Accepting Transgenderism is just Bending the Knee to the Beast

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I’m going to make a bold assertion:  Barack Obama does not care about transgender people particularly.  Hardly any of the liberal left pushing this issue really do, any more than they care about minorities, gays, or poor women.  At least with some of those groups, there are sizable voting blocs to go after.  But with transgenders, there isn’t even that.  This is a tiny percentage of people.

I think really it’s just as simple as a demand to bow to the power of the state.  It’s just O’Brien demanding that Winston agree that 2+2=5.  It’s just submission to power that matters.

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Do We Trust our Kids with the Gospel?

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It seems to me that when a person is converted to Christianity as an adult, and then becomes a parent, there is a common pitfall they fall into. It is not easy to recognize the real nature of our fallen state, and it is the most natural thing to love our children dearly and want the best for them. So it seems common that this adult convert to Christianity will believe, perhaps even only on an unconscious level, that his children can be spared all the pain and sorrow that he himself experienced from falling into sin, if only he raises their children right. He will simply put in place all the right rules, strict discipline, and thorough indoctrination in the Christian faith, and the result will be that his child will have a relatively trouble-free life, without falling into any of the gross and destructive sins which he himself experienced. Or even more simply, he will simply shelter his child from anything that might corrupt him, and expect him to turn out fine.  Any parent can be tempted with this, of course, but it seems like it’s a particular temptation for the first generation Christian parent, who perhaps doesn’t realize that he would still have been a sinner, a bad sinner, even if he grew up in a Christian home.

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Facebook is Not Our Friend

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We really need to be aware of the way that the supposedly neutral platforms we use, like Facebook and Twitter, are in fact tipping the scales in a particular political and cultural direction.  This is one of the reasons I’ve backed way off of Facebook use, and leaned more toward my blog, which I think I’m going to be doing even more of going forward.  Facebook’s owner and top people are all progressives.  But then most or all big corporations these days, not just tech companies, are.  They go with the flow in order to avoid trouble.  In tech, though, there are a lot of true believers.  Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc- all are very much part of pushing the progressive agenda, and we Christians need to be aware.  A social media platform absolutely depends on its users to create content that will draw in eyeballs.  But when we know that it is using us not just to make money for itself (which we already knew) but also to shape the national narrative in an anti-Christian direction, then I think we have to do some serious thinking about how (or if) we use this platform any more.

I think one of the things that means is creating our own spaces for discussion that can’t be curated or moderated by them, or at least not so easily.  So, let’s have more of our discussions on our own blogs.  You put something on Facebook, then Facebook is in control of who sees it.  Facebook can still be a useful tool in some respects, but it’s increasingly apparent that it is not a neutral platform for discussion.  So let’s do more of that in spaces we control ourselves.

When I first started blogging, that’s where all the action was and it was relatively easy to get readers and get discussions going.  Facebook really sucked all the oxygen out of the blogosphere for a long time.  Big blogs still did fine, but nobody was going and visiting the blogs of friends and acquaintances any more like they used to.  They’d just look at Facebook.  I know I did a lot of my lighter updating, and even some of the more serious writing, on Facebook, for a while.  But they control that platform.  Who knows when anything that doesn’t fit the whole progressive agenda will be declared a hate crime and just deleted?  At least my blog, hosted on a smaller host and with content entirely controlled by me, is a lot more under my control than that.  It would be significantly more difficult to suppress it.

One Often Overlooked Benefit of Housewives

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Mothers, stay home with your children if at all possible, especially while they are small.  Among the many benefits of doing so is that mothers laboring within the household creates wealth for the household in a form that is not so easily stolen by the government through taxation and inflation.  This is one of the main reasons governments promote subsidized daycare and universal education, because it makes it easier for mothers to work, to create wealth in the form of dollars which can then be easily confiscated by the state.

Pointing People to Christ

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It seems to me that the fear of nominal professors, those with a false assurance, has led many to press home the question to people, “Do you trust Christ enough?”  “Are you really resting and receiving Christ?”  “Have you really repented?”  I think it can be a  mistake to proceed along these lines, to ask ourselves whether there is something in me that is enough.  That is the route to doubt and despair, or else really false hope and pride in myself.

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Covering Each Other’s Shame

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Teaching recently on Genesis 3, I was impacted by an aspect of the story I hadn’t really thought about before.  When the fall happens, we see that Adam and Eve are immediately plunged into shame at their nakedness, and that nakedness alienates them not only from God, but also from each other.  Both of them hid themselves separately, alienated from each other as well as from God.  And then when God confronts them, there is the well-known blameshifting that happens.

But God makes the promise of the gospel to them.  And he kills animals and covers their nakedness, covers their shame.  The killing of animals in the context of the promise of the gospel is a clear pointer to Christ.  So covering them with the promise of the gospel not only allows them to dwell in fellowship with God, but also with each other.

As I reflected on this, I realized how much marriage depends on this very thing.  Being married to someone, you get to know their sin very well.  And people don’t sin against each other in random ways.  It’s the same old patterns, day after day, year after year.  And if we constantly pick at each other’s faults and sins, then the marriage will be miserable.  It is in covering each other’s shame with the blood of Christ that two people can really dwell with each other in love.  That’s not true only of marriage, but really of any relationship.  It’s certainly true in the church as well- see how much Paul talks in the New Testament about forgiving each other.  But it’s in marriage very often where you are confronted with another person’s sin most directly and most repeatedly.  Certainly my wife sees my sin more clearly than anyone else, and has had to forgive me more than anyone else, and that forgiveness is always going to be the bond of any successful marriage.

“Do This and Live”?

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At the blog “Meet the Puritans,” Patrick Ramsey and Danny Hyde have written a pair of posts elucidating a difficulty with the way the difference between the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace is sometimes articulated.  They quote E.F. Fisher saying that the Covenant of Works says, “Do this and live,” while the Covenant of Grace says, “Believe and live.”  Ramsey, taking issue with Fisher, quotes John Ball saying that Leviticus 18:5 must be expounded “evangelically,” and also refers to Luke 10:28.  He says that Fisher’s point is that we are justified by faith and not by works, which is true, but that Fisher should not use Leviticus 18:5 to make the point.  Leviticus 18:5, he says, is saying the same thing the New Testament is saying when it extols godliness in such passages as Matthew 7:14 and 1 Timothy 4:8.

But isn’t this precisely the same contrast that Paul makes in Galatians 3:12, when he states that “the law is not of faith” and then quotes Leviticus 18:5?  He contrasts that to the righteousness which is by faith in the previous verse, “the just shall live by faith.”  He makes the strong contrast between these principles, of justification by works and justification by faith alone, stating clearly that the works principle is the principle taught in the Law of Moses.  Paul cannot, in Galatians 3, be referring to Pharisaical misunderstandings of the Law, as some will assert, since in the same discussion he says things about God’s good purpose in giving the law (namely, to reveal their sin and lead them to Christ; see Gal. 3:19).  It’s not misusing Leviticus 18:5 to contrast the righteousness which is by the law to the righteousness which is by faith, since this is precisely the use to which Paul puts it there.

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Identity

Matt Powell, 1 Comment

It feels these days like a race between 1984 and A Brave New World.  I thought Huxley was winning, but some days I’m not so sure.

Consider:  Target has just announced that their bathrooms are now transgender friendly.  People can use whichever bathroom corresponds to the gender they identify with.  Yet, also consider:  We have been told that males and whites are privileged and by default oppressive, sexist, racist, because of their whiteness and maleness.  That is, because of their biology.  But we are also told that biology means nothing when it comes to one’s identity, only what one feels.  But if one therefore does not feel privileged, how can one say someone is privileged?

The whole premise is put on the individual’s own self-expression and self-identity.  But if this be so, then nobody can confidently say anything at all about anyone else’s evil thoughtcrimes or privilege or whatever.  By doing so, you are defining my experience, you are defining my identity, and that is the big no-no.

When I was in high school, distraught by the large number of other Matt’s in my class (25% in a class of 16), I decided one day that I would be henceforth known as “Eddie,” from my middle name “Edward.”  I learned a valuable lesson that day, and that is one’s identity cannot freely be formed by one’s own purely individual desires.  One’s identity is a complex combination of many factors–family relationships, personal history, biology and the like, with one’s own personal feelings being a fairly small part of it.  If I have served time for a violent crime, then that will define certain aspects of my identity regardless of my feelings. And the biological sex and ethnic background I was born into will likewise affect me in certain ways, regardless of my feelings, and in fact, the greater rebellion I have against those realities, the greater a prisoner of them I will be.

I see more and more the great importance of the Fifth Commandment, that we honor our father and mother, which has implications far greater than just how I treat those two individuals.  It describes the attitude I ought to have about where I come from, the factors that went into making me who I am.