The God of the Bible portrays Himself as male.
I believe it’s safe to say only Western Civilization has so completely formalized and institutionalized resentment to God’s choices, particularly in matters relating to gender and sex. That’s not to say there was never any gender confusion in other cultures, or that no other civilization faced feminine resentment over the alleged power differential. Rather, only in the West do we see it embraced as a fundamental social myth. Only in the West is it confused as self-evident injustice.
In the Bible, there is zero maneuvering space on the issue of gender confusion: You are required to embrace whatever role your equipment indicates. Quibbling is perversion. The principle is quite broad and covers far more than gender. God is sovereign: The role He assigns you is not up for negotiation. To gain the full benefit of His promised blessings, you have to obey. Physical deformities are rare enough, and often enough attributable to human sin, that arguing against the revealed provision of God is evil.
So it should be obvious that the silly obsession with “gender-inclusive” language is itself immoral in general, but applied to God is blasphemous. Go back and review the Old Testament. At every point, the mere notion of deified femininity is invariably evil. To then jump to the conclusion that women are slandered is also blasphemous; the Creator is not accountable to His creatures. That’s just one of many examples of goofy binary thinking and false dichotomy so characteristic of the West. If, like Joel Osteen you want to pass judgment on the intellectual legacy of God’s revelation, and judge your own Western social mythology as superior to God’s millennia of revelation, then you can join him in Hell when it’s all over with.
Don’t confuse the Two Realms. There are people both spirit-born and homosexual, for example. The latter is a matter of confusion about God’s revelation. It’s just one of many examples where people completely fail to embrace God’s provision and cannot harvest His blessings on this earth. It has little connection with eternal destiny. Obedience is at best a symptom of spirit birth, not a necessary condition. God’s choice of whom to take with Him into eternity is in no wise dependent on any human choice. The New Testament says so in blunt terms, so there’s no excuse for getting that wrong. Decision theology remains one of the most heinous and blasphemous lies of our age, and also one of the most common lies.
The correlation between spirit-born (Spirit Realm) and obedient (Fallen Realm) is that you need not take seriously anyone’s claim to be spirit-born if they manifest insufficient interest in obeying God’s Word. Obedience has no knowable effect on your eternal destiny, but makes a world of difference in how things work for you here. The image of casting crowns at the feet of Jesus in eternity is a parable, a symbol not meant literally in any sense. It symbolizes whether your life here brought Him glory. Your only hope for His blessings here is to stand in His glory. The point is, while earthly obedience does make a difference in Heaven, it is portrayed as a matter of how embarrassed you may be for having so completely missed out on all the blessings you could have had here.
The point is this: Don’t be a fool. That means you should strive to understand and embrace fully the moral character of God as revealed in Scripture. That requires you understand Scripture from the intellectual heritage of the Ancient Near East, not at all anything like the intellectual heritage of the West. No one can deny that there is a radical difference between the two; search my blog on “epistemology.” Those who insist it doesn’t matter are in the same moral class as Joel Osteen and others who deny there is such a thing as “sin.” They are offering an entirely different moral law code from an easily discernible heathen source. It calls for a life of worldly success, one which actually tends to work so long as the world system runs well enough. But God is not complacent; in due time He will act to remove that matrix of lies that support that false image of success. When that happens, only those who walk in His Laws will be left standing. In other words, Osteen’s morals only seem to work.
As always, if these things don’t call your name — if what I write isn’t somehow self-evident to your spirit — then call me an idiot and ignore me. It’s that simple. You can always ask questions, but most comments I’m likely to see are off-topic on the grounds of demanding I address things I already said are not up for debate. If you sense a need to defend Western social mythology as somehow godly, then do so on your own blog. You are not entitled to equal time on my blog. I’ll help you set up an account and make sure you know how to point the finger at me so readers have no doubt whom you indict. Be as fiery as you like, impassioned or reasonable as you like. Meanwhile, I have to obey what I understand as the leading of God in my own spirit.
You won’t get me to take you seriously when you question biblical morality regarding gender.
