More on the Worldview Revolution, then an Overview of 1 Tim 2

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is, uh, it's a Tuesday, I believe, and next week, um, gonna be heading out for the first time in a long, long time, uh, which means

I get a lot of time to listen to books and stuff while driving. I hope I can find open gas stations.

It hasn't taken long to dive right into the joy of, of, uh, of socialism, has it?

Wow, man, I tell you, you, you elect the socialists, you end up living in a socialist country.

Um, anyway, uh, heading out to, uh, prior Oklahoma next week. And, uh, so I hope those of you in the area, if you can find gas too, uh, will come out and we'll, uh, it's, it's only about 20 minutes outside of, uh, outside of Tulsa.

And, uh, also, uh, at that time, uh,

I'm hoping that my hosts will frequently take me to a certain, uh, breakfast place.

Last time I was there, uh, just number of months ago, only one, no, that was

December, December of last year. We went by this breakfast place in prior Oklahoma. And I think

I told you, I shouldn't mention this because they might stop doing it. But, um, if you, if you get a bacon and eggs breakfast there, you literally get enough bacon on your plate that if you, if you do the doggy bag thing, um, that would pretty much cover me for a month.

It really would without what I would bring home. It was great stuff too. It was great bacon, hash browns, um, eggs.

I mean, wow. It was a cholesterol feast. So anyways, we're going to be heading out next week.

So, um, Rich said he was going to be spending that time, uh, working on some stuff in the

AO Max studio. Um, but he has become so, um, dedicated to his, his work here that he already started that work.

Uh, so I'm not sure what he's going to be doing next week. Maybe you'll have time to, you know, do something else, bring somebody, bring somebody in or something.

Who knows? I mean, I don't know. Anyway. Um, so we're, we're tidying things up in there.

So we have a little room for, uh, human beings so we can have some, uh, stuff in there with a small studio audience, but actual living people.

It sort of changes the dynamics, uh, really does to have, have peoples sitting in there.

So I, um, I had this tab open on a browser a couple of weeks ago and never got around to it.

Uh, but, and I, I, I don't like starting off program on a negative note, but I don't want it to necessarily be a real negative note.

Uh, oh, by the way on Sunday, just an announcement here. Hopefully I won't forget this on a

Sunday. I preached at Apollo Geo church and I did a single sermon on the, uh, argument that we dealt with on the 1946 thing.

So if you want just to just a sermon that dealt specifically with, uh, first Timothy 1, 10 and first Corinthians six, nine through 11, it's really first Timothy one, eight and following and, you know, a little broader context in that.

But anyway, the deals with arson, a coy taste. Yeah. Mother's day sermon. Yeah. That was a, that was a real, um, yeah.

Warm, fuzzy chocolates and roses type sermon. Uh, on my part,

I do realize that, but it's, we live in a day when I'm not sure how much time we have for chocolate and roses type, uh, sermons to be perfectly honest with you.

But anyway, we dealt with that. It's available on YouTube and Facebook and various places like that.

Go to Apollo Geo studios, track down, um, share it with your, share it widely.

Uh, because what I was doing was I, I want people to use the errors that are being propounded by the 1946 movie and on social media.

People are saying, Hey, they inserted homosexuality in the Bible. That is one of the worst arguments they've ever come up with.

So let's use it. If, if you know the answer, then let's use it to open the door to, to use that, to bring a message of hope.

And that's what we were focusing on doing. So I hope you'll, um, track that down anyway, to this story, the headline from April 28th.

So, you know, two weeks ago, 29 year old woman walking with date killed after man jumps from building and lands on her, uh,

Taylor Kale or call K H K A H L E 29 was killed in a freak accident.

If you want to call it that when a suicidal man who jumped from a building landed on her, as she unknowingly walked below, um, the decedent was an unidentified adult male who appears to be approximately 20, 30 years old evening hours of, uh,

April 25th, 2021. The decedent was observed entering a parking structure in downtown

San Diego. He was then seen hanging from the outside railing of the ninth floor balcony of the structure.

He went onto a passerby who was walking on the sidewalk below. So a very pretty young lady, 29 years old, uh, walking with her date on the sidewalk and a jumper jumps from the ninth, ninth floor and lands on her and seemingly killed her faster than it killed him.

Oh, they both died. Um, but, uh, she was just a week away from her 30th birthday.

Um, and, uh, from what says here, she was not married, no children.

Um, but which these days not unusual at 29 years of age.

Uh, but the point is you're out with your date on a walk and of all places,

San Diego, okay. You know, New York, you expect stuff to fall off of buildings in New York. That's, that's

New York, but San Diego, um, maybe a seagull, you know, has a heart attack and croaks and falls on you,

I suppose. But, but a, a, someone committing suicide falls from the building and kills you as you're walking along.

And if you're like me, the first thing you thought of was that's sort of what

Jonathan Edwards was talking about in centers in the hands of an angry God is what he was.

He was basically trying to get people to realize that they're walking on a rotted bridge over the fires of hell.

If they are continuing in their rebellion against God, that there's nothing that is keeping them from falling into his judgment at any point in time.

And it just strikes me that I, when, when we went to, uh,

Germany in 2017, before the Reformation celebration of 500 anniversary, one of the things that I mentioned a number of times to our people was the fact that there was such a major worldview change since that day, that it's hard for us to really understand the passion with which men and women discussed life and death and judgment.

That's one of the things I liked about the, the BBC, um, presentation years and years ago of Martin Luther heretic is they did a good job in communicating to the, the viewer, the impact on young Luther of seeing death and the imminency of judgment, the imminency of judgment.

And we, most of us living in the West, just simply struggle with that.

Now there are people you, you live under the CCP, you live in North Korea, imminency of judgment is easy for you to understand because any, you live under any totalitarian regime that can disappear people, that can make people just, you, you know, that today could be it.

And you don't even necessarily know why, but you know that life can be short and you just automatically try to keep your accounts short with the people around you because it could be your day.

And most of humankind has lived with that realization.

It is us in the West and only over the past less than a hundred years who have sanitized our experience.

We don't, you don't take children to funerals. You don't have open casket funerals. You don't, you don't discuss death.

We don't, we don't discuss death in the church nearly as much as we should, and nearly realistically as we should.

I've said that many times, especially when I'm talking about my book on grieving, we are, we walk into the grieving process horribly unprepared, even as Christians, we really do.

And so the whole idea of the imminency of entering into judgment is central to an understanding of how theology has been discussed in the past.

Now, you then transfer the discussion of those issues into our modern context where pretty much everybody thinks they're going to live forever.

They've, you got to remember Luther and anyone, anyone at all in Germany at the beginning of the 16th century had all seen dead bodies on the street.

They had all seen death. They had all had brothers and sisters who died in, in their youth.

They had all, they had all, death was around them all the time. Plague would still come by. People would be fleeing from towns to towns and fleeing into the woods.

And this was, this was what life was. And so you knew that life was short.

You, you didn't have to really ponder Psalm 90 too often to understand why you needed to ask

God to cause you to count your days so you could present a heart of wisdom to him, knowing that life is short and that there would be judgment.

You, you look at the massive change that has taken place in the

West and the removal of the imminency of death and judgment has changed everything.

If you want, if you want, in my opinion, one of the primary reasons why we're seeing the things that we're seeing today, it is the advent of a godless, man -centered, um,

I won't necessarily say atheistic though. That's obviously part of it.

I mean, there's, there's dead religion in there sort of mixed in, but the whole secular system, even when it tries to pretend that there's room for religion, doesn't have a creator and therefore does not have a day of judgment.

You remove the creator and you remove the day of judgment and you have a completely different human species. You really do.

You're going to have different government. You're going to have, everything's going to be different reasons for war. Everything changes.

Everything changes. And we are now seeing what that means. And so you see a situation like this and you know, it's easy to go,

Oh, well, you know, that's, that's just a freak accident. No, there are no freak accidents.

And the wise heart, the Christian heart takes too hard a situation like this and goes, man,

I, how often do I not listen to the wisdom of James? If the

Lord wills, we will do such and so. If the Lord wills, we will do such and so. And mankind can't even have that wisdom now.

The wisdom of mankind is there is no purpose in the future.

There is no plan in the future. There's, there's no transcendent meaning. There is no judgment.

You're not created. And if a guy falls off a building on top of you, well, he fizzed his way, you fizzed yours.

Now neither one of you fizz at all. It's all there is to it. There's, there's, there's no more meaning to it than that.

Because from their perspective, you know, that doesn't impact anything on Saturn.

And Saturn looks at our pale blue dot and could care less that you just died because there's nothing out there to care.

This is a, this is a pitiless, random, purposeless, uncreated, massive amount of energy that's moving toward heat death.

It's all there is to it. There's nothing more. Let's not worry about it. That's, that's where we are.

So with that in mind then, when you look at the nations that are farther down the secular road, now

America is seemingly running as hard as we can in our masks, which does slow us down a little bit.

Hopefully we'll just pass out from lack of oxygen like that poor girl did and maybe stop for a while.

But the nations that have been at this longer than we have are farther down the road than we are.

And so there are places that we can look. And I'm not talking about the CCP. I mean, they're full -on totalitarian communists.

That's, that's looking at the end of the road. That's, that's where everything points to right now.

But that's, that's the, the worst case scenario. I'm talking more of the

European nations, especially Northern European nations, because there's some reason the Scandinavian nations,

Northern European nations, Belgium, Netherlands, places like that, have embraced their secularism at a, at a higher rate of speed.

Now, certainly France has as well, you know, all the way back to the

French revolution and all the rest of that kind of stuff. But when you look at what's happening in the

Netherlands, you look what happened, what's happening in Belgium and, and then up in the Scandinavian nations, really, you see those dead state churches with almost no regenerate people left in them at all.

And then you see the state acting as the state must eventually act when you embrace a secular worldview.

So in Finland, there is a very interesting looking fellow here.

Finnish bishop -elect charged over historic Christian teachings on human sexuality. This is

Dr. Johanna Pajola. He's bishop -elect of the

Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland. Has been charged by Finland's prosecutor general with incitement against a group of people.

The charges stem from a 2004 booklet. So 17 years ago, 2004 booklet published by Luther Foundation Finland, which articulates historic

Christian teaching on human sexuality. And what terrible, horrible things is he saying?

Well, according to the Bible and the Christian conception of man, homosexual relations are against the will of God and marriage is intended only between a man and a woman.

This is what the Christian church has always taught and will always teach. Now realize same -sex marriage began in Finland in 2017.

So 13 years after the publication of this booklet, it becomes legal in Finland.

So they're going back before it was even legal in Finland for the charges they're making.

The booklet argues that homosexual activity must be identified as sin by the church on the basis of the teachings of scripture.

What's interesting, the author, Dr. Päivi Reisenen, a

Finnish member of parliament, further argues that a failure to recognize sin as sin undermines the very need for a savior.

Okay, basic, simple, historic Christianity.

And Dr. Reisenen has now been charged with incitement by the prosecutor general, both for the booklet and for other comments on human sexuality, as Dean Poiola is editor -in -chief of Luther Foundation Finland's publications, including the booklet

Male and Female He Created Them. He also was charged. He also was charged. This decision of the prosecutor general says a lot about our time.

Dean Poiola commented, while I am concerned about the state of religious freedom in our country,

I trust the judiciary will make the right decision. Well, on what basis are judges supposed to make decisions?

Well, it's all a worldview issue. And once you embrace the ethical and moral anarchy that necessarily comes from a rejection of God as creator and as source of law and morality, how can you expect a proper decision in a situation like that?

I don't know. The International Lutheran Council has earlier expressed concern about the investigation of Lutherans in Finland for upholding historic

Christian teaching. That concern is deepening. Recent actions in Finland have created an international scandal, which continues to grow.

And it's true. And I'm not sure if I have this one in here, but I saw,

I think there was one. Maybe I didn't save that one. No, I didn't. There is a, oh no,

I think I did. There it is. No, no, it's the same one.

This is just talking about the Christian leaders face six years in prison for quoting the Bible on homosexuality.

And that's the same thing in Finland. But I think I saw another one.

And it's interesting, many of these individuals, these Christians who are being prosecuted and persecuted are in government.

They're members of government. There was a woman, and I don't think it was Finland. I think it may have been

Sweden, Denmark, somewhere up in that direction. There was a woman that I believe is part of the government who also is under investigation or been charged with incitement.

And of course we know what incitement means. You will not find anyone being charged with incitement of hatred toward Christians.

That's not going to happen. Instead, there is one worldview, and that worldview says these things are good and right and are to be celebrated.

And whatever those things are, they will be the destructive of human life. This is a culture of death on the march and establishing itself and flexing its muscles and doing what it wants to do.

So we see this happening, and these folks are just like a decade ahead of us.

The only thing keeping us from being right up to speed with this, I mean, this is what the Equality Act wants to lay the foundation to do.

And it will. So we're trying to catch up as quickly as we can. The reason that we've been a little slower,

I think, is just simply cultural impetus.

There's still too many of those old -style people left, and you have to be a little careful.

You don't want to get people too upset too quickly. We'll move them along as we can.

And now that you have corporations being your primary mechanism of doing things rather than the government, that's really effective.

That's really effective. So now that you can use the economic power of the corporate oligarchs, and you're hearing the term oligarch.

Hopefully you're familiar with the fact oligos means few in Greek. Archae, governing authority.

So we've talked about Russian oligarchs for a long time. Under Putin, you've had these incredibly rich Russians who control frequently oil, things like that, and very often mobs and crime and drugs and prostitution, everything else.

And they are unelected, but they're chosen by Putin. And they basically rule in certain areas.

And so it's a corrupt oligarchy. We now have a corrupt oligarchy in the

West, but it's a technocratic oligarchy. So the technocrats, the people with the ability to turn off your internet access and silence you and shut down your access to banking, your access to everything today, or turn off the gas as Russian hackers did and are creating.

Can you imagine if they went after everything? I mean, so much of our infrastructure is susceptible to this type of stuff.

Here in Arizona, you turn the lights off for a week in a row, and how many people are going to die?

Yeah, well, yeah, the nuclear power plant, you hope that there's some manual overrides out there.

But yeah, so this technocratic stuff, the oligarchs, the

Facebooks and the Twitters and the Googles, much more effective at bringing this about than any government.

Government's never effective at doing anything other than messing up. And everybody knows that.

You should know that. If you live in the real world, you would know that, but there you go. So it's a worldview issue.

And what's happening in Finland and all these other nations, the inevitable clash of the old, where you had a recognition of a day of judgment, a creator, moral and ethical sanity and consistency from generation to generation versus the new, where anything goes as long as it's against the old.

And it could change in the next generation. There is no consistency over time. There is no transcendent value to anything, no transcendent moral or ethical goodness that you can pass on to the next generation or the generation after that.

There are, of course, results to all of this. There is an impact to all of this taking place.

I do notice, just in passing, an article that appeared called,

Attacks on Christian Homeschooling Are No Longer Subtle. And part of this is due to the massive surge in the number of people homeschooling, thanks to the coronavirus panic and the fact that you have teachers unions that seem to exist only for political purposes.

They have nothing to do with the education of children. And they seem to exist basically for themselves to make sure teachers get paid and don't have to teach.

That seems to be the situation in most places, which right now, honestly,

I am thankful that many of these teachers unions have shut down the schools because I fully recognize that now what they do in those schools is nothing but indoctrination.

They're not teaching anything. Teaching and indoctrinating are not the same things.

And if you do see your students as nothing but fizzing bags of chemicals, all you're doing is trying to get the fizz to go the right way.

So you have to have an overarching system that you want to impose upon the fizzing.

That's all there is. The idea that you're looking at these individuals and you're seeking to allow them to be the best that they can be in whatever they choose to do, and the idea that you're being inclusive and having multiple views, that's not that.

That is certainly not the school system in Oregon, Washington, California, New York, Maine, Illinois, any places like that.

Just look at the curriculums in all those places and you will see that the public education system has one purpose now, and it's not to teach you to read and write.

It's to teach you to be a good drone of the system. Well, it is, and that's why the

Biden regime, and I really wish everyone would pick up on that term. It's not the Biden administration.

They're not administering a common body of law. They are overthrowing all of that.

They could care less what the constitution has to say, and they're doing everything they can. In fact, there's a bill in Congress right now, the

Corrupt Politicians Act. Let's talk about naming it accurately.

Every single person pushing it is a corrupt politician that is specifically designed to create one party rule, to freeze the

Democrats in control and make it impossible to ever remove them. And if you're sitting there going, didn't you say that was going to happen last year before the election?

Yeah. And I wasn't the only one. Anybody who could just sit back and go, look at California, used to be a

Republican state. I mean, Reagan came from California. And now there's not a

Republican holding a single statewide office in that entire... What happened? Demography, how you set up the entire system to perpetuate single party rule.

And who comes from there? Kamala Harris. Hey, well. So this isn't an administration.

It's a regime. You've got the Putin regime and the Xi Jinping regime, and we have the

Biden regime. The only difference with that is that both Putin and Xi Jinping are actually involved, and they know what day of the week it is.

But this is nameless, faceless people, leftists to the man and woman.

And it's their intention to make sure that there is never again a free election in the United States.

And they have the power to do it. And they may pull it off, as was warned last year.

But I can't sit here and say, and still a majority of you vote for him, because I don't think that happened either.

So there you go. But lots of people still did. Lots of people still did.

And so all the big EVA guys, as you're seeing the Biden administration removing protections for doctors and just cramming transgenderism right down the gullet of every single man, woman and child in the

United States. I just hope you're so thankful that there aren't any mean tweets today.

Your children are in danger, but there are no mean tweets. And you got it right, didn't you?

Yeah, all you mean tweeter people. Anyway, back to the article here. Because of this huge rise in homeschooling.

And look, you know what's happened is a lot of people simply looked around and realized, you know what?

My children are much better now that they're homeschooled.

They're making progress. They're reading better. They're learning more. We have a better family structure. Doesn't mean it's perfect.

It's different stresses. But man, they look around and go, man, so many of the problems

I was having my kids, I don't have anymore. Oh, well, wonder why that might be? Because they weren't being educated.

They were being indoctrinated. Hey, there you go. So I've said for a long time, it won't be long.

Even though homeschooling first started with the liberals, now they're going, hey, we, you know, the

Biden regime, what do they want to do? They want to start school two years earlier and pay for it to go two years longer.

Wow. Just think about that. 16 years of indoctrination.

I would think they could be more effective than that. The Chinese managed to do it in less than that, but I don't know.

Maybe we're just a little bit slow, but you just watch. You just watch. There is going to be so much more about it.

All right. Look, the Southern Baptists are going to be getting together and having a little chat pretty soon.

And as a result, there is a whole lot of discussion going on about all sorts of things, critical race theory and the binding authority.

What is the level of authority of a statement of faith of a church? What about if you're a member of a denomination?

How strict does your observation of the statement of faith have to be?

And what elements of the statement of faith are definitional over against others?

So if a ostensibly Southern Baptist church adopted modalistic theology purposefully, not out of ignorance, there's probably a bunch that already do out of ignorance, but purposefully abandoned

Trinitarian theology for modalistic theology and made that public.

Okay. Most people would view that as a first order priority and would seek to remove the church when that church in, maybe it was

California, remember about five years ago, the pastor whose son came out as gay decided to become affirming and the

SBC disassociated itself from that particular church once it became an affirming church.

Okay. So that means the issues of sexuality, marriage are first order, or at least super high order elements of what is required for fellowship within the

Southern Baptist convention. Well, as you know, last week Saddleback Church, which is technically

Southern Baptist, they don't say much about it. I don't think they really do much as far as the cooperative program is concerned.

I don't know, but I've heard that's the case. Everybody knows that there has been a very clear trajectory on the part of Saddleback Church and Rick Warren for decades.

If you haven't seen that coming, if you haven't seen that, you just haven't been watching.

And so they came out with an announcement that they had just ordained three women pastors.

Now they also ordained two or three male elders.

So I don't know if they are making some kind of distinction between pastor and elder.

Do they make a distinction? Is an elder a lesser office than a pastor? Is elder a greater office than pastor?

Do they have any kind of theology of authority?

Most Baptist churches don't in the

SBC because of an abuse of a theology of authority in a lot of fundamentalist churches.

So you get this fundamentalist idea, you shall not touch the

Lord's anointed, and you get the abusive single pastor situation or the abusive deacon board model where you have an oligarchy of men who aren't supposed to have a particular kind of spiritual authority in the congregation to begin with, but they control everything.

They control the purse strings, and so they hire and fire the single pastor as they see fit rather than a biblical plurality of elders mechanism.

You have these other forms. Anyway, they ordained these three women pastors.

And now, of course, as there already was going to be, there has to be a conversation in the

SBC. And I'm not in the SBC, so not only do

I have all sorts of friends who are, but we are all impacted. I mean, it's technically the largest

Protestant denomination. That is only technically. I don't think there is a larger Protestant denomination.

I just think that Protestant denominations in the United States are massively overblown as to their actual size.

I don't think the SBC is. The SBC might be 55 to 60 % of what it's claimed to be as far as people who are actually attending church with any kind of semblance of regularity.

And in fact, if you cut that down to churches that actually look at their membership roles and make sure that they're in contact with everybody on their membership roles in some type of regular sense, it would be minuscule as far as the numbers are concerned.

It's much smaller than it's claimed to be. Anyway, but we're still impacted by all of these things.

And if you haven't noticed, the Southern Baptist seminaries are cranking out woke folks right, left, and center.

And so something's got to happen. Something's going to happen. So you've got all the critical theory stuff going on, and that would have been big enough.

But now you've got Saddleback and all sorts of other Southern Baptist churches ordaining women.

Now, I've never been in a church where this had any chance of ever being an issue.

I was talking with my former elder from the church where I was for almost 30 years just recently, and was reminded once again that as long as he's kicking, this isn't an issue that's ever going to rear its head in that church.

I can assure you of that. So I'll be honest with you. Believe it or not, some of you are going to go, this is impossible.

There are controversial issues that are not on the front burner in my thinking.

There's stuff that I just, yeah, I'm not saying that's not important. But there's only so many hours in the day.

There's only so many things you can become passionate about. So you know that for a long time,

I blew off eschatology the same way. I was wrong to do that, but I blew off eschatology the same way.

It's like, whatever. And this is sort of one of those areas. I'll be honest with you.

I've read some papers, and I've listened to conversations, and I probably know more than your average bear does about what the issues are.

But I would not right now want to debate the issue. I would have to have some time because there are certain areas that, and remember,

I went to Fuller Seminary. So I remember very clearly one of my favorite professors, I had him for six classes, way to my left, but a tremendous teacher.

I mean, he knew his subject. That's where I learned to listen to people who are on your left, spit out the bones, and enjoy the meat because there can be real meat there.

And he was PCUSA, and they were ordaining women.

And so I had all sorts of, one of the last classes I took was with a professor who came over from Pasadena, from the

Fuller campus, and was even farther to the left. I mean, at one point in that class,

I've told this story before, but at one point in that class, it was 1989, he walked around from the podium and pulled up a desk, and I pulled my desk up, and the rest of the students surrounded us, and we debated abortion in the middle of an ethics class.

And I was the one against it. So it gives you an idea what was going on even back then.

But I remember this one, this wasn't that professor, it was a different professor, but the professor that I really enjoyed,

I'm hearing all of this stuff about women, and that other professor, for example,

I was the first person I had ever had say, the Lord's Supper needs to be open to everyone, it is an invitation to come to Christ, anyone who would say that only

Christians should partake, this is a terrible, horrible thing, and so on and so forth. And so I was having to listen to the reasoning of these people to understand, where are they coming from?

And the consistency, and the thing that I appreciated about that one professor was,

I could tell he still had a very high view of Scripture. And the challenges he had was to basically maintain that high view in light of the issues that were going on in his own denomination as Presbyterianism was doing that nosedive downward.

So I've listened to all sorts of people who believe in women elders, and women pastors, and of course, you've got the

Anglican Communion, and the women bishops, and oh, and then the

Lutherans, the liberal Lutherans, ELCA, where the E means absolutely nothing any longer,

I can assure you. But only last week, the ELCA ordained its first transgender bishop, where else but San Francisco.

That's sort of what you'd expect, but now they have a transgender bishop in the ELCA. And again, the trajectory has been so easy to see.

I mean, looking back now to the 1990s, it's not at all shocking to realize that these denominations that began going this direction would eventually collapse to the point of ordaining people that don't know whether they're a male or female.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The trajectory now, in hindsight, was perfectly clear.

If someone had said that back then, oh, you scaremonger, that can never happen, and now it has.

Which means that eventually, you will have polyamorous bishops, you will have intergenerational attracted bishops, you will have interspecies attracted bishops, and the whole nine yards.

You will. They have to. I mean, the drive is to break everything down completely, to destroy all

God -given categories. That's the goal. So it's got to go there eventually, and it will, and it will.

Mark it down. So let's look at 1

Timothy, and let's do it this way, okay? I want to, let's see here.

Okay. I did not take time to prepare this in the sense of going and reading stuff.

For example, for my response to Trent Horn, we bought, what, about last week?

About four or five resources, books, or something like that. Like, for example, John D. Lawrence's priest as type of Christ, the leader of the

Eucharist and salvation history according to Cyprian of Carthage. Okay? So when we want to go in depth, we go get the doctoral dissertations and all the rest of that kind of stuff, and we go in depth on it.

Okay. I didn't do that with this because as I looked at the text, I'm like, this is a great example of where we can get, where both sides can get so focused upon a word that basic important rules of exegesis get just thrown out the window.

Let's just listen to what the text says, okay? And let's think about what it's saying.

1 Timothy 2 .8. Now, let's back up again. That's up in the air. We got to put that down.

Is that where it needs to be? Is that where it is in the screen that everybody else is seeing?

Because that seems odd to be able to see the corner of this thing back here. But anyway, give

Rich something to do. That doesn't accomplish anything.

These may be presets, but I'm sure there's a way to fix that. You bet.

You once told me you're good at this. So let's see what you got. Okay. So first thing to notice, just back up a second.

This is the stuff I normally don't see going on when these passages are being thrown back and forth, but they need to be.

1 Timothy 2. What's the first thing that should cross your mind? Well, 1, 2

Timothy and Titus are pastoral epistles. Philemon's frequently thrown in there.

It's got a little bit more of a specific element to it. But 1, 2 Timothy and Titus are specifically written by Paul to men that he has placed in authority as bishops, elders.

Thanks. That's great. Bishops and elders in the church, they are in a position of authority.

And Paul is writing under the assumption that he doesn't have much time left.

And hence, he's writing to the next generation of church leadership. So the letters have a

Catholic, small c, universal tone to them.

Sure. When Paul writes Titus, he mentions Titus, the Cretans.

And so he recognizes where Titus is in that instance.

But I contrast that with, for example, 1 Corinthians or 2 Corinthians, the Corinthian correspondence, where there are certain elements of the discussion to the

Corinthians that seem to be directly relevant to the context of the church of Corinth, which was filled.

The city of Corinth is filled with idolatry. There are temples everywhere. And so the constant discussion of things offered in sacrifice to idols, that's because that was the only way you could get meat in Corinth.

All the meat had been offered in sacrifice to idols. So if you offer in sacrifice to idols, then it's brought out the back door and it's sold in the meat market.

So that raised issues. The temple prostitutes whose hair was shaved, that's what made them easily distinguishable and recognizable.

That might have something to do with head coverings in Corinth. And hence, there would be contextual societal elements that are a part of the

Corinthian correspondence that are not a part of what is being written to Timothy. No matter where Timothy is, there is an element to these letters that is meant to be general and universal.

This becomes very important in interpretation of male and female roles, because much of the argumentation is, well, that was then, this is now.

And so very much there is a discussion of what is culturally contextual in these verses and what is meant to be taken universally and applied universally.

This is also relevant to the male -female issue, because in this text, the terms for male and female, man, woman, husband, wife, are used specifically and clearly.

So some people literally argue that, well, but it's just meant in a generic sense.

I literally had people yesterday, I threw out the standard thing I've said a number of times.

It's like, if God intended us to have women elders, why are there no qualifications for women elders in the

New Testament? Did we only need qualifications for male elders? Why not women elders?

The qualifications we're given are of men. And I literally had people saying, well, it's not necessarily of men.

No, it is necessarily of men. When you're to be a one -woman man, that is talking about men.

What do you mean? It's, well, it's just sort of meant, it's like, what are you even babbling about?

Can't even figure that part out. Anyway, the point is we're reading Paul, writing to Timothy, providing

Timothy with important information that Timothy is then to pass on from Paul in regards to the very structure of the church in general.

So I don't think it is at all improper to point out that at the end of all of this, in 1

Timothy 3 .14, Paul says, I am writing these things to you, hoping to come to you before long. But in case

I am delayed, I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church living

God, the pillar and support of the truth. Now, Roman Catholics always go to 1

Timothy 3 .15, not realizing that if you read it in context, he's talking about the local church. The local church is the pillar and support of the truth.

And so this is how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God anywhere.

So these are generic, universal rules from the apostle to a man who is functioning as the bishop in the church, maybe of Ephesus at that time, even though the idea of staying in just one place it probably wasn't what was behind Paul's thinking in many of these things.

So with that in mind, beginning in verse eight of chapter two, therefore,

I want men, I want the men to Andros in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands without wrath and dissension.

Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing. So if you just had verse eight by itself, you could say men there is just Andros is just a generic, but you've got likewise, you then have gunikos.

So no, Paul is talking about groups here, men and women.

Men are to in every place pray, lifting up holy hands without wrath and dissension. There is to be a,

Christian men are to be known as men who pray without wrath and dissension.

There's to be a focus upon this reality. Women are to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather a means of good works as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.

So braided hair, gold, pearls, costly garments, modest dress.

We're talking about females. We're talking about women and we're talking about men.

That's been established. There isn't any question about this. Now, some people say, well, men should dress modestly and discreetly too.

That's true, but that's not what he's talking about. You can go there if you want to, but that's not exegesis.

That means you're trying to get around something. Instead of listening to where Paul's going, where Paul is making this distinction, you're trying to go someplace else.

So instead of doing what the world says to do, and that is with the clothing, braided hair, gold, pearls, costly garments.

Instead, they are to dress themselves by means of good works as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.

So are we talking about women here? Yes, we are talking about women here. Paul is actually functioning on that terrible, horrible gender binary.

This is indeed what he is doing. So let's notice something.

Now we get to verses 11 through 15. A woman must receive, quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness, but I did not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over man, but to remain quiet.

For it was Adam who was first created and then Eve, and it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived fell in transgression, but women would be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self -restraint.

And then he moves on to there. It is a trustworthy statement if any man aspires the office of overseer.

So I want us to see that connection because we will look at it. Next, let us please note the terminology, all right?

So we have a woman, gunay, okay?

A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness.

Verse 12, I do not allow a gunayki woman to teach or to exercise authority over an

Andras man, but to remain quiet.

For it was Adam who was first created and then

Eve. Now is Adam, I'm sorry? Well, thank you.

I'm glad you are seeing a theme in the colors there. There is no question in Paul's day about the gender of Adam or the gender of Eve.

There really has never been any question about these things down through human history until today's muddled infantile society and muddled infantile pretended church in some places as well.

For it was not Adam who was deceived, but hey, gunay.

So gunay up here in verse 11, a woman, but now the woman being deceived fell into transgression referring to Eve, referring to Eve, okay?

So if this was any other subject, if this was an eschatological subject, if this was a subject in regards to the atonement, if this was a subject in regards to resurrection, name it.

Very few of the people having debates right now on the subject of men and women in the church would miss what's obvious right in front of us in the text, that there is a clear distinction being followed, okay?

It would be obvious. But for some reason it gets lost here because there are other things being debated.

So a woman in quietness, manthaneto, must receive instruction with all submission.

A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. Now, I'll tell you right now, one of the primary arguments that you'll find in scholarly papers and position papers and stuff like that has to do with this term right here, alphantine, alphantine.

And you are familiar with this term as it has come across into English long after this time period because you are with the word authentic, authentic, same root.

And so how is authentic, which is a descriptor, and a verb to be related to one another, specifically in the infinitival form here, because it says,

Paul says didaskine, to teach woman,

I do not permit. Neither, so there's two things he does not permit.

I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over man. So here is the first infinitive, didaskine, to teach.

It is in parallel to alphantine. The one who would be receiving the teaching and the one who would be receiving the exercising of authority is a man.

The one doing it is a gune. So we've already established these are gender specific terms.

There's no way around that. Anybody who says otherwise just simply doesn't want to hear what Paul's saying is not interpreting it in the context in which he was writing it.

This is what the author intended. This is what the first person would have read it, would have understood.

This is what the audience would have understood. This is what the context at the time would have communicated, all these things.

All the standard stuff that we use to properly handle the word of God in any other context, this is where it is.

So Paul says, I do not allow a woman didaskine, to teach, nor alphantine, andros.

But, so when you have Paul using de and allah, but de is the first, allah is then what's, would then, it would be, but rather than that, this is what should take place.

But to remain quiet. That's what he says.

I know that's not politically correct. That's not soft.

That's not malakas. But that, but you'll notice right here is your third infinitive, but to be in quietness.

This is what he says to Timothy. Now didaskine, we know what that means.

That means to teach. So what does alphantine mean?

Well, to exercise authority over a man. Here's the argument.

The argument is that that means to exercise authority in the sense of Lord over someone improperly, to rule over someone inappropriately.

There's some smart people that come up with this idea. Here's the problem. Let me turn the stuff off here and let's let accordance do something for us.

Here's alphantine. Let's turn on the instant details here. And you'll notice that alphantine down below, notice that they have as part of the meaning to domineer, have authority over.

Search for lexeme. Uh -oh. What does that mean?

Well, you may be going, we are expecting you to tell us. What that means is this is called a hapoxlegomena.

A hapoxlegomena. It's the only place it appears. It's not used elsewhere.

We can't go to a parallel passage. We can't go to someplace else and get some light as to what this means.

That's immediately a problem. That's immediately a problem. I don't know why

I remember this and I don't remember which church it was. Yes, I do.

Biobaptist Church, Charminstown, Pennsylvania. Had a fellow back there run by and haven't thanked him for that yet.

He's like, well, I may have, I don't know, but someone who lives in the area went by and took some pictures for me recently. Can you believe my, my, uh, elementary school that I went to in second grade is still, is still there.

You know how old that place is? Is it, is it a museum? Is it what? No, it's not.

It is a school, an active school. My grade school is a museum. Well, it's, they turned it into administrative offices.

Well, that's cause you're so much older than I am. Um, so anyway, uh, it was

Biobaptist Church, Charminstown, Pennsylvania. My dad was teaching a class and he,

I don't know why I remember this. I, I remember weird stuff. In fact, I was only reminded, um, a couple of days ago that I, uh, uh, about being at a softball game in, uh,

Sun City, Arizona years ago, somebody hit a foul ball. It came right at me. I was holding a orange pop in my hand and without dropping the pop,

I caught the fly ball. Everybody started clapping. And so I bowed, uh, and I, I had totally forgotten that.

I, it, so I was just like, thank you very much. But that had gone straight out, straight out of the, it wasn't there.

And then someone reminded me of it and I'm like, oh yeah, I remember that. That's great. It's nice to have folks remind you of things.

Anyways, why do I remember this? I don't know, but my dad was saying you do not use a hapaxlegomena, a word that is used only one time in scripture to establish dogmatic doctrine.

And that is a appropriate rule of, of exegesis.

And so that's the first thing, keep in mind. But the point, next point is that doesn't mean that you just go, oh, we don't know what this means.

You then have to try to find the meaning by its usage in its context.

And here you have a single sentence. There are no major textual variants, so we don't have to worry about that.

And what you're dealing with is two parallel infinitives with then what might be called an adversive infinitive in the third clause, but rather to be in silence.

Aenae is the infinitive there. So what's the parallel to authentine?

It's didaskine, to teach, to teach. So here are your two parallels.

Even if you don't read Greek, you can see what looks like E -I -N at the end of each one. That's your infinitival form.

And so they're both in reference to a man by a woman.

I do not permit a woman to do this action and this action, but rather to be in silence.

So didasko is a very well -known verb. We know what didasko means.

And we have dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of references. We've got pages worth of references to didasko and didaskine.

And we can look at Johannine use of didaskine and we can look at Pauline and Lucan and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So that ain't even close to a hypoxigamina. It is used many, many times.

And therefore, its meaning should be very easy to determine.

So let's take not exercise authority out for a moment.

So this is in the context of a woman quietly receiving instruction with entire submissiveness.

And then it follows into a discussion of Adam and Eve and deception.

And then goes into if a man seeks the office of bishop, elder, overseer, he's seeking a good thing.

Is there such a thing as authoritative teaching? Yes, there is. Yes, there is.

There is authoritative teaching. Should we make a distinction?

And most churches have made a distinction. Between authoritative teaching, for example, quote, from the pulpit, there were no pulpits in the early church, but in the fellowship and less formal roles of teaching.

Yeah, there's a reason to make that kind of distinction. But in this context, it seems that didaskine and authentine, even if you're going to try to use terminology such as domineer to exercise authority over, it is in the context of the communication of Christian truth.

And I, sadly, let's just think about history for a second.

Let's put this aside for a second. Every single denomination over the past 100 years that has collapsed on homosexuality, has collapsed on transgenderism, where do they start?

What came first? Women teachers? Women bishops? Or that other stuff?

In every instance, it's the same thing. I cannot think of a single denomination that today is affirming the

ELCA. What came first, ordaining women or embracing homosexuality and transgenderism?

It's a simple answer to all of these things. Because if you then look at what is called the preaching or teaching ministry in those denominations, the idea of the scriptures as an authoritative word from God, and the idea that the preaching of that word in the congregation is an authoritative word from God himself, that he is conforming his people to his image, that there is authority in the preaching of the word of God amongst the people of God, was abandoned a long time ago.

And so you have these little sermonettes and you have these little motivational 14 -minute things before you have the

Lord's Supper with Skittles and soda pop. There's a connection to everything that collapses all at the same time.

And what I see happening is that what people will do is they'll look at this and they'll go, okay, all right, what

I'm going to do with this is, and you will hear this today, you will hear this from, and it'll either be the churches that leave the

Southern Baptist Convention because Southern Baptist Convention takes a stand on this, or it'll be the

Southern Baptist churches that continue down this path and other churches leave the SPC because it won't take a stand on this.

But what you're going to hear, because I've already seen it online, there was a guy day before yesterday that wrote something about, no, no, yeah, no, it was on Monday, so it was yesterday.

Evidently, Beth Moore spoke at his church or something. And you would think that Paul had been raised from the dead and had spoken to this church.

I mean, it was embarrassing what this guy was saying, just how, oh, and the main thing was, oh, we cannot stop the

Spirit of God from gifting these women to preach and teach. This is what you're going to hear.

This is what you're going to hear. It's also what you hear from Daniel Kirk. Remember? We played

Daniel Kirk's debate with Bob Gagnon. The Spirit is telling us that we must embrace our

LGBTQ brothers and sisters in the church, and this is a new move of the Spirit, and Straw was here.

And what ends up happening is, instead of going, this is what the Spirit of God has given to us, that it gives continuity from generation to generation, what you're going to get is, we see the

Spirit of God doing this, therefore, at least initially, eventually, the view of Scripture collapses to where you don't even have to worry about this type of stuff anymore.

That was just Paul. Paul was limited in his understanding. He was a first Jew. What do you want? But initially, when you still have to try to profess some kind of belief in Scripture and that there's some level of consistency, because let me just be real clear with you here.

For the vast majority of seminaries in the world today, they don't believe that you have to be concerned about what

Paul says here. They don't believe Paul wrote it. A large majority of New Testament commentaries today would dismiss 1

Timothy and Titus as being Paul. Paul didn't write it. This is somebody else. It's a forgery.

We don't have to worry about it. But before you jump off that cliff, there's sort of a period of time where people try to ease people into this by saying, oh, no,

I still believe this is the Word of God. And so what I think's going on here is

Paul just doesn't allow a wife to domineer over another man's husband.

So Andross here is another man's husband, and this is a wife, because this would introduce problems there.

Now, this didn't have anything to do with what came before or after. So you're isolating it because you're trying to read it out of having relevance to the theology that you're creating out of other sources.

But that's one of the ways you can do it. I've heard people do that, is that this is a domineering thing.

It's a domineering teaching. And that's all that Paul has in mind here, because there were, well, there were prophetesses in the early church, right?

So you jump back to Acts, you go into an unusual period of time. Rather than this being that section of Scripture that is to give universal teaching for the church for all time to be applicable across societal stuff, you jump back into unusual situations in Acts and try to create some kind of a contradiction between the two so that you can diminish this one and make the unusual situation more normative for later periods.

That's how you get around to doing it, all right? So I think that sort of throws some light on women will be preserved through the bearing of children.

That doesn't mean that's how they get saved, even though it is sozo. But sozo has a very wide semantic domain.

It has a very wide range of possible meanings. And so I think what's being referred to there is,

I have seen many a man's life destroyed by his trying to serve a flock.

And many a pastor's wife has come to recognize she'd rather have the children than to deal with the adult children in the church, okay?

And so I think that's what's being referred to here. But the whole idea is that women are to continue in faith and love and sanctity with self -restraint.

So they're there to be faithful. You have to have knowledge to be faithful. There has to be communication of these things. There are women who have tremendous insights, all the rest of these things, faith and love and sanctity, along with...

And then self -restraint is actually from Sophronismos, Sophrosunnes, but Sophronismos is the mindset of discipline, being disciplined rather than seeking those positions that are not theirs, which may be what's being referred to earlier in that.

And then it is a trustworthy statement. If any man aspires the office of overseer, it is a fine work he desires to do.

An overseer then must be above reproach, and then mias, gunaikas, andra, a one -woman man.

So you can stand on your head, you can spin in circles, you can try to come up with whatever you want to.

The qualifications for the elder are for a man. That's the text.

I actually had somebody, a pastor, on Twitter say, there's nothing in there that precludes women.

There's nothing in there that says anything about women other than being a one -woman man for the overseer.

And I just keep asking, if scripture is sufficient, why isn't there a list of qualifications for women elders?

Because there would be a whole different range of challenges that would be relevant.

I mean, there's so much in here about temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, free from love of money, peaceful, gentle, one who manages his own household.

So there would be relevant things for a woman to know if she is to hold this position of elder.

We're not told. We're not given that. Do you think Paul just forgot?

Was it taken out? Got a conspiracy theory here or something? No, we're not told because that's not the position that is given in this situation.

And again, if you just allow the language to be the language and the text to be the text, it makes those distinctions.

What? Yeah, I'm not getting into that today. Thankfully, Rich did not turn on microphone for that one.

That's a whole nother thing. No, not going there today.

So anyway, there are some thoughts from yours truly, prompted by all this discussion going on, that entire books have been written on this stuff.

But if you just sort of step back and use the standard mechanisms of exegesis and hermeneutics and interpretation that you use for everything else, it's really not that difficult.

It's really not that hard. And it demonstrates that there are other influences coming in in this situation that are influencing people's interpretation.

So I don't know if that's helpful to you. I hope it is. I hope you found it to be helpful. Thanks for listening to the program today.