Another thing that’s been cooking in the back of my soul is that not everything children do is childish. On the one hand there is that verse about putting away childish things, but then Jesus also said regarding children, “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
A peculiar mistake American women make is that men being men means they are childish. This, of course, rises from the feminist spite for men. And this, in turn, rises from the Western traditions rooted in our Germanic heritage that insists women are the roots of civilization, more valuable to society than men. This is a pagan notion, not at all consistent with the Hebrew assumptions about reality.
The Bible states flatly that Eve didn’t comprehend the moral threat of eating the Forbidden Fruit. Paul goes on to clarify that Eve was deceived because of her own created feminine nature. And while men can be morally deceived, it’s a matter of their fallen nature, not their created nature.
The accusation that a man is being childish almost always comes in the context of a man who doesn’t bow the knee to the variable breezes of her feelings at any given moment. She works from the assumption that, whatever she feels at any given moment, everyone around her must also feel. She quickly forgets that her childlike girlish instincts can also flair up.
There are some people in this world specially gifted with a talent for teaching children. They remember being a child and empathize with that huge mountain of understanding children have to climb. They remember not knowing things, and how they learned. These adults are capable of getting inside a child’s world and guiding them to security and competence. Unfortunately, this is not a part of what the system looks for when selecting people to become school teachers.
That’s in part because there are flaws that come in the same package, and those flaws frighten women in particular who lack that gift. Women who cannot understand children can still mother well enough, but they refuse to take advantage of the gifts God gives to men and women who do understand children. They associate that package with danger because they know bad things can happen, but “bad things” as measured only by people who don’t understand children.
It’s a vicious circle. Our society rejects the good things children, and childlike adults, do because it’s economically inefficient. So when that behavior shows up in adults, it’s a really big annoyance to those who lack the vitality of a wonder and joy about the world. It just so happens that virtually everyone who steers society lacks that wonder and joy, in part because children don’t want to steer society that way. The desire to steer society through rules is anti-child, anti-joy and anti-wonder. Joy and wonder take time, and greedy people think time is like money. They can’t stop and smell the flowers.
Thus, those who are sensitive to joy and wonder as children get damaged by TPTB. They come into adulthood with a lot of unfinished business. Do you not realize that the vast majority of pedophiles are adults with a lot of unfinished business like that? If you create a social structure that hates joy and wonder, you cannot avoid having pedophiles. Our society permits all kinds of perversion. If you create a structure that embraces perversion without understanding its implications, it is tantamount to embracing all perversions.
Let’s get one thing straight: God is not nearly as worried about child molestation as Americans are. With average Americans it’s the crime of the millennium, but in God’s eyes it’s actually a rather small problem built into the fallen world.
Meanwhile, the same joyless powers-that-be have this false notion that we cannot help pedophiles. They have zero faith in God to heal the hurts that create pedophilia in the first place. Go ahead, let a recovered pedophile testify to God’s grace in any church. Watch how folks will drag their children to the far side of the room from that person. Their paranoia is precisely the kind of thing that provokes children to curiosity about such people. Children ask, “Why is he/she so dangerous?” And it’s the healed pedophile’s sensitivity about children what will draw children.
It’s not the presence of children that makes a pedophile desire sex with them. It’s the presence of sexual perversion, the winking and laughing about it, that awakens their own perverse desires. If you build a society that is too embarrassed at its own perversions to examine the underlying psychosis of pedophilia, the problem never goes away. Society itself needs to be healed.
Hebrew society took human sexual desire, with perversions, for granted. It didn’t demonize them. It was just a natural result of the Fall. Nor can you get from the Bible the obsession that sex is only for procreation. Sex should be play; thus, the KJV refers to Isaac “sporting” with Rebecca, which betrayed the nature of their relationship. Children are actually a joyful side effect, not some onerous duty. The Bible frankly leaves the door wide open for joyful exploration of sexual experience — within the safe boundaries of lifetime covenant commitment.
Women, if you don’t embrace the childlike joy of your husband, you are pushing him to sexual wandering, to include pedophilia. If you can’t enjoy the childlike moments we all should have — the joy and wonder about things — then you cannot fill his needs. If you cannot be the gal he needs, stay out of his life in the first place. He will be frustrated and hate you for being a chain and ball, instead of being his partner in facing the world. If you must dominate, and cannot surrender yourself to responsiveness, you have already killed the relationship.
I was riding it out but you lost me. Pedophile to me means pre-pubescent attraction. By an adult. And somehow the wife is to blame if her husband starts experiencing this? Because she didn’t express or encourage “joy and wonder”? I just really don’t understand. It really is not natural for adults to be sexually interested in children. In fact it’s super creepy and nasty. Blossoming young ladies, yes. Children, no. Where is your reference that Hebrew society takes sexual perversions for granted? What does that even mean? That is normal? If “normal”, then acceptable. Evidence of this in OT?
“Wonder and joy” as a child becomes interest and appreciation in maturity. Most kids with a decent upbringing are able to get there. With education we learn about life, and literacy enables us to delve into what interests. Enshrining wonder and joy seems odd.
I can’t imagine my 5 year old daughter being sexually violated. It literally makes me sick. Any wonder why parents would be protective of their child if their was someone in their vicinity known to have perverted tendencies. Parents protect their children. Period. Sorry, not sorry, if I hurt the poor child molesters feelings.
Btw I guess you are in the know about how God feels about stuff. But I know,that a that a child who is touched inappropriately by an adult is gonna have issues. For a long time.
Well, there is a huge gap in understanding here. I’ve been studying and writing for years about adopting an ancient Hebrew perspective, because that’s the background for God’s revelation. To understand the Bible requires that we strive, as much as possible, to rediscover that intellectual background. It’s the background God Himself designed and created, starting with the call of Abraham, and it’s radically different from the one most Americans hold. That’s what’s behind about one third of the many ebooks I’ve published. At this point, most of my readers have been through that material and aren’t so shocked by this one blog post.
No, perversion isn’t normal or okay, but it is typical of people being people. Our American society, having come to where it is now a vast distance in time and space from where folks in the Old Testament were, has a very different attitude about what is typical. America is part of Western Civilization, something totally different from the Ancient Near East of the Bible. When it comes to human sexuality, Americans are rather schizophrenic; it’s a very broken and damaged outlook. Americans typically have a far higher sensitivity about certain issues that arises from a large number of pagan influences. It assumes a wholly different set of assumptions about reality, and most certainly about God. The ancient Hebrews would not have had such a strong, visceral reaction about child molestation, though they would certainly have had a strong reaction from an entirely different direction. The Covenant of Moses would have demanded a response we find repugnant, not because they were simply “primitive” and foreign, but because they were more consistent with God’s way of looking at things. Our different outlook means we have moved far away from God; everything Jesus taught was rooted in the Old Testament.
Part of my point is that the sickness of the American outlook is the source of the problem. Child molestation would be exceedingly rare in ancient Hebrew society, because the urges toward pedophilia would have been dramatically less. It simply wasn’t a part of the landscape of human sexual desire in that society. In our American society, it’s a huge problem. It’s so pervasive that we despair of ever getting it under control. I’ve spent enough time doing pastoral counseling of Americans to know this. It’s not the existence of the urge that is so awful; it’s the amplification of that urge that is built into our society. The American way of life actually promotes pedophilia, mostly in our pagan idolatry of youth, as if childhood was sacred. It’s that idolatry that makes Americans so shocked at pedophilia that also makes child molestation more likely to happen.
Once we can begin the process of rebuilding a biblical — ancient Hebrew — outlook on life and reality, we can by God’s mercy and grace take away that pagan idolatry of childhood. It’s not a question of whether perverse desires exist; it’s a question of how to make them so weak they don’t influence our behavior. It’s nailing our fleshly nature to the Cross. The notion that pedophilia is a “sickness” is not at all biblical; the idea of “mental illness” is a very bad paradigm that is contrary to the whole background of Scripture. Pedophilia as a sexual desire is present in most men alive today, but they have been conditioned to deny it, to refuse to look in the mirror and see it. No, not universal, but more prevalent that anyone wants to admit. It’s the few brave men who can admit that it’s there who gain the power to ovrecome it. The better question is, “How do we keep it in check?” And the answer requires reorienting your mind and heart to a biblical outlook. Stop idolizing childhood, because it’s most certainly not good for children, and those children grow up to be exceedingly broken adults.
Yes, I’m calling for a radical rejection of American social and intellectual values. That’s what Jesus taught. The God of the Old Testament is the Father of Jesus, and embracing the Hebrew outlook is as close to getting to know God as we can possibly come. It gives us the confidence to say and live what God thinks about things.
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