When you search the word ‘women’ on the internet, thousands of tabs open ranging from being women of the Word to women of the world. Some are promoting books of what it means to be women of the Word, while others in the same breath, are promoting the best plastic surgeon on the charts. Those promoting the latter desire to convince you to alter the body God gave them to the body they believe is more in tandem with current trends. The scriptures however, have so much to say about women and many times, what it says is often misunderstood or presupposed as diminishing to this gender. This causes many, including the women in the body of Christ, to safely distance themselves from this criteria by lack of knowledge although their zeal for God is there.
First and foremost, it would be hard to explain any gender, especially the female gender, without placing it in the right cultural context. There are laws, patterns and principles which were set by the hand of God in the order of creation. Any human being therefore who tries to go against this order, is met with struggle and strife and often found living a life marked by endless and redundant battles.
In the account of creation, God created the man first and gave him assignment and mandate over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth . Upon completion of His masterpiece, God saw that it was not good for a man to be alone (not lonely, for these are different), and thought it best to create for him a helper that will share in the assignment and mandate given him. .
Just as in every order, whoever joins any initiative first will always know more than whoever joins second or last by reason of experience and know-how. Naturally, we see that when Adam was being given his assignment, it is not written that he took his helper and companion through the covenant and instruction he had been given by God in detail. This leaves a gap for us to presume that she did not know as much as Adam, who by reason of order was to lead her according to that original instruction. That is why accepting to eat of the forbidden fruit, Adam abandoned his post and the set order, causing the very sin from the woman being deceived to be credited to him.
There is an important lesson here that teaches us to always honor our assignments and do them as unto the Lord because an unction to perform it in excellence is given to you in that moment as the assigned, rather than deserting the task into the hands of another.
Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. NKJV
At the time Paul is writing these letters to Timothy in Ephesus, salvation was still fresh and many people were hearing the good news for the first time. In Ephesus however, people were in the custom of worshiping a goddess by the name of Diana, otherwise known as Artemis by the Greeks who women also invoked as a goddess of fertility and believed she had the power to cause them to conceive. In the temples of goddess Diana, it was a common tradition to have predominantly women leadership and because of the order in which worship was conducted in this context, the men that ascribed to this faith submitted to the ordained leadership. When Paul wrote this instruction in our theme scripture, he was addressing the newly converted women from the worship of the goddess to the worship of the one true God through His Son, Jesus. He was exhorting them to submit with a heart to learn what it entails to ascribe to this new found faith in Christ.
Once they had proper understanding , having also been tested and proved by their faith, love and holiness with self-control, they could then be reinstated as teachers of the right doctrine. As mentioned above, the first to practice something will normally teach the others and considering the cultural context of that time, men were the pioneers of most labors, including those of faith, making them the teachers of that time.
Today, this scripture is still used out of context, causing the very women it is supposed to advantage in the body of Christ, to distance themselves. They feel diminished and lack boldness to act on the assignments brewing in their spirit because few have been taught the relevance of the Word of God which makes it transgenerational, transdimensional and capable to benefit one today as it did over 2000 years ago and as it will until the end of time
And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. NKJV
As a child of God, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for we are all one in Christ Jesus and Christ is God’s. This simply means that it matters very little where or who you are in the world of men, when the credibility of your message is strongly founded and vindicated by the Spirit of the most high God. In consideration of Paul’s instruction above concerning the former women teachers in goddess Diana’s temple, he exhorts women again to not usurp, or take their former position of leadership by force from the men they found already toiling in that respect, until they are ripe for the assignment and its demands.
Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. Luke 1:45 KJV
As a woman of God, it is your responsibility to submit, hear and execute the instruction of the Spirit at work in you, in a balanced manner. You ought to view yourself as one who has been entrusted with a mandate that is older than language or culture and of which you carry the womb to reproduce both physically and spiritually, in your career, in your mothering, in your ministry, in your charity and most importantly in your love. Your God given capacity to nurture and incubate all that goes through your hands has in it the danger to destroy you and many around you if a little pride gets mixed to it Be therefore sober, that the enemy may not take from you through culture, trends and modernization, what is to feed generations to the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. [SELAH]
If you have never given your life to Jesus Christ, and you feel that this is the perfect time, pray this prayer:
“Lord Jesus, I thank you because you died for my sins and you were raised for my glory. Today, I receive you as my Lord and Savior. I am born again. Amen.”
