Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate. — St. Paul, after mentioning this exception to the fit objects of the Church’s charity and protection, again returns to this special class of helpless ones: “the widows indeed” — a class, no doubt, in those days of selfish luxury and of extreme misery and hopelessness, often utterly neglected, and not unfrequently left to starve and to perish in want and misery.
It has been asked why, in these official directions to Timothy, the question of relief of poor Christian widows comes so prominently forward. We find also that, in the first years which succeeded the Ascension, many widows in Jerusalem seemed to have been dependent on the Church for sustenance (Acts 6:1). Now we should expect to find in the Church of Christ the same loving care which was taken in the old days, when Israel was a great nation, of these solitary and unhappy women. (Comp. Deuteronomy 24:17, where we find special laws respecting the garments of widows never to be taken in pledge. See, too, such passages as Exodus 22:22; Deuteronomy 27:19; Isaiah 1:17; Jeremiah 7:6; also Isaiah 10:2; Malachi 3:5.) Still, this hardly accounts for the statement of Acts 6:1 and these lengthened directions to Timothy. It is more than probable that there were, especially in these Eastern cities, a very large class of these desolate and unprotected women. The practice of polygamy is accountable for this, in the first instance; and the rigid morality of the Christian teaching would place a bar to the female convert from heathenism relapsing into a life where moral restraints were utterly disregarded. The charities of the early Church, especially in Oriental cities, were, without doubt, heavily burdened with this grave and increasing charge — provision for these poor desolate women; and it was to relieve the congregations in some degree that St. Paul wrote these elaborate instructions to Timothy, warning him, as the chief minister of the Ephesian Church, against an indiscriminate charity, and at the same time providing him with a system of severe restraints to be imposed upon the assisted women.
Still, the chief pastor in Ephesus must remember that among the women of his flock there were some widows indeed, with neither children nor grandchildren to assist them, without friends even to cheer their desolate, widowed life. To find out and to succour these poor, sad-hearted, friendless beings, St. Paul reminds Timothy, was one of the duties of a Christian minister.
Trusteth in God. — These, without love of child or friend, cast themselves on the support of the everlasting arms. The language here used by St. Paul pictures, evidently, some loving and trustful character then living, of whom he was thinking while writing the Letter to Timothy. “She hath trusted and still trusts in God; she continues in prayer night and day.”
And continueth in supplications and prayers night and day. — Like Anna, the daughter of Phanuel (Luke 2:36-37), whom some suppose St. Paul took as the model and example for these Christian widows. The meaning of these words, descriptive of a holy life, is not that the earnest and pious bereaved woman should pass her days and nights in the unrelieved monotony of constantly repeated prayers. Such a life, unpractical and useless, would never commend itself to one like St. Paul; the words simply describe the desolate one casting all her care on the Lord, and telling Him, as her only friend, of all her thoughts and actions, her words and her works.