I seem to be missing some of these. I'm not sure if we simply forgot to hit record but I plan on redoing this series for Youtube. If you can find the missing links I'd appreciate sending them my way.
Thursday, September 29, 2022
What Is the Purpose of Parenting?
The above blogpost identifies a type of parenting that is biblical. The problem is that most people no longer know what the purpose of parenting actually is, so when they read something like this, they think it is merely one option among many. So let's talk about the purpose of parenting.
Most people, whether theoretically or subconsciously, think that the purpose of parenting is to make successful children. They should be successful socially or financially or spiritually. Ideally, all of the above. The problem with this idea is that it sets an anthropocentric standard for parenting that looks for outcomes that only God ultimately has control over.
Certainly, one should strive to form their kids this way, but these results cannot determine the standard of successful parenting because an atheist can accomplish the first two without teaching anything about God, giving absolutely no glory to God whatsoever, and the final result can only be accomplished by God and can be done so with or without the parent's help.
In other words, the first two can be godless and the last one is only up to God. If one accomplishes the first two goals with his children but the last is not accomplished then he might say that he has failed at parenting. Likewise, if the last one is accomplished but not the first two, he might still think he has failed as a parent.
The problem with all of this is that it simply isn't biblical. If any or all of them were the result of successful parenting and the lack of any or all of them were the result of bad parenting, we would have to conclude that God is a bad parent because many if not most of the children of His creation fail to accomplish one or all of these three. Are we really prepared to say that God is not a good parent?
Instead, biblical parenting is about representing God in one's parenting regardless of outcomes. In other words, you may get better results if you parent in a way that does not represent God. Certainly, if you always affirm your children in whatever they do, you'll have a better social relationship with your kids. If you tell them that they can do anything they set their minds to do, and teach them something very "new agey" about themselves, that confidence may give them greater success in the workplace and in their relationships. But, biblically speaking, you have failed to parent biblically and to give God glory in your parenting.
And what is it to parent according to God's glory? Glorifying God means that you lift God up over yourself and your child in order to communicate who God is in relationship to your child through representing God in the way you parent. In other words, you as a parent represent God and in doing so you communicate law and gospel to your child the way that God communicates law and gospel to His people in the Bible. You communicate God's authority (i.e., the fear of God and His judgments) and His character (i.e., the law) and the love and mercy of God through the gospel.
Your child may not believe in God in the end. That wasn't God's goal with your parenting. Obviously, we all want our children to be saved and it is a part of our goal and hope, but in the end that is God's eternal decision and not a result of the works that you do. All you can do is seek to represent God accurately through your parenting, and that means you must represent the Bible's communication of God accurately in everything you do with your child.
If your child turns away from God when they are grown, it should not be because you did not communicate God accurately but rather because you did and God chose not to regenerate your child.
What this means is that any alternative type of parenting that does not seek to communicate God according to the Bible, but according to what is right in your own eyes with your own goals in mind, is wicked regardless of the results.
One might say that it is not about the destination but the journey. It is not about the ends but the means. We might also say that the ends is the means. The job of the parent is not the result but to communicate God correctly in the process. That is the way that God parents His people with varying results as He has decreed it.
Now, we hope and pray that the results will be that they are saved in the end. We desire that they would be successful in their social and financial endeavors, and we incorporate things into parenting that look forward to that success, but we are unfaithful to the goal of parenting if we adopt any systems and theories of parenting that do not represent God the way that the Bible does. For this reason, the greatest parenting book is the Bible (Law and Gospel).
Note: Law, of course, is not just the literal laws in the Torah or Epistles but also the wisdom in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, etc.).
The home is the smallest unit in the government of the church and the state. The purpose of both of these is to represent God accurately, not to have perfect results in everyone's behavior and relationship with God. We would desire it but that is clearly not God's purpose. We have people who become criminals regardless of whether a government represents the fear of God accurately and we have people rebel against the church and reject Christianity regardless of whether the church represents God accurately through the Scripture. If it is not about the results but whether we are faithful in representing God correctly in the larger family of church and state, why would we ever think that the purpose of the home would be something different?
Saturday, September 24, 2022
Are Men and Women Equally Bound by the One Flesh Union?
The restrictions on divorce and remarriage are the same for either a man or woman without distinction. Let me explain why.
But let me describe why this assertion comes about first. It's held by an early church "father" by the name of Ambrosiaster. Ambrosiaster is a pseudonym given to an anonymous author who had a commentary on Paul. Most scholars note that he tends toward Pelagianism and other views that run contrary to the Fathers in general. The name given to him actually means "would-be Ambrose" because his writings were first thought to be from Ambrose. He is an outlier and does not hold to the general teaching of the other Fathers, regardless of the attempts to harmonize some of them with him.
In his commentary on 1 Corinthians 7, he argues that a man who is divorced by a wife as an innocent party is free to remarry even though, if the situation was reversed, the wife is not. He bases his argument on the idea that male headship sees the man as the owner of the wife but not the wife as the owner of the man. Hence, if the wife throws off his headship, he is no longer obligated to her. Since he is no longer obligated once she has done so through divorce and maybe even adultery, he is free to remarry. He argues the following.
A woman may not marry if she has left her husband because of his fornication or apostasy, or because, impelled by lust, he wishes to have sexual relations with her in an illicit way. This is because the inferior party does not have the same rights under the law as the stronger one has . . .The reason why Paul does not add, as he does in the case of the woman, “But if she departs, he should remain as he is” is because a man is allowed to remarry if he has divorced a sinful wife. The husband is not restricted by the law as a woman is, for the head of a woman is her husband.
Now, here is the problem. The reasoning is not based upon Jesus' prohibition of divorcing and remarrying. It is based upon issues of ownership that ignore the one flesh union as the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament understanding had. In other words, it sees divorce and remarriage as legitimate because it only uses the Jewish understanding of possession that existed in the Old Testament. Yet, it is precisely this interpretation that Jesus says was not the case from the beginning. God, instead, had joined the two in becoming one flesh and no man was to separate it. Hence, any remarriage is an adultery being committed.
The husband owns the wife because the wife is his own body and he owns his own body. If she is joined to someone else, therefore, she is committing adultery regardless of the situation. So far we are all in agreement with Ambrosiaster. However, in 1 Corinthians 7:2-4 Paul states:
διὰ δὲ ⸂τὰς πορνείας⸃ ἕκαστος τὴν ἑαυτοῦ γυναῖκα ἐχέτω ⸋καὶ ἑκάστη τὸν ἴδιον ἄνδρα ἐχέτω⸌. τῇ γυναικὶ ὁ ἀνὴρ τὴν ⸀ὀφειλὴν ἀποδιδότω, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ ἡ γυνὴ τῷ ἀνδρί. ἡ γυνὴ τοῦ ἰδίου σώματος οὐκ ἐξουσιάζει ἀλλʼ ὁ ἀνήρ, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ ὁ ἀνὴρ τοῦ ἰδίου σώματος οὐκ ἐξουσιάζει ἀλλʼ ἡ γυνή.
But because of sexually immoral acts, each man is to possess his own woman/wife and each woman is to possess her own man/husband. The man/husband is contractually obligated to the woman/wife, and likewise, the woman/wife is contractually obligated to the man/husband. The woman/wife does not have rights over her own body but the man/husband does. And likewise, the man/husband does not have rights over his own body but the woman/wife does.
The argument Paul makes assumes the Lord's argument about the two becoming one flesh. Because they are one flesh the one owns the other. Possession is not based upon the federal headship laws of the Old Testament but upon the one flesh union built into creation, a union that makes the woman as equally in possession of the man's body as the woman's body is in the possession of the man. The marital contract that is solidified by the one flesh union of the sexual act, therefore, makes it impossible to break because it is impossible for a person to break from himself. This is Jesus' argument to the Pharisees. They are no longer two but one and subsequently cannot be broken into two again by any man. Paul adopts this reasoning in 1 Corinthians 7 as well (7:10, 39). This can be seen again in his analogy found in Romans 7:2-3.
In other words, possession is based upon the one flesh union that solidifies the marital contract whether one is male or female. If the husband cannot be separated from the wife and she owns the husband's body because it is her own, then he cannot be joined to another without committing adultery regardless of the situation.
The old federal headship idea that Ambrosiaster appeals to is no more. Polygamy is now forbidden because the original reasoning for adultery in creation is restored by the Lord Jesus. Hence, as Paul says, a man now must have his own wife, i.e., she is not the woman/wife of another; and the woman must now have her own man/husband, i.e., he is not the husband of another. He is ἴδιον “belonging to herself" or "her's alone" and is parallel to the fact that the man must have ἑαυτοῦ “his own" woman/wife "belonging to himself."
Because of the one flesh union and the single ownership of a man by a woman, it is impossible for him to be joined to another now without committing adultery and this cannot be changed due to any circumstance other than death, i.e., the demise of one part of the flesh union, whether it be male or female.
Heroes Kill Villains
God is merciful and compassionate, but not always. Sometimes it's evil to be merciful and wrath is called for instead. We tend to not think about this too much as we see God as the merciful One, but we need to also acknowledge that the devil inspires mercy and compassion in humans as much as God does. He just does it toward the wicked. He uses it as way to preserve his murderous agents. He's the villain telling the hero that the hero shouldn't stoop to his level and kill him or his minions. Afterall, heroes are merciful, right?
The story in 1 Samuel 15 is instructive here. Saul spares Agag the king, and a whole host of livestock and humans he desires to own, despite the fact that God told him to kill all of them. Now, one might say that his motives are not mercy but pride in that he desires to parade his captives as a way of flaunting his victory. However, built into the commands God gives for the death penalty is the command to not be merciful toward those who are wicked and under God's judgment. Regardless of the motives, to spare the wicked when they should be destroyed is mercy.
In Deuteronomy 7:2, God says, "and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them."
It is clear that to show mercy upon the wicked is wicked. But why? Because to show mercy upon the wicked by sparing their lives is to treat their evil as benign and to unjustly oppress the innocent. It is to lift up the wicked as deserving of honor and the innocent as less than worthy to receive honor. It is to favor the wicked over the righteous. Furthermore, to spare the wicked is to join with them in their shedding of innocent blood and oppressing those upon whom they prey. God, being just, desires to show wrath to the wicked, not mercy, and for anyone claiming to represent God to show the opposite of what God desires to show is himself a false prophet, a murderer, and deserves death himself, which is what the passage goes on to say.
By sparing Agag, Saul was not only communicating the opposite of God's desires toward the wicked, he was joining with them and their future generations in killing and oppressing the innocent.
Mercy is for the repentant, those who throw off their roles as destroyers and seek to be givers of life through the Lord Jesus Christ. Wrath is for the wicked who have solidified themselves in the role of the destroyer. Hence, to show mercy to the wicked is a satanic, not a Christ-like characteristic of our modern society.
When leniency is given to violent criminals, it is a great injustice and the display of a worthless leadership. The more the implementation of our laws reflect a mercy upon criminals, the more they inflict crimes upon the innocent and show themselves to be satanic in nature. Hence, God's wrath is toward, not only the doers of wicked deeds, but upon those who would give no justice to the innocent victims and enable the wicked to victimize more of the innocent in the future.
All of them should be rounded up, and once it is determined through a court of law that they are guilty, executed swiftly. But that seems cold and harsh to our culture. In the modern mind, it's much more peaceful and merciful to let them run rampant to kill, beat, rob, and rape the innocent. Hence, the wrath of God will fall, as it did upon the Canaanites, upon the whole of the current leadership and every so-called Christian calling for leniency upon the wicked.
The good and righteous God is the Destroyer of destroyers because He is the Giver of Life. Those who would follow Him will do the same. Those who enable the destroyers are simply making the devil's argument but all who know the truth know this truth: heroes kill villains.
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Tuesday, September 20, 2022
How to Deny the Gospel While Affirming It
Superfluous. I think I had to spell that word in elementary school in the early eighties. I had never used it before nor heard anyone else use it. It's much more commonly used today. Of course most know it means "unneeded, unnecessary, extra, useless as to adding anything of need."
Man will always drift toward a satanic religion because it gives him immediate results. What is satanic religion? It is any religion that attributes creation to anything else other than the Creator's activity. It views transformation, therefore, as a result of the work of other causes. It glorifies other gods, demons, nature, society, or humanity but it does not glorify God as the Savior.
God has saved humanity through the gospel and through the gospel alone. Sin has caught up all men everywhere so that they are bound to be damned by anything and everything they have done or thought. Their only hope is Christ and His work in the gospel. There is no other hope for them than this.
This means that the gospel is the transforming means through which God, the Creator, gets the glory for transformation. You must be born again. All must be born again through the gospel and cannot be through any other means.
But men who do not see the effects of this rebirth immediately feel that they need other means. Some pursue the excitement of stimulating emotions through entertainment, some through ecstatic experiences of what is supposedly the work of the Spirit, some through meditation, some through religious rituals that give the person a further experience that feels more wholistic.
Others pursue philosophical routes in order to stimulate the mind, looking to understand deeper and hidden things in an almost occultic manner through speculation that views the Word of God as rudimentary knowledge to be transcended through divine experiences and philosophical knowledge.
Some combine these two for a better experiential result, but no matter the path, although saying they believe the gospel, they are denying its sufficiency to transform by itself, and thus, are denying God the glory of the entire creation of whatever is transformed.
One might sum up all of the above as a Gnostic spirituality. Access to secret knowledge through philosophy and heightened emotional and mental experiences has always been mistaken for the biblical spirituality of every day mundane life. Speaking the gospel and living as a picture of it seems too simple. It doesn't stimulate the mind and body in the same way as the immediate dopamine rush and goosebumps created by the false spiritualities that would replace it.
Hence, people gravitate toward icons and incense, robes and rituals, signs and shaking, Aristotle and Aesop, plays and prose, but the simple gospel seems too common a garment without the bedazzled adornment of these other experiences.
No doubt, all who have been deceived by this spirituality will argue that the gospel is either at the foundation or interwoven within all of these other things. One might have made the same argument that the calves of Dan and Bethel were not stealing the glory from the temple but extending it. Within these were the religion of YHWH that gave glory to Him by virtue of the decree that these idols represented God's greatness. Nonetheless, God was not glorified by them because He had declared that His sole means of representation was through His Word in the ark that was sitting in the temple in Jerusalem. It was sufficient. There was no need to expand it and the very expansion itself was a rejection of its sufficiency, and therefore, the power of its God to transform through it.
The seeker churches have adopted the model that the gospel needs a makeover. It can still be that nerdy girl with a ponytail and glasses underneath but now she'll have far more makeup, cool accessories, contacts, and a minidress. All the Reformed jeer in disgust but let us wait to express our lack of delight in the neo-evangelical additions to the power of the gospel and realize that we have seen the same among ourselves. The gospel is an ugly girl to many of us without Aristotle or Freud. It is a boring nerd without the pazazz of enthusiastic experiences. The Word seems empty and less effective without the pretty colors of stained-glass windows and iconography. Maybe just a touch of visual symbolism here and a dash of incense there would make the gospel a prettier and more exciting girl to be with.
If the above were understood, it would bring an end to the pop-psychology market among Christians. What else do you need to save your marriage, bring up your children, deal with childhood trauma? Is the gospel not the answer to all things? Or is it impotent to transform all areas of your life, family, and society?
Biblical religion sees spirituality as a slow process of becoming like Christ through the gospel, not an immediate feeling of closeness to God through existential experience and philosophical knowledge. These means are not only fool's gold they take away one's trust in the gold market itself. They are empty replacements that only seem like they are doing something to the individual because of the bodily, fleshly chemicals they produce when one practices them.
The preaching of the Word of God creates a culture from the ground-up by transforming individuals slowly and, dare I say it, as invisibly as the God who creates. I do not mean that there will not be true physical effects of the preaching of the Word but rather that the process is so slow and far less dramatic than speaking in tongues and falling over before a crowd of ten thousand people that the transformation and knowledge thereof is almost invisible.
And that is the problem. We want to SEE change. We are idolaters by nature. We demand a spirituality that we can evaluate through intellectual or emotional stimulation because we demand a religion of sight rather than faith in the invisible workings of God. We are the gods of this religion, as the devil desires it. We are the ones who determine the efficacy of the simple gospel by how our spirituality makes us feel about our own progress and the progress of others around us. We are all liars and self-deceived though. Our spiritual progress is determined by the gospel at every stage, whether we have not only believed it and its sufficiency in the beginning but whether we are picturing it in our actions to follow. This means that biblical spirituality is about the gospel from beginning to end and it is sufficient from beginning to end. In other words, it never leaves the gospel. The gospel creates the gospel and never anything else. All that is of Christ is the pure gospel and all of the devil is anything that is not the pure gospel.
You are free to love philosophy, traditional ceremony or modern entertainment but none of it contributes to the gospel a single particle of transforming power and can only remain as an empty husk that can be discarded at any time. We do not change people by having the right tune in our songs, the right style of our clothes, the right philosophers in our libraries, the right food in our stomachs, or the right drink in our mouths. None of this is the true culture of God because God's culture isn't about songs or clothes or human wisdom or food or drink but about the glory of God who will not share that glory with anyone or anything else. He is the Savior of the world and what He has done does not need additional adornment for it to be fully sufficient and effective to change the world that He began to create millennia before Aristotle or Freud were a twinkle in their parents' eyes.
God's culture, therefore, does not need to mimic the atmosphere of medieval Byzantine folk religion or a smoke-filled pub in the late Rennaissance period. It can exist in those atmospheres but it neither needs nor is enhanced in any way by them. It alone transforms. It alone creates. It alone accomplishes the will of the Spirit who uses it to change all things to testify of the Son who gives glory to the Father. It alone must be our mission focus. Anything else is superfluous.
Thursday, September 15, 2022
The Difference between Christian and Secular Patriarchy
I love superhero movies. Yes, even when we are inundated with them, and even when they are horribly woke. I still have a place in my heart for them. Ultimately, I think it's because they stir something up that looks much like the gospel, especially the ones where the superhero dies to save humanity. It's the ultimate sacrifice that reminds us of Christ's ultimate sacrifice. The superhero is a protector to the very end. He is the ultimate man because he represents the ultimate Man.
There are two types of men. Some men are predators. Some men are protectors. Some men will use their strength and power to fulfill their desires and others will use that strength and power to protect the prey of these men from these men. In other words, there is a patriarchy that exists to feed the self-exaltation, the self-deification of fallen man, and there is a patriarchy that exists to protect the would-be victims of this sinful type of patriarchy. Every man, of course, has a capacity for both. There is in every man the desire to be a predator and a protector. The issue is what exists in the man's life to sway him into one role or the other at any given time.
For some, the desire to be protector actually stems from a selfishness to be exalted as a hero. This plays on his flesh and desire to be praised as a deity. He wants to be a superhero, not because he loves those he wishes to protect but rather because he desires to be loved by them. This man, unfortunately, is only a protector for the crowd. In secret, he will end up having little to no desire to be anything other than a predator. We'll call this the "Bill Cosby" type of protector.
Many people were shocked to learn that Bill Cosby had preyed upon women the way that he did, especially since he presented himself to be such a protector in the public eye. Anyone who grew up in the late 80s viewed Cosby as America's Dad. The problem is that the desire to exalt the self is not enough to make a man from the inside-out into a protector. He is a protector only due to temporary environmental factors.
This is why many men will decry prostitution and porn for their victimization of women in public but in private support the industry by participating in it.
I am not saying, of course, that Christians do no such things due to the conflict within them, but rather that Christians identify this hypocrisy as sin and seek to rid themselves of such contradictions in an effort to become only protectors and no longer predators at all. So I am not arguing that Christians do not sin but rather that they identify their hypocrisy as sin and are swayed to live in the role of protector both in public and in secret.
The reason why they do this is because biblical patriarchy, despite the overly simplistic condemnation of all types of patriarchy by a pseudo-feminist culture that is actually male chauvinism at its core, is all about protecting those who are weaker, whether they be women, children, or the poor and sick.
Biblical patriarchy exists as God's instruments, His images, through which He protects those who are weaker in the world. Hence, the law is primarily about protecting victims. There are no laws that exist in the Bible that favor the strong and their abuse of the weak. Those who use their power to prey upon the weak will answer to God for it.
Having said all of this, therefore, two things are imperative if we are thrive as a community. The first is that getting rid of the patriarchy has been disastrous for our secular culture. The predators convinced women in our culture that freedom from a man's authority is a necessity in becoming truly human. Instead, the argument of these serpents simply turned women into the slaves they desired to use as whores to fulfill their desires, votes for political power, and life-time workers for the industrial complex. Rather than becoming truly human, women were made into dogs.
Biblical patriarchy looks like oppression to the modern mind who has been brainwashed by predators because it protects women so that they might become truly human, and protection is limitation. It guards them from predators by limiting their relationships with other men both before and after marriage. It protects them by limiting their power in demanding that they defer to their federal heads. It protects them by limiting their voices in teaching and exercising authority in the community in order to keep them from both losing their motherhood in favor of fatherhood and from the judgment of God who desires the roles remain distinct.
But it does not use this authority that is given to the man, an authority given to limit the woman in order to protect her humanity, as a way to limit her humanity itself, and that is the difference between the secular and biblical models of patriarchy.
A woman should be encouraged to thrive within the role she is given and become her true humanity as a mother, and mothers are honored in Scripture, not dishonored. We do not treat them as slaves by making them whores, instruments of political power, or workers that do the jobs we don't want to do. In other words, they do not exist to fulfill our sexual desires at the cost of their dignity and honor as a daughter of God and a mother; they do not exist to be our politician in spreading gossip and slander against our opponents within a community, and they do not exist to be our personal slaves at home, even if we have the authority in the patriarchy to abuse in such ways and to make them so.
Does this mean that women do not have an obligation to honor the authority and fatherhood of the man by feeding into his manhood by fulfilling her role in marriage as one who is sexually available to her husband, honoring him where she can in her speech to others, and serving the household through work? Of course she still must do this if she is to become the female version of the Christ-like humanity that she is meant to become. The issue is whether the man, as her leader and teacher, accomplishes this in his wife in a biblical or unbiblical way.
The biblical way to make a woman who she needs to be is to become the protector the man is meant to be. This means showing that he cares for his wife and children by using his authority and power in service to them. It means being secure in his manhood so that he need not constantly reestablish it by asserting a selfish authority that is unwavering and irrational. In essence, his submission to God's mission and to God in self-sacrifice is the primary means by which he teaches his wife and children to do the same in their submission both God and to him; and in doing this, they take upon the image of God, the true humanity, into which God has called them.
There is a way to make your wife lesser, to make her a dog, all the while citing the biblical mandate for the man to take headship. Ephesians 5:25-6:4 is instructive here to counter this tendency.
25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she recognizes her husband's authority . . . 4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Here we have the man's marching orders from God. He must enter the patriarchy if he is to become true humanity. He must become a husband and a father. He must become a federal head. But he is not to become the secular picture of patriarchy but a biblical picture of patriarchy that presents the character and ministry of Christ to the church.
If anyone could demand that He be treated as God, it would be Christ. Yet, this passage tells us that he loved the church, not by demanding he get his way in all things, but rather by serving and giving Himself up in order that His Bride might attain to her full humanity. His children are not humans to rule over in order for him to feel superior and in control as the right of deity he wishes to assert, but rather as one who uses his position for the good of the others, and that good is to bring them up into godly human beings who are also self-sacrificing, loving, and in joyful submission to Christ's authority.
Biblical patriarchy is not primarily about control, therefore, but about how to use one's power to benefit the healthy and godly humanity of one's family, church, or nation. It is not about getting one's way. That would be secular patriarchy that desires to fulfill the serpent's plan for humanity in self-deification. Instead, biblical patriarchy stands as the means through which men become true men, women become true women, and children grow up to be one or the other without spot or blemish. It defends the weak and gives justice to those that a more predatory patriarchy has victimized. In short, it's becoming the superhero who saves humanity by dying because that is what our Superhero did for us.