“Move beyond your self-image, your past,
and your circumstances to discover who God created you to be.”

      How would our lives be different if we walked in the reality that men and women were designed and created by God to live as equals? That paradigm has certainly not been my reality–either out in the world or within the church. Again and again, my sisters and I have gotten the message that we are less than. As a result, many of us have doubted that we could ever be equal partners with men, doubted our worth, doubted ourselves, and tragically, doubted that God actually calls us to bring all of who we are to the table. Reclaiming Eve aims to silence these doubts and encourage us to live out God’s intentions.
      Authors Suzanne Burden, Carla Sunberg, and Jamie Wright start by taking us back to creation:

      “Let us [the Trinity] make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry on the ground.” So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1. Emphasis mine)

     There’s no indication of gender based hierarchy in this passage. It’s one six letter word in Genesis 2:18 that has caused great confusion and much pain for women; “It is not good for man to be alone, I will make a helper suitable for him.” Though the English word helper has connotations of servant or hired help, the Hebrew word used in this passage is actually ezer. The authors of Reclaiming Eve explain,

     “This same word [ezer] is used sixteen times in the Old Testament to describe God himself and how He comes through for his people in a time of great difficulty. . . . God could have used a Hebrew word meaning female slave. . . or wife, but He didn’t. . . . The full force of the original meaning of this verse might come out something like this: to end the loneliness of the single human, I will make another strong power corresponding to it, facing it, equal to it. And the humans will be both male and female.” *

      Ask a hundred Christian women and I can guarantee that more than half of them have never heard this. Reclaiming Eve hopes to change that. The book helps us all to see that, “as a female, we are not given a role, but a responsibility, together with Adam, to represent God by using and caring for and creatively overseeing his good world.”
      In order to share this responsibility with men, we must be equal to them. Unfortunately, true equality threatens the status quo–both individually and institutionally. It’s as if those in power assume it’s a bound system with a limited amount of opportunity and power to go around. Therefore, if that limited amount has to be divvied up equally, those who currently have will have less. This has contributed, understandably, to women fighting for their share of the pie. But there is another way. Burden, Sundberg, and Wright suggest forming “blessed alliances” with our brothers. “Instead of raising boxing gloves against the other gender, Jesus encourages us to bend down and wash one another’s feet. When the world tell us we’ll never be on the same team, our Savior’s sacrifice reminds us we are already one in Christ Jesus.”
      The authors challenge us to explore the arc of Scripture and ask ourselves, “Do I represent God well?” Regardless of our social status, education, ethnic background, or employment. As a mother of young children–do you represent God well? As a single, high-powered executive–do you represent God well? As a full-time student, elderly widow, or divorced thirty year old–do you represent God well?
      For us to answer yes means we need to love, respect, and partner with our brothers in bringing God’s kingdom to the earth. When we do, we reflect God’s glory more fully and more accurately. Burden, Sundberg, and Wright remind us that, “Jesus didn’t come to uphold or modify the curse, but to reverse it. . . . As we unfreeze Eve, we set ourselves free to discover her anew in the Bible’s first pages. And in doing so, we will discover ourselves–or perhaps recover ourselves–as women created with astounding intention and purpose. For as we awaken Eve from the pages of Genesis creation story, we begin to understand her vital importance to God’s cause.”

    Reclaiming Eve empowers us to be allies alongside of our brothers which the church and the world so desperately need.
    
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*The authors adapted this quote from Joseph Coleson’s Ezer Cenegdo: A Power Like Him.
All quotes from Reclaiming Eve unless otherwise noted.

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