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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 God never rescinded any of that.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.
The Requirement of Censorship with the Separation of Church and State: The Truth of the Bible Requires Institutional Adherence
Recent Twitter Files reveal widespread and coordinated censorship there. Where vile language acceptable, those speaking truth have lost their jobs. Long before, state institutions censored the most important truths in human history without recrimination.
Before you continue, I offer you a guide. This post will move outside of most people’s box. I ask you not to delve into the establishment clause of the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Before you jump to practical ramifications, consider the truth of the post.
The Truth, the Logos
When you read Genesis 1 in the Bible, you are reading the account of the beginning of all time, space, and matter. Everything originates with God out of nothing. That is the explanation for everything. It does not even exist without Him, but He also sustains it.
The Bible record is truth as well as is the truth. Scripture presents itself as the truth. Jesus, God the Son, said to His Father God in John 17:17, “Thy Word is truth.” It might make you feel good and help your life, but that is just a byproduct of its truth. It works because it is the truth. The truth is one, because God is one. Nothing in this record contradicts any other part. God does not deny Himself.
God created man in His image and with His likeness. He intended man to reflect Him in his nature. Men should treat and look at the world in every aspect like God would. They should follow what God says, the truth, for and about everything. God expects men to view the world, see it, like He does.
Modernists speculate a fully naturalistic origination and continuation of all things. They opine this as progress from the superstition of ignorance. In fact, the premoderns had it right. It never was a natural world. The Greeks were right in their concept of cosmos, which they called logos, an intelligence that permeated all space and matter and in contrast to random and chaotic naturalism.
People in John’s day understood his Logos in John 1:1, who He said was Jesus Christ, was the source for this cohesion, intelligence, and order. Paul wrote that in Christ were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) and that by all things consisted (1:17). That was the Logos.
No Bifurcation of Truth
Paul was also emphatic in the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Jesus showed Thomas the wounds in His hands. He was one, whole Person. A physical body was the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Both body and spirit glorified God. This contradicted a pagan dualism, that separated truth into separate spheres of the spiritual and physical.
This New Testament presentation matches the Old Testament concept of truth, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). Every aspect of knowledge falls under the purveyance of God’s truth. Even though someone may divide the truth into various fields such as government, economics, math, and biology, it still is one cohesive, orderly truth proceeding from the one mind of one God.
Whatever field or region under the sovereignty of one truth splinters from the one, or whenever it does, it becomes distorted, superficial, meaningless, and subjective. The greatest advancements today in philosophy and science come in what Stephen Meyer calls “the return to the God hypothesis.” The universe is fine tuned. A cell is irreducibly complex. In philosophy, only God explains the existence of everything that exists. It’s impossible for something that exists not to have a reason for its existence.
Separating the truth from government, art, music, and economics, leaves any one in chaos and moral relativism. The gospel does not stand apart from all the truth of the Bible. And the gospel itself cannot and should not be divided into separate components of different degrees of subjective value. For instance, it is good for social reasons and perhaps psychological ones but not to reconcile to God and appease His holy wrath.
Religion the Truth, Equal with Facts
The state is good with religion as long it isn’t the truth. If it becomes the truth, it is equal with facts, science, math, and engineering. True religion cannot just stop with the true definitions of a man and of a woman. Next it says you go to Hell if you reject Jesus Christ. Even worse it limits your marijuana use.
Much of the philosophical conversation today revolves around what I here write. One faction, even considered conservative now, bemoans the loss of Western Civilization and its advantages. It is the water in which we swim, even if no longer Judeo-Christian ethics.
Classically liberal intellectuals warn readers and listeners. They won’t like the disappearance of Christianity, hearkening Nietzche’s prophecy about the death of God in the 19th century. However, if you remove the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ, the consummation of all things in the future literal, physical reign of Jesus Christ, you eradicate all of Christianity. It is a whole that cannot be separated into disjunctive parts.
Total Truth
For a long time Christians self-censored by backing away from total truth (the title of Nancy Pearcey’s book). They stopped bringing the truth to all the subjects and every institution, all ordained by God. The dismissal of one is the dismissal of all.
A moral statement is either true or false. True moral statements come from the Word of God. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, nothing else the Bible says is true. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 15. You cannot chop the Bible up like that. The moral values become meaningless without the truth of the history and the scientific declarations.
The table of nations in Genesis 10 is the truth. The prophecies of Daniel 11 are the truth. What scripture says all over about men and women is the truth. These are not subjective and relativistic. They are objective. They are true. All these writings should be taught everywhere as truth, not in religion class as an alternative along side the lies of other religions.
The separation of church and state, which is not in the United States Constitution, necessitates censorship. Anything church related is only church related and stays in the church. Only state stuff belongs in the state, which as many of you know, includes everything in the world, including biblical issues like marriage and parenting practices. Then the state labels all of theirs science and facts and outside of the state, unless cooperating with the state, subjective, private, and even conspiracy. If it is truth, it is your truth, subjective truth, which is fine as long as you keep it outside of institutions.
Take Moses into the Supreme Court Building
For awhile the state has been fine with a sculpture of Moses with the two tablets on the Supreme Court building. It is a decoration. It is a ritual. Maybe it’s even an archetype into which you read whatever you want. They cannot use it as grounds for decision making, even if its self-evident truths form the basis for logic, argument, and morality.
Perhaps a government and big business or oligarchical complex now joins in widespread censorship. Let’s just say that complex does censor the citizenry of the United States and other Western countries. Christians already censored themselves by segregating themselves away from God’s world and keeping the truth away from its institutions, whose very existence arises from that truth.
God requires more than talking about the truth at church. He requires adherence to the truth in every institution. This is the teaching of all nations. True discipleship requires national adherence. Churches at least should adhere, but their goals are further than that. They want the knowledge and dominion of His truth everywhere.
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