Feminism (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, ministry.

Pastor Steve Cooley is right here next to me. Good afternoon, Los Angeles. Oh, wait.

We have kind of a funky setup here in the Compromise studios. It's no

Compromise studios. It's deluxe. And we're not looking at each other's faces. Typically, you sit across from each other, but for us, we've decided not to do it that way because we like to do things differently.

So, we just look straight ahead. We don't even have to look at each other. Once in a while, I look over, though. Yeah, because the way our studio is set up, we're actually looking over the beautiful panorama of the

Atlantic Ocean, have a really picturesque view. Yeah, kind of like Patrick Slyman's got it rough up there in Pigeon Cove.

The church is on the water. Yeah, that would be tough. That's a bridge over Trouble Waters.

And we look out over the beautiful West Boylston parking lot. I see a lot of dirt out there.

Who sang Bridge Over Trouble Waters? Simon and Garfunkel. Okay. Yeah. And who wrote it?

Probably Garfunkel. Simon and Garfunkel. Simon wrote it. He wrote the song, but they always said Simon and Garfunkel.

No, he wrote a lot of them. He wrote a lot more of them than Garfunkel. Garfunkel is just kind of the ...

He had two things going for him, a voice and curly hair. He had a lot of hair.

A lot of hair. Yeah. But not on the top of his head. Well, in the beginning, he did. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. Like when he was a baby? No, like when they were young. Oh, okay. Okay. Neil Young, do you ever listen to Neil Young?

Yeah, that dude is getting really ugly now. I mean, what is he, like 300 years old? We are spiraling down so fast.

It's called I've Had No Lunch Today, Except for Some Nuts. I did.

What'd you have? The awesome peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Wow, you drove all the way home for that?

Well, because I forgot to bring anything. And was it organic peanut butter or was it natural peanut butter or was it skimpy?

It was skimpy made from 100 % peanut shells. Wow. Well, that actually isn't skimpy, that's skimpy just as you said.

It's time to play Name That Tune. I'm going to give you a quote and then you're going to have to kind of tell me the theological tune of that quote or theological tone.

I was hoping it was real songs. Tune and tone. No, we have to actually do something productive. After all, this is going on Christian radio.

This is not 430 people to people with a bunch of bogus stuff put out over there. This is actually biblical radio.

Okay, good. All right. So, we have Roxanne Dunbar who said in 1969, ultimately, we want to destroy the three pillars of class and caste society.

So, these are the three pillars, family, private property, and the state. And in order to do this, we need to do away with the evils of sexism.

I thought you said this was Bible and not, was that the Democratic National Convention?

Yeah. Oh, really funny. Well, it's interesting that this feminist, that's the topic of today, feminism.

This feminist knows that there is a structure. She doesn't know that the structure is built on some biblical principles.

But here's the thing that she did get wrong. If you're going to try to get rid of the differences between men and women, you've got to go after the church, the family, and the government.

So, she got it a little wrong here, family, private property, and state. So patriarchal, patriarchal, however you say it, you know, you just smack of the patriarchy here

I could say. By the way, I was just reading last night, Steve, those who want to say the Bible's world was a patriarchal world, therefore, we shouldn't be surprised that God is called

Father, that He is called He, that Jesus was a man, Holy Spirit's called a

He, you know, God is not called Holy Mother, I guess somebody's called

Holy Mother, but it's not God the Father. The Trinity, we have the Father, the

Son, and the Spirit. We don't have Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer. But one of the reasons why that all happened,

A, because God wanted to do that, but it was in a culture of Mother Earth, Mother Nature, paganism, with all kinds of female words for the world and the system.

And I love it that God made sure we realize that there's a right way to think about Him and there's a pagan way to think about Him.

Yeah, I mean, what the Bible does is set up an antithesis, you know, the exact opposite of the world system.

And you're so right. I mean, when we look at ancient cultures, it's not like they were all set up where the men dominated and male -dominated theology, but in a lot of cases it was women.

I mean, when we look at the mother -child cult that was prominent in the Middle East, a lot of female gods and goddesses and fertility was worshipped.

When you were growing up, Steve, in the 60s and 70s, did you ever watch Isis? No. No. Did you ever watch

Wonder Woman? Yes, I did. Was she kind of an Isis kind of lady, but just more mainstream?

Yeah, I mean, I think so, yeah. I almost said broad, Steve, but then I'd be calling her a broad. No, you wouldn't. She was an

Amazon. I mean, I remember once, well, she was. She was from that tribe.

Wait a minute. You just don't know your comic books. Well, when

I think of Amazon, I think usually of dot -com, and then I think of Amazon kind of women, and then the third one down in the list, which seems to be number one on your list, is the comic.

But that's what Wonder Woman was. There was a whole mythical tribe of these superwomen, and they were called, amazingly enough,

Amazons. Okay? There's nothing wrong with that word. It's just, you know, it has to be put in context.

You might get a reader. Are you going to bleep that out? No, I'm not going to bleep it out. I'm going to say steve at info at no com, ryanstraininghood .com.

It's a legitimate word. All right, today we're talking about feminism in the local church. Feminism is in the world.

Wouldn't you say that's true, Steve? Yes, I would. It's pretty much everywhere. Let me give you two illustrations that - You're about to declare war on women,

I can tell. Yes, I hate women. I hate my mother. I hated my two grandmothers.

I hate my wife, and I hate my three girls. That's why you want to oppress them and, you know, yoke them up as slaves.

How about this? National Review, August 1997. Steve, you're going to just flip.

If you were - National Review. This is conservative. This is conservative. Yes. National Review. See? Okay.

I'd like to call your attention to the subliminally sexist message of one of our most common roadside signs, the school crossing sign that appears in almost every neighborhood.

This sign features a picture of two children, a boy and a girl, crossing the street together. The boy is much taller than the girl, portraying the part of the older brother, while the girl's role is that of dependent younger sister.

The boy seems to have his hand gripping the little girl's elbow as if he were guiding her. All these details suggest that the boy is dominant, the girl is weaker.

I suggest that half of our school crossing signs should be changed to show a taller girl and a smaller boy.

A change like this could give American children a much better sense of the full range of possible relationships between males and females.

And I'd suggest that that person get a life. Golly. I mean, listen.

Listen, I have two granddaughters right now, and we're around the older one more. And you know, she's also at an age where we're getting to see her learn and grow all the time.

And I never think, why doesn't she just learn to be subservient?

She's too smart. Why? You know, for her own good or whatever. I just think she's a very bright young girl and I want her to develop to her full potential.

We have two, we had two daughters. We didn't say, you know what, we don't want you to go to college. We don't want you to do this.

We don't want you to do that. We wanted them to grow up and they, they, they obviously did, but we wanted them to have a sense of themselves.

But we also want them to know what God says men are to do and women are to do.

There's two different roles for, for men and women. I mean, we're not the same no matter what any knucklehead says.

Oh, sorry. Did I say that? Here's what feminism has forgotten conveniently accidentally on purpose.

They've suppressed this truth that subordination, that is submission, does not equal, does not mean inequality.

So we are equal in Christ, both image bearers, men and women, and we are dependent upon one another.

But we have different roles in society, different roles in the home and certainly different roles in the church.

And so that's their problem. They don't want to say, they want to say equality means everything's got to be the same in terms of person.

We believe that much, but in function as well. Well, just think about how stupid that is and how that just does not work in real life.

You know, I was in the army. Just imagine if I went up to my lieutenant, I was a, well, you know, an enlisted man, private and then a specialist.

But imagine I went up to my lieutenant and said, look, you know, this whole command structure thing's got to go.

We're all equal and we're all going to do our own thing. We're all image bearers of God and you're just going to have to deal with it.

You can't run, you can't run anything like that. You can't run a corporation that way. You can't run an army that way.

You can't run a government that way and you certainly cannot run a household like that. Steve, I think it was pretty bad of some of those

World War II accounts of some of the higher ranking officers sending in some of the privates to do some dirty work that had to be done because they needed to save the captain to direct the other men.

I think that was pretty bad. I mean, it's just, look, it didn't mean that those guys were any less valuable.

What it means is that their rank was less valuable. But and, and, you know, if the captain,

I mean, this is proven time and time again, if the people who are running the operation, and this was especially true in non -American units, but if you take out the non -commissioned officers and the officers, the enlisted men would tend to fall apart.

They would tend to crack under pressure and cease to function as a unit. When you take out the leaders, the unit ceases to function.

So feminism, probably driven by satanic forces, understands that if you want to undo

God's created order, then you go after the government, you go after the home, and you go after the church.

Steve, 1 Corinthians chapter 11 should set the record straight once and for all. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is

Christ. Men are under Christ in the local church service. The head of Christ is

God. But I skipped one here in the middle. The head of the wife is her husband.

So Christ submits to the Father. Does that mean He is not equal? We believe in the eternal sonship of Christ Jesus.

God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, one God, three persons. Yet the

Son submits to the Father, and He goes to earth to rescue the elect.

The Son is on earth, and He submits to the Father. Does that make the Son unequal to the Father?

No. And, you know, I mean, if they had their way, I guess the feminists would say this, that, you know,

Jesus should have stuck up for Himself and fought for His rights as an individual.

And it just kind of, it ignores the whole purpose of the

Godhead, which is unity, and they work as one. And in the same way, we are designed to fulfill different roles for a singular purpose.

So I was just, you know what I love to do, because I'm such a feminist at heart, is when

I do weddings, I love to go to Ephesians 5, where it says, you know, wives submit to your husbands, and you should see the women's eyes and faces.

I just like to watch them while I'm doing that, because they get so mad. And then I go, you know, it says that, but then it says, husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave

Himself up for her. And if men love their wives sacrificially, it's not so hard to imagine that.

But you know, they just want to, I'm not going to submit to any man. Okay. I'm just telling you what the

Bible says. And you're right, I mean, the idea of feminism is to set aside the

Bible, and we're going to do things our own way, and let's just see what happens. Wall Street Journal, an article titled,

The Lord's Name, some time ago, Congregational Church in Long Beach, California.

Do you like Long Beach? I used to live, sort of, in Long Beach. My folks did in Long Beach. Kind of some, well, there's some nice parts by the beach, but there's some other rougher parts.

Oh, and my folks lived, I mean, outside of our block, look, there were shootings and all kinds of stuff going on.

I mean, it was not a nice area. Here is what Pastor Mary Ellen Kilsby said.

I thought you were going to say Sister Mary Elephant. No, although I know of the person that you're referring to.

Here's what it says. Here's how the Sunday service starts in First Congregational Church, Long Beach.

May the God who mothers us all bear us on the breath of dawn and make us to shine like the sun and hold us in the palm of her hand.

Well, I mean, I know one person who absolutely loves that, and that would be

Satan. I mean, that is satanic. It's pagan. It's just flat -out pagan.

Steve, we have been given revelation from God, of course, natural revelation, and we see the sun and the moon and the stars, but we've also been given specific revelation from God through a variety of different ways in the history of mankind, right?

Dreams, God speaking directly to Adam, through Moses, through the prophets, the

Urim and the Thumm, all kinds of things, and in these last days where he speaks to us through his son and the son's apostolic messengers.

But for these people, that's not good enough. We don't care what God has said. I find it fascinating,

Steve, that God would tell us anything. Isn't it great to have revelation? To have a word from God about things we would never know unless he disclosed his mind?

This great uncovering, unveiling, yet they will not have God rule over them, and so it has to be she instead of he, it has to be her instead of him, it has to be mother instead of father.

I think I'll let Jesus be man, realizing he was an emancipator of all kinds of sinners, including female sinners.

Well, you just hit at the heart of the issue, and the heart of the issue is they don't really believe the Bible is the word of God.

They believe it was written by men, and as the word of men, they can just set it aside whenever it pleases them. So it's no problem for them to just ignore it and go on that way.

I think we have a gender police update. You want to give us a police car sound or something, Steve? Gender police update.

I don't know. You know how to flip the lights, and you know how to make the siren go on.

Yes, I do. Now, when you were in the police car, do they have different buttons so you say lights only, siren only, lights and siren?

Yes. And are those three specific buttons? Yes. They are? Yeah. And where would they be located?

Well, it wasn't three different buttons, but one lever and with three different positions, but you would never run just the siren by itself.

And then we had a department directive to stop rolling code two, which is lights only, because they didn't like that.

They thought we abused it. I saw some of that going on in Lancaster the other day, so I don't think they're under the jurisdiction of the

L .A. County Sheriff's Department. Yeah, probably not. That's a different Lancaster. We do have a Lancaster, California. You do?

Yeah. And the Sheriff's Department did serve that place. But Lancaster, Mass., I don't think the sheriff comes out this far.

No, Seventh -day Adventist told them not to. Yeah. Okay. So here's the gender police update. In the

National History Museum at the Smithsonian, of all places, there's masculine, patriarchal suppression there.

Did you know that? Yeah, sorry. I've been there, and it is as socialist and Marxist as you can get. There are some heartabeasts there, some

American heartabeasts, and next to the exhibit, it says this, female animals here being portrayed in ways that make them appear deviant or substandard to male animals.

The article says a family of lions at a watering hole are also labeled sexist since the standing male and reclining female suggest a pre -feminist division of labor.

Heather McDonald, author of Revisionist Lust, the Smithsonian Today, writing in the Washington Times, adapted from a longer piece in the

New Criterion, notes that today's Smithsonian has been transformed by a wholesale embrace of the worst elements of America's academic culture and is mired in a mindless parodying of academic fads.

So that's pretty sexist when you have the tawny male lion laying there while the females go kill all the other animals.

Who are these people? They're just, I mean, they see sexism everywhere, and I mean,

I don't want to go too far because it'll just, it drives me nuts to watch those people, to listen to them, because they literally look at reality and then deny it.

I mean, these are the same people that will tell us, you know, it's just as natural, homosexuality is just as natural as heterosexuality.

I mean, they're clueless. These are the same people who could look at the natural creation and say there is no

God. They are utter fools. Steve, when we think about God as male, that is at least

His name, the Father, and then Jesus Christ, of course, the incarnate Christ, was male. What the feminists want to do is they want to say if God is male, then male is

God. What's wrong with that? If God is male, then male is God, and if you're not male, then you're not closer to God.

It just, it misses the whole point. The point isn't that God is male, therefore males are superior.

The point is that what we know about God is that He wants to be seen as male.

So if He wanted to be known as female, then He would have done it the other way, and He didn't do that for His reasons, not our...

Not her reasons. Yeah, not anything to do with us, and, you know, does that make men better?

And the answer is no. I mean, in many ways, we could argue that men are worse.

In fact, you know, if we go to Genesis and the fall, what do we see there?

We see two things. One is that men, by virtue of the curse, are going to be forced to work, and what does that mean?

It implies that they're going to be lazy, and that women are going to want to rule over their husbands, which means that they're going to have to be commanded to submit to their husbands.

So, I mean, the two things are... It's true. You know, men are stereotypically, what, lazy, and women are stereotypically, what, usurpers of the men's authority.

I mean, that's just... Isn't that the reality? It's reality, Steve, if you're a me,

Tarzan, you, Jane, caveman -like troglodyte. Well, you know, I guess I am, only in my case, it's me,

Tarzan, she, Janet. Oh, rough up, Tarzan. Annie, get your gun, in her wedding vows,

I promise to love and honor, but not obey. Kind of sounds like, what was the latest wedding there in England?

Oh, yeah. She had to be all reworked. Prince William, and whatever, Princess Daisy, or whatever her name was.

Uh -huh, and also back when Fergie married Andrew. Not the singer, Fergie. But the

Weight Watchers, Fergie. Oh, not the one from Black Eyed Peas. Yeah, when Fergie married Andrew, all the pomp and circumstance, and there was a lot of Bible in those weddings, by the way, a lot of Anglican church

Bible verses, songs that were very biblically oriented. Fergie was supposed to say,

I promise to love, honor, and obey, and my news account here says she did say the phrase, but not without a sideways grin at the prince that said much more.

And they're now divorced. So how did that work out? And it might have been his fault, but still, it's the whole point.

God has revealed himself as Father, so I think of God as Father. I just don't think of him as Mother.

And so, if you want to have the Trinity named not the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, but the Comforter, Healer, and Sympathizer, I guess you can do that if you'd like, but not at the risk of sinning against God, thinking about him improperly.

And you can do that if you like, and all I'll say is, well, then you nicely set aside the commands of God, because he's made it very clear who he is.

And if you don't like that, then you don't like God. Steve, that would be you daintily set aside the commands of God, because we have to have a little sophisticated elegance.

Decorum. Totally. We're going to talk about this in several weeks to come, but there's a modified

Lord's Prayer that's out there, because we wouldn't want to have our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.

So Steve, to get your theological anger juices going, our Mother God who is everywhere, holy be your names.

May your new age come, may your will be done in this and in every time and place. Meet our needs each day and forgive our failure to love as we forgive the same failure in others.

Save us in hard times and lead us into the ways of your love. In the wholeness and power and loving forever, amen.

My nose is not as long as it should be. Yeah. Well, at least you listen to sermons.

Yes, I do. Yes. Sexuality, feminism, Steve, I think it's fair to say even though these have been extreme examples in liberal mainline churches, we're going to talk about this in weeks to come that feminism has crept into evangelical churches as well.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it is part and parcel of the church saying in many, many churches in many ways.

The problem is, what do we see in most churches? In most churches, the men do not step up.

Why? It gets back to what I said earlier. Men are naturally lazy. Vacuums must be filled.

And so the women are more than willing to fill them. And it's the path of least resistance.

You know, and I can understand a lot of I'm not saying it's right, but I can understand a lot of pastors, a lot of elders and everything just willing to kind of step back and let the women do the work since they are more than willing to do it.

And you know what? They seem to be more spiritual and certainly apt and gifted.

Well, you can't exclude people because they want to serve. And how could you say no? And I'm trying to think of something funny to say right now,

Stephen, I can't do it. I just know there are people when I got to Bethlehem Bible Church that wanted to read the scripture as women. And I had to tell them no.

And they're no longer at the church because I'm better. Well, that's obvious. But there are other reasons not because I'm better because of what the text says.

We'll live and die on the hill of the text. And what is so hard to deal with with that?

If God says X, then why do we necessarily want to make it Y? People just rebel against the word of God.

And that's all this is. Feminism is rebellion. Mark it. Info at NoCompromiseRadio .com.

Go ahead and write us. See you soon. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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