Ordinary People, Extraordinary God

It is tempting to read the women of Scripture as a gallery of examples — virtues to copy, failures to avoid, a moral curriculum with a name attached to each lesson. Be loyal like Ruth. Don’t doubt like Sarah. Be bold like Rahab. There is nothing false in noticing their courage or their faith. But read that way, these accounts quietly become about them: their character, their choices, their credit. Scripture rarely tells their stories that way, and this series will try not to either.

Eve is not primarily a case study in disobedience — she is the first person in the Bible to receive a promise of rescue, spoken by God before she had done a single thing to deserve it. Sarah’s faith did not begin as faith; it began as laughter at an impossible word, and Scripture leaves the laughter in the text rather than editing it out. Rahab’s introduction is her occupation before it is her conviction, and the genealogy of the Messiah names her anyway. None of these women earn their place in the story. They are placed in it — by a God who has never once required impressiveness as a condition for being used.

That is the first thing this series wants to notice: how consistently God works through ordinary, compromised, unlikely people, and how consistently the initiative is His.

The second thing is where each of these lives ultimately leads. Rahab and Ruth are not simply admirable — they stand, by name, in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus Christ. Hannah’s prayer becomes, a thousand years later, the direct template for Mary’s own song over the birth of the Messiah. The woman at the well becomes the first person in John’s Gospel to hear Jesus say plainly, “I who speak to you am He.” Mary Magdalene, once described only by the severity of her affliction, becomes history’s first witness that the tomb was empty. Follow any one of these threads far enough and it runs to Christ. That is not a coincidence layered on afterward. It is, this series will argue, the point.

The third thing, and perhaps the most important, is what these lives reveal about God Himself rather than about the women alone. He is the God who speaks a rescue plan before He speaks a punishment in full. He is the God who keeps His covenant with a woman who has stopped believing He will. He is the God who writes a foreign widow and a Canaanite outsider into the bloodline of His own Son. He is the God who chooses to announce His resurrection first to a woman society would not have trusted to testify in court. Every story in this series is finally a story about His character — His initiative, His mercy, His strange and consistent preference for working through exactly the people the world would have passed over.

Read this series expecting to meet these women. But read it expecting, more than that, to meet the God who kept showing up in their lives before they had anything to offer Him — because that God has not changed, and He is not finished choosing ordinary people yet.