Are Women Redeemed from Labor Pains?
Because Jesus bore our pains (Isaiah 53:4), you might wonder whether women have been redeemed from labor pains. It would seem that pains should include everything, including pains associated with childbirth. However, Genesis talks about women bringing forth children in sorrow, so this question isn’t quite as easy to answer as it first appears. We know for sure that women are redeemed from sterility and miscarriages (Exodus 23:25-26) and death while giving birth (1 Timothy 2:15, which will require a lengthy explanation below due to the many difficulties in interpreting that verse). But being redeemed from labor pains (or not) is a trickier question. Jesus obviously did not bear labor pains in His body on the cross, but He took all kinds of other pain for us.
One quick “try” to rationalize the idea that God’s people should have quick, painless childbirths would be Exodus 1:19: “And the midwives said to Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere in the midwives come in unto them.” However, this argument falls apart when you back up 2 verses to Exodus 1:17, “But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive.” This proves that the midwives were lying to Pharaoh. They were NOT actually late to the deliveries due to the Hebrew women being so quick to deliver their sons, who were supposedly having supernaturally fast childbirths.
Making this more interesting is the fact that there are two major curses in the Bible – the “curse on the earth” in Genesis 3:16-19 (see below) and the “curse of the Law” (i.e., the curse for breaking the Law) in Deuteronomy 28:15-68 and Leviticus 26:14-39. Without question, Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law because Galatians 3:13 explicitly says so. However, “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” was part of the curse on the earth, not part of the curse of the Law.
Here is the full “curse on the earth:”
Genesis 3:16-19:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, and in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
There is no mention of weeds (thorns and thistles) in the garden before sin. Obviously, we have not yet been redeemed from weeds. Any farmer or anyone with a garden can vouch for that.
People still have to work hard for a living, so that part of the curse on the earth is still in effect. (Some lazy people have tried to make a doctrine that Christ has redeemed from working, but 2 Thessalonians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:28 disprove this.) Also, if this curse were removed from the earth, we would be immortal already, since returning to the dust of the earth is explicitly part of the “curse on the earth” cited above. (There are people around preaching the old error that we can have immortal bodies in this life, but when the people preaching this die, as inevitably happens, it weakens the credibility of the argument. Of course, the biblical fact that we have mortal [subject to death] bodies (Romans 6:12) that have not yet received immortality also ruins that argument.)
I’ve seen the argument that even though we are not redeemed from working, we are redeemed from working hard. However, Paul said that He worked with his hands.
1 Corinthians 4:12:
And labour, working with our own hands: being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it:
Paul also exhorted Christians to work in Ephesians 4:28.
In both cases above, the Greek word ergazomai denotes hard work that produces weariness, fatigue or exhaustion. So Paul’s writings make it clear that hard work has not been done away with because of our redemption in Christ.
No manna falls from heaven today, so making bread still requires work, which was another stated part of the “curse on the earth” that we are obviously not redeemed from yet.
Ask any farmer if he no longer needs to till the soil but instead just speaks to the ground and commands a harvest to appear. Ask anyone with a garden if he just speaks to the garden, claiming deliverance from the “curse on the earth” of weeds rather than having to exert effort to pull out the weeds. That part of the “curse on the earth” is still obviously in effect.
Someone could argue that doing work you don’t like is part of the curse, so now you can do work you DO like and not be cursed. However, we have yet to have angels appear and clean toilets. In fact, my wife’s job at Bible school was cleaning toilets. Diapers have to be changed, houses have to be vacuumed, cars have to be washed, dishes have to be cleaned and put away, trash has to be taken out, and so on. I consider it too much of a stretch to state that we are redeemed in this life from any work that we might find disagreeable.
Part of the curse on the earth was having the husband rule over the wife, which was not rescinded in Genesis, nor has it been rescinded even in the New Testament:
Ephesians 5:22:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord
Colossians 3:18:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
Of course, that is not a license for a husband to be a brutish dictator over his wife, which would actually hinder his prayers (1 Peter 3:7).
God tells us when the time is when there will be no more curse on the earth. It is in the future on the new earth and not before then:
Revelation 22:3:
And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:
The counter-argument is that the curse won’t be AROUND anymore even though it’s here now and we’re redeemed from it, but in light of the points above, it is not just around but we still have to deal with it in our lives rather than just “believing it away,” which if we could do, we could live forever in our current bodies and invalidate some verses cited above.
Because we still physically die eventually (“return to the dust”) and have to work for a living (at least you’re supposed to if you’re able to work, even if you live in a welfare state), it would appear that we are still under the “curse on the earth” which includes sorrow in bringing forth children, which we will have to define more clearly below.
IIn passing, we should note a difficulty found in Genesis 8:21, where at first it might appear that the curse on the earth was rescinded: “And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.” However, God said that He would not AGAIN curse the ground ANY MORE, meaning that He will not ADD an additional curse on the ground to the curse that is already on it. As amply demonstrated above, the curse on the earth in general is still in effect today, even for believers.
What Are Labor Pains?
If you read most translations of Genesis 3:16, including the NKJV, they translate the verse to say “labor pains.” The most common Spanish translation (RVR 1960, which was translated directly from Hebrew) also uses the Spanish word for pain. Young’s Literal Translation sticks with the King James’s “sorrow” rendering. So if you read most translations and don’t do any digging into the Hebrew, your version of the Bible will just tell you flat out that women will have labor pains.
So that would seem to be a convincing argument that women are not redeemed from labor pains since they are part of the curse on the earth that remains to this day.
Now to make sure that “no” is a completely biblical answer, there are two necessary steps. We must prove conclusively that labor pains are in fact part of the curse on the earth from which we have not yet been redeemed, and we must demonstrate that Christ did not redeem us from that particular kind of pain.
If labor pains aren’t part of the curse on the earth, the entire argument above falls apart. So let’s start by examining the Hebrew in the phrase “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” to verify that sorrow actually does means “pain” as in labor pains. A quick lookup reveals that the Hebrew word used for sorrow in the phrase “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” appears in the following other Bible verses as the underlined word or phrase:
Psalm 127:2:
It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.
Proverbs 5:10:
Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours be in the house of a stranger;
Proverbs 10:22:
The blessing of the LORD, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it.
Proverbs 14:23:
In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury.
Proverbs 15:1:
A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.
Jeremiah 22:28:
Is this man Coniah a despised broken idol? is he a vessel wherein is no pleasure? wherefore are they cast out, he and his seed, and are cast into a land which they know not?
Now we have a problem! The word sorrow did NOT turn out to denote actual physical pain clearly in any of the other places where it appeared. Therefore, we are on very shaky ground if we want to declare that Genesis 3:16 is the only verse in the Bible where that word means pain. There is another Hebrew word that means pain, and the one in Genesis 3:16 isn’t it. It’s actually the one mistranslated “sorrows” in Isaiah 53:4 where the literal Hebrew indicates that Jesus carried our pains. So even though the same English word “sorrow(s)” is used in both Genesis 3:16 and Isaiah 53:4, it isn’t the same Hebrew word, and the one for pain is the one in Isaiah, not Genesis!
So we have not been able to prove that labor pains are part of the curse on the earth. You could make a case that labor itself in childbirth is part of the curse on the earth, and thus a woman will have to go through labor (hard work) to have a child. But if this simply means hard work as opposed to pain, a woman could still be redeemed from the pain associated with that hard work.
Can we make a case from the first instance of the word sorrow in Genesis 3:16, which is actually a different Hebrew word? It appears in the context of conception, not childbirth, but let’s at least look at the other cases where the word sorrow in “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception” appears in the Hebrew:
Genesis 3:17:
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Genesis 5:29:
And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.
Once again, we can’t make a convincing case for this to refer to actual physical pain, as it is possible to work hard for a living without being in pain.
Does the Bible say anything else about labor pains, particularly in the New Testament? Yes, it does:
Galatians 4:19:
My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,
Galatians 4:27:
For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband.
So far we haven’t encountered anything decisive about pain per se. But now we find:
Revelation 12:2:
And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
In the case of the verse above, the Greek word does refer to being tormented (and is so translated in other places), not just working hard. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be in pain, but the woman in this metaphorical statement was. Now consider:
John 16:21:
A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.
So we’d best look up the words for travail, sorrow and anguish in the Scripture above and see if they shed any light on anything.
The word for travail means to deliver, bear or give birth, and nothing more. So there is no pain element associated with it.
The word for sorrow means grief, sorrow, heaviness, or in the case of giving, it’s the word used for “grudgingly” that tells you not to give grudgingly. It does not indicate physical pain in any other verse where it appears, though it certainly doesn’t connote a feeling you would ask for if you had a choice.
The word for anguish is elsewhere translated affliction, persecution, trouble, and burdened. Once again, there is no physical pain connotation, but none of these translated words are things you would pray to receive on purpose.
So far, we still have not proved anything conclusively about pain. Let’s consider some other Scriptures.
“The sorrows of a travailing woman shall come upon him…” – Hosea 13:13
The word for “sorrows” is translated “pains” or “pangs” in many translations other than the KJV, but we don’t have anything conclusive here.
“And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth…” – Isaiah 13:8
The word for “pain” has various meanings, but it IS translated “pain” or some variant of it in Psalm 55:4 (“My heart is sore pained within me…”), Isaiah 23:5 (“…so shall they be sorely pained at the report of Tyre”), Jeremiah 30:23 (“…it shall fall with pain upon the head of the wicked”), Lamentations 4:6 (“And I will set fire in Egypt: Sin [a place name] shall have great pain”), Joel 2:6 (“Before their face the people shall be much pained…”) and Micah 4:10 (“Be in pain and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a woman in travail…”). So now it appears that we HAVE found some support for the idea that there was to be pain associated with childbirth after all.
Isaiah 21:3:
Therefore are my loins filled with pain: pangs have taken hold upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth: I was bowed down at the hearing of it; I was dismayed at the seeing of it.
Psalm 48:6:
Pain seized them there, Anguish, as of a woman in childbirth.
Jeremiah 6:24:
We have heard the fame thereof: our hands wax feeble: anguish hath taken hold of us, and pain, as of a woman in travail.
Jeremiah 22:23:
O inhabitant of Lebanon, that makest thy nest in the cedars, how gracious shalt thou be when pangs come upon thee, the pain as of a woman in travail!
Jeremiah 49:24:
Damascus is waxed feeble, and turneth herself to flee, and fear hath seized on her: anguish and sorrows have taken her, as a woman in travail.
Jeremiah 50:43:
The king of Babylon hath heard the report of them, and his hands waxed feeble: anguish took hold of him, and pangs as of a woman in travail.
Micah 4:9:
Now why dost thou cry out aloud? is there no king in thee? is thy counsellor perished? for pangs have taken thee as a woman in travail.
1 Thessalonians 5:3:
For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
In the case of the verse above, the Greek word odin that is translated travail appears only 3 other times in the Bible. Twice it is translated sorrows and once it is translated pains. The most notable thing is that 1 Thessalonians is in the New Testament, but it still refers to an uncomfortable childbirth. It doesn’t specify “upon a sinner with child,” but still “upon a woman with child,” which would seem to still include Christian women.
Given how often pain and travail (in childbirth) are associated with each other, it seems clear that the understanding under the Old Covenant, at least, was that childbirth does involve pain, travail and anguish. It had started looking like maybe pain wasn’t part of the package, but now we have enough Scripture to indicate that it was understood that pain in childbirth WAS part of the package after the earth was cursed.
What About Jesus Taking Our Pains?
Now what about Jesus bearing our pains and thus exempting women from labor pains? There are no Bible accounts of women who were ready to deliver coming to Jesus and giving birth without pain. It’s hard to draw arguments from silence. Yet it’s hard to imagine God saying that all other kinds of pain were taken for you, but one particular kind of pain that only women have must remain. If pain is a curse for sin, and you have been redeemed from sin, why should you have to bear pain of any kind?
On the other hand, no one can assert that Jesus bore labor pains in His own body when He suffered for us!
As you can see, the problem with this question is that you can come up with a rather convincing argument in either direction!
We never get our doctrine from experiences, whether our own or that of others. Some Christian women say that they had pain-free labor, feeling only strong pressure but not pain. Some doctors have stated that there are tens of thousands of pain-free childbirths every year for whatever reason and there is no indication that this was limited to Christians. There are probably plenty of unbelieving women who also say that they had pain-free labor using blatantly New Age techniques. You do not want to get involved in anything to do with New Age techniques (self-hypnosis to access your inner god, etc.) even if the adherents claim success. After all, there are plenty of voodoo adherents in the Caribbean who claim success, too, and that doesn’t mean you should run out and practice voodoo or get a book on “Christian” voodoo! So I would caution Christian women to really look at what they’re considering getting into when someone claims to offer “pain-free” childbirth. There are people out there claiming success with “Higher Power” as opposed to JESUS, and you always want to avoid the Higher Power crowd and only go with the Jesus crowd.
Are the Christians who had pain-free childbirth onto something, or are they simply blessed to be in the minority of women who get off easy in childbirth, whether believers or not?
What Does 1 Timothy 2:15 Mean?
1 Timothy 2:15 is surely one of the hardest verses in the Bible to explain; I’d rank it up there with 1 John 1:9. Those who advocate pain-free childbirth interpret this to mean that you are saved from pain and discomfort in the process. Can it really be taken to mean that?
1 Timothy 2:15:
Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
The “they” part is straightforward; it is the husband and wife referred to in 1 Timothy 2:12 (see Notes on 1 Timothy 2:15). So no, 1 Timothy 2:12 does NOT state that no woman can have authority in the church. It is talking about a wife usurping authority over a husband – click here for much more detail on that often-contentious matter! The difficult part is understanding what “saved” means. There are all kinds of explanations in the church world.
At least one denomination actually believes that women go to hell if they don’t have children because they are “saved” in childbearing. (I did not make that up! They made it up, supposedly based on the verse in question!) This isn’t quite as easy to dismiss as it first appears because the word in is the Greek word dia, which often does mean “by” or “through” or “by means of.” So they assume that Paul meant that women are saved by childbearing or by means of childbearing. However, that conclusion would be at odds with many other verses that do NOT mention motherhood as a condition to be saved. The question is whether dia can mean something different, and we see that dia does have a different shade of meaning in 1 Corinthians 3:15, where Paul talks about being saved, yet so as “by” fire (or through fire, as in Young’s Literal Translation). The picture seems to be of someone who is running out of a fire with only his body and no other possessions. However, dia in that context certainly does not mean that a person whose works are burned up are saved by (or by means of) the fire that burns them up. It is clear that believing that Jesus rose from the dead and confessing Him as Lord are the prerequisites to being saved, not bearing children. So we can move on.
Another popular explanation is that women are saved from hell by “the childbearing,” which according to this line of reasoning refers to Jesus. This is another honest attempt to make sense of a difficult verse. However, that explanation falls apart due to its condition of continuing in faith and love and holiness with sobriety. If that is indeed the condition of being saved through Jesus, we have just introduced the very Galatian works gospel that Paul so ardently preached against! If we have to maintain a certain love or holiness standard to stay saved, we would lose our assurance of eternal life. How would you ever know if you measured up to that standard? Just how holy would your conduct have to be? The second reason this falls apart is that the condition involves both the husband and the wife doing something. This would predicate your salvation on the action of someone else, which is clearly unbiblical. This is no better than the error preached in certain areas that if you’re cremated (something you can’t control because it involves the actions of others after you’re gone), you go to hell. The Bible is clear that your eternal destination is something that only you can decide; no one else’s actions can determine it. The third issue is that the only other place where a similar Greek word appears talks explicitly about widows remarrying and bearing children (1 Timothy 5:14) and it is sure that none of THEM will bear Jesus! The fourth issue is that Paul didn’t refer to “the childbearing” to mean Jesus anywhere else, so this is suspect. The fifth issue is that “the childbearing” would be an awkward way to describe someone’s labor and childbirth. If a friend delivered a baby, would you ask “How long were you in the childbearing?”
So another explanation came along to sidestep the issues with the explanations above. This one says that a woman finds her fulfillment in raising children, and so she is “saved” in a certain sense by doing that. This solves the issue of the Greek word dia by keeping its meaning in many other places as “by means of” – she is “saved” (fulfilled) by means of raising children. However, this puts the woman in the role of a baby factory and child care provider who has no other fulfillment. What about women who never have children? What about women whose children are grown and gone? Are they now doomed to be unfulfilled for the rest of their lives? That doesn’t seem reasonable. And again, there is the pesky problem of the condition that involves both the husband and the wife. Is she doomed to be unfulfilled raising children if the husband runs off with another woman or lives an unholy, unloving life? Another serious problem is that the Greek word for childbearing, while found only here and in a modified form elsewhere where Paul advises widows to remarry and bear children (1 Timothy 5:14), is a compound word that could roughly be translated child-happening, child-making, child-doing, and so on (one of the words is a somewhat general-purpose word and the other refers to a child). It appears to be a reference to an event (“the child-bearing” in Young’s Literal Translation) and not an ongoing process. So I admire the thought that went into trying to keep the word dia as “by means of” while explaining the verse, but the “saved through (dia) fire” illustration above already demonstrates that we don’t really need to do that. This explanation seems to be grasping for straws and I can’t picture it as being what Paul really meant.
So then another explanation came along that childbearing is a trial, and you are saved “though” it like someone running through a fire – things may not be easy, but you are still saved from hell at the end if you stay faithful to the Lord through it all. But any explanation that “saved” means “saved from hell” comes up against the issue already stated above that someone else’s actions cannot determine your salvation from hell, and the word they is plural so it can’t just mean the woman herself. So again, I’d say “nice try” but I’d move on.
So if the verse doesn’t mean any of those other things, what does it mean? I would say that it means that the woman will be healed, preserved, delivered, etc., through the child-bearing process. In other words, she will not die or contract incurable problems by giving birth. This would be consistent with the word sozo found in this verse for “saved” – this word is translated healed as well as saved in the traditional sense. The condition is that she and her husband continue in faith, love and holiness with sobriety. This condition can’t affect her eternal destiny, but it can affect her temporal situation when it comes to childbirth. Now, are we back to a works gospel? I don’t think so. We aren’t talking about works saving anyone from hell. In this life, our works DO determine our destinies to a large extent. Our words bring life and death. If we give sparingly, we reap sparingly, and if we give bountifully, we reap bountifully. If we honor our parents, we will live longer. If we show mercy, we will reap mercy, but if we sow judgment, we will reap judgment. A lot of what we get in this life depends on our works, though going to heaven or hell depends only on the “work” of calling on Jesus to be saved, not any of our own works of righteousness. So I don’t think it’s inconsistent for God to say, “Here is a promise of making it through childbirth, but here are the conditions.” It may not seem fair that the woman’s outcome depends on the husband, too, but I don’t see any other way to read the “they” in that verse as the husband and wife depicted in verse 12. (One author believes that “they” means multiple females, but that is not the context in verse 12.)
If she is physically preserved in that sense, does that mean that she can have a pain-free delivery? After all, if she has a promise of being delivered and healed through childbirth, wouldn’t being free of pain be part of being healed?
At this point I would defer to other New Testament writings concerning pain and childbirth. There is no indication from other Scriptures that the new standard is pain-free childbirth and that only the wicked have to endure it now. We see no reference to “a SINNER in childbirth” – it was still “a woman” who is in travail, even in the New Testament (see 1 Thessalonians 5:3 and John 16:21 above).
My Conclusion
As we have seen, you could build a case on either side of this question, and many people have! If someone wanted to go for “pain-free childbirth” I wouldn’t stand in her way to discourage her, but on the other hand, I would not want her to feel like she let the Lord down through lack of faith if she actually DID have pain after all and requested medication to deal with it.
I think I have demonstrated that the curse on the earth, which does include pain in childbirth, is still active on the earth today. Unless you don’t have to weed your garden or farm or work hard for a living or can claim that you will never return to the dust physically, it is quite obvious to me that even you as a Christian are still subject to the curse on the earth even though you are not subject to the curse for breaking the Law of Moses. So my best answer to the question would be, “No.”
What tips the scales to move me decidedly onto the “still in effect” side is 1 Timothy 2:15. The fact that childbirth is raised as a particular potential problem area in 1 Timothy 2:15 indicates to me that the curse on the earth regarding childbirth issues was actually not lifted away at the cross. If it were, childbirth should be a breeze for the believer and no special promise should have to be made about it. Paul could simply have said, “Because you’re in Christ, you will be saved through the childbearing process” without attaching any conditions to it. I believe that Paul’s point was that even though the curse on the earth is still in effect, God will guide godly couples through the process of childbirth without any lasting harm.
It’s a tough issue, and if you study and reach a different conclusion, I won’t start a war with you over it.