Mothers, even in the fallen sinful world we live in, with all the curse and its effects, are a blessing. God continues to bless future generations through their mothers. Mothers provide care and support in a way no one else can. God has designed for mothers to have this uniquely special relationship with their offspring.
One of the strangest moments summarizing the lost state of unbelievers today occurred during recent US government proceedings. During those meetings, a person of great academic education and career success was asked to define what a woman is. The answer was unhelpful and downright a rejection of objective truth. The present value placed upon ambiguity, fluidity, and ever-shifting definitions is a recipe for disaster for individuals, families, communities, and whole nations. Rejection of truth is now often the barometer for trustworthiness and enlightenment. It is as though to appear to be a person who knows something nowadays, a person must demonstrate all of the intellectual permutations of what that person has gone through, what tribes that person represents, and what assumptions that person wants to avoid by giving anything close to a definitive statement. Decisions and definitions seem to be rooted and guided more by personal experiences and preferences than by any appeal to objectively observable principles.
Mothering Throughout Scripture
I begin this discussion today in this way first to say that I am a man, a married man, who has never been a mother. In my experience personally, I have zero seconds spent existing as a mother. Instead of appealing to experience, I will be appealing to the objectively observable principles we see throughout the Old and New Testament about mothers.
The First Reference to Mother
As with many of the spiritual things, we ought to start our discussion in Genesis. In the first few chapters of Genesis, we have both the first occurrence of the word for mother in Hebrew (2:24) and the first Mother named (3:20).
The first occurrence of the word for mother is in an explanation of marriage based upon the first marriage between Adam and Eve:
Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” 24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
We can observe a few things about mothers in this brief passage. Mothers for a time, are in a relationship with their children in regular daily living. What exactly that relationship looks like is not detailed here, but there is an assertion that it is normative, expectant, and good, that children are raised with fathers and mothers. We also observe that marriage is the event that changes the relationship between children and their parents. Marriage moves a child from the daily regular provision, protection, care, and support of a father and mother, to their own family unit of husband and wife. In sum, we can say that the first instance of mothers in the scripture assumes a relationship to children. It is not ridiculous to come away from even the most introductory statement of God’s Word with a few foundational principles in mind—to be a mother is to have a specific caring relationship with her offspring.