Before the Battle of the Sexes (Genesis 2, Jeff Kliewer)

The Lord Renews Strength and Orders Our Steps

Say, good morning. I'd like to invite you to come on in. Join with us. Take a seat. We are about to start. You guys are going to get a good lesson in Hebrew today. What's that word you've got thrown out there?

Edzer Canegdo. Anybody know what Edzer Canegdo means? You're going to find out tonight, today. I'd like to open us up in Isaiah. Isaiah chapter 40 verse 31,. They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.

They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint. I do remember the days when I used to be able to run and not grow weary. But here's the promise.

In the Lord, this is a reality. He knows us. He sustains us. And not only does He give us His strength, but He's going to show us where we're supposed to go. You see, the world has its agenda and the world is going to encourage us to go for it.

The world is going to encourage us to be in control. The world's going to encourage us to do things that would be appealing to the flesh. But here's the thing. If you wait upon the Lord, He's going to not only give you the strength, but He's going to put you on the right path.

He's going to mount you up like eagles and you're going to run and not be weary. We need to turn to God. He and only He will carry us and lead us in the way we should go. We have some announcements for today.

First of all, please come back tomorrow at seven o 'clock for our congregational meeting. We're going to affirm our new elder and deacons and church officers. Those emails have been placed out. We've got some members to talk about.

We have the budget to approve for next year. So if you're a member, please join us. If you're not a member, but you're interested in our church, it's a good opportunity to hear more about what's going on here.

Gentlemen, I've been asked to be strong in my affirmation of our desire for you to join us into our retreat. Now, my thought was I'm going to have anybody that's already signed up to stand and we could see who doesn't stand.

I was told not to do that. But here's the thing, you know, and if there's any way that you can join the retreat, it is a time for men to be with men. It is a time to be challenged. The topic this year is going to be scriptural masculinity.

It's going to be a time for us to learn what it is to step up. I think Pastor Jeff's got some words about that today. If you think you would like to go, but this isn't something that you can afford at this point in time, we have scholarships available.

So please do not let that be the reason that you don't come. If you have a desire to come, you need some financial help. You can talk to Jeff, myself, John Detoli. That's, that's fine. We just want you to be there with us in fellowship.

So please sign up Jeff's, Pastor Graham. Now ladies, I haven't had anybody tell me I need to be strong in encouraging you. That must mean that you ladies already know about this. But let me say that we really desire for you to join in on the women's retreat.

Both are in the month of April. A couple of events happening today. First of all, after the second service, there'll be the second opportunity if you want to know what's in our budget that will be presented tomorrow.

Ray will be there after second service to be able to give you insight as to what's in the budget. Ask questions as you desire. Also after second service, we are going to have a a meeting of the helpers for this summer's VBS ministry.

If you've never been involved in a VBS ministry, it is a great opportunity to take part in helping reach the children of our community and to give them truth. So if you have any interest at all for this summer's VBS, after second service, there will be a meeting for VBS volunteers.

Please come back at six o 'clock tonight for our time of prayer. It is growing and it is powerful and it is exciting to see. We've outgrown the classroom. We're in the sanctuary, but it is amazing to hear the brothers and sisters praying for each other and for our needs.

Join us tonight at six o 'clock. After the prayer meeting tonight is the Young Adults Bible Study. That should probably kick off somewhere around 7 15. I don't know what the definition of young adult is.

I only know Tim said I didn't get invited, but he said I could come anyway. Anyway, if you're part of the Young Adults Bible Study, tonight at 7 15. On the 23rd, which I guess is a week from this coming Saturday, it's another special event for the men.

It's a regional event. It's down in Glassboro. It's called a Resurrection Breakfast for Men. So it's looking towards Resurrection Sunday, some great teaching, and again, time of great fellowship. Look to Jeff's Pastor Graham for sign up for that.

Let's turn to prayer. Father, we do come to You this morning knowing that in You comes real strength and support. In You our strength is renewed. In You we mount up with wings like eagles and run and are not weary, walk and are not faint.

Our flesh, Lord, we confess is weak. The world is on the attack and there are ways that the world would have us go. But Lord, the blessings because of You, because You are the sovereign Lord, are what we seek.

Father, we pray for Your presence so we learn about the truth of Your creation and all and how You have created men and women and how You have set things according to Your order. Lord, we come to hear it and to grow in Your truth.

We need You and we surrender to You. We pray, Lord, in our midst for those in need. We pray, Lord, for our Pastor Jeff, as he prepares to bring this word to us, that the power of Your Spirit will reside in him with his words and that You would be opening our hearts, that we would hear.

We wait for You, O Lord, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, we're going to make a joyful.

Noise this morning. I'm not making any promises over and above that, but it'll be a joyful noise. Let's all stand. You make it easy to love You. You are good and You are kind. You bring joy into my life.

You make it easy to trust You. You have never left my side. You've been faithful every time. And all I want is You. You are the refuge I run to. You are the fire that leasens to trust You. Nothing to fear for You are.

O Jesus, You came to my rescue. Took my place upon the cross. You redeemed what I had. My whole world revolving around the center of my heart. You're the treasure. You're the prize. It is You. You are the refuge I run to.

You are the fire. I'll follow You anywhere. There's a million reasons to trust You. Nothing to fear for. You are by my side. I'll follow You anywhere. It is You, Jesus. You are the refuge I run to. In the context of our song that we're going to sing from our hearts this morning, I just encourage you to think about everything that God has done in your life, your personal life, your family's life, everything that He's led you from and through, and if not just the gift of salvation itself.

But just raise that stone of memorial to God in your heart for His goodness to you this morning. Amen. Come, my fountain, every blessing. Hard to sing. Streams of mercy never ceasing. Call for songs of peace.

Fixed upon full worship.

God’s Word Brings Order to a Confused Culture

Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father God, we live in a culture that is very confused. And our prayer, Father God, is that Your Word would go forth this morning to bring order in the chaos. We pray, Lord, that You would order our thinking, restore our minds to the created order, the way things You have, that You have made things to be.

God, help us to think Your thoughts after You. Change the way we think as we listen to Your Word. We pray also that You would send us out to bring the good news of the gospel, and with it the good news of Your created order, and that this would be a light in our culture, that You would use us and here this morning train us through the preaching of Your Word.

In Jesus' name, amen. I was getting my oil changed a couple of days ago and struck up a conversation with a lady who was waiting on her oil to be changed as well. She was an elderly woman. I think she even mentioned she was 88 years old.

And so she opted for the oil non-synthetic version that would only last a shorter amount of time because she says, I don't think I'll be here for another oil change. I thought, oh, that's very sad, very sad.

But she looked healthy. And as we were sharing the gospel, I was sharing the gospel with her and talking, she began to tell me about her life. And she said that her son married an older woman and they agreed that they would not have children.

However, now he's approaching his mid -40s and she's 57 years old, and he has made the decision that he really wants to have an heir. Well, there's a problem. And he has decided to take matters into his own hands using technology that he and his wife will hire a surrogate to carry his baby.

This poor woman in Utah with struggling as a single mom will get paid. This woman tells me $100 ,000 and she will carry his child. And then when the contract comes due and the baby is born, she will have no recourse to keep that child as her own, but must surrender this baby to the family living in Pennsylvania.

How confused and broken is our culture that surrogacy would be such a thing? The natural created order of a woman to love the child that she bears and to rear that child and the natural design of God in procreation now thwarted or played with through technology.

It is very sad to see, but of course it is a progression. I think it began with the feminism of the 1960s, which has progressed in unnatural directions and gone off the rails. By God's grace, Roe versus Wade was overturned in the Dobbs decision.

Praise God for that. But just the next year, the president issued a statement on January 20th, 2023, in which he said that women can control their own destinies. And he honored Roe versus Wade commemorating it as a national holiday, saying that he would like to recognize the countless women whose lives have been saved by Roe versus Wade.

Imagine the upside down worldview in which the killing of babies, half of which are women, is the saving of women's lives. There is a confusion in our culture. I don't think that we recognize because we have only been raised in this culture.

We do not recognize the extreme disorder of the Obergefell decision of 2015. For 6 ,000 years marriage has been between one man and one woman in all cultures, and especially in the Christian cultures that are shaped by the biblical worldview.

But in 2015, marriage was redefined as if the mirror image of a man could be the helper suitable and corresponding to. When asked, what is a woman? The Supreme Court Justice Katonji Brown Jackson answered, I'm not a biologist.

As if to say that a woman cannot be defined. So deep has the confusion become. And so dark that Washington State last year issued a law and passed a law that if a child desires to be transitioned to a different gender and runs away from home, goes to a youth shelter, that shelter does not need to notify the parents and get approval for the transitioning of this child.

What has come of this country? The poor children are not transitioning from one gender to another, but are only harming themselves. It is a terrible thing when the president of the United States addresses the country and turns to the Supreme Court justices on the front row and says, with all due respect, justices, women are not without electoral or political power.

Of course, he failed to read the teleprompter properly when saying that, but he went on to say, you are about to realize just how much. What the president was doing a couple of days ago was stoking the fires of the gender confusion in this culture, trying to stoke the fires of the Genesis 3 fall.

In Genesis chapter 3, the curse that is upon women is that their desire shall be for their husbands, but he shall rule over them. And that desire for is the same exact language of Genesis chapter 4, when we are told, sin desires to have you, but you must master it.

It is a desire to overturn the order whereby the man is the leader in the home, the spiritual authority, and the woman is a help meet to him, suitable for him, submitting to him, in the home. What we are seeing is the exact opposite, and feminism does not celebrate the beauty of women, the beauty of childbirth and child rearing, the beauty of submission, and the proper order of the home.

We need to talk about what men need to hear in a culture like this. There's a lot of young men that wonder, why is it that God has given me such a strong sex drive, and yet tells me I cannot have sex until marriage?

Teenagers thinking I might be a decade away from being married. Why this strong desire? What is God doing here? Seems too much to bear. Young men need to hear that that very drive is driving you to grow up to maturity, to take control of your life, to form a home wherein you can provide for a wife, and protect a wife, and lead a wife in godliness.

And so God's design is to drive you towards maturity, to drive you to grow up, to become a man, and to be a man is to be willing to work, be willing to provide, and protect, and to die to the desires of the flesh.

And so that self-control must be learned, and the desires of the created order are good and necessary for men to become men, and women also need to hear how God has created women. That the lies of this culture, this feminism, are leading to the destruction of the family, to children who are harmed rather than protected.

Women need to be encouraged in femininity. There was a wonderful documentary produced by Matt Walsh. Some of you might have seen it. It is called, What is a Woman? And Matt Walsh goes to the gender theorists of Harvard and all the great institutions of the world and asks a very simple question, what is a woman?

And all of them get tangled in knots, unable to even answer this most basic question until finally Matt turns to his wife at the end and says, honey, what is a woman? And she just rolls her eyes as if why would you need to answer that question?

She said, an adult female, human, pretty simple. And then she hands him a spaghetti jar that she was struggling to open, and she says, who needs your help opening this? And it was a beautiful end to the documentary because it shows that there are differences.

God ordered differences between men and women, and these things are good. Turn with me to Genesis 2, where we see male and female before the battle of the sexes. If the culture desires to stir up animosity and difference between men and women in such a way to oppose men and women, God's word presents the beauty of God's good, beautiful, created order.

Genesis 1 and the Pattern of Creation and Sabbath

We will pick up in chapter two, but let me first review the principles of chapter one. Remember, there is repetition throughout chapter one. Four things repeated, and God said. Ten times we are reminded that it is what God says that orders the world.

Let every man be a liar. What God says is true. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. That's the second thing. So things are, and it was so, and there was light. And God said, and there was the third repeated phrase, and it was good.

Culminating in verse 31, and it was very good. God's created order is a good order, and there is no flaw in it. It is perfect in every way. The fourth phrase is a repetition of the days, and there was evening, and there was morning the first day, and the second day.

Of course, this literary device of actually describing evening and morning means that we're not talking about ages, but rather the word yom refers to a 24-hour period of time, meaning that the earth is actually very young.

Now, it does have an appearance of age because when God created the world, he made it mature. Adam was a fully formed adult. He wasn't created as a baby, and so if a scientist looks at the world, they will see light in transit from the distant galaxies and say to themselves, well, the world must be billions of years old.

But if the God of supernatural power created that light in transit as well as the distant star, then we're dealing with an entirely different worldview. It really comes down to presuppositions. If you believe Genesis 1 -1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, then you have a God of infinite power.

If he can do that, create all that exists, time and space, matter, activity, and I forget the fifth one from Herbert Spencer's taxonomy, but the point being that in Genesis 1 -1, all that exists comes into being by the word of his power.

If you presuppose this God, then all things are possible. The man inside of a fish is not hard for God to bring back to resurrected life as an image of Christ. In reality, Jonah in the belly of a fish, or the miracles that Elisha and Elijah did are not difficult for God.

Of course, if you come with an anti-supernatural bias as scientists do, then you come to faulty conclusions. And so, we are reminded, and God said. Now, let's pick up on the final of the days in this repetition in verses 1 -3.

Genesis 2, 1 -3, thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.

So, God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. Let me ask this question. Given a supernatural God of infinite power, how long would it take him to create the world that fast?

So, why six days of creation? The point is not that he needed that long to create, but that according to verse 3, he was blessing the seventh day to make it holy. Six days of work, and then a seventh day of rest.

This was a pattern that God was modeling for the world. Such is the point of that repetition. The seven days that you likewise would order your week in this way. Now, with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, the Sabbath day is in a sense overtaken by the resurrection of the Son of God.

To mark the difference of that change of dispensation where the Son of God rises on the first day, now the church will not worship on the Sabbath, but on the Lord's day, the Kuriah HaMera, the day of the Lord, the first day of the week that we would bring the first part of our lives to him and offer that day as holy.

So, I would instruct you this way and encourage you this way. That Sunday is not just an hour for the Lord. In fact, if I preach for two hours, you still have 22 left to do the same thing. The whole 24-hour period, evening to morning, is holy unto the Lord.

To come back and pray at six o 'clock is entirely fitting, but also to rest from your work, to take time away from the pressures of your day job, and to consecrate that day as holy, to be with your family.

That the whole day is holy unto the Lord. It's different. It's set apart. This is the point here. And so, it's a gift, a beautiful gift of God's design, that we would labor for six days and rest for one, setting it apart as holy unto the Lord.

And it reminds us that God has good plans for his children. He wants you in that healthy rhythm of work and rest, not becoming passive and lazy and taking too much time off, nor overworking, which is the other end of the pendulum swing.

But to follow his pattern results in flourishing. And this is always the case. When we do things God's way, we order our lives by God's design, things begin to fall into place. We are blessed in obedience.

Psalm chapter 1. And so, now we go on to God's order for men, for women, and for sex. Three categories. We'll begin in verse 4 with the creation of man. And here what we're seeing is that it's not a separate creation account.

Chapter 1 was the general creation in six days. Chapter 2 now zeroes in specifically on the six-day creation of men and women. And this specific passage is to instruct us of who we are as men and women.

So, there will be a specific message to men and a specific message to women. Verse 4 and following. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.

And a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And the man became a living creature.

Pause there. We are made of dust. Lest anyone begin to exalt in their humanity and humanism in our culture. The great culprit of what's destroying western civilization is the humanism that exalts man to the highest place and tells man that they can control their destiny without reference to God.

We need to be reminded that we are dust. We are formed of the dust of the earth and yet living as creatures. We learn from chapter 1 we bear the very image of God with intellect exceeding the animals, with the will that can choose to be obedient or disobedient to God, with a spirit that can relate to God, whereas animals do not have that soulish man, that inner man in relationship to God.

We bear the image of God as living creatures. But specifically to men we will now turn as we continue in the passage. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east and there he put the man whom he had formed.

Recognize that man at this point is alone and out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Man is made and placed in the garden to have dominion. But notice from verses 10 to 14 that flowing out of the garden which God himself cultivated, he made the trees to spring up, the most beautiful trees, perfect order in the garden.

But going out of the garden there is not such cultivation of the ground. 10 to 14. So man is going to now have dominion to bring the entire earth to be like the garden of Eden. And he should move along the trajectory of these rivers as he moves out.

Chapter 2 verse 10. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah where there is gold.

And the gold of that land is good. His creation is good. Bdellium and onyx stones are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris which flows east of Assyria.

And the fourth river is the Euphrates. Notice the rivers flow out from Eden. And so what does that mean in the context of Genesis 2? That man given this creation mandate to fill the earth and subdue it must go out from Eden and cultivate the entire earth.

But how can one man do that? Well there's a problem yet to be solved and will be solved here in the next chapter. The key verse for understanding manhood appears next in verse 15. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

A man is meant to work as a vice regent, a steward of God's beautiful creation to represent God as an image bearer. He is made to work. He's not first of all made to rest or to play. He is made to work, to take dominion, to take initiative, to work and keep the garden that God has made.

He is an image bearer with a purpose sent out to represent God in the world. Verse 16 and 17. And the Lord God commanded the man saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden. These are the good gifts of God in this beautiful world that he has made.

A man of God should be a man of joy, delighting in the things of God, recognizing the creation, seeing the beauty of that flowing river, noticing the trees, giving praise all day long, thankful hearts, and radiating the joy of heaven.

This is the picture of a man, a godly man, because these are good gifts that you are surely free to eat from. But verse 17, the man must remember his place and remain in obedience to God. As soon as he exerts authority over God and begins to step out of place, he will die.

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. The image bearer is not God himself. The order of God does not exalt man over God, but he is always under God and must be obedient.

So manhood, true manhood, is to work as an image bearer in obedience to God. And so be able to establish a home by initiative to be able to provide for a wife and for children and to protect them from all the dangers that will come after the fall.

This is what it is to be a man. What is it to be a woman? There's documentaries because our culture doesn't know. What is it to be a woman? In a sentence I say, a woman is also this image bearing creature made by God with not only equal value, but even of the same substance, but made from man so as to be man's edzer connecto, help meet, helper suitable, different from man in corresponding ways.

Let me show this to you in the passage that we're dealing with. Verse 18 and following. Then the Lord God said, it is not good for the man that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.

This term edzer connecto in the Hebrew, helper fit. In the King James, you're familiar with the term help meet. It is one who is different from the man in corresponding ways. But here we see that the helper is of the same substance as man.

The created beings other than man were not suitable for him. The animals could not fill this role. One of the very essence, the very being of man must come from him in order to fulfill this role. So two things are in view here.

One is that she must be the same as him because different animals won't do. But the other thing is that she must be different from him in ways that are complementary. He's been given a creation mandate to fill the earth, but he's a man alone, completely incapable of doing this without her.

He needs her to fulfill the creation mandate. And so in verse 18, she is to be the helper fit for him. Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

Do you see his authority there? His ruling authority. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the beasts of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him, an edzer kenegdo, one who's different in corresponding ways, one that corresponds to him.

Verse 21, so the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman.

Man is ish, woman is isha. Woman. And brought her to the man. The man said, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Every wedding that I've ever officiated, which seems to be more and more these days.

Great job guys, by the way, that's that's stepping up as men. We want to see more and more weddings. Every wedding I've officiated, I have shared this analogy that I learned from my grandfather when he officiated our wedding, Jen.

He said, I want you to notice that when God made a woman for the man, he did not take from his skull that she would be over him. Or from his heel that she would be under him. But from his rib, that she would be the nearest to his heart.

But she would be under his protection, under his lead. But a help need a support to him. This picture of the rib is a picture of the Edzer Kenegda. The corresponding difference. But that she comes from him.

Of the same substance. She's made of him. So as a being, she is equal. How does this apply to men and women in the church? When God poured out his Holy Spirit upon his church on the day of Pentecost, we are told that he poured out his Spirit on men and women.

Male and female servants alike. Because together we share in the same Spirit. We are all baptized into one Spirit. So this aspect of sameness is so important to stress that men and women are not hierarchical in value.

We equally bear the image of God stamped upon us. I want to take us through a tour of a few passages. By few might mean seven. But in the New Testament, just briefly commenting on the creation order. Turn with me to 1 Corinthians 11 3.

1 Corinthians 11 3 is in my mind the most definitive statement of how we are to view the complementarian relationship between men and women. We're not going to talk about the issue of head coverings because there is a discussion of cultural versus principal differences there.

When we go through 1 Corinthians 11, we'll look at both of those views as being equally viable. It's not the point today. But in 1 Corinthians 11 3, we see what I think all Christians need to agree upon.

And that is the principle that as the father is the head of the church, so the man is the head of his wife. 1 Corinthians 11 3. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ. The head of a wife is her husband.

And the head of Christ is God. Is the father greater than the son? Ontologically speaking, in value, he is not. To say anything less than that Jesus is fully divine, fully God, equal with the father, is to become an Arian or some other kind of heretic, diminishing the person of Christ.

And yet in the roles of the trinity, it is always the son submitting to the will of the father. Have you noticed that? Jesus will say, not my will, but yours be done. And he says he doesn't do anything except what the father commands.

So there is an authority relationship, a hierarchy in roles between father and son. And in the same way, husband and wives are different in corresponding ways, such that the husband is the head of the wife.

And likewise, in the church, you see this design. Over and over again, Paul will appeal to Genesis 1 and 2, the creation order, to teach the church the headship of men. Look at verses 8 and 9, 1 Corinthians 11.

For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. From, for. The idea appealing back to Genesis 2 is that woman comes from man. How so? From his rib.

Adam was not made from Eve's rib. Eve was made from Adam's rib. The next verse, neither was man created for woman, Eve was not created first to be this ruling worker who takes dominion of the earth, and Adam made as an edzer connecto to come and help him, suitable, but rather it was Adam who was created, and the woman for him.

Do you see that? This is the created order of God. So how does it apply to the church? Well, 1 Corinthians 14 .34, you can turn there or just listen, teaches us that women are to be silent in the church, not meaning as a carte blanche statement, but in terms of the authoritative proclamation of the word in the general assembly.

That this role in the pulpit is one of authoritative teaching, leadership, headship in the church, and so women ought not be preachers, pastors. You see that explicitly, we will go to this one, 1 Timothy 2, 11 to 14, where it says, let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.

1 Timothy 2 .12. I love the sound of those rustling pages, that means y 'all are studying the word. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, rather she is to remain quiet.

Now notice that there is not a cultural appeal, as in we have no other tradition, or this is the tradition of the church, rather what does Paul appeal to in giving this command? Creation order. He says in verse 13, for Adam was formed first, then Eve, and then in verse 14, he appeals to the fall.

We'll talk about this next week in Genesis 3, but Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. When the headship arrangement got upside down, and Eve was leading Adam, sin came into the world, not through Eve, who was deceived, but through Adam, who willfully submitted himself to the headship of his wife in order to bring sin into the world.

Verse 15 is surprising to some, but it says, and yet she will be saved through child bearing, if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control. And many people thought, wait a minute, I thought you were saved by the blood of the lamb, not by having kids.