This is one of those verses that people use, again, to say all sorts of things. Let us first read it and see what comes to mind.
Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.
First, it’s difficult and dangerous to interpret stand-alone verses, especially those that begin with words like yet, or so, or therefore.
So then, she will be saved through childbearing – sounds like ladies are only saved if they give birth. Does that line up with everything or anything else we read in the Word, that ladies have to bear children to be saved? If we back up a verse to v.14 we see that the she should really, given sensible reading, be Eve. We read …the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be…Normal sensible reading would say that she is Eve then. But then Paul seems to open it up and say if they continue…Eve was only one, so they cannot be Eve, so we have something particular to Eve that then affects all ladies?
Back in Genesis 3.15 Eve was told that from her family line One would come who would right the wrongs of Eden, who would trample sin and death and the devil, and restore humanity’s broken relationship with God. This, I’d suggest, is the she will be saved.
Interestingly, in the Greek text, there is a definite article, the, before childbirth. So, translating literally word-for-word would render this,
Yet she will be saved through the childbirth – if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self control.
The idea seems then, that rather than blame Eve for sin entering the world, rather than pin the fall onto all of womankind, we are be thankful and grateful that it is through the ladies in our life that we are all brought into the world, and it was through a lady, Mary, that our Lord and Saviour came into the world.
David Guzik summarises this well, he writes,
Probably, the idea here is that even though the “woman race” did something bad in the garden by being deceived and falling into transgression, the “woman race” also did something far greater, in being used by God to bring the saving Messiah into the world…Don’t blame women for the fall of the human race; the Bible doesn’t. Instead, thank women for bringing the Messiah to us.
Without the ladies in our lives none of us would be here, and the Word become flesh wouldn’t have miraculously come to earth in the way He did, and it would be impossible for us to say, with confidence, that we are all saved through the childbirth.
James Travis 