The New Testament says it clearly in many different ways: Contend for the truth. This is the image of spiritual warfare, fighting the Enemy and his allies in the Unseen Realm. We’ve said it here often enough that the true battlefield is your own soul. You must make war against your fleshly nature, dragging it out of the Enemy’s camp and compelling it to obey the Word of God. Your fleshly nature is not the real you; it is the turf over which spiritual battles are fought. You must conquer, capture and occupy your fleshly nature in the name of Christ.
My writings are filled with discussions of how that works out in detail. It’s a matter of your feudal submission to Jesus as Master and Lord. You learn the Word and learn how to hear His voice in your convictions. Of course, learning the Word means seeking to embrace the Hebraic mindset that was the primary vehicle of divine revelation. You must understand Scripture in its own context.
But this is not the end of the matter; it is only the foundation. The Great Commission demands that we take this battle with us throughout our human lives, finding ways to confront the rest of the human race with the gospel message. The model for this is not just yelling at everyone you see. The model is the totality of your existence, from which you might also sometimes say a few words appropriate to the context. If that background of your existence is not the primary witness, then your words will mean nothing. Mere rhetoric is the same as Satan sarcastically preaching the gospel message on every street corner. There must be Holy Spirit power behind the words, or they become a lie.
The primary means of establishing that background of power is in forming a covenant community of faith. The world needs most to see how Jesus loves His people in how we love each other. It is already trite to say that this love is not just a feeling, but a commitment to each other’s welfare, because their welfare is your own.
And while I must certainly offer compassion to those outside the Covenant, I dare not equate that with the love I build within the community. It is not the same love, because for it to be agape it must resonate and magnify within the recipient. This is the real treasure, the divine inheritance of Christians in this world. We are not permitted to throw those pearls to swine, or give what is holy to dogs (the words Jesus used). We can show affection to stray dogs, letting them lick up the crumbs from the covenant children’s food. But they must come inside the Covenant first in order to be treated as people. Still, we must show compassion in one way or another.
The primary thrust, the substance of that compassion is the truth. His love is His law, and it marks His dominion. This is how we contend for the truth in this world. If the truth is defined by how we love each other as Christ loves us, it still results in actions and words that indicate the boundaries of that love. For example, we are not some “free love” cult. There are boundaries to how we express divine love and the world needs to see them.
In America, a major area of contention is the boundaries and structure of human affection. America worships sex. At the same time, sex has never been so twisted and perverted as it is now in this country. It’s not just the covenant boundaries of sexual behavior that is perverted, but the raw data of how human fleshly nature works is also denied. The pagan deity of feminism is a pack of lies women tell themselves, and demand that men also bow down and worship. It is spiritual warfare; feminism is the work of false gods.
The so-called Manosphere and Red Pill lore is just a movement about restoring the data itself. It clarifies the nature of the human problem. It’s a major chore just rescuing the data, never mind applying the Covenant to that data. If the data is falsified, the meaning of the Covenant is also perverted. You cannot bring the Covenant to a false reality. We must fight through two fortified lines of the Devil.
A recent wave of fiery darts of Satan comes in the form of a Netflix series called Adolescence. The promoters of this crap directly mention the “manosphere” as if it were a great evil. It is a direct attack on the raw data of how men and women interact, a fresh assertion of the lies of pagan feminism. What can we do about it? How do we contend for the truth in this context?
I’m not going to give you a plan. There is no single divinely inspired method of making war. There is no single centralized facility or institution. That’s how humans think when they ignore God. It is necessary for each of us to build a community of faith so that God can reveal the particulars of how He wants to use you.
If you aren’t already living in acknowledgment of the raw data of human sexuality, you have no hope of even understanding the problem. On top of that, you still must stand up for the Covenant truth of how people should live with all the very real problems of human sexuality. And you still must know the Word and be firmly in the grip of your convictions to know what your role is. This is a spiritual battle, and it requires a firm foundation in the Spirit Realm, or your plans to act will be futile. The raw data is not the whole story.
God alone decides what He will bless, and I assure you it’s not human-centered living.
