Is The Bible Good For Women?Chikamu

Many questioning the goodness of the Bible for women don’t value an answer that takes an eternal or communal view of good. If good for women is limited to earthly self-actualization, then the good we seek is not consistent with the good the Bible offers.

Such an earthbound view of goodness has no room for martyrs—those who are put to death for their faith—or those who die looking to Jesus from their cancer beds. An earthly view of goodness might allow for temporary suffering: for children who get well and broken bones that can be reset, for the cancer that goes into remission, or for the marriage that is restored.

That view of goodness might still value the testimony of Corrie ten Boom, whose book The Hiding Place details her imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Corrie was eventually freed and spent the rest of her life-giving testimony of God’s watchful care of her during her imprisonment. But what do we do with her sister, who died at the worst of it? At her sister’s death, Corrie wrote, “There lay Betsie, her eyes closed as if in sleep, her face full and young. The care lines, the grief lines, the deep hollows of hunger and disease were simply gone. In front of me was the Betsie of Haarlem, happy and at peace. Stronger! Freer! This was the Betsie of heaven, bursting with joy and health.”

There is a good that Rahab, Tamar, Hagar, Joseph, and Esther understood from far off. Corrie ten Boom and her sister understood this. Dietrich Bonhoeffer did too as he walked, praying the psalms, to his death at the hands of Nazis. Believers who persevere in belief through the pain of long-term suffering understand a good that is better than our limited earthly ideas of human flourishing—ideas that make the prosperity gospel so popular even though it fails its followers again and again.

In Romans 8:18, Paul writes, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” When we understand a good that extends past our earthly lives, we are better equipped to receive the goodness the Bible offers us as we persevere daily in this one.