“I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works.”
1 Timothy 2:8-10 ESV
The crisis of our time is the inability to think in categories. The great Russian chess master, Kasparov, once remarked that the purpose of propaganda isn’t only to tell lies but to muddy the intellectual waters so that clear thinking becomes impossible. This is precisely what’s happened in our day. The onslaught of woke mendacity and deception causes a great fatigue to fall over the mind. Truth is so under assault that the temptation is to “quietly give up.”
Not only that but the education system openly wars against God’s truth through the subtle destruction of one’s faculty of reasoning. This is where categorical thinking comes in. In fact, modern education is decidedly anti-reason and anti-truth through the deliberate obliteration of categorical and foundational thinking. For example, notice how rare it is for a teacher or politician to anchor what they’re saying to a foundation. Notice how much presumption there is instead of clear definitions. Ask the average teacher or professor what their theory of knowledge or ethics are and it’s like cutting a hemophiliac.
They have no foundations they’re willing to admit to because at the bottom of it all is the film-flam of secular humanism. Indeed, they claim to be wise while conveniently hiding from any examination of their core principles. Like Tyler Durden, everyone in the schools, universities and media agree: don’t talk about Secular Club. At the bottom of it is the grand fantasy that no one plus nothing produced everything.
Over against this, 1 Timothy gives us three essential categorical truths for living properly.
Sound doctrine.
Proper gender roles.
Proper church structure and fellowship.
Chapter one emphasized the necessity for us to be grounded in the truth of Christ and salvation through faith alone. It’s upon this that sound doctrine rests and nothing else. Any line of reasoning about mankind and life that doesn’t lead to Calvary is false (Romans 11:33-36). And this leads us to Chapter two and the Biblical presumption of gender. Of course, this flies in the face of modern American/woke philosophy but God is the Creator and, therefore, the source of all categories and truth. He is truth. It’s a fool’s errand to try and find one’s purpose in life outside of Scripture, which is to say, to try and define one’s life on autonomous terms.
Next, we read again of the Biblical proclamation that God created us as male and female. Yes, some females are more “masculine” than others and the same is true in reverse of some men. But this in no way obliterates the truth. All the caterwauling and controversy about gender and sex is due to secular man’s war on God. Sinful man wants the privilege of being his/her own god and the woke assaults on gender are downstream of this basic and central deceit. Many are astonished with how insane it is for allegedly scientific people to believe that giving puberty blocking drugs, and surgically mutilating children, is a good idea. And not only that but to believe that opposing such insanity is evil.
But Christians should understand that the core of unbelief is a war on reality because sin must suppress the obvious truth. It’s only by God’s grace that any sinner sees reality aright in the first place. What we’re seeing in America’s mad dash toward the cliff is the fact of His “giving us over” to the consequences of our premises. So, unless we repent, more is on the way. As Dostoevsky said, when man jettisons God, all things are permissible.
All this said, a young woman (or man) who asks the question of identity has their answer. Who am I? To answer that is simple. You are either a man or woman (or a boy or girl) created by the Lord and for Him. You were born into a family and in that family you should be reared and brought up in a Biblical church in an area where God’s civil magistrate (Romans 13) punishes crime. That’s the order of life right there and there is no other. All deviations from this foundation are suicidal and bring the terrors of either anarchy or tyranny.
The young woman who knows that she’s the Lord’s – the daughter of the most High God – will seek Him. Yes, she’ll see herself aright; she’ll find her identity and worth not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. She’ll measure herself as the Lord’s precious possession, saved by His sacrifice and loved to eternity by Him and this will protect her. It will nurture her. It will direct her steps. And it will all result in the great fruit of the radiant beauty that is feminine character.
Absent this, women often seek to be beautiful through raw sexuality. Indeed, it’s a tragic thing. When a young woman is deprived of the true love of her mother and father, and the upbringing that shows her the excellencies of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, she’s at risk of being dehumanized by men. She will be told the hideousness that a woman’s heart, pure and Godly, is a useless thing but that her sexuality is all. She will be told the lie that playing a whore is empowering. Isn’t that what the daughters of our land learn now? Aren’t they encouraged to “explore their sexuality” by giving themselves over to men who would only use them as they would any other material thing in the world? Aren’t they told that a woman’s worth is when she’s young and that worth is only commensurate with how lustful she can make men of low character? Aren’t they taught that a wife and a mother is a meager bit of business in a world of “influencers”? Yes, doesn’t the world tell a young woman that she’s more valuable if her labor produces thousands of animalistic men on social media rather than Godly children in a quiet home?
Absent the love of Jesus Christ and the sound doctrine of Scripture, we’ll seek love in a deceptive world and find ourselves debased, alone, and frustrated. Love isn’t a feeling, nor is it sex, though romantic love will include those things. Love is in Christ alone and inside those wonderful fences of family and church that restrain and keep out sin. Real love requires the defeat of sin through faith in Christ or otherwise sin will choke out our every virtue. Sin destroys our every attempt at honor and beauty. Sin separates us from God and each other and makes true intimacy impossible because trust isn’t present where sin resides. But in Christ we have true fellowship and the security and loyalty we all long for.
Our freedom is never in sin because sin is slavery. This is what it means to say that the truth will set us free because the truth is Jesus Christ – the God-man Himself who so loves us that He gave Himself up to death on the cross so that we would be saved.
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