She Shall Be Called Woman

Dannah Gresh: Abigail Dodds has this to say to any woman listening.

Abigail Dodds: I am not interested in telling you that you are extra special or extra unspecial, but I am very interested in describing you accurately, truthfully, and without flinching, whether that makes you extra special or extra unspecial.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free, for July 7, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Now, Nancy, would you say it’s true that we women tend to analyze, maybe even criticize, ourselves a lot, maybe more than men?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Well, I can’t speak for men, but I think we can safely say that many women have a tendency to look in the mirror, whether literally or figuratively, and they’re disappointed with what they see. They’re not measuring up to a standard they’ve set for themselves. So, that can drive them to push harder, try harder, perform better.

Dannah: Yes. They’re taking their cues, their definitions from the wrong sources. Right?

Nancy: Right! From the moment that Adam and Eve first ate the forbidden fruit, sin has clouded and distorted our sense of who we are and what’s most important. So, today we’re going to recalibrate our thinking by looking to God’s Word.

Dannah: To help us do that, we’re going to hear a message from Abigail Dodds. She lives in Minnesota. Not too long ago she spoke to a group of women at the conference called, “A Godward Life,” sponsored by Bethlehem College and Seminary.

Nancy: I love Abigail’s no-nonsense way of helping us see that no matter what the popular definitions, or lack of definitions, are about words as basic as woman and man, God has spoken on this. We would do well to listen to Him.

Dannah: Here’s Abigail Dodds with a message titled “She Shall Be Called Woman.”

Abigail: Okay, pop quiz to start.

According to the Scriptures, what is compared to the pillars of the palace, the dawn, the moon, the sun, and an army with banners? What does the Scripture compare to each of those things?

That might be too easy for this crowd, but if you don’t know, it’s a woman. A woman is compared to the pillars of a palace, the dawn, the moon, the sun, and an army.

I wonder how many of you have seen a document that came out by Matt Walsh called, What Is a Woman? (Okay, good, I have a fair amount of you.)

In short if you haven’t seen it, after traveling far and wide, he visits with professors and doctors and counselors and regular people on the streets to find an answer to the book’s following question of: “What is a Woman?” At the very end of the documentary he turns to his wife and asks her, and she answers like this:

“A woman is an adult human female who needs help opening this,” and she hands him the pickle jar. (laughter)

It’s cute. It’s true. I’m glad it’s in there. It certainly isn’t the whole story, is it?

So, think for a minute. How would you answer the questions:

• What is a woman?
• What are women for?
• Or another way to ask that is: What, if anything, makes them necessary?

I would hope that you would have a decent idea of what a woman is, especially since I think most of you here are women. But even given that, even given the fact that we are women, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that we just automatically know what she is and what she’s for.

Sometimes we just don’t know. Sometimes we don’t know exactly what we’re for. Sometimes we’re just blind, or we’re deceived, or we’re rebellious or any number of things. So it’s important for us to have a clear idea of what a woman is and what she’s for because we may not know.

But beyond our own personal benefit, my real and deep hope is that you would get this clear—not just for you, but for the benefit of the next generation. I want to make the case to you that we must answer these questions clearly and biblically for the sake of our children and our children’s children.

Maybe if you’re my age or older than me, you might think, This is so obvious! Like, why spend time on this?”

Or, maybe if you’re spending most or all of your time in church culture with really little time outside of that bubble, you may think, Those are the world’s problems, not the Church’s problems. We’ve been over this before. We don’t need to do this.

And to both of those objections, I would just want to use my “Mom” voice to say to you, “You need to wake up and smell the hormone blockers.” You need to open your eyes, take a stroll through Target for five minutes in the month of June—with their chest binders and their packing underwear marketed to women who want to appear as men. You need to understand that kids today are growing up in a world that we can’t even fully grasp in terms of its pervasive perversity.

We can think that a rural location will protect us from those these things, but these sick ideas go wherever the internet goes. Even kids who are home schooled or who are carefully monitored by their parents in regard to their internet access or all kinds of things are going to be exposed to these perverse ideas about what a woman is and isn’t because it is the new air, the new toxic air that our culture is just pumping out into the world. It’s in commercials, in billboards, in conversations with other children.

Those messages present false and harmful pictures and ideas about womanhood as if those ideas were normal. If you don’t agree with them, you’re not just abnormal. You are a hateful bigot.

So the only true protection is spirit-empowered knowledge and wisdom from the Word producing sturdy disciples who take every thought captive to Christ to destroy strongholds, that is arguments and lofty opinions raised against the knowledge.

So, how would you define woman and what she’s made for?

Here’s my attempt at a definition informed by God’s Word and God’s world: a woman is a human, made by God, in His image, from man, to be man’s helper and glory.

That’s what she is. It’s not mainly describing what she does, but who she is. Genesis 1 says she was created by God, in His image. Genesis 2 tells us how God made her—from man, from the rib of man, as a helper fit for him. First Corinthians 11 says she is the glory of man. That passage is drawing on that creation order from Genesis. In other words, that’s how God describes who and what a woman is.

And then the next question: What is she for? Or, what if anything makes her necessary?

Hopefully you may be reflexively thinking, “A woman’s chief end is to glory God by enjoying Him forever.” And that is true.

But I’m wanting to draw out a distinctive part of that. What is a woman in particular for? Does she have any distinctions in how she’s to glorify God?

And here again is my attempt to biblically say what a woman is for. So, a woman is a human, made by God, in His image, from man, to be his helper and glory by subduing and filling the earth with God’s glory, primarily through godly offspring.

I’ll say it one more time. A woman is a human, made by God, in His image, from man, to be his helper and glory by subduing and filling the earth with God’s glory, primarily through godly offspring.

That is distinctly what she is for. Eve is the only one who could help Adam produce offspring.

Man is the glory of God. That’s what the Scriptures tell us. So by making more men, she’s filling the earth with God’s glory, and she is filling the earth with the glory’s glory—daughters. That is, more women. That ensures that the glory will keep filling the earth—God’s glory everywhere.

None of this happens without the woman, without uteruses to grow life and breasts to nourish life and to care and nurture and sustain life.

This is Bible and Biology 101. This is what you learn if you just open the Book and read the first pages with biological common sense.

And you might be wondering, Okay. But what about the fall? What about sin? What about the curse? It sounds like, Abigail, that you’re saying that a woman’s purpose is just to have children.

Let’s talk about that.

First, we know that after Eve was tempted in the garden, she and Adam sinned and mankind fell into sin. Consequently, we are all born into sin, enslaved to sin, and groaning under its weight.

So, yes, she is the helper and glory. She is made in God’s image. But none of those things are as they ought to be. And, frankly, for me, it’s way easier to talk about that sin part because it’s what I am so intimately acquainted with. I’ve known that from birth. I have known the sinful nature my whole life.

I have also known new birth and transformation, but that sin nature, though crucified, is not yet cast into hell. Indwelling sin remains. Therefore my experience of womanhood has never been unstained from sin, and neither has yours.

But I want to draw your attention to two words in my definition. The word “primarily” and the word “godly.”

So I said: a woman is a human, made by God, in His image, from man, as the helper and glory of man, to subdue and fill the earth with God’s glory, primarily through godly offspring.

That means there are other ways to bring God glory. You can bring Him glory through obedience to do whatever He has put in front of you to do today.

Like doing the dishes.

Like finishing up some homework.

Like making your bed.

We can all do things to the glory of God whether we’re eating or drinking, or whatever we do, when we do it by faith.

And then, secondly, look at that word “godly.” Notice I didn’t say, “She brings him glory and fills the earth only through biological offspring.” I said, “Through godly offspring.”

That’s because, even though God physically made and equipped women with their bodies to join to a husband and bring forth children in their bodies, not every woman can or will do that because of the curse.

But this design still matters, and it’s still important because that’s how God did it. He made our bodies to correspond to man and to mother children. We all came from a mother, and we all have the capacity to mother.

Not all of us will have biological children or have a womb that is full, but all of us should be aiming to be godly mothers in the Church, mature Christian women, whether married or single, spiritual mothers in the Church who produce godly offspring.

Because of Christ in the new birth, God restores every Christian, every Christian woman, to spiritual fruitfulness, and that is a breathtaking mercy of our redemption. There are no barren women in God’s family. All of us can be fruitful vines in God’s house because of Christ.

So, we have a definition. It’s probably not perfect or complete. It’s the best that I could do in light of Scripture. Maybe you have some tweaks you’d like to tell me about later. But hopefully it’s faithful to the Word.

So next, I want to draw out three important implications from that definition. Three important implications from the purpose statement that I had about what women are and what they’re for.

So the first is this: women are dependent on men (and men on women—men are also dependent on women). But my first point is: Women are dependent on men.

So perhaps you’ve seen the way some activists and some feminists have taken to spelling the word woman. Have you guys seen this? They put an X where the A or the E would go, so it looks like W-O-M-X-N. Anybody seen this?

The reason they put the X there is to try and reject the way that men show up everywhere, like, even in the word “women.”

So, it’s kind of ironic because it’s supposed to be this shot against the patriarchy, but they still pronounce it “women.” So, now, it still has men in it, it’s just spelled funny, but you’re still using the word men in your word women. So, it’s kind of funny.

But what’s interesting about this is that the English words for man and women are a really beautiful parallel to the Hebrew words for man and women.

The Hebrew words are ish and isha. She shall be called isha because she was taken out of ish.

English renders it similarly and beautifully: She shall be called “woman” because she was taken out of “man.” She wouldn’t exist without him. Paul reiterates this dependence in 1 Corinthians 11. He says,

For a man ought not to cover his head, since he 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. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so now man is now born of woman. And all things are from God. (vv. 8–12)

So Paul not only shows us that woman is indeed meaningfully dependent on man, but this order of man, then woman, woman from man, is the grounds, the reason for why wives should publicly and clearly submit to their husbands in corporate worship when they pray or prophesy.

Because Paul doesn’t leave it there, he also shows that men are dependent on women because now man is born of woman, even though woman was first taken from man in the beginning.

So, just a little test to see where we’re actually at: whether in the church or in the public square, if I said out loud, “Men need women!” I think, in the Church even and in the public square, I would get a universal nod, “Yep, uh-huh, sure thing.”

But if I said, “Women need men!” Even in the Church, I think I’d get some bristles. And I think some of the bristles come because of just how true it is. Sometimes painfully true because of the curse.

I know women who have been abandoned by men. Women who have a major absence of the men who should have been there for them in their life, especially absence of good fathers in their lives. And it is not a small thing. It can be a very damaging thing to be left without something, someone you were meant to depend on.

We need men. We really need godly men. God made it that way. But we don’t need to lose heart when a man isn’t who he should be, when he doesn’t show up, or when we have been left without that father or whatever that person was that we needed to depend on.

We don’t need to lose heart because there is a second man. Some men follow in the footsteps of the first Adam in their passivity and their neglect. But there is a second Man. He is everything that we need, and you’re connected to Him.

We are reborn, made from the second Adam’s side. It’s His Spirit that is always with us, and we can depend on Him for everything that we need.

Nevertheless, women are dependent on men, and men on women. We are connected.

So remember: just as you prefer the man that you’re particularly dependent on—like your husband or maybe your father—you prefer him to be godly. Do you not?

So also, be a godly woman in relation to the man who is particularly dependent on you—your sons, your husband, the men around you.

And perhaps most of all, do not resent that God made woman dependent on man, not independent of him. Sin has made this difficult in every direction, but because of Christ, we can thank God for the men in our lives. Thank Him for our husbands, our sons, our brothers, our pastors, our uncles, all the men of God.

And go further:

Thank Him for the men who built the roads that you drove here on.
Thank Him for the ones who put together the cars.
And the mechanics.
And the ones that built the house that you live in.
And pick up the trash every week.
And the ones who work the heavy machinery.
And take care of the sewers.
And do all the jobs that we women don’t really do—some of them because we can’t.

Give thanks for men.

One of the great lies sold to women is that their team in life is “Team Women.” It’s not. Your team is your local church. It’s your family. It’s your husband. And all of those are led by men and the Man, the Lord Jesus.

So we are not in a competition with men. Men, as a category, are not the enemy. We need them.

So, point number two. First, women are dependent on men. Point two: women’s glory is derived.

Again, notice the obvious with me here: Women didn’t make themselves. God made women. First, He made them from the dust, and then He made them from the dust’s rib. So, we are dusty bones glorified with life.

Paul says it like this: “Man is the image and glory of God, but women is the glory of man” (v. 7).

Woman is a thing made of a thing made. Some would say that this kind of makes us extra special, like a really more potent form of glory. Some might say it makes us maybe a little less special, like a little bit more distant form of glory.

I am not interested in telling you that you are extra special or extra unspecial, but I am very interested in describing you accurately, truthfully, and without flinching, whether that makes you extra special or extra unspecial.

I mean, we were all sinners in rebellion against a holy God, destined for wrath apart from Him. So I’m not really sure how we could get less special than that.

But, on the other hand, your name was written in the Lamb’s Book of Life from before the foundation of the world, chosen in Christ before anything came to be. And I’m not really sure how you could be more special than that.

The plain reality is that, comparisons to men aside, women are special. And we’ll have to sort that out somehow without getting ourselves tied into too many knots because, strangely, it’s that knowledge that we are special and that we matter that can get us into a bit of an ugly mess.

We start wondering, like:

• “How special am I? I mean, is she more special than I am? Is he more special than I am?”
• “Why aren’t more people listening to me?”
• “Where is my notice and my honor?”
• “Where is my seat at the elders’ table?”
• “Why aren’t more people listening to my voice?”

But all of that stuff is just envy and entitlement and bitterness and rot. Whenever we start grasping at glory, it just departs.

Remember:

[Christ,] who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and given him a name above every name. (Phil. 2:6–9)

Why is it that we think we can get glory through nagging or whining or complaining or insisting or manipulating or talking ourselves to death when our Savior, the one we call Lord and Master, did the opposite?

Do we think we’re His sheep when we won’t follow Him?

Do we think our godly legacy and heritage will come through clamoring or grumbling or pity parties?

So I’m not here mainly to tell you how glorious you are as a woman and to inspire you with visions of grandeur, even though you are glorious, and it is all very grand. I’m here to tell you that none of that glory came from you. It came from God.

What do you have that you did not receive, for He gives to all life and breath and everything else, which is why He gets all the glory.

The more you point at a woman’s glory as a thing on its own and try to grasp it or hold it or possess it, the more you will lose it. But the more you humble yourself before God’s glory, and become obedient to Him in all things, the more you will go from one degree of glory to another.

So for my third point:

First: Women are dependent on men.

Second: Women’s glory is derived.
And now third: Women make home.

Sometimes I think this implication may be the one that we can tiptoe around or avoid because we know just too many seeming exceptions to this rule, too many who might feel offended or hurt by it, or we might just have a very inaccurate or a little weird idea of what the call “to make home” really is.

But I’m not stating this as a rule or a command to be obeyed, like, “Woman, make home.” That’s not how I’m saying it, even though Titus 2 does make it plain that the work of the home shouldn’t be neglected, but it should be taught to younger women.

What I’m saying is it’s a fact. It’s just the way things are. Women make home, either they do it well, or they do it poorly, either by their neglect or their faithfulness, women make home. And I just want to help you see that.

Answer me this: Where was your first home?

So think really far back—way back to your first home. Think so far back that you can’t remember it.

A home from before you had memories.

A home that saw loads and loads of growth in you.

Important milestones.

A home where you grew twenty inches in nine months.

We all had such a home. Every living human has been given a home inside his or her mother’s womb. No person exists without that first home. And from that home we emerge only to be engulfed in a home that is the same person only on the outside rather than the inside.

Now our home is her arms, her chest, her shoulders. And our home begins to expand to his arms, his chest, and his shoulders and perhaps a sibling’s arms and chest and shoulders.

But there is something about her—the mother—that is uniquely home. Her own body met all of our needs in utero.

And there is a special gospel dynamic that exists in our joyful, non-possessive, open-handed servant-hearted homemaking because in making a godly home we are pushing back at the curse of exile.

We are representing to our families and to the world that, although we are aliens and strangers, we have not been left as orphans. We are pointing to the better country—the lasting home.

Genesis 3 describes the curse—and I know you’ve all heard it before—but here’s what it says:

To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over you.” (v. 16)

So the home of a woman’s womb is under sin’s curse. What was meant for life and filling and flourishing will not, for some, be a place of death or barrenness or great trial.

I’ve always been a little shocked when Christians talk about natural childbirth as though that’s some guaranteed win. Christians, of all people, shouldn’t pretend like, if we just listen to our bodies, that all things will go well. We don’t control how it goes.

We can’t predict how terrible childbirth might be. We can stop stressing about epidurals and C-sections and everything else, and we can, instead, give thanks to God that He has brought us through a curse when we have our babies.

So, we should not act like our bodies, if left to themselves, will just do all things well. They will not. Our bodies are no longer as suited to being home as they were from before sin entered. There is an element of exile in our wombs.

Also notice that Adam and Eve were forced out of their home, the garden, to the point that, were they to try and re-enter, they would face an angel with a flaming sword. It says,

Therefore, the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east at the garden of Eden, he placed a cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Gen. 3:23–24)

They were exiled from Eden.

Israel, too, was exiled from their home because of sin. They were driven out from it and enslaved in a foreign land. But the faithful, the faithful were always seeking home. Here’s what Hebrews says in chapter 11, verse 13:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (vv. 13–16)

So I want to emphasize something about our redemption in Christ. Because Christ was born of a woman, He entered the perilous home of Mary’s womb. He came through that cursed and dangerous place triumphantly. He also entered this world. He made His home here, even though He had nowhere to lay His head. He was rejected in His own hometown.

Yet, here’s what’s so glorious about Christ: He Himself becomes our home. We are born of His Spirit, and His Spirit is at home in us.

John 14, verse 18 says, “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” And verse 23 says,

“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him and will come to him and make our home with him.”

Christ’s Spirit is not above homemaking. He makes His home with us. Not only that, He is making a home in heaven for us. John 14, verse 1 says,

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.” (vv. 1–3)

And if that weren’t enough, this homemaking God sets a table for us. Every time we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we are partaking of His table, His body, His blood. We don’t set the table. We don’t bring our own food. It’s His food. It’s His body. He nourishes us, and we eat of Him and are satisfied. And He Himself is the servant at the table. Luke 12:37 says,

Blessed are those servants who the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them.

So I think that when women bristle at the idea of home, of having to cook or clean or beautify or serve or make their lives primarily about the comfort and well-being of others, it is because they are blind—blind to the ways this reality and calling is deeply connected to the very work of Christ, and particularly Christ’s Spirit who dwells with us.

Try listening to the calling in Titus 2, where older women teach younger women to keep home, with the understanding that one curse of sin is exile. Yet women are called to work at home, to keep home.

Our bodies are a home.

When we keep home, as Christian women, we are holding on to the hope of a better country. We are giving our children, our roommates, our friends and our neighbors a glimpse and taste of what’s to come. No more exile. Homecoming.

And if you grew up without a mom to tend the home, or a grandmother to make home a warm envelope of hugs and good food, or a friend’s mom to show you that home can be really hilarious and fun, or an aunt to tell you that home can be the place where people really want to know you well, or a sister in Christ to show you that home can be both beautiful and comfortable and well ordered, or a mentor to show you that home is for welcoming others as Christ has welcomed you; then you know, probably better than most, just how important home is because you know the lack of it, because it is for all those things, and much, much more.

When we make home, we are doing the Lord’s work. We are giving the foretaste, the foreshadow, the glimmer of what’s ahead. We are both soothing and awakening the ache for the better home to come.

C.S. Lewis paints this very dark and beautiful picture. He says this:

We can be both banished from the presence of God, who is present everywhere, and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside, repelled, exiled, estranged. Finally and unspeakably ignored.

On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged.

We walk every day on the razor edge between those two incredible possibilities.

Apparently, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door, which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.

And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of the old ache.

That is the kind of work we’re engaging in when we make home, the work of bringing people inside—inside sturdy walls, inside beauty, inside love, inside a welcome—so that their loyalty is oriented to the lasting home in Christ because they’ve tasted it, and they have seen just how good it is.

So let me leave you with this: we don’t define womanhood because we didn’t make it. God did, but we do embody it—whether willingly or in rebellion.

And my prayer for all of us here, and for daughters and mothers and sisters and friends, is that we would know deep in our bones that being made a woman is a blessing. It’s a gift. It’s good. It’s important. It’s not something to run away from, but it is something to give glory to God for.

Oh Lord, thank You for this beautiful way You’ve made your home with us. Thank You for Your kindness to us in Christ. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the call that You’ve given us as women. Thank You that we have a purpose in You.

I pray that You would be with these women and bless us in Jesus’ name.

Dannah: That’s Abigail Dodds, helping us recalibrate our thinking, (to borrow a term you used earlier, Nancy), to line up our own definitions of what it means to be a woman with what God actually says.

Nancy: Exactly. Abigail wrestles with these kinds of topics a lot in her book called, (A)Typical Woman, meaning not typical. Here’s the subtitle: Free, Whole, and Called in Christ.

And that phrase “in Christ” is so important. The more we center our thinking and our understanding of who we are as women around our relationship with God and His Son, Jesus Christ, the more accurate the view of ourselves will be, and, as we say here at Revive Our Hearts all the time, you’ll find freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

Well, there’s more information about how you can get a copy of Abigail’s book, (A)Typical Woman, linked in the transcript of today’s program at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Dannah: Yes. And that concept of finding our identity in Christ, rather than taking our cues from popular opinion, or even looking within ourselves, that idea is our theme for the month of July here on Revive Our Hearts.

And today, as a way to say “thank you” for your donation of any, we’ll send you a copy of a book by Allie Beth Stuckey. The title is You Are Not Enough (And That’s Okay.)

So much of what we hear today is basically an encouragement to just love ourselves more and look within ourselves to find what we need. But this book helps you see how toxic that kind of thinking is, and it points you to the One who is enough.

Again, you can request your copy of You’re Not Enough (And That’s Okay) when you make a donation of any size at ReviveOurHearts.com, or when you call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Next week we’ll hear from Mary Kassian about how God calls us to be confident women, but the right kind of confident. She’ll explain. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to complete freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.

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