Anne of Bohemia--part 1

MY BELOVED BOHEMIAN

The Story of Anne of Bohemia--part 1

By Douglas Bond

How to be powerful

Imagine if you were a king or a queen, and you could just speak and people had to obey you. History is replete with examples of powerful people who used their power to hurt and enslave others, the weak, the poor, the powerless. “Off with his head!” King Henry VIII shouted many times—he’d ask questions later, maybe. Or Catherine di Medici, scheming the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of thousands of Huguenot Christians in 1572; “Kill them all!” Or envious King Herod, in his determination to kill King Jesus, massacring all the baby boys in Bethlehem. I could go on.

If you had power, you could stop all this! Imagine the good you could do! It’s not all bad to desire to have the strength and influence to use for good, to undo evil schemes, to overturn the powers of darkness. Think of how much good you could do if you were powerful!

But there’s a problem with this line of reasoning. Have you noticed that Jesus did not come to the powerful and influential. He could have. He’s God, after all. But the angelic warrior hosts first announced his birth to shepherds bivouacked on a Judean hillside with their smelly sheep; shepherds were of no account in Ancient Near-Eastern culture; they were considered unclean by the Jews (even Jewish shepherds), and so little did the civil society think of them, they couldn’t testify in a court of law. They were powerless. But God ordained that Jesus’ birth would be first announced to nobody shepherds. Read through the Gospel accounts and you see Jesus intentionally seeking out the nobodies: leper outcasts, the adulterous woman at the well, smelly fishermen, slaves, children, and women.

Power the world’s way—or God’s way

Women, “the weaker vessel,” Peter calls them (I Pet 3:7). For a number of decades now, our culture has been contorting itself to correct this deficiency for women, being weaker than men. Critical Theory says that men are oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story, and so we need to empower women. Science be dashed, we even have hosts of biology-deniers who insist that women can do anything a man can do; women can be independent of men (who needs them!); women don’t need to submit to God or their husbands; women should be free to be their own persons, follow their own opinions, be autonomous of men. Notice, that all this is another version of what the serpent pitched to Eve in the Garden of Eden: you don’t need to submit to God’s command. Take and eat! You can be like God (meanwhile, Adam was watching the football game, not lovingly leading his wife away from temptation).

True confession: I’m all for empowering women (keep reading)! But there is the world’s way of attempting to do it, and there is God’s way. Allow me to be blunt. The world’s way is a failed project. It can’t deliver on its promises. It does not work. It does not work biologically (however much we keep saying it, women are in general far weaker physically than men—that’s biological fact); it doesn’t work relationally, in the work place, in the marriage, in the family, in the church. However hard we try to implement the world’s way of empowering women in these spheres—it actually destroys marriages, families, the church—and women.

But here’s the good news! God has designed a way for women to be powerful—and it works! It really does empower women to do the greatest good. But what is God’s way for women to have power? So many things in God’s Word are counterintuitive, that means they work in the reverse of the way we think they should work. Allow me to illustrate from history...

(read part 2 about ANNE OF BOHEMIA)

Join me in Luther's Germany and Hus and Anne of Bohemia's Prague, June 18-28, 2024. Early registration is closing soon. You will not want to miss this marvelous tour!