Biblical Womanhood
Welcome to 30 Minute Theology Studies, where we take a Christian doctrine and try to make sense of it, all in about 30 minutes. God’s already given us the sense in Scripture, we just need to work through the biblical data, organize it in a helpful way, and then apply it. Of course, theologians do this all the time and come to different conclusions, so we’ll have to address some of the problems along the way, before we can arrive at a solution. So, let’s see how much of that we can sort out in this short time. Let’s go ahead and get started.
In this study, we’re talking about biblical womanhood, which is really under the broader topic of gender and sexuality. I’ve already done a study on biblical manhood, which I would recommend listening to first (or you could maybe just scan the transcript), because I will be building on some of those passages that we discussed there in that study. But, either way, I will review some of those ideas here now, and then I’ll complete some of those thoughts a little later.
In the biblical manhood study, I introduced the most important passages on gender and sexuality—those being the genesis account of creation. And then we went to look at a couple passages where both Jesus and Paul pointed back to that account when discussing the relationship between men and women in the home and in the church.
Genesis means origins; Genesis is the story of our creation; it’s our origin story. And God included it in his Word because it’s important. When people start questioning the importance of Genesis and the creation account, there’s a real danger in getting God’s whole story wrong from the very beginning. Genesis is not a fairytale; it’s foundational. It’s true. (and there’s more to say on that, but we’ll have to save it for a theology study on Creation.) But the creation account lets us know why we’re here and what we’re supposed to be doing. And we’ll get to what that means for women in a minute, but first a quick review on what men are meant to do.
Scripture makes much about the order of the creation of men and women. We saw it in the creation account, and in both Jesus and Paul. Men were created first and then women were created next, from the man, for the man. This order was purposeful; it put men out front. Men lead the home and the church. The word used in the Bible for leadership is proistemi (PROIS-tah-mi), it means ‘to go before; to get out front’. So, this is not some top-down authority, it’s not a dictatorship; no, it’s an out-front protection.
And we asked ourselves, in that study, about the obvious fact that men are created with greater size, strength, and aggression, and we concluded that it must’ve been by design. We know God is a good designer; he’s purposeful, and we made the connection with Adam’s work in the garden, and the subsequent curse—that God connected Adam to the curses' effect on his work in the world. So men were made with greater size, strength, and aggression to correspond with this call to be out front, to do the difficult, dangerous work.
And this being out front isn’t glamorous. It’s dirty work. And more than that; it’s often deadly. If there's a risk of death, then that’s the thing that husbands and fathers should be doing.
Paul makes it our duty to die like Christ for the sake of our families. When Christ set his face like flint and he marched to his death in Jerusalem, that’s the kind of will and determination that men should have in the face of danger. We go get ourselves killed, so that others don’t, so that they can get away.
Now, of course, that doesn’t mean (at least for most of us) that we will literally have to die. Most of our dirty work is not nearly that heroic. Leading our families, more often, is just about men making a stand on important issues, and taking the hit for it. It’s about getting the family going in the right direction, even when it gets hard.
And we saw how men being out front also applied to pastors and elders in the church—that pastors and elders do the difficult, dangerous work of exhorting and admonishing—that THAT role is reserved for men. And I know that there are some exceptional women out there who could fill the pulpit, and some even preach the word in the way that Paul told Timothy to preach, but there’s also a lot of inspirational and motivational speeches that pass for preaching. The women preachers that I’ve heard . . . I wouldn’t exactly call them confrontational. But then that’s really a problem all around in our churches. And I could say some things about that. Maybe I’ll do a study on preaching at some point. Anyway.
Oh, and I didn’t say this in the manhood study, but I’ll say it here. You know, sure we could encourage our Christian sisters and daughters to get out there in front of the church, you know, first in the line of fire. Go ahead, get on stage and preach the Word, refute and rebuke, practice church discipline, but if we did, women should know this about men: that men WILL by nature, we will instinctively—and call it chivalry or whatever—but we’ll spend all our time out there defending you women, instead of actually contending for the faith. Out there on the front lines, we should be fighting, but instead we’ll be distracted with defending the women who are out there with us. And I’ve seen this happen time and again in church ministry. When God’s creation order gets dis-ordered, it becomes a liability for everyone involved. We men will redirect our energies and we’ll lose focus. As long as women are out there with us on the front lines, we’ll be preoccupied with them, we won’t be able to help it, it’s in our nature—we’re protectors by design. And don’t think that the enemy won’t use God’s good design against us. Satan’s got us right where he wants us, all distracted from our mission.
Alright, so we talked a little about biblical manhood, let’s get into biblical womanhood. And we’ve talked a lot about what women shouldn’t do, but I’d much rather talk about what they should be doing. I can get excited about the work that women do—in fact, I alluded to it in the manhood study, that what women do may be even more important than what men do.
And that’s why biblical womanhood matters, it matters to humanity, to how humans will rule the world like God, in his image. If you only studied biblical manhood, you’d probably leave depressed, discouraged with all the talk of dirty work—the difficult, dangerous things that men do. ‘Go get yourselves killed.’ It’s all about death.
Well, thank God for women, they’re all about life. If men are death-dealers, women are life-givers. And I don’t just mean that they’re life-givers in their birthing babies . . . Women give life to the world in countless other ways. They are absolutely important to God’s plan—the world needs women.
So let’s get into the biblical data.
Women are life-givers. We see it first in Genesis, in our origin story.
“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
And then in chapter 2:
“Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”
And then in chapter 3, the creation account gets wrapped up with this: “The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.”
And you probably have a note in your Bible next to that verse that says something like “Eve sounds like the Hebrew for life-giver and resembles the word for living.”
So she's helper—we saw that earlier, and here we see that she's life-giver. So, it stands to reason that her helping has something to do with her life-giving. And again, it means so much more than just giving birth.
We see some of that in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In the passage we looked at in the manhood study. In 1 Corinthians 11 we read “the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” and Paul’s reason in verse 8 is that “man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”
So, man was created first which put him out front, and then we read that woman was created for man to be his helper. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He quickly tries to balance things out a bit, understanding that men may think that that gives them permission to overpower women with their greater size, strength, and aggression. We see that women actually have a countervailing power.
Verses 11-12 say: “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.”
So, it starts, ‘in the Lord’ meaning by God’s good design, then it goes on. Sure woman depends on man to be her protector, it says, but man also needs woman’s help—we’re also dependent on women. There are things that men can’t do, things that only women can do. Getting things done, humans doing what we’re supposed to be doing, depends on women just as much as men.
Then it says that, yeah sure, Eve was made from Adam’s rib, but that was just one, single event, that was just her origin, her beginning. But now, every human that will ever live from here until the end of history will be born of a woman. Women will bring life into the world.
And there’s another important passage in 1 Timothy, chapter 2 that’s similar—the other one we read in the manhood study. Like the 1 Corinthians 11 passage, where the first few verses applied to men and then the verses after that applied to women. We get the same thing here in 1 Timothy, chapter 2. Verses 12-14 read: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”
Paul wanted Timothy to pass on some instructions to the churches regarding women teachers. I mentioned in the manhood study that this passage needed more context and I didn’t get a chance to give any, so maybe here I can, at least, say that these verses are not saying that women must always keep their mouths closed. We read elsewhere that woman can pray and prophecy in the church, and that she should teach certain groups of people, so here, that women are to remain quiet must mean that she is to remain quiet only if she is praying, prophecying, or teaching in a certain way, in a way that usurps the authority of man, those pastors or elders out front, the ones who go get themselves killed. So, there is a way, a certain way and in front of certain audiences, that women SHOULD speak up, in fact they’re commanded to speak up. So, this is not saying that women are to remain quiet in all circumstances.
Ok, so where I was going with this passage, was to get to verse 15, where it reads: “Yet, she will be saved through childbearing—if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
So, men are out front doing the dirty work, dealing in death—things that Paul does not permit women to do. But then he says what women WILL be doing, they’ll be out there giving life. It says she’ll be ‘saved’, but we’re not talking ‘salvation’ here, as in Christ’s work of redemption. It’s more like she’ll be ‘rescued’. Humanity will be rescued. Maybe think of it like this: ever since the fall, since Eve was deceived, the world's been a sinking ship. And it says that Eve is like a life preserver; she’ll rescue herself and the world from drowning, with her life-giving. In all of man’s dealing in death; woman is a bright spot in the world—she’s the salvation of us all.
Ok, so we have some biblical data. We kind of just used the same passages that we did for the manhood study, and when we read a little further we saw that they also have meaning for womanhood. Now, let’s do some organizing of that data, to see if we can make more sense of it.
So, the Genesis account is foundational. God created us in his image and likeness, to rule the world like he would, as his image. And God created us male and female, in that order. Man was created first, to be out front, and woman was next, to be man’s helper. God, being a good designer, made men with greater size, strength, and aggression, so that he could deal in death, while she would rescue the world by giving it life.
We also learned that because of sin, men would sinfully use their greater size, strength, and aggression to try to overpower women, and that women would try to get out in front of men. Women would try to be death-dealers instead of life-givers.
Our other passages showed how Paul would remind the two—men and women—of their differences, and their duties based on those differences. In 1 Corinthians 11 we read “the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” So Paul was saying to men, yall are the head of the family, get out front and lead. And to the women, he followed that up by saying, in verses 11-12 say: “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.” So, men are out in front leading, but women your job is just as important, maybe even more so. You are the ‘mother of all living’. You bring life into the world. Every human owes its existence to a woman. But it's not just that, it’s not just giving birth.
We see that in our next passage. I Timothy 2, verses 12-14 read: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” But it goes on, verse 15 reads, “Yet, she will be saved through childbearing—if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”
The woman is a life-saver. She’ll rescue herself and the world. And how does she do that? By childbearing. Not only do women birth babies, but they BEAR them. Childbearing is a woman's countervailing power. Men have power, because of their size, strength, and aggression, but that power is limited, it ends in death. Women, on the other hand, may be more powerful in that they put their stamp on every single human. Their influence extends further than any man’s ever could. And women’s power is positive, it’s toward life, and it grows exponentially.
And you can see how Paul puts this all together in Ephesians 5. Male and female. Men and women. Death-dealing and life-giving. It’s all there in Ephesians 5. I’ll read the whole passage:
“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”
Here we can pull it all together, all gender and sexuality studies come to this. This connects both our manhood and womanhood studies. Here we finally learn what all of this has really been about. This is the mystery that was once hidden but now revealed . . . Men and women rule the world together in relationship because they picture Christ and his church.
Gender and sexuality, male and female, husband and wife is about us and Jesus. He’s the husband and we’re the wife—that’s the mystery of men and women. Can you see the picture? Husbands die a sacrificial death like Jesus, so that women can live like the church.
So, we’re not just ruling the world within a relationship in order to create culture, or even to grow the church, although those are important parts of it, but actually we’re putting God’s glory on display; we’re presenting a picture of the gospel.
This is the significance of gender and sexuality, male and female, husband and wife. This is why it’s so important that we get it right. If we break up that relationship, or reorder it in any way, or even just make it unimportant or unnecessary, we’re saying something about Christ and his church; we’re seriously messing with the presentation—with the picture.
Alright, with the time we got left let’s try to pull together some applications. So, we’re created male and female with important differences. We’re not the same; we’re not interchangeable. God is a good designer, and he made us with purpose. Men were created with greater size, strength, and aggression in order to be out front doing the dirty work—we go get ourselves killed. We die for our families and for our churches. Women can counterveil that size, strength, and aggression with childbearing. Women are unbelievably powerful. Not only does every human come from a woman, but she also forms every one of them.
I’m always surprised by feminists, by the way, who fight so hard for things out there in the political arena, when they forget that they have the power to form human opinion on the front end—when little humans are young and impressionable. If they wanna see change in this world, I wanna say to them, then bear the children you wanna see out there running the country. The power’s in your hands, if you’ll wield it. Stop dealing in death, and instead infuse life in the world.
Which gets me to Titus 2, where Paul gives some practical instruction to women on how to infuse life into the home and the church. Titus 2 says:
Women “are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”
Teach what is good, women, be life-givers in the family and in the church. You can do this in a way that men won’t—in a way that men can’t. We’re always dealing in death. Remember in Ephesians where Paul had to warn fathers to stop ‘provoking your children to anger’. Women train children differently, they train in love, to love the family, to love the home, and when children trained to love by moms, by life-givers, when those children grow up, when they become adults, as the Proverb says, “they will not depart from it.” That’s how you change the world.
One last application, and we’ll get real practical here, maybe even a little personal . . . So, I ended the manhood study by talking to just men, so I’ll talk to just women here. Did you notice in our passages, in 1 Timothy 2, Titus 2, and implied in others, that Paul often encourages women toward ‘self-control’?
I think this kinda parallels Paul’s marching orders at the end of 1 Corinthians that I finished up the manhood study with: “Be watchful,” Paul says, “stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” but then tempers all that aggressiveness with this, he says “Let all that you do be done in love.” So, like I said earlier, we men, dealing in death all day, gotta remember that everything we do STILL must be done in love.
So, in the same way with women, with all yall’s life-giving—with yall always infusing emotion into everything, it’s gotta be balanced. Remember to maintain some self-control. So, yes, be all about life and emotion, but also be ‘in control’. And I know I gotta be real careful here, ha! In fact that’s probably a good place to stop.
Alright, so thanks for listening to this 30 minute theology study. Hope to see you at the next one.