MacArthur - Twelve extraordinary women: how God shaped women of the Bible, and what He wants to do with you

2005 by John MacArthur

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Scripture quotations noted NASB are taken from THE NEW AMERICAN STANDARD
BIBLE, The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972,
1973, 1975, 1977. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacArthur, John, 1939
Twelve extraordinary women : how God shaped women of the Bible and
what He wants to do with you / John MacArthur.

p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7852-6256-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4002-8028-5 (trade paper)
1. Women in the BibleBiography. 2. Women in the BibleMeditations.
3. Christian womenReligious life. I. Title.
BS575.M26 2005
220.9'2'082dc22
2005021006

Printed in the United States of America

08 09 10 11 12 QW 20 19 18 17 16

DEDICATION

To all the little girls in my life, my granddaughters, who are on the way
to becoming, by Gods grace, extraordinary women:

Kathryn

Olivia

Kylee

Jessica

Susannah

Gracie

Brooke

Elizabeth

Audrey

I am grateful for and indebted to Phil Johnson, who has again, as so often before, applied his remarkable editorial skills to my material. For this book, he has done far more than that, by adding his own rich insights to those chapters where my meager material was inadequate.

And very special thanks goes to my extraordinary Patricia, who has faithfully supported this ordinary man through forty-two years of marriage.

CONTENTS

I never anticipated that my book on the apostles (Twelve Ordinary Men) would be as well received by readers as it was. People seemed to appreciate and enjoy the character-study format, even though it is a slight departure from my normal expository style. The books method and arrangement seemed particularly well suited to small-group studies, and that might have helped fuel a still wider interest. Perhaps even more significant was the intensely practical and personal relevance of such character studies. It helps, I think, to see the apostles as they were: ordinary men. That was, after all, the whole point of the book. These were men anyone can relate to. Most of us can easily see aspects of our own character in their personalities, their shortcomings, their struggles, their frequent blunders, and their longing to be everything Christ wanted them to be. It gives us great hope to see how wonderfully God used people such as these.

After Twelve Ordinary Men had been on the bestseller lists for more than a year, my friends at Thomas Nelson suggested a sequel. Why not deal in a similar format with the lives of twelve of the principal women of Scripture? Everyone who heard the idea was immediately enthusiastic about it. Thus the volume you hold in your hands was born.

Of course, there were no decisions to be made about whom to feature in the first book. Jesus chose His twelve disciples; all I had to do was research their lives and write about them. This new book would be a different matter. Faced with a plethora of extraordinary women in the Bible, I made a long list of possibilities. The task of narrowing the roll to twelve was by no means easy. I weighed their relative importance in biblical history and chose twelve women who were critical to the story of redemption.

I hope youll agree that my final short-list includes a good variety of personality types and an interesting assortment of truly extraordinary women. My hope is that, as with the first book, readers will see aspects of themselves in these studies and be encouraged by the reminder that our personal struggles and temptations are the very same kinds of trials that all believers in all ages have confronted. Thus we are reminded that even in the midst of our trouble, God remains eternally faithful (1 Cor. 10:13). The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel too. He is also the God of every believer in our generationmen and women alike. We, like all of them, have our shortcomings. But we are His people and the sheep of His pasture (Ps. 100:3). And His faithfulness still reaches to the clouds (Ps. 36:5).

Some have already asked me the significance of the delicate shift in titles. If the disciples were ordinary, how is it that these twelve women are extraordinary?

The answer, of course, is that while the disciples were ordinary in one sense, they were also extraordinary in another sense. As far as their innate talents and their human backgrounds are concerned, they were genuinely ordinary, and deliberately so. God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence (1 Cor. 1:2729 NKJV). It was only Christs work in the disciples lives that gave them such remarkable power and influence, so that what they became was something quite uncommonand what they accomplished (Acts 17:6) was something truly extraordinary.

The same thing is true with the women featured in this book. Most of them were unremarkable in and of themselves. They were ordinary, common, and in some cases shockingly low-caste womenin exactly the same way the disciples were common men. Take the Samaritan woman of John 4, for instance. We dont even know her name. Likewise, Anna was an obscure, elderly widow who appears in only one brief vignette in the opening of Luke (2:3638). Rahab was a common harlot. Even Mary, the mother of Christ, was a young girl of no particular distinction, living in an obscure town in a barren and despised district of Galilee. In each instance, what made them extraordinary was a memorable, life-changing encounter with the God of the universe.

The only real exception is Eve, who began life as someone quite extraordinary in every way. She was created by God to be the pure and pristine ideal of womanhood. But she soon spoiled it by sinning. Still, she, too, became a living depiction of the truth that God can recover and redeem those who falland make them truly extraordinary trophies of His grace in spite of their failures. In fact, Im convinced that by Gods redeeming grace, the person Eve will be through all eternity is far more glorious than she was in her original earthly innocence.

In other words, all these women ultimately became extraordinary not because of any natural qualities of their own, but because the one true God whom they worshiped is great, mighty, glorious, and awesome, and