“Now King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women…. He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart away” (1 Kings 11:1, 3).
In this passage, Solomon is the epitome of a self-centered, selfish, and lust-filled king using women for his pleasure. This may well be the most grotesquely inverse picture of how Yeshua the Messiah treated women in the New Testament. Rather than being a promiscuous king who abused his power to take seven hundred wives and three hundred lovers, Yeshua willingly sacrifices his own life to save his one and only “Bride”: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless” (Eph 5:25-27). For Yeshua did not come to accuse or abuse women, but to save them; and when they were with Yeshua they knew they were perfectly loved and completely safe (see John 4:1-26; 8:1-11).
And just as Yeshua selflessly loved and zealously protected women in the New Testament, so too Yeshua’s disciples must do everything in their power to make sure women feel safe, secure, and genuinely loved in Yeshua’s church!
“Do not sharply rebuke an older man, but rather appeal to him as a father, to the younger men as brothers, the older women as mothers, and the younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Tim 5:1-2).
