could not teach, what happened to the prophetesses? Actually, so far as we know, there were very few prophetesses in the New Testament. We know of Anna and she was really under the Old Testament order, though mentioned in the New Testament. We know of the four virgin daughters of Philip, the evangelist, but very few others. What we do know is that the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians says that the women have no part in the public services of the church, either in the teaching ministry, or in the prophesying. Now in those days there was prophesying; the word of God was not complete and until the word of God became complete, God spoke through prophets, local prophets as well as the inspired prophets who gave the Scriptures as it came into being. But the rule was that the prophetesses were not to speak in the public services. So where there were prophetesses like Philip's four daughters, we may be sure that they practiced their ministry of prophecy as God inspired them in a much more private manner, within their homes, and there is no evidence that it was conducted in the public services of the church.