Motherhood in God's Image
An Homage to "Fatherhood in God's Image" (The Lutheran Witness, December 2023)
Things that are sacred need to be protected. Things that are blessings also need to be protected. You have insurance on your house, a pantry for your groceries, a bank for your cash, a barn for your hay, a lock on your car. Blessings need to be protected.
There are few things more sacred and more of a blessing than children. No matter how a child comes, that child is a blessing (Psalm 127–128), and Jesus commands you not to despise them (Matt. 18:10). No matter how often children come, no matter how loud and sticky they are, children are blessings. They need to be protected.
Motherhood is a good gift of God given for the protection of children. Just like God our Father protects His children, so also our earthly mothers are given by God for the protection of their children. Woman finds the perfect example for her own motherhood in the Fatherhood of God. The Fatherhood of God should shape, form and order the motherhood of woman.
Yet, so often, instead of forming our motherhood in God’s image, we end up with a skewed view of God’s Fatherhood because of our twisted image of earthly motherhood. Modernism and modern life have made motherhood optional at best, and at worst penalized it. In the last century, we have redefined marriage and reconstructed motherhood in our image and after our likeness.
Our sinful flesh is destructive. But God’s Fatherhood is not destructive. Just the opposite: God’s Fatherhood is creative and life-giving (Gen. 1). Our sinful flesh is selfish. But God’s Fatherhood is self-giving. God the Father “richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life. He defends me against all danger and guards and protects me from all evil. All this He does only out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me” (The First Article: Creation). This selflessness is the duty of earthly mothers as well.
As mothers seek to imitate God in His great Fatherhood, here are three of the essential ways in which mothers protect their children:
1. Mothers protect children from motherlessness
This may seem like a redundant statement, but it is an important one. Motherlessness is bad and motherhood protects children from it.
God has ordered life in a very specific way. When we buck against that, it is to our detriment. We must not pretend motherhood is optional or unimportant, but understand how crucial mothers are to their children, by God’s good design.
It is imperative for the mother to be a permanent figure in the house to protect the children from motherlessness. It is important for the mother to be there not just at the birth, but throughout the child’s upbringing — at church on Sunday, at the supper table at night.
More and more secular research is showing us what we have always known through biblical wisdom: The presence of a mother, alongside that of a father, directly influences a child’s cognitive development, his capacity for a higher vocabulary, more complex language skills, social-emotional development and more… Motherhood protects children from motherlessness. Motherhood is not optional.
2. Mothers protect children from physical harm
An evident example of motherly protection is the physical protection that mothers provide for children in the womb and beyond. Scientists have found that the composition of breast milk changes when a mother’s baby is ill. If a mother is exposed to a bacterial or viral infection, her body makes antibodies to combat it; these transfer to her baby through breast milk. The levels of immunity-boosting leukocytes in breast milk also rise whenever the baby is unwell. Mothers are created to provide physical protection for their children.
3. Mothers protect children from Satan
Finally, the mother is a gift of God to protect her children from the devil, who is actively waging a war against the children of God and seeking to devour them (1 Peter 5:8; Rev. 12:17). Here we speak of the spiritual protection mothers are called to provide to children. We stated above how the mother must be present at the supper table, here we speak of how the mother must be present at the Lord’s Supper Table.
In the fourth century, Satan’s heresy of the day was calling into question the truth that God was eternally Father. In the 21st century, his heresy is calling into question whether human mothers are necessary at all. Satan’s war against motherhood has included no-fault divorce. It has cascaded into same-sex marriage, and a host of other perversions and sins which have become so commonplace.
In the undoing of motherhood, what do we see? Do we see liberation? Progress? Improvement? No, all we have is a hurting church, broken families and damaged children. This is not what we see in the Fatherhood of God, and it is not His will for the motherhood of woman.
Mothers protect children from Satan. Many mothers did not go to college. They might not have any theological education. But the duty of mothers is simple: to take their children to the Divine Service, raise them to have sincere faith in their Lord Jesus Christ (2 Timothy 1:5), teach them all the Lord has done for them in redemption from slavery to sin (Deut. 6), and instruct them in the way they should go (Prov. 22:6). In this way, the mother protects the blessing of children from the assaults of the devil.
Deborah once sang in Judges 5:24-27:
Most blessed of women be Jael,
the wife of Heber the Kenite,
most blessed of tent-dwelling women.
He asked for water, and she gave him milk;
in a bowl fit for nobles she brought him curdled milk.
Her hand reached for the tent peg,
her right hand for the workman’s hammer.
She struck Sisera, she crushed his head,
she shattered and pierced his temple.
At her feet he sank,
he fell; there he lay.
At her feet he sank, he fell;
where he sank, there he fell—dead.
Then, in verse 31 we’re told, “The land had peace forty years.”
Deborah’s and Jael’s lives were marked by fighting. Their lives were marked by war so that their sons and daughters could have peace.
This is the duty of mothers. Let us give thanks to our Heavenly Father from whom our human motherhood is derived for providing such a fence of divine Fatherly protection around the souls of our blessed children. Be a mother or support a mother, for through this gift, God protects one of His greatest blessings.
Addendum
This transformative work constitutes fair-use of the copyrighted material in the article Fatherhood in God’s Image (December 4, 2023). Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 allows for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, parody, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research.
Biblical Revelation and Inclusive Language (A Report of the Commission on Theology and Church Relations of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, February 1998). Note especially the section titled, “Personal Identity of God” quoted here:
God transcends biological and gender categories. Despite the fact that biblical language is thoroughly gender specific and that God is personally referred to through masculine names, titles, and pronouns (see below), the Bible contains explicit affirmation that God transcends all biological and gender categories. Sexual nature was characteristic of the pagan gods and goddesses in the environment of ancient Israel. But Israel steadfastly and uncompromisingly rejected any such understanding of God. God may be “Father” to his son, Israel, or he may be “Husband” to his bride, Israel, but God is not a male deity nor biologically masculine. “I am God and not man” (Hos. 11:9; see Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:39).
Dec 19 is the Commemoration of Adam & Eve on the LCMS Church Calendar. Genesis 1:26-27 affirms that both man and woman are created in God’s image. God the Father-Creator is the perfect source and example of how an earthly father should love and care for his children, just as God the Father-Creator is the perfect source and example of how an earthly mother should love and care for her children. Human fathers (Adam) AND human mothers (Eve) are created in the image of God, their Heavenly Father.
26Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Though Adam & Eve sinned and destroyed mankind’s perfect relationship with God and one another, we—men and women—have been redeemed by our Lord Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, through his death on the cross. As St. Paul writes in Romans 3:
23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
“O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!” we hear in the liturgy of the Easter Vigil. Man and Woman, together in Christ, are redeemed and somehow made even more perfect, more whole than they were on that sixth day of Creation when God proclaimed all things, “Very good.”
May all Christian fathers and mothers—men and women created in God’s image, redeemed by the blood of Christ, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit—look together to God their Heavenly Father as the perfect example of love, selflessness, and protection for their children.
+Soli Deo Gloria.+