Biblical Womanhood
This is an abbreviated excerpt of the second message of a 3-part series delivered to the middle schoolers and high schoolers at Sioux Falls Christian on the topic of biblical sexuality.
Introduction
There is an alarming trend in America, especially prevalent among middle and high school girls. At unprecedented rates, teenage girls are announcing that they are actually boys stuck in girls’ bodies. Transgender ideology has swept our nation and left many people completely unable to answer basic questions like what it means to be a man or a woman. But God created us male and female in his own image, and our sexuality is fundamental to who we are. Therefore, this is one of the most important questions we can address these days.
In Part 1, Logan addressed the topic of biblical manhood. This week, I want to ask, “What does it mean to be a woman?” What is godly femininity? And that question is relevant to both men and women. If you’re a woman, you should want to mature in godly femininity, to glorify God in your female body, and to cultivate contentment and thankfulness to God for the way he made you. If you’re a man, you should want to honor, esteem, encourage, and protect godly women.
Godly Femininity Is the Unique Glory of Women
This is my main point: Godly femininity is the unique glory of women. When I say that godly femininity is the unique glory of women, I mean two things. First, I mean that men do not—and can never—possess femininity. Men may act effeminate, but effeminacy is not femininity. It is an insulting imitation of femininity and a shameful abdication of masculinity.
I also mean that women diminish their true glory when they try to act like men. The world tells women that they have to prove their worth by doing whatever it is that men do. But the God-given glory of women is found in their femininity, not their imitation of masculinity. The strength and glory of women is different from men. A woman is uniquely glorious as a woman and not as a second-rate man.
I want to show you four aspects of womanhood from Scripture, specifically the beginning of Genesis and and the end of Proverbs. Proverbs 31 was originally written by a mother for her son: “The words of King Lemuel. An oracle that his mother taught him” (Proverbs 31:1). And the king’s mother taught him this oracle to help him avoid wicked women who destroy kings and to find a godly woman fit to be a queen. As a woman herself, the queen mother knew women. She knew how much influence and power women have, either for good or for ill. And as a queen, she knew what kind of woman her son should look for to be the next queen.
Proverbs 31:10–31 is an acrostic; each line begins with the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet. An acrostic is a memory device, which tells us that the queen wanted her son to memorize by heart this description of the kind of woman he should marry.
The point is that godly femininity is deeper than mere biology. It wasn’t enough for the king to find a biological female. (Many conservatives today are content to define a woman as a biological female, but they are unable to offer a positive definition of femininity beyond that.) King Lemuel was to look for a woman distinguished in her conduct and character. This is why we talk about godly femininity.
So here are four glorious aspects of womanhood, drawn from Eve in Exile by Rebekah Merkle and material from Bill and Barbara Mouser called Five Aspects of Femininity.
God Made Women to Give and Nurture Life.
Genesis 1:27–28 says,
“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” (emphasis added).
God created two humans on a massive planet and told them to fill it. Humans are the image of God, and God wants the world to be filled with his image. So families are really important in God’s Story—husbands and wives, moms and dads, and babies. And this points us to one of the most fundamental truths about femininity: the essence of femininity is motherhood.
There’s a reason people refer to the earth as Mother Earth and think of the earth as feminine. The earth is teeming with life. Like a mother, the earth nurtures and sustains life. The earth receives seeds and rain and sunlight and turns those seeds into crisp apples, plump pumpkins, ripe tomatoes, and juicy watermelons—things that look and smell and taste delicious. The earth is fruitful, and femininity is fruitfulness.
Women not only give birth to children; they also nurture and sustain them, train and discipline and raise them to be godly men and women. Motherhood is the most undervalued, misunderstood vocation in our society today. People talk about motherhood as if it requires no skill or intelligence, like it’s a demeaning task to raise human beings. But motherhood is glorious and challenging. It requires great skill and intelligence. The woman in Proverbs 31 is competent to conduct business, buy real estate, plant a vineyard, provide food and clothing for her household, and more.
Being a mother and raising children is one of the ways women give life, but it’s not the only way. Listen to Elisabeth Elliot:
“Surely motherhood, in a deeper sense, is the essence of womanhood. … Womanhood is a call. It is a vocation to which we respond under God, glad if it means the literal bearing of children, thankful as well for all that it means in a much wider sense, that in which every woman, married or single, fruitful or barren, may participate—the unconditional response exemplified for all time in Mary the virgin, and the willingness to enter into suffering, to receive, to carry, to give life, to nurture, and to care for others.”
Motherly love and care is glorious, and it is a glory unique to women.
God Made Women to Take Dominion
After Genesis 1 talks about being fruitful and filling the earth, it says,
“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” (Genesis 1:28, emphasis added).
Women were made to be like God in this respect. To be made “in the image of God” means that humans resemble God and represent God on earth. In the ancient world, kings would put up statues of themselves, in their image and likeness, in the lands that they ruled to remind people who the king was. Humans were made to rule the world under God and to fill the earth with his image. That’s what it means to have dominion over and to subdue the earth. God placed Adam and Eve in a cultivated garden, but the rest of the world was a wilderness, and God told them to subdue it. That means God made women for hard work.
Some people demean women as helpless and powerless, but femininity is not weakness. Proverbs 31 says, “She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong. … Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come” (Proverbs 31:17, 25, emphasis added). A godly woman is physically and emotionally strong.
“She … works with willing hands” (Prov. 31:13).
“She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household” (Prov. 31:15).
“Her lamp does not go out at night” (Prov. 31:18)
“She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness” (Prov. 31:27)
A godly woman is neither weak nor lazy. 1 Peter 3:7 does refer to women as “the weaker vessel,” but that’s a comparison, meant to remind men that they are to use their strength for the good of women. It doesn’t mean women have no strength. The particular work to which God calls women requires physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual strength that is uniquely feminine.
God Made Women to Help and Complete
Genesis 2:18 says, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’” “A helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:18, 20) means a helper who is opposite him or corresponding to him. Adam needed help beyond what any of the animals could provide and different from what another man could provide. He needed a companion who was complementary to him—the same but different.
One thing is complementary to another, not by being identical to it, but by adding something different that enhances or accents the qualities of the other. Musical notes can be harmonious. Colors and flavors can be complementary. Milk and oreos, peanut butter and jelly, ketchup and mustard are complementary.
And so God created Woman as the corresponding opposite of Man.
“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. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’”
—Genesis 2:21–23
When Adam saw the woman, he immediately recognized that she was the same as him, and yet she was gloriously different from him. She was made from the same material: “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” She—like him—was the image of God. And yet he called her Woman because she was different.
One theologian writes,
“[Man] needs a helper; a woman, who does not stand above him to dominate him, nor beneath him as one degraded to the status of a tool for pleasure, but one who stands alongside him, stationed at his side and therefore formed from his side.”
—Herman Bavinck
To be called a “helper” does not imply that women are inferior to men. Men shouldn’t take offense that God says they need help from women. Neither should women shouldn’t take offense that God made them to help.
In particular, God made women to focus on their households and families in a unique way. God made the man from the earth, brought him to the earth, and charged him to work the earth. When God made woman, he made her from the man, brought her to the man, and gave her the task of helping the man. Man is oriented from his home out toward the world; woman is oriented toward her husband and family. And these different orientations are complementary.
We see this in the Proverbs 31 woman. Her household is her priority and she nurtures her family:
“The heart of her husband trusts in her. … She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life” (Proverbs 31:11–12).
“She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household” (Proverbs 31:15).
“She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet” (Proverbs 31:21).
“She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness” (Proverbs 31:27).
“Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land” (Proverbs 31:23).
God does not command individual women to submit to men in general, but when a woman gets married, she takes her husband’s name and becomes a helper-completer to that particular man. But it is right for godly women—old or young, single or married—to cultivate this disposition in their various relationships. In 1 Timothy 5, Paul describes godly widows who deserved honor and support from the church as women who had “a reputation for good works: if she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work” (1 Timothy 5:10).
God Made Women for Glory
Related to this helper-completer role is the concept of glory. 1 Corinthians 11:7–9 says, “Man … is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”
Many people read this and take offense, as though it elevates men above women, since it says that man is the glory of God. But think of other phrases in the Bible. In the tabernacle, there was the Holy Place and then there was the Holy of Holies. Is the Holy of Holies more or less holy than the Holy Place? When we say that Jesus is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, we mean he is the highest and greatest king.
Scripture says that man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. That implies that woman is the glory of the glory of God. Humans are the crown of creation, the image of God resembling God’s likeness and representing God’s rule. And women are the crown of the crown.
Genesis says that man was made from the dirt, but woman was made from the man. It’s like man is a rough stone cut from a mountain with hammers and chisels and pick-axes, but woman is the precious gemstone carefully cut from the stone. Women were created second. But not second like the silver medalist in the olympics who finished behind the gold medalist. Second like the harmony that completes the melody. Second like the pop of accent color that stands out against the neutral color. Women were created to glorify and beautify. And ultimately, women were made to glorify God, to reflect his glory and goodness.
Conclusion
In summary, it is a glorious thing to be a woman, and God has good and glorious work for women to do in the world. A godly woman is far more than a biological female. She is a female made in the image of God who receives her femininity with gratitude and cultivates godly feminine character by faith. She stewards her God-given femininity—nurturing life, taking dominion, helping and completing, and beautifying—all for the good of others and the glory of God. And she is marked by confidence and joy. Godly men and women do not despise femininity, but treasure the goodness and glory of womanhood.