Bill and Barbara Mouser
Mary and Jesus by Bernadette Carstensen. Buy a print here and support a crisis pregnancy ministry!
In November 2018, Agence France-Presse reported that feminist theologians in Geneva Switzerland had published "A Women's Bible," the latest effort by feminists to reconcile their political agenda with the Bible's candidly patriarchal view of the sexes by reading feminist dogma into the ancient texts. Yet, Advent and Christmastide have always featured a woman as a primary character. The Virgin Mary brings to a climax a relationship between life-giving mothers and their savior-sons that stretches all the way back to the beginning of the Biblical record.
Life-giving is an easily understood aspect of Biblical womanhood. What many fail to recognize, however, is the vital role which women have played in raising up sons who in turn played vital roles as leaders and saviors for God's people. Consider the following twenty life-giving women and the key men to whom they gave life (named in parentheses):
Eve (Seth) Sarah (Isaac) Rebekah (Jacob) Rachel (Joseph) Leah (Judah) Tamar (Perez)
Jochebed (Moses) Shiphrah and Puah (Moses) Miriam (Moses) Pharaoh’s daughter (Moses)
Manoah’s wife (Samson) Hannah (Samuel) Naomi and Ruth (Obed and King David’s line)
Jehoshabeth (Joash) Elizabeth (John the Baptist) Mary (Jesus) Lois and Eunice (Timothy).
Many of these women and their sons are well known; others are less familiar. All these women gave life to the men they brought up in the world as God's servants and as saviors for God's people.
The Virgin Mary, of course, stands at the pinnacle of this long line of life-giving mothers. In the list of 20 mothers just named, seven of them bore sons in the Messianic line: Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, Tamar, Ruth, and Mary. When God appointed Mary to give birth to the Savior of the World, she received a blessing greater than any of the women in the list above.
But, it would be a gross misunderstanding of Mary and her mission to think hers was a one-off calling. Mary is unique: her Son is divine. But, to rear a savior of God's people is a zenith of the maternal vocation all the way back to the beginning of time. The majority of the twenty women named above did not bear sons in the Messianic line. But, they did bring forth sons who played pivotal roles in the history of God's people in their own day.
God used most of these women to nurture and train men whom God used as warriors in their own eras. Rachel’s son, Joseph, was not in the Messianic line, but he had a great work to perform. Moses was not in the Messianic line, yet he had a monumental task from God—and it took five life-givers to prepare him for it! Samson, Samuel, John the Baptist, and Timothy—none were in Christ’s ancestral line, but their mothers produced sons with strategic roles in God’s work. These mothers brought forth saviors and warriors for the spiritual battle of their day. The same spiritual struggles continue in every generation. The shape of the battlefield in any generation is determined largely by what the mothers did in the preceding generation.
Four of Moses’s lifegivers were not his mother at all! Exodus does not begin with God giving commandments on Mt. Sinai, but with the five women who gave Moses life: Jochebed, his birth mother; Shiphrah and Puah, the midwives; Miriam, Moses' sister; and Pharaoh’s daughter. Moses’ mother gave him birth and nursed him. The two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, protected his life while willingly risking their own lives by disobeying Pharaoh's order to kill Israelite baby boys. Moses’ sister, Miriam (the patron saint of baby-sitters) guarded him as she watched over him in the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter had compassion on him. Motivated by her own womanly, lifegiving heart, she heard a little baby in distress and naturally wanted to protect him, to give him life and not death. The Princess may have been the only woman in Egypt equipped to train Moses for the life he eventually led. But it was her nurturing heart, not her regal power, which motivated her to do her historic ministry.
A survey of womanhood through the Bible reveals that every historical epoch in Scripture begins with women.
The beginning of the human race features Eve and the birth of her first three sons.
Exodus does not start with God and Moses on Mt. Sinai. It starts with five women giving Moses life, protection, and training.
The era of Prophets and Kings does not begin with Samuel, Saul, or David. It begins with Hannah, struggling with her barrenness, praying, and bringing forth a son.
The book of Ruth tells us the story of David's great-great grandmother and how David came to be born in Bethlehem, because two faithful women returned to their ancestral home in Bethlehem and raised up a seed to God.
Matthew and Luke begin not with John and Jesus, but with Mary and Elizabeth. Just as the ancient text of Genesis foretold, the conquering warriors come through women. The story of spiritual victory starts with a woman. Jesus, through the Virgin Mary, is truly the seed of a woman, not the seed of a man. Through the Virgin Mother, the Serpent Crusher came, just as God's promise in Genesis 3 foretold.
The Church is institutionalized in the pastoral epistles—1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. In 2 Timothy 1:5, Paul says, “For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and I am sure that it is in you as well.”
Throughout Church history, great pastors and Bible teachers were evangelized and trained by their mothers, grandmothers, and other lifegiving women.
The feminist theologians in Switzerland produced "the Women's Bible" to present what they suppose is true femininity. From the Bible, however, a chorus of women, headed by the Mother of Jesus Christ, proclaims the power of women to shape and direct future generations by giving life to godly sons who join their mothers to advance God's Kingdom. And while women move history in many other ways as well, “Lifegiver and Savior” is the true story of Christmas.