Audio Transcript

Welcome back to this new week on the podcast, week number 530 for us. Amazing. Thanks for being a part of this podcast over the past decade, and thank you for praying for God to sustain us in this work.

Last Monday, we talked about the value and dignity of womanhood. It was a really important episode in a world blind to God’s glorious, intentional design for male and female creatures. That was APJ 1909. And we’ve celebrated the incredible glories of motherhood as well. On motherhood, I regularly recommend one episode from seven years ago that we recorded. I’ll never forget it. It’s titled “I Want Kids. My Husband Doesn’t.” It’s just a great, classic episode in the archive on the glories of motherhood. And as always, you’ll find our archive at askpastorjohn.com. There you can search for episodes 908 and 1909.

Speaking of the glories of motherhood, we have an international question today about 1 Timothy 2:15, an important text, a curious text, that we haven’t touched on in about four years now. We should. And we will because today’s question is from a listener to the podcast named Luba, who asks, “Pastor John, can you please comment on 1 Timothy 2:15? What are we as women supposed to be saved from in childbirth? And what does this mean for women who will never have children? This verse is highly discussed among us Christians inside of Russia. Thank you for your wisdom.”

In this context right here in 1 Timothy 2, Paul is making the case that spiritually qualified men should be the authoritative teachers — or you could say pastors or elders — in the church rather than women. Now, we’ve addressed that issue several times in Ask Pastor John. But this time, the issue is different.

Saved Through Childbearing?

Here’s the text at the end of verse 15, with a very puzzling sentence. I’ll read the whole two verses and then underline that last sentence that she’s asking about.

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. [Now, here’s the sentence:] Yet she will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control. (1 Timothy 2:12–15)

So what is the meaning of verse 15? “Yet she will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”

Who’s she? “She will be saved” refers to “the woman” (or Eve) in verse 14, but I think Paul means for us to generalize it — I think Luba is right to make that inference — because he shifts from the singular she to the plural they in the very next phrase. He says, “She will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith.” The natural way to take this they is “women in general.” So, I think she’s right to ask the question she’s asking the way she’s asking it.

So what does it mean that women in general “will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control”? What about women who never have children? How does the verse apply to them?

Some have suggested that “through childbearing” refers to the birth of Jesus. Since a woman bore the Savior, we could say that women are saved through that childbearing. But that’s unlikely because, among other reasons, the only other use of this Greek word childbearing is found in 1 Timothy 5:14, where it simply means ordinary childbearing among women in general. It says, “So I would have the younger widows marry and bear children” — childbearing. So I don’t think that’s what it refers to.

“In spite of childbearing being part of God’s curse on sin, women will be saved through it.”

What then does it mean that “she will be saved through childbearing”? Here, I’m happy to give credit to Henry Alford, a British scholar who died in 1871, who pointed me to a text in 1 Corinthians that I think holds the key to Paul’s meaning here.

‘In Spite of’ Childbearing

So the key question is, What does through mean when Paul says, “She will be saved” — women in general will be saved — “through childbearing”? I think what gets most of us off on the wrong foot is that we almost all jump to the conclusion that through means by means of: “She will be saved by means of childbearing.” Then we cast about for how that could be the case. There is another possibility for what through means, and that was the clue I saw in 1 Corinthians 3:15, where Paul uses this very word in a similar situation and it means something very different.

So here’s what Paul is talking about there. You remember he’s talking about the judgment according to our works — in particular, whether we’ve taught true things in the context of the church. He says there’s wood, there’s hay, there’s stubble, and if some of your works are wood, hay, and stubble, they’re going to be burned up at the judgment. And then he holds out hope that the person himself — even though the wood, hay, and stubble of his works gets burned up — might be saved even though he has not lived the life that he should have lived in any perfect way. He says it like this: “If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15). So there’s that saved idea and through idea.

Now, what’s the meaning of through here, which is the same word used in 1 Timothy 2:15? It does not mean by means of — that is, “by means of fire.” He will be saved through fire in the sense that fire is threatening him and he comes through it safe. It means, virtually, “in spite of fire.” Even though he is under the threat of fire, yet he will be saved. He will come through it saved.

So my suggestion is that this is the way we should try to understand the word through in 1 Timothy 2:15 when Paul says, “She will be saved through childbearing.”

Overcoming the Curse

Now, how would that work? “She will be saved in spite of childbearing” sounds kind of odd, — or “through childbearing” the way a person comes through some threatening circumstance. Well, go back to Genesis 3 and remind yourself what happened after Adam and Eve sinned, which is the context here in 1 Timothy 2. What happened was that both of them were told that the curse of sin would fall on each of them in their respective, special role: Adam in his farming work, the sweat of his face, and Eve in her childbearing. So, Genesis 3:16 says, “To the woman God said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.’”

“The pain of childbearing, the misery of its long-term effects, often was a reminder of God’s displeasure over Eve’s sin.”

Now, let’s let that sink in for a minute. How that must have landed on women for centuries, especially before modern medicine — no hygiene, no spinal blocks, no episiotomies, no sutures, no Cesareans, no antibiotics, no pain killers, and often no recovery. Untold numbers of women died in childbirth, and countless more suffered the rest of their lives from wounds, tearing that prevented childbirth or any kind of normal sexual life. In other words, there were aspects of childbearing that felt like a curse from God because, in a sense, they were.

Often, that burden lasted a lifetime, not just in the moment of birth. How easy it would have been for women in Paul’s day, for example, or through the centuries, to despair and feel that God was against them. He’s just against them. He was their curser, not their savior. The pain of childbearing, the misery of its long-term effects, often was a reminder of God’s displeasure over Eve’s sin.

Now, I think that is what Paul is responding to. And his response was gospel hope. In other words, no to the curse. No, these pains of childbearing, even if they last a lifetime, are not God’s word, his final word, to women. God intends to save. They will be saved through the fiery trials of childbearing, through the apparent curse of childbearing. In spite of childbearing being part of God’s curse on sin, women will be saved through it.

By Faith in the Savior

Then Paul adds, “. . . if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control,” which simply means, I think, “if they’re Christians.” That’s the link with the Savior. She’s justified by faith, and then love and holiness and self-control are simply the fruit of faith that confirm that it’s real for men and women. She is a real Christian, and that’s how she will be saved, in spite of the painful reminders of the curse of God in childbearing through Eve’s disobedience.

So in answer to Luba’s question, “Well, what does this mean for women who have never had children or will have children?” it means this: though they may never have tasted the pain of childbearing in their own bodies, they still might feel a solidarity with all women under the curse of the pain of childbearing because of sin entering the world. So they can share in the same hope as women who have had children — namely, the hope that in spite of the pain women have to endure, in spite of that pain because of the fall, nevertheless, God is for them, not against them, and if they trust in Jesus Christ and walk in lives of holiness, they will be saved.

Audio Transcript

Boosted by a fresh dose of resurrection hope coming out of Easter Sunday, we are talking about death on the podcast this week. We are free to speak openly about dying in hopeful ways the world cannot speak of, free to say that what is sown into the soil “does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36).

In that hope, we started the week with the story of V. Raymond Edman, a preacher who died in the pulpit, an event from Pastor John’s very formative years at Wheaton College and one he almost never talks about. But he did on Monday. And today we read about death in the Navigators Bible Reading Plan. It comes in the context of Paul talking about division and jealousy in the church, in 1 Corinthians 3:1–23. And there Paul gives us this amazing motivation for not getting jealous in this life. And that motive is the gift of death. He says, “Death is ours.” And that has led to many emails over the years asking what in the world Paul means that death is a gift to us, specifically there in 1 Corinthians 3:22. How, Pastor John, would you explain the divine gift of death here in this context?

Well, I love this text, 1 Corinthians 3:21–23. Tony, it’s very hard for me to talk about this without raising my voice with exuberance, and I will try to restrain myself. But hundreds of realities are thrilling in the Bible. This one is off-the-charts, unspeakably amazing. Let me read it for our friends so they know what we’re talking about.

Let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. (1 Corinthians 3:21–23)

End of Boasting

So, Paul is trying to get the Corinthians to stop boasting in human beings. That’s the agenda. Back in 1 Corinthians 1:11–12, they were saying, “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas.” In other words, they were exalting themselves over others by borrowing significance from their favorite teacher or orator or intellectual, claiming to be superior to others because they were in the Paul group or the Apollos group or the Cephas group.

And basically, Paul says (in 1 Corinthians 3:21–22), “You’re insane. You’re crazy for thinking like that.” Why are you crazy? And he gives them the reason. “Let no one boast in men,” and here comes the reason: “[because] all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future.” Everything is yours.

So, Paul exposes the craziness of the Corinthian boasting by turning their words upside down. They were saying, “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas.” And Paul says,

No, they belong to you, you idiots. All things are yours. Paul is yours. Apollos is yours. Cephas belongs to you. And by the way, so does the world and life and death. All things are yours, you crazy Corinthians. Come on, wake up to who you are. You belong to Christ. You are fellow heirs with Christ, and he is the heir of God, and God owns everything. Get it? Come on.

So stop acting like idiots, Corinthians. Stop trying to prop up your significance in this world by boasting in your favorite teacher. You own everything. The poorest Christian among you, the poorest Christian on this planet, is richer than the richest unbeliever.

Death Is Your Servant

Specifically, then, what does it mean that death is yours, along with everything else? “You own death. It’s your possession. It doesn’t possess you; you possess it.” What does that mean? Now, I’ll give you my understanding of that statement, and then I’ll take you to several passages of Scripture that support this understanding.

“The poorest Christian on this planet is richer than the richest unbeliever.”

When Paul says, “Death [is] yours,” he means, “Death is your servant — not your master, your servant.” It does for you what you need to have done. If I say, “The food in my refrigerator is my food; it’s mine,” I mean, “I can eat it without stealing, and it serves me; it strengthens me to do what I need to do.” If I say, “This car is my car,” I mean, “It serves me; I use it. It doesn’t use me; I use it. It gets me where I want to go.”

So, I’m saying that Paul means, “Paul is your servant” (in fact, he says that earlier in 1 Corinthians 3:5). “Paul is your servant. Apollos is your servant. Cephas is your servant. The world is your servant. Life and death are your servants. You don’t serve them; they serve you. You don’t exist for their benefit; they exist for your benefit. In the end, they will do for you exactly what you need to have done. Death will do for you what you need done.”

All Things Serve God’s Children

Now, here are some biblical pointers to that understanding. Psalm 119:90–91 says,

Your faithfulness [O God] endures to all generations;     you have established the earth, and it stands fast.By your appointment they stand this day,     for all things are your servants.

Everything in the universe serves the purposes of God — everything. There are (as R.C. Sproul used to say) no maverick molecules. Every bird that falls, every hair that turns white, is of God. Everything serves the purposes of God. We are God’s children, and it would make no sense if God said, “Well, all things serve me, but when it comes to my children, I just have no idea how to make all things serve them.” That is crazy. It’s not only crazy; it’s blasphemous. If all things serve our omnipotent, all-wise, all-caring Father, then all things serve us.

More Than Conquerors

Which brings me, then, to Romans 8:28. “We know that for those who love God all things [including death] work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” In other words, all things, including death, serve the children of God, serve their good, do for us what we need to have done.

Then Paul lists all the things that might “separate us from the love of Christ” (Romans 8:35), and included in that list is “danger” and “sword,” which means danger and death. We used swords to chop off people’s heads in those days. And we know that because, in the next verse (Romans 8:36), it says, “We are being killed all the day long.” Christians are dying for their faith every day, even today. Somewhere in the world, some Christian’s life is being threatened for his faith. And Paul says, “Death is yours. It serves you.”

How does he say that right here in Romans 8:37? This is the really amazing part. He doesn’t just say, “Death cannot separate us from the love of Christ.” He says that. It’s not all he says. He says, “No [no!], in all these things” — not in spite of them, but in all these things, including death, danger, sword, peril, famine, nakedness — “we are more than conquerors.” You could translate it “super-conquerors.”

“Life and death are your servants. You don’t serve them; they serve you.”

So, if death takes your life (which he says it does in Romans 8:36), how are you, in that moment when death has taken your life, more than a conqueror? How does it serve you? You’re not just a conqueror — it doesn’t just lie there conquered at your feet. It is “more than a conqueror.” It gets up; death gets up. After you’ve slain death, it gets up and serves you. Death does what you need doing and takes you where you need going.

Two Powers Dethroned

So, if we really believed — O God, help us. Every time I work on this text, I just shake my head and think, How in the world can this text go out of my head? How can I not live in the light of this text? And it happens. It’s just a horrible thing how it happens to us Christians. This text just goes out of our head.

If we really believe this text (what the Bible says about us in 1 Corinthians 3:21–23) — namely, that all things are ours, including the finest intellects on the planet and the best orators and the richest people and life and death and the world and the present and the future — if we really believed that these things are our servants, two powers would be dethroned in our lives. First, we would no longer desperately try to find our significance in this world by being superior to others or by lining up with people who are superior. We would see that as insane. And second, we would stop fearing death. “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). It’s gone. It’s not only gone — it comes back around and becomes our servant.

Death is our mortal enemy — an enemy that Jesus defanged (Hebrews 2:14–15), and one day will utterly destroy (Revelation 21:4). He revealed his omnipotent power over death by raising people from the dead (Mark 5:41–42; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:33–34). Through his own resurrection, he revealed that all authority in heaven and earth is his (Matthew 28:16). D-Day over death for all who believe has arrived (2 Timothy 1:10), and V-Day’s future has been secured (1 Corinthians 15:25–26).

How then should we pray for God to heal our dying loved ones? On the one hand, until Jesus returns, death is an inescapable reality for everyone (Hebrews 9:27). So praying for healing isn’t always God’s will. In the case of a dying great-grandmother, for example, we may be more in line with God’s will not by praying for healing, but by praying for her to finish well (Philippians 1:23), trusting that because her Savior has conquered death for her, she will never see it, not even for a second (John 8:51).

On the other hand, because Jesus robbed death of its life-stealing power by bearing the full wrath of God for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21), we sometimes should pray that he would snatch our loved ones from the grasp of death. We can pray for miracles, asking him to spare us the sorrow upon sorrow that comes from seemingly untimely deaths (Philippians 2:27), even as we trust him for his answer, whatever it might be.

‘She Can’t Breathe’

In a recent article, I shared how God humbled me and taught me to trust him through my daughter’s battle with cancer when she was 8 years old. Despite our prayers for God to spare her life, she drifted closer and closer to death’s door. The new “promising” experimental treatment we authorized further robbed us of hope when it gave her a life-threatening side effect called VOD of the liver.

The worst part was how she was laboring to breathe. That’s the final line to cross before death, isn’t it — no longer being able to breathe the breath of life (Genesis 2:7; 3:19)? Our doctor told us that if she continued to struggle, they would have to put her on a ventilator. They would sedate her and strap her down before intubation so that she could not pull out the ventilator. Taking that step could mean that my wife and I would never speak with our daughter again.

Then it happened. It was two o’clock in the morning when the pediatrics ICU doctor woke me up. “We have to put your daughter on a ventilator right now. She can’t breathe, and her carbon-dioxide level is past the emergency benchmark.” Everyone had been dreading this moment, but here it was. Desperate, I called my wife so she could rush to the hospital, perhaps in time to speak one last time with her baby, but she didn’t pick up the phone. My daughter was dying, and the person she loved more than anyone on earth wouldn’t be there to hold her and say goodbye. I was broken.

Waiting and Praying

Then, like the voice of an angel, the nurse whispered to me, “Dad, if you are not comfortable, they can’t make you do this.” And so, when our doctor returned with the ventilator, I told her I wanted to wait and pray. The doctor’s countenance morphed. Her voice steeled. She said that if they didn’t intubate my daughter right then, she could go into cardiac arrest. The doctor warned me repeatedly, but each time I firmly told her I wanted to pray and wait. I’m no doctor, and as a rule, I hear and receive doctors’ recommendations. But in this moment, I couldn’t shake the sense that God wanted me to pray and wait.

“God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him.”

Eventually, everyone left the room, and I dropped to my knees. “God, you said if we ask you for a fish, you won’t give us a serpent. If we ask you for bread, you won’t give us a stone. God, I am asking you to give me my daughter’s life.” I prayed through the night. Each hour I prayed, my daughter’s carbon-dioxide levels dramatically improved, and her breathing grew stronger. In the morning, her doctor came into the room and removed the order for the ventilator, and the following week, he let her come home for a weeklong visit before her second round of chemotherapy.

Our daughter, who had been at death’s door only a few days before, was home with no detectable cancer to be found in her body. God and God alone did that.

Amazing Providence

My daughter was cancer-free, but she was far from being out of danger. Because the first round of chemotherapy had almost killed her, her bone-marrow specialist wanted her to skip the final two rounds and go straight to receiving a bone-marrow transplant. Our oncologist disagreed and told us he believed bone-marrow transplants work best when even the imperceptible levels of cancer are reduced by the final rounds of chemotherapy.

Because they couldn’t agree, they left the decision with us, giving us the weekend to decide whether to continue with two more rounds of chemo or go straight to a transplant. So my wife and I went away for a night to pray and seek wisdom from a multitude of counselors. We called friends with medical backgrounds, although we hadn’t spoken to some of them in over twenty years. And how God providentially answered our prayers seemed even more amazing than how he miraculously strengthened my daughter’s breathing.

Oncology Expert

We called Judy, who used to attend a UCLA Bible study with me. I had heard that she worked as an oncology nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She told me that the doctor who trained our oncologist was actually at her hospital. Then she said, “You won’t believe this, but the doctor who wrote the national experimental protocol that your daughter is on just walked past me, and I’ll check with her!” Both doctors agreed that under our circumstances, we could go straight to the bone-marrow transplant and skip the final two rounds of chemotherapy.

Bone-Marrow Expert

Then my wife, who years ago had spent a year in medical school, called a former classmate, Larry, who suggested that we reach out to the UCLA bone-marrow transplant department. When we pulled up their webpage, my wife recognized a high-school classmate, LaVette, and I recognized one of the doctors, Ted Moore, with whom I had attended a UCLA Bible study. We called the number listed, and my wife’s high-school friend picked up. She said she had never answered that phone but had just so happened to be walking past it when it rang. Dr. Moore was in a meeting, but she would have him call us back as soon as he was free. Within the hour, I answered the phone to “Hey, Bobby. It’s Ted.” The unassuming UCLA student I knew from sixteen years ago had become Dr. Theodore Moore, a renowned expert in bone-marrow transplants. With complete confidence, he counseled us to go straight to the transplant.

VOD Expert

Finally, we called Dr. John Vierling, a liver specialist. My wife and I had met him years ago when her cousin asked my wife to sing at the funeral for Dr. Vierling’s son. Our concern was whether having a history of VOD would make the risk of undergoing a bone-marrow transplant too great for our daughter, because a major risk from these transplants is contracting VOD. As God would have it, Dr. Vierling was an expert on VOD, and he counseled us that we could safely proceed with the transplant.

Through the unveiling of his amazing providence, God had answered our prayer. We authorized our daughter to undergo a bone-marrow transplant at City of Hope eighteen years ago. Eighteen years later, she is a walking cancer-free miracle of God.

He Holds Every Breath

I know my daughter’s story is just one among many stories that end so differently. We journeyed through our trial with four other families — three children my daughter’s age and one adult, all of whom had similar types of cancer. We prayed for each of them, but none of them survived. God does not answer every prayer for healing. So, how might he have us pray when our loved ones need a miracle?

“Our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus.”

First, armed with the trust that God sovereignly ordains our prayers as a means to accomplish his ends, we freely pray for miracles, as Elijah did (James 5:17–18). Honestly, before God healed my daughter, I would pray for God to heal others, but I didn’t necessarily expect to see a miracle. For that, I repent. God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him, including healing our loved ones on their deathbeds.

At the same time, however, we pray with the kind of faith that does not rest on God saying yes to our prayers (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). By his grace, we can accept his answer when it’s no, as David did (2 Samuel 12:16–23), and we can submit to his will and worship him when we can’t understand his answer, as Job did (Job 1:21; 42:1–3).

Christians also embrace the reality that, until Jesus returns, everyone we love will die, and our lives are but a vapor in light of eternity, whether we die at age 10 or 100. So our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus, and that he would grant our unbelieving loved ones repentance and faith toward Jesus. Our first prayer for our daughter was for her soul’s salvation.

A wise friend reminded me, when we were enduring our trial, that God holds the pen that is writing our story. Everything God writes is good: in the end, we will see his story as good, and in the present, we believe it to be for our good. So yes, pray for a miracle, and trust that God holds your loved one’s next and last breaths.