a word before we begin

Let me start, My Friend, with the two pictures of you that you have almost certainly been handed, because this booklet is going to take a hammer to both of them, and I want you to know from the first page that both are going in the bin.

The first picture is the one much of the church has given you: the godly woman as a soft, still, seated thing, who waits. She waits to be noticed, waits to be pursued, waits to be led, waits to be told, and does not move, because moving is supposedly unwomanly, unsubmissive, unbecoming of a daughter of God. She is a lovely piece of furniture in her own life, and she has been taught to call her stillness holiness.

The second picture is the one the world hands you in its place, and it is a shout: get it, girl. Go take what is yours. Answer to no one, submit to nothing, bow to no man and no order and no God, and call that freedom. It is loud, and it looks like power, and it is really just the first picture flipped over, a woman defined entirely against something instead of for something.

You were handed a woman who only waits, and a woman who only takes. The Bible has a third woman, and she is better than both.

Here is what I mean to show you across these pages: the Bible has a third woman, and she is better than either one, and she is all over the Scripture in plain sight, and almost nobody preaches her. She moves. She acts. She speaks first, seeks, decides, risks, goes. And she does every bit of it inside God’s good order, honoring it, never once against it. She is bold and she is submitted in the very same motion, and the camps that fight over women cannot see her because each of them has decided those two words are enemies. They are not.

And I will tell you plainly, right here at the start, where this lands, so that no one is caught off guard: the egalitarians are wrong, and wrong at the very root, and the complementarians, who sit a good deal nearer the truth, still get this one thing wrong. I will make that case in full further on, once you have seen the women themselves and can weigh it against the Book itself.

chapter one

the woman who moves

Say it plainly first, the thing the rest of this booklet will prove, so you can hold it in your hand as we go: the woman who moves first is not a rare exception in the Scripture, smuggled in against the grain. She is everywhere. And the Spirit of God, who wrote every one of these accounts, does not scold her for it. He praises her.

You have been given the impression, I think, that Scripture holds up one kind of woman, the quiet and receptive kind, and merely tolerates the bold ones as strange one-offs, a Deborah here, a Jael there, oddities to be explained away rather than examples to be learned from. But go and actually read, and count, and you will find the opposite. Over and over, at the hinges of the great stories, it is a woman who moves, who acts first, who does the decisive thing, and the text celebrates her for it in the plainest terms.

Ruth rises in the night and goes to the threshing floor and asks a man to redeem her. Abigail saddles a donkey and rides out on her own judgment to stop a massacre. The bride of the Song rises in the night and seeks her beloved through the city streets. A woman from Canaan argues with the Lord Jesus Himself and will not take no for an answer, and He marvels at her faith. A sick woman shoves through a crowd and reaches out and takes hold of her own healing. These are not footnotes. These are some of the most beloved and most honored women in the whole of the Book, and in every single case the thing they are honored for is that they moved.

The woman who moves first is not a rare exception in Scripture. She is everywhere, and the Spirit praises her for it.

We are going to walk through them, one at a time, and I am going to show you two things at once in each, because both are always there and the camps only ever see one. First, that she genuinely moved, boldly, on her own feet, first. And second, that she moved inside God’s order and to honor it, never to throw it off. Hold both, because the holding of both is the whole point, and it is the thing that will set you free from both the waiting woman and the taking woman at a single stroke.

ruth at the threshing floor

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sources & notes

  1. Ruth 3:6–11, Ruth’s night-errand to the threshing floor and her request that Boaz “spread thy skirt” over her (Ruth 3:9), a formal appeal to marriage under the law of the kinsman-redeemer. The Hebrew goel (גּאֵל), “redeemer, near kinsman,” is the relative charged by the Law of Moses to redeem an impoverished family member’s land (Leviticus 25:25), to redeem a kinsman sold into servitude (Leviticus 25:47–55), and, in the related levirate provision, to raise up offspring and preserve the name of a man who died without an heir (Deuteronomy 25:5–10; cf. Ruth 4:1–10). Naomi names Boaz as one of these redeemers in Ruth 2:20. See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Old Testament Words, s.v. “Redeem”; and the standard Hebrew lexicons (BDB, “גּאַל”). Ruth’s initiative is thus a bold appeal made precisely within God’s appointed order, not against it.
  2. Boaz stands as a type of Christ the Kinsman-Redeemer, and Ruth as a figure of the redeemed. The goel who was near of kin, able to redeem, and willing to pay the price prefigures the Lord Jesus, who took on flesh to become our near Kinsman (Hebrews 2:11–17) and redeemed a destitute people (1 Peter 1:18–19; Titus 2:14). The typology is developed at length in J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible (Ruth), and Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Committed (Ruth and Esther). The point pressed here, that the type is built upon a real history and does not dissolve it, is the ordinary grammatical-historical principle: the literal account stands, and the figure rests upon it.
  3. The Song of Solomon, in which the bride (the Shulammite, Song 6:13) is the principal speaker, opening and closing the book and voicing the greater part of it. Twice she rises by night to seek her beloved through the city, Song 3:1–4 and 5:2–7. The Song is read in the conservative expository tradition on more than one honorable level at once, as a celebration of wedded love between a man and a woman and as a picture of the love between Christ and His people; see McGee, Thru the Bible (Song of Solomon). On either reading the bride’s bold, faithful seeking stands plainly on the page.
  4. 1 Samuel 25, the account of Abigail, Nabal, and David. Abigail acts on her own judgment, gathering provisions and riding to meet David “but she told not her husband Nabal” (1 Samuel 25:19), intercepts his march of vengeance (25:13, 21–22), and delivers her appeal (25:23–31); David blesses her counsel and turns back (25:32–35). Nabal’s name is glossed within the narrative itself: “Nabal is his name, and folly is with him” (25:25). Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on 1 Samuel 25; and McGee, Thru the Bible (1 Samuel).
  5. The Syrophoenician, or Canaanite, woman, Matthew 15:21–28 and Mark 7:24–30. Her reply, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs” (Matthew 15:27), takes up the Lord’s own figure and presses it in faith; He answers, “O woman, great is thy faith” (15:28). She is bold in her pleading and lowly in her posture at once, addressing Him as Lord and casting herself on His mercy.
  6. The woman with the issue of blood, Matthew 9:20–22, Mark 5:25–34, and Luke 8:43–48. Twelve years sick and impoverished by physicians (Mark 5:26), she reaches through the crowd to touch the hem of His garment on her own initiative, is healed, and is sent away in peace: “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole” (Mark 5:34). The Lord commends, rather than rebukes, her reaching faith.
  7. The created order of headship and the calling to ordered relation between man and woman rest on Genesis 2:18–24; 1 Corinthians 11:3–9; Ephesians 5:22–33; Colossians 3:18–19; and 1 Peter 3:1–7. The argument of this chapter is that the women surveyed act boldly within that order rather than against it, so that neither the egalitarian reading (which sets their boldness against the order) nor the passive reading (which sets the order against their boldness) does justice to the text. On true submission as active, strong, and serving rather than passive, see the companion booklets in this series.
  8. The word ezer (עֵזֶר, “help, helper,” Genesis 2:18, 20) is the word by which God names the woman “a help meet for him.” The term occurs twenty-one times in the Old Testament: twice of the woman (Genesis 2:18, 20), a few times of nations appealed to for military aid (e.g. Isaiah 30:5; Ezekiel 12:14; Daniel 11:34), and the greater number of times of God Himself as the helper and deliverer of His people, our “help and… shield” (Exodus 18:4; Deuteronomy 33:7, 26, 29; Psalm 20:2; 33:20; 70:5; 115:9–11; 121:1–2; 124:8; 146:5; Hosea 13:9). The word therefore denotes strong, active, rescuing help, never a servile or inferior one. See the standard Hebrew lexicons (BDB and Strong’s, H5828); and cf. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Old Testament Words, s.v. “Help, Helper.” That the woman is a strong helper takes nothing from the created order (note 7); the two truths stand together, which is the whole burden of this booklet.
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