What the Bible Has to Say to the Mother
By M. L. Dickinson
“How gentle God’s commands! How kind his precepts are!” Not long ago an intelligent young mother said: “Motherhood seems, indeed, the crown and glory of my life, but why do people congratulate me as if wifehood and motherhood were the end and aim of existence? I thought God made me to be a good woman. I mean to be a good wife and mother in passing.” Throughout the Bible we find recognition of this divine purpose to bring the mother-soul to the “full stature of a perfect womanhood,” uplifting the whole nature as the surest way of ennobling any part. We can never begin to gather from its sacred teachings the direct messages for any class without finding how little the Bible specializes. Running all through its pages there is a broad stream of general instruction applicable to all human beings alike. Here and there may be traced little rivulets of precepts for a particular class, usually the untutored or subordinate. To these belong such commands as: “Children, obey your parents;” “Honor thy father and thy mother;” “Servants, obey in all things your masters.” But the mother’s need is a broader and deeper need, and for her flows the whole wide stream of suggestive teaching—the water courses of the Bible which ought to make the woman-soul, and so the mother-soul, like “a tree planted by the rivers,” of which it is said: “His leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” As we study this more general teaching, we say not only, “How gentle God’s commands! How kind his precepts are!” but how wise, how strong, how mighty to pull down womanish weakness of character, but powerful to upbuild, until women—like Jacob, who became a prince of God— shall also have a new name given, and become princesses in the household of the King. Every mother who approaches the Bible lovingly, claiming its unmeasured treasure as a part of her inheritance, though she may find its direct words to mothers few, will find that all its riches belong to her womanhood; and that its principles, if not its precepts, may become the spiritual food on which the mother-life exists. But in the search for specific texts we are impressed with the overwhelming indications of the high value set on motherly character and motherly service to the child and the home. She is not urged and commanded to rise to her high calling, but it seems to be taken for granted that she will do so. And that the mothers of the Bible met this expectation is shown by abundant passages calling upon others to exalt and honor her. Thus in the example of her life, and the esteem to which her life entitled her, the mothers of our time may find most practical and valuable teaching. The Mother in the Old Testament
The references in the Old Testament imply full recognition of the mother, not only as parent and as participant with the father in the care and rearing of the children, but they everywhere demand for her the love and honor due to her unparalleled devotion. For the noblest women of their race, without regard to the character of the service which won for them distinction, the chosen people of God had no better name than “mother.” With the name and fame of the great lawgiver and leader of his people through the wilderness, runs always the story of the mother who saved him for his great career through days and nights of watching by the hidden cradle in the rushes of the Nile. For Deborah, to whose voice as prophet the leaders of armies listened; who went up with the hosts to battle because the captains of the hosts refused to go without her; who sat under her palm tree judging the children of Israel, they found no name so great as “mother in Israel.” Adam’s name for the woman God had given him was, “the mother of all living.” For the aged wife of Abraham, the friend of God, what distinction like that of “mother of nations;” and what sweeter testimony to her hold on the life of Isaac than we have in the simple story of the new love which came to him with Rebecca, which lifted from his heart the shadow from that gloomy cave in Hebron, and confronted him “after his mother’s death.” One does not forget the glory and power of God or the honor of Elijah as shown in the healing of the son of the woman who had shared her cruse of oil, but we must remember, too, that here God through his prophets shows his own tender sympathy with the mother-heart. We find ourselves watching breathlessly, while the flush creeps through the pallor, and the light of life12comes into the dulled eyes, and the white lips quiver as the child’s soul comes back to him. We see the look on the prophet’s face as he lays the boy in his mother’s arms; we hear his voice, “See, thy son liveth,” and her answer, as she takes him back: “Now by this I know that . . . the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.” God’s love, comprehending the mother’s anguish, and answering the cry of the mother-love, was the surest, swiftest way to win the answer of that mother-heart to the yearning heart of God. That poet told it when he wrote:— “O great Heart of God! whose loving
Cannot hindered be, nor crossed,
Will not weary—will not even
In our death itself be lost.
Love of God! of such great loving
Only mothers know the cost,
Cost of Love, that all grief sharing,
Gave itself to save the lost.” The greatness of the mother-love and its likeness to the love of God are revealed by David when his tender submission voices itself as in the one hundred and thirty-first Psalm: “Lord, my heart is not haughty nor mine eyes lofty. . . . Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.” How high a value he placed on mourning for a mother is shown when he measures his goodness to his enemies in their affliction, by saying (Ps. 35: 13, 14): “When they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting. . . . I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother.” And the quick recognition of the kinship of the spirit of motherhood and the spirit of God is shown in the almost universal transference to our own lives as individuals of that utterance of the prophet concerning Jerusalem in the sixty-sixth chapter of Isaiah, when he says: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” So sorely has the individual heart needed this comfort, that it has claimed and taken and rejoiced in it, regardless of the fact that the word was for Jerusalem, and we were asked to “rejoice . . . with Jerusalem, and be glad with her.” In Prov. 23: 22 sons are urged, “Despise not thy mother when she is old,” and all evil things are attributed to a generation that “doth not bless their mother;” and the highest reward of the good woman is, as we see elsewhere, that “her children rise up, and call her blessed.” The Mother in the New Testament
Coming down to the New Testament, we find abundant evidence of the appreciation and exultation of motherhood. St. Paul recognizes it when, speaking of the unfeigned faith which he finds in Timothy, he reminds him that it dwelt first in his grandmother Lois, and in his mother Eunice. In another epistle he urges: “Entreat . . . the elder women as mothers.” All these examples and precepts which in one way or another seek to stimulate the heart’s honor and devotion for the mother, by their very loving loyalty influence the mother to be worthy of all by her own recognition of her high destiny and her profound responsibility to God. Leaving this line of human illustration, there remains only to call attention to Christ’s evident ideal of the rank of the mother in the kingdom he established. There are not many sentences, but they are pregnant with meaning. The obedience of his boyhood, the evident surprise that his mother’s heart should not have known intuitively what was passing in his heart in Jerusalem when he asked, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”—the gentle question surely might have been: “I thought, of course, my mother would have understood,”—the tender committal of her to his beloved John at the last,—these seem human, tender, personal. This was Mary’s son providing for his mother—a great example for every mother and every son. But the broader message, “Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother,” was for his kingdom for all time, for all the world, opening the door for all manhood and womanhood to live for him in divinest companionship of sisterhood and brotherhood. And for all motherhood he made a way to share the blessedness of Mary the mother of Jesus. She who, down through all the ages, lives to do the will of his Father; she who trains her own children to the Christ-life; she who mothers any one of the little ones of whom he said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me,” she might enter, nay, even unto this day she does enter, into the promise given at the cross. Surely, if all other pages of the Bible were barren of a message to mothers, this last and sweetest is enough.—M. L. Dickinson, in Pittsburg Christian Advocate.