But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.
So I think I've established that I intend to use this blog for things I'm struggling with. But I've realised it would probably also be a good idea to use it for things I've learned outside struggling here.
I think one of my best examples is 1 Timothy 2:15. I learned this a fair while ago, but I've been struggling a bit through 1 Timothy lately so it has come up again (I will be blogging about other things from 1 Timothy in the near future, hopefully).
The verse above does seem pretty strange. It's pretty easy to read it to mean "the purpose of women is to bear children" -- amirite? Too bad for barren women. Guess they can't be saved. And I can't remember my exact response, but I have a feeling it was a bit "oh dear. I better reconsider my not-wanting-to-rush-to-become-a-mother thing". It seems the folks over at The Skeptic's Annotated Bible took it much the same way.
I think I continued with this understanding until, in some argument over some probably-embarassingly-stupid thing with D., I brought this verse up... and D. said to me "you realise that verse is talking about Jesus, right?"
Ohhhhh. Nope. No, I didn't. That makes a lot more sense. And gets rid of that absurd salvation-through-works problem.
So thank God, who places in our lives people who are older than us, wiser than us and have a different approach to Scripture to us. Thank God for D. And I hope that example illustrates why I want to bring out stuff I struggle to understand instead of just sitting by myself, not understanding :)
