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Originally Posted by Wannabee  Perhaps I missed something. But I thought he was responsible with the texts and biblical understanding of the ministry of and to widows within the church. |
OK. Where in the text does Paul identify that this is a matter of future service to the Church? Reading vv 9-10, it’s clear that Paul is acknowledging past service on the part of these women (possibly before they were made widows) and identifying this past work as criteria for adding them to the list. I would agree with all you said about these widows having served the church being cared for by the church in their old age in the absence of family.
But this is not what MacArthur seems to be making out of this passage. He is taking it farther. He says:
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Now let me stop you right there. We know from the early church that they had elders and deacons and deaconesses. They're all mentioned in 1 Timothy chapter 3. But apparently here they also had another group of servants in the church, special servants who were godly widows. And apparently they were given some official status and they were put on a list, as verse 9 says, as official servants in the church. They were older women, at least sixty years of age. And they would have a primary responsibility of serving the younger women, of mentoring the younger women. And as there are qualifications for elders, and qualifications for deacons, and qualifications for deaconesses, so there are qualifications for these older women who are to be put on the official servant list for the mentoring of young women. The fact that there are qualifications given here supports the idea that they were serving in some kind of an official capacity. Apparently the early church kept lists of such women.
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It does not appear from this passage that Paul is making any such list of special servants to the church made up exclusively of older, family-less widows. It just seems to me that MacArthur is reading much into the passage that’s not really there.
But I'm really looking for confirmation from other commentators that would support MacArthur’s theory.