I’m not taking any prisoners on this one.
I’ve grown weary of people repeating the lies of Satan — about Satan. There’s a whole bunch of noise out there from alt-media and liberty-minded folks about something they claim is satanic. They are trying to make it the ultimate crime against God’s Word, when the Bible says next to nothing about it. It is a case of injecting cultural taboos into the Bible.
Because of this, Satan is allowed to sidetrack the whole discussion. Worse, it lets a lot of people off the hook who are guilty of serious collusion with Satan’s real agenda.
Let’s get it out there: Child trafficking and sexual abuse is not the ultimate evil in Scripture. It’s bad, for sure, but it’s not the worst that Satan’s servants can do. The few mentions of anything resembling child abuse in Scripture are all symbolic, not literal. It’s not that God doesn’t care about the kiddos. Indeed, He uses them as a symbol because they are important to Him. Rather, their abuse is just a side-effect of something truly serious. If you get hung up on treating the side-effects, the real problem will kill you.
The tendency to see it as the ultimate evil is because of cultural idols. This is a particular sin of westerners. Western folks worship youth; this is why pedophilia is such a widespread issue in the first place. There are other cultures with a problem of child sexual exploitation, but the ancient Hebrew people rarely struggled with it. The ANE cultural background did not worship youth. Youth was not sacred to them, and it is not sacred in the Bible. Children were important for other reasons, but they were not idolized to the point where everyone wanted to cling to youth as a stage of life.
It wasn’t special. It was not imbued with mythical magic. It was simply to be survived. It doesn’t matter why we idolize youth; it’s evil for any reason.
That’s why pedophilia is not mentioned in Scripture as a sin. The Hebrew people had plenty of other cultural problems, but that was not one of them. Nor would I suggest that children were never sexually abused, but that in the ANE world, it simply wasn’t an obsession either way. Today’s western parents panic over the idea precisely for the same reason other folks lust after their children. Both of them idolize youth. If you obsess about child sexual abuse, you have precisely the same moral problem as those who lust after children.
Thus, Satan gets a lot of folks twisted up in this, taking advantage of the defiled pagan cultural background of the West. It keeps folks from noticing what he is really working on.
Satan loves religion. He hates genuine faith. He hates the Covenant and genuine covenant obedience. Folks who cling to the privileges of God’s Law are folks he cannot get his hands on. He is bound by God’s Law, too. He’s not at war with God; he’s at war with our faith in God. Faith makes you obedient to God’s Law.
God’s Law is first feudal; faith is commitment to God’s Person and glory. He is your feudal Master. The connection is personal through your convictions and faith. His will is summarized in the Code of Noah. His will does not include big church buildings and organizations, nor the big budgets and expensive facilities. It does not require a uniform of any sort, though it does require measures of modesty in general — such as no jewelry that doesn’t serve some important function. Oh, and you get one shot at marriage. If you don’t get it right the first time, you are out of the game. Jesus said that.
As long as church leaders worry about how they are perceived by the wider population — it’s summed up in the term “marketing” — then they are not serving the Lord. Because the second point is that God’s Law is tribal and covenantal. It means leadership is not “professional”. But I’ve said enough about elders and pastors already in previous posts. Most institutional religion violates the Covenant of Christ. The rising tribulation is going to shake an awful lot of people loose, because they have no genuine spiritual anchor.
The discussion of the Covenant is Satan’s real concern. He uses the bogeyman of child abuse to distract people from his real agenda. Go ahead and keep chasing that issue; it makes Satan smile when you call it “satanic”.
One factor, too, and I don’t know if this is a side-effect or a cause, is the trauma that comes with child abuse. It’s a nice industry to get into curing that, so it makes sense that practitioners would want to diagnose that affliction wherever they can “find” it.
Darned right; it’s a major element of American culture. There are any number of “afflictions” in “dire need” of therapy, and all of them boost the trauma factor of rather mundane human experiences. Thus, the victims are eternally in trauma, never healed, never able to simply go on with their lives in a fallen world.