Anonymous Asks (258)

“What does God have to say to single mothers?”

“Go and sin no more”?

Okay, not funny. More than a few single mothers — widows, abandoned wives — get little or no choice in the matter. Still, many young women these days elect to bring a child into the world under less than optimal circumstances, in which case much of what the Lord would say to single mothers is likely to be the same sort of thing he would say to people who have sinned in other ways.

Even “sin no more” was also said to a man. So there is that.

There is little in scripture to directly address the issue of single motherhood. That doesn’t stop the writer of this website from repurposing a few verses to make her point, which is probably not the ideal way to deal with the dearth of specific advice for single mothers. Instead, maybe we can learn a thing or two from examining how God dealt with the single mothers of the Bible. It’s illustrative rather than instructional, but sometimes illustrations can be useful.

Hagar

One of the first cases of single motherhood in scripture is Hagar. Hagar was the Egyptian servant of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Impatient with waiting for the fulfillment of God’s promises, Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham as a wife hoping to raise up offspring through her. There is no indication in the text of Genesis that either party consulted Hagar about her wishes, but when she became pregnant with Ishmael, Hagar’s contempt for her mistress provoked Sarah to mistreat her and drive her into the wilderness. “Marriage” over, et voilà: the Bible’s first recorded single mom.

You’ve probably heard people talk about how many lives could be saved by time-traveling back to kill Adolf Hitler. Trust me, if you were to time travel back and kill Hagar instead, you could save millions more: not just Jews, but people from many, many nations. The Spanish would love you. At this point, Hagar’s story could and maybe should have been wrapped up with a quiet demise in the desert. Ishmael would never be the heir of promise. His descendants would give the world the religion of Islam and 1,500 years of bloody, imperialistic wars. Abraham and Sarah had made a mistake generations of their descendants would end up paying for over and over again.

Frankly, if Hagar had died in the desert, the nation God would raise up through Isaac and Jacob would ultimately have been much better off, including today. But that is not how God works, and we should all be grateful he doesn’t think about things the way we do.

Instead, God sent his angel to tell Hagar the Lord had listened to her affliction and instructed her to return to her mistress and submit to her. Hagar called the Lord “a God of seeing” and “him who looks after me”. That’s what grace looks like. This single mother was not forsaken, even though it would have been extremely convenient for nearly everyone else if God had forsaken her.

Later, after Abraham and Sarah cast Hagar out again, with nothing more than bread and water and her young son, God guided Hagar to a well so she and Ishmael would not die of thirst. He repeated his promise to make Ishmael a great nation, and protected the boy as he grew.

The Widow of Zarephath

God sent his prophet Elijah to stay with a Sidonian widow raising a young son in poverty during a famine. They were expecting to die of starvation until God miraculously provided for their needs through Elijah. Later, when the woman’s son became ill and died, Elijah’s prayer brought him back from the dead. God was meeting the needs of his prophet through this woman, while simultaneously meeting hers through Elijah, and using the illness of her son to reveal himself to her.

Again, we are seeing a lot of grace here. God had plenty of ways he could have provided for Elijah without sending him miles away to Sidon, but he had plans for this single mother that required Elijah’s participation. Much later, the Lord Jesus used the story the widow of Zarephath to provoke the Jews to jealousy because she was a Gentile. They became so enraged with Jesus that they tried to throw him off a cliff. This too was part of God’s plan when he sent Elijah to Zarephath.

The Two Prostitutes

I suppose to balance this out we should look in on a couple of Bible characters that better fit the right wing stereotype of single motherhood. (The left wing stereotype makes them all into saints and single motherhood into some kind of competitive advantage in child rearing.) Thank the Lord that good and godly single mothers exist, but so do women whose lives are more like this pair.

Two prostitutes came to King Solomon to resolve a dispute over a dead baby. Both mothers had newborns, and all four shared a bed. One of the prostitutes inadvertently smothered her child in the night, and took the other’s child as her own. Solomon was called to render his decision about who was really the mother of the living child, and he tricked both mothers into revealing their characters.

What can we learn about single motherhood from this episode? One child died, and the other ended up being raised by a prostitute, but God got the glory in Israel for Solomon’s display of wisdom. The truth of the matter is that even when our lives play out suboptimally or even sinfully, they prove God right in all his judgments. Even the worst of single mothers cannot help but prove the inherent rightness of all God’s instructions to mankind.

God and the Single Mother

For all that single mothers are criticized, sometimes legitimately, it’s still way, way better to raise a child without a father present than to seek out an abortion. The Christian single mother who depends on God to sustain her through the tough process of raising a child alone can be sure the Lord will be just as present in her time of need as he was in Hagar’s, just as engaged in teaching her about himself as he was with the widow of Zarephath, and just as able to bring glory for himself out of her situation as he did in the case of Solomon’s two prostitutes.

And if you can find somebody like Elijah to hang around and serve as a spiritual mentor for your little boy or girl, even better.