When we sin, we remind ourselves that standing with us before the Father is Jesus Christ. Jesus accomplished a perfect righteousness in our place and died on a cross, bearing the full weight of the wrath of God for us. Our total trust, our total reliance, and our total dependence are not in any notion that we are sinless (because we are not). Our total trust, reliance, and dependence are in the truth that Jesus, through His sacrifice and perfect righteousness, makes us acceptable in the presence of God.

“He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”
1 John 2:2
The word propitiation, as used by the apostle John in 1 John 2, has been the subject of much debate throughout the centuries. The question is this: Does John mean by propitiation that Jesus Christ, through His death on the cross, obtained forgiveness for us, or does John mean that through His death, Jesus not only obtained forgiveness for us but also satisfied the wrath of God against us? How you answer this question will either lead you to the gospel of Jesus Christ and a saving knowledge of God, or to a faulty understanding of who God is and what He requires as payment for our sins.
Some would say that God is not a God of wrath. They would say that God does not demand blood sacrifice to satisfy His wrath against sin and sinners. They claim that God is pure benevolence – a loving God, who would never have this kind of wrath that needed to be satisfied against sin. These people argue that this word means that Christ came and died and brought forgiveness, but that God did not need to have His wrath appeased because a loving God is not angry.
The problem with this view is that the Bible clearly presents God as angry not only with sin itself but also with sinners. In Psalm 2:12, the kings of the earth are enjoined to “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.” Our God is a God of wrath who becomes angry with sinners and sin – especially the sin of rejecting His Son. This anger toward sinners is just and warranted. It is the just anger of a holy God who rightly exercises wrath against what is truly evil and wicked.
David writes in Psalm 7:11 that God “has indignation every day.” What is it that makes God’s wrath necessary? It is the fact that He is a righteous judge, and the world is full of wicked people. God is not some petulant deity who becomes angry without cause. Our God, as a righteous judge, must exercise wrath against those who are wicked and defy His divine law. If he wasn’t angry at evil, he wouldn’t be righteous.
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We do not live in a perfect world. Every household will make decisions based on their life circumstances, and Christians should avoid being overly prescriptive about matters that are truly secondary. God is honored when Christians prayerfully consider how to best pursue their God given priorities. Even though motherhood is diminished in the world, the church can uphold its glory and dignity.

Motherhood is Life
I recently rewatched “Saving Private Ryan” for what must have been the 10th time. Saving Private Ryan tells the story of a young man whose three brothers were killed in combat in WWII. Private Ryan was the only brother to survive D Day. When military officials realized this, they dispatched a special regiment of eight soldiers to track him down, somewhere in France, to retrieve him and bring him home.
Saving Private Ryan is a masculine movie. It’s all about brotherhood, war, duty, honor. But when I watched the movie this time, however, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before—mothers. Many of these young men, who were fighting for their lives on another continent, were thinking about their mothers back home. In a particularly disturbing scene, a soldier lies on a beach in Normandy, clutching his bloody stomach that had been blown open, crying out “mama!” while he died.
The mission to save Private Ryan was deemed urgent because the military command wanted to spare his mother the overwhelming grief of losing her last remaining son. One scene depicts the awful moment just before she learned the news that she’d lost her other three sons. She is standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes as she notices a military vehicle approach. A man dressed in a military uniform exits the front passenger side of the vehicle, turns toward the back door of the car and opens it. A chaplain steps out. She knew immediately. She falls to her knees in grief, knowing that she’d lost one of her sons. Surely her mind is racing with questions. “Which son? How did he die?” But the audience knows the situation is much worse. She’d lost three of her sons in one day, and the fourth was still missing.
Scenes like this show the power of motherhood. When strong, young men in war are in the throes of death, their hearts are naturally drawn to the safety, comfort, and love of home. They long for the woman who gave them life. Mothers embody everything they hope for in dangerous times. War is death. Motherhood is life.
The World’s View of Motherhood
Many young women feel the need to suppress their maternal instincts because they’ve been culturally conditioned to devalue motherhood. They’ve grown up watching shows and hearing stories celebrating how “girls can do anything boys can do.” A friend once noticed a poster in a school highlighting girl’s potential in a series of pictures associated with different careers. One was a doctor, another was a business executive, a third was an astronaut. Of all these images inspiring young girls about what they could become in life, none of them depicted mothers.
During a small group discussion with some Christian friends, one young woman sheepishly admitted that what she most wanted out of life was to be a wife and a mother. She was hesitant to acknowledge this, because she felt that this was somehow aiming below her potential, wasting her gifts, and settling for second best. All her life, she’d heard about how exciting a career can be, but she’d heard relatively little celebrating the fact that she can create and nurture new life. In pop culture, pregnancy is depicted as a hurdle to overcome. But the testimony of scripture is that children are a blessing and motherhood is a glorious vocation (Ps 127:3-5). This is not to say that women should not get an education or have a job. For our purposes here, it’s simply a matter of priority. Motherhood is highly valued in Scripture but devalued in modern culture.
Motherhood has never been an easy calling ever since it came under the curse of sin (Gen 3:16). Nevertheless, throughout history, societies have always valued motherhood as a social good to preserve and nurture civilization. As the industrial revolution radically changed the household, some feminist thinkers began arguing that the traditional household was outdated, oppressive to women, and needed to be changed. It was holding women back, enslaving them to their husbands and children. But women could be liberated from this bondage by seeking careers outside the home the way men did. They assumed that women could be more free, more fulfilled, and more valued in the marketplace than in the home.
Even though most Christian women would quickly recognize the error of this thinking, the basic assumptions and desires of feminism can nevertheless seep into our unconscious minds, training us to devalue the vocation of motherhood. Women are being subtly conditioned to believe that the marketplace is immanently desirable—where true happiness and fulfillment can be found. Motherhood is a secondary endeavor if a woman chooses to succumb to her own biology. Homemaking should rarely be the top vocational choice, unless she’s going for a trendy, boutique, trad wife flex. This thinking is ungodly. Nevertheless, the feminine nature has a way of asserting itself. It cannot be so easily denied. Women are naturally and instinctively inclined to make homes.
The Feminine Design
I have pastored many women through infertility struggles and have personally seen how devastating this trial can be. For these women, their missing motherhood can feel like a personal failure. Why is missing motherhood such an emotional weight for so many women? Because it’s their design. Motherhood is the goal (or telos) of the feminine design. Women are physiologically oriented towards it. A woman’s menstrual cycle is a monthly reminder that her womb was designed to bear life, and her breasts were designed to feed and nurture life. This astoundingly powerful ability to create life should be affirmed and celebrated, not minimized or dismissed.
The Scriptures present motherhood as one of the greatest blessings a woman could receive. Similarly, a barren womb was one of the greatest trials she could endure. Womanhood cannot be properly understood apart from her potential for motherhood. It is the unique design of her body. When God created Eve, he was not merely solving a loneliness problem, but a reproduction problem. She was God’s answer to man’s inability to fill the earth on his own. This is why Adam named her “Eve, because she was the mother of all living” (Gen 3:20). God gave him much more than a wife. He gave him a potential mother.
A common word Scripture uses to describe motherhood is “fruitfulness” (Gen 1:28). This word appears in the Bible over 200 times, covering a range of interrelated meanings from gardening to sexuality. Fruitfulness is multiplication. Just as the Garden of Eden was meant to grow, expand, and multiply to cover the earth, Eve was meant to be fruitful and grow, like a garden. Women are uniquely equipped to multiply and amplify things. A woman’s body can take a single sperm from a man and knit together a new human being from it. Just as her name suggests, Eve truly did become the mother of all living, giving birth to the whole human race. This feminine ability goes beyond physical childbearing. Femininity represents the ability to expand what is received. As author Rebekah Merkle put it, “When God gave Eve to Adam, he was handing Adam an amplifier… Adam is the single acorn sitting on the driveway which, no matter how hard he tries, remains an acorn. Eve is the fertile soil which takes all the potential that resides in that acorn and turns it into a tree, which produces millions more acorns and millions more trees.”
The Vocation of Motherhood
Women are natural homemakers. Marriage is all about making a home, and wives will naturally devote themselves to it. The question is not whether she’ll do it, but to what degree she’ll prioritize it. Every household will need its cabinets stocked with groceries, meals prepared, and laundry washed. Beyond this, the children will need to be fed, nurtured, clothed, disciplined, and educated. Typically, the mother takes the lead in handling these chores. She may do them all herself, or she may outsource some or all of them to others. For example, a well-trained and qualified nanny can be hired to come into the home and perform all these tasks. A nanny may be a better cook, better housekeeper, and better teacher of the kids. This being the case, why not hire them to do as much as possible? Some families see this as the wisest option, since, after all, the nanny is the professional. She’s the expert. But homes need more than domestic expertise; they need a mother’s presence.
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Written by Colin J. Smothers |
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Here is the same message The Nation seems to have just discovered on one of their sociological safaris to the American Heartland. Christians think sex belongs in marriage and that all life, even unborn life, should be protected and celebrated. News at eleven. For students of history, this is as surprising as it is new. Regarding chastity, Jesus himself taught that God’s design in the beginning—“he who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4)—defines what is both permissible and advisable regarding human sexuality: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5; cf. Genesis 1:27; 2:24).

In C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress, John the protagonist finds himself in Eschropolis (“Ugly City” in Greek), where the boys look like girls and the girls look like boys, and everyone acts obscenely in their avantgarde rejection of puritanism. Scandalized by what he encounters, John objects, only to be shouted down by one of the residents: “We have got over humanitarianism!” “And prudery!” shouts another. Funny, these impulses. Two peas in a pod.
In his allegory, Lewis exposes modern progressive morality, which is in such ugly disarray that progressives regularly call good evil and evil good and cannot fathom moral principles when they encounter them. Instead, they convulse in protest.
I thought of Lewis’s passage recently when I came across this article from The Nation, a leftist groupthink organization that shared the following deep thought on social media: “The church in heartland America promotes a harsh sexual morality. But it sends a mixed message: Premarital sex is sinful, but teens who have babies are revered as mothers.”
Where to begin? For starters, upholding chastity and revering motherhood are hardly unique to the church in the American Midwest. In actual fact, these tenets of Christian sexual morality are as old as Christianity itself.
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