Home » Posts tagged 'first amendment'
Tag Archives: first amendment
The Watershed Moment in the Decline of the American Church: Distinction Between the Sexes
The Beginning of the Bible
When you open your Bible to the first chapter of Genesis, you read in verse 27:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
As if that mattered, God repeats this in Genesis 5:1-2:
1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; 2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
Male and female. That’s it. God created male and female, two different sexes. When I read scripture I notice also two different genders for mankind, communicated by he, him, his and she, her, and hers. “It” never refers to a member of mankind, only the masculine or feminine genders.
God Designed
Furthermore, God designed distinction between the sexes. He gave each a distinct kind or type of body and emotional make-up. God also differentiated a separate, distinct role for each sex. Each role complements the other. According to this truth, God forbade same sex coital activity and marriage.
God also mandated the preservation or keeping of the designed distinctions between male and female. He banned or outlawed masculinity for women and effeminacy for men. God never rescinded any of that. He repeated the regulation in both the Old and New Testaments. God also instructed on it with varied statements intended for compliant application.
The fall of mankind in Genesis 3 resulted from abrogation of the male and female roles. The curse of sin on mankind then instructs also in Genesis 3 concerning the future disorientation of sexual roles. God prohibits men and women from changing or exchanging roles. He also requires them to preserve clear symbols or marks of distinction in appearance.
Rebellion
The rebellion against God starts with the man abrogating headship. It continues with the woman usurping male authority. Mankind perverts the God designed and created hierarchy.
Mankind follows role rebellion with role and then sex confusion. A person becomes his sex at conception. God ordains parents to train the conceived and then born male to continue a man in every way; likewise the female to be a woman in all manners.
The animus between male and female in Genesis 3 continues. People must support God’s design. They must also oppose all manner of role confusion. God especially demands this of true churches.
Long ago churches began relinquishing their responsibility to distinguish between sexes. The world started this decline, but churches followed. Churches accommodate role rebellion now in numbers of ways. Some churches take some stand against the decline, but nearly every church capitulates in some manner out of fear, convenience, or pragmatism.
Rick Warren and Southern Baptist Convention
In a very obvious, public way, the Southern Baptist Convention battles right now who can lead their churches. Will they be men or men and women? So-called “America’s pastor,” Rick Warren, fights for the egalitarian, role confusion in the Convention. He threatens the departure of thousands of “purpose-driven” churches from the convention over the issue.
Transgenderism, surgical sex changes, and gender neutral bathrooms make the headlines. This ship started sailing long ago. Conservative evangelical John MacArthur preached a standard exposition of Ephesian 5 on the two distinct marriage roles. Women in mass rose and left the auditorium in protest.
Sixty to seventy years ago, every woman wore a dress or skirt in church, let alone at home. Of course, every man wore pants. This was (and still is) the only symbol of sexual distinction. It’s why transgender “women” wear dresses like Kaitlyn Jenner. It’s also why transgender “men” wear short hair and pants.
Anecdotal
In the first month after my wife and I moved to Indiana, I went to a junior boys basketball game at the elementary school. A blue jean wearing woman coached the boys team. She stomped and yelled like Bobby Knight on the sideline. No one flinched at her antics. Just another day in rural, red-state Indiana. This, my friends, is the new normal.
The next night my wife and I went to an ice cream place and started up a conversation with some professing Christians there. We continued in pleasant interaction. Then I told the story of the junior boys game, its four overtimes, ending with sudden death. I described the coach something like in the previous paragraph. They met my story with no response. They went mute silent with pained expressions on their faces. After an awkward moment of hearing the crickets in the background and feet shuffling, subject changed.
For the Future of Churches and America
Maybe at one time in the United States, leadership fires a woman for behaving like a man. Today, leadership, maybe even female leadership, fires a man for criticizing the woman. This fits into the contemporary battle of first amendment rights. According to the Declaration of Independence, these inalienable rights come from God. The country banishes God from public conversation. Government and society in general prevent speech from and about God.
If you visit a business promoting transgenderism today, you could say the following. “I will be back when you stop pushing your left wing religion on me.” It is a very dogmatic religion established by the state today.
Churches will die with concession on sexual distinction. The Democrats famously booed including the name of God in their political platform in 2012. Will churches boo sexual distinction? Have we reached a moment when this is even an unwelcome subject matter?
To stop American decline, judgment must begin in the house of God. Churches must stand on the designed distinctions between male and female. They may say they support supernaturalism and young earth creationism. Will they worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator? If creation means anything in a practical way, it means male and female created He them.
How Does a Culture, Including a Christian Culture, Survive Without a Cancel Culture?
Previous Articles (One, Two, Three)
“Cancel culture” has a nice ring to it, a kind of poetic rhythm when one says the two words together. Go ahead, say them, “cancel culture.” It does now have a Wikipedia article. When I googled books with the terminology “cancel culture,” a glut of books appeared written in 2020-2021 with “Cancel Culture” in the title. I’ve not read one of them. I wanted to know how early the term appeared, because it’s been on my radar for at the most two years.
A book, Environmental Impact Assessment, written in 1979, reads:
We have come to the realization—yet again—that knowledge is power, that we need to keep building on our science and be ever mindful that a democratic society is based on genuine public engagement, not the so-called cancel culture that is denying genuine dialogue (author’s italics).
Before I graduated from high school, the quote appeared. Surprising. That’s the first and only usage I found in the twentieth century. I don’t know who popularized it. I went about trying to trace it, but I don’t know who originated the terminology. Originally, it seems, it was “call-out culture,” the idea here being that described by Adrienne Matei on November 1, 2019 in The Guardian:
The contemporary idea of a “call-out”, however, generally refers to interpersonal confrontations occurring between individuals on social media. In theory, call-outs should be very simple – someone does something wrong, people tell them, and they avoid doing it again in the future. Yet you only need to spend a short amount of time on the internet to know that call-out culture is in fact extremely divisive.
She pointed to a statement by former President Obama in an Obama Foundation Summit, which was on October 30, 2019, in which he said:
If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong word or verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, because, ‘Man, you see how woke I was. I called you out.’ That’s not activism.
The rise of the term “cancel culture” seems to occur in the middle of 2020, which also happened to be right at the beginning of the Covid-19 ‘pandemic.’ Now it is well entrenched, and the earliest popular book seems to be Primal Screams, which said:
Consider an example that materialized in March 2019, captured in a New York Times piece called “Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture.” It reported the case a (sic) young black man who identified as gay and was employed as a “sensitivity reader” by various publishing houses. In that capacity, he enforced “cancel culture” (i.e., the flagging that progressive groupthink would deem unacceptable).
Wouldn’t it be an interesting job to be a “sensitivity reader”? I had never heard of it until this quote. I googled that too, and it appears a lot, 40,000 times. As a pastor, a chunk of your congregation could take that job while listening to your sermons. The New York Times article was written on March 8, 2019.
Cancel culture emerged as perhaps one of the top issues for the 2022 mid-term elections. The cancel culture tried to cancel Joe Rogan on Spotify and failed. On the other hand, Whoopi Goldberg said something offensive about the Holocaust on her show, The View, and they cancelled her for a few weeks, so she could take time to reflect on her ignorance, stupidity, or callousness. Another aspect, it seems, of cancel culture is a reaction to the unvaccinated, losing one’s job even if he has natural immunity. This relates to the trucker protest on the U.S. Canadian border, which is bigger than a vaccination issue.
During this last six months I’ve worked on a lot of writing projects and wrote almost two chapters on sanctification for our book, The Salvation That Keeps On Saving. The two chapters are “Dedication and Sanctification” and then “The Biblical Theology of Sanctification,” the latter of which I’m halfway done, the former I’ve completed. For the latter, I am looking at every use of the related Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament words for sanctification, which is almost 1,000.
You reader know that God canceled in the most severe way everyone on earth except for eight people in Genesis 6-9. He ordered the cancellation of all the Canaanites. When Israel didn’t, Israel suffered greatly for that. The Assyrians and Babylonians tried to and succeeded greatly at cancelling Israel. The Bible requires churches to cancel someone’s church membership, called by us, “church discipline.” Jesus taught that in Matthew 18:15-17 (See our book, A Pure Church).
God says in Leviticus 20:24, “But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people.” Two verses later, He continues: “And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.” It’s not just Old Testament. Jesus said in Matthew 13:49, “So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just.” Many more examples occur.
Recent Comments