My Path Before My God....

It's funny. I never thought I'd get slammed for what I believe about Biblical submission to a man by a man! I always figured that they'd embrace that doctrine willingly! Maybe I need to elaborate what it is that I believe.

The Bible tells us that women should not have a position of authority over a man when it comes to the church. That is the role that God designed men to have. But where does that leave the female half of the population? Does it leave us cowering and groveling before our brothers? Absolutely not! We are created by God with a different role. We are the life-givers, the caregivers and the lovers He created. He created us as the perfect match for men, perfectly equipped to be all that a man is not. We are not required by God to be a man's servant. On the contrary, the man is instructed to serve the woman as Jesus served the church and gave Himself for her. So how can the man be the servant, but the woman submit? The answer is the love of Jesus. As the man and the woman EACH draw closer to a deeper relationship with Jesus, as He is the center, then they must draw closer to each other. So many times, we've all been at weddings where we have heard the passage from Corinthians read, "love bears all things...." and kinda zoned out until it was over. I propose that we all drag out our Bibles (some of them are pretty dusty) and really READ that passage. Take it apart and understand what it says. Then, step back and ask yourself, "If I really fill the role God designed for me, do I feel like I'm losing anything at all by either being a servant (men) or submitting to my husband (women)? Joyfully, I have found that buoying my husband up, helping him and offering an opinion now and then (NOT nagging) has led to a better marriage. He actually WANTS to be a servant and I can't get enough of the tenderness that he offers! I'm not saying that women are dumb and should never express their opinions! I wouldn't be a blogger if I believed that! But I do welcome my husband's oversight and if necessary, I edit myself. I cherish his viewpoint and we have some very lively discussions. Someday, we will stand hand-in-hand and side-by-side before our Creator. I will not be inferior to my husband, nor will he be superior to me. We will accept our rewards together from our Lord and will live with Him for eternity.

And so I say to my dear brother blogger, who implied that my beliefs were a danger to future generations, that while I am not in a position to preach to you, I do love you enough to pray that God will teach you what no woman should. I pray that your eyes will be opened and you will learn of the love that Jesus had for us. I am comfortable in my role of submissive wife. I am neither afraid of it or diminished by it. Rather, I am fulfilled and rewarded. May God help you to see this mysterious truth by His grace, through Jesus Christ our Savior, amen.

Palestine or Israel?

As news of the Palestinian elections unfolded, I initially felt a sense of dread and sadness. How could the average voter choose a violent, militant leadership? Even in the face of decades of corruption, it seemed ridiculous! Then I began to think about it this way. If I were a mother in Palestine, what would my life be like and how would I vote? To begin with, I guess I'd be grateful if I were allowed to vote at all! Women do not have a whole lot of standing or influence in Palestinian society. Having been raised in a "refugee camp" without decent schools or medicines, I'm probably not very well educated. My political decisions would be based on a very narrow set of factors -- how my husband told me to vote and what I heard through neighborhood gossip. I can't read for myself beyond the most basic words. My biggest concern is how I will feed my family today, and neighborhood gossip says that my husband can't find work because of the Israelis. It says that it's because of them that I can't get medicines when my kids have ear aches. It says that it's because of them that my kids can't go to school. So how would I vote? For the guy that says he going to make "them" go away! Am I right? Have I thought it through? Probably not. I don't care about it anyway. I just want my kids to have a better life than I do. Americans sit down hard in their chairs, scratch their heads, and say, "How did that happen? How could they vote for Hamas?" I contend that it was a desperate attempt to make things better or to change what is, not necessarily to eradicate a race. For years, I have been guilty of looking at the "Palestinian situation" and thinking that after almost 50 years, no one should be living in "camps" and that they should have simply moved on. But realistically, how do you do that when you have no education and don't know where to turn? How do you do that when your whole life, from your cradle to now, has been a string of blaming the Jews for your poverty and your misery? Is it right? Of course not! But no one has taught me anything else. You can't read or understand the newspapers. You don't understand that these Jews think that they should live on Grandpa's land because they think they've got a covenant with Almighty God. You just want it to change!

As an American, I look at the middle east and root for the Jews. They returned to the land promised to their fathers, just as the prophets said they would. But here is where they made the mistake: after centuries of persecution, they returned with a 'you don't bother me, I won't bother you' mentality. They have tried desperately to work out a diplomatic, negotiated solution. But God didn't tell them to do that. When he told Joshua to take the land, He told him to kill and destroy all who were there. God told them not to allow anyone to live. In today's "civilized" world, we think that's simply horrible -- but it's God's command and decree for the Jews to live in Israel.

As the prophets also foretold, it will never end until the world ends. When Jesus returns and sets things right, then it will end. Will Hamas kill Jews until then? Of course. And the Jews will return their attacks in kind. Our only hope now is, as it has always been, Jesus Christ. I pray that He comes soon!

Musing

This musing considers the question of moral relativity. I am amazed at the excuses that people use for their bad behavior. So often you hear that this wasn’t as bad as that. We can all look back in history and pick characters that we’d all agree deserve eternal punishment for their atrocities. Everyone (except maybe the Iranian president) can agree that Adolf Hitler was responsible for the deaths of over 6 million Jewish souls, but we often forget the other 17 million elderly, infirm, blacks, handicapped and otherwise “impure” as well as pastors, teachers and priests that dared to object to his policies. We can all point to him and say, “I never did anything as bad as he did, so I’ll be OK”. We look at other countries and cultures and mentally place them on a balance. As long as we feel like we come out “morally better” than the next guy, we figure that we have no peril. We aren’t so bad so we must be “good enough”. God surely won’t condemn us, right? We do this sort of “self-exam” that goes through our mental list of sins and hold them each up against some other person, decide that we’re not so bad and certainly haven’t done anything bad enough to deserve eternal punishment, so we must be OK. The problem with this is that our picture of what is perfect is very different from what God’s picture is. And since we try to shrink that picture down to something we can at least get close to, we mentally shrink God right along with it. For many of us, God is so small and powerless, He fits in a little Sunday-sized box and doesn’t even have the power to fix a parking ticket! The wakeup call comes when we begin to read His word and grow in our understanding of just what that word says. It says that our very best is like filthy rags to God! So if I know I’m not being my very best because I’m just trying to stay a little better than the next guy, then where does that leave me in God’s eyes? When I was younger, a pastor used the analogy of swimming from California to Hawaii. Everyone might start out swimming pretty well, but sooner or later, only the strongest swimmers would be left and even they would fall hundreds of miles short of the goal. So how would anyone ever get there? God’s word tells us that Jesus is the living Son of God. It says that He lived among us without sin and made the ultimate blood sacrifice. Because of His work as the great High Priest, He offers atonement for all the mess that we’ve made of our lives. And He doesn’t offer that atonement based on anything we can do or can earn! We have eternal life in Him and it is a free gift! Will we ever mess up again? Sure will! But that doesn’t mean that we’ll be condemned for it. He listens to the repentant heart and understands our human frailties. The hardest thing to do is to believe it, and if you can’t, simply pray, “God, if this stuff is true, give me the faith to believe it”. Then spend some time reading what God’s word says about who He is. You too, can be as amazed as I am, that He can save you and change you into a new person. Not somebody who’s a little better than the guy next door, but somebody who will be known as a child of the Living God! Moral relativity becomes irrelevant, praise God!

Ponderings....

Since my post yesterday, I have been doing a lot of thinking about our society. The pondering has raised some questions and I think I’ve formulated some, if not answers, at least some talking points, in response. I’ll deal with the first today and others in future posts.

First question: If society places little or no value on the life of an unborn child, what led to this devaluation and how does society make peace with what conscience it has? I think that one of the measuring sticks for the value of that unborn life is socially perceived to be the degree that this life will be loved and wanted and will not be a “burden” to society at large. The excuse for many abortions has been, “I just can’t deal with a pregnancy right now” and “I just can’t afford to start a family right now” or “I have to finish xyz before I’m ready for this.” Note the subtle wording that excuses the murder of the child – ‘a pregnancy’, ‘start a family’, ’ready for this’ – no where is the word baby or child used. When the woman is in the abortion clinic, her child is referred to as the fetus or embryo and her womb (a word that connotes nurturing and safety) is referred to as her uterus. Yup, you’re right, it’s only words, but words ease guilty consciences and soothe the nagging of persistent self-accusations. Then, after turning the unborn little life into a thing that needs to be removed, like a tumor or a cancer, it becomes much easier to not want it or love it. It’s much simpler to justify the act if you point to the millions of abused and neglected children in society. Instead of doing something to help them, let’s just not create any more, and the existing children of loveless existences will grow up or die off, and we will have a society without this burden, right? The courts debated for years about when life begins, and eventually had to conclude that it does begin at conception. So to make it “right" to take that life, the courts had to try to assign the rights to that life to some entity other than itself. Thus, it concluded that although life begins at conception, the rights to that life belong to the mother until the life can live apart from the mother, and the mother could somehow search within herself for the value of that life to HER. If she did not love it, better to remove it early enough in the pregnancy that she might avoid loving it. Following this line of thinking, you will not see an ultrasound machine in an abortion clinic because if that mother got a glimpse of her precious child moving around or its little heart beating, she might feel the natural love that God gave her and feel a desire to protect the child in her womb.

I guess what strikes me as most ridiculous of these arguments is the way the tapestry unravels when you pull on one of these threads. If a life has no value because it is not loved, then there can be no condemnation for killing the bag lady that lives under the bridge. That unravels to: if a life has no value because you don’t love it, then you should be able to slaughter my grandfather because you have no love for him? Why should it matter to you that I love him and I assign value to his life? What is to prevent society from simply setting fire to all the nursing homes and saving itself a huge Medicare bill? If you say that life may be terminated because it has not come to usefulness, then you must also say that life may be terminated when it has outlived its usefulness and must attempt to now create some sort of measuring stick for when that happens. Hitler did it and so did Stalin. Many so-called ‘religions’ of the world do it by saying that if you do not become one of them you are not eligible to live. Do we really want to go there in America?

Please understand that I am not advocating blowing up abortion clinics nor do I wish to see a repeal of Medicare or Welfare or any other program that helps life to continue in whatever shape it’s in. Nor do I believe that the decision to keep a child is ever easy. What I do believe is that there should be some return to the absolute truth of God’s word. When the bag lady is not loved by anyone that we can see, God loves her. And that little baby that a woman would call a fetus is loved and known by God. He has endowed that tiny life with a unique identity, with unique DNA that will never be created again, even finger prints! He already knows the color of the child’s hair, his skin, his eyes, whether he will be short or tall, thin or fat, mechanically inclined or at home in academia. With love and care, He has pieced the child together and formed it with or without what we might call flaws or defects. He has made that child for His perfect purpose and we usurp His throne in daring to terminate that life or any other.

Please join me in a daily prayer for the unborn. Upwards of 43-million innocent babies have been slaughtered while society looked the other way and rationalized its behavior. Oh God, please save one teeny, tiny little baby today!

What Price?

Our society first accepted the premise that abortion was not murder but was a matter of a woman’s right to choose to “fix” a difficult situation she found herself in. Then society said that doctors could not take a moral stand of their own but must, if requested by the woman, perform an abortion. The laws have been tweaked and twisted to allow for various objections and exceptions until society now, not only grudgingly accepts abortion as a “woman’s right” but defends and imposes it on all who celebrate God’s creation wish to preserve life, no matter what form it comes in. Somewhere, in the tweaking and twisting process, the “value” of the life came into play. It became OK to kill an unborn baby if its life might somehow be of less value than a “healthy” baby or a “wanted” baby – that somehow, if a baby was unwanted, it had no worth. Somehow, the “extra” babies created by the process of invitrofertilzation became a commodity that could be purchased for stem cell research. When this happened, society could now put a price on the priceless. Now, the value of life (read, “quality of life”) becomes the measuring stick by which we determine if a life should be allowed to continue. A woman may kill her baby in the name of choice. The terminally ill may kill themselves in the name of dignity. The Michael Schaivos of the world are allowed to remove the feeding tubes from their wives in the name of choice (read, “convenience”). What’s the next step? Wouldn’t it be simpler to euthanize your wife than to work on your messed-up, difficult marriage? What about that patience-trying, rebellious teenager that just wrecked your BMW? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just eliminate him than pay the hospital and rehab bills, now that he’ll never walk again? If followed to its logical conclusion, the argument for the “right” to kill a baby is more frightening than Mein Kampf! I praise God that he is still sovereign and He’s still in control of even this moral spiral that society is in. I anticipate the day when Jesus will return and right this mess. In the mean time, Pastor Tom, (see engagingyourworld.blogspot.com, 1/20/06) I will pray that He will bless your efforts to save babies now and that the love of Jesus will shine from Family Matters.