(A)Typical Woman Excerpt -- By: Abigail Dodds

Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 01:1 (Spring 2019)
Article: (A)Typical Woman Excerpt
Author: Abigail Dodds


(A)Typical Woman Excerpt

Abigail Dodds

Content taken from (A)Typical Woman by Abigail Dodds, ©2019. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187, www.crossway.org.

The End Is The Beginning

When most of us come to Christ, we know relatively little about him. Likely we haven’t even read all of his Book. But what we do know is indescribably good news, and it is enough to secure our eternal devotion.

What we know when we come to Christ is the end of the story, as far as the Bible is concerned. We know the gospel, which came into full view in the last third of Scripture. Even those of us raised on Scripture, when we come to Christ, our coming is still located at the end of the Book.

And as we find ourselves new, reborn, and in Christ, having begun at the end, we go back and learn or relearn all about God’s story—his creation, his plan, his promises—which has now become our story. We read how Christ was there from the beginning and that God made everything through Christ (John 1:1–3), how we were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4), how Christ was everywhere (Luke 24:27)—popping up visibly and invisibly—and how that’s now our family history. It’s like children asking to hear the story of how they were born and how their parents and grandparents met. They need someone else to recount it or show them the photo albums or baby books. And they never, ever get tired of hearing it.

So rather than understand ourselves as first women and all that entails and then Christians, it actually works the opposite way. Without Christ, we can know what we ought to be as women because of the clear signs given to us in creation and in our created bodies, but we will be powerless to be what we ought. Even more than that, we will be at war with God and his creation. We must first be found in Christ in order to humbly and happily receive both the revelation of God’s world and his Word. We can never come to the Old Testament, even the creation account, and expect to understand it rightly without the revelation of Jesus Christ. That’s who the whole book is about, after all. So that’s where we begin.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is something a young child can understand, but its complexity and ramifications are inexhaustible. It is that God, who created everything and everyone (Gen. 1:1), sent his Son (1 John 4:14), wh...

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