Episode 185: Are we Modeling Good Fruit or Folly?

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This is a really sensitive and controversial subject today that I can’t talk to kids directly about so I am coming to you with instead—the question of whether we are discipling our kids into the Scriptural promises of the good spiritual fruit which comes along with trusting God and yielding to the Spirit, or whether we are succumbing to culture and teaching them the opposite. And it’s difficult because oftentimes church culture is incredibly worldly and especially when we have convinced ourselves that our church, our denomination, and/or our faith traditions are somehow immune. Am I just talking to myself here or are you getting uncomfortable too or are you just thinking about someone else’s faith walk? Personally, I am thinking about mine right now! As I should be! My kids didn’t always have the best example when it comes to faithfully doing what it takes to follow a very counter-cultural Messiah—as counter-cultural then as He is today. Actually, let’s be honest, my kids never had the best example except when I was reading directly from the red-letter words, in context. Speaking of which, I recently heard about this thing—a red letter only Bible where I guess it only has the words of Yeshua/Jesus? I went through a few pages of the Gospels, just for fun, and looked at some of what He was saying out of context and it wasn’t good. Having never actually read such a thing, and I am not interested in spending money or time to do so because we need all of the Gospels and not just edited versions, I may have it all wrong but still—it struck me as kinda funny but in an unfunny way. So, if one of you have read a red letter only Bible, please send me an email to enlighten me.

 

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, everything changed about a month ago when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms that my days of teaching adults are over, so now this portion of my ministry is devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it. Which is super easy to do, by the way—hijacking it. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. Let’s stop doing it and teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, but geared more toward discipleship and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

So, yeah, in mid-November the Lord broadsided me and told me to focus completely on teaching kids and equipping caregivers with no more focus on adults. I have known it was coming since 2015 but teaching adults was something I had to learn first because teaching what I teach to kids is much more difficult and the tightrope I have to walk is far more perilous. I would rather teach something wrong to a grownup than to a kid, you know? And I have to stay away from politics and sex, and anything that is going to cause division between children and their parents or undermine that relationship. I have to be doubly careful about the integrity of what I am teaching. And we all teach wrong things—that’s inevitable—but the way we teach things is even more important. Teaching adults, people can get away with a lot of nonsense and some appallingly bad behavior—even though we shouldn’t—but with kids we are laying the foundation for what behavior they will think is acceptable from the pulpit and what isn’t. That’s a scary responsibility. Really, kids became my priority over three years ago when I started the radio show for kids but now, they are the only show in town as far as I am concerned. I still teach and pay attention to you guys when I need to support what I am teaching the kids in ways that I can’t do personally—like teaching Sodom and Gomorrah when we get to Genesis 19 after the series I am teaching now on “Being like Jesus.” Honestly, kids need to have Yeshua (I always call Him Jesus when teaching kids so that everyone is clear who I am referring to—I am not interested in being confusing) as their foundational baseline because dang, those patriarchs and kings did some messed up stuff that the Bible doesn’t make any excuses for and neither should we. When we start with perfection, we can avoid a lot of the problems that come when parents and teachers believe that they have to call the bad stuff good. We have only one perfect example, just one. Not Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Moses, or anyone else. When we normalize the teachings of Yeshua, our own lives change and our kids see it. Okay? Okay.

Oh, and just FYI—I do not teach kids the way I teach you guys. I am not as direct, or confrontational with them or blunt like I have to be on topics like this—I break things down and we explore things slowly from the Bible and from the history of the ancient Near Eastern and first century worlds. I believe we can be confrontational when absolutely necessary while still being kind and gentle but firm and self-controlled. We’ll see how it goes this time. However, not with kids. I don’t find it productive or effective or edifying for them. And they deserve to be able to learn to think critically so that they have the ability to make up their own minds without manipulation or too much interference from a non-parent. So, that’s where my mind is about teaching adults vs teaching kids. Just FYI. That goes for my radio shows and my books.

 

Lots of sermons out there are directed at how we and our kids are worldly, right? And that’s not a bad thing. We should want our kids’ heroes to be people like Mister Rogers and the great saints of the past. People like Gladys Aylward and Cameron Townsend, but they often don’t even know who they are—everything is Taylor Swift and Beyonce and sports stars and actors and influencers and all that. Music and movies and sports are fine, don’t get me wrong as I really enjoy music and movies—but they aren’t our examples of how we should behave. They are cultural and not counter-cultural. And that’s just obvious—not telling you anything you don’t know. The church largely focuses on preaching against all that but is that the biggest problem facing the Body of Messiah? I really don’t think so. Yeshua didn’t really talk about that stuff, at all. And He could have spent time talking about stuff that would make what we deal with now look tame. When was the last time your kid saw someone nailed to a cross along the roadway? Or death matches in the arena? What He did talk about was the character of the believer and especially in the Sermon on the Mount. And before Matthew wrote his account, including the Sermon on the Mount, there were oral traditions of the teachings of the Messiah, passed around among the congregations and Paul must have known them well because his letters are very much obsessed with and focused on promoting the character instructions of Yeshua. In fact, get rid of Paul and you get rid of the hardest teachings in the entire Bible on what it means to love neighbor and enemy in real life. Yeshua spoke in sweeping generalities to a Jewish audience, but Paul confronts the day to day nonsense that believers were getting into with infighting and just generally being jerks.

Get rid of the Sermon on the Mount and Paul, and Judaism and Christianity both get a whole lot easier to live out—and since Constantine brought the military into the faith—that’s exactly what started to happen. Did you know that the early church took the Sermon on the Mount and the commands to be peacemakers and meek and loving toward enemies very seriously? This while they were being thrown to the lions in the arena! If anyone ever had a reason to not take Yeshua’s hardest commands seriously, it was definitely them. But their witness brought down normative paganism in the Roman Empire. It’s crazy and upside-down but no one can argue with the success. Paul spent a lot of time giving individualized instructions to the different congregations he founded throughout the Roman Empire based upon what was and was not respectable within the different cultures. Obviously, Rome, Ephesus, Jerusalem, Corinth, and Antioch are all going to have very different local laws, ideals, and traditions even though they were all under the umbrella of the Roman Empire. In some places, women weren’t even allowed to be educated. In others, the majority of the population was enslaved or retired military and their families. Imperial Cult was celebrated zealously in one city but was more of an afterthought in others. So, they had to be taught to be counter-cultural within the culture. It was a tricky situation—to be respectable in all the right ways but to be very different where the culture was oppressive and antichrist.

 

The difference, and this is where we can most help our kids, was in the character they were commanded to have on display at all times. Their character was not to have a shred of worldliness, and character, of course, is about our mental and moral qualities. It’s not only about how we think but about how what we think (or claim to think) manifests in what we are actually doing. Men of the Roman Empire were expected to be adulterers while women could be executed for it. But when it came to ground zero and Yeshua was speaking to His fellow Jews, He told the men quite plainly that they couldn’t exalt themselves over the gentile men whose perceived masculinity was enhanced by being sexually aggressive—when they were looking at women lustfully or divorcing their wives over frivolities in order to marry some other woman. He was saying that it is all the same thing as what the Roman men were legally doing in broad daylight. Yeshua was saying, frankly, that lust isn’t inevitable and that when we view one another truly as human beings, brothers and sisters of the same Father in Heaven, that we will not degrade each other with lustful and dehumanizing thoughts. In fact, it should be difficult (if not impossible) when we see others as siblings. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, by the way, that was the jist of the philosophical virtue of self-control—controlling oneself sexually. Obviously, despite many philosophers valuing that virtue, others didn’t and the general public—not so much.

Meekness and humility were also very counter-cultural and still very much are. First century honor/shame culture prized and rewarded aggression in males—whether that be verbal, physical, or sexual aggression and Judaism wasn’t that much different from the rest of the world in that. Men engaged in aggressive verbal wars to see who would come out on top and who would sink to the bottom. This was normal life, but Yeshua made certain to stress the absolute worldliness of gaining honor in such a way, and that the way of the Kingdom of Heaven rewards the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers and that it is the peacemakers and not the bullies who are the sons of God. Again, the audience would have been flipping out because Yeshua was telling them that the female virtues were also supposed to be the male virtues. Yeshua was telling them not to practice Greco-Roman and ancient Near Eastern modes of masculinity. He told them that the Kingdom of Heaven was so completely different than what they believed they needed to be, that their entire lives needed to be turned upside down. And this should have been very obvious after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple when God didn’t reward the Zealot rebellion—which was worldly in every way you can imagine; if you haven’t read what the first century Jewish historian Josephus had to say about how the Zealots made the Romans look like saints, you should.

 

As I said before, the early church practically used the Sermon on the Mount as the handbook for acceptable behavior until, all of a sudden, they were no longer a persecuted minority and had an army at their beck and call. That’s what happens to everyone, right? It’s the way of this world and its kingdoms, which is why it is very hard for the church to be countercultural in all but the most glaringly obvious ways. Sure, we do a good job of teaching our kids not to twerk or to do drugs but those are just symptomatic of larger issues—we aren’t teaching them to be Kingdom people because it isn’t safe or culturally masculine. But that’s why we have always been taught to take up our crosses and follow Him—because His way isn’t safe in the here and now. His way requires courage and transformation away from what brings honor in the world. The way of the Kingdom isn’t power and hierarchies and wealth and worldly honor but oftentimes the exact opposite. I want to look at Galatians 5. I mean, look, I could teach on this for years and not exhaust it but I really don’t want to do that here. You guys can connect the dots. What I want is to set the stage for teaching kids what the Bible tells us about actually being like Jesus—what it really means to be disciples and what Galatians 5 tells us we will become as we let go of the world and take hold of the Spirit. People rarely read more than just verses 22-23 because what comes before is just painful to our worldly desires for artificial set-apartness and self-righteousness and safety. I don’t like it any more than you do so let’s just get it over with, starting in verse 16:

I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is against the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you don’t do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things—as I warned you before—that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. (Gal 5:16-26, CSB)

 

So, what’s “obvious” here in the works of the flesh? Are they really obvious? I see a lot of that stuff masquerading as ministry on social media and from the pulpit. Our carnal minds are actually drawn to the people who are doing a lot of these things and because of that, we make excuses for the others too. But if you belong to political party A and would roast alive a person from political party B who did such and such, but you excuse it in your candidate and from the pulpit then we have to ask exactly how un-obvious these terrible things have become. Let’s look at the works of the flesh that are actually now celebrated from the pulpit and in our political, public, and private lives that we turn a blind eye to when we are enjoying it.

Idolatry—politics is probably our worst example here in America and something I never discuss with kids. I have watched people excuse behavior that actors in Hollywood would get cancelled over—if the politician is good for their issues. And it’s frankly worse in the church than outside it. And whatever we excuse, our kids are listening and watching and internalizing. If we can exalt a politician who is not only committing the works of the flesh but bragging about it, we will never be able to wrestle our own children out of endorsing and copying the same behavior that they see us admiring. What’s our political legacy? Who is it okay to destroy as long as the economy is good and our issues are being promoted? Do we have credibility with our kids when we turn a blind eye in the name of politics and promote commandment-breakers and bullies as bastions of masculinity to be emulated? And worse, the cult of personality within our churches and exacerbated by social media where the worst behaving people in ministry draw the biggest crowds and get to write books telling men and women how to be men and women—for the purpose of attracting the world into the faith by being more like the worldliness of another era, not less. And when these people fall into adultery or financial crimes or whatever, we defend them because the “message” feeds our flesh. Is that okay? Does that line up with anything Yeshua ever taught?

Hatred—that’s like the drug of choice in the church. We are specifically commanded not to hate in the Sermon on the Mount. And it is specifically modeled for us that we are to bless and forgive. But nowadays, if you are grieving and concerned for Palestinian children (which any feeling human being is when they take time to think about it calmly), you are accused of hating the Jews. How can love for Jews manifest as hatred for children, when 50% of the population of Gaza was born after the last free election in 2006? It can’t. We can and should and must love both, okay? When does love for the innocent on one side mean hatred for another side unless that is the general state of our hearts? Did loving and forgiving those who killed Yeshua mean that He endorsed their governments? We treat hatred as though it is a right and a virtue when one of the fruits of the Spirit is specifically a promise that as we yield to and mature in the Spirit that our love will grow and overpower and defeat our casual hatred. Hatred compromises us, it is one of the underlying themes of the Gospels. Sometimes I wonder if, when Yeshua commanded His followers to love their enemies, if someone accused Him of hating the Jews. That’s a flesh response. That’s what we do these days. It’s natural but not representative of a cruciform life or mature fruit. It’s worldly to hate and to preach and support hate.

Strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy—some of the most popular preachers out there have all of these on open display under the auspices of being zealous and speaking the truth in love. People who thrive on being angry and promoting anger even over the smallest things, who cannot tolerate any form of disagreement, who label everyone who is not in lockstep as other, dangerous, heretic, enemy, stupid, etc. Leaders who do not make disciples of Yeshua but of themselves—openly ambitious instead of humble and meekly serving. Cutting down anyone who seems threatening, creating factions and envious of the influence of others over the people around them. Teachers who would rather make up an answer to a question than to send the questioner to another teacher. Gosh, I have received some terrible made-up answers from people who simply didn’t know how to admit that they haven’t studied such and such. The creation of these hierarchies where we lord authority over one another the way Yeshua warned the pagan gentiles did (which was actually a challenge lobbed directly at the politically powerful Sadducean priesthood). No wonder such things go hand in hand with sexual and financial abuse in the congregations.

How about violence? Oh, we bristle with fear when we read the Sermon on the Mount and immediately say, “But what if?” instead of saying, “Lord, I am listening. My flesh is crawling and I don’t like it but I am listening.” How do we teach our children to take Messiah seriously when the first thing we say after each verse of the Sermon on the Mount is, “Yeah, but, He can’t mean that because that’s dangerous and hard and scary.” That’s the Beast Kingdom in us, in all of us, and we teach it to our kids because it has been drilled into us. That Jesus couldn’t possibly mean for us to actually be in danger—like the church usually has been throughout history whenever it isn’t backed by political power and an army. That’s anti-Christ because when we say things to countermand Yeshua, or use the Constitution to negate Him, or “common sense” to sweep away His commands—we are doing exactly what the persecuted church never has done because they never could.

Some of the last recorded words of Yeshua by Matthew are that we are to go into the world, teaching people to do everything He commanded. There are five teaching blocks in that Gospel and the first and foundational one is the Sermon on the Mount. That’s the manifesto of the Kingdom of Heaven in the New Creation age. That’s the narrow path. That’s the meat we move on to after we learn to digest the milk of the basic commandments. That’s the upside-down way we are called to live and be different and when we do, we prosper spiritually. But it requires a lot of trust. It’s hard and everything in us screams against it. It’s never been any different for any generation—none of us like it. We want to be safely enmeshed in some sort of artificial 1950’s John Wayne type masculinity where we can trust in big, strong, white dudes to protect us while trying to avoid being forcibly kissed and even spanked instead of trusting in God despite His requiring us to live in a meeker way that exposes us like a huge raw wound floating in a cesspool of infection.

Now, I don’t teach the kids anything like that. I just teach them about Jesus and what love, joy, peace, patience, etc. looks like and I allow Him and parents to do the rest. They are still children and don’t need to unlearn all the stuff we need to unlearn. I don’t want them to turn against the adults in their lives or to feel unsafe in their homes. They aren’t the ones choosing what to listen to from the pulpit or from politicians or whatever. They still see some things very clearly and while we have come to force ourselves to see as good and normal, they are still very pliable and teachable. That’s why we are supposed to be more like them and why the Kingdom belongs to them and not to us. But they are walking away from the faith and from our politics—because neither are modeling Messianic character for them. And I can say that regardless of denomination or political party. Our walks have to be in line with the teachings of the Messiah and not something we have to make excuses for being the opposite of. Remember, Yeshua could have called down ten thousand legions of angels but all He ever did was to flip over some tables and chairs once, and to herd critters off the Temple Mount. That’s self-control. And then He died for all those people involved. We can’t ever forget that. That’s radical, and not worldly.

So, over the last few on Context for Kids, we covered self-control and what Jesus did compared to what He could have done and last week, it’s mercy/gentleness in the parable of the ungrateful servant. Yesterday I recorded a program on faithfulness—which is more complicated than it sounds. I won’t, of course, be talking to them about rogue preachers or politicians. Jesus is enough. He really is. They can spot the counterfeit as long as we don’t try to pass it off as the real thing. Frankly, the reason we see so many church abuse situations is because we have learned from our parents to accept abuse and bad behavior from “anointed” people and we have been passing it down to the generations that follow us.

 

 

 

 



Episode 181: Privilege–what it is, isn’t, and why it matters

When I teach the kids, they call me Miss Tyler, but today I am Auntie Tyler. Privilege is a concept that appears all over the Bible and in every sort of literature within it. Privilege is incredibly important within the Biblical narrative–but why? I want to peel back a lot of the rhetoric, talking points, and misinformation out there to take a hard look at how Christians should view privilege and what it should mean in the life of the Body of Christ.

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So, this morning we are going to do something very different than usual. We’re going to talk about the sociological reality of privilege and what it is, what It isn’t and why it matters—especially to the church because we find it mentioned all over the Bible and in all types of Biblical literature from the historical narrative to poetry, and wisdom sayings to apocalypse. Privilege is a word that tends to provoke strong reactions from white people, like me, even when we readily acknowledge the ways in which we ourselves don’t have it as good as other people do for this or that reason. Personally, I believe the topic has been poisoned by those who want to make it look like the argument of privilege is saying things that it absolutely is not saying—that every single white person has it better than every single person of color (POC) in this country or that if you are white then you haven’t struggled. The truth is that absolutely no one is saying that even though there are talking points out there that have been designed to provoke fear and defensiveness in white people. But the Bible talks about privilege.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on Amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids. (affiliate link) I also have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for adults and kids. You can find the links for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com, and transcripts for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

Let’s look at the UK. It shouldn’t even be remotely controversial to say that, if you are a member of the royal family or the nobility then you have natural privileges and perks that average everyday folks do not have. You are more likely going to attend Eton and Oxford than public schools. You will have top-notch health care and access to whatever it is that will assist you in developing your natural talents. You won’t worry about money as long as you are responsible with it because you have inherited wealth from your ancestors, as well as titles—giving you standing that you did nothing to earn. In fact, you didn’t earn anything you were born to possess or benefit from. No one does, rich or poor. We would all agree that it is a privilege to not have to deal with certain hurdles that others have to try to jump over.

Let’s look at Israel, and I understand this is a sensitive topic right now but who on earth would choose to be born behind the barriers in Gaza or the West Bank? Any takers? Of course not—there is no one who would not rather be born to a Jewish family in Jerusalem instead. Who would make the conscious choice of being born a woman in Iran or Afghanistan now that the Taliban has regained control of the country? Who would choose to be born in a war zone, or in an apartheid state on the side of those being oppressed? I am very grateful to be living in America and to be white because it means that I didn’t struggle in the ways that many of my friends of color have struggled. I am grateful that I wasn’t born into poverty in Mexico or South America, whose governments are either in cahoots with, controlled by, or in a losing battle with powerful drug cartels. I am grateful I have never had cause to live in mortal fear of what will happen to my sons who, despite being biracial, easily pass as white. There are hurdles I have never had to jump because I am who I am and I am sure you can say the same thing. The Bible flatly tells the have’s not to despise the have not’s and to not ignore them or mock them. When we deny the privilege all around us, we are despising and mocking those who suffer the consequences of the situations they were born into.

And there are other kinds of privilege. Generational wealth and education within the middle class. Although slavery was made illegal in the 1860’s, various forms of it lingered long afterward and even to the present day. Even poor whites, during antebellum days, benefitted and profited from cheaper cotton and tobacco than they would have if the workers were fairly paid and were free to seek employment elsewhere or were educated. My ancestors didn’t own slaves, as far as I know, but they did enjoy the benefits of what was being perpetrated against enslaved people. At the end of the Civil War, my family retained what they had before the war, while freed blacks were let loose with absolutely nothing. No land. No money. No education. No open arms waiting to embrace them anywhere. It is only within recent memory that the black community in America has been able to begin generating generational wealth–the ability to send off their children with a fair start in life educationally and financially and for the children to someday inherit and build upon what they had growing up. People who are firmly middle-class often fail to see what an advantage it is to have things provided for them because their parents had things provided for them. People who are upper middle class and rich are often completely oblivious to it. But the Bible isn’t. And the prophets sure weren’t.

The way your family life is set up constitutes an area where advantage and disadvantage can be quite obvious. No one would deny that growing up in a loving, non-abusive, supportive Christian two-parent family free from addiction—regardless of socio-economic conditions—gives young people a huge leg up psychologically over those who do not have it. Attending a school where the teachers truly care and support their students makes a world of difference. Never having lived in foster care, being raised by relatives while parents are incarcerated, dead, or just gone remove a lot of hurdles that real kids out there face. Foster kids are often put out onto the street when they hit their 18th birthday; when the support money stops coming in, and they end up at men’s shelters or on the streets.

Some privileges are seemingly random—physical beauty, musical or athletic ability, intelligence, health, and being able-bodied. All of these contribute to a person’s chance of success—including color and gender. Nothing I have mentioned so far has anything to do with merit or virtue. They are very much what we could call “accidents of birth.” No one is born deserving or not deserving any of these. They just are what they are. I would be a ridiculous fool to say that it isn’t a privilege to be very intelligent, white, and to have come from a family that was mid to upper-middle class by the time I graduated from High School. My parents paid for college—another privilege. My husband has those same privileges. We never had to worry about how to pay for college, and neither did our kids. Neither of us earned that—even though we worked hard in school because there are people who worked even harder to had to work full-time or part-time or take out student loans to afford their tuition. They, through no fault of their own, had that hurdle that we didn’t even hardly know was there. Not only that, but we were able to attend more prestigious schools with better science and engineering programs.

Let me just stop right there. Do I feel guilty about that privilege? No, I don’t—that would be counterproductive and self-centered. But that isn’t the same thing as me not seeing the injustice of it and knowing that change needs to happen. I really like Star Trek because it represents a world where a lot of this inequity has been defeated. I mean, there will always be abuse and irresponsible parents, but I believe that a world where no one is hungry and every child has equal education and opportunities is in alignment with the trajectory of Scripture. That we should greatly desire it goes without saying. I had a dream back on September 4 that I want to share. I wrote this in the morning when I woke up but haven’t shared it until now:

Last night, I dreamed that I woke up one day as a black woman in America. I still had all my memories of being a white woman, and the voice I used while talking to others was the voice of a white woman but the reactions to it were very different. I saw neglect and disrespect. I saw black youth in what can only be called a pit of vipers–cobras specifically–and my demands that those in charge do something about them going unheard and not taken seriously. And I am talking big obvious cobras just under the sand. Then, suddenly, I was white again, and I yelled about it and people scrambled to deal with the cobras as though this was the first they had heard of them. I went from setting to setting like this with similar results.

It wasn’t a matter of attractiveness because the woman whose face I bore was younger and far more attractive (I would kill for her hair, lemme tell you). The face was far more professional looking, well groomed, you name it, but she wasn’t white.

For many years now, I have been asking God to really make the reality of “privilege” clear to me, and that did it. I was so frustrated. Being “white” on the inside, in the way I thought, acted, spoke, etc. had absolutely no effect on these people’s reactions to me compared to how they responded when my face and body reverted back to my own. It was like a switch flipped in their heads that I should be listened to, cared about, taken seriously, and even feared.

Not caring about cobras waiting to strike at kids who were black until someone white was there demanding action and help in getting rid of them? And that’s the point, isn’t it? The not caring. It’s worse than hatred, really. The pretending that things aren’t wrong when steps can be taken on behalf of kids, even.

It was strange; the cobras were actually yellow. I had no idea there were yellow cobras but I looked them up and there they were, Cape Cobras. Geez, they looked just exactly like the ones in my dream, venomous and highly aggressive. They live in South Africa. And white adults were just standing by, casually uncaring. To care would mean needing to do something because no one could ever, ever see something like that in real life and refuse to act if they had even an ounce of love for kids. We don’t want to compare ourselves to apartheid South Africa—but after my dream, I think that maybe we really need to reconsider if we are different enough from them to feel good about ourselves.

How can this be true in a country that calls itself a Christian nation?

And that brings me to another reality in life about privilege, one that I knew about but had normalized until my book designer David posted something about it. I hadn’t ever realized that it shouldn’t be normal for me to worry about being sexually assaulted if I am out walking at night. It isn’t something that men need to obsess over or even really think about. They might get beaten up and mugged, of course, that can happen to men or women, but they don’t lie in their beds at night thinking, “What if an intruder breaks in and rapes me?” I think about that. I have always thought about it. Imagine being a single woman. Oh sure, I have had to deal with my fair share of discrimination—having started my working life in the 90’s. And I have had to deal with dismissive comments no man would ever hear, regardless of color. But the worst treatment I have received as a woman has been in the Church.

It was in the second church I attended as an adult that the modern worship leader began to come on to me and harass me sexually. When I rebuffed his advances, he didn’t stop. When I went to church leadership, I was told that it must be nice to know that I’ve “still got it at my age.” I was 33, hardly geriatric. And the idea that any woman naturally loves that sort of attention from a married man with six kids? Ew. It creates a hostile worship environment. Before too long, when his wife found out, I was blamed and it was made known that I was unwelcome in that congregation. He was more valuable than I was. I was the problem, even though I had done my due diligence in reporting it. It was a Southern Baptist Church, and although it surprised me then, now it wouldn’t.

But that still paled in comparison to what began to happen when God called me to teach—even though I make no effort to teach men. Heck, I make no effort to teach anyone except by posting on my websites and social media pages. I am only on the radio because people came to me and asked me to do it and I have only spoken at conferences where I was asked to come and given authority to teach. And yet, even in minding my own business, I get gender-based hate mail from men who (instead of simply disagreeing with me) get ugly and pull verses out of context to tell me that I must remain quiet. Even at home, I guess, because that is where I teach from. The reason is because of my gender, and not my level of knowledge, intelligence, giftedness or calling. It’s something men never have to deal with. Likely, it is something they can’t even imagine—and any sort of discrimination we can’t even imagine represents a privilege in our lives.

In the outside world, in many ways, I am more privileged than a black man. But inside the evangelical churches (along with too many others) he would be privileged over me. Someone white might tell him to shut up, regardless of how good a preacher or teacher or leader he is, but it would only be based upon his color.

One of the ways I like to explain privilege is this—“who would you never, in a million years, want to trade places with?” For all that many Evangelical white men (certainly not all) complain about a war on men and specifically a war on white men, I don’t see any of them volunteering to be a black man and much less a black woman. And it is because they (and we) recognize that it is far better to be white in this country than black. This doesn’t mean that as long as you are white, you have it made because you absolutely do not. A white male can struggle terribly because of poverty, a lack of generational wealth and opportunity, poor education, disability, poor health, etc.

Privilege isn’t the same thing as having no struggles, it’s just an acknowledgment that the playing field isn’t equal. And that shouldn’t make any of us bristle. Nor should it make anyone feel guilty for whatever privileges they did have. We were born into an unjust system, but it doesn’t mean we have to ignore it or have a right to deny it. We need to pray and work for a better world. One of the things I hate to hear the most is that America is a great country because the best and the brightest can rise to the top. Yeah, they can, but not always and it isn’t inevitable. As a special needs mom, I am not satisfied with living in a society where we are okay with only the best and brightest being able to escape abominable circumstances but where everyone else is destined to continue to suffer and somehow it’s okay. America won’t be great until everyone escapes, and every child is fed and educated and safe. Maybe the worst thing I ever heard another believer say is, “Well, God knew that people would be born into those circumstances,” when I made the statement that it broke my heart how much more difficult it is to preach the Gospel to people who have never known anything except deprivation and fear and righteous anger at being sidelined. It isn’t okay with me. It shouldn’t be okay with any believer to allow it and ignore it and even institutionalize it or see it as inevitable. And if that makes me a liberal then what on earth is wrong with conservative Christians? I am simply siding with those with whom Messiah identified in Matthew 25 in the parable of the sheep and the goats.

Those of us with whatever measure of privilege we have, as believers, must always speak up on behalf of and assist those who do not.

Prayers for a Privileged People by Walter Brueggemann C. 2008 pp 87-8 (affiliate link)

A Prayer of Protest

Since our mothers and fathers cried out,

since you heard their cries and noticed,

since we left the brick production of Egypt,

since you foiled the production schedules of Pharaoh,

we have known your name,

we have sensed your passion,

we have treasured your vision of justice.

And now we turn to you again,

whose precious name we know.

We turn to you because there are

still impossible production schedules,

still exploitative systems,

still cries of pain at injustice,

still cheap labor that yields misery.

We turn to you in impatience and exasperation,

wondering, “How long?” before you answer

our pleading question,

hear our petition,

since you are not a labor boss and do not set wages.

We bid you, stir up those who can change things;

do your stirring in the jaded halls of government;

do your stirring in the cynical offices of the corporations;

do your stirring amid the voting public too anxious to care;

do your stirring in the church that thinks too much about

purity and not enough about wages.

Move, as you moved in ancient Egyptian days.

Move the waters and the flocks and the herds

toward new statutes and regulations,

new equity and good health care,

new dignity that cannot be given on the cheap.

We have known now long since,

that you reject cheap grace;

even as we now know that you reject cheap labor.

You, God of justice and dignity and equity,

keep the promises you bodied in Jesus,

that the poor may be first-class members of society,

that the needy may have good care and respect,

that the poor earth may rejoice in well-being,

that we may all come to Sabbath rest together,

the owner and the worker,

the leisure class and the labor class,

all at peace in dignity and justice,

not on the cheap, but good measure,

pressed down,

running over … forgiven.



Episode 170: Why Gender and Identity Confusion Are All YOUR Fault…and MINE Too.

Last summer, I did a series on my kids show about gender identity issues and I wrote this at that time to help adults understand how it is absolutely not the kids or just the liberal media who have created this problem—we’ve been just as bad and even worse as believers. How can that be? What can we do? This week we are going to explore just that. My series for kids can be found here. There is also an extensive book list on this topic below.

(My affiliate links for Amazon products are included in the post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

If you can’t see the podcast link for this episode, click here.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link) and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

This week is really different and this episode is designed to dovetail with the series I did last summer with the kids. I designed it to help children deal with the modern crisis of gender confusion—without talking the slightest bit about sexuality because I don’t believe this has anything to do with sexuality. I believe it has to do with kids not being able to win no matter what they do, and not being permitted to be the unique people that God created them to be. Between worldly culture, and religious culture, we have really done a terrible disservice to children that has created problems that were worse than the ones we thought we were preventing.

Evangelical Christianity has been positively obsessed with creating “masculine” Christian men and “feminine” Christian women. But what does that even mean, and who decides, and based on what cultural time period and values, and what about people who were never born to meet those elusive standards? How are our kids reacting to these standards and how do these expectations damage and confuse them and drive them into thinking they aren’t really boys and girls but instead people who can’t measure up for this or that reason? Little boys are made from snips and snails and puppy dog tails, right? Not always right. Big boys don’t cry, but Jesus wept, and so did Jacob, Joseph, David and many others in the Biblical text. Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, except when they aren’t. Girls are supposed to be meek and submissive, not bring home any income that will threaten their husband’s fragile egos, and stay home and raise families based upon 1950’s upper and middle class white household standards that weren’t feasible for much of anyone even fifty years before, but what about those who never marry or can’t have children, and do not meet our culture’s standards of physical beauty? If we look back through recent and ancient history, what expectations of ours would we find to be worldly and culturally determined and which would actually be commanded and celebrated throughout Scripture? We will be covering this and a whole lot more today.

First things first. In the Bible, God never endorses any culture. The Bible, in fact, stands as a critique of human culture—past, present and future. That’s why it is useful. It didn’t tell Abraham that the ancient Near Eastern way of doing things was good. It didn’t tell the Israelites in Egypt that their culture was good. It didn’t tell the people at Sinai that they had it right. The Bible, from front to back, is the story of God rescuing us from not only our sins but our cultures—from the brutal ancient Near Eastern reality of the OT to the brutal Greco-Roman Hellenistic reality of the NT to the unique brutality of our modern times. Hellenized Judaism got slammed and so would American Christianity if we would spend a lot more time listening to what the Spirit has to say. In fact, the Bible never says, “Yes, you guys are perfectly just and absolutely doing it right.” The Bible can’t say that because we have always been and will always be creatures who are influenced by worldly standards of worth, beauty, justice, ethics, and morality. We can no more claim ourselves to be unaffected by the injustice of the world than by the pollutants in the air. We are all compromised, and we have even incorporated our culture into our religious observances, and we do that because we read our own cultural ideals into the text without even thinking about it or being aware of it. But perhaps the most damaging thing we have done is when we lift the cultural reality, the background scenery, of the Biblical world and set it up on a pedestal as an ideal for our lives in the here and now. Guess what? God was initiating a campaign to bring them out of that culture and into His, which is founded on the principles of justice and righteousness, love and goodness, grace, kindness and gentleness, and perhaps most importantly, self-control. We cannot be completely like Him when we are also clinging to the culture—no matter whose culture it is. Yahweh has reached out to us both through His instructions at Sinai and even more dramatically through the New Creation inaugurated at the Cross, not to enshrine the standards and culture of ancient societies but instead to set humanity on a trajectory of reform and freedom from participating in the evils of this world. Evils, I might add, that come in some really surprising forms.

In many ways, we have reformed. Slavery is almost unheard of within the Judeo-Christian world—despite being accepted as good and even God’s will into the 18th century by just about everyone who wasn’t enslaved. Women can now be educated in almost all Christian sects and have been freed from the tyranny of polygynous marriages that set them as rivals to their sisters in Christ and subjected them and their children to the divided attention and resources of their husbands—who enjoyed their undivided attention and partook of the undivided resources of many women. Women can now survive abandonment, as there is now respectable employment for us in the world. Children are no longer left exposed on hillsides to die as people walk by without noticing, even though we still have abortion and many of the social problems that lead women to make that choice. So much has changed but so much more needs changed. It is a better world than it once was, as any student of history can attest, but we still have a long way to go.

We get some things right, don’t get me wrong, but one of the things we have gotten very wrong is our very American idea about what is manly and what is womanly. Ideas that very much exclude men who are not naturally tall, muscular, or rugged looking. Ideas which exclude women whose facial features aren’t delicate enough or their bodies thin enough or curvaceous enough to conform to this decade’s idea of what makes a woman beautiful. Pastors give sermons talking about how men need to have a beautiful woman on their arm, one who is a model of social perfection. But social perfection differs widely from era to era and a woman’s/girl’s body is subjected to the fickleness of the worldly culture that tells men what to consider beautiful while they themselves must often deny whom Yahweh uniquely made them to be in order to measure up to the men on the covers of romance novels. We have created a tyrannical system where only a few can measure up—not to Biblical standards of beauty and gender-perfection (which are characterized not by looks but by fruit, virtue, and industriousness inside and outside of the home for both sexes) but to cultural norms. Christian men want a woman who looks good according to the culture, and women have been trained to want a man who is likewise culturally acceptable. Such is the tyranny of the worldliness of the church and such is the trap our children have fallen into—but they are increasingly realizing that it is futile and are responding in unhealthy ways.

Pastor Stewart Allen, in January of 2021, preached a sermon that became viral on the internet where he complained about wives letting themselves go and how men “need” a beautiful woman on their arm. It did not go unnoticed that he wasn’t thin, as he demanded of his wife, or attractive by modern standards, as he demanded of his wife, or even well dressed in the pulpit. Everything that came out of his mouth was worldly—and being cheered on by his audience. And he isn’t the only one saying these sorts of things—giving the message that men only need to be men but women have to meet cultural standards of beauty that few attain, not even with the help of airbrushing and computerized manipulation of their images. We live in a world where men may age but women must not. This is a message that is exalting our sons (as long as they are suitably masculine in their behavior, as defined by culture) and setting our daughters up either for failure or for vanity at a very early age. That culture does it, of course, is to be expected. That the church follows culture is criminal and vile. I do also find it strange that in terms of dealing with transgendered individuals, we say that a man and a woman are defined by their chromosomes and not by anything else, while saying the opposite when it comes to how men and women are required to behave and look. In that case, it isn’t enough to have that XY chromosome and to have male genitalia—because to be a Christian man you also have to go to lumberjack school and be capable of growing facial hair—or you aren’t really a man at all. It’s a no-win situation because we have become decidedly unbiblical and worldly in our expectations.

We weren’t always like this, obsessed with these ideas to the point of forcing Christian men to be uber-rugged in order to be acceptable as men of God. And we certainly didn’t get these ideas from the Bible, which says absolutely nothing about the ideal man in terms of appearance but instead focused on the heart and on the actions required of Kingdom humans, male and female alike. The problem came in when we decided we needed to look not only respectable in terms of our behavior, but also prosperous in terms of our appearance. Again, not biblical. Instead of standing out as counter-cultural and a refuge for the least of these and the poor and the outliers of society, we strive to look like the world in terms of their values—only, it is the 1950’s white middle and upper class world that never worked for anyone else and doesn’t represent the historical reality that both men and women have been breadwinners and that makeup and fancy hair were reserved for royalty and not for normal people because of the time and resources required to indulge in such luxuries. But now a woman isn’t deemed to be an acceptable wife or to look professional without looking like the royalty of ages past while men get away with a far, far lower standard.

What about the kids who don’t and can’t measure up to cultural standards (as opposed to Biblical standards)? Are we going to make our congregations into extensions of the hell so many of us endured in High School? Maybe some of you enjoyed the social life of High School but if you did then there’s a really good chance that you lack the perspective to appreciate what we adults are doing to our kids to try and get them to measure up to worldly standards before they ever even see a schoolroom. It’s nothing but peer pressure, and it is an insult to God and how He made individuals, not Barbie and Ken dolls.

God does not control us or commandeer us. God has never demanded we look a certain way or work out or wear elaborate outfits or makeup or spend a ton of money at the salon on our hair and nails. God stands as a witness against out materialistic and beauty-obsessed culture and not as a fan of it. Women aren’t even allowed to look like themselves if they want to appear professional, or if they want to keep a man—when he leaves, we get the speculation that we have let ourselves go instead of looking at the faithfulness and self-control of our husbands. And self-control, by the way, in Greco-Roman context, was inherently tied to the ability to control oneself sexually. But in a culture focused on externals—in a church culture focused on externals—that’s just where our worldly minds take us. And our kids watch it, and they internalize it, and they judge themselves according to those standards even before their peers get ahold of them. Am I pretty enough? Am I doing the right things to be attractive? Am I macho enough? Am I enough of a man to satisfy the crowd’s demands?

Here are the questions we force on kids when we inflict severe and unyielding gender stereotypes on them: “If I am not feminine or masculine enough, does that mean I am gay? I have all the girl parts but my body is not very girlish—so maybe I am really not a girl at all. And I am not interested in hair or makeup or being a cheerleader, am I a lesbian? I love sports and science and I am loud and boisterous and my parents tell me that I came out of the womb that way. Maybe I am a boy trapped in a girl’s body.” Or how about, “Grandpa says that I am a 98 lb weakling and that I need to get outside and play sports, but I was in the hospital three times last year with asthma attacks. I get told that I need to toughen up if I want to be a real man but I am really interested in music and painting. I write my own songs and play three instruments and my art teacher tells me that I have a real talent in oils. I don’t enjoy watching sports, much less playing them. Even though I have a crush on Sheila down the street, the other boys say that I must be gay and even the guys at church. Did God make me wrong? Why am I so skinny and sick? Why am I so talented at the arts and music? If I go to Julliard will I really come back as a…well, I hate that word a lot. Why is the way I am not manly? Why do I have these talents if they aren’t for guys and only for girls? It seems as though—if I show the world who I really am, that I don’t belong to any group at all and I don’t know how to deal with that.”

What values are we really promoting here? Where is the emphasis on fruit and godly living? Why are we focusing on attractiveness and the seventy-year-old cultural norms of a select few in order (promoted on television, no less) to show the world that Christians somehow have most-favored nation status? It’s simply another form of prosperity Gospel but just as in the areas of health and money and stuff, most people come up empty. Instead of the church being a sanctuary, it becomes just another reminder that they don’t measure up. And our kids are watching. And our kids are the victims. And our kids are fighting back by trying to mesh who they know they are on the inside, messy and unique individuals who do and do not measure up to this and that, by showing it on the outside. Or, in extreme cases, by changing their outsides. Very frankly, it is because we have given them no way to be whom God created them to uniquely be, while still validating them as males and females. It’s a heart issue we adults have and we have forced the hand of all the kids who have never really fit in, and who have no idea how to fit in. People like me. And I wonder what I would have done when I was a teenager if this had been an option for me, this counter-culture pushing back on the insane ideals that were never really reasonable for the majority. Resentment and confusion build throughout the generations until they explode into something really damaging. And not just with gender. And when it happens, we blame the generation which explodes when we should blame ourselves for perpetuating anti-Kingdom values. Haven’t we always known that it was wrong? But haven’t we gone along with it anyway, desperate to belong?

When our kids are struggling with this insane, unjust, and ungodly system of measuring up—when they don’t even know if they are really boys or really girls because they don’t fit into that very strict mold that Evangelical Churchianity has foisted on the (and the rest of us have adopted as our own and gone along with) how dare we judge them when what we must do is step back and measure what makes a real man or a real woman in terms of godly character. Until we can accept others as image bearers regardless of how well they fit in socially, aka in worldly ways, then our kids won’t be able to stomach what they hear in church as we preach one set or values from the text while we live out our faith and indoctrinate one another and especially our kids according to the worldly standards of the 1950’s while pretending that they are somehow Biblical. Or that they were a great time to be living if you weren’t upper or middle class suburban whites. There are books out there telling girls and boys what they need to be in order to be pleasing to God and none of it comes from the Bible—it comes from the culture of the last few centuries and especially the golden age of Hollywood, when men were portrayed as tough and as controllers of the world, and women were soft, and delicate and occasionally spunky but still knew their place and couldn’t get anything done without a man to protect them. That led into the era of John Wayne and Billy Graham, who changed the way the world saw evangelists with his rugged good looks and focus on physical fitness. Today, it looks like Mark Driscoll and Allen Stewart telling men and women from the pulpit about how they must measure up physically and not spiritually.

If we want to talk about gender confusion, we must start with what the Scriptures demand of both genders and then look at what they are being taught from many pulpits. And we have to learn to be discerning about the messages we teach our children—often with the agenda of not wanting them to be socially unacceptable or homosexual or whatever it is that embarrasses us—and the messages that our kids are receiving from the pulpit and asking ourselves if we are making them into barbie and ken dolls or into servants of the most high, meeting different standards and living up to what it really means to bear the image of the unseen God whose character, and not appearance, must be emulated. This God without DNA because He had to create it and who is unapologetically described in the Bible as both paternal and maternal, emotional and forgiving, merciful and justice-minded, patient, loving, kind, gentle, self-controlled, generous, an ally to the vulnerable, no respecter or persons Jew or Greek, male or female, Greek or Barbarian (an idiom meaning educated or uneducated), slave or free and we are to emulate Him in that. No excuses. What we are not called to do is to create an idol out of any cultural ideal and substitute that for the command to represent Him to the world—and the manifestation of His glory to the world will look the same and different depending on who He created us to be.

When God gifts someone with the talents of music or other arts, it isn’t because He wants them to play baseball instead. And we insult God when we shun His beautiful gifts just because of cultural pressure. Evidently, God is under the impression that masculinity is about having a penis but other than that, a man can be so many things, have so many talents and interests—and it is only the idolatry of culture that tells us otherwise. And frankly, whether you or I approve of homosexuality or not, same-sex attraction doesn’t eradicate gender. Suggesting otherwise drives people in the wrong direction and toward gender confusion and not away from it. When we penalize culturally “un-masculine” or “un-feminine” traits, we compound the problems. There is nothing wrong with a man who wants to be a stay at home dad. In fact, that might very well be God’s design for him. Who are we to tell God what men and women should do and look like? This is what we do when we marginalize Deborah for being a leader or Paul for being sickly and, by his own admission, meek in person and only forceful in writing. Or when, as Mark Driscoll and others have attempted, made their version of Jesus into a tattooed, swearing, muscle-bound fan of cage fighting who would mock men who didn’t measure up to modern masculine ideals.

We’re the problem. As moms and dads and relatives and teachers and preachers. In fact, we are worse than Hollywood because anyone can see they are worldly but we pretend that our standards are somehow not worldly because they reflect the worldliness of another generation and one specific ethnic group. It seems holy and right because we look back with rose colored glasses and refuse to see what life was really like in those days and the cost of that lifestyle for those who couldn’t ever hope to have it. Men can be meek, and women can be strong. God makes and uses all sorts of people. Not everyone will be married and not everyone will have kids. Since the Resurrection, our command to be fruitful and multiply has been tweaked into a need to preach the Gospel and multiply the children of God in that way. There is nothing wrong with being our unique selves in service of God’s Kingdom as long as we image the character of God as preached by Yeshua and by Paul—who both set such high standards that growing into them should be far more of a focus than our appearance.

Are we giving our kids what they need to measure up to Kingdom standards? Or are we desperately wanting them to look attractive to the world based on standards that have nothing to do with the cruciform message of Christ and Him crucified, resurrected, and reigning?

Helpful books (affiliate links)

Valente, Sarah Hawkes Mary Ellen Rutherford is a Brave Little Girl –uses the story of Deborah to show that brave, rough and tumble girls are still girls

Pyle, Nate Man Enough: How Jesus Redefined Manhood–this book revolutionized my understanding of how we harm boys and men

Baumann, Andrew How Not to be an *SS: Essays on Becoming a Good and Safe Man

Snodgrass, Klyne Who God Says You Are: A Christian Understanding of Identity –this was the book I based my children’s series on, but it was written with adults in mind

McKinney, Jennifer Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars-Hill Church and American Evangelicalism –excellent book on the problems with promoting certain destructive male stereotypes as inherently Christian.

Gregoire, Sheila Wray She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up

Payne, Philip The Bible vs Biblical Womanhood –new release, read it last month and it was a really terrific challenge to those who wish to lock women and girls into man-made boxes

Barr, Beth Allison The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Williams, Terran How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

Byrd, Aimee Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

 



Episode 154: Sukkot and the Mystery of the Eighth Day

What do the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, the eighth day, the pilgrimage festivals, and the Fruit of the Spirit all have in common? Everything.

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He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug out a pit for a winepress, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenant farmers and went away. At harvest time he sent a servant to the farmers to collect some of the fruit of the vineyard from them. But they took him, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent another servant to them, and they hit him on the head and treated him shamefully. Then he sent another, and they killed that one. He also sent many others; some they beat, and others they killed. He still had one to send, a beloved son. Finally, he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenant farmers said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill the farmers and give the vineyard to others. Haven’t you read this Scripture: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This came about from the Lord and is wonderful in our eyes?” They were looking for a way to arrest him but feared the crowd because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. So, they left him and went away. (Mark 12:1-12, CSB)

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have many years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link)and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah. All Scripture this week is from the Christian Standard Bible.

So, why on earth would I associate Sukkot with this parable? Because it occurs at harvest time and that is the focus of this next week’s celebrations—beginning tonight for me and perhaps at another time for you based on your calendar and I am going to give you a heads up here; I don’t even remotely care what day you do this on. I just don’t. Been there, done that, played calendar and name police and it never bore anything in me except horrible, prideful, elitist fruit. So, I care about IF you keep it and not WHEN. And even with that, I care about the reasons WHY you are or aren’t keeping it. I never did until the Lord spoke to me about it—and I don’t place human voices on par with His so just because I am saying something and teaching something, just doesn’t rise to the same level as God placing it in someone’s heart. I will never forget the time I was kicked out of a congregation because I had the audacity to wish people “Chag Sameach” on, *gasp*, the wrong day. Got an earful publicly and privately from the leader of the congregation and the people who were commenting on my post were treated deplorably. I got blocked by him and his wife and I never went back. And so, what was gained, folks? Nothing. What was lost? Unity over the big stuff. And with that, I will segue into the whole point of having a harvest festival—the presentation of the best of our fruit to Yahweh.

Each of the three pilgrimage festivals involve the presentation of or celebration of the harvest to honor Yahweh. During the Passover week, on the day after the weekly Sabbath, the first sheaf of barley was presented at the Temple by the priests from their own fields. This occurred on the first day of the week—or it could also be seen as the eighth day aka shemini atzeret. Shavuot, or Pentecost, celebrates the wheat harvest but was also a day when the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, along with the Bikkurim, which was a presentation of the best of the early harvest in baskets, to the priests at the Temple. This also occurred on the first day of the week, or the eighth day. In the Fall, after all of the harvest was in and the tithes presented, the seven-day festival of Sukkot was celebrated—also called the Festival of the Ingathering at the beginning of the agricultural year. This festival was followed by an additional day called, you guessed it, Shemini Atzeret, or the Eighth Day.

The harvest festivals always feature either a prominent (or hidden) eighth day—symbolizing New Creation, new life, new beginnings, and resurrection. It is the presentation of what belongs to Yahweh, being given over to Yahweh. The eighth day was the day of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s resurrection, the falling of the Holy Spirit upon the gathered followers of Yeshua on Shavuot, and the very day when Yeshua cried out, “On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.”  He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit, for the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (John 7:37-39, CSB). Luke tells us that the Transfiguration occurred on the eighth day. The initial priesthood was inaugurated on the eighth day and the fire came down from heaven, consumed the sacrifice on the altar, and the glory of God rested on the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle. Solomon built the Temple in seven years but it was completed in the eighth month. John tells us that the eighth day is the most important day of Sukkot. And with the Scriptural focus on the historical and spiritual events of the eighth day, now we know why. The eighth day of a male child’s life was the day of circumcision—which was a pointer to the promise of a coming Messiah from the seed of Abraham, through a woman. Which might seem odd but we know from ancient writings that it was believed that a woman’s uterus was considered to be a field and that the man’s sperm was a “baby seed” that needed nothing except a fertile field to grow in. It wasn’t until the 1660’s that they figured out that wasn’t true and that women produced eggs that were a needful part of the process. And that it was a man’s contribution, and not women, who determined gender. If I was to keep going, we could just talk about the importance of the eighth day all through the Bible. But I want to talk about the harvest.

In the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, Yeshua hearkens back to what was just an unapologetic, in your face parable based on Isaiah 5:1-7: “I will sing about the one I love, a song about my loved one’s vineyard: The one I love had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He broke up the soil, cleared it of stones, and planted it with the finest vines. He built a tower in the middle of it and even dug out a winepress there. He expected it to yield good grapes, but it yielded worthless grapes. So now, residents of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard than I did? Why, when I expected a yield of good grapes, did it yield worthless grapes? Now I will tell you what I am about to do to my vineyard: I will remove its hedge, and it will be consumed; I will tear down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland. It will not be pruned or weeded; thorns and briers will grow up. I will also give orders to the clouds that rain should not fall on it. For the vineyard of the Lord of Armies is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah, the plant he delighted in. He expected justice but saw injustice; he expected righteousness but heard cries of despair.”

This was rich in meaning to any agricultural society—to work hard all year and to be rewarded with a bad or insufficient harvest. To plant hedges in order to keep out foxes and walls to keep out thieves and wandering livestock. This is a vineyard that was given every advantage—from the vinestock to the excellent soil to the care it was provided. But the grapes were worthless and were to be left vulnerable. In context, this was spoken to a people who were not only idolatrous, which is bad enough, but also oppressive. The vulnerable were crying out because the powerful were exploiting them, enslaving them, and robbing them. They were misusing the bounty that the Lord had provided and were trampling on “the least of these.” They cried out, and Yahweh heard their cries and decided to act. And of course, the wealthy ended up slaughtered and exiled while the poor were allowed to remain in the Land when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, both of which had been defiled and violated through idolatry, oppression, treachery, and the shedding of innocent blood. The Jews of the first century decried these terrible sins and felt that due to their Torah observance, that they were nothing like that generation. They were wrong. You can legalistically keep Torah and still act corruptly—all you need are loopholes and creative arguments and proof-texting and cherry-picking of Scripture. You know, like we still do now when we want to get out of Yeshua’s really difficult commands in the Sermon on the Mount and we want to overrule Him. Or ditch Paul when he echoes that we shouldn’t act like jerks?

Now, this was a well-known parable from Isaiah and Yeshua is going to build His own, counting on His audience having heard it before and especially the literate elites. If you remember from my series on Mark, Yeshua spoke in parables when He (a) didn’t want the hardhearted to understand what He was teaching, and (b) when He wanted to be clear enough to be understood yet obscure enough that the subjects of His parables wouldn’t be able to say anything for fear of admitting it was about them. This is both.

He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug out a pit for a winepress, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenant farmers and went away.

This was very common during those days, for an absentee landowner to be nowhere near their land in Judea and Galilee or to even be foreigners. Oftentimes, tenant farmers were actually the former owners of the Land who had lost it due to the severe taxation they experienced from Rome, the Temple elites and Herod’s corrupt tax collectors. It was sadly normal to work your own land, for someone else, to whom you owe a large portion of the harvest. Right off, the crowd would have felt hostility toward the nasty colonizing landowner profiting off their oppression. They are not thinking about Yahweh as the owner yet.

At harvest time he sent a servant to the farmers to collect some of the fruit of the vineyard from them. But they took him, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed.

There was doubtless a collective smirk and nodding in approval from the gathered audience. “Yeah, that’s how you treat those danged Romans!” What they couldn’t say was “those danged chief priests” who had grown incredibly wealthy from owning and taxing the businesses around and even on the Temple Mount. They were buying up the land of people who couldn’t burden the tithe and the taxation together. They are totally thinking about Romans taking advantage of their poverty by demanding produce, the Temple elites doing the same, and taxation at this point. Social banditry was on the rise (think if Robin Hood was Jewish) and these bandits were very popular because of the revenge they took on the wealthy.

Again, he sent another servant to them, and they hit him on the head and treated him shamefully. Then he sent another, and they killed that one. He also sent many others; some they beat, and others they killed.

Of course, in retrospect, we see the treatment of the prophets in pre-exilic Israel and Judea—the audience is just enjoying the vicarious violence that they could never get away with perpetrating against the villains among them.

He still had one to send, a beloved son. Finally, he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenant farmers said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So, they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

This wasn’t as strange as it sounds to our modern ears. You’ve heard the expression, “Possession is nine tenths of the law” right? An owner from far away might not have the means to send soldiers and with so many dead servants to show for all this—if he hasn’t sent them yet, he probably can’t. And if he gives up on getting anything from the land, he may give up. But they had to be thinking, “What a colossal idiot this guy is, sending his son when they killed all the servants.” Unless the son was a Roman citizen, even the government wouldn’t much care. Unless they got a really big bribe or something.

What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill the farmers and give the vineyard to others.

Okay, it just stopped being fun and subversive, darnit. That fire sure got doused in a hurry. Yeshua has stopped being entertaining and now He has shocked them back into reality. There will be consequences. No gain. He isn’t talking about a revolution where they all take back their land. The tenants would have been better off just parting with the harvest due their landlord instead of leaving their wives and children widowed and orphaned. The fairy tale is over and Yeshua has just totally doused all of the crowd’s hopes that He would be leading such a revolt against the powers that be. Their collective hopes are dashed. He is not the revolutionary Messiah they are looking for. And if it had ended there, that’s how everyone might have perceived it. Except Yeshua buried the lede and is now going to change the entire meaning:

Haven’t you read this Scripture: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This came about from the Lord and is wonderful in our eyes?” They were looking for a way to arrest him but feared the crowd because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. So, they left him and went away.

Oh yeah, He went there. First, He talked about reading that Scripture so He isn’t talking to the overwhelmingly illiterate crowd. He’s talking to the educated Temple elites. Most everyone else had only heard that Scripture. We have to be really attentive when reading the Bible because it was (all of it) given to a culture that transmitted and received information orally. Writing and reading was rarely needed and not being able to read or write wasn’t a disadvantage until quite recently—after the development of the printing press, really. Authority was vested in the original speaker and not in the written word (I am talking about this a lot in the study series that I will continue with next week). So pay attention when the word writing is used, make sure it isn’t a mistranslation of simply something that is being communicated—because we consider the written text to be best but they knew that the words were only truly authoritative because without the proper tone applied to them, they could be completely twisted. Just like on Facebook when people see something they disagree with and assume that the tone is hostile. Yeshua, for example, being the logos is the spoken word of God. It wasn’t just what He said but how He said it.

Anyway, the landlord is suddenly Yahweh, the servants are the prophets, and even someone called “the Son” isn’t safe. Yeshua is quoting Psalm 118:22 and hinting at Isaiah 28:16, where what the people have rejected was the most important thing of all. And they all know it now—but the reference to reading wouldn’t apply to more than a few of them. They wouldn’t have missed it. It would be like if I said something to a crowd like, “Well, when YOU voted that person into office,” and anyone who wasn’t a citizen or too young, or a convicted felon would perceive that comment differently than someone who could legally vote. What we hear is different depending on what is normative for us. When we hear read or write, it doesn’t register because it is normative and assumed that everyone can.

But what does all this have to do with Sukkot? It has everything to do with Sukkot. Getting back to the beginning, each pilgrimage festival was about presenting Yahweh’s portion of the harvest to His representatives. He is that landlord in a faraway land. We are the tenants—just as they were. We have an obligation to recognize and honor His right to the fruit of our harvest and so we must labor for good and bountiful fruit to present Him with the best of it, with what He deserves. We are still an agricultural people, spiritually, even if we live in high-rise apartments in cities and can’t even see the ground, much less grow anything in it. Our harvest comes in the form of good spiritual fruit that is nothing if it is only “spiritualized”. Becoming meek, peaceable, humble, loving, joyful, patient, generous, gentle, self-controlled, considering others as more worthy than we are, merciful, trustworthy, just, and serving the least of these as though they were Yeshua Himself—it isn’t optional, it is a condition of truly following the Lamb wherever He goes.

We cannot go where He goes if all we produce is the fruit of the flesh– sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar (Gal 5:19-21, CSB). Let me tell you what these things look like out there now in the “Torah observant” community. Widowed and divorced people promoting the idea that abstinence is only for virgins so that they can have sex while they are dating—I had to unfriend a guy who was pushing that, in private, to women he was interested in. A guy who, get this, was saying that eating the wrong cut of beef was a worse sin than idolatry. Teaching lies after you know it is in error because you don’t want to lose the audience and money you built off it. Idolatry nowadays mostly comes down to greed, sex, and Christian Nationalism—where the state is promoted and politicians are worshiped and the nation is seen as a savior, which requires turning a blind eye to oppression and historical evils. Hatred is rampant over the smallest of disagreements (which goes back to idolatry). Fighting, manipulation, divisiveness, undermining of others in order to build personal kingdoms in service of personal ambition. Porn use, a desire for multiple wives (sex partners), more and more cheap stuff supplied through domestic and overseas slave labor, dependence on military power, alcohol abuse, etc.

Are we presenting rancid fruit, or are we withholding it altogether? Do we have wealth but refuse to share it with the vulnerable? Do we have skills that we refuse to use for the good of the Kingdom? Do we have power and influence but refuse to help the oppressed? There are a great many ways to deny our Lord His harvest. We need to be very mindful of how we handle our own share of it.

Oh look, Yeshua isn’t the only one who can bury the lede…



Episode 147: The Sin of Sodom and Setting the Record Straight on Recent Accusations of Heresy

First off, I had an AMAZING weekend with the most wonderful group of ladies at the Surge Conference over the weekend in Texas. I had a miraculous healing that will allow me to travel and I will share that next week!

But Monday was bizarre–as it always the case when we have spiritual triumphs, right? And so I was subjected to some false accusations about what I do and do not support, teach, and say in two private Facebook groups which cater to a grand total of 800 members, while what I actually say was twisted and misrepresented. In a classic case of “Church as usual” because the poster was an admin, there was an argument about whether the post should be removed which took shamefully too long in the (much) smaller group and is still ongoing in the second. He is still an admin in good standing in both groups but I am not going to name names. My goal here is to address the accusations of heresy because my primary ministry is to children and I cannot allow the accusations to scare parents away. Parents, of course, need to be careful. I understand that and so I am always very careful about what I present to their children. I have asked God to judge between them and I because I trust Him. This isn’t the first time I have been lied about and slandered by people who don’t fact check (and if they had fact checked and look at the current series I am teaching to children they would have simply rolled their eyes) and it won’t be the last, but I am taking a page out of the playbook of Mister Rogers and stopping to address only those accusations which could end up hurting children.

If you can’t see the podcast link, click here.

So, I had an interesting weekend—actually, I had an amazing weekend full of miracles but that will be next week’s podcast. This week I am having to address some accusations, outright lies, and to verify what I do and do not teach and believe because there was a rather unpleasant brouhaha over things that I had no idea I even believed but when the admin of a private Facebook group says it, it must be legit, right? And I usually ignore such things but I have no idea how many people shared it as though it was Gospel and I need parents to know the full story—they need to be able to trust me with their kids.

Fortunately, I have friends in said group who sent me the following:

Earlier today, I was unfriended by a “teacher” who posts and comments regularly. I’m not sharing this post because I am bitter. This is a report of what she is teaching and how she responded.

Okay—the context, yes I absolutely unfriended him and it had been a long time coming. Boundaries are a positive thing. I had posted this really cool book quote from Kevin Pendergrass’s book Blinded by the Bible and it is a great read. Really brings up the problems with a lot of our paradigms and how we interpret the Bible and it’s just a great wake up call to really begin to think about what we are doing and why and where these methods come from. Anyway, I am really enjoying it. And this is what I wrote:

“Ouchies, our hypocrisy is showing…so epic! If we are going to acknowledge that abominable practices were allowed and regulated in the OT as a cultural accommodation and starting place, we must understand the NT in the same light. You cannot have it both ways. Either we go back to the patriarchal norm of the OT where it is not just any man, but the oldest man in every family, in charge of everyone (no matter what age) and able to decide what his sons will do for a living, whom they will marry, how they will worship, etc, and back to the days where you (and your sons and daughters) can be owned as chattel slaves (and yes, the Bible allows generational, permanent, chattel slavery as long as said slaves are not Israelites), then we have to keep following the path of wisdom and striving toward the perfection that will be the fully realized Kingdom of God on earth. Man and woman were made the tselem (image/idol) of God so that they could rule and reign over Creation wisely, not over other image-bearers. Is Yeshua/Jesus our King or not?

“Most Christians are willing to admit there is a fluid change from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Yet, many believe that the New Testament is prescriptively fixed, meaning that while God accommodated trajectories and allowed immoral practices (ie slavery and misogyny) to be incorporated in the Old Testament, all the specific instructions in the New Testaments are unchanging, binding, and absolute.”

Pendergrass, Kevin. Blinded by the Bible : Rethinking Our Relationship with Scripture (p. 146). Kindle Edition.”

For context, he would be referring to the fact that although Paul never endorsed slavery, and said that slave and free are equal in Christ, he never forbade it either. And Pendergrass made the point that Paul, and I agree to this, probably could never forsee a world without slavery. Really, no one except the Ebionites really seemed to object to it and until the 1800’s there was no mass awakening and push to eradicate it based upon the command to love our neighbors as ourselves. I actually didn’t find this at all controversial, but just a really great point. We don’t approve of holy war/genocide. We don’t require women to be silent in the congregations (and neither did Paul, as that seemed to simply reflect a local thing in Ephesus), we wouldn’t consider it immoral for slaves to escape and most of us these days would harbor them, or at least I hope we would! Nor would we think it acceptable for American soldiers to go overseas and genocide everyone in a village except the virgins and to forcibly take them as wives. Now, if you have read my book Context for Adults then you know why those laws were enacted and why they were mostly an improvement on the way the rest of the world did those things and why they were better off that way. But we would consider such things war crimes now and rightly so. Yet, they were an improvement on the brutality of the ancient Near East. Let’s continue with his allegations:

“A month or so back, Tyler Dawn Rosenquist shared a post about how Polygyny (one man marrying more than one woman) and slavery laws are done away with in the new Covenant.”

Okay, let’s stop right there. I actually didn’t say that, here is the original post (I won’t provide links that would “out” his identity unless there is no alternative):

“Polygyny–the ancient patriarchal social construct that determined that (for the purposes of political alliances, production of heirs and a rich and powerful man’s lust) men and women aren’t equal in any way, shape, or form because men deserve exclusive sexual power over their wives but wives had no such privilege when it comes to their husbands.

Thank God that the overwhelming majority of men do understand that this is faithlessness to the wife of their youth.

Moses limited it as part of his “allowances” to the hardness of heart of the culture at large (as well as divorce per Yeshua/Jesus in Mark 10), along with strict limitations on the evil of chattel, generational slavery because it is a horrible thing for anyone to own and oppress a fellow image-bearer (be they enslaved or spouse). But in Mark 10:9 Yeshua says this–

“What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

But what does this mean in context and in clearer language? The context is one man and one woman being joined and him leaving the home of his parents (which they didn’t practice, by the way, men remained in the father’s home and brought the wives with them–so much for Hebraic culture being a faithful reflection of God’s will, eh?). And then Yeshua said, “What God has joined together (in a Covenant relationship of which He is the central player), let not “person” (anthropos–generic human being) separate (divide, come between, cause to withdraw or depart from).”

Polygyny, in the Bible, is always a destructive force within the family. Jacob’s sons, Leah and Rachel, Hannah and Peninnah, David’s sons, Solomon’s destruction of the kingdom, etc. It is because another person (or many, or hundreds) is separating husband and wife. There is no way around it. The woman has a divided husband and a divided home and a divided life and the children have a divided father. The man has a smorgasbord. The incoming wife is a separator, and the husband and she both are adulterers. That sin compromised David and led to the rape of Bathsheba and rivalries between the sons of different mothers before and after his death.

Yeshua doesn’t have multiple wives, but one wife–the Church. We aren’t individual brides but a collective. I am not a bride, we are the Bride:

“Husbands (plural), love your wives (plural, direct object of plural husbands), as Christ loved the church (singular) and gave himself (singular) up for her (singular), that he might sanctify her (singular), having cleansed her (singular) by the washing of water with the word, so that he (singular) might present the church (singular) to himself (singular) in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she (singular) might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands (plural) should love their wives (plural) as their own bodies. He (singular) who loves his wife (singular) loves himself.” (Eps 5:25-28, ESV)

What man is willing to love himself by sharing his wife with multiple husbands? Certainly not the men believing it is a good thing to have more than one wife. If they treat their own bodies to multiple women, then they must love their wives by allowing her to have multiple husbands. Of course, wives generally have no interest in this, we do desire our husbands and too many of them use it against us–just as Yahweh warned us would happen as a consequence of that relationship broken in the Garden.

I Timothy 3 is clear in the qualifications of Christian leadership and good standing–each man must be the husband of one wife. If not, if he came in with more than one wife which wasn’t common in Greco-Roman times but not unheard of either–some Jewish men still considered the lack of a Torah commandment outright outlawing it tantamount to making it a male prerogative. But to be a leader within the Body of Messiah, it was not permitted. Titus 1 repeats this prohibition because a Christian home cannot tolerate oppression. Oppression of a spouse is a violation of the Covenant and therefore grounds for divorce. When Yahweh divorced Israel, it was due to oppression and idolatry–the prophets actually spoke of oppression as much or more than idolatry as Yahweh’s reasons for anger. The Mormons ignored this and “black Mormons” (insider talk for polygamist sects) still do.

Anything, any doctrine, any tradition, that gives a man permission to run wild with his lust or longings for another woman is condoning the oppression of the wife of his youth and adultery. Anything, any doctrine, any tradition that prevents his wife from confronting and holding him accountable for his sin is oppression and a violation of the bilateral covenant of marriage. And anyone who is telling women to submit to this is an oppressor. Any woman who does this needs desperate prayer because no one would accept this as healthy if it had not been inflicted on them as some sort of way to please God by being treated as an inanimate object.

It seems like holiness to submit ourselves, as women, to a man’s oppression, dehumanizing us, and I have heard so many heartbreaking testimonies from women over the last 24 hours, but it is decidedly unholy. When we look at Scripture with an eye to see what we can get away with instead of with the goal of spurring us on to an end of oppression and radical, self-sacrificial love, the Bible becomes a weapon. When we grasp onto Moses’s allowances as rights and invitations to do as we will to others, evil is never far behind–be it in terms of the justification of chattel slavery, the degradation and dehumanizing of women, or the beating of children (anyone else read the abuse manual “To Train Up a Child”?). It damages the souls of all involved, and for what? Nothing of righteousness or justice. And it is damning their husbands, not saving them. That is not what love does. Love cares enough to confront–contempt inspires silence.”

Obviously nothing there about claiming that the New Covenant did away with the polygyny “laws”. However, I do not believe that either polygyny, misogyny, or slavery or genocide are compatible with the Gospel, and I stand firm on that. No apologies.

“On that post, I said this approach was a slippery slope. These commands are parts of God’s eternal law. If we say that some of God’s Law isn’t eternal and good and righteous, then before long we will be cutting out other things as well.”

Obviously rewriting what I said but okay. The allowances of Moses for the culture aka cultural accommodation, were in many ways good and righteous for the times. Righteous is a legal term meaning when two things are weighed in the balance, one comes out right and the other wrong. Compared to the laws of the ancient Near East, Torah was very righteous. But we cannot ignore the words of Yeshua/Jesus when He plainly stated that some of what is in there makes allowances for hard-heartedness and I definitely put slavery and polygyny in that category, along with quite a few other laws that we would never want to see followed now, like forcing POW virgins into marriage after slaughtering their families. Torah wasn’t given in a vacuum and it was the beginning of the legal conversation between God and men and not the end and the Jews totally get this.

“Well, today she shared what’s in the pictures below and unfriended me when I commented.”

Yes I did and it was a long time coming. I have been far more patient with him than with most. No idea why. Here’s why—the first commenter decided to change the subject and made insulting remarks about “sodomites” and how this sort of thing will lead to their justifying their “perversion” which had zero to do with the topic and when I corrected him on his use of sodomite, he and this other gentleman decided that I was waving a rainbow flag or something. What I said was this:

“I would rather err on the side of people going too far sexually than in the oppression allowed even during the first century. I believe that we are too quick to credit humans with rebellion than we are to credit the Spirit with the ability to led us in the right direction. And the sin of Sodom wasn’t sexual perversion. There were shame rape gangs violating foreigners not because of sexual attraction but because that was an ANE power play, it was symptomatic of the larger problem of oppression, which is what Ezekiel labels as their sin. Men don’t go around raping other males in the ancient world because of desire, it was a way to strip them of honor by treating them as women. It isn’t even remotely what we have in the world today. It was treating men like women, and the victim and not the perpetrator was shamed. Leviticus reversed that and made sure the rapists were subjected to penalties.”

Getting this wrong is one of my pet peeves and the person who said it is a teacher who should know better. And a scholar backed me up on my take on what happened in Sodom. Lev 18:22 reversed the pattern of the ANE world—a raped man wasn’t shamed while the rapist was honored because it made both sides of the homosexual relationship shameful. So, no more double standard. That being said, I don’t believe anything in Scripture would support the shaming of a male rape victim just because the crime happened to involve male penetration, which is inherent in the Lev 18:22 prohibition, as I explained later, in a comment that was conveniently not posted along with the original one. I also made it clear that slurs against homosexuals are not okay with me.

“this is why I speak up against when folks denounce polygyny and slavery as “absolute evil” and abolished by the New Covenant. It’s not popular. I get almost no love for it. Some folks pm me and thank me for taking the hits. The truth is that God allowed men to have slaves and allowed husbands to marry more than one wife as long as she wasn’t taken to spite the first wife. God also sanctioned the destruction of babies. Our cultural morality needs to take a back seat to God’s.

When there is a justification for changing the standard of what God allows to continue (God doesn’t ever endorse the continuation of sin), it never stops there. The justifications keep rolling. Before you know it, the sin of Sodom is redefined, and Leviticus 18’s prohibition against homosexuality is rewritten off as a cultural polemic against ANE sex gangs.

Thanks for asking this question.”

Obviously a cheap shot across my bow and I had just had enough at that point. Enough of the assumptions, enough of the chest beating about taking the hits and getting no love. So yeah, unfriended him. I admit it, no apologies. And I locked it all down because the post had become about homosexuality while the actual context had been lost. I was at the airport and had a long day ahead where I knew I wasn’t getting home until at least midnight and I just didn’t have the patience.

“To summarize, she’s saying that *because* we have *moved forward* from and *abolished* slavery and polygyny from the Old Testament revelation, we can do similarly with New Testament revelation pertaining to women in positions of leadership.”

Whoa there, this is literally the first mention of women in positions of leadership. What the heck? I do teach whoever will listen, obviously, and would never tell a man he can’t listen to me. I also say that we have to be sensitive to the Spirit and not close our eyes and ears to when God calls someone to leadership, regardless of gender and I do point out the instances of female leadership within the NT corpus. But he just added 1 and 1 and got the letter W. Now, I did point out that Yeshua pointed to a much better way, obviously, and there are a lot of things that we recognize now to be cultural accommodation and a starting place toward how things will be in the New Jerusalem. I don’t feel that’s controversial. I also never said that anything was abolished from the OT revelation, I mean, it’s still written there, right? I am not endorsing rewriting the Bible. But I do make it clear that the world has changed and so now that women are educated we shouldn’t feel bound by the restriction that existed in Ephesus when in Corinth it obviously wasn’t practiced, as per Paul’s own words and by his approval. That’s it.

“She was pressed about her position, and her answer was simply heresy.”

I assume he is talking about my correction of what happened in Sodom and why calling them sodomites is misleading—as Ezekiel himself tells us in 16:49-52.

“Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it. Samaria has not committed half your sins. You have committed more abominations than they, and have made your sisters appear righteous by all the abominations that you have committed. Bear your disgrace, you also, for you have intervened on behalf of your sisters. Because of your sins in which you acted more abominably than they, they are more in the right than you. So be ashamed, you also, and bear your disgrace, for you have made your sisters appear righteous.”

Is Ezekiel guilty of redefining the sin of Sodom? I mean, you don’t even get to the point where rape gangs are roaming the street unless there is first a systematic and severe level of oppression and wickedness going on. That isn’t what people do as their first step into oppression. And a major NT scholar backed me up on it—is he guilty as well? In fact, you won’t find serious scholars making the claim that the sin of Sodom is homosexuality because serious scholars know their Bible too well to make that mistake and peer review would tear them apart. It’s only the un and under educated who make this error. So count Ezekiel among the heretics.

What I was pressed about, and refused to answer (but I will answer later) is if that meant that I endorsed homosexuality. Now, you have to know me and I despise people changing the subject on my posts and then trying to force me along with the agenda. And I had had a long day and was being toyed with and the guy demanding the answer wasn’t even acknowledging his error, he just sidestepped and was interrogating me—based on nothing but assumption. And in private messages after I just locked it down because I was sick of the nonsense and that agenda having taken over, he demanded that I answer him or else he would be forced to assume I supported it. You see, that’s just a mistake with me. I have lived with that sort of manipulation and threats and it just doesn’t work with me. I will refuse to answer every time because it was out of line. But I will answer it in a bit because it is my choice to do so and I hate to encourage bad behavior.

“She recently just taught at a women’s conference in Dallas, Tx and folks need to be aware of what she is teaching.”

I teach everything out in the open so it isn’t even really a question. And now he will make a list of claims that are kinda weird. And remember that until I unfriended him, he wasn’t raising any concerns about my teachings.

“She’s teaching that the apostles oppressed women and taught oppression.”

Excuse me, what? Has anyone ever heard me say such a thing? On the contrary, I make a point of talking about how positively egalitarian they were compared to the world around them. They looked like liberals, for goodness sake, compared to the surrounding culture. So this is a flat out lie. He made it up. It can’t even be argued coherently from anything I have ever taught. I have made it plain that Paul set a definite trajectory toward a more balanced relationship between men and women and especially in the congregations. Twenty percent of the leadership of the early church that he cites were women! He called Junia an apostle and others were deacons and such. Oppressive? Heck no. But they did also practice cultural accommodation based upon the cities they were in and the specific concerns. Paul told masters to treat their slaves as equals. I just—I don’t know where this comes from but it must involve some really creative eisegesis.

“She’s apologizing for modern same-sex activity as *not* what God forbid (sic) in Lev 18-19.”

No, but I did clean up some bad context on the slur “sodomite”. I never said anything about Lev 18-19 not referring to homosexuality. A homosexual, however, isn’t a rapist and just because men rape men, doesn’t make them homosexual. It’s about power, now and then. Rape is something that violent people do, regardless of sexual orientation.

“I explain my position a bit in my comment on her post, but I’ll give a brief answer. All of God’s laws are good, and we need to lean on His understanding and not our own—even when it comes to marriage, slavery, genocide, and who can lead ministry, etc. Until she repents of what she is teaching, she should be unfollowed.”

So, his take is unless something is outright outlawed, we can’t call it bad and therefore it must be righteous. He defends slavery, polygyny, etc. and is very vocal about it. I won’t detail his teachings or even name him. But I am responding to the lies and charges and twisting of what I have said and believe.

Am I an apologist for homosexual behavior? No, I do believe that the Bible clearly outlaws it. However, and this is where the confusion comes in—what the Bible describes is not what we know today either. It was describing sex, pure and simple and actually only male homosexuality. Paul is the first to even mention women and he didn’t do that until near the end of his life when he wrote Romans. What would be said now about committed relationships between same sex people? I don’t know but I do fall on the side of there still being a prohibition. What I do know is that I love those who are same-sex attracted. If Fred Phelps rose from the grave and was chasing them down in the streets with a gun, I hope I would have the courage to hide them and care for them in my own home before allowing them to die. So, I don’t approve but I also wouldn’t dream of allowing them to come to harm. But then, don’t we all disapprove of this or that in another person’s life? Why does this one loom so large when worse sins like gossip run unchecked in our congregations? And not just gossip. I do not see it as being any more offensive than other things described as abominations, like eating unclean meats (Lev 11), dishonest scales (Pro 11:1), and this entire section of Proverbs 6:16-19:

There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers. (ESV)

Honestly, given the choice of being in a church full of gays and lesbians and being in a church full of the people in Proverbs 6, there is no contest. And frankly, those abominations describe very well what happened in that group (and at least one more) on Monday, and in the fact that that post remained up for over 24 hours while the admins couldn’t decide it if was wrong or not, and that the only person involved who has apologized or tried to make things right was the one person who had nothing to apologize for. And if this was just a matter of adults thinking these things about me and believing the lies, I wouldn’t really care. But my primary ministry is to kids and for the last seven weeks, specifically trying to help them deal with gender and identity confusion in particular so that they will have a firm foundation. I mean, that’s the irony of the situation. I am trying to keep kids out of all that and here I am being slandered as an apologist. The timing doesn’t seem all that coincidental to me. Parents need to trust me and they need to know what I do and do not teach and what my ministry aims are in teachings kids about the Bible. This isn’t a hobby for me although I am not paid for it either. I am tired of watching kids fall away from the faith when they grow up. I am tired of them not being able to answer the hard questions and I hate it when they are so sheltered that they are caught off guard by objections that they have nothing but easy answers and platitudes to offer that are easily knocked down even by an unbeliever of moderate intelligence. I want them to know who God is, who they are, and the purpose of His Word to us. It bothers me deeply to think that parents would be scared of me because of what they have heard from someone with an axe to grind simply because I believe slavery and polygyny to be incompatible with the Gospel Yeshua preached.

But next week I will have to let you know about the miracles that happened at the Surge Women’s Conference in Texas (but not in Dallas, he was wrong about that too), and especially those related to my health and my ministry future.