The western church’s capitulation to feminism is part of the reason it suffers a creeping rigor. Why would there be any life in something that carries its own disaffected head (ie. the disconnected men) around like so much luggage? No wonder the men stay away from this freak.
The church can learn a lot from gangs. Really. Men join gangs for one reason: they want a father figure.
Many troubled men grew up without strong male role models. But these men do not turn to church because the congregations they’ve attended are predominantly female, and the spirit of the place feels so warm, nurturing and gentle. Men need a masculine path to Christ. Young men crave a wilder, more demanding faith, and don’t mind the spur of discipline when it’s administered in love.
What if our churches were structured differently? What if the basic unit of the church were not the committee, but the band of brothers? What if every congregation had men leading other men to maturity in Christ? What if these spiritual fathers were challenging young men, and sending them out on dangerous missions (as a gang leader might send out a young initiate)?
Today, a young single man 18-35 is the person least likely to show up in church. Do you think a church based on spiritual fathering might turn that around?
David Murrow
www.churchformen.com
“…the coming of the kingdom means that the saints are, in Christ, seated in heavenly places, enthroned in fulfillment of the dominion mandate. Heavenly dominion over sin and Satan is the basic form of dominion for the individual Christian. But the Bible teaches that the saints have dominion over earth as well as heaven (Rev. 5:10). Heavenly dominion is over “spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12), but by exercising this heavenly dominion, the church rules also on earth. The rule of the church over the demons is not only subjective and spiritual, but has objective historical consequences.
The Biblical doctrine of regeneration is not the same as that used in systematic theology. Theology uses the term “regeneration” to refer to the invisible onetime renewal of the elect, which brings about their faith and salvation. In the Bible, regeneration is a continual work, with peaks and valleys, and applies not only to individuals but also to society and the cosmos as well. Thus, the elect can experience turning points (conversions) or regenerations at a number of crisis points in their lives, in addition to the fact that every day brings with it the need for continual conversion and renewal.
James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church, p. 6
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On the AV forum, Matthew Cart wrote:
When I was first a Christian I used to believe that it was always wrong to tell a lie, no matter what. Both Leviticus 19:11 and Colossians 3:9 talk about not lying to one another. There are scores of verses that talk about honesty.
I was first introduced to the idea of exceptions to this rule by a friend of mine. He spoke about the Chinese Christians who lie to communist authorities while they are escaping from prison and persecution type situations. Also there are Bible smugglers who lie to get Bibles to Christians in persecuted countries. There is a lot of deceit that happens, even with Voice of the Martyrs, doing things in secret and using deception for the sake of the gospel. You could consider this lying.
Didn’t Christians also practice deception and lying during Hitler’s reign to have the Jews? Someone would come to their house and ask if there were Jews there and they would say, “No”.
I am also challenged by the story in 1 Kings 22 where God put a lying spirit in the mouth of his own prophets in order to purposely deceive someone…
The repeated theme is (I think) actually that of the “warrior-bride” tricking the “serpent” before making an escape, as observed by James Jordan in his lectures. This would possibly include all the examples above plus the Hebrew midwives, Rahab’s hiding of the spies, Jael’s deception of Sisera, Michal’s lie after David’s escape and Esther’s “invitation” to Haman. These and many more were “eye for eye” justice from Eve upon the father of lies, the serpent, fulfilled of course in the cross.
It appears again in Revelation, when the serpent vomits out counterfeit living waters (false doctrine) which is swallowed hook, line and sinker by the Judaisers and Jews (the “Land”), but not the saints. In this case it was like Solomon’s sword – a deception that made plain which woman was the true mother of the living child and which woman was lying.
So Eve deceives the serpent. It is ironic justice.
There is a lot of truth in theonomy. But things have changed since the time of Moses. At that point, the church and state were basically one.
After the exile, things were different. The role of the Jews was to be priests within the Gentile state. They no longer had the right to administer capital punishment. When they witnessed faithfully, there was a Jew at the emperor’s right hand, steering the empire for God’s people and their stand for the truth.
By the time of Christ, instead of a Joseph, Daniel or Mordecai, the Jews had a Haman, a Herod. Instead of being a nation of priests, they wanted a king like the Gentiles. This makes Herod even more culpable for his role in the death of Christ, standing (legally) at the right hand of the power.
I believe the church today is exactly the same. The church administers ‘inhouse’ justice through excommunication. When the church is faithful in disciplining itself, and thus witnesses faithfully, it stands side by side with the state in administering capital punishment. Our failure to witness has led to ‘life’ for murderers and death for the innocent.
The Bible is clear on the shedding of innocent blood. A murderer dies to atone for the blood he shed. It is judicial. Correlating capital punishment with abortion is a total misunderstanding of justice.
As in AD70, perhaps all the innocent blood shed in this gospel age will be atoned for by the final generation. The murderers are marked like Cain for now, but Abel’s blood will be atoned for.
Darwin’s Joker
by Gary DeMar
There are no spoilers in this review. I saw The Dark Knight, the new Batman film, this weekend. It’s everything the reviewers have been saying about it and more. Heath Ledger’s performance is certainly worthy of an Academy Award and not because of sentimentality over his premature death. The role was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and he played it perfectly. You will believe he is the Joker. I suspect that Ledger called on some of his below-the-surface struggles, his own demons if you will, to bring the character to life. We all have the potential to play the Joker, but we keep it in check because of the “work of the law” written on our heart (Rom. 2:15).
The movie is disturbing. It’s meant to be. I don’t know the worldview of Christopher Nolan, director, co-writer, and co-producer with an impressive film pedigree, but he got so much right in depicting fallen human nature and the consistency of living out the implications of a worldview without a moral rudder.
Regarding churches claiming apostolic authority, particularly the Catholic/Protestant divide, something that is overlooked is that worship was centralised on earth but this ended in AD70. It was possible for Satan to roll the political power of Rome into bed with the religious authority of Judaism, and bring both systems down upon all true worship as persecution.
Since that time, the centre of true worship is in heaven. It is now impossible for Satan to corrupt or attack its centre because the new Jerusalem is above. We see this in Revelation 2-3. Not only is the menora now split into seven separate lampstands, the lampstands are in the holy place, seated with Christ.
So, when the Roman church became corrupt, God’s people came out. When protestantism becomes corrupt, God’s people come out. As Christianity declines in the west, it is booming in the southern hemisphere. Satan is bound from mounting an all-out worldwide attack on the church until he is released for a short time, and then only so he can be drawn out of Egypt like Pharaoh to be destroyed.
There is an institutional church, but in her visible form she is only ever local assemblies. The ‘city of God’ is in heaven, incorruptible, unassailable. If her earthly ‘branches’ leave the vine, they wither up. When they have only darkness to share, Jesus snuffs them out. They are no longer ‘the church’ regardless of whether the physical institutions remain.
Magisterially, the church governs from heaven. The new Jerusalem will descend at the end of history, but any attempt at a centralised, earthly city of God before then is doomed to failure, Roman Catholic or otherwise.
by Jack Van Deventer
My Dear Woodworm,
As your most affectionate uncle and Senior Commander in Satan’s Army, I hereby write you to maintain your ongoing efforts to destroy the Enemy’s Church. You are but a Junior Tempter now, but with continued success you will surely rise through the ranks. Your orders are to attack and weaken the clergy, the leaders of the Opposition.
Your attack on the clergy should occur on three fronts. First, while allowing the preacher to pound the pulpit with regard to the truth of the Scriptures, have them deny their applicability. Tell them that the Old Testament is for ancient Israel, not for us. Teach them to hate God’s Law as being irrelevant, outdated, and harsh.
“…Regarding Cephas’ segregation from Gentile believers, Paul says that this is not walking according to the truth of the gospel. That means either separation or gospel, but it can’t be both; (2) In Rom. 3.28-29, Paul says that we reckon that a man is justified by faith without works of law, and he asks in return, “or is God the God of the Jews only?” Notice “or”! In other words, justification by faith and ethnocentrism are mutual exclusives.
Now let me ask, can a person believe in racial segregation and believe in the gospel and justification at the same time? I will say “no”. Now let me say that it is not that such a person has failed to grasp an “implication” of the gospel or of justification. The language is much stronger than that in the NT. Such a stance is a perversion of the gospel and a competing alternative to justification. A person can believe in the gospel partially and grasp justification fallibly. But a person who believes in racial segregation or cultural hegemony does not believe in the true gospel and does not grasp the true meaning of justification.
I will never forget Mark Seifrid telling me that 11.00 a.m. on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in America. Now let me ask, is there a reason why some of the most rancorous and acidic critiques of the New Perspective derive from certain leaders in certain Southern denominations in the USA? Is it because they are happy to use justification as a stick to bash Catholics for works-righteousness, but object when that same stick is used to bash them for driving for 40 minutes across town to attend a white middle-class church when a perfectly good evangelical black church is 5 minutes around the corner?…”
Michael F. Bird, http://euangelizomai.blogspot.com/2009/01/justification-and-race.html
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