https://www.drycreekbiblechurch.com/sermons/gospel-first-things

Great sermon yesterday by Pastor Carlson. It made me realize that Jesus wasn’t the only one claiming to be the Son of God, the Jewish leaders were as well. The thing about arrogance is that it’s not arrogant if you can do it. Jesus was the Christ, they were just arrogant. And the war begins over the Old Testament. We should not listen to the Jews, especially today on their views of the OT, because they were wrong Jesus says those scriptures speak of him, and they missed it. And they have defined this new Judaism on this rejection. The old Judaism became Christianity.

Jesus quotes from Psalm 82, “God said to certain leaders of the people, ‘I say, you are gods!” And you know they loved this verse, they thought of themselves as gods. They all claimed to be gods in their heart, they were the chosen people. But Jesus claimed it in public and he backed it up. The whole Psalm is contrasting good rulers from bad. The Pharisees claimed this as their book so here is what their book actually says, it says good rulers hear the cases of the poor and helpless, rather than profiting off of them. These people had been wronged and needed a judge to hear their case and give them justice, this is the last thing the Pharisees would do, and so they proved to be unjust rulers. They favored the wicked. And they also judged Jesus wrongly, while Jesus judged the people fairly, he showed them compassion. He also judged the Old Testament rightly and gave this teaching to the people so that they would not be ignorant and oppressed.

Many Psalms and other ancient poems are written in chiasm a sort of mirrored pattern. And what’s in the middle is usually the focus:

Also we have the idea that God made the world so he could communicate to us. He made the lilies of the field so he could say “consider the lilies of the field” And he put this Psalm in the Bible so he could speak of the Pharisees.

I don’t think I have ever heard anything more disturbing than a rabbi trying to explain away the clear Biblical teaching against sodomy.  It’s his book he says, trust him.  Here we have Dennis Prager doing the same thing with pornography.  Is it any wonder that the world’s pornographers are Jewish?  They don’t see a problem with it.  They read the OT just like the arrogant Jews of Jesus’ day.  It’s a set of rules they can mostly follow.  They don’t need Jesus, they just need a Jew who can give them their rightful place as kings of the world.   Because they are better than everyone.  But take heed lest we fall. You see the same arrogance among the Mohammedans, the Chinese, or even the Catholics.  But it’s also here, many Americans think we deserve to rule the world.  But it doesn’t work like that Jesus rules the world, we just work for him.  Or in our nation’s case, we stand in his way and so he cuts off the tree and grafts in . . . Africa? China?

Conservatives want to talk about biology all the time now. Well biology says you can have children as soon as you have your period. Which is age 11-15 for most girls. Another principal which is culturally almost as fundamental as biological facts, is that marriage is for the protection of children. So what is the basis for the principal that being married from age 11-18 is immoral? Is it in the Bible? I don’t think so. Is it in biology? No.

It seems to be something we just made up. Oh well girls that young are not ready for marriage, they say. Well God seems to think they are. Just like He made them male and female, he made them ready for procreation at whatever age. Maybe we should prepare them better, for the reality of this responsibility. It doesn’t mean they all have to, but it should at least be a possibility.

“And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I made you flourish like a plant of the field. And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full adornment. Your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare.

“When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord GOD, and you became mine. Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil. I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with fine leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk. And I adorned you with ornaments and put bracelets on your wrists and a chain on your neck. And I put a ring on your nose and earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen and silk and embroidered cloth. You ate fine flour and honey and oil. You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord GOD. -Ezekiel 16

What is the situation in our culture? We live in a hyper sexualized culture, it is pushed everywhere at a young age. The demand is driven up, but the only legitimate remedy, marriage, is seen as inappropriate until an older and older age. Our cultural idea is generally that you shouldn’t get married until you are done with college which happens at a later and later age, probably something like 22. The average now is 28.6. That leaves ten years for girls to be ran through, trained up by liberal professors(90% are), deceived by media and formed into a creature which has very little use as a real wife. And that’s the low end, many are much older. And this supposed education, otherwise called becoming your own person, training isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be either. A bachelor’s degree today, is probably about the equivalent of the 8th grade education our grand parents received. That puts you at age 13. And we all know this training is more about recruiting feminists to causes than it is making women who love their husbands and their children.

Frances Cleveland, 1886

Even in churches, young marriages are often mocked, though they do happen. We need a better system. Women are more and more likely to get divorced the more people they have slept with and that number grows the more years they are single.

Another growing factor is the way young people despise anyone older than themselves. They have been told their whole lives that old is bad, old is the patriarchy, old people enslaved everyone and they were. . . mean. Which leads to younger women told not to consider older men, you know the best able to care for them and actually support a family. Of course it still happens, but men like Leonardo DiCaprio are ridiculed often for dating younger women.

The only U. S. President to be married while in office was Grover Cleveland. At the time he was 49, he married Frances who was 21. And the country loved her. She was arguably the most beloved First Lady ever. That was only 137 years ago, what happened? Why do we prolong childhood indefinitely? Why do we not build better people more prepared for marriage? Why don’t we incentivize situations that make it possible for families to work?

I think the spirit of Stephen Crowder in rejecting big business deals is the American spirit i. e. the Christian spirit.  It is the spirit that Chesterton often touted as the breath of the renewal that is the eternal revolution.  In order to maintain orthodoxy the church must be ever renewed.  In order to conserve, to keep, things we must be ever changing.  We must renew things that have grown tired.  For ours is not a tired revolution, we live under the, The Holy Spirit.  A fresh wind,  a new song.  The carbuncles of seriousness and business encumber the ship and they must be chipped off if we want to keep the ship.  We must always be making progress towards the old things.  The big business model is a remnant from modernism.  It’s old and tired and unorthodox.  It is devouring everything in it’s maw, the church, the family the individual.  All the wise ‘successful’ business men in the room criticize him for not playing the encumbered game they all play.  

I think we see this most clearly with Rush Limbaugh.  He never played by the rules, he was able to carve out his own way.  It was unique and distinct and beneficial to millions to emulate him in making your own way, utilizing your unique skills.  Create something do something don’t just be a piece of the machinery.  Of course Rush mellowed over time from the raucous pranks and skits and rallies.  But he always went his own way.  The point I am thinking about is how the vacuum he left was soon filled.  It was filled by people clearly unable to go their own way.  It was filled by a uni-party group think which Rush despised most.  Dan and Sean and other people I forgot, clearly have their balls in a vice. They fear losing their power their money whatever.  Rush never did.  He lost football teams, he lost advertisers, he lost friends, but his audience always grew because his message was true.  He was radically taking us back to orthodoxy.

While Levin yells at people instead of doing what he is good at, writing books; while the Shapiro and Kirk cosy up to big Sodomy, so they can raise the big bucks; while Beck paints chalk boards full of giant conspiracy theories; Steven Crowder is the successor to Rush.  He is original, a couple clicks more Christian than Rush, unrelenting, truthful, wise and fun.  He is the man we need.

Of course there is another.  Mark Steyn.  Also creating an orb that is all things good.  His conflicts with CRTV seem to reveal the same things Crowders encounter does.  It’s the same spirit you sadly saw in Big Pro Life.  People fall in love with themselves, their movement, their business model, and forget the purpose they started out to achieve.  The point is not the remain viable, or to perpetuate your brand or not have to worry about where the rent money is coming from.  The purpose is to push back the evil, to win this world for Christ, as far as the curse is found, and to have a joyous time doing it.

Further Reading: Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton

Original Pub Domain

Now a New Translation

Original video

Oh, there is another video

It’s interesting that we have Jesus’ response to a mass murder in Luke 13:

  There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

The Tower of Siloam, James Tissot.

His response is first to question their social norms and then tell them to repent.  He didn’t tweet about how much he cares or how horrible this was.  He didn’t emote, or hashtag or show solidarity.  He didn’t even accuse PIlate, and he certainly didn’t find other random people to blame.

1.  In scapegoat cultures, people get what they deserve and it absolves the whole community of guilt.  Just like Job.   All these bad things happened to him, he must have been a sinner.  If we get rid of Job, the gods will be appeased and the rest of our culture will continue on.  The Jews looked on with a sort of glee, of course Galileans were killed, they were second class deplorables, the MAGA people of the day.  Now that they were gone, the community was more pure, they were more pure, and blessings would ensue.

2.  He repeats it twice, unless you repent you are all gonna die.  That is the radical refocus of the Gospel.  While the wrath is poured out on Christ as the ultimate scapegoat, our response should be humility not gloating.  It’s avoiding the sidelong glance Jesus talks about other places.  What is that to you?  Events should spur us to self reflection and repentance and going a better way.

Specifically in context.  The Jews thought they were doing fine, better now having gotten rid of some riffraff.  And they would be even better if they could get rid of this Jesus.  But after they killed him, forty years later,  they all did perish.  The faithful Christians fled to the hills, and the Jews in their arrogance stayed and fought Rome, and each other, and they all died.

We do the same thing in a mass shooting.  We look for someone else to blame.  We go along with our cultural cues, virtue signaling, placating, politicking, appeasing, the last thing we would do is repent.  Are you hopping on the bandwagon to blame the innocent?  Are you contributing to a culture of death?  Are you supporting government policies that encourage fatherlessness?  Are you supporting the training of young people to hate their creator? To lack purpose? To question even their sex?  To think they just happened as the result of chance?  Are you fine paying for education that does this and embracing this pluralism, which defies the work of God and his son Jesus?

The crazy in our world seems to multiply every day. I think that is exactly the math Jesus warns us about in Matthew 12:43-45:

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation.

I think this was specifically directed to the Jews of Jesus’ day. Those who rejected Messiah. The ‘end of the world’ was the end of the Jewish order set up by Moses. This was the world where God chose a people for himself, a people of the land. He put them in the land to be a priestly people to the nations. For the most part they were not, but in a real sense they were, Jesus the Messiah is the perfect priest for every tongue, tribe and nation. He fulfilled their desinty.

This is the old world Paul is talking about in Galatians 3:23-29:

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

The Mystical Nativity. Sandro Botticelli. c. 1500.

In the old world the law was the school master of the Jews, keeping them in line. But then they had to grow up, to be come adults. They were then to be ruled by the Spirit, within. You no longer need the nun with the ruler slapping you on the wrist. You rule yourself, make judgements for yourself and act in the world by your spirit. But the rebellious child becomes multiplied in rebellion as an adult. Without the tutor there to keep him in line, he runs into the arms of evil. Today, the Jews are still trying to live like in the olden days. They carry around their school marm with them. It looks ridiculous, it is ridiculous, they are supposed to be adults. This is a new world. But they keep trying to live like the old world.

But what about the gentiles in the old world? They are often referred to as the sea. In one sense the Jews under the tutor of the Law, were to be the tutors of the nations. They were a priestly people, a mediator between God and the other nations. God sent them into Egypt and then Babylon, which became the two centers of ancient wisdom. Even the Greeks got much of their wisdom from lost sources in Egypt. The world was watching the Jews. But in general the pagan world was a world of idolatry. And as Paul says in I Corinthians 10:20-22:

No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?

The old world was ruled by demons. When the Satan offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world, he and his demons ruled them. They ruled like a tyrant. The peoples of the earth were enslaved to sin and death. Jesus, broke this curse, and freed all these peoples. But this is a new world. We are no longer in the nursery, now we are adults and we can do real damage. We get the idea from the Flood and Babel that God was limiting mans’ ability. So that we didn’t destroy ourselves. We were children. But now we have been baptized with Christ, Pentecost has come and Babel has been reversed. This is a great blessing, we now have more freedom to glorify God. To be truly human on this earth, governed by the word written on our hearts, the Spirit. But what about those turning back?

You can’t go back to the old world. Once the house is swept, going back means seven times worse. The old world tyrants would never question hierarchical authority structures. That was how they ruled. The demons were counterfeiting what they saw God do. They couldn’t imagine mankind freed and ruled by the Spirit. They would not have dared question sex. Even sodomy was generally frowned upon, and they mostly worshipped fertility. It just makes sense, you need people to rule, people to kill. And endless cycle of death. In a sense the demons were geographical, and their kingdoms were competing with God’s people. Men lived in fear, and would not dare have the audacity to commit the evils we see today. We see this with many paganisms, even today, Mohammedans live in fear. It prevents a lot of evil, but it is not man living up to his full potential. It is beneath his dignity. Once Jesus opened that door and we walked into the new world, going back means a much worse place. As Peter says in 2 Peter 2:20-22

For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”

I get the idea from the first part of I Peter, that the work of Christ on the cross was beyond what the angels could imagine. “angels desire to look into”. There was a good too amazing for them to consider. Man will judge the angels, our capacity is greater than the demons. We have free will in a way that they do not. But the same goes for demons in the opposite direction. We are now capable of evil far greater than they can imagine. Christendom, as adults, ruled by the Spirit, reached great heights. And now we have further to fall. We undermine sex, family, authority, language and on and on, all seven times worse than we were before. We dive into evils that would make our pagan ancestors blush. When you are ruled by the Spirit, you take for granted that what is within is good. You have a conscience and you act by it. But when that is not the case, and you look within, the depth of the darkness is seven times darker. The fields were once rich for the harvest. But when you become bored, inured to the blessings of Christ and take them for granted, you begin to experiment with questioning them, with tearing them down. All the capability of man for good turned towards evil. This is what we read in the news every day.

The worst part is that we have a niche carved out in the church for accepting this. We call it pluralism and dare to say it is good. We inventy silly eschatology about everything getting worse, as if Christ on the earth was made to destroy it. We insist that people do have a right to curse God. Where did they get this right from? We say silly things like “I don’t want a theocracy”. We as children of the king, princes, sit back and allow parts of his kingdom, bought with his blood, on the cross, to be invaded and ruled by these fools. We are his hands and feet. We are to judge, binding and loosing as we see fit. The gates of Hades are a joke, we need to knock them down. We need to stop handing over our children to be seven times the servant of Satan. We need to enlist them in the good work of building the kingdom for many generations. We need to get our story straight and stop participating in the crazy.

“an Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.”  -Baron Pierre de Coubertin, Founder of the Modern Olympics

Everyone gets offended by this, but is he correct?

Impractical:  Extravagant displays of sport are not cheap. Every modern Olympics loses billions of dollars(Tokyo 30bn).  If we compare it to professional sports, we can see that no one watches women’s sports. If you don’t sell tickets, you don’t make money.  An olympics of men would probably be profitable, like men’s professional sports are.

Uninteresting:  From above the fans vote with their feet, the WNBA loses 10million dollars a year, even after slick accounting tricks.  As I always say the only women’s sport that makes any sense is beach volleyball.  I suppose we could add gymnastics and figure skating, but not for the ‘right’ reason.

Unaesthetic:  Unfortunately we have lost our sense of feminine beauty and redefined it to idealize the female as a greek god statue.  If our aesthetics were based on the God-given purpose for women, their super power, having kids, we might find muscle bound women who probably can’t have kids due to the stress their body is experiencing, unattractive.  If you have never appreciated the soft beauty of a woman with no sharp corners as Edmund Burke instructs us,  I can’t help you.

Improper:  From all the numbers I have seen 80-90% of female athletes think they are lesbians.  Which, to use a sports metaphor, is like showing up for a game of one-on-one and no one has a ball.  This is about as improper as it gets, as far as I can tell.  Are hyper competitive women loving their husbands and their children?  That’s a hard no.  First most of them avoid both.  And those who get married: 80% of divorces are filed by women, in a culture where domestic violence is falling like a rock, before COVID.  And these divorces are leading to destroyed children.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was correct, even if you are just offended.

“ ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers,” –Mat 25:26

I never really go this verse until I heard it today.  He is saying because this is how I roll, you should do that too.  I have always heard it explained away, that this was just how the servant saw the master and not how he actually was.  But this is how God rolls, and how his people do too.

“I gave you land you had not worked on, and I gave you towns you did not build—the towns where you are now living. I gave you vineyards and olive groves for food, though you did not plant them.” –Joshua 24:13

The Parable of the Talents, Willem de Poorter (1608-1668)

Normal blessing is where you plant and God makes it grow, you don’t make it grow.  You don’t give the increase, the profit.  And this is the next level, you didn’t even plant and you get the benefit.  And this is God’s expanding vision for his people as they entered the land.  This is why they didn’t take all the land immediately, God was keeping it in escrow until their tribes expanded to enough people to take in the harvest.

It’s no concidence that Jesus uses the same language to describe his Kingdom, coming.  It’s no coincidence that this was the language used by the Pilgrims who came to this land.  Read the story of William Bradford.  God prepared the way for them, no question.  And I think for all Christians.

And we have yet another promise from God to the same effect:

   “And when the LORD your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—with great and good cities jthat you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant—“ –Deut. 6:10,11

Christians don’t like this kind of talk today.  We as Christians are to go into the whole world and conquer in a similar way.  But it isn’t the conquering of one tribe over the others.  It’s the dividing of the sword. Do you want to join the Israel of God and become a Christian, or do you want to cling to your old paganism?  Do you want to join the real tribe, bringing His will to Earth as it is in Heaven? Or do you want to have your wealth devoured by the New Israel?  This is a battle, but it has never been fought with swords the way Islam has always expanded.  But it is still a battle, which means conflict, coming to swords sometimes.  Did you really think that great commission thing would be easy and without conflict?  Could you sail over to another continent and do a better job?  I doubt it.    And the other idea is that when one person has something it means he took it from someone else.  Stragely the economy and the Kingdom of God are an expanding pie.  His blessing and profit abound.  The more people you invite into the great tribe of Christendom, the more you have.  It is a ponzi scheme that actually works.  The only way to lose is to stay ouside in the cold with the other pagans.  Or be thrown out by the master.

The next verses are the scary part.  It’s where we in the West are today:

“and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.  It is the LORD your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear.  You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you—  for the LORD your God in your midst is a jealous God—lest the anger of the LORD your God be kindled against you, and he destroy you from off the face of the earth.” –Deut 6:12-15

The false god we are worshipping tells us that all the winning that Christianity did was wrong.  We don’t say the calf brought us up out of Egypt(Exodus 32:4) we say it was wrong to be so mean to Egypt and to conquer all those evil pagans offering their children to Molech.  So we join them in bashing the work of God and call it multiculturalism.  We want to offer our children to Molech too, and we call it Planned Parenthood.

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,

but the sinner’s wealth is laid up for the righteous.  –Prov 13:22

We don’t like this version, we don’t like the end of Jesus’ parable either:

‘Take the money from this servant, and give it to the one with the ten bags of silver.  To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who do nothing, even what little they have will be taken away. –Matthew 25:28,29

That’s not fair, that doesn’t sound like hippie Jesus at all.  It sounds more like, the traditional American Protestant work ethic.  We should help the poor, but we need to have the wisdom to distinguish those who hate God and are reaping what they have sown, like all the pagan peoples in Indian Reservations, from actual poor. Do you really think we should give the sinner more, or feel bad that his wealth has been the inheritance of the Godly? God doesn’t. Instead we should be leveraging what God has given us to get more.  We want the whole world.  Expecially now.  This is a time when we are doing the a horrible job at this  The Kingdom is contracting while foolish Dispensationalists cheer that it means Jesus is coming back.  No it means we have been foolish, we are the wicked servant and he is casting us out.

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This is the most controversial thing I can say.  But I might as well say that men have sticks or that men have swords, it won’t help much.  This offends both Left and Right.  The Left is offended because they are always offended, but in particular because they are currently engaged in destroying every aspect of the created order they can, including biological sex.  They hate God.  In the past they were content to be upset at this statement simply for the biological realities it makes apparent.  Men and women are not the same.   Half of the Right is offended by this because they are doing their best to hide in the corner and get along with the Left wherever they can.  The other half is offended because how dare I be so scatological, they are hiding in the opposite corner behind their crumbling prudish victorian constructs.  Their friends in the other corner have no problem with crudity, having caved to the world on this long ago, but for the prudes this is their everything. 

The Bayswater Omnibus, George William Joy. c.1895

To hate biological sex, is to hate God’s created order, before the fall, it is to be evil. Today evil men want to recreate everything including themselves in their own image.  They want to be God, this is the worst and first sin; pride.  They obviously can’t, so they pretend that some cosmetic surgery theater and encapsulated chemicals make them their own creator.  God is not impressed.  But I don’t hear the prudes mocking them to their face for this insanity, as they should.  I don’t hear accurate descriptions of this evil and what it does to children.  Only silence and that vaccuum gives a wide birth to evil.  You are both wrong.

But let’s take a step back, before things became quite so radical.  Before these crazy people were sewing fake phallic devices on confused women, they hated the whole setup.  It’s just not fair that sex is what it is.  They tried to deconstruct it and reconstruct it and twist it, but the facts are stubborn things.  Sex for men and women is not the same.  Physiological differences are appropriate, God given and reflective of deeper realities.  What men do in sex and what women do is sex is quite different.  We can believe in complete egalitarianism when women start raping men.  It’s not a thing.  Men are in control, they are bigger, stronger, have less at stake with sex.  There is also an aspect of violence that you aren’t really supposed to talk about.  But there is blood.

The fact is that God gave the power of violence to men, he gave them the sword.  And almost everyone hates this that I can see, both the World and the Church.  We seem fine with that whole Romans 13 mantra, as if the state can claim whatever it wants and we are rewarded for going along.  But when it comes to the household, in our culture, women are to be in control.  They either get that control by docile husbands convinced that doing whatever their wife wants is servant leadership, or if the men dare to assert physical force, the suggestion of physical force, or even loud language(speech is violence), women call the cops, the state, and reset the power dynamic.

This can only be described as bent, crooked, perhaps kinky.  We are fine assenting to the fact that the sword must be bourn  by the state to stop evil, even though it rarely does.  Due partly to women voting, making laws, being on juries, having no stomach for such things.  This was the first kink.  So why doesn’t this Romans 13 ultimatum apply to the other hierarchies?  To men as the head of household. It always has.  What makes our brave new world different?  We are seeing the results all around.  Divorce is out of control.  Single men and formerly  married men are relegated to increasing suicide.  Women are tearing families apart like never before(women file for 80% of divorces).  They appoint themselves to the priesthood of single mom, and proceeds to sacrifice their children on the feminist alter of crazy.  Their children have the rap sheets to prove it.  Not to mention the social and developmental damage, that follows for generations.  You thought an abusive father was bad, welcome to the next generation hell, no father.

“Of all single mothers in America, only 6.5 percent of them are widows, 37.8 percent are divorced, and 41.3 percent gave birth out of wedlock. The 6.5 percent of single mothers whose husbands have died shouldn’t be called ‘single mothers’ at all. We already have a word for them: ‘widows.’ Their children do just fine compared with the children of married parents.”  -Ann Coulter  

If we wanted to be more responsible, we might say that the state and the heads of households have limits.  But if God gave governments the power to punish evil, he gave it to husbands for a reason too.  Husbands can be abusive, but so can the men of the state, which is just made up of fallible men.  With the added fact that forcing judges and police to interfere in the family adds all sorts of other problems.  We know that Jesus didn’t meet violence with violence.  He didn’t even defend himself.  And he was rewarded for his humility, and is now seated at the right hand of the father.  No one wants to hear it, but we are repeatedly told that suffering when we have done no wrong, is to store up treasure in heaven(James 1).  Every moment a wife endures unjust abuse, she is accumulating glory and her husband is storing up wrath. Not only eternally but often on this earth as well.  It will probably pass and is probably better for the kids to stay with your husband.

But it also goes the other way.  If speech is violence, why isn’t female speech ever violence?  The feminist just hates the male, so anything he does is wrong and trying to make comparisons to violence is just a ploy, when you don’t have anything real.  There are actually a lot of verses about the female tongue as a source of deception, nagging, or nonsense.  (Prov 2:16, 6:24, 7:5-23, 22:14, 23:27; Prov 21:9, 25:24; I Tim. 4:7)  How apt the Biblical comparison of an evil woman with a pit, ditch or well.  Men have penises women have—pits.  But we already knew that.  And we also knew that women can exert evil with their persons, just as a man can.  And if unchecked, even the best of us can become the worst.

What does the Bible actually say about violence towards your wife?  Internet searches are a total joke.  People just spouting their feelings and cultural cliche’s onto the text.  The Bible doesn’t really say anything.  But there are a lot of comparisons.  We think slavery is the worst thing ever, even though we have all sorts of it going on around us.  The thing about a slave is that he is yours.  People don’t abuse their things, unless they are idiots, like Nabal(I Samuel 25).  Same with your wife, even if you view her as only a possession, which no one ever did outside of Paganism, you don’t abuse your possessions.  The two become one flesh, and you might as well strike yourself.  So of course you love your wife as your own body.  But that doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes cause pain setting a bone, or opening your wife’s womb. In the Bible there is a time for violence, the threat of violence and violent words(Ecc. 3:1).  The basic requirements on how to treat your wife are found in Exodus 21:10.  A husband owes his wife food clothing and marital rights(his penis).  If you strike another man’s wife, and cause damage, you must pay back her husband, eye for an eye.  But there is no rule about your own wife because you have only harmed yourself.  If you strike your slave and he survives, with no harm, you have hurt no one but yourself (Exodus 21:21).

We could make other comparisons with verses about children.  A father is not supposed to exasperate his children, yet he is to discipline them. Do not spare the rod.  It is very clear that there is a big difference between lashing out at your child or anyone in retaliation or anger, for yourself, and the act of discipline which is meant to correct.  I don’t see why this wouldn’t apply to wives as well. It seems to me that in the past people understood this and a slap to stop hysterics was appropriate.  Or grabbing her to prevent her running away, was to be expected.  You might agree more than you think.  We have no problem with the wife using violence to get her husband to do what she wants, even if she acts in wrath.  And often these days his mere presence, without any violence on his part, is met with violence on her part. She can call the men with guns and have him hauled away.  And we are fine with it.   But we have inverted God’s order.  And what are the results of our wonderful system?  As I said before divorce, and out of control women, destroying their children.  Have these women  forgotten their secret weapon?  Peter(another name for penis) says winning them without a word (I Peter 3:1). But that requires self control, the very thing our culture does not teach. And what about that respect thing?    Women have their methods for expressing disappointment in their husbands, they certainly don’t need violence, and to try to usurp or employ the methods of the man is a perversion.  But we are so used to them, we don’t even notice.

Conceal carry laws make something dear to you, a source of power, less effective and more easily manipulated by others.  It is immoral to make laws that make protecting yourself more difficult.  What if you were forced to keep your wallet locked up and could only carry it with a permit?  What if having your wallet on your person could get you arrested, because it’s not fair that you have more power than other people.  What if your economic capability were kept by others and only doled out to you as they saw fit? Then of course when they measured it out to you it would always be a little light, all those fees and inflation.  This is almost what has happened.  A few powerful people exploit that power and use it to control the mass.  Instead of a broad distribution of power, which means that any error is a small error you have a concentration, which reduces both diversity and freedom. Any error is a big error.  This is the same in martial maters as well as matters of mammon.  To exert monetary force is the same as exerting violent force, which is why women are attracted to strong men and rich men.  Possibly now more to the latter, because now they have the state to take care of the violence for them.  Nothing says hypocrisy like calling the men with guns, because violence is wrong.

It should be assumed that everyone is carrying a gun.  Just like you assume a large man can attack you, so you don’t piss him off.  Rather than make a big deal about everything, you let a lot of things go.  This is the basic human dignity, and respect.  And this is the fundamental problem with cops they don’t let little things go.  In fact they emphasize little things, in an attempt to find larger things.  They pass a million annoying little laws in the hope of trapping someone that broke a big law.  Of course when they do catch them, 60% of the time, they don’t do anything, and even in the most exacting cases we are capable of, the convicted finish out their lives on death row at the expense of the community they have wronged.

This is the main problem with policing instead of deescalating situations, they drive around seeking whom they may devour.  The reasoning is that they are the good guys, the reality is that they create conflict often out of thin air.  In response to this they are forced to make excuses often, that it is for the greater good.  And they are forced to treat everyone as a criminal, instead of treating everyone as a threat going about the business of good.  Which is actually what the law demands, innocent until proven guilty.

What if you went around picking fights with everyone over every little thing like Larry David?  You would get a lot of fights, a lot of conflict.  While it might make for a funny show, it makes for a messy culture. this is what we now have.  And to create a class of people who must be bowed down to for the common good is just BS.  If police want to be respected they should earn it. Twenty four year olds with three weeks training and a gun are not worthy of respect any more than the average person on the street.

A more sensible approach would be for the government and it’s agents to assume everyone is innocent and to leave them alone, until they commit the large crime and then to punish them as Romans 13 states.  Those lesser infringements are the purview of the family.  When Jr. is acting up you correct him, so that the infringement doesn’t not become a large thing.  When your brother wrongs you, you correct him so that it does not become the power hungry politicians abusing their paper power or violent offenders abusing their physical power or women abusing their deceptive power.

This is brought out by the Ahmaud Arbery case.  These civilians acted the exact same way the police are required to act, every day(looking up details to refine my hunch one of the shooters was a former cop).  They assumed guilt and acted on it, quite reasonably.  This in turn provoked Arbery to act to defend himself, which is natural.  Fight or flight is natural and to be expected and even trained.  These citizens then took these actions to be proof of further guilt, just as the police are trained to do.  Making natural reactions a crime and proof of other crimes, because we work for the state, is the foolishness we are entangled in. The work of the citizen should be the same as that of the police.  To leave people alone until there is an actual crime.  Then to discover who committed that crime, with the force of all the people, the state, and to bring that person before a representation of the people, the jury, to decide if they are really guilty before the law as understood by the people before God.  Then the people wield the sword on behalf of God who has deputized them to do so.

Apparently the McMichaels assumed he had a gun, and made the decision to put themselves at risk for the sake of justice for a number of local robberies.  They acted just as the cops would.  What makes no sense to me are these very poor choices when faced with overwhelming force.  He didn’t bring a knife to a gunfight he brought running shoes, and he didn’t even use them.  You think you are going to start slapping someone who has a gun and a friend with another gun? That is about as stupid as it gets. And this has happened many times.  It seems to me if you though white people were all racists who wanted to kill you, you would run.  Or better yet, find out what they wanted and resolve things peacefully.    

The judge said “I believe that assuming the worst in others we show our worst character,” This is what the McMichaels did this is what the whole culture and force of our system requires that we do.  Because there is no actual justice, wronged citizens are forced to assume the worst, and act upon it.  Why do we assume? Because we live in a world of unaddressed evil and we get suspicious.   And looking at it more the judge suppressed Arburys prior criminal history.  Why was that debatable?  Because we all know the system did not serve justice to him in the past.  We know he didn’t pay his debt because our system does not require that, ever.  Once you are in the system you are always guilty, that is what our unforgiving culture does.  And looking further he was on probation for having a concealed weapon at a school, who cares and running from the cops, who cares.  Which in our system were probably a euphemism for an actual real crime he did commit, that was plead down to this.  These men were convicted of doing what the cops are required to do every day.

Some other thoughts on that case.  The guy in the back, in his car, filming the shooting was convicted of aggravated assault,  and three felony murder counts.  What a joke.  And to bring race into it is just ridiculous.  If they just hated black people why didn’t they just shoot all of them?  Was this the first black person they had ever seen?  When McMichaels was a cop he shot every black person he met?  No the worst they could come up with is that he missed some training.  And they knew it was a bad case which is why no one was charged until mobs of fools misinformed by the lying media made a big racial deal out of it. It really is sick.  There is no justice in our land.

In response to this: https://wng.org/articles/handling-a-hostile-culture-1640586880?fbclid=IwAR0R7HJNG1PHWYaMeKWlqvDRbhChP00ryP1m2__bpC98aULigxbIUlVTjW0

I have always admired Keller for his willingness to apply classical white western civilizational techniques on rhetoric to his preaching.  Which is about the most offensive way I can think to say it.  What city people think Christians are is wrong, and going out of your way to accurately correct that is a valuable thing. Soemetimes Christians speak and insider mentality can push people away who are honestly seeking.  I think this is very rare, but still.

On the other hand there are a few clarifications he seems to avoid, in the spirit of not offending city people, which offends conservative Christians.

First, when Jesus talks about justice for the poor and widow and orphan, the thing that needs to be fixed isn’t their poverty.  He is talking about when they have a grievance, they are to be heard by a judge, without partiality, just as if they had been rich.  This is justice. (God shows no partiality)  Our country does a better job of this than almost anywhere on the earth, except that we used to do it better.  He conflates this with social justice all the time.  And it is for sure the bent of the interviewer and most of these city people, so it’s hard to tell exactly where he stands.    Social justice says that the poor are poor because they have been wronged.  And that you are guilty because you have something someone else does not have.  It treats people as part of a class instead of holding them individually responsible.  It is the very partiality Jesus said not to hold.  The law does not treat people differently because they are poor, either for good or ill.

Of course we should discuss charity, and discrimination but they are not issues of justice.  And using the term is just confusing.  If you don’t hire someone because you don’t like their group, that’s not an injustice.  You aren’t the government, you aren’t a judge or a king.  But to pass laws favoring a certain group is injustice.  Calling it social justice is just a lie.  Giving to poor people is not justice.  Requiring people to give to the poor is injustice.  I love how we can’t impose Old Testament laws agains sexual perversion, as almost all Christians have done for 2000 years, but we should impose this simplistic view of gleaning today.  You had to allow the poor to glean on the land because it was God’s people’s land.  You couldn’t sell the land because it belonged to your family and tribe.  This is not a communistic view of all property, it is the theocratic view of property for the people of Israel.

Interesting that elsewhere he quotes Proverbs 31:8-9 as proof that we are all to give the poor more social power.  When the verse is a king, talking to his son, a future king, telling him that he should judge rightly by hearing the poor fairly.  It is not saying to give the poor special social status.  It is not advocating for social justice.

Second, taking a political stand is not the same thing as believing exactly everything ever said or done by one party.  This is the problem we have right now with any group.  We hate groups because groups may or have done things we don’t like, so we float around as individuals because that insulates us from the criticism we hand out for others, because we can’t do anything real.  Criticizing someone for being part of a groups is a logical fallacy, it is unequal weights and measures, it is cheating. Telling people to vote for Trump because he is against the mass murder of babies by their parents in the womb, does not mean you are advocating everything he ever did.  It means you are making the best choice.  It means you want to prevent the insanity that happened this last year.  And a failure to make this statement, isn’t rising above politics, it is being irresponsible and failing to lead your congregation to make wise decisions.  Keller is a good communicator, so be brave and dare to communicate to the city people why half of the country voted for Trump.  Instead he spreads the mantra that Jesus wasn’t political.  Which is just a talking point to make people feel ok about voting for the evil Biden.  Voting for Republicans is being political,  voting for Democrats is social Justic which Jesus would have wanted.  This is just a lie, disguised in the terminology.