68. 7 Ways To Blaspheme The Word Of God (Part 1)

Welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 68,

Blaspheming the Word of God, part one. A time for a bit of brevity and frankness.

As I near my 40th birthday and I watched the collapse of the American empire, I am resolved to speak plainly about what the

Bible says. No tricks, no gimmicks, no apologies, just plain and honest truth from the

Word of God frankly delivered. I'm resolved towards this because it is in such short supply these days.

If honesty and truth were our nitrogen and oxygen then this entire country would be left suffocating.

This is because the church abandoned her post a long time ago. Pastors traded in their pulpits and their posts for skinny jeans, pop psychology and man buns.

Being relevant became more important than righteousness. The approval of carnal men more important than the approval of almighty

God. And instead of heralding the unvarnished word and a world bereft of truth, many have adopted a slimy sort of worm -tonguedness known as winsomeness that prefers to keep feelings intact while souls barrel onward toward hell.

That kind of charade has ran its course and I believe it has been found lacking. What the church and society at large need now more than ever is not marble -mouthed, weak -kneed, spineless, jellyfish pastors who are more afraid of offending the congregation than they are of offending

God. We need men with chest, men with shoulders who can bear the burden, men who will wrestle with the text and pour over it with fear and trembling and humbly declare that is the

Father's God -breathed revelation for a world lost in heresy and sin. We need that today because God is good and because God's word that he authored is good and it's good for us.

We may not always like what it says in the same way the child doesn't always like the taste of medicine, but what goes down bitter will produce something sweet.

That's certainly true of today's passage, which not only communicates substantial and hard -to -swallow realities, but it also chafes and irritates the soul of the modern man worse than a week -long diaper rash without a tube of Bordeaux butt paste.

What we will see though, however, is that these texts are not only true, but they're also good for us so that anyone who lives them out will be blessed and anyone who ignores them and their teaching will do so at their great peril.

So with that, let us dive into our text, which is Titus 2, three through five.

The older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers and not given to much wine, teachers of good things, that they may admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.

Titus 2, three and five. Now, a word about blasphemy. According to Paul, the word of God can be blasphemed, which blasphemy is a word on the level of damnable cursing.

In the Old Testament, when a fella or a felicia blasphemed God, they were immediately put to death by the community since blaspheme was not only considered a social poison and a contagion that would spoil a nation, but it was also an affront to the awesome holiness of God.

See Leviticus 24, 16. When you blaspheme, you are violently cursing the name and the character of God.

You're shaking a middle finger at the heavens. You're looking out at the sovereign Lord with demonic disdain and malevolent boldness.

And you are saying, may you be damned. And in your hubris, if you're the blasphemer, you deserve to die.

You deserve to die because in your madness, you believed it would be possible to ascend the heights with Satan, asserting your stupid and unlearned opinion over and above the most high

God. And think about it this way. If the most glorious and beautiful angel that was ever created will be decisively cast into the lake of fire for his pride, how much more so will a worm like you?

Like the smallest little ant cursing the most prominent man, you deserve to be pressed down into the ground, stoned by the angry mob, buried beneath a crushing weight of earth because you believed that you could bring an infinite, holy, and matchless

God, pure and maximum in all splendor and glory. Yeah, that God down to your pitiful and senseless level, putting him securely under your wretched feet.

Death, my friend, would be too good for a fool like you if you were the one speaking blasphemy against the almighty

God. That is why the Old Testament talks about it that way because you have done something utterly incomprehensible.

Now, in this passage, we need to contemplate what it means to blaspheme the word of God because Paul is not just saying that we're blaspheming the name of God, he's saying that we're blaspheming the word of God.

So what does that mean? Well, the word of God is the divine revelation. It represents everything that God loves and everything that he intended to communicate for us to know.

And that includes the knowledge of him. It represents everything that he wanted us to believe and to obey.

Indeed, to assail the Bible is to wage war and assault on the very nature of God himself.

Now, you may be thinking, how so? Well, number one, the Bible is the sacred repository of God's divine revelation, carrying within its pages the timeless wisdom, divine truth, and majestic narratives that were inspired by the creator himself.

Its words, which are divinely breathed out, resound with the authority and the essence of the almighty.

When someone launches an attack on the Bible, when they seek to undermine that, they're trying to undermine the very foundation of God's self -revelation to humanity.

They're casting doubt upon the authenticity, the reliability, and the divine inspiration of the scriptures.

And in doing so, they're questioning God's character and integrity that are revealed therein, because he is the author of the word.

Second, Paul uses a common phrase for the word of God, which is enhologos tu

Theou, the word of God, which is often, that phrase is often used of Jesus Christ.

Look at John 1 ,1, especially if you can look at it in the Greek, it's the same phrase. With that in view, blaspheming the word not only communicates cursing the

Bible, but it also communicates cursing God's son, the word made flesh, the logos of God.

Now, I want you to imagine this. Wouldn't you believe that the same God who fiercely prohibits blasphemy of his name is not also gonna respond with unbridled and righteous fury when his sacred word is slandered so grievously, when his son is slandered so grievously?

Wouldn't a sin like that provoke the ire of a holy God? Could God, being righteous and just, ignore such dastardly crimes?

I think the answer is, of course not. The reality is that without Christ, mere good pleasure and mercy, this passage would hang over nearly every pulpit in America as a death sentence on the man or the woman,

God forbid, who does not teach these things. What do I mean? I mean, in this passage,

Paul tells us that there are seven truths that older women are to teach to the younger women so that they do not blaspheme

God. That means that if you do not teach these truths to younger women, or if you teach younger women to live in opposition to these seven truths, then that would amount to nothing less than the charge of blasphemy.

It's that serious, because God loves womanhood. That's the thing.

Society is gonna look at a passage like this and say, God hates womanhood. No, that's blasphemy.

God loves womanhood so much that he is unrelenting on its design.

He's not gonna let you or I redefine it. He loves womanhood. And if anybody teaches a woman anything contrary to what

God says in Titus 2, three through five, let that man be accursed. He's a blasphemer.

That's how seriously God takes his vision of womanhood. That's how much

God loves womanhood. There's not a passage like that when it comes to men. There's a passage we're gonna talk about in a couple weeks that is very strong, and we're gonna talk about that one as well, that it deals with men.

But God never defends his design of masculinity as strongly as he's defending this.

Dear women, when we go through this passage and we look at this, do not look at this as some sort of restriction upon you.

This is God rejoicing over his design and fighting for it, saying that it's worth preserving.

And that's why we're going into this passage is because God deeply cares about his design for you as woman.

Now, a brief word before we get started on this passage about what the older woman means.

The passage indeed concerns the older or the aged woman in the community, but it's more than that.

It's not just the older woman or the aged woman. It's the mature woman who's been walking with Christ and who has a godly discipleship about her.

She's a mature woman in Christ. So that's the reason why I'm writing this article is at least in part is to help mature godly women within Christendom to effectively work so that this passage will not be blasphemed, so that they will be gatekeepers of this passage.

And also so that the kingdom of Christ will grow in ways that please the father. But I'm also writing this because I want everyone in Christ's church to see how vital these seven commandments are to him.

I want young women to see them so that they'll live them. I want older women to see them so that they'll teach them. But I want everyone to see them because I want them to see how important these things are to God.

He doesn't threaten mild divine annoyance if we don't obey these commands. He doesn't threaten that, well, you'll quench the spirit if you don't obey these commands or that you'll be a heretic if you don't obey these commands.

No, the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul to write that this is an awful blasphemy against God's revelation.

If you teach anyone to do anything other than what is communicated in this text. So it's a strong passage.

It's a passage of God's strong love for womanhood. And with that,

I have a couple of different reasons why I'm bringing this passage up. Number one, the Holy Spirit convicted me on this passage that this is a passage that many people avoid and I just,

I can't avoid teaching it. That's number one. But I'm also praying that young married women will read this post and that they will rejoice in the truth that it's communicating.

They will be conformed to who God has made them to be. Womanhood will not improve until Christian women begin living like God designed them.

That's when womanhood is gonna improve in this country. That's when women are gonna begin flourishing instead of being put under the angry thumb of the pink -haired lesbians.

There are plenty of other godless, deplorable visions of what a woman is that will destroy womanhood, that are gonna plaster this veneer of liberalism onto femininity.

We don't want that. That's contributed to nothing but chaos and confusion that so many women in our society today are feeling.

Instead, I believe that it's high time that our beloved and our precious sisters in Christ, our dearest mothers in the faith, were given a compelling biblical vision for what married womanhood looks like so that they can flourish and be strengthened in the role that God created for them.

Now, I'm also praying that the older women would rejoice in the blueprint that God has provided for them, and it would cause them to eagerly get involved in the discipleship of younger women.

Many older women that I've talked to have never had this modeled for them when they were younger, maybe, and that's truly sad.

Maybe they had mothers who were out of the home, or maybe they had devoted mothers, but they had a lot of concerns. Maybe they had to work outside of the home, or they had a handful of older women in the community who were distant and aloof, and just for whatever reason, they never had someone who intentionally came alongside of them and guided them in the vision of what womanhood is.

That's awful, and that's sad, but there's a whole generation of women now who've graduated into this class of what

Paul would call older women, and yet they feel so much discouragement and confusion that they don't even know where to begin.

How could I possibly disciple younger women when I've never been discipled? Which is, that's a reality that many women are facing, and it's true, and it hurts, but we have to praise the sovereignty and the specificity of God in this passage, because He's provided us with specific instructions for older women to follow in discipleship, even if it was never modeled for you.

And again, if this is done well, then we will not have another generation of Christian women growing up confused about what it means to be a woman, or confused about their gender, or ill -equipped for marriage and for motherhood, or incapable of passing these timeless truths onto the next generation.

Ladies, if you're older in the faith, you may not have been discipled, but ensure that the buck stops with you, that there's not a new generation rising up who could have been discipled by you, but they weren't because you were scared or afraid or whatever.

Let the new generation not have your same story. Let the new generation of women look back with great delight that you came alongside of them and taught them how to be a biblical and godly woman.

That's number two. I also, in this article and in this broadcast,

I want to also pray that pastors would stop avoiding texts like this and would teach the truth to their congregations.

Women need to hear what God has said about them. Little girls and young women, married, single, they need to catch a vision for who

God has designed them to be. That vision must be communicated by you, pastor.

Don't abnegate your responsibility for applause or because you're afraid that someone's gonna be offended and they're gonna leave your church.

Put your big boy pants on, preach the text with love, gentleness, and humility, and respect, and let your people catch a vision of who

God's made them to be. With that, let us look at our passage and let us describe the seven different aspects of who a woman is.

Now, we're not gonna be able to cover all of that this week. We're only gonna be able to cover two. The first two, we'll get the next five next week.

But the two things that we're gonna cover today are two ways that women can give glory and honor to God.

If they neglect that or if they're taught differently than that, that's called blasphemy, which we wanna avoid.

So number one, what are older women supposed to teach younger women? What are pastors supposed to teach younger women in their congregations to do in order to honor

God? Well, to love your husbands. Paul begins with a simple command.

Older women are to encourage younger women to love their husbands. When that is not taught or when young women are taught to behave differently than that, the word of God has been blasphemed.

That's what Paul is saying. Now, to get after what Paul is talking about here, we need to understand what the apostle means when he uses the word love because he's not using the normal word for love.

He's actually using a very abnormal word for love that's gonna shed a lot of light on what he's actually talking about.

Instead of using the word agape, which is the common term for biblical sacrificial love,

Paul envisions a peculiar kind of love that young women are particularly gonna struggle with and they need to be encouraged with in order to give glory to God in their home.

Now, I'll demonstrate why this is so important. If you imagine you and your husband have a massive argument, a blowout fight, it's not that unusual that you later on that evening are gonna be making dinner for your family.

You may be fuming, you may be carrying all sorts of hurt feelings and resentment but you naturally, by God's grace, you have this natural instinctive ability to put yourself aside for a moment to care for the needs of your little clan, that is your husband included.

He doesn't miss a meal just because you're angry, usually. In fact, sacrificial love,

I would argue, comes more naturally to women than it does to men. Men can tend to be more self -centered and selfish than women.

Women can tend to be more selfless in lots of ways which is why Paul does not use the common word for sacrificial love, which is agape, when referring to women.

He knows women do that naturally. Instead, he uses a different word.

He uses a word called philandros which combines two common Greek words together, the word for husband and the word for love in order to make this sort of compound word out of the two of them.

In that sense, a woman is commanded to be the lover of her husband or if you wanna put it more simply, she's commanded to be a husband lover which begins to sort of shed light on what

Paul is talking about. But we need to go further because he doesn't use agapeandros, which is not a word.

He uses philandros which is from the root word phileo which is the kind of love that is described with brotherly love and the affection that exists between best friends.

When Paul uses this word, he's not only commanding young women to love their husbands but he's telling them to love them like they are her best friend and to be friendly towards them and agreeable in character and demeanor, to be nice to them, kind to them, affectionate towards them, respectful towards them in all ways in the same way that she would show her best friend.

Paul tells the older women in the congregation, you gotta make sure that you encourage the women, the younger women to be pleasant towards their husbands because this is precisely where she's gonna struggle the most.

He's telling the younger women, make sure you understand that your role in your husband's life is to be friendly to him, to laugh with him, to cheer with him, to build him up, to establish a sort of camaraderie with him so that he feels supported by you and cared for by you.

I'm gonna tell you the deepest desire of a man for his wife is that she likes him.

He already knows that she loves him. She does all of these sacrificial and wonderful things. He knows that she agapes him.

He wants her to phileo him. He wants her to respect and like and enjoy him.

When she comes into the room and he's sitting there, he doesn't want her ire or her nagging or her frustration or all of the weight of the world that she's carrying.

He wants her to look at him and be proud of him, to enjoy his presence, to like him.

That astounding command that Paul is giving here goes right at the heart of where most women struggle.

She's gonna naturally and very comfortably pour out all of her time and her energy to make sure that he and all of his children have everything that they need.

She's good at that. But how often will the husband get to see her being friendly to him, kind to him, joyful and pleasant to him?

If you ask most husbands, would you say, does your wife love you? Maybe they'll say yes. But would they say, does your wife like you?

Does she find you attractive? Does she think that you're funny? Does she enjoy your company?

Those often to men are more important than the sacrificial love that sometimes we as men can quite frankly overlook and that's to our detriment.

We need to repent of that when we overlook all of the wonderful and glorious sacrificial things that you do.

But Paul here through the power of the Holy Spirit is also saying women, you gotta love your husbands like he's your friend, like he's your companion.

He's gonna see your sacrificial care, but does he see that you're interested in him, that you enjoy being around him?

Will a man know that his wife likes him? Paul and the Holy Spirit both consider these questions consequential and so should we.

Now, knowing this, wives, you must ensure that your husbands and your children see you smiling.

They need to be able to hear the tone of love in your voice, the joy, the personality that you have, the vivacity, all the effort and energy that you put into a coffee date with your best friend need to also be given to your husband.

You need to speak with him the tones that you would speak to with a friend, greet him like you would a new acquaintance at church where you're putting on your best face.

You should reserve your best face and your best effort for your husband.

Ladies, do not become so fixated upon your mission as a wife and a mother and as a homemaker that you lose that friendly, spunky love that the text is calling you to.

Do not be a nag, the Bible says that. Don't dull out shrilly comments that are meant to cut him with a thousand wounds.

Enjoy your husband. Find reasons to enjoy him. Find common interest to support him in.

Pour out your friendliness and your kindness upon him because in the text, it tells us that greatly pleases the

Lord. The second way that we see in this passage, the second out of seven, that a woman is to bring honor and glory to God is to love her children.

Again, Paul does the same thing when discussing a woman's love for her children. He does not use the word for sacrificial because a woman's gonna do that naturally.

Her children may have taken her to the point of absolute madness, caused her to wanna pull out every single hair she has from every follicle in her head and she's still gonna feed them, she's still gonna pray for them, she's still gonna change their soiled diapers, she's gonna breastfeed them while they're cutting razor sharp teeth and she'd even die for them if that were necessary.

She, as a woman, is excellent at sacrificing. She doesn't need to be encouraged in that. It's natural and praise

God for that. But where the woman needs help and encouragement is in being chipper and in being friendly and in being pleasant and in bringing a joyful aroma into the home that God has given her.

It's easy for a mother to become discouraged, no doubt about it. It's easy for even the godliest woman to let her children and her husband see her annoyances or the eye rolls or to hear the different tones of grievances and offenses or to feel the weight of unmet expectations.

All of that's easy, but God doesn't call us to easy. He calls us to what

He's designed us to do. Now, let's be 100 % clear here.

I get it. It's easy to be frustrated because your husband is not perfect. Your children are not perfect.

They're hard to love. I'm hard to love. My kids are hard to love. So I get it. I understand why my wife gets frustrated.

But I also see what this text is saying. Does our family get to hear our joy?

Do they get to hear authentic kindness oozing from the response of a woman? Do they perceive happiness, the kind of happiness that can only come from knowing

Christ? Do they get to see that on their mother? Or do they see the woman who has told them a 10th time to go clean their room and now she's yelling?

Now she's angry. Now she's name -calling or now she's frustrated. Do they get to see her letting her hair down and having fun?

Those are aspects of love that God wants our young woman to eagerly bring into her home.

He was so emphatic about it that he called it a blasphemy of the word of God when a home is deprived of a mother's friendly mirth.

Now, from this passage alone, we're gonna look at it more next week. But from this passage alone, it is clear that the word of God can be blasphemed and that the apostle

Paul carefully gives us specific criteria that he considers blasphemous. For instance, an older woman who does not teach a younger generation of women to live out these truths can be accused of blaspheming

God's word. In the same way, a younger woman who rejects this vision of womanhood may likewise stand condemned by God's holy and authoritative standard for femininity.

It's true. Standard, which we began seeing unfolding this week, includes how a woman loves her husband and how a woman loves her children.

More than being sacrificial and meeting the family's needs, the woman is to be taught and encouraged and reminded and admonished to bring joy into her home, friendliness into her family, a pleasant atmosphere for them to live in.

She's to be tender with them, kind to them, and to bring exuberant love and joy to every nook and cranny of her casa.

Will a woman struggle to do this? Absolutely she will. Will she be condemned to hell if she does not do this perfectly?

Absolutely not. We know from the scripture that our salvation is not based upon our performance.

We all sin daily. We fall short of the glory of God and we are occasionally wretched world -class sinners.

And at the same time, our salvation is never in jeopardy. Why? Because the

Lord Jesus Christ died for every single sin, every single stain, every mark upon our character, every blight upon our soul, every blasphemy that we had ever hurled at Him.

In Christ, all our sins have been washed white as snow and they've been cast as far as the

East is from the West. Which means that our God will not remember our trespasses and He will no longer hold them against us.

On the basis of Christ, we have been forgiven. But that does not mean that we can go on sinning and living in the same old patterns.

Paul would say, may it never be so. As forgiven people, our lives must increasingly conform to the word of God, repenting where we fall short, striving for godliness as an act of love and devotion to our loving creator who saved our souls.

We do not ignore scripture now, especially now, because in Christ, we've been empowered by the

Spirit to grow in scripture and to produce the fruit of it. Now, a final note to all the ladies who are listening.

Dear sister in Christ, this is a high calling that God affectionately loves and will not sacrifice

His standards on. He loves womanhood. And as we examine these truths this week and next,

I don't want you to allow the enemy to beat you up and to tear you down and to accost you with feelings of inadequacy and shame.

There is no woman who perfectly lives up to the Bible's vision of womanhood. Just get that in your mind now.

If there are things in this passage where you are currently and obviously deficient, repent. Give them over to the

Lord, joyfully lay them down. Pick up your cross and follow Him. The vision of womanhood that He describes in His word is better and more beautiful and more lovely than any vision that we could come up with on our own.

Embrace what God has said about you, sister. Let your heart be filled with joy.

Let your tongue be seasoned with stevia. And your vibrant personality not wasted on strangers and acquaintances and friends, but that the people that you love the most will get to see and experience the very best of you.

Give yourself permission to be friendly and joyful to the glory of God and for the good of your home.

And with that, we will see you again next week on part two of the podcast. Until then,

God bless you. Thank you so much for subscribing to the broadcast.

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Get the word out there to as many people as we can. Thank you for joining the effort. We'll see you next time on the broadcast.