Why the Prayer Covering?
By: Dave
Why the prayer veil?
Before we can talk about the prayer veil, we must understand a few things. First we were created by God, for what? 1 Co 10:31 says we are to bring glory to God. If this is not our first and foremost desire as a Christian, then we're done with a dialog.
Mans biggest downfall is himself. We are human and we like people to like us. We don't want to be different, we want to blend into the crowd. The Word says come out from among them and be ye separate.
I would like to address the long hair first, and that it is a glory to her. In society today it's more common to see short hair on a woman then long, but when a man sees a woman with long hair his heart tells him that's her glory. We have became so complacent to short hair, the wrongness doesn't bother us.
If a woman professing Christ is in public with her hair down and uncovered it would not be unusual for a man to lust after her. This not only is bringing glory to her instead of Christ it is causing another person to sin. In 190 AD, Clement of Alexandria, an elder writing from Egypt counseled: "Let the woman observe this, further. Let her be entirely covered, unless she happens to be at home. For that style of dress is grave, and protects from being gazed at. And she will never fall, who puts before her eyes modesty, and her shawl; nor will she invite another to fall into sin by uncovering her face. For this is the wish of the Word, since it is becoming for her to pray veiled."
This is the real reason for not wanting to be covered, we feel it makes us look different. If Christ gets glory from our being covered, and our life is set aside to glorify Him, the prayer covering would be a simple thing.
We all understand that the covering is for headship, the wearing of it by a woman honors God and the not wearing of it by a man honors God. A woman that wears the covering in public is telling her husband that she is in submission to him, and that she is not out in public looking beautiful for other men. Her submission to her husband makes God very pleased with her.
We've had a lot of conservative Christians opting to take off the covering of late. One of the local churches was getting too many questions about the covering. The paster just said “the covering was for the Corinthians, and I don't want to hear any more on this subject”. If this was only for the Corinthians, I want to know if the Corinthians had a special thing going with the Angels? This phrase alone gives this whole passage a new direction. The word “angel” actually comes from the Greek word aggelos, which means “messenger.” The matching Hebrew word mal'ak has the same meaning. It says she will have power on her head because of the angels, wow. What an honor to have power on her head from the angels. Finding out what kind of power she could have because of the angels is an other study, but I know this applies to our women today.
Our women need to wear the covering honoring their husband and there by bringing glory to God, which is our reasonable service.