Hello and Welcome to the Women’s Weekly Bible Challenge! I’m Lisa Ann Spencer.
My goal in these Bible studies is to:
- Teach you how to study the Bible for yourself
- Encourage you to believe the exact words of your Bible
- Exercise our senses in using the strong meat of the word
- Focus on Women in the Bible.
In this week’s study we are going to begin a new series titled, When God Speaks to Women.
Please grab your 📖Bible, 📔a journal, and your favorite 🥤cuppa.
Q: Have you noticed how rare it is for God to speak directly to women?
Women have a very unique and specialized role in God’s plan for Heaven and Earth, but this does not include leadership in a corporate church setting.
Because God’s design for women is not that of leadership, He would have no occasion to speak directly to women in the manner He has spoken to men. This is the reason we rarely see God speaking directly to a woman. This fact also confirms the patriarchal history of the world over the course of the past 6,000 years.
As usual, I will issue a WARNING!⚠
Many women are offended by this truth. I hope you will not be offended by the word of God. Instead of being offended, I encourage you to turn to God’s word and find out WHY God has chosen to operate the way He does.
When we humble ourselves to His word, we will grow in wisdom and mature as a Christian. We will become more knowledgeable about God’s will. We will learn, as a woman, what we can do to serve the Lord while willingly allowing Him to use us HIS WAY.
However, if we resist the will of God and follow our own will, none of our accomplishments will abide on the day we stand at His judgment seat, no matter how great those accomplishments appear to the world(2 Corinthians 5:10).
So with that warning behind us, let’s move forward to take a look into the word of God and see what He has spoken directly to women.
It should be no surprise that the first woman God spoke to was “THE WOMAN”, later named EVE. She had no name at the time of her conversation with God. We now know her as Eve, but then she was called “WOMAN” by Adam. She is also referred to as “His wife” (Genesis 2:24).
Let’s take a look at the book of Genesis.
Genesis 1:27 So God created
man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and
female created he them.
I want to point out a couple of things that will help you in our study:
#1 The word CREATED is not the same as the word MADE in the King James Bible. Created means to form out of nothing. Only God can do this. So in this verse, when God CREATED MAN, in his own image, we can understand that it is a SPIRITUAL matter, for God is a Spirit (John 4:24). He created them MALE AND FEMALE.
#2 This shows us that God is not GENDERLESS as some suppose. If we believe the words, we can understand that the image of God is both male and female. I do not completely comprehend it, but I do choose to believe it.
#3 There is a distinction between the words IMAGE and LIKENESS in the King James Bible. You may notice how the word IMAGE is associated with the word CREATE and how that the word LIKENESS is associated with the word MADE.
Genesis 5:1 In the day that God CREATED man, in the likeness of God MADE he him; 2 Male and female CREATED he them;
If we turn to Genesis 2:7 we see the MAKING, from preexisting matter, of Adam.
Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
And in Genesis 2:22 we see the MAKING, from preexisting matter, of the woman.
Genesis 2:22 and the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
I point out this distinction in the use of particular words in Scripture because the Bible makes a distinction for a reason.
Let’s consider this verse written by the apostle Paul:
I Thessalonians 5:23 And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your WHOLE SPIRIT AND SOUL AND BODY be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Bible is our source for TRUTH. There is no other book in the world that tells us we have 3 parts; spirit, soul and body. There are so many things we can only know because of this book. Even the lost world possesses knowledge that was only revealed to man through this book.
My point is this: If we cannot trust every word of the book because we doubt its perfection, if we doubt God’s promises to preserve His words forever, how can we then determine what parts are right and what parts are wrong? Do we just pick our favorite issues or choose to believe only the things that we can grasp? Are we going to choose to believe what the Bible says about itself, or are we going to choose to believe what a man says? This is an important issue.
When I approach the Bible, there are many things that I do not understand, but I choose to believe them because the word of God says it, and I have put my faith in Him and His word. I pray and ask God to help me in my ignorance. I ask him to help me understand His word, but if I do not believe the words, how can God give me understanding? I choose to believe the words, and I hope you will, too!
Let’s return to the study at hand – When God Speaks to Women
We see in Genesis 2:23 as it refers to Adam’s wife “…she shall be called Woman,…”
Her title is closely tied to her position as help meet and wife to Adam.
Genesis 2:24-25 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his WIFE: and they shall be one flesh. And were both naked, the man and his WIFE, and were not ashamed.
“Woman” was created for a purpose, which included multiplying; bringing forth children to subdue and have dominion on the Earth.
God’s purpose was stated in Genesis 1:28
And God blessed them, and God
said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
We notice that God spoke His purpose to both the man and the woman.
The Bible does not record God speaking to the woman again until after the fall.
Q: Should we assume that the man was the head of the first family and that God spoke only to him?
A: We would have to assume that if Scripture had not later recorded a clear account in writing, preserved for our edification.
1 Timothy 2:11-14 Let “the woman” learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over “the man”, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but “the woman” being deceived was in the transgression.
This was the standard from the beginning.
I have already covered this passage in a previous series titled, Women Teaching Part 3, which I will link HERE. Today, I want us to learn all about the first woman and the will of God for her life. What is it that we can learn from what God says, or what He DOES NOT say, to her?
It would be out of order for God to go to the woman to give instructions for how the family was to operate.
If we pay attention, we should notice that the Bible was written by men and to men because God spoke to men directly as leaders of families and churches to direct the operation of His will and purpose for Heaven and Earth.
When on the rare occasion we see God speaking directly to a woman, it should grab our attention! It can certainly teach us something. There is even a situation in the New Testament when God ignores a woman, which teaches a very weighty, doctrinal lesson. We’ll get to that eventually in this study.
I will end the Blog here and pick up next week as we begin to work our way through the book of Genesis to study about the women to whom God spoke. Hopefully we will find out WHY God spoke directly to Eve and learn from it.
CHALLENGE: I would encourage you to read through Genesis this week. There are 50 chapters, so 8 or 9 chapters a day would be a reasonable goal. Take note of when God speaks to a woman, and make a list in your journal. Then, use your concordance to look up the woman’s name and see if she is mentioned elsewhere in Scripture. For example, the first woman was eventually named Eve. Look up “EVE” in your concordance. BlueLetterBible.org will work best for this exercise.
Be a faithful student of the Bible, and I look forward to seeing you again next week for WHEN GOD SPEAKS TO WOMEN PART 2.
The material covered in this Blog can be found here:
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