This morning, being its Mother’s Day, I’d just like to take a look at different passages and look at them in light of the significance of women and why, really, the home women and mothers are under attack in our culture today. And I would like to begin by having you open to 1 Timothy 4. He’s sharing with him some of the things that Timothy is going to be facing in his life. He’s also speaking prophetically about the last days in which he lived.
And he warns Timothy, and he says,
1 Timothy 4:1-5
“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times shuns to depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron, and forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats which God hath created, be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified by the word of God in prayer.”
I want us to focus on one of the areas of attack.
When we went through Timothy, we talked about the dietary laws and how many people today are taking those in extreme and making a religious system out of dietary laws. I’m not going to emphasize that this morning. But I do want to emphasize the attack on marriage and the significance that that has on the home and relationships within the home.
Timothy is told that there’s going to be a departure within the believing community, within those that say they’re Christians, but they’re really not Christians, because they departed from the faith. They’re not of the Lord, although they at one time said they were. Hebrews talks about that.
And it says here that this departure is that they’re giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. I want us to look this morning initially at seducing spirits and doctrines of devils. Those who are attacking the home today.
And then I’m going to give two examples of women who overcame the seducing spirits and doctrines of devils that were introduced in their culture that are in the scriptures.
Prayer by Pastor Glenn Knudson
Let’s just bow and pray. Heavenly Father, as I come before you this morning, Lord, I pray that you would just speak to us through your word. Help us to understand that we live in a world where Satan desires to undermine and destroy the faith of your people. He desires to bring false doctrine in to have people deceived and to turn away from the truth. May we understand the significance and the importance of the home. And Lord, help us to understand the importance of our mothers and mothers, why you established a husband and wife, and out of that relationship can come children. And that that is a blessing that you have given. And Lord, help us to realize that Satan wants us to view it as a curse. And Lord, I pray that you would just speak to us through your word this morning. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Back when I was just finishing high school and beginning to go to college, a new movement had sparked in our nation. It was called the Women’s Liberation Movement. At the heart of the Women’s Liberation Movement was the fact that they stated they needed to be able to be equal to men, that they were really no different than a man, they deserved everything a man had.
And really at the heart of it, if you look at the real fundamentals of what they were teaching and preaching at the time, it wasn’t that they wanted to be on an equal par in salary and jobs, but they wanted to usurp man’s authority. God had given man and woman. What has happened, that doctrine of women’s liberation has progressed to the point today that you have a Supreme Court Justice.
It was recently the last one that was appointed to the Supreme Court. One of the senators asked her the question, Would you define a woman, please? She says, I am unable to define a woman because I am not a biology professor. I do not teach biology classes. I do not know how to define a woman because of these reasons. Yet she is sitting on the highest court of the land. She is going to be defining and seeing whether our laws are being upheld properly. And at the heart of it is who we are. And she can’t define who she is. Because she’s a woman.
How have we gotten that far? How have we gotten so far today that we are told men can give birth? It’s a physical impossibility. And I don’t know how many surgeries you plan on having, but you will never give birth if you’re a man. However, if you say, I’m a man, but you’re a woman, Yes, you can give birth and say you’re a man, but you’re really not a man, you’re still a woman, or you wouldn’t be able to give birth.
This is the total idiocy that has embraced our culture as doctrines of demons have penetrated our world. But lest we think that it has not impacted the church, I want you to understand at the heart of Christianity is the attack on the home, an attack on women, an attack on mothers. When I was going to school at NDSU in 1971, to show you how far long ago this had infiltrated the church, we had a regional conference for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of the campus ministries that I attended at the time.
At that conference, after one of the sessions had a breakout, I was talking to a young woman who was the regional advisor or helper for InterVarsity in the Illinois region. And Champaign, Illinois area was one of the big areas that IV was big in. As I was talking to her, she expressed to me that she was living together with her boyfriend. She expressed to me they had not any near future plans of getting married. I was shocked. I hardly heard of anybody living together who wasn’t Christian at that time in 1971, let alone a Christian. Let alone a Christian who was trying to influence and lead young people. But it was a lie from Satan. That lie has perpetrated and penetrated into much of our Christian culture today.
I say that if you go to many evangelical churches, you will find Christians there, people who profess Christ, who have no intention of getting married but are living together. Yet the scriptures are clear that we are to be joined together as husband and wife, and not just wink at it and say, well, I’ll try it out and see how I like it. As you look at this, it’s the influence of our culture has permeated the church to the point that in some areas the church reflects more of the culture than it does of God.
Why did God make women and men different? And what special role did He give to women He never gave to the man? And He prepared a woman specifically to take on that role as wife, as mother. He created her body and her mind in such a manner that it was different from a man. We’re just talking a little bit before the service this morning.
I don’t know, I can’t see what my wife can see because she sends me downstairs to get things and I can never find them. And it’s not only my problem, it seems like it’s some of the other guys here too. They can’t see what our wives see.
God has created us with unique abilities for a purpose. If you look at just the physiology of the whole thing, a man has a whole bunch of testosterone and very little estrogen. A woman has a whole bunch of estrogen and a little bit of testosterone.
Testosterone gives a man a desire to protect, to defend. It gives him the ability to take care of and to meet the needs of and to protect and to apply for. Estrogen enables a woman to be much more caring, loving, nurturing than a man.
And it doesn’t matter, besides that, genetically we’re made up different in that a woman has two X chromosomes and a man has an X and a Y. And you can pump people full of different hormones, giving men a whole bunch of estrogen and women a whole bunch of testosterone, it still does not change who they are. They’re still the person that God created them to be. It may make them feel totally different and respond out of character for who they should be, but they’re still who they were created to be.
I want you to understand there’s a reason that all this happened. Within the home, God established a place of nurturing and caring for the next generation. I’m going to say that I don’t know the homes that you grew up in, and some of them I do, some of them I don’t.
But I do know one thing in common, everybody that’s sitting here or hearing this message had a mother. Maybe that mom was a great mom, maybe she wasn’t so great. But I want you to understand God established a relationship between the child and the mother because she is the first one that has great influence in her children’s behavior because God intended for the mom to be in the home with her children to nurture them on a daily basis.
And he gave her the body and the hormones and the mind to do that. If you sit most men at home with the kids and tell them mom’s going on a two-month vacation, you take care of the kids, they’ll go crazy. They’re not built to do it.
I mean, if we have to, we can. But it’s not what God created us to do. And Satan’s plan is to destroy the home.
Because out of the home comes the passing from generation to generation of values, of understanding, and of a perception and an introduction to who God is. That is the way God planned it. He planned for Adam and Eve to be created as husband and wife, and out of that would come their children, and they in turn would teach their children who God was and introduce them to the Lord.
However, Satan at a very early stage in man’s creation and development got in the way. And no more had men and women been created and had been going to establish the home than Satan was there to introduce temptation and Adam yielded to sin. And it’s been a challenge and a battle ever since.
It didn’t take long within their home for some children to be introduced to godliness and some children embracing satanic, ungodly, death values. And early in the book of Genesis you’re introduced to two brothers. One is named Cain and the other is Abel.
They had been both taught by their parents that they would make offerings to the Lord. And I firmly believe that they were taught about the promise that had been given to Adam and Eve when they sinned of the coming Messiah. And how that this Messiah would crush the serpent’s head, gain victory for them over sin.
And that they were to worship and praise this God who was their Deliverer and would be the one that would come and shed his blood for them. But it was very early in the book of Genesis you find these two men building altars. Abel builds an altar and he takes rocks and builds an altar and sacrifices a lamb on this altar.
A bloody sacrifice. Cain on the other hand builds an altar and there is much care taken in Cain’s altar. I have no doubt in my mind that if you saw Cain’s altar it would have been beautiful.
And all kinds of plants and flowers and vegetation is the picture that we’re given in scripture on this altar. No blood, no sacrifice. God comes, he accepts Cain’s sacrifice and altar.
Abel sacrificed an altar, he rejects Cain. Why? Cain was doing it in his own strength. Cain was doing what Satan had tempted Adam to do.
Just do what you want to do. Take that food and eat it and you shall know, you shall be God. Why do you have to listen to God and how to come to Him? Just do it in your way.
And you have the first false religious system that is recorded in scripture apart from where Satan came and tempted man who had the ultimate humanism where he becomes God to Adam and Eve. And you have Cain introducing another religious system where I will develop the sacrificial system, I will develop the gifts, I will develop the altar. God is pleased with Abel.
He is displeased with Cain. He rejects Cain’s offering and Cain is in despair. I couldn’t have done it any better.
What’s wrong? And the Lord tells Cain, why are you in despair? Why are you despondent? Why are you acting the way you are? Sin is ready there and crouching at your door ready to consume you. And it did. It wasn’t long after Cain and Abel were out walking.
Now Abel raised sheep and knowing the character of Abel, had Cain asked him for a sheep to sacrifice to the Lord? I’m sure Abel would have given him one. And why did it have to be a sacrifice? Because it was looking forward to the blood sacrifice because the penalty of sin is death. And the payment for that penalty was the shedding of blood.
Our physical and spiritual death were the result of sin. And the only way sin could be paid for was for another to come who was without sin and shed his blood on our behalf and take the place for us that we could be forgiven and our sin could be covered. Abel looked forward to Jesus’ coming.
Abel sacrificed the lamb saying, I am doing this showing that thy trust in the coming Messiah whose blood shall be shed for me just as this lamb’s blood is shed. And he understood the consequences of sin as that lamb who was innocent paid with his life to be a sacrifice looking forward to Jesus who would come and be innocent and pay a sacrifice for us. Cain didn’t look at it that way.
And instead of asking God forgive me for not looking to the promise of the coming Messiah and coming to you on your terms, maybe if I just get rid of Abel, there won’t be anybody there to bring guilt upon me for getting it wrong. And it says that Cain killed Abel. The first murder recorded in scripture.
This battle has been going on since the beginning of time. A battle to destroy the home, a battle to destroy the family, a battle to destroy our understanding and vision of God, a battle to destroy our understanding of his coming Messiah and Redeemer and Savior. Jesus warns Timothy of seducing spirits and doctrines of demons that are coming and they’re even going to say don’t get married.
There’s no significance in it. The home has no value. Well, I want us to take a quick look at a couple of women out of the Old Testament who didn’t necessarily have the greatest influences all around them but yet made tremendously right decisions and choices.
There was a, really it was a secular poem. I had written it down but I didn’t have it. But the title of it was The Hand Who Rocks the Cradle Rules the World.
It was written in the 1860s. It’s not a Christian poem. It has a unique understanding of the significance and the importance of a mother and a woman.
Adolf Hitler said, Give me a child when he’s seven and he’ll be mine for the rest of his life. Satan understands the significance of molding young people’s minds. It’s not by chance that if you go to the public schools today there is very little, if anything, taught in most public schools about biblical Christianity, creation, Bible principles.
The Bible is looked upon as something that shouldn’t be brought into the schools because it’s a religious book. Even though our nation was founded upon the principles contained within it and our founding fathers established our constitution based upon this book. But you can’t teach it in most public schools today because it’s too religious.
But you can teach secular humanism. You can teach evolution as fact. You can teach Eastern mysticism and Hinduism.
You can teach Islam and immerse kids in it so that they understand it better. But you cannot come and teach them biblical Christianity. Why? Because it’s a direct opposition of all those other things.
Every one of those other philosophies has as its foundation doctrines of demons and seducing spirits. And they come against God. It’s not by chance.
We as God’s people need to understand that. I was listening to a man this last week and he said most Christians in the church today, their view of God and their view of Christianity is short-sighted and negligent. He said most Christians would become so active in our Christian lives we don’t have time for God.
It’s very true. But all these activities I’m going to, all of these programs I’m going to, all of these things that I belong to, all these organizations I’m going to. I remember when my wife and I first got married, we were gone just about every night of the week to church for some meeting, some activity, something.
But if you asked us at that time in our lives, how many people have you shared the Lord with this week? We would say, when would we have time for that? We’re too busy working for God. And so Satan dupes us into thinking we’re very busy, but we’re very religious, but we’re not very Christian with God. And the more religious you get and the less personal, the more susceptible you are to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons.
So that today the church has entered in and brought into it many things that are direct assaults upon the family, direct assaults upon the biblical principles in the Bible, and the truth that is in God’s Word. And the very things that have been brought into the public school are now in the church, and we can’t figure out why our kids are messed up. Ken Ham wrote a book dealing with when children begin to lose their desire to pursue God.
And if I took a survey here this morning, probably most of you would say, well, I’m not sending my kid to secular college because that’s where they lose it all. And granted, when I went to NDSU, I had a biology professor that taught evolution as fact and called creationist fools. Creation was nothing but for old women and people without a brain.
That’s what he told me. Had a biology English teacher that taught the most disgusting poems and disgusting literature and recommended that everyone in the class, and she was a woman, recommended that everyone in the class read Playboy because they had the best writers for Playboy. Then I went to sociology and psychology where they taught the exact opposite, and that was my degree, the exact opposite of what biblical truth is.
And do you want to know today how many kids out of Christian churches are going to secular and Christian colleges, and their degrees are sociology and psychology, not biblical counseling, not biblical truth? How did it all happen? Ken Ham said that it wasn’t at the colleges. It wasn’t even at the high schools. It began much earlier, junior high and grade school.
Do you want to know why? Because most pastors never preached from the word of God, showing that God had the power and the authority to create the world, that creation is real, that the family was established with a purpose, that there’s a difference between a man and a woman, that there are only two sexes, that there aren’t a whole alphabet of people, and that God established it for a purpose and a reason, and that he’s the one that we’re accountable to. And they’re not taught that from the pulpits, they’re not taught that in the Sunday schools. And so they go, well, I’m hearing about these other things and these other gods, and they’re much more effective than our God.
And then we can’t figure out why the kids are gone. This morning I want to talk about two mothers who are faced with a very similar situation. The first one is found in the book of Exodus.
In Exodus chapter 1, we are introduced to The Mother of Moses, I want you to just read what was going on in Egypt at the time. And I want to pick it up and begin at, well, let’s start at verse 11 of chapter 1.
Exodus 1:11-18
Therefore, it said of them past masters, that is, the Hebrews were now slaves to the Egyptians. And they were doing all the building and bidding of Pharaoh. They were not free any longer. And they had taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Chisholm and Ramses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they grieved because the children of Israel, and the Egyptians made the children of Israel serve them with rigor. And they made their lives bitter and hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all the manner of service in the field, and in all their service wherein they made them serve, but with rigor. And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of one was Sethra, and the name of the other was Tilah. And he said, When you do the office of midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools, that is, the stools where they delivered their babies, if it be a son, then you shall kill him, but if it be a daughter, then she shall live. But the midwives feared God, and did not, as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.
So once you understand that spiritual battle was there, and hermeneutics was set in real life, it wasn’t just some philosophical guys getting together and debating, is God real, or is Pharaoh king, or is Pharaoh God, it wasn’t that. It manifested itself in, we will kill your men children because you are coming too strong. Your God is preserving you no matter what we do.
But the midwives wouldn’t do it. They feared God, more than they feared man. More than they feared Pharaoh.
It was evident during COVID, a lot of churches didn’t fear God, more than they feared a Biblist or Dr. Fauci. So they shut down, quit preaching the gospel. I know that there are some churches today that still don’t meet together.
Some churches have never recovered. But people never came back. It was too easy to sit on line, or too easy to do what I wanted to do at home, and I don’t have to take that time to get cleaned up and dressed and go down.
What’s the point anyway? These women, they fear God, more than Pharaoh. Pharaoh could take their lives. He found out that they were preserving the lives of the male children.
It could mean their deaths. And the king of Egypt called the midwives and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive? And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women, for they are lively and they are delivered, ere the midwives come in unto them. In other words, we can’t even get there before they’ve had their babies.
They are so fast in having their kids. We can’t get from our house to theirs. They’re ready to deliver, and there’s the baby.
It’s already there by the time they get there. So we have no choice. We can’t kill the baby, because it’s already born.
So Pharaoh comes up with a second scheme. When they’re born, how am I going to get rid of these male babies? I’ll drown them in the Nile River. That’s what I’ll do.
And so Pharaoh, Therefore, we read, God dealt with the midwives with people multiplied, and waxed very mighty. And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that He made them houses. And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is born he shall cast into the river, and every daughter he shall save alive.
And there was a man of the house of Levi, who took a wife of the house, a daughter of Levi. And a woman conceived and bare a son. And when she saw that he was goodly child, she hid him three months.
And when she could no longer hide him, she took him an ark of bulrushes, dodged it with swine, with pitch, and put the child therein, and laid in it the flags of the river’s brink. And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him. I want you to see something.
Did Moses’ mother capitulate to what Pharaoh wanted done? She did not throw her son in the river. She did not drown her son. She hid him as long as she could.
And then it is evident that she had a relationship with the Lord. And she trusted God can do something in this situation that seems impossible. And so she took and she made a basket out of bulrushes.
She covered it with pitch so that it would not sink. She put the baby in it. And she had her sister watch over him from a distance to see what God was going to do.
The amazing thing, and we won’t take time to read the text. You can go home and read the rest of it. I’ll give you a summary of it.
What happens is Pharaoh’s daughter comes down with some of her maidens to bathe in the river. And all of a sudden they see this basket and they hear a baby cry. And she goes over and says it’s a baby.
And she knows it’s a Hebrew baby. But she doesn’t drown it. God had placed her there and placed in her heart a desire.
And I don’t know what the situation was, why she adopted the child. But she adopted this baby. And she takes this baby home.
But the problem is they didn’t have the local drugstore where you could buy formula. If you weren’t pregnant and could nurse your baby would probably start to die. So she’s got a problem.
She’s Pharaoh’s daughter. But she didn’t bathe the child so she’s not able to nurse. At that moment Moses’ sister comes up and Moses’ mother in faith had placed her there.
And says do you need someone to nurse your baby? She says well yes. I know the perfect woman. Moses’ mom.
So Moses was weaned. In Egypt they were usually weaned probably at three years of age or around there. So the first years of Moses’ life were spent in the house of Moses’ mother.
With his mother. And when he’s there I can guarantee you she’s investing her time in that child teaching him about God. And the power of God.
The power of God to deliver in circumstances that seem impossible. So when Pharaoh’s daughter comes and takes Moses and she takes him to Pharaoh’s house and she raises him as her own son and he’s trained some historians believe Moses was actually being trained to be the next Pharaoh. He’s getting all the education that the Pharaoh he would come face to face with when he came to deliver the Israelites from Egypt.
The same education he was getting Moses was getting. But there’s something different. Moses has been introduced to the true and the living God by his mother.
You can go to the book of Hebrews and you see an interesting thing about Moses. It says that when Moses became able to make his own decision he rejected the ways of Pharaoh and embraced God. And as Moses is going through the desert and even before he got there God calls him and Moses doesn’t feel capable of heeding the call of God because he says I’m not capable, I can’t speak.
Yet Moses could speak. He’d been trained with Pharaoh in the house of Pharaoh. But God says, I’ll send Aaron then, your brother, he’ll speak for you.
But you’re my man. And when Moses goes to confront Pharaoh he’s going on behalf of God. He’s not going as Moses.
And when he gets there he’s facing what appears to be a totally impossible task. These people have been enslaved for another 80 years from when he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter in the bassinet in the river. It’s 80 years later.
They’ve been enslaved for another 80 years. They’ve had 80 more years of oppression. Yet Moses says, let my people go.
Ten times Moses says let my people go. Ten plagues come on Egypt. And why did Moses believe that those plagues would come? Because he believed in the God who delivered him.
Because his mother had faith in that God, that he was going to do the impossible and save her son. Moses was used by God to do the impossible. He’s separated by the rod of Moses.
God caused the Red Sea. As Moses stood, and the Red Sea parted, and the people walked across on dry land, and Moses turned, and the Red Sea came back together and drowned Pharaoh and his chariots and horsemen. While he was wandering in the desert, Moses was faced with challenge after challenge by the people and by the enemies of God.
There was real spiritual warfare going on all around him. And yet Moses’ understanding was God is bigger than my circumstance because it happened to me when I was born. And my mom told me about it.
There’s another woman I want to introduce you to. Go to the book of Joshua. In the book of Joshua, the nation of Israel is getting ready to go into the Promised Land.
Joshua 1:1-14
Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people saying, Pass through the host and command the people saying, Prepare ye victuals, for within days we shall pass over this Jordan and go to possess the land which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it. And the Reubenites and the Gadites and half the tribe of Manasseh spake to Joshua saying, Remember the word which Moses, the servant of the Lord, commanded you saying, The Lord your God hath given you rest and hath given you this land, your wives and little ones and your cattle will remain in the land which Moses gave you and on that side of the Jordan, but you shall pass before your brethren armed as mighty men of valor and help them.
So we see that all twelve tribes are going to pass into the land and they’re going to supernaturally protect the elderly and the wives and the children and their animals as these two and a half tribes stay on the east side of the Jordan.
Joshua 2:1
And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly saying, Go ye into the land, even Jericho. And they went and came into the harlot’s house named Rahab and lodged there.
God is very honest.
He tells it like it is. Rahab was a harlot. And if you were a harlot in her culture you were intimately involved in the pagan worship service.
That was your job. You were helping the men of your culture worship the false gods. Yet when this woman named Rahab who’s a harlot, hears about what God has done on the other side of the Jordan.
He’s defeated the Amalekites. He’s defeated Og and Suhan, two Amorite kings. He’s supernaturally protecting two and a half tribes of Israel and their families.
And she cries out, even though she is a pagan, she cries out to this God and she is used by him to preserve the two spies. And the only thing she requests of those spies is she says, when you come in, because I know that you’re coming in, I know that you’re going to destroy the city, I know that you’re going to kill all the occupants in it. I ask that you preserve myself and my family.
So they tell her, take a red cord and her home was on the city wall of Jericho. That’s oftentimes where the homes were built, was on the walls high up. And they said, place a red cord out of the window of your house so that we can see where you live and you and your family will be spared as long as you have done everything that you told us you were going to do and you’re waiting there.
If you’re not there, we can’t guarantee your safety, but if you’re there and the red cord’s there, we’ll guarantee your safety. She was there. The red cord was there.
Her family was there. It doesn’t give us her family members, but there was no husband, I can tell you that. It probably could have been parents, sisters, others, but they were there with her and they trusted and believed God.
They’ve done archeological digs at the site of the city of Jericho. One of the amazing things they found is the walls fell out, not in. If you’re attacking as an enemy army, you would attack and you’d use battering rams or other things to cause the walls to crumble and begin to either fall straight down or fall in as you begin to attack them.
God brought down the walls of Jericho and they all fell out, but the amazing thing is they found in their excavations one area of the wall, just one area of the wall that was still standing and it appeared that there was some type of living quarters in the upper portion of that section of the wall, the house of Rahab. Rahab was taken in and she became part of the nation of Israel. She married a prince of Israel.
That prince of Israel and Rahab had a son. That son’s name was Boaz. I want you to understand who Boaz was.
He was a man who believed and trusted in God when his own relatives didn’t want to. And there was another woman who came into Boaz’s life and her name was Ruth and she was a Moabitess. The Moabites were never supposed to intermarry with the Israelites but yet she had married an Israelite woman’s son when she and her two sons and husbands had gone into the land of Moab because of famine and her husband and two sons had died and she tried to get her two daughter-in-laws, Ruth and Urpah, to go back and to live.
She said, go back to your dads, go back to your families. Because Ruth would not, she says, your God is my God. And Ruth went with her.
When she got to Israel, there’s a man by the name of Boaz and Naomi tells Ruth, that man named Boaz, he’s your kinsman redeemer. Now a kinsman redeemer, we don’t understand what that means but a kinsman redeemer, if you lost, like Naomi did, all the males in your family, you would lose the rights to the land that belonged to the males of your family because it was passed down from generation to generation. But if there was someone who was of the same family and was a close relative, they could become the kinsman redeemer and they would purchase the land and take responsibility for it and along with it, the living women and widows of that family.
Boaz was confronted with this situation. Throughout the whole introduction to Ruth, you see that he shows favor to Ruth. He tells his own servants, leave extra, because she came out to glean after the gleaners had been there to take back to Naomi and her because that’s all they could live on.
They didn’t have a man to provide for them. He said, leave extra in the corners of the field for Ruth. And she’d come home and she’d bring all this extra and Naomi would say to her, why do you have all this food? And she says, well, he left it for me.
She told him to go and lay down at his feet that night and it wasn’t any sexual thing because our culture is so caught up in that. It wasn’t. She was laying down there saying, we are willing to submit to you as our kinsmen redeemer.
Boaz wakes up before White. He finds a woman at his feet, it’s Ruth. He tells her, you must go.
He doesn’t want anything to be said about her, that she was there. The next day, he goes to make arrangements because there’s one man who is a closer relative than he is and he cannot become their kinsmen redeemer until that relative would give up the right. So he goes and he lays it all out to the relative and the relative says, well, that sounds like a great deal.
I could use more land and I’ll take it. He says, well, you know, there’s just this one thing that comes along with it. It’s Naomi and her daughter-in-law.
You have to be responsible for them. And the guy says, oh, that’s a deal breaker. I’m not doing it.
And so he says that he took off his shoe and gave it to Boaz. That is a symbol that he had broken his responsibility in the covenant and instead passing it on to Boaz and now Boaz was the next in line to be kinsmen redeemer. Boaz marries Ruth.
Out of that union comes Obed and out of the house of Obed comes Jesse and out of the house of Jesse comes David. But I want you to understand, going back to the end, a harlot worshiping a false god who believes in the God of the Bible, the God who is the true God, changes her whole life, gives her life to the Lord, trusts in Him in a situation that seems impossible. The impossible situation is if the king of Jericho finds out what she’s done, she’s dead and her family’s dead.
But she’s trusting God because God had placed her in that place at that time, for that moment and she was going to be faithful to her calling and faithful to her God. And she changed to God at that moment. She repented from her pagan gods and embraced the true and the living God.
And she brought up a son who believed in the same God. And she brought up a son who saw the impossible had been done in the life of his mother and the impossible could be done in his life as well and in the life of his wife and in the life of what would become his great, great, great grandson, David. That’s why Satan wants to have seducing spirits and doctrines of demons because he understands the significance and the importance of women in the home and in the family and the impact you can have on the lives of your children.
I challenge you to go online and read Susanna Wesley. She had ten rules for her home. Read those rules.
If you as a mother make your children follow those rules, you’ll be raising godlike children. She raised John and Charles with two of her sons. When John had questions about rearing children, he went to his mother.
I didn’t read it today because we usually read it every Mother’s Day. It speaks all at once. It’s bad because who can ever live up to a woman with Proverbs 31? But every woman should try.
Every woman should be a Susanna Wesley. Every woman should be a Rahab. Every woman should be a mother of Moses.
Every woman should establish her calling and understand the significant position God has placed you in. And if he blesses you with children, it’s the highest calling you can have. Higher than any CEO position, any salary you’d make, any cruises and trips you could take.
Because you’re shaping the next generation. And if you’re shaping your children, you’re giving them the answers so they won’t be gone before they ever reach the age of college. Because they’ll have the face of mom in their house.
It’s as simple as that. Dear Heavenly Father, I pray that you would just speak to us through your word. Help us understand.
Women are so important. Lord, you give them to men. You establish them to be the ones that run the home and have a tremendous influence in the lives of children.
Lord, help us to realize that. Lord, help all women that are here to realize the high calling God’s placed on their life. It’s not for a job.
It’s not the power and position. But it’s to be called the calling of a woman and what that means. Go with the supreme Jesus name.