1 Timothy 2:15 (KJV)
Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
There are certain passages that, if taken on their own and without regard to the whole counsel of God, can seem problematic. The pastor who seeks to be true to the whole counsel of Scripture often finds himself accused—by certain obstinate individuals—of trying to explain away or excuse parts of the Bible.
As a pastor, I’ve encountered my fair share of otherwise godly, faithful, and sweet Christian mothers who bristle at this passage and others like it. I’d like to remind the reader that placing a passage in the context of the whole Bible is not explaining it away—it’s rightly dividing the Word. That’s proper interpretation. Sometimes I wonder if God didn’t allow a few of these difficult verses in His inspired, infallible Word to force us to look at the whole, rather than just pulling verses out to suit our preferences.
On this passage, Barnes writes:
“Clarke, and others suppose that it refers to the promise in Genesis 3:15, and means that the woman shall be saved through, or by means of bearing a child, to wit, the Messiah; and that the apostle means to sustain the woman in her sorrows, and in her state of subordination and inferiority, by referring to the honor which has been put upon her by the fact that a woman gave birth to the Messiah.”
(Honesty requires me to report that Barnes himself does not accept this interpretation—but I do.)
Gill writes:
“They may be rendered impersonally thus, ‘Notwithstanding there is salvation through the birth of a son’: and the sense is, that notwithstanding the fall of man by the means of the woman, yet there is salvation for both men and women through the birth of Immanuel…”
He writes further,
“The meaning of the words is that there is salvation through the incarnate Messiah for all sorts of persons—for all men and women who believe in Him, with that faith which works by love and shows itself in holiness and sobriety—provided they continue therein. For there are some who profess these things, who have only a temporary faith and feigned love, not true holiness; and these fall away and are not saved.”
I agree with Gill on this.
Salvation is the result of faith in the One born of a woman—Jesus Christ, our Saviour.
On a slightly different note—but still within the same discussion—Barnes makes another observation worth sharing:
“[Faith] is not designed to make any immediate and direct change in the laws of our physical being. It does not of itself guard us from the pestilence; it does not arrest the progress of disease; it does not save us from death; and, as a matter of fact, woman, by the highest degree of piety, is not necessarily saved from the perils of that condition to which she has been subjected in consequence of the apostasy.”
I’ll leave the reader to meditate on that with their own cogitations.
#RightlyDividingTheWord #SavedThroughChildbearing #FaithCharityHolinessSobriety #WholeCounselOfGod #ChristBornOfAWoman
Rightly Dividing Difficult Scripture: Truths to Remember When Reading Hard Passages
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