War Against The Woman

By Patrick Sullivan

"Get ready to go on a ride through Scripture that begins and ends with the War Against The Woman! Once completed, you will have a much clearer understanding of the big picture that is the Holy Bible. You will have unraveled the gordian knot that Holy Scripture can be by pulling out one of the most important threads, The Woman." Dr. Brian Kiczek, the Rosary Doctor.

 

"I have been part of many Bible studies, but I have never experienced a journey through Scripture a sin 'War Against The Woman'. Patrick Sullivan masterly takes you on a journey through Scripture by connecting the Threads, to unlock one of the most overlooked keys to holiness, Mary. 'War Against The Woman' is a must read for every Christian who is striving for heaven." Keith Doucette, Co-Director, The John Paul II Centre for Divine Mercy

 

"I am so very moved by this book! Patrick makes the Bible come to life! I cannot count how many times I would stop reading and put my head back and just say" WOW!!!" Kathy Tripp, Parish Secretary

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evango
• Release date: Aug 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777852511

Book preview

In thanksgiving for my Mother who like Mary has endured the battle for love of her children.

Mary, Mother of the Incarnate Word, is placed at the very center of that enmity, that struggle which accompanies the history of  humanity on earth and the history of salvation itself... In this history Mary remains a sign of sure hope.

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St. Pope John Paul II

PREFACE TO THE SERIES

Who doesn’t like seeing someone reading the Bible in a public place? There is something combative about it, as if by doing so, the person is breaking some unspoken rule, a rule that too many in our culture live by. In Canada, where  I live, that open act of aggression is noticed, and for good or for ill,  people feel the need to make their opinion about it known. 

I have had people commend me for having the Word of God open and next to my cup of coffee at the local cafe. I have had people want to sit down with me to gauge my understanding of the Bible, so that like Philip and the Eunuch from the Book of Acts, they might help to bring my understanding to another level. And I have had the opposite experience as well, where people mumble rudely as they pass by, saying things like, you are wasting your time or what a joke.

All of these comments, whatever we can say about them, have shown me that the Bible is not a neutral book. It forces decisions on every one of us. So pick up the Bible; it is much better than picking a fight.

A Book Worth Studying

Many Christians read the Bible, but far fewer actually study it, and this is a poverty. St. Jerome most famously said, Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ, and he is right. But this leads us to an obvious and sad conclusion: many Christians fall short of the knowledge that God the Father wants us to have about Jesus.

It reminds me of an hour long train ride I took out of the city some years ago. I had noticed at one point that another passenger had pulled out a Bible and seemed to be reading it attentively. 

After some thought, I decided to ask him about it. And while I am still a little vague on the exact question that I posed, I do remember that I wanted to know if he understood the main story line from the Old to the New Testament. His response was not what I expected. You can’t understand the Bible, he told me. It just doesn’t make sense. That man had made a decision; the book is just a jumbled mess, interesting for its historical influence perhaps, but not a book to be studied. It doesn’t make sense and that is all.

Compare that experience with the numerous encounters I have had at various Catholic parishes. Attending their Bible studies, I found that they too had inherited the belief that the Word of God was not something to be studied. Yes, they believed that the Scriptures were true; and yes they believed that the Spirit worked powerfully through those same pages, but no matter the intensity of belief, the focus was not on what the Scriptures mean, but on  what the Scriptures mean to me.  

Usually, these Bible studies looked something like this. We would read a single passage from a structured reading plan only to come to the same end, and question: What is the Spirit telling you about the passage? And while that is a very important question, it is equally important to ask what the Spirit is saying to the Church, the community of believers all at once, about Jesus, or worship, or morality, or prophecy, or Mary, or any number of things. 

You see, if we are not willing to ask both the personal and the communal question, then we are walking a dangerous line, and this is what occurred to me several years ago. 

Having encountered these kind of Bible studies over and over  again, I realized that we, in our parishes, are coming dangerously close to treating the Bible the same way as the unbeliever. We are becoming a people who ultimately are more concerned with our own agendas and experiences than with what God wants to convey through the entirety of the Book. I will say it again, "what does the Bible mean to me?" is an interesting question, but finding out what the Bible means is more interesting and important still.

The difference then is between reading it and studying it, between trying to follow a story or examining its message. You can do the first as a believer or an atheist, just as one might read the legends of some Greek gods. You might find it interesting or you might not, but reading is not a question of belief. However, if you are going to study the Bible, then both the atheist and the believer will be constantly challenged by the same question: Do you believe the message? Do you believe what the people and the prophecies say about this man named Jesus? 

And that is what this book is about. It is about helping you to study the Bible so that you can answer those kinds of questions. Do you believe in the angels, in what the Scriptures teach about Mary, worship, sin, and so on? If you are interested to know what the Bible says about these things, and not just what you think about  them, then read on, this book is for you.

How To Study the Bible

There are many ways to study the Bible, but like with all things, some ways are better than others. To illustrate this, imagine for a moment that the entirety of the Sacred Word were a tapestry, hanging on a wall in a great room.

Now, if you wanted to study it you could do a few things. In recent years, some of the most effective and enjoyable methods have been to step back from the tapestry so as to see the BIG picture from beginning to end.

Using this approach, you could focus on the salient points; what  makes the narrative move forward, how different events are connected, and in particular, how the Old Testament flows quite naturally into the New. Without a doubt, this is an important thing to do at one time or another.

Standing there in the great room, you might also get the idea that you could learn a lot about the tapestry by walking up to it and folding it in half. As you do this, you could compare one side to the  other, observing how certain things are present on both sides of the image. Now, that’s clever. We call this kind of approach, typology, and it too can be very fruitful as we discover persons, places, and things that point towards something similar but greater, from the Old Testament to the New.

There is however, one more thing you could do that has not often been tried. Hungry for more knowledge still, you could turn the tapestry over and look for the individual threads that make up the beautiful image on the other side.

With this approach, you could locate the beginning of each thread, and you could follow it as it slowly makes its way to its conclusion. Now, notice what this could do for you.

It would still reveal some typology, and it certainly would give you a greater overview of the whole Bible, but now the details wouldn’t be lost on you. Instead, if you had the patience for it, you would be  able to see just where the thread was robust and where it thinned out. You would see where it seemed to stand alone and where it got so tied up with other threads that it was difficult to unravel. 

But most importantly, you would understand that what we  find in the New Testament is not haphazard or random, not a  sudden break with what came before, but a beautiful conclusion to what was in the works for millennia. And because you know this, you would also know that the Bible is not just a story, but a masterpiece with a message, filled with questions for you and I, questions like, do you believe?

So, that is what we are doing in Threads Through Scripture.  Together, we are locating the threads and we are following them until they bloom beautifully as images in the New Testament.

Ground Rules

To accomplish this, we need to carefully lay out some principles for our study so that we don’t get lost in the search. 

First, we need to remember that the data we will be observing, just like the threads of a tapestry, often gets tangled up. What I mean is that it is usual to have two or more threads intertwining in a single passage or story. A scripture verse from the Psalms, for example, could reasonably involve data from the Messiah thread and the Angels thread, and possibly more. 

Second, because the Bible covers a time span of several  millennia, we can cut down our work by focusing on four  distinct time periods:

• The Period of Genesis

• The Tent and Temple Period

• The Period of Exile

• The Period of New Testament Fulfillment 

These demarcations are useful because they tend to coincide with  developments in the various threads, allowing us to take notice of  our data at just the right moment. 

Third, because the Bible is so vast, we are compelled out of ne cessity to limit the number of Scriptural examples we examine per time period. There is no need, in other words, to show all ten  examples of a thread being lived out in the tent and temple period when only one or two examples are necessary. So remember, just because only two or three examples are given, it does not mean that there are no more examples. Far from it!

In fact, one of the things that makes Threads Through Scripture so enjoyable is knowing that when you pick up the Bible after you have completed your study, there is still a very high chance that you will come across further examples.

But, that also doesn’t mean that there are always many examples of each thread. Sometimes when the thread is thinnest, we will have to be content with it merely surviving through a time period as we look with expectation to its revival in what comes next.

How Many Threads Are There? 

There are potentially dozens of threads in the Holy Scriptures, but thankfully, there are far fewer major threads. These are threads that move the entire story of the Bible forward (e.g. Mary, the Angels, the Messiah etc.) and really help us to make  sense of Jesus and His Church. In this multi-book series then, each book will focus on one major thread and the themes that help it to come alive.

The threads are presented in no particular order, and it really does not matter which of them you study at any particular time. The