An indignant Jane Fonda writes in her new autobiography:

". . .I cannot reconcile myself to the Judeo-Christian assumption that man was God's principal creation, with woman (Eve, fashioned from Adam's rib) a mere derivative afterthought."

Nothing could be more silly.

As my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Chicago (www.graceimpact.org), explained just yesterday in a Mother's Day sermon, when God took a part out of Adam to create Eve, He gave Eve some things directly from His image and likeness that were for her especially.

"There's some things He took out of man and put into woman and that's why 'men are from Mars and women are from Venus,' as the popular expression goes," explained Jordan in his Sunday sermon I heard over the internet (www.PalTalk.com).

"That's why the only creature on God's planet that you guys will never understand is a woman. Man's made as that hunter and that provider and the only creature he can never capture and completely understand is the woman. That's what makes you so fascinating, ladies. It's why you have the privilege of holding the bar up so high. If you hold the bar up here, he'll jump that high. You hold it down here, he'll jump that low. The poor dumb thump doesn't know any better. He just can't figure you out."

While the pagan depiction of God as mother violates the integrity of the God of the Bible and demeans His person and character, God's character does include feminine traits.

In Isaiah 66:13, for example, God Himself, making one of numerous references to the nation Israel as His child, says, "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you."

"There are things about God that are like a mother and it's not God our heavenly mother; it's that there are some things He put into a woman and into a mother that are like Him and she's that way because she's like Him," explains Jordan. "You know what a mother's comfort is like? You want to know what comfort is from God when He says He comforts us in all our tribulations?

"If you want to understand what comfort's like, He says look at a mother comforting her child. When a child runs and falls down and skins his or her knee, does the child jump up and say, 'Daddy, Daddy!' No, the child says, 'I want my momma.'

"There's just something about comfort that a mother provides because there's something about a mother that's like God."

In Isaiah 49:15, God Himself again, in reference to His people the nation Israel, emphasizes He's like a good mother who is all-caring: "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee."

There are bad mothers who neglect and/or mistreat their children and God's saying, "I'm not like that momma. I'm like the mother that doesn't forget," explains Jordan.

"To be a good mom you've got to be a doctor, a tailor, a waiter, a chaplain, a teacher, a judge, arbitrator, cook," says Jordan. "You got to be all things to all men to raise kids.

"And you're going to know something about tears. You're going to know something about hospitals, disappointments. God said, 'You know what I'm like, I'm like that mother who you can't get her compassion for her kid out of her heart.' "

An analogy, says Jordan, is when a man is caught by police doing some dastardly act and the TV newspeople, in rushing to obtain reaction from the mother, often get the simple, pleading response, "He's really a good kid."

"Now that's not an evaluation where she didn't know he didn't do something wrong--that's just a mother's love," says Jordan. "You know why a momma's like that? Because that's how God is in compassion."

Demonstrating God's own identification with the fury of a mother when anyone tries to come between her and her child, is a verse in Hosea (13:8), in which God warns, "I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them."

"He's saying, 'You know what I'm like when somebody comes in and tries to take Israel away? I'm going to be like a bear that's bereaved of her whelps,' " explains Jordan.

The mentality is sort of like, "Somebody's come and stole my kids?! I'm coming for you, sucker!"

"There'd be something you'd never want to do is get in that situation with a mother coming after you," says Jordan. "God says that's the kind of fury I have over mine."

Insight into Jesus Christ's maternal instinct, even when His children are in gross disobedience, can be found in Matt. 23:37, in which Christ, looking out over the city of Jerusalem, says, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"

"Could there be anybody who would deserve that less?" says Jordan, referring to Christ's words. "They killed the prophets, they stoned them that were sent unto them and yet with that mother's compassion, that mother's heart, that heart that only a mother can understand, He says, 'How often I would have gathered you under my wings. I'd have taken those wings—Deuteronomy 32:11 talks about the eagle's wings, how she has her young nestled—and put you under them and shielded you from the wrath you're going to get, the punishment that's going to come because of that. I would have done it for you but you would not.'

"The mother broods over, watches after, takes care of, gives refuge to her kids because she's like God. There's something in the nature of God that's like a good mother."

Relayed in Jordan's Mother's Day sermon was a striking story about a mother's love given in a sermon once by the great 19^th-century evangelist Dwight L. Moody. Here's the passage:

"D.L. Moody told a story one time about a woman in England whose son had killed five people—butchered them, sliced them up like a Jack the Ripper kind of copycat.

"And that boy's mother sat in the box during the trial and when he was sentenced, she fainted, fell out.

"They got her awake and she grabbed the boy, hugged him, kissed him and, in order to take him to prison, they had to literally tear her apart from him.

"She went off and petitioned the court to get him off but it never happened. And after they hung the boy, she went and petitioned to get his body, but they wouldn't give it and buried him in the prison graveyard. When that momma died, the one instruction in her will was, 'Bury me next to my boy.'

"You say, 'What in the world?! Where would that come from?' He was a murderer; nobody had any use for him on the face of the earth but a mother. She was able to do that, not because she thought the lives of the people he killed were valueless, it's because there's something in her that's like God, who never lets you go even when you ought to be let go."