Aaron Sharp - The Most Important Women of the Bible

This book is all about the women of the Bible and the role they played in Gods plan of redemption for humanity. This book is also coauthored by a husband and wife. Knowing this, it might come as a surprise to you that in a book about biblical women, coauthored by a woman with a masters degree in theology, a man wrote the Introduction.

Far too often when we talk about the role of women in the church, gender in general, or frankly any topic, everything seems to boil down to one word power. Who has the power? Who wants the power? Who is being kept powerless? How do we speak truth to power? These questions seem to percolate at or just below the surface of a great number of issues today, particularly when the topic has anything to do with the sexes.

Over the course of my life, I have been blessed to be raised by, influenced by, married to, and friends with an extraordinary number of godly women. None of these women were perfect (though my coauthor certainly comes close), but there is one thing they all have in commona focus on eternity.

Truth be told, I doubt that any of these women would have thought to describe themselves as eternally focused, but as an observer I can tell you that the depiction is a true one. Even now, often years or even decades after the fact, the impressions left on me are unforgettable.

In my mind there is the image of a grandmother who never had much in the way of material possessions; whose husband succumbed frequently to temptations of adultery, alcohol abuse, and myriad other vices; who never stopped going to church; who never stopped praying for every single member of her family; who took what little money she had for a weekly hair appointment and gave it to the churchs mission offering. Would that little lady have thought of herself as eternally focused? No doubt the husband, whose residence in heaven today is largely due to her prayers, would say so. When I think about it, I can picture the confused look on her face had anyone ever asked her if she was focused on eternity, but I can tell you as one of the many whom she loved and influenced that she most certainly was.

There is another image in my mind. This one is also of a grandmother. In many ways the two grandmothers stories are similar. This one also prayed persistently until a husband accepted Christ, albeit at a much earlier period in life. Her love for Gods Word practically radiated from her skinshe devoured new commentaries and was quick to pose theological questions to a seminarian grandson, even if some of them revolved around the eternal state of her beloved and long-since-departed dog. Today, there are men and women nearing retirement age who speak glowingly of the Sunday school lessons she taught when they were small children. Maybe she would never have used the phrase eternally focused in reference to herself, but that makes it no less an accurate description.

I could go on and on, but my mother will read this book expecting not to be a part of this Introduction (deserving though she may be), and my wife will coauthor the rest of this book, no doubt removing anything I might write about her. These women who have made an impact on my life are merely the latest in a long line of women of faith who lived their lives for eternity. In the Bible we see an abundance of women who had a part to play in Gods plan of redemption.

To twenty-first-century Christians, the women of the Bible can easily become two-dimensional characters in the black-and-white print of an old book. We must remember three facts about the life and times of the women who grace the Bibles pages. First, thanks to the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, all of humanity was in desperate need of redemption. This need left every human being on planet Earth hopeless. Sin was a spiritual disease that humanity was unable to remedy by itself. Second, Jesus, through His death, burial, and resurrection brought about redemption. Where humanity was incapable of doing anything about its sin problem, God himself provided the answer in the person of His Son. Third, what we have today in the written Word of God is the story of redemption for humanity brought about by God. This redemption is promised by God at the beginning of Genesis, finds its culmination in the life of Jesus in the Gospels, and is proclaimed throughout the rest of the New Testament. The life of every man, woman, and child in the Bible either looks forward to the coming of redemption by Jesus, or it looks backward to the work of redemption that has already been done by Christ.