get it girl

chapter one

the woman who moves

Say it plainly first, the thing the rest of this booklet will prove, so you can hold it in your hand as we go: the woman who moves first is not a rare exception in the Scripture, smuggled in against the grain. She is everywhere. And the Spirit of God, who wrote every one of these accounts, does not scold her for it. He praises her.

You have been given the impression, I think, that Scripture holds up one kind of woman, the quiet and receptive kind, and merely tolerates the bold ones as strange one-offs, a Deborah here, a Jael there, oddities to be explained away rather than examples to be learned from. But go and actually read, and count, and you will find the opposite. Over and over, at the hinges of the great stories, it is a woman who moves, who acts first, who does the decisive thing, and the text celebrates her for it in the plainest terms.

Ruth rises in the night and goes to the threshing floor and asks a man to redeem her. Abigail saddles a donkey and rides out on her own judgment to stop a massacre. The bride of the Song rises in the night and seeks her beloved through the city streets. A woman from Canaan argues with the Lord Jesus Himself and will not take no for an answer, and He marvels at her faith. A sick woman shoves through a crowd and reaches out and takes hold of her own healing. These are not footnotes. These are some of the most beloved and most honored women in the whole of the Book, and in every single case the thing they are honored for is that they moved.

The woman who moves first is not a rare exception in Scripture. She is everywhere, and the Spirit praises her for it.

We are going to walk through them, one at a time, and I am going to show you two things at once in each, because both are always there and the camps only ever see one. First, that she genuinely moved, boldly, on her own feet, first. And second, that she moved inside God’s order and to honor it, never to throw it off. Hold both, because the holding of both is the whole point, and it is the thing that will set you free from both the waiting woman and the taking woman at a single stroke.

chapter two

ruth at the threshing floor

Start with Ruth, because there is no clearer case in all the Scripture of a woman taking bold initiative toward a man, and doing it entirely inside God’s order and law.

You know the shape of the story. Ruth, a widow, a foreigner, gleaning in the fields of a man named Boaz to keep herself and her mother-in-law Naomi alive. And Naomi, seeing that Boaz is a near kinsman, tells Ruth to do a startling thing: to wash and dress herself, go down to the threshing floor at night, wait until Boaz has eaten and lain down, and then go and uncover his feet and lie down and wait to see what he will say. And Ruth does it.

“And she went down unto the floor, and did according to all that her mother in law bade her.”

– Ruth 3:6

Read what happens next, because it is Ruth, not Boaz, who speaks first, and what she says is very nearly a proposal. He wakes at midnight, startled to find a woman at his feet, and asks who she is. And she answers him plainly, and then she asks him, directly, to marry her, in the language of the law.

“I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman.”

– Ruth 3:9

Spread thy skirt over me, for thou art a near kinsman. That is a woman asking a man to marry her, and doing it by invoking the law of the kinsman-redeemer, the goel, the near relative whose God-given duty it was to redeem the destitute and to raise up the family line of the dead. Ruth is not throwing herself at a man in desperation. She is boldly, knowingly, calling on him to do the very thing God’s law appointed a kinsman to do. She moved first. She spoke first. She proposed.¹

Spread thy skirt over me, for thou art a near kinsman. That is a woman asking a man to marry her, in the language of God’s own law.

Now watch both halves at once, because here they are, unmistakable. Ruth is as bold as a woman can be; there is nothing passive in a widow rising in the night to go and ask a man to redeem and marry her. And yet every ounce of that boldness moves inside God’s order and honors it. She goes on Naomi’s counsel, submitted to the older woman set over her. She appeals to the law of the kinsman-redeemer, submitted to God’s revealed way. She asks Boaz to cover her, submitted to the very headship she is inviting. And Boaz’s response says everything about how Heaven regards what she did, for he does not rebuke her boldness as unwomanly for a moment. He blesses her for it.

“Blessed be thou of the LORD, my daughter… thou hast shewed more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning.”

– Ruth 3:10

He calls her bold night-errand a kindness, and a virtuous thing, and the whole town will shortly call her a woman of worth. There is your answer to both camps at once, standing at a threshing floor at midnight. To the church that says a godly woman does not move: Ruth moved, and God wrote her a book and set her in the very lineage of Christ for it. And to the world that says a moving woman has thrown off all order: Ruth moved entirely inside the order, on wise counsel and under God’s law and toward a man’s covering, and that is exactly why it was beautiful. Bold and submitted. Both. At once.

And I must say one thing more here, because it guards this whole booklet from a misreading, and because it is simply true. This story of Ruth is also, gloriously, a picture of Christ, and I would not have you miss it while we are busy watching the woman. Boaz the kinsman-redeemer is a type of the Lord Jesus, our near Kinsman who took on our flesh and paid the price to redeem a destitute and foreign bride who could never have redeemed herself; and Ruth, in that picture, is the church, drawn to her Redeemer and cleaving to Him. That layer is real and it is precious, and I hold it with all my heart. But hear this carefully, for it is the very hinge of how we are to read: the type does not cancel the history. Ruth is a picture of the church redeemed, and she is also a real Moabite widow who really rose in the night and really asked a real man to cover her. It is not either the allegory or the woman. It is both, at once, the one built upon the other. And the people who so love the picture of Christ in this book that they never once notice the flesh-and-blood woman who moved first have done exactly the thing this whole booklet was written to undo: they have let a true and beautiful layer become an excuse not to read what is plainly on the page beneath it.²

chapter three

she sought him through the streets

Before we leave the women who moved toward a beloved, I have to set one more before you, and she is perhaps the boldest of them all, though I will not linger long over her here, for her Song deserves a slow walk of its own another day. I mean the woman of the Song of Solomon, the Shulammite, the bride of the greatest love poem ever written.

Here is all I want you to see for now, and it is enough. Go and read that Song and mark who is speaking, and you will find that it is mostly her. She opens the book and she closes it, and she speaks the greater part of it, and she speaks its highest lines. And what is she doing through so much of it? She is longing, openly and unashamed, for the man she loves, and she is seeking him. Twice in that book she rises from her own bed in the night and goes out into the streets of the city to look for him, alone, searching, asking the watchmen, refusing to rest until she has found him and taken hold of him.

“I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.”

– Song of Solomon 3:2

The greatest love poem ever written is carried, in the main, by a woman openly seeking the one she loves.

A woman rising in the night and searching the city for her beloved; there is no passive, waiting, seated woman anywhere in that picture. And yet mark the other half, as always, for it is here too: all her seeking runs toward one man, her own, inside a wholly committed and answered and honorable love, never once against it or outside it. She pursues, and she pursues faithfully. Bold in her seeking, and submitted in her faithfulness, both at once, and the Spirit of God made her the leading voice of the most beautiful love song in all the world. I will say no more of her here; her Song will keep. But she belongs in this company, and she may be the plainest proof in all the Scripture that a godly woman may desire, and seek, and pursue.³

chapter four

abigail rides out

Take Abigail next, for if Ruth shows you a woman bold toward a husband, Abigail shows you a woman bold enough to override a fool and ride straight into the path of an armed and furious king, and be praised by God for it.

Her husband was Nabal, a harsh and worthless man whose very name means fool. He had insulted David and David’s men, who had guarded his flocks, and David was now riding toward the household with four hundred armed men and murder in his heart, meaning to kill every male in it by morning. And Abigail, when a servant told her what her husband had done, did not wait, did not ask Nabal’s permission, did not wring her hands. She moved, and fast.

“Then Abigail made haste, and took two hundred loaves, and two bottles of wine… and laid them on asses.”

– 1 Samuel 25:18

She made haste. She gathered provisions on her own authority, loaded the donkeys, and rode out to meet the oncoming king, entirely without her husband’s knowledge, the text is careful to tell us she told not her husband Nabal. And when she met David, she got down off her donkey, bowed to the ground, and delivered one of the wisest and most courageous speeches any woman makes in all the Scripture, taking the blame upon herself, talking a raging man down from slaughter, and reminding him that he would not want this blood on his hands when the Lord made him king.⁴

She did not wait, did not ask the fool’s permission, did not wring her hands. She moved, and fast, and it saved lives.

And once again, look at both halves, because Abigail is the sharpest case of all. Was she bold? She acted decisively against her own husband’s decision, rode out alone toward armed men, and spoke hard truth to a future king. There is nothing timid in any of it. And yet what was the entire aim of all that boldness? To submit, to honor, to keep order from being torn apart. She moved to stop a murder. She moved to keep David from sinning against God and staining the throne before he reached it. She humbled herself to the ground before the Lord’s anointed and called herself his handmaid. Her boldness was entirely in the service of God’s order and God’s anointed and God’s peace.

“And David said to Abigail, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, which sent thee this day to meet me: and blessed be thy advice.”

– 1 Samuel 25:32–33

Blessed be thy advice. The future king thanks God for a woman who rode out and overruled the folly of her own household, and he takes her counsel, and he obeys it, and lives that were about to be lost are saved. Now hear this carefully, because the world will try to grab Abigail and misuse her: she is not a banner for a wife throwing off her husband whenever she pleases. She acted against a genuinely wicked fool who was leading his whole house to slaughter, and she acted to prevent sin and death, and she did it in humility, not in rebellion. That is the razor’s edge the world cannot walk and the Bible walks without effort: a woman may be bold, even against a man in authority over her, when he commands what leads to ruin, and she does it not to seize her own way but to honor a higher order still. Bold, and submitted, at once.

chapter five

the woman who would not take no

Come now to two women who moved boldly toward the Lord Jesus Himself, because if there were ever a place a woman ought supposedly to sit still and wait to be served, it would be before the Son of God. And instead these two press in, reach out, argue back, and take hold, and the Lord, far from rebuking them, holds them up for their faith.

The first is the woman of Canaan, a Gentile, whose daughter was tormented by a demon. She came crying after the Lord, and He at first answered her not a word, and the disciples wanted her sent away, and even when He spoke it was to say that His mission was first to Israel and that it was not fitting to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs. And here is where nearly anyone would have wilted and withdrawn. She did not. She answered Him back.

“Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”

– Matthew 15:27

She takes His own image and turns it, humbly but boldly, into an argument for her cause, even the dogs get the crumbs. It is one of the boldest exchanges any person has with the Lord in the Gospels, and a woman is holding up her end of it, pressing, reasoning, refusing to be turned away. And what does He do? He marvels.

“O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”

– Matthew 15:28

She took His own words and turned them into an argument, and He called it great faith. Boldness toward God, and He praised it.

And notice, once more, both halves together, for they are here too. She is bold to the point of arguing with the Lord, and yet every word of it drips with submission, she calls Him Lord, she owns the low place, she does not demand as one with rights but pleads as one casting herself wholly on His mercy. Bold in her pressing, submitted in her posture, and He honors both at once.⁵

The second is the woman with the issue of blood, twelve years sick, who had spent all she had on physicians and only grown worse. She did not wait to be noticed in the crowd. She did not send word and hope. She reached out and took hold of what she needed.

“For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.”

– Matthew 9:21

If I may but touch his garment. She reached through the press of the crowd and took her healing, on her own initiative, with her own hand, and the power went out of Him and she was made whole in that instant. And He turned, not to scold the woman who had dared to reach for Him unbidden, but to find her, and to bless her, and to send her away in peace, daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. She moved. She reached. She took hold. And He called it faith and healed her for it. The woman who would not sit and wait, in both these stories, is the woman the Lord commends.⁶

chapter six

two camps, both wrong

It is time to say plainly what has gone wrong, and to name the two camps that fight over women in the church, because between them they have buried the very woman we have just spent five chapters watching. And I am going to be as hard on the one as on the other, because the truth is hard on both, and I will not soften it for the side that happens to sit nearer to me.

The first camp is the egalitarian one, and I will tell you straight out that it is wrong, and wrong at the root, not merely at the edges. It looks at women like Ruth and Abigail, sees them move, and concludes that God’s order of headship and submission must therefore be a mistake, a relic, a thing to be thrown off. That is not a small error you can wave away as a different emphasis; it is a rejection of what the Scripture plainly and repeatedly teaches about how God has ordered men and women, in the home and in the church, and no amount of a bold Abigail changes it, because Abigail herself never once threw off that order. The egalitarian takes real women who moved inside God’s order and drafts them into a war against that very order, and that is a misuse of them from the ground up. Where the Word has set an order, we do not get to vote it down because we have found some women who were brave.⁷

And the egalitarian wins a great many of these arguments only by fighting a strawman she built herself from the complementarian stance. You have heard the mocking version, for it is everywhere: that submission means a woman is to duck down and get out of the way so that God can hit her husband, sit passive and silent and let him drive the whole household off a cliff and simply watch it happen, and call the watching obedience. Then, having painted submission as that spiteful, do-nothing ducking, she holds it up and says, see how absurd, see how demeaning, we must be rid of it. But that was never what the word meant, and she knows it, or ought to. That caricature is not submission at all; it is the very opposite of it, for it is prideful at the core, the wife secretly certain she is right and rather looking forward to watching God prove it on her husband’s head. It is self-centered, concerned with being vindicated rather than with serving. And it does not lift a finger to help, when help is the very thing a wife was made to give. Abigail did not duck down and wait for God to strike Nabal; she rose and moved and acted to keep disaster from falling. Real submission never was that passive, sulking ducking. It is a strong help, active and serving and bold, offered up inside God’s good order, and the egalitarian who can only defeat the cartoon has not laid a glove on the real thing.

The egalitarian is wrong at the root; the complementarian is nearer the truth and still gets this wrong. Both have half the woman.

But do not think I am simply going to hand you the other camp as the safe and finished answer, because the complementarian camp, which sits much nearer the truth and gets the order itself right, has its own real failure, and it is the failure this whole booklet was written to correct. Having rightly kept God’s order of headship, it has too often gone one wrong step further and taught that the order requires passivity, that a submitted woman is a still and silent and waiting woman, that to move first or speak first or act boldly is itself a breach of her place. And that is simply not in the text. It is a cultural addition, a costume sewn onto the doctrine, and it cannot survive five minutes with Ruth on the threshing floor or Abigail on the road or the Canaanite woman arguing her case. The complementarian is right that the order stands. He is wrong when he dresses the order up to mean that a godly woman does not move.

And I am going to be honest with you about something here, because I would be a coward not to, and because this booklet is worthless if it is not honest. That costume sewn onto the doctrine is not a harmless thing, and it is not abstract to me. There is real misogyny in the church, real suppression of women that goes far past anything God ordered, and I have felt the edge of it myself. I am a woman who does this work, who sits with the original languages and the commentaries and labors over the text the way you are reading me labor now, and I know there are men, sincere men, brothers I love and will stand beside in glory, who would look at me doing it and tell me I have overstepped, that a woman handling the Word like this is a woman out of her place. They believe it in good conscience, and I do not question that their hearts mean to honor God. But they are wrong, and I can show you from the Book that they are wrong, and the harm they do while meaning well is real harm to real women. I will not sit here and tell you it is imaginary, that no daughter of God is ever really kept small, that the whole thing is a grievance women invented. I have tasted it. It is real.

But mark what I am doing with that, and what I am not, because this is the very knife’s edge the whole booklet walks. I am not taking my anger, righteous anger specifically, and using it as a crowbar to pry off God’s order, the way the first camp does; a real wound is not a license to rewrite the Word. I am saying that the suppression is a human addition to the order and not the order itself, and that the cure for a costume badly sewn onto the doctrine is to take the costume off, not to burn the doctrine. The order is God’s and it is good. The smallness men have pressed on women in its name is not God’s, and it is not good, and it is no betrayal of the order to say so. It is the very thing honesty requires.

Do you see what both have done? They have agreed, the two of them, on one false thing, even as they war over everything else. They have agreed that boldness and submission are opposites, that a woman who moves must be a woman throwing off her place, and a woman who keeps her place must therefore be a woman who does not move. The egalitarian believes that lie and so, wanting bold women, throws off the order. The complementarian believes the very same lie and so, wanting to keep the order, suppresses the bold women. Both are working from the identical false premise, and the whole weight of Scripture stands against it, because every woman we have looked at was bold and submitted in the same breath, and the Spirit of God saw no contradiction in it at all.

Initiative and submission were never enemies. That is the false thing both camps swallowed. A woman can move first and honor headship. She can act boldly and keep God’s order. She can pursue, decide, speak, risk, and go, and do the whole of it inside her place and not one inch outside it, because her place was never a chair she had to stay seated in. It was a direction her boldness was meant to run.

chapter seven

bold and submitted

Let me give you, at the last, the real thing, the true version of the words the world put on a banner and got half right. Get it, girl. The world means by that: go take what you want, answer to no one, bow to nothing. And it is a counterfeit, as the world’s version of everything good is a counterfeit, because it kept the boldness and threw away the order, and a boldness with no order to run in is not freedom; it is just a woman crashing about, serving herself, alone.

But there is a true version underneath the counterfeit, and it is better, and it is yours. Here it is. You are not called to be the still and seated woman who waits for permission to exist. And you are not called to be the loud and lawless woman who bows to no one. You are called to be the third woman, the one the whole Bible has been showing you: the woman who moves, who acts, who speaks, who pursues, who goes, boldly, on her own two feet, and who does every bit of it inside the good order of God, honoring it, running her courage along the track He laid rather than tearing up the track. Bold and submitted. Both, at once, forever, with no contradiction in it at all.

For the very first word God ever spoke about what a woman is meant to be to a man is a word of strength, not weakness. He called her a help meet for him, and the word is ezer, a helper, and lest anyone think that a small or weak word, it is the very word the Scripture uses over and over for God Himself as the helper of His people, our help and our shield, the Lord is on my side. Of the times the word is used in the Old Testament, the greater number are of God Himself, the strong deliverer who rides to the rescue of His people; only twice is it used of the woman, and never once does it carry the sense of a servant or an underling. It is a word of strong, active, come-to-the-rescue help. The woman was made, from the first, to be a strong help, not a decorative one; a rescuer at a man’s side, not an ornament in his house. Strength was written into the design of her from the beginning.⁸

Her place was never a chair she had to stay seated in. It was a direction her boldness was meant to run.

And this is the same strong woman we have watched all through these pages. It is Ruth, bold at the threshing floor and submitted to the law of the redeemer. It is Abigail, bold on the road and submitted to God’s anointed. It is the bride of the Song, bold in her seeking and faithful in her love. It is the Canaanite woman, bold in her arguing and submitted in her pleading. It is the woman who reached through the crowd, bold in her reaching and submitted in her faith. Not one of them waited to be told she was allowed. Not one of them threw off her place to do it. Every one of them moved, and every one of them honored God in the moving, and every one of them the Spirit of God wrote down and praised.

So go and be her. Move. Act. Speak the true thing, seek the good thing, do the hard thing, go where God sends you and do not sit waiting for a permission the Bible never made you wait for. And do all of it as a daughter under her Father, inside His order, for His glory, honoring the way He arranged His world rather than warring against it. That is the real get it, girl, and it is a thousand times better than the counterfeit, because the counterfeit leaves you bold and alone, and the true thing leaves you bold and covered, bold and blessed, bold and exactly where God meant His daughters to stand. So then, there is one thing to say. Get it, girl.