Free
I’ve been privileged to speak to women on various occasions this women’s month. Each time God laid a message in my heart, I was reminded of just how much God loves His girls and just how much He longs for them.
Last week I studied the effects of sin that dramatically changed our storyline as women. When you read Genesis 1 when God first thought of us, you’ll see how God created mankind (both male and female) with the authority to rule, in likeness to him. God then identifies the subjects of their rulership; the animals and the earth (according to older translations). But when sin came into the picture, it changed this. The woman moved from one who was to rule together with man, to one who was to be ruled by him. I love the details in the verse that detail this shift.
“To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Genesis 3:16 (NIV)
Sin messed with our desire. What led to us sinning was desiring what we shouldn’t. Satan just did the talking, his talking got Eve desiring the fruit she was told to stay away from, and so from desire came disobedience. Mankind was created to desire God. The teacher who wrote Ecclesiastes sought to find the meaning of human life. He found everything to be meaningless and came to this conclusion: the whole duty of man is to fear God and to keep his commandments (Ecclesiastes 12:13). Because God made us and made us like Him, our existence resolves around Him, our first and foremost desire should be for Him. Sin made us desire man more than anything else, and so gave man access to rule over us.
With man ruling over us, we lost our worth. Man, not God, dictated to us who we were and what we were capable of. We became objects, used and abused by men for the fulfilment of their desires. Our value was measured by a ring on our finger or the number of children we could bare. Our significance was limited to whose wife and mother we were. Our individuality diminished, and we only mattered when attached to something else.
But that is not how God had meant for it to be and even before Jesus came with his liberation for women, God was already dropping hints. We have the daughters of Zelophehad (Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah) who demanded to be considered heirs for their father’s inheritance. See, in that time, only sons were considered to be heirs, and if a man died having no sons, what was his would be left to the next male relative. These girls were determined to be valued as individuals and not to be overlooked just because they weren’t males. When Moses went to enquire of God about this, God told him the girls were right and had Moses write out a new law about it (see Numbers 27).
My favourite though is Deborah. I love how God describes her.
“Deborah, a prophetess, the wife or Lappidoth, was leading Israel at the time.” Judges 4:4
The way it is penned, we see how she is God’s before she is anyone elses. She is his prophetess, she has a purpose, she has meaning without being attached to something or someone else. She is attached, yes, but her attachment is not the fundamental thread of who she is. It is okay to be somebody elses wife or mother, it is part of God’s design and brings a certain kind of fulfilment, but that shouldn’t be the first or only thing about you, there’s more to you than that.
Jesus’s ministry saw the liberation of women: setting them free from sin, realigning their desires and linking them to their divine purpose. In Jesus, we women have found meaning and purpose, we have been freed to be ourselves unapologetically. It is therefore our duty and responsibility to ensure that we are not enslaved again by anything or anyone so that we may be all and do all that God intended us to be and do. To do this, we need to draw nearer and nearer to Him, no chain can remain in His presence.
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