Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 24

Deuteronomic Blessings

In Deuteronomy, the central commands were to remember and give thanks, and those were the key ingredients in obedience. And God promised that He would bless Israel in every way for that kind of grateful obedience. He would bless them in their families, in the land, with good weather, fruitful harvest, safety from enemies and wild animals, plenty of food and wine, and growing populations and influence over other nations. This is what we call Deuteronomic blessing: blessing that begins in the heart but touches everything. These are spiritual blessings that impact everything. 

And Jesus put this meal at the center of the new covenant with the central commands to remember and give thanks in order to restore those Deuteronomic blessings to the world. What was offered to Israel in types and shadows in a small land in Palestine is now on offer to every nation through the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is why Paul can tell Gentile kids in Ephesus that honoring their parents comes with the promise of long life in the land. Covenant faithfulness reaps covenant fruitfulness. 

And it really is not faith or humility to deny this. Some Christians think it sounds more faithful or humble to say that if you obey, all you can expect is hardship and difficulty and suffering in this life but Heaven when you die. But this is not what Jesus said. He said that all who have given up families and houses and lands for His sake will receive a hundred fold in this life with persecutions and eternal life. We do not deny persecution, but we also must not deny the blessings that Jesus promised. 

So here we proclaim Christ crucified and risen for the death of all your sin and the resurrection and renewal of you and all things. Do you remember? Then give thanks with open hands and open hearts. This is not a vending machine. This is not a health and wealth gospel. But it is real covenant gospel. It is good news for us and good news for the world. The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. He comes to make His blessings flow, far as the curse is found.

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ. 

Photo by Valentina Ivanova on Unsplash

Why We Worship the Way We Do

The joy of the Lord is our strength, but a central part of what we are seeking to recover is a true Christian joy that is weighty and solid as opposed to the light and frothy joy of emotions and feelings. Emotions and feelings come and go, ebb and flow. You can sing a song, play a certain set of chords, turn the lights down, and say a certain set of words and with a high degree of accuracy manipulate peoples’ emotions and feelings. And a lot of modern Christian worship is aimed to do that. The best forms of this still believe that the gospel must be at the center of it, but they still frequently believe that they must present the gospel in a way that is calculated to hit people in the “feels.” 

We do not deny that God has given feelings and emotions, but we do deny that this often results in true regeneration, true Christian joy, or lasting obedience. Jesus said that the joy He gives can never be taken away. If your Christian joy comes and goes, it isn’t Christian joy. Christian joy is more like the foundation of your house than the weather outside. Christian joy is more like concrete and rock, not the breezes or temperatures or seasons. Christian joy is a mountain that cannot be moved. And this is because Christian joy is Christ in You. Christian joy is Christ in you the hope of glory. Christian joy is Christ in you for the forgiveness of all your sins, the certainty of eternal life, God’s sure blessing, and victory over sin, death, and the devil. 

And this is why we worship the way we do. We are not opposed to the warmth of emotion and feeling, but we are highly suspicious of our natural feelings and emotions. We know that they can come and go, and we’ve seen the damage that kind of worship can do. We are living in a land that has worshipped feelings and emotions, and now our land cannot distinguish feelings from truth. So we are here to cultivate the kind of joy that goes down deep, the kind of joy that Jesus gives that never fades. The kind of joy that really is strong to obey not matter what. 

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

7 Reasons Why Gay Conservativism Will Never Win

Introduction
In the aftermath of Dave Rubin’s breathless announcement that he and his sodomite lover are actively involved in eugenics, and the conservative world largely bowed and scraped at the altar of queerness, biblical conservatives need to address this head on with clarity, courage, and joy. 

This attempt to draw the line at transgenderism, while embracing homosexual mirage and motherless and fatherless families and buying and selling eggs and renting wombs is arbitrary, irrational, and therefore completely unconservative. I have written on this before, specifically with regard to the Daily Wire releasing the Jordan Peterson interview of Dave Rubin and his freezers full of breastmilk and almost simultaneously announcing that they want to become the new Disney and groom your children. Biblical Christians need to stop and think long and hard about whether they want to throw more of their dollars down that hole. Yes, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles have led a helpful onslaught against liberal nonsense and irrationality, and I’m happy to call them co-belligerents on a number of fronts. But Christians do not put their trust in horses or guns or numbers or money or brands. We trust in the living God, in Jesus Christ, and in His Word, and if that is not front and center, we cannot win. 

So here are 7 reasons why compromise with gay conservativism will never work, never win, and will land us with yet another cycle of compromises, corruption, and betrayal. 

1. You cannot draw arbitrary lines of morality and goodness and call it conservatism. Conservatism is not conserving the latest consensus. Conservatism is conserving truth, goodness, and beauty, grounded in God’s Word, revealed in nature, and preserved in faithful traditions and common law. The open embrace of sodomy and homosexual mirage is a completely novel and revolutionary attack on all three pillars of conservatism. God’s word is clear that homosexuality is right up there with incest and bestiality, nature itself declares the insanity and suicidal realities of homosexual sex (along with the STDs and fruitlessness), and our Christian tradition has uniformly rejected it as anything approaching normal, acceptable, or edifying. It is not true, it is not good, and it is certainly not beautiful, despite all their attempts with Botox and photoshop. You can’t win with arbitrary standards.

2. There are no brakes on this car. Closely related to the first point: the goddess of consensus always bites back. It has been said that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting for what’s for dinner. This is why conservatism has always been rightly suspicious of democracy. The founding fathers of our nation had done their homework, and they knew that democracy in its pure forms has always devolved into anarchy opening the door to tyranny. Related is the fact that democracy at its best is only a well-groomed mob, and at worst, it’s lynching and riots in slow motion (or not so slow motion). Jordan Peterson tried to walk some sophisticated philosophical line in his interview with Dave Rubin, noting that raising children without a mother was unusual and not normal, but that it has apparently now been accepted by our society. But as I have noted previously, it was not accepted by our society, rather, it was crammed down our throats by activist judges. As recently as 2008 Barack Obama was still insisting that marriage was between one man and one woman. Unless or until conservatives openly and clearly reject so-called gay marriage and homosexuality, they are no better than an ”evolving” Obama. Which means you cannot accept this aberration from morality and nature, and then object when the pedophiles demand to be accepted by the next “consensus.” And why not the trannys? Why not Bruce Jenner? What? Will you appeal to nature now? Will you appeal to truth? To tradition? You cannot submit to the demands of consensus and “evolving on the issues” today and then object when consensus comes back around and demands Drag Queens and child lovers. You can’t win with mob rule. 

3. While it is unpopular and probably illegal in several states and countries to say this out loud, a gay conservative movement is not only a walking contradiction, it’s a neutered movement. I mean this on several levels, but let’s begin with the way homosexuality emasculates men. While there are certain flamboyant forms of effeminacy, with campy styles, affected lisps and gaits (which by the way is just transgenderism lite), the overall point is that a man who refuses to take up the calling to pursue one woman, woo her, marry her, and be faithful to her and provide for her and any children the Lord gives until his dying day, that man is denying his manhood. He may be muscular. He may be smart. But if at that very point where he is called by God to be a man, in loving and leading a woman and her children, if at that point he refuses, he is neutering himself. Homosexuality (in both men and women) is deeply bitter and lazy. It is bitter in its rejection of God’s assignment and the way He has made the world (frequently with scars from abuse and mistreatment of the opposite sex), and it is lazy because it is easier to love someone who is a lot more like you. This is why the Greek word for “effeminate” means “soft” and it also frequently means “coward.” So this is why a gay conservatism will never win. They have already compromised with the most basic reality in the world. They have rebelled against nature, truth, and logic, and you think they will help you restore sanity to Biden’s circus? You can’t win without masculine courage.

4. We interviewed Doug Mainwaring on CrossPolitic recently, and he pointed out the sociological and political reality that you cannot work for small, limited government without strong nuclear families. It is a simple fact that as families breakdown through adultery, divorce, pornography, and abuse, the government grows to meet the growing demand for referees, social services, adjudications, and welfare. A conservatism that embraces a deformed version of the family, a version of family that is inherently unstable, is a recipe for continuing the big government statism of the liberals. You cannot have it both ways. The liberals know this. They openly want a demented version of “freedom,” with people free to have sexual relations whenever, however, and with whomever they want, and since that creates all kinds of chaos, destruction, and brokenness, their solution (the liberal solution) is a massive, bloated Savior-State that will pay all your bills, provide for all your children and your parents in their old age, health care, welfare, and send you crack pipes if you should need one. You cannot have a civil government that is limited by God’s Word and common law if you will not have families governed by the same standards. And if family can be re-imagined to be two dads and no mom (or three, depending on how you count), then why can’t the civil government hire 87,000 more IRS agents to take care of you? You can’t win by supplying your enemies with reinforcements.

5. What we are dealing with in the conservative political movement is nothing less than what we have been dealing with for decades in conservative churches. The play is laughably predictable, and conservatives are the kind of idiots who seem to be willing to fall for it every. single. time. It starts by allowing men to act like pimps and womanizers. It starts with pastors and politicians having women on the side, affairs, and porn, and the people let them. The pastors are not disciplined and fired, and the politicians are reelected. But you cannot admit fornication and adultery, and then not get homosexuality. Porn and prostitutes is just gay sex for only slightly less demented men. How so? Well, those hookers aren’t real women. You aren’t paying them to act like real ladies. You’re paying them to use their bodies, to get them to act like men, hot and ready, and then left behind like a cheap can of beer. You weren’t interested in a real woman, the kind of woman who wants to be cherished and loved, the kind of woman who longs for commitment, loyalty, and provision, the kind of woman who wants children and grandchildren. So we put up with heterosexual perversion, which, it turns out is just practice for homosexuality, and about five minutes later, you’ve got men in pulpits and politicians who are at least effeminate swishers, even if they aren’t yet swinging the other way. Give it five more minutes, and you’ve got guys who are saying they feel gay, but they aren’t practicing. It’s a spiritual gift, they say, some queer treasure, a heightened sensitivity to people and relationships. And if or when the churches and states allow those men to represent us and lead us, we might as well have women in those positions as well. They look better, and do the whole feminine thing way better than men with limp wrists. And so it goes, from fornication and adultery to effeminacy and feminism, to full blown homosexuality and since it’s all unnatural, hateful and destructive, why can’t they just change clothes and play Mr. Potato Head with body parts? You can’t win when you refuse to address the root problem.

6. The thing that conservative Christians need to get is that the root of all this compromise is guilt and despair. Why do we let this cycle go on over and over again? Because we are guilty, and we don’t know what to do about our sin. We’ve looked at porn; we’ve gone to hookers. We’ve touched people, and we’ve been touched. We’ve abused, and we’ve been abused. And when that guilt and shame builds without being dealt with biblically, people despair, believing that there is no way out, and then they make deals with the devil and one another. The currency of the devil is fear and guilt, and the systems of the devil function on this currency. We agree to protect one another, not confront sin, not deal with sin so long as others will leave us alone. I won’t bring up your sin, if you won’t bring up mine. I won’t confront your hypocrisy, if you won’t confront mine. But this is like a herd of pigs rushing off a cliff into the sea, grabbing on to the tail of the pig behind them hoping not to drown. And again: you cannot keep this kind of compromise contained. You cannot compromise sexually and have high standards financially. You cannot compromise and lie about marriage and fidelity, and not become a liar and a thug in the rest of your life. The problem is guilt and fear, and the only solution is the cross of Jesus. The only solution is to confess your sins, get clean, and repent of your sins biblically. Step down from office, resign, and stop leading people toward destruction. 

And the doctrine of justification by faith alone is crucial here. This is the doctrine that teaches that you can become completely clean before God. Paul says in Romans 8 that there is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. This “no condemnation” does not mean “no consequences.” It means that in the midst of the consequences of your sin, you can still live under the blessing of God. It is this “no condemnation” that gives compromised leaders the courage to step down, and it is this “no condemnation” that gives people the courage to insist upon it and trust God through it. Incidentally, this is why conservatism must also be predominantly Protestant because Roman Catholic doctrine rejects justification by faith alone and insists that you can lose your justification. While there are many truly conservative catholics, and I’m thankful for them, as long as there is any tinge of guilt left, they are liable to the hooks of the devil. You can’t win with hypocrisy. 

7. Lastly, a gay conservatism cannot win because it cannot have the blessing of God. You can say, “God bless America” all day long, but if you are doing things intentionally, flagrantly, openly, defiantly that God condemns, you cannot and you will not have the blessing of God. Jesus taught that God made man in His image in the beginning “male and female,” and for that reason, a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, so that the two may become one flesh (Mark 10). This is what it means to be made human in God’s image, and this is what marriage and sexual union are. And they cannot ever be anything else. Period. Full stop. You may have a brand that is popular, but if you do not have God’s blessing, you will fail. You may have deep-pocket donors, but if you do not have God’s blessing, you cannot win. And to all the conservative Christians who are tempted to think that the National Conservatism Conference or the Daily Wire or Prager U or Trump are our only hope, remember Gideon’s 300 men. We don’t need money; we don’t even need numbers. We need the blessing of God. Speak up now. Tell your leaders that they must be faithful men who fear God, and if they cheat on their wives require them to resign. If they will break those vows, you cannot trust them to keep any promises. And if your go-to conservative leaders are not actively resisting every form of homosexual compromise, then get new leaders. Cancel your subscriptions. Vote with your dollars. Vote with your feet. Tell them that you are only interested in a true biblical conservatism because you are interested in actually winning. Pride always goes before the fall. You can’t win without the blessing of God.

Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash

God Walks with Sinners

Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness because of their unbelief and disobedience. God brought them to the promised land fairly quickly, but when the spies returned with an unbelieving report of giants in the land, the people refused to believe God and so they were sentenced to 40 years of wandering. Only Joshua and Caleb, the faithful spies, would be granted entrance into the land. Scripture says that for the most part God was not pleased with that generation; most of them died in the wilderness in unbelief. 

Nevertheless, God provided from them in the wilderness abundantly. He sent them magical bread six days a week, and then even quail on occasion, and gushing water from rocks in the middle of the desert. He supernaturally cared for their well-being, protecting them from enemies, and Scripture says He even cared for their shoes, so that they did not wear out. In the midst of judgement, God still remembered mercy. In the midst of walking through the consequences of their sins, God walked with them in the tabernacle, and the fire by night and the pillar of cloud by day, providing shade from the burning heat. 

Sin frequently has consequences, but there is a massive difference between walking through those consequences under the blessing of God or the cursing of God. God is full of compassion; He makes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. But for the just, for those who look to Him in faith and gratitude, that rain is even sweeter.

Perhaps you are enduring some consequences of your past actions even here today. The offer of this table, the promise of this table, is that Christ will be with you, even there, even in the consequences of your sin. Here is your bread in the wilderness. Here, is even wine from the grapes of the promised land, ahead of time.

If you have confessed your sins, then you are clean. You are completely forgiven. This bread and wine is God’s solemn promise of that forgiveness, and His solemn vow that you are now under His blessing. Scripture says that this is a cup of blessing. Would you have the blessing of God on your life? Then come in faith. Confess your sins. Humble yourself completely. And rejoice in Christ. 

And come and welcome to Jesus Christ.  

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

Children Are Most Welcome

Children are most welcome in our services. If you are newer to our community, it could be a little surprising or startling if you aren’t used to it. We don’t have children’s church or Sunday school during our worship services on purpose. Jesus said, let the little children come to Me. Throughout the Bible, children are recognized as full members of the congregation of God’s people. When Israel wanted to leave Egypt, Pharaoh offered to let just the men go to worship at the mountain, but Moses insisted that all of Israel had to go, including the little ones. 

At the same time, we recognize that this presents some challenges. So three encouragements on this front:

First, while the children are most welcome, and the occasional squawk or cry is full expected, please do be mindful of the congregation around you. Feel free to stand in the back, or take a walk in the fellowship hall, listen to the service in one of the cry rooms, or use the discipline room, as needed. 

Second, like most good things, practice and forethought go a long way toward getting better at good work. So practice for church with your children throughout the week. Short times of family worship can be great opportunities to practice sitting still, remaining quiet, saying Amen, saying the creed, singing the Lord’s prayer, raising hands, and kneeling. If a bunch of what we do here on Sunday is the only time they ever do it, you might sympathize with their confusion and frustration – you’ve never taught them how to do this. And remember that meeting with Jesus is our joy, so practice and teach with lots of joy (and maybe some treats along the way). 

Third, parents, do not grow weary in doing good. Do not grow weary in wrangling little people. Do not be embarrassed to faithfully shepherd your little ones during the service. We are all cheering you on and don’t be afraid to ask other members of the congregation for a helping hand as needed, and please be assured that God is pleased with your sacrifice of praise. Maybe you sang two and half verses, heard a third of the sermon and took the bread and johnny spilled half your wine, but be fully assured: the blessing of God rests on parents who joyfully strive to bring their children to Jesus. 

Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

Danny & Hannah

“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy iscruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned” (Song 8:6-7).

We live in a world that uses the word “love” all the time, and yet it clearly doesn’t know what the word means. Love has been twisted into a mystical experience that can come and go, and that is virtually indistinguishable from lust. Love has been reduced to feelings and sensations, and when the feeling fades, when the sensations subside, the natural conclusion is that love has ended. 

But Scripture teaches that love is as strong as death. In fact, it is stronger than death. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. It is a fire that cannot be put out, a vehement flame, a coal that still burns at the bottom of the sea. The zeal and jealousy of love burns even like the grave, even like Sheol. True love is commitment. True love is loyalty. True love is dead set, fixed, steadfast, immoveable, unbreakable. True love is firm, bold, iron clad. People can and do fail, but love, true love, never fails. 

It is right that marriage vows are made “till death do us part,” since marriage is a gift for this life, and in the life to come, the Lord says that we are no longer married or given in marriage. But this does not mean that our love ends in death. This doesn’t mean we won’t know one another in the resurrection or love one another. The resurrection is not when we look back in longing for the good old days of this fallen world. No, in the resurrection, nothing good will be lost, and everything good will come into its fullness. In this world, we see glimpses of the good gifts of God getting better, as for example in the care of an elderly man for his wife of over 50 years, but in the world to come, we will see the best versions of everything and everyone. No good thing will be lost, and every good thing will be transfigured into its best form, including love. As the Psalmist said: at Thy right hand are pleasures forevermore. 

Whatever marriage is destined to become it will not be tame, lame, or boring. It will not be less glorious than what we celebrate here in this life. No, marriage in the life to come will be transfigured into something far more glorious. And at the center of it will be real love, deep loyalty, friendship, passion, joy, and laughter. But this means that even our sexuality will be raised and glorified. We will not be sexless creatures in the resurrection. We are made male and female, and it was very good, but in the resurrection, we will inherit some heightened form of sexuality that I suspect will make all the current liberationists blush. 

And we know all of this because God is love. Our love in this world is borrowed. We love because He loved us first. While the pagans and unbelievers have some taste of real love because they have been loved with existence and good food and beauty, it is God’s saving love in His Son Jesus that has come for this fallen world to remake all things, to put all things right. This underlines the firmness of love, the security of love, the immovability of love. To say that God is love is to say that love does not change. Love is not moody. And if God’s love will put all things right, then there is a fixed nature to the world, to reality, to gravity, to logic, to nature, to male and female and marriage. 

Love is not whatever anyone wants it to be. It is that very delusion that brings every form of sadness and brokenness into this world – the delusion that love can be anything, that love changes, morphs, and evolves. But that is the path of lust, not love. Lust is self-seeking, self-serving, self-pleasing. But love gives of self, sacrifices self, denies self for the good of others. Their good is not whatever they are lusting for. Their good is what God made them for. Their good is what God loves them for. And so our love is meant to line up with God’s love in laying ourselves down so that others might grow into more of the glory God has for them. 

In fact, this is why God sent His Son into this world. The wages of sin is death, and therefore everything touched by sin turns to dust. It is contaminated and cursed. So this is the great problem in this world: God made a good and beautiful world that we contaminated with our sin and death. But God sent His only Son into this world, and down into the depths of this sin-cursed world in order to take the curse away. 

Jesus was condemned as a criminal and nailed to the cross for our sins, for our lust, for our selfishness, for our pride, for our lies and sinful anger, both as God’s great justice, and as His great love. His jealousy is as fierce as the grave. He is jealous for His holiness and for His justice, but He was simultaneously jealous for His people. So He went down into the grave, down into Sheol, to the bottom of the sea, and He went down into death for us, and He went down into death to find us, and to find every good thing. It was God’s love that sent Him, and it was God’s love that struck Him. Jealousy is as cruel as the grave, as fierce as Sheol. 

Scripture says that God laid on Him the iniquity of us all, but since we were full of iniquity, you might as well just say: He laid us on Him. He nailed us to the cross in Him. When Christ died, we died. But God did not allow His holy one to see corruption. He did not leave His soul in Sheol. When the justice of God was fully satisfied for all our sin, the fire of His love was still burning bright. All the waters of God’s righteous fury could not quench love. And the Song of Solomon actually says why: that vehement flame, that flame that is as strong as death, is literally, the flame of Yahweh, the flame of God, a flame that will burn forever. And it will burn until every tear is wiped off of every face, until everything sad has come untrue, until everything good has come into its best form, until the City that is God’s Bride has come down out Heaven to Earth.

So Danny, my charge to you is to imitate this fierce love of God in your love for Hannah. In particular, I charge you to love Hannah by loving her consistently. This world sends floods and waves, but God’s love is the great sandbar beneath them all. As you rest in Him, you will not be moved, and as you are immoveable in Him, you will be a great source of comfort and security for your wife. The glory of men is their strength, and this means that God has called you to be strong for Him and today, strong for Hannah and the children the Lord gives you. But you cannot be strong on your own. You must be strong in the Lord, and this means that you must cast all your cares on Him. Do not cast all your cares on Hannah. Cast them on the Lord. As you do this, your love for Hannah will be strong and bold. Danny, I do not mind saying that you have chosen very well, and I am very proud of you. And I know your dad is too. 

Hannah, my charge to you is actually the same: to imitate this fierce love of God, but because you are a woman, when you do this, it will necessarily look somewhat different. The Bible teaches consistently that what a woman needs to particularly practice in her interactions with her husband is respect. While love and respect are distinct actions for us, remember that all of the virtues are one in God, and so there is a sense in which when a wife is full of the love of God it enables her to respect her husband. The glory of a woman is beauty – the way she cultivates and glorifies life inside of her and all around her. Hannah, you are truly lovely today, and as you take up this calling to respect Danny, look up to him, follow him, help him, you will be his glory and his crown. 

On Hating Pastors & Presidents:

Authority, Honor, Submission, and Obedience

Introduction
If you watch or listen or read much of what is coming out of Moscow, Idaho, you might be forgiven for getting the impression that we are all political activists. I suppose that’s true or not true depending on what you mean by it. By its traditional meaning though, we aren’t anything of the sort. Perhaps we have a slightly better average turnout for elections, but I don’t think many of us really relish political involvement at all. Most of us would rather not worry about it. Most of us would rather be home with our family or singing psalms or starting some new business. Most of us wouldn’t go out of our way to go to a Trump rally, and a bunch of us didn’t vote for him one or both times he ran, even if we are thankful for what God has done through him. 

However, we are committed to the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all, and this includes the political sphere, and therefore, we are committed to saying so, and repeatedly, if necessary, since that seems to be one of the central places where that is being denied, at least publicly. We love Christ because He died for our sins, and we hate it when He is ignored or mocked publicly. We refuse to deny Him before men because we long to be acknowledged before the Father. 

Submission & Authority
But I think it’s worth reviewing some of our longstanding principles, things we have preached and taught for decades that drives what we are doing around here. We are Christian conservatives, not libertarians, even though there are a number of folks that prefer that name in our midst. But our central, core convictions are firmly conservative, not libertarian, the difference being a more robust affirmation of the goodness of civil government, more emphasis on the doctrine of original sin and the tendency of men to selfishly screw everything up (especially power), and deep gratitude for the common law tradition, where God’s law has been percolating through cultures over time. We are not traditionalists because we are Protestant, and therefore, Sola Scriptura applies to the public square just as much as it applies to worship. Scripture is our final, perfect authority in every sphere. 

We believe that Jesus is Lord, and that means that He is Lord of all and over all. There is no absolute human authority on earth because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Only Jesus is the perfect man because He is also fully God, and therefore He is Lord of the public square, Lord of the Church, Lord of every family, and Lord of every soul. This means that all other claims to absolute authority are blasphemous and idolatrous. Only Christ deserves that absolute allegiance and worship, and therefore, all our honor and reverence and obedience to human authorities is in Christ, under Christ, as to Christ. But what that means is that the different governments established by God are equals before God, even with their different assignments. Just as Idaho and South Carolina interact as equals as states, just as the president of France and the president of Germany could meet on equal footing, so too the heads of families, churches, and states meet as equals, since their authority comes from the same place. And even though the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of our government have different tasks, different assignments, the nature of their authority is fundamentally the same, and within their respective assignments they interact as equals, and therefore, our reverence, honor, and obedience should match that equality. 

You can always tell a culture’s idols by where authority is automatically accepted and obedience most strictly required versus those places where discussions immediately run to the exceptions and abuses. In our land, the bloated nature of civil government is obvious because it is largely assumed that you must always obey, no questions asked, since they have guns, police, prisons, and well, all the power. Oh yeah, and Romans 13. But in the same church where that assumption is embraced thoughtlessly, you might have a nice Christian lady at a women’s Bible study (let’s call her Mrs. Smith) announce that she needs to leave a little early since her husband asked her to have dinner ready at a certain time. And if there aren’t snide comments and disrespectful jokes made about it, there may still be some raised eyebrows, and maybe some text messages afterwards about praying for the Smith’s marriage, and maybe even direct questions to Mrs. Smith about whether everything is going OK, and if she needs to talk, she knows she would have a “safe” place. 

The point being, in many modern conservative churches, the authority of the family and the husband/father is utterly undermined, dismissed, and mocked regularly, even while the authority of the state looms large over everything, with pastors bowing and scraping before their every whim and demand. At the same time, I know that there are some who see that and hate that, but they also see some who appear to be in our ranks who are not actually interested in submitting to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. There are some who are rebels at heart and who don’t mind using the current abuse of civil authority as an excuse for the sin of belligerence, there (in the civil sphere) and almost always elsewhere. They mock civil magistrates, not with prophetic love, but with Satanic disdain. And you can tell that they have no idea what spirit they are of because their marriages and families are often in shambles, they can hardly hold down a job, and they refuse to become or stay members of a local church and submit to elders and pastors. You can also tell them by their angry outbursts online, their inability to be corrected or admonished, and the beleaguered looks on everyone close to them.

These people are not helping, not part of our work, and need to be told plainly that they are part of the problem. They are tyrants and terrorists, and no one should want to let them anywhere near the steering wheel of anything important. As one friend has pointed out, if these political firebrands were suddenly put in charge of America, we’d be in the same place we currently are or probably even worse. Contempt for authority is tyranny. You might be a raging tinpot dictator online right now, railing against Biden and AOC and the Fed and the Great Reset, but as soon as you’re in charge of anything, you’d be doing the same things they are, even if you’d find other factions to squash and destroy.   

Using the Same Measure
The kind of Christian community we are building here in Moscow affirms and honors the goodness of civil authority, ecclesial authority, and familial authority, with the Lord Jesus over them all. What I have told couples for many years, when we walk through Ephesians 5 together in pre-marital counseling, is that this means Jesus is standing behind the head. So long as the head is leading toward Jesus, in obedience to Scripture, submit and obey gladly. So long as the head is leading in things indifferent (styles, preferences, and true wisdom calls), we submit and obey gladly and leave room for differences of opinion. But when the head begins to disobey the Lord Jesus openly, flagrantly, leading away from Christ, true Christian submission to the authority of Christ cheerfully ignores instructions, disobeys, and seeks to wisely subvert that disobedience. And we insist that this is love. Love seeks the other’s good and so it cannot go along with those things that harm and undermine Christ’s authority. 

We have been over this many times, but I don’t think we can say it enough: a man who begins leading his family astray theologically must not be followed. A man who wants to explore Roman Catholicism or Woke Evangelicalism must not be followed. This doesn’t mean the marriage must necessarily end, but a Christian woman need not bow down to or “pray through” statues of Mary any more than Daniel’s three friends needed to bow down to the Babylonian shrine. Neither may a Christian woman go along with sexual immorality or financial folly. A man is duty bound to provide for his wife “as his own body,” and running a family into the ground with a porn or gambling addiction needs no permission to confront and resist. 

Abigail was righteous in subverting the folly of her husband Nabal. The midwives were righteous to lie to Pharaoh and save the Hebrew baby boys. Paul was righteous to evade arrest and be let down out of a window. Peter and John were righteous to disobey the instructions of their “pastors” to stop preaching Jesus. And yet, David was righteous in refusing to harm the Lord’s anointed, Saul, even when he was hunting his life. Paul was righteous to apologize for calling the High Priest a white-washed wall. And Jesus was righteous to have his disciples pay an unjust poll tax to avoid giving offense. Christians must get their head and heart around both sets of Scriptures. 

One additional note on this is the fact that the Lord Jesus has given specific assignments to those He delegates authority to. The civil magistrate has been assigned the ministry of justice, punishing evildoers, and praising the righteous. The family has been given the assignment of caring for health, welfare, and education. The church has been given the assignment of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. When a magistrate begins taking care of health, welfare, and education, the magistrate is actively disobeying the Lord Jesus. Christians must honor and obey the magistrate, while not approving of the magistrate’s disobedience, looking for every opportunity to confront and subvert that disobedience in love. This confrontation and subversion is the same kind of confrontation that we would counsel a wife or child or parishioner with a disobedient husband, father, or pastor. We counsel honor wherever honor is possible, obedience in all things that are not enabling sin or furthering disobedience, strategic obedience or disobedience in certain areas, and resolute, cheerful disobedience where commands require disobedience to God.  

We teach the goodness of authority and submission in all three spheres, and we are seeking to do so with biblical equity. The same Lord is over all, and therefore, we want our honor and obedience to reflect that. The same measure we use to measure obedience and honor in the family is the one we want to use in the church and in the public square. And we are endeavoring to use the same measure we use to distinguish obedience to indifferent things from disobedience to primary things in all three spheres. And just because an authority is being disobedient in one respect, does not mean that their authority is completely abolished, or that our duty to honor has suddenly ceased. We counsel wives to submit to their disobedient husbands in every possible way. We counsel parishioners to submit to their disobedient pastors in every possible way, seeking the peace of the people of God. And likewise, we counsel citizens to be in submission to magistrates in every possible way, honoring them and their position as they would honor Christ the King.  

If a husband began serving his family the Lord’s Supper, we would correct him because he is not a pastor. If a pastor began insisting that the church ought to adjudicate crimes, we would correct him. And if the magistrate begins insisting on health measures that do not amount to pulling people from a burning building, we correct him. And if upon correction, these authorities do not back down, we would give permission to those under their authority to ignore those claims. While the stakes are much higher when it comes to the duties and assignments that God gives to the different governments, we teach that it is love to hold authorities to their assignments. It is love for the Supreme Court to strike down unconstitutional laws passed by congress, just as it is love for the President to veto unconstitutional laws. It is love when different branches of government check and balance one another, and it is love when different branches of God’s governments (families, churches, or states) do the same.   

Conclusion
Psalm 2 says that when the nations rage and plot vain things against God and His Christ, saying let us break these bonds asunder, the Lord sits in Heaven and laughs. He holds them in derision. And we believe that when authorities resolutely defy God and refuse to be bound by His sovereign law, that we should join the Father in laughing at their tinpot tyrannies. This includes men who are pigs, pastors who are snakes, and magistrates that are foxes. 

If by political, you mean that we are committed to the Lordship of Jesus over all, that we love and honor these various governments that God has established in the world, then I suppose we are a fairly politically active Christian community and guilty as charged. But what this means is that on any given night, you’ll find most of us at home with our families eating dinner, singing psalms, reading stories, playing games, and puttering in our gardens. We are busy paying our taxes, obeying husbands, parents, pastors, and a few of us might have an American flag hanging off the front porch. We do believe that what we are doing is politically active and potent, but we don’t think the civil government is nearly as important as it currently thinks it is. 

Jesus said that sometimes obedience and loyalty to Him will look like hatred of father and mother, spouse or children, and so it does. But by the same token, depending on the culture and the moment in history, obedience to Jesus might also look like hatred of your pastor or president. And if that is what is called for, and you are not willing to do so, you cannot be His disciple.  

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Baal, Eros, and Christ

On Women Being Forced to Be Pregnant

Introduction
So the pagans are wailing, screaming, crying, and I’m expecting any minute for someone to start cutting themselves on national television. Although, we’ve certainly seen imitations of it already in theatrical displays of menstrual blood, taking abortion pills on camera, and AOC pretending to get handcuffed by police. But the whole thing is reminiscent of the prophets of Baal shouting and crying and dancing around their altars. 

And if we know which side we’re on, our part is clear. Our job is to mock them. Our job is to mock their false gods. Our job is to point out that their gods are not real, and that they are deaf, dumb, and blind. They are probably sleeping. They are probably on vacation. They are probably in the lavatory checking social media. 

Introducing Baal the Giant
But in order to do this well, in order to play our part, we really must know which gods to mock. There are several in the modern pantheon vying for preeminence. Demos-State is one of the ugly gods with a lot of external force and power. Demos-State is Statism, the worship of the civil sphere as a god, in the name of the people (demos), in the name of so-called democracy. In the ancient world, they called him Baal, which means “lord.” Baal proclaims that it stands for the “will of the people,” which turns out to mean the outcomes and decisions that they believe the people really wanted if they were as enlightened as their statist overlords (and shut up down there!). Baal is a fairly typical abuser. It’s a religion with a hefty coercive force, with lots of guns and prisons and money. This false god is all kinds of passive-aggressive, and gets most of its power from enforcing a sort of constant Stockholm Syndrome on the populous. Baal demands, threatens, confiscates, and then gives you back a tiny bit of what was stolen and pretends to wipe away your tears with stimulus checks, tax credits, and porn. It blames you for the problems, and always takes credit for improvements. 

While this Demos-State Baal god is powerful, it’s actually fairly clumsy, hulking, and fragile. Baal is like a giant. It is large, forceful, can do a lot of damage, but it also moves relatively slow and is a largely unsuspecting target. A well-aimed, smooth stone could take him down. And he really is hard to miss. But I actually don’t think he’s the biggest problem, or the most revered god in our land. He gets his power mostly from another. 

Next Up Eros
So the god who really must be at the center of our sights and mockery is Aphrodite or better, Eros, the sex-lust goddess. This is currently the cult that is driving the power of the Demos-State. Why must the Baal-State continue to accumulate power? Because the Baal-State is guaranteeing orgasms on demand, sex on demand, porn on demand, and promises to pay for all the damage left in the wake. Pagans have always worshipped sex. Gravity always falls down. And when men refuse to worship the Maker, they begin worshipping that which was made. And sex is consistently at the top of the list of created things people worship. 

This helps explains the obsession with sex, sexual orientations, sex change operations, sex education, puberty blockers, and of course the sacrament at the center of all it: abortion. And so we return to the shrieks and howls of the Left in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, with claims that women are now being “forced” to keep their pregnancies. Oh horrors. Next, you’ll be telling me that people are being forced to keep their winning lottery tickets. In other words, conservatives need to get really good at responding to this claim with a hearty belly laugh. 

This is like complaining to an Italian restaurant that you are being “forced” to eat Italian food. This is like complaining to the pilot of your plane, after landing in Denver, that you are being “forced” to go to Denver. This is like ordering a new dress or tuxedo, getting it in the mail, putting it on, and then wailing that you are being forced to wear new clothes. Shall I go on? There’s a common denominator here, and it’s one of the Left’s favorite words. And the word is “choice.” You had a choice to go to the Italian restaurant or not. You had a choice to buy that ticket, to get on that plane or not. And you had a choice about whether or not you wanted to order those clothes and put them on. 

But, but… But What about Rape?
Of course the come back is: but what about rape? In the case of rape, something was forced. Yes, but don’t miss the rhetorical ploy. We went from talking about all pregnancy being “forced” to one very particular and relatively rare occurrence. Pregnancy resulting from rape accounts for around 0.5% of pregnancies each year. That’s less than 1% of all pregnancies. Feel free to check my numbers but a quick google search tells me that studies suggest around 32,000 pregnancies result from rape each year, compared to the overall total of 6,369,000 pregnancies per year, according to the CDC. So the vast majority of pregnancies were not forced at all. 99.5% of pregnancies were not the result of rape. In 99.5% of pregnancies, the sex was consensual, and the woman made a choice. 

So let’s be clear that in 99.5% of pregnancies no one is forcing a woman to be pregnant. She made choices that naturally lead to pregnancy under the right conditions in God’s world. 

But even in the case of rape, the fact remains that while a horrific crime was committed, and a woman’s body and honor has been violated, the resulting child is not the criminal. The child is a gift. The child is an immortal soul, bearing the image of God, with gifts and glory and potency for the good of the world. Despite the horrific cime; the child did not commit a crime. And in no scenario is it just to punish the child for the crimes of his or her father. If you want justice, report the crime to the proper authorities and ask the judge to punish the criminal to the fullest extent of the law. If biblical law were honored in our land, this would lead to the execution of many rapists. And that would be justice. 

But because our land balks at God’s justice, criminals are slapped on the wrist, while babies are crushed and pulled apart like some kind of medieval execution ritual. This never accomplishes justice, and it never makes the mother feel better. It only adds injury to injury, crime to crime. And now instead of only being the victim of one crime, the woman becomes an accomplice in a second crime against her own flesh. This is like being the victim of an assault that results in a bad bruise on your leg, and then determining that in order to get rid of the bruise you need to amputate your leg. Even in the cases of rape, a child conceived is like winning the lottery. Every human life is an immortal soul that bears God’s brilliant image. Even in the horrific crime of rape, the gift of life is a cosmic blessing. 

Feeding the Brute Beasts
Christians need to master this argument and be ready with the answers. It is simply false that woman are being “forced” to be pregnant or stay pregnant. First off, I (nor anyone I know) thinks any woman should be forced to stay pregnant indefinitely. I am very much in favor of the usual gestation time of human babies, in the nine month range, give or take. But second, the hidden assumption here and in many of our conversations related to sex is the assumption that people must have sex incessantly, constantly, all the time, everywhere, forever, world without end. But the assumption is thoroughly Darwinian and Freudian and pagan, and it is not Christian, Biblical, or even natural. Darwin reduced human beings to animals, and so essentially taught that they are driven by pure, brutish instincts, chemicals, and material make-up and circumstances, and Freud laced the whole thing with sexual urges and warned that people do bad things if they are not allowed to release those sexual urges. And so it is assumed that if you tell a human being that they should not, must not act out certain sexual desires, that you are harming them. And you are driving them to do evil things. 

This is why you must not tell a homosexual that their desires are unnatural and shameful; that would cause them to feel bad and perhaps make them do bad things. This is the cause of the screaming demand that various Christian counseling and therapies be outlawed. Likewise, you must not tell a man who thinks he is a woman that he is in fact a man and will always be a man. The shrieks and cries go up that this is the cause of high suicide rates among transgenders. And if you’re paying attention here, this means that pro-life pregnancy centers are quickly being lumped together with reparative therapy as causing harm to women, “forcing” them or at least coercing them or tricking them into carrying their unwanted pregnancies.

So you must see the play: everyone must have sex. Everyone must be allowed to have sex all the time, with anyone, anywhere. We must act like animals. Otherwise, (checks notes), we will act like animals. If we do not serve our instincts, our instincts will turn bloody. If we do not serve our lusts, our lusts will turn violent. But this is like saying if you don’t feed the bears, the bears will eat you. If you don’t leave food out for the mountain lions, the mountain lions will eat you. And when people are eaten one after another, right on schedule, the shrieks and demands are that we haven’t yet left out enough meat for the wild animals. Let’s have another congressional committee to find out who is not leaving out fresh, raw meat for the carnivores! The reason people are dying is because you aren’t playing along. Christians are the people standing around saying, maybe we shouldn’t feed the wild animals. And they look at us like we have three heads. They think we are the problem. They think you are strange.

This is exactly what Peter said, “For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries: Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you…” (1 Pet. 4:4). And in Jude, it describes similar patterns of lust and fornication as acting like “brute beasts,” corrupting themselves (Jude 7, 11). This is why they cannot understand why we won’t join them, why we won’t feed the beasts. All of us were brute beasts in Adam, but Christ made us alive. We were once mad in our sins, but Christ forgave us and sent the demons into the pigs. He died for our sins, for all our demons, and now we are seated in our right minds and fully clothed in His righteousness alone. This is why they don’t understand, and this is the message we have for them. There is a way out. There is a living God who hears and saves. And His name is Jesus. He was crucified and raised from the dead for sinners.

Conclusion 
Putting all of this together, we should not miss the thoroughly religious nature of what is happening all around us. The shrieks and protests and lip curled threats are nothing short of religious enthusiasm and frenzy. And so we must not fear. They worship sex. They worship orgasms. They worship choice. They worship raw power. But idolatry is always destructive and disappointing. Sex gods will always let you down. And you will end up with STDs, broken hearts, and apparently when it gets really exciting, blow up dolls, which are great emblems for the emptiness of this religion.   

Idolatry also has a way of taking this world far too seriously and at the same time (ironically) not really enjoying and appreciating the world for the gift that it is. The Christian invitation is to take God seriously so that this world may be received as His pure gift. Take your sin seriously, take the Cross seriously, so that you may be set free. If you worship the gift, if you obsess over the gift, you will destroy it in the process, but if you worship the Giver and the Maker, it allows you to take everything a lot less seriously, because the fate of the world does not rest on our shoulders. This whole world is a gift. This whole world is grace. We don’t deserve any of it. And so every bit we get is a lavish gift, Christmas over the top, every day of the year. 

So they’re over there bumping and grinding and twerking, defiling their flesh with filth and corruption, screaming and shrieking for their gods to save. It’s like a room full of toddlers laying on the floor throwing fits. Which really is kind of hilarious. It’s certainly sad, but it’s also ridiculous. They’ve puffed out their cheeks and the decibels keeping going up, but their gods aren’t listening and the world isn’t budging. God is in Heaven, and Jesus is risen from the dead. 

The Spirit has been sent, and He is making all things new. We are the first fruits of that, and we are enjoying His gifts. Because our sins are forgiven, the world has been given back to us, wrapped with a bow, with love, from God the Father. It all belongs to Him, and so it all belongs to us in Jesus. So find a woman and marry her and make love to her, and make her the mother of as many children as the Lord will give. Provide a home for them, and train them up to fear the Lord, laugh at evil, dance in your living room, sing at the top of your lungs, and taste and see that the Lord is good. 

Photo by Foto Pettine on Unsplash

Freezers Full of Breastmilk: The Daily Wire Marriage Vibe

(Or Why Matt Walsh and Jeremy Boreing Should Talk Sometime)

Introduction
Count me in as one who is certainly thankful for Matt Walsh’s recent documentary What is a Woman? If for no other reason than it forces the question further out into the open instead of our culture simply being force-fed answers from the rabid and drooling Left. 

Now this last week, Matt engaged with Macy Gray who publicly flipped on the question, initially arguing for the traditional, biological definition of a woman and then after the utterly predictable backlash, publicly repenting and conforming to the Leftist catechism that “Being a woman is a vibe…if you in your heart feel that that’s what you are, then that’s what you are, regardless of what anyone says or thinks.” After pointing out the complete irrationality of the flipflop, some (also predictably) called Matt heartless and cold for piling on. To which Matt replied: “Sorry but women who publicly renounce the definition of “woman” for fear of mean comments from trans activists deserve all the scorn they get. That kind of gutless cowardice is exactly what got us into this position in the first place.”

At which point things got even more interesting than usual since JK Rowling chimed in, defending Gray, at least in part due to the intensity of the backlash, “Endless death and rape threats, threats of loss of livelihood, employers targeted, physical harassment, family address posted online with picture of bomb-making manual aren’t ‘mean comments’. If you don’t yet understand what happens to women who stand up on this issue, back off.”

Matt replied: “I respect the courage you’ve shown on this issue, @jk_rowling. But many people have simply caved to the demands of trans activists and completely surrendered truth and reality to them. The cowards are also villains in this story. They need to be held accountable.” To which Rowling replied: “And your film did a good job exposing the incoherence of gender identity theory and some of the harms it’s done. Many institutions I used to admire have uncritically embraced this dogma, but I reserve my ire for them rather than shouting ‘coward’ at individual women.” And so a bunch of folks were up in a tizzy and a dither about the whole thing. 

Is Marriage a Vibe?
What I want to talk about here is illustrated in this exchange, and raises some very important questions. But let’s have one more tweet from Matt Walsh from back on Jul 1, 2021, in which he wrote: “There will never be unity. One side of the divide thinks that children should go to drag shows, women have penises, infanticide is good, and all white people are racist. There’s no common ground between us. I despise their worldview and have no respect for those who ascribe to it.” Matt is exactly right, only I want to press it into one additional corner that he leaves unaddressed.

And the issue is eugenics, homosexuality, and marriage. Dave Rubin has publicly described his buying of eggs, his selection of various characteristics for his children, and his intentional plan to raise his children without a mother, in the context of his so-called “marriage” to another man. And my question to Dave, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh, Jeremy Boreing, or anyone else at the Daily Wire who cares to answer is this: What is marriage? Is marriage just a vibe? If you in your heart feel that that’s what you are, then that’s what you are, regardless of what anyone says or thinks, right? Or is the public acceptance of homosexuality and homosexual mirage the “kind of gutless cowardice that got us into this position in the first place?” I mean, if you feel in your heart that you are married to small shrubbery, are you? And if you limit marriage to an arrangement between sentient beings, on what basis? By what standard? And what about highly educated chimpanzees? Of course biblically and traditionally, marriage has been understood as the covenantal union between one man and one woman for life with the goal of bringing children into the world and raising them. Only a man and a woman can become one flesh; only a man and a woman can be married; only a man and a woman can conceive and bear children; everything else is a sham. Everything else is pretending. Everything else is going along with irrationality and incoherence. And everything else is an insult to the genuine article.

The Daily Wire & Marriage Drag
I wrote recently that Jeremy Boreing’s razor ad was a valiant attempt at taking on the corporate woke mob, but that it failed because it embraced some of the very proto-woke assumptions that got us to this point in the first place. You cannot have traditional America without traditional marriage. You cannot have traditional morals and values and freedom apart from reality, objective truth, and reason. And the very same irrationality that The Daily Wire and Matt Walsh want to rightly mock and deconstruct in trans ideology is at work in claiming that real dudes act like pimps buying and selling arm candy, like Jeremy Boreing did in his razor ad. I noted it briefly in that article, but it really bears saying again: You can’t object to buying and selling eggs if you don’t object to buying and selling the sexualized bodies of women. That’s what got us here in the first place. 

You cannot admit the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies in prostitution, porn, swimsuit models, pinups, or eggs or breastmilk and then reason in a straight line, objecting to the modification of male bodies into “female” bodies. If you can buy and sell them (or parts of them), then you have already dehumanized them. You have already stripped them of their fixed transcendent value and reduced them to their component parts. So why can’t you just play Mr. Potato head with them? I agree with Matt completely. There can be no unity between rationality and irrationality. There can be no common ground between those who think “that children should go to drag shows, women have penises, [and] infanticide is good” and those of us who know the difference between boys and girls. But what Matt and the Daily Wire need to grapple with is whether it is actually a marriage when two men say “till death do us part” and begin sodomizing one another. Is that a “one flesh union?” Is it marriage? The Christian faith and nature itself have universally denied that for centuries. And it was accepted as common sense until about five minutes ago.  

And so I really do think that Matt Walsh and Jeremy Boreing need to have a conversation. And by that I really mean the whole leadership team, however that’s structured at the Daily Wire. Jeremy Boreing just recently announced that they want to displace Disney as a conservative entertainment provider for your children, and almost before the announcement was finished, they released Jordan Peterson’s first interview on the Daily Wire with Dave Rubin, speaking in sophisticated tones about the fruitlessness of sodomy and overcoming nature with technology and freezers full of breastmilk. 

The Daily Wire has essentially announced that they too want to groom your children. They are not coming in the gaudy debauchery of Drag Queens, but rest assured they are coming in the sterile drag of intellectual complexity and queer refinement. The very same agnosticism that Matt Walsh rightly exposes and mocks on the question of what a woman is, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin exhibit in spades for over an hour on the same network on the topic of marriage and family. The very same incoherence that Matt exposes in the radical Left is on display in high relief as Jordan Peterson repeatedly explains why what Rubin is doing doesn’t really make sense and isn’t really “ideal” but “society” has decided to do anyway. 

Adding Insult to Injury
First off, and with all due respect for Dr. Peterson who has done some incredibly helpful and courageous work, “society” has not decided to accept homosexual mirage. Rather, radical leftists have decided to attempt to shove that perversion down our throats. The same radical activist ideology that gave us Roe in 1973, purporting to grant the right to chop up little babies in their mothers’ wombs is the same ideology that gave us Obergefell in 2015, claiming to overturn constitutional amendments in 30-some states that had duly defined marriage as one woman and one man, and they did so following a Federal constitutional amendment, known as the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law, incidentally by that champion of marital fidelity Bill Clinton himself, and passed with enormous majorities in the House and Senate. No, Dr. Peterson, American society through their elected officials overwhelmingly opposed so-called homosexual “marriage.” And then it was foisted upon us like an ugly sweater on a poodle. 

But secondly, and even more importantly, it must be pointed out that whenever a word’s meaning is expanded, the meaning of the word is either deepened or cheapened. Furthermore, and fundamentally, language comes from God as revelation from Him about the true nature of the world and as a gift to us so that we might live in His world in an understanding and coherent way. I believe that Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin would agree with me here when it comes to defining other fixed realities like north and south, green and red, up and down, and male and female. So long as you use language to correctly identify reality, the meaning of the words is only deepened and enriched, but if you begin adding contradictory notions to these words, you end up cheapening the words and you are attempting in effect (if not in fact) to destroy the reality. 

This is the case with the notion and definition of a woman. Every time a biological male claims to be a woman, he is not only lying, he is also insulting every true woman. And this is only intensified when the man goes through the trouble of getting castrated or breast implants. Whatever he does medically, he cannot become a woman. He cannot remake himself. He cannot undo his fundamental being, his DNA, his chromosomes, no matter how many hormonal cocktails are pumped into his body. And there is an important sense in which the more he does to himself in an attempt to become a woman, the more he is only adding insult to injury (on multiple levels). The lies and insults of a crossdresser or drag queen are bad enough, but then they can change their clothes and remove their makeup and the overt insult is over, at least for the moment. But the hormones and surgeries magnify the insult to the extent that many other people are now helping them, and great amounts of time, money, energy, and medicine is all being piled up in service of the insult to every true woman. Every step along the way is completely worthless. A biological male is never, in any sense, getting closer to becoming female. A woman is not the bare minimum of anatomical parts or chemicals. A woman is an immortal soul made in the image of the living God with a glory of a natural beauty flowing from her soul into every aspect of her life, together with the power of making and cultivating and glorifying life. 

You can never reach that glory with plastic surgeries and hormones. You can never even get close. This is like trying to build the Tower of Babel to reach up to Heaven. When the Lord heard the commotion of that “great civilization” it was still so infinitely infinitesimal compared to Him that the Scripture says that He had to “come down” to see what they were doing. And so it is with every woman compared to those males attempting to cross that infinite chasm. 

But to my main point here: it’s the same thing with marriage. The same One who “made them male and female”; is the One who defined marriage in the very same breath as: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate” (Mk. 10:6-9). Jesus said that the two go together. You cannot insist on male and female and then redefine marriage. Marriage is a created reality that is fixed. It is not a merely human institution. It is not a mere human contract. It is not merely an ancient tradition or custom. It is built into the fabric of reality. In the same way that male and female are fixed realities that cannot be bridged, cannot be faked, cannot truly be changed, neither can marriage. But the notion and glory of marriage certainly can be maligned, slandered, and insulted. What Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin did on that opening episode for Daily Wire was a sophisticated exercise in shit talking the glory of marriage. It was sophisticated, tidy, and a complete insult to every true marriage, including the marriage of Christ and His Church, the archetype of all true marriage. 

We’ve been informed by our overlords that donning black face is the gravest sin, but if a man dresses up like a woman, we are repeatedly told that this is fun, sexy, brave, and enlightened. The “n word” is derogatory and hateful, and so it is rightly banned from our vocabulary. But I don’t think anyone has any idea just how hateful and derogatory this trans ideology is to men and women, or how hateful and derogatory this sodomite mirage is to marriage. But chances are good that I will get a lot more concerned emails from Christians about my use of the phrase “shit talking” than the Daily Wire will get about their proposal to groom your children in the complexities of marriage and society. 

Conclusion
I have said previously that I am thankful for the work of the Daily Wire. And in all sincerity, God bless them. There is a gaping hole in the media landscape for non-woke people to simply embrace reality, love and tell the truth, fear God, and have some fun. But this means that discipleship is inescapable. Every media company, every news outlet, every podcast is arguing for a worldview that orients truth, goodness, and beauty. And my question for Jeremy Boreing, Matt Walsh, and the Daily Wire is: What will the Daily Wire children’s shows teach about male and female and marriage? And will they be taught that what Dave Rubin is doing is evil, unnatural, and a rejection of God’s created reality or not? 

While the Daily Wire and many conservatives rightly mocked Supreme Court Justice Nominee Kentanji Brown Jackson’s refusal to answer the question “What is a woman?” if the Daily Wire is not committed to teaching children that Dave Rubin is part of the problem, then the Daily Wire’s silence is no better than Katanji Brown Jackson’s “I’m not a biologist” and maybe it’s actually worse. Because as Matt Walsh once said, “Our gutless cowardice on this very point is exactly what got us into this situation in the first place… many have completely surrendered truth and reality… The cowards are also the villains in this story. They need to be held accountable.” If we know what is right and we refuse to fight at that very point, then we are cowards and we truly are in the process of joining the villains. 

Never Lose Your Joy

The joy of the Lord is the joy of forgiven sin. This is the joy that Jesus gives that no one can take away. This is also the joy that is always there for you, always at your disposal. Life is full of challenges and hardships, but the promise of God in Jesus Christ is that if you confess your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive you and cleanse you from all unrighteousness. 

If you do not have this persistent joy in your life, it may be because you are not a Christian and you are still in your sins, or it may be because you are a Christian, and you haven’t been confessing your sins and you’re out of fellowship with God and the people around you. John says that he wrote his letter so that we might have fellowship with him, and his fellowship is with the Father and the Son, and he says he wrote that our joy might be full. So joy goes together with fellowship, beginning with fellowship with God, and then flowing out into fellowship with those around you. Then it says that this fellowship and joy is light. God is fullness of joy and fullness of fellowship, and therefore He is light and there is no darkness in Him at all. Sin is darkness. Sin brings shadows, doubt, mistrust, misunderstanding, confusion, hurt, depression, sadness. If your heart is full of those things, if your home is full of those things, then it has darkness in it. 

Then it says this: if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. The way to walk in the light and be in fellowship with God and one another is through the blood of Jesus cleansing us from all our sin. How do we get the blood of Jesus to cleanse us? If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 

Forgiveness of sins is the foundation of Christian joy. You can face very difficult circumstances, even terrible and horrible things, but if your sins are forgiven, you won’t lose your joy. It is possible by the grace of God to always walk in the light, meaning that you determine to confess your sins as soon as they happen, as fast as possible, before the sun goes down every day, so that the blood of Jesus cleanses you right away, and you stay in fellowship and you never lose your joy. 

Photo by Kevin Jarrett on Unsplash