You’re A Warrior!

Behind every fulfilled woman is God who created her with gifts and strengths to fulfill her calling.

On the sixth day of creation, God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.  So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:26, NIV)

In the above verse, God’s reference to “us” and “our” attributes the work of creation to the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit working as one in their creative enterprise. The words “they” and “them” attest that man and woman as God’s image-bearers will work together as co-rulers of God’s creation.

The little word “so” is the bridge between God’s assertation of what will happen and his explanation of how it will happen. In order to rule effectively, more than one gender was necessary. The woman brought something to the table that the man didn’t, and it was more than her ovaries.

In Genesis 1:28, after blessing Adam and Eve, God tells them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” In the second part of this verse he tells them again to rule over all the other creatures. Not just to become parents and bear children but to rule, together, as partners.

Women are more than their eggs just as men are more than their sperm. Neither of us was created only to fill the earth with our offspring. We aren’t merely begetters of God imagers; we are divine imagers. If filling the earth was our only purpose in life, then why did God say we were to rule over creation? And what does this imply for barren women, sterile men or single men and women? Why create any of them at all if they have no part in God’s purposes?

Typically, no one questions a man for pursuing a purpose beyond being a husband and father. Yet how many times have you heard someone criticize a woman for putting her husband and children “on the back burner,” so to speak, so she could pursue a demanding yet fulfilling career?

In ancient Rome, women could barely leave the house without bringing shame on themselves and their families. They were literally “to keep the home fires burning.” One of the goddesses they sacrificed to was Hestia, or Vesta, goddess of hearth, home and family. We’ve come a long way since then, but in a 2015 survey on how Americans spent their time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that on an average day, women spent over one hour more than men performing household activities and caring for and helping the members of their households—nearly three hours per day.

Few men have been told that their primary purpose was to support their spouses, but many women have. The reason goes back to the mistranslation of a phrase that appears in two verses of the Bible: Genesis 1:18 and Genesis 1:20. After creating Adam and all the other creatures inhabiting the earth, Genesis 1:18 quotes the Lord God as saying, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Genesis 1:20 adds—“for Adam no suitable helper was found.”

Why was it “not good for the man to be alone?” The woman, Eve, could have been created partially as a companion to ease Adam’s loneliness. But is there more to the phrase, “a helper suitable for him”?

In 1611 the translators of the King James Version of the Bible did a great disservice to women when they  translated the Hebrew word “ezer” found in the earliest translations of the Bible as “help meet.” Those two words eventually become “helpmate.”

Of the twenty-three times the word “ezer” appears in the Old Testament, only twice is it translated in the King James Version as “help meet”—in Genesis 2:18 and 2:20, both referring to Eve’s created purpose! The other occurrences of the word “ezer” denote power or strength and refer to God as its source (for example, Deut. 33:26, Ps. 70:5, Ps. 121:1-2).

So God didn’t merely make an assistant for Adam, someone whose purpose was merely to further Adam’s purposes. Rather, he created a “power” or a “strength” corresponding to Adam, which in my mind means, wherever Adam was weak, he made Eve strong. Only then could they effectively rule God’s creation as he intended them to.

So when I see the words “Fight like a girl,” I think, “Fight like a warrior—an ezer.” The strongest warriors are God’s girls, arrayed in his strength and armed with the death-defying power with which he raised Jesus from the dead. That power is available to us through the Holy Spirit.

So go ahead. Fight like a girl in whatever battle you’re facing. God made you stronger than you imagine.