A Long Way to Go

Every time I write something, my spirit cries out to God, “Give me the words! Don’t let me get in Your way, O Lord, but help me to straighten and smooth the path so You can touch hearts.”

There’s little room for criticism of people who don’t understand. God knows, I started off damnably ignorant. And I’ve been known to come across all wrong to some folks, which is why I pray for the words. The room for criticism comes when people get the divine truth and reject it. It’s always because they serve some other god, and maybe several.

While the Hebrew Scriptures personify the false deities of men, in our culture there are plenty of impersonal deities. This is the curse of Hellenism and Western Civilization. It’s the reason America has a vast pantheon of countless deities. The notion that the universe is composed of non-living matter has resulted in the death of God in our consciousness. It moves God into the sphere of things spooky, superstitious and inexplicable, which in turn means that there is nothing you can do about Him, that you cannot engage Him directly and personally.

God explained Himself quite eloquently, and He is very much alive today, calling us back to Him. He said that He fully expected people to approach Him personally and individually, to get to know Him and love Him as Sovereign. Even talking like that often fails to register in the souls of many, who unconsciously discount such language as mere lyricism. Well, I’m here to declare that you can know what God thinks about things in this world, and He has commanded that you do so.

Doing so means a massive internal battle to displace the American outlook with the ancient Hebraic outlook. You’ll spend your whole life engaged in that task and are wholly unlikely to ever arrive. But it’s not the destination that matters so much as God’s command that we start down the path. It happens to be the path that Jesus taught. The only way to understand Jesus is to get inside the ancient Hebrew mind. That’s the mind God created as the vehicle for revelation; it’s the mind necessary to understand revelation.

So the reason I pick on the issue of pedophilia is that it represents one of the most powerful and sacred idols in America: the idolatry of childhood. It’s a nasty demon you worship there, one that destroys like few other.

Go to any active evangelical church, and you are likely to find there people who have risen out of all kinds of sin. There are former thieves, alcoholics, dope users and dealers, even former murderers. You’ll sit next to them and fellowship with them, even bring your kids around them. We even have a whole range of sexual perverts whom God has famously healed. But let one person mention they once suffered from pedophilia and the whole picture changes. Notice how it’s no longer the grace of God that is sacred, but some pagan idol that intrudes.

Can God heal pedophiles? Can God heal the victims of child molestation? Not in America.

The reason victims of child molestation struggle for the rest of their lives is that American society offers no hope for them. In their minds, the child is now eternally damaged goods. They have lost their one hope of kneeling at the altar of the false god of childhood. As every pagan worshiper knows, the demon god of childhood won’t allow children with sexual experience to enter the shrine. Instead, that demon declares the child forever broken. Such children know they are outcasts; they can grasp internally that they are damaged goods. Mommy and Daddy and all the other adults are so crestfallen at the unspeakable loss of all future hope. You poor, crippled baby. At least, that’s how our American society acts, treating physical disabilities with extravagant affirmations and accommodations, but not having been molested.

The clinical literature showing how some children have recovered and adjusted to having been molested, and have gone on with childhood and the rest of their lives is forbidden knowledge.

So it stands to reason that a genuine American consciousness would be ready to slay child molesters with a very ungodly vehemence. This, when it is American society itself that deeply inflames the perverse desire for sex with children. Have you not seen how kids are being sexualized in advertising? Lust for them and buy the stuff, just so long as you don’t actually touch them. It has to be more thrilling than sex with adults, because it’s so terribly sacred. That’s the nature of perversion: It twists things around backwards. It’s the other edge of the same sword of idolatry. With one edge you elevate something unjustly, and with the other edge you build a desire for despoiling that thing.

There are bad things happening to us all the time. If we follow the Hebraic outlook on life, we take it in stride as the hand of God. There is no internal argument over whether He did it to us Himself, or simply allowed it to happen. Rather, we don’t hold this life as sacred (another idol of the West). We expect a shitty existence because this is not the world God made for us. Rather, we share in the blame for rejecting His world in Eden based on His revelation, and this is what we get instead, and it’s nasty. Bad things are supposed to happen to us. It’s programmed in, and only miracles can get you out of some of it.

And the real miracle is that He reveals the strength to handle it, to recover and go on with serving Him so that our response to all the bad stuff shines the light of His glory. And somehow we are supposed to believe that child molestation is not simply a part of this nasty background, that somehow it is the one sin that cannot be forgiven? Do you think Jesus didn’t die on the Cross of pedophiles, too? He described the unforgivable sin as something else entirely.

Pedophilia doesn’t figure in the Bible narrative because it wasn’t among the sins peculiar to the Hebrew people. Paul ran across it; there were pagan cults among the Gentiles that included child molestation as a part of their rituals. It was quite rare. Paul lumps it into a lot of other stuff, because by itself it wasn’t such a big deal. It was never in his mind a singular kind of sin any worse than all the other sexual perversions common to pagan Gentiles. His attitude was Hebrew, just like that of Jesus.

That teaching, “Suffer the little children to come unto me…” does not make children more sacred than His followers. Don’t pervert the teaching. It teaches adults to stop thinking they have any particular advantage, but rather, they have a ways to go to find the proper starting point to begin following Christ. Children are in some ways closer to the staring point, primarily because they don’t cling to a mass of demands from God.

Christians who choke on pedophilia have a very, very long way to go to claim they are following Christ.

Now, let’s have a corrective. If you survey the Covenant of Moses, you’ll find that children were expected to recover from the wounds of life. It wasn’t an iron demand, but a nurturing atmosphere that taught them not to take themselves too seriously. The ancient Hebrew consciousness was that the world was an ugly place and bad things happen. But as long as you are alive, God has a purpose for you. Find it, embrace it, and live it to the hilt.

So if a child was molested, that would be just another bad thing that happens in an evil world. For the perpetrator, they would be handled according to the damage done, not to the child or the parents, but to the Covenant blessings of shalom. They would not be killed, except in the most egregious and shocking violations of other parts of the Covenant. For example, if it was homosexual, then that is the primary threat, not the molestation of a child. Homosexuality was a capital crime.

For normal heterosexual child molestation, the perpetrator could be forced to pay a sum of money to the parents. The kid can still grow up and get married. If it’s a girl child, it depends on her age whether the perpetrator becomes responsible for lifetime support. Notice how the Hebrew culture did not worship sexual freedom any more than it worshiped childhood. In their minds, it was the fundamental nature of a stable and functional society — particularly one that served to reveal God’s personal moral nature — to give men more sexual freedom than women (though it was hardly carte blanche). We simply don’t have room to get into that here. The point is that the single greatest concern was the stability of the social structure under the Covenant.

And the other point is that Americans worship not only childhood, but sexual freedom of choice. Both of those are nasty demon gods. Again, American Christians have a very long way to go to approach the biblical model of Jesus.