American Conundrum. Indictment Of An anti-Trinitarian Culture
“Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward” Psalm 127:3
In modern American conservative protestantism there has recently been revived discussion on the role of the family in the lives of individuals. The discussion hasn’t arisen out of intellectual pursuit, it’s rather a practical (pain induced) reaction of young men and women who get married and have kids and realize how crazy it is raising kids without the involvment of their own parents(grandparents). Indeed, this discussion is long overdue.
Americans in the last 100 year have developed a new system of life that’s foreign to Biblical model of life, and indeed it’s foreign to any normal functioning society in all of human history. The bonds between parents and children are extremely weak or non existent: It’s weak when kids are little, and it becomes functionally non-existent when kids become adults. And here I am not talking about the pagan section of American society, I am talking about the very conservative sectors of American protestantism. Parents seem to be pretty cold towards their children, and children reciprocate it back to their parents, and this coldness moves in to their local church communities. Displays of affection such as kissing and even hugging are shunned. It’s maybe due to the fact that American society is pretty sexualized and they see everything thru their private organs, as pornography has taken hold of almost everyone’s minds and eyes in this country. Or perhaps it’s due to other factors, I am not sure, however, this phenomenon of distance within the family relationships is very bizzare to me coming from a non-american background.
For the record, we have to mention that there are two extremes that family relationships can take. One is already the above mentioned individualistic distant behavior among family members which is the norm in America and in my opinion it has been extremely damaging to families, churches, society and economy at large in this country. The other extreme in family relationships is when families are TOO close to each other and end up hurting each other. But in my opinion the damage from the latter form of extreme is not as huge as the damage from individualistic extreme. And the benefits from the individualistic extreme are far less than the benefits of the close-knit family extreme.
I come from an ethnic Armenian background with close knit family structure so I speak from that, and from what I have seen in the American society. And by American society I mean the conservative evangelical world. Also, this doesn’t relate to one particular denomination, as the vices of this nature seem to be common in almost every denomination. These people seem to be first of all Americans and second of all as Christians. I would even go as far as saying I don’t see much essencial difference between the Christian Nationalists in American protestantism and anti-Christian-nationalists. By their practical behavior both of them look the same to me. Modern people often criticize OT patriarchs for doing things according to the culture of their times and regioin(such as polygamy), but these modern people don’t see that they themselves are moving by the abominations of their own times and cultures.
Why am I writing this Article?
I write it because there have been alarming changing taking place in American christianity, or rather, changes that have already taken place and there seem to be no slowdown to the rapid decline of Christianity in America. And I am not the only or first one to see it, many others have seen it too, and very few are doing anything essencial to reverse the trend(one of the few people who do any work are Peter Leithart, James Jordan, Douglas Wilson and a few others, and I am not saying I totally agree with everything they teach, though I admire many of these men’s intelligence). The divorce rates of Christian believers and non-christians are basically the same, which is an indictment of American Christians. The abortion rates also seem to have no major gaps. I say this when I consider the chemical abortions that have been happening in this country, the kill pill. I have seen lots of church attending christian wives regularly taking the kill pill so they don’t get pregnant. If life starts at conception, and these women do conceive, and then within days with the help of the kill pill they kill their newly conceived baby. Is this first degree murder or not? I believe it is. And if it is then the church as such is under great judgement of God in tolerating such murderers in their midst. Pastors say they believe conception starts at life, but when you go and ask them how many people in their congregation have ever been disciplined for using the kill pill, the number is ZERO. And many pastors will tell you they havn’t done any research on the subject, they don’t know much about these pills. OK then, what kind of bullshit have they taught you at the seminary? Just expository preaching and exegesis or the WCF, but nothing about the most pressing issues of the day? Nothing about the weightier matters of the law ? Have you been steeped in piety based readings so much that it has fried up your brain and judgement faculties ? And as a rule, if your pastor tells you he doesn’t know anything about the kill pills that have been around for 25 years, which can now be legally ordered online and delivered to your door, then it’s time to leave your church and find another one. The “calculated ignorance” of your pastor speaks volumes about how detached he is from reality, or how ignorant and stupid he is.
If children are an inheritance from the LORD, the fruit of the womb is a reward from God, then they are basically using poison to kill the inheritance and the reward from God.
And I can maintain that this kind of genocidal behavior is stemming from the individualistic family structures that dominate american churches.
So, to define what the American individualistic family structure is here is what I have seen. What does American suicidal individualistic family structure look like? Kids grow up in families and parents expect them to get out of the house and become independent by the age of 18, and they expect them to get out of the house and live on their own. And whether they are ready or not to leave the house, they are pushed out of the house. They usually enroll in a university thousands of miles away from their family home and community and church, which means that any covenantal family and church and community bonds they had are totally and irrevocably broken. (in most cases the bonds don’t exist even when these kids reach the age of teens. Moving away from parents at such great distances is already showing that their covenantal bonds, if they ever existed, are already severed).
So the kids go to a 4 year university, incur hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt, live at least 4 years without a family, alone, or with roommates. Or, if they don’t attend university they still go away from their family (or are driven out), live outside of family structure, alone or with roommates. Well, what could go wrong with that ? EVERYTHING !!! This is absolutely stupid and reckless behavior. At the best cases they get married after they graduate from university, and permanently live in small rented apartments in some crappy unimportant small town’s ghetto neighborhood, and spend several decades trying to pay down their student debts. But this is just the start of their troubles, the beginning of birth pangs. And this is the best case scenario. Majority are very worse case scenarios. Not having any family structure in which they live, there is basically no one to keep them accountable. They may be considered adults, but they ARE NOT ready to start life on their own. They would probably be ready to enter life if the parents homeschooled them and taught them some skills and trades and taught them other essencial life skills such as evaluating other people and their intentions when they come in contact with other people, which they inevitably will do. How many parents go thru such pains and sacrifices to prepare their kids for such ? 1 out of 100,000 ?? And that’s a maybe, big maybe. And even if they had taught them all those things, their children still would need them and their family. How does it make any sense for people to raise children up to the age of 18 and then ask them to go and live on their own? What is lost here? Well, when these 18 year olds go to live on their own, they are like Adam and Eve in the garden, who have to learn everything from scratch, going thru pain and temptations and trials, which often times end up destroying them. Just look at christian churches and the number of youth with mental health issues, broken lives, confused worldviews, zero confidence, fear of the unknown.
I am a father and have gone thru much trials and temptations and failures when I was young and unmarried, gone thru many bad and naïve decisions made with youthful optimism which caused me much pain in life. Do I want my children to go thru that all over again? Of course not ! I want to constantly impart the wisdom I have gained to my children, constantly teaching them how to live their lives and function in a very complex society, how to make sense of things, how to evaluate other people’s intentions and reasons, how to spot opportunities and how to see and reject fraudulent deals they get offered by get-rich-quick schems that proliferate American society. Moreover, I have been talking with my wife and reminding her constantly that our work is most likely is NOT going to be done even when our kids grow up and have normal jobs and families. We must be ready to jump in and help them with babysitting their children when (not if) that need arises. We DO NOT have the concept of retirement in our family dictionary. I homeschool my children, and if you ask my 7 year old what the word “retirement” means he will tell you it means “laziness and selfishness”, because that’s how I defined it for them. And I am confident that once they gradually grow into adulthood and maturity, when they are in their 20’s and 30’s and 40’s, they’ll put this word (and other words I have defined for them) in its proper context and realize that their father had been right all along and everyone had been wrong in defining these concepts.
Indeed, the pains and travails of individualistic American families and children raised in those families never end. Here’s one real example that I personally witnessed. And you can see the contrast between American individualism and close-knit family structures. Some decades ago I was attending a very conservative American church which was teaching what you call advanced doctrines of the bible to their congregants. There was this Armenian girl who had married to this American guy. They had 2 little kids. I knew this girl for years so one time in church I was asking her how she was doing and how well she and her husband had settled into their new life. And I also randomly asked her if her American husband’s parents helped them with their kids, babysitting and watching and everything else that comes with raising children. And she said “no, my own (Armenian) mother actually comes and helps us all the time”. So I was thinking, her mother lives 45 minutes away from them, which means her husband’s parents must be living real far from them. And I asked her how far her husband’s parents live from her. She said “they live across the street from us”. WHAT ??? Mannn, what the heck ? I thought I didn’t hear her correctly, and asked her again where they live ? She repeated by saying they live across the street from them. I WAS STUNNED, and speechless. This made absolutely no sense to me. I didn’t want to dig into their relationships so I was reluctant to ask her what the heck was going on. But she anticipated that and she told me that “well, they are Americans, they are kind of different. They have their private lives, and if I have to ask them to watch the kids when I have to go to a dentist or leave the house for something, I have to first get an appointment with them, and see if they are available in this day and time and for how long, like, how many seconds they can watch the kids”. And apparently, her American in laws grew up attending American churches which teach advanced dotrines, and her Armenian parents grew up attending doctrinally very, very weak Armenian evangelical churches in Los Angeles. So, we get people with a lot of theological knowledge who are pretty useless, selfish, stingy bastards, and we got people with very little theological knowledge who are dedicated to making sure their married kids’ marriages don’t fall apart under heavy pressures of life. In 1 Corinthians 13 Saint Paul says that when people possess deep theological knowledge, are very intelligent, but have no love, they are like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, and he even goes much further in discrediting all the good attributes that people can have but when they don’t have LOVE they are nothing, zero. Basically, you can read theological books all the time, you can listen to expository preaching and you can even yourself exegete passages of the bible, but if you don’t have love, then you can shove all that knowledge and wisdom up your (reformed or unreformed) American ass. You are USELESS !!! When Adam listened and obeyed the beast in the garden, God made for them clothes made up of the skin of a beast. One theologian has said in the past that this had twoford meaning. One meaning showed that Adam had lost a large part of his humanity which was made in the image of God and he assumed the image of the beast, or beasts of the field. He basically became beastly, like an animal. The other meaning was that it showed Adam that in the future there would be redemption and he should live with that hope that salvation would come outside of him to cover his guilt and eventually to totally ammortize his guit and make man righteous before God. And when it comes to individualist American parents and the kinds of horrible things they force their kids to go thru, they assume the beastly aspect of that story, rather than the redemptive aspect.
And the beastly aspect in the families starts when parents refuse to provide family integrated home education to their children. Homeschooling isn’t merely education, it also includes teaching practical life skills, bonding and covenanting with family members. I don’t merely teach my children English and Math and Sciences. We also take them with us everywhere we go, to shopping, car oil change, sometimes to workplace, weddings, parties, conferences, DMV, and basically everywhere else. They go where me and my wife go. This is why my children trust me(and my wife) and have faith in me. That’s why they can sit next to me 45 minutes listening to a sermon because I tell them it’s good for them in the future, even though %95 of the sermon makes no sense to them at this time.
But as it comes to the modern American lifestyle, where kids are expected to leave home at the age of 18, go to a 4 year old college and graduate and get a job and form families, this system DID actually work “well” for them (I’ll explain the quotes), while the reality that the Bible presents us tells us it SHOULD NOT work. Then, how did it work up to now? Well, once you know what the American 90 year debt supercycle means you will understand how that “worked”. They made it work because of the presence of the debt supercycle. The debt supercycle had its roots going all the way to the American Civil War and the soldiers’ pensions, and in the spiritual realm it started with the collapse of the Presbyterian church in America starting in 1869’s General Assembly, when they basically undermined the Authority of scriptures, albeit stealthily. But in more practical terms it started about 90 years ago, in 1930’s introduction of Social Security and other welfare programs. The government started borrowing money to pay for social welfare programs and for a permanently standing (US) army. Of course this debt supercycle massively accellerated in 1970’s dollar’s break from the Gold standard and the constraints that that standard that imposed on the profligate money printing and spending(collapse of Bretton Woods). With the dollar freed from Gold, they started printing money like crazy. America started creating wealth out of thin air, which is of course magic and divination. And this is EXACTLY how children getting out of the house at 18 and attending a 4 year college and living on their own concept started. It was made possible by the immorality in finances and impossibly large borrowing of money and masking wealth creation. What it has created is massive inflation that has been wrecking havoc on all areas of the American economy and life. Yet, American christians live such ignorantly as if they can continue evicting their kids out of the house at 18 and having them go to a 4 year college and expecting them to have normal lives. They can keep ignorantly believing whatever they want to believe, but the divorce and immorality rates in American conservative churches and the collapse of American evangelicalism tells a different story. Children, unprepared by parents, are driven out of their homes at the age of 18-20, they start attending a 4 year college and incurring so much debt from which they can almost never get out, and this puts enormous stress on their lives and drives many into drug addiction and fornication. But even without this debt burden, living away from their family and community in which they grew up, with no essencial accountability or social safety net, they still end up in drug, pornography and other addictions, go into a life of fornication and tattoos and body piercings, which of course all but guarantees that they will end up divorced in a future marriage. Many people look at very conservative churches that preach excellent sermons, and they wonder, how is it that elders of such churches have adult kids none of whom are believers ? None of whom have God glorifying lives ? Well, this is why !! Because they have no biblical family values. They have American family values, they are no different than pagans ! It was THAT generation that has doomed the future of their children with no way of escape for them. This is a terrible testimony on Protestantism in America. And it’s the collapse of family and faith that has led to the collapse of Protestant religion in America. This portends horrible things to come, there’s no good news from this. People don’t see child abuse where there is much child abuse happening. Driving kids out of the home at the age of 18 is the worst kind of child abuse.
And instead of repenting in dust and ashes, the conservative pastors are focused on warning people regarding the evils of close-knit family structures, and non existent threats. They keep doubling down on promoting evil and failure. They focus on some isolated cases of abuse in such family structures and look at it with magnifying glass, in their self righteous pious rage.
Doug Wilson
People have been criticizing Doug Wilson for many of his family centric preaching, even going as far as calling him a heretic and a really terrible man. I have read couple of his books on family, and I would say I would agree with %95 of what he teaches, and his teachings have been helpful in my family and marriage life. There are things I totally disagree with him and sometimes he has the habit of shocking me. I myself sometimes can’t understand how a man THAT intelligent and biblically literate can sometimes say some of the things that he says. But yet, the man has done so much for American families in reversing the harmful effects of modernism. And by the way, those who had been criticizing him for many years, when Doug Wilson brought lawsuits against them for defamation and slander, ALL those people shut down their blogs and websites and totally disappeared from the internet. Doug’s critics turned out to be %100 slanderers and liars, stupid people.
But why would adult children want to go and live 100’s of miles away from their parents? Answer: Because they hate their parents and their parents hate them. Because their parents have been disgusting pieces of dirt, they are selfish sperm (and egg) donors. Their parents are lazy bums, total cowards with no faith, regardless how much theological knowledge they have. Their parents have made it crystal clear to them that they shouldn’t expect any help from them when they are adults. There are a few pastors in some conservative denominations who have started talking about this and do a lot of work to reverse the trend, creating conferences on family economics and home education, and often times their (so called reformed) denominations hate them and throw all sorts of dirt at them!! A good pastor friend of mine did massive work in this field, and his own conservative denomination subjected him to much wicked abuse and ridicule over decades. Good thing is he has no fear of men and keeps doing what he believes is the right thing to do.
Also, one other thing. Those modernists who force their kids out of the house at 18-20 years of age, they often stress self-reliance and independence that they want their kids to achieve by getting out of the house. It seems noble motive, but it’s really stupid. What it really achieves is, it transfers dependence from one place to another. Their kids stop being dependent on their parents, but they start becoming dependend on the government(or big corp.) for their jobs and food and healthcare and everything else. Some of them enter the medical field and become nurses, others become police officers, and many more join the defense industrial complex or the armed forces. And all of these industries are heavily subsidized by the government, by printed money, or by stolen money(taxes). These industries and institutions would all collapse the moment the government stopped financing them with printed money. Even the farming industry would collapse if the Federal Department of Agriculture stopped constantly giving them hundreds of billiions of dollars of “free money” every year. So, basically, that American self-reliance and independence is really a mirage. And needless to say, these idiotic self-reliance and independence seeking parents mostly have raised their kids by breaking the 8th commandmen, “thy shall not steal”, by sending their kids to taxpayer funded government schools. They are nothing but thieves and robbers by biblical standards. They only selectively and self righteously like to condemn those who receive some kind of welfare or food stamps, but when it’s them doing it then it’s fine.
In the biblical account there are cases where men lived away from their father’s house while unmarried. One case is Jacob. Though in this case it was due to the reason that his father Isaac had become extremely wicked and basicaly rejected God, and Jacob was fleeing from his murderous family, for his life. Another case is Moses. But we must understand that these cases happened because of very tragic circumstances. Jacob had Moses both had to flee their father’s homes because they were going to be murdered by evil family members or others. But the best example of a man living far from his father’s house is Cain, who killed his brother Abel and was wondering east of Eden, like a vagrant. And we know how that ended. It’s apparents that modern americans are much more like Cain than Abel, they are basically social and spiritual gypsies, never living in the community and place in which they were born.
Home Ownership, The American Dream
And speaking of mirages and self deceptions, the modern cult of home-ownership in America falls into that category. Some decades ago I was attending a mega-church in Sun Valley California which shall stay unnamed, and during one of the evening question and answer period a married man asked this famous celebrity pastor what advice he would give on buying a house as he was considering buying one. This pastor, always being self-confident and cocky, told the man that buying a house is an investment. Back then I was young and didn’t know much about these issues, but when I look back at it, that was the stupidest advice that anyone could give to that man. Of course, the man later went and “bought” a house, put himself under terrible financial stress, ended up divorced, and lost the house to foreclosure.
First of all, I am not here to give people advice on whether they should buy a house or not to buy a house because it’s a very complex decision and it depends on what each individual’s plans and means are. But I can tell you several things about buying a house in America, and generally speaking, buying a house is one of the stupidest thing anyone can do in America.
First of all, when you buy a house and call yourself a ‘homeowner’, you have to realize that you aren’t owning that home unless you have paid fully cash for that property. If you put %20 down and borrow %80 of the funds from a bank on a 30 year mortgage, you DO NOT own that property, it’s NOT yours, you are NOT a homeowner, stop being stupid and calling yourself a homeowner: the bank owns that house. You have the title under your name, yes, but unless you ammortize that loan (kill the debt) and get the bank (lender) Note free and clear, then you can’t call yourself a homeowner. And don’t ask an ignorant pastor for financial advice. Those mega wealthy pastors made their wealth by manipulating masses, they didn’t make their money in being wise and intelligent investors. A house can be called an investment if you buy a house in a way (structured deals) so that you can rent that house to someone else and have positive monthly cash flow, AND, you can get at least %5 CAP rate on it. If you don’t know what a CAP rate is, and you havn’t taken any property investment classes, then you shouldn’t get anywhere close to any investment property at all. You will hurt youself, hurt the seller, and hurt the bank all at the same time.
And here are the reasons why buying a house in which you live in CAN NOT be a good investment for you. First of all, you are getting into a 30 year mortgage debt obligation. Imagine this. Before, you lived in a $3000 a month rental property, Then you buy” a house and move into that house which, with all charges combined, incuding mortgage+taxes+maintenance+insurance amount to $6,500 a month, every month for 360 months, which is 30 years. Now, sit down and let that sink in, that’s every month. Before that you were paying about $3000 (max) for rent, and now you are paying $3,500 a month EXTRA, which is an aweful lot of extra money to come up with every month. Also, what could go wrong in the next 30 years that would prevent you paying out that much money every month ? Job Loss? Divorce? Business failure? Sickness? Death of a working spouse? What’s the chance that one of those things could happen in the next 30 years? %90? Well, it would mean the loss of your house and every penny you paid. You must also consider that when you sign the contract with the seller and the bank/lender, and when you start making your monthly mortgage payments, the banks have structured the laon lcontracts in such a way that whatever money you pay is FIRST going toward paying your interest part of the payments, NOT the principal. For example, if you buy an $800k house, and the 30 year cummulative interest on that is going to be about $600k, then every mortgage payment you make is essencially going to go towards covering that $600k interest, it’s not really lowering your $800k principal much. What this means is, if you buy a house to live in, then you won’t be able to sell your house without a massive loss. OK, if you buy a house you have closing costs of approximately $30k to begin with, then if you want to sell your house in the next 3 years, this is the approximate lossed you will incur. $30 closing costs when you buy, and another $30k closing costs when you sell. Within 2 years you will also have paid interest payments and taxes and other things in the amount of approx $130k or so. So within 2 years you are down to approx -$200k. This means that if you bought a house for $800k, and that house appreciated by $200 and reached a value of $1 million within 2 years (very unlikely scenario), then you are going to barely break even. And I can tell you what the situation is with people who bought houses. I have attended churches where some young couples with kids had bought a house. With 20 years of working hard and saving every penny, it went towards their down payment. And most of their income is going towards covering monthly mortgage and other related costs for the house. They don’t seem to have much money left after they pay their house payments. Moreoever, the appreciation of the property over many years doesn’t seem to offset the negating inflation forces in the economy. Here’s an example. If you bought a 3 bedroom and 2 bathroom (1300 sq ft) house in Glendale, CA in 1994 for $400k, and in 2024 that house has appreciated up to $1.2 million, you might think that you won by $800k. But you are wrong !! Based on the consumer price index the price of that house should have gone up to $1.7 million, not $1.2 million. And consumer price index is an inflation index calculated by a federal government agency, which means that real price inflation is much worse than they calculate. That $1.7 million figure is probably supposed to be $2.2 million.
The Horrid Effects of “Independence” and “Self Reliance”
Over several decades I have observed people who had gotten out (were driven out) of their parent’s home and had started living on their own, some alone and others with roommates. And this is what I saw every time with every case. These people over time had become some of the most selfish, stingy, stupid, sheepish, lacking common sense people that I had ever seen. The most amazing thing to behold was how detached from reality these people had become. And the more they grew older and older, instead of growing wise and wiser, all the above vices in them crystallized into rock solid personality cult. They had serious problems with loyalty, solidarity, faithfulness, hospitality. These are people who are in their 40’s and 50’s, married with kids, and they have carried over their youthful abomination of the life of loneliness into their adulthood. Here are some examples of their unbelivable stinginess and stupidity. I attend church for 10 years with these people, I invite them to my house, spend $400 on a first class meal, food fellowship for them, and in the next 10 years not a single one of them invites me to their house for food fellowship. They don’t want to spend a dime on a person who has spent hundreds or in some cases thousands of dollars for them. These people are filthy gypsies. They havn’t grasped the concept of biblical reciprocity. And the most amazing thing is that, they treat their very own children like this.
Sunday morning they attend church, and the moment they enter the church building they take their small kids and run to the kitchen of the church to seek free food. They open drawers and everything else, trying to find ANY food. Their kids are STARVING! And in winter time at 55 degree freezing cold weather, which LA humidity makes worse, these people on Sunday morning are wearing warm coats and clothing and boots, while their little children are literally running around in church, barefood with a very thin clothing on them. Ok, maybe I am stupid and don’t understand why they are doing this, and someone else can explain this bizzare behavior of such adults to me. Of course, their little children constantly catch cold and get sick, which explains why these idiots attend church once a month or once every other week. And we can safely conclude that if these people don’t love their own children, how can they love others in the church ? They CAN’T, and they DON’T.
Having been driven out of their ancestral homes at their late teen years, and lived alone without a family, these people have turned into very cold hearted selfish beasts, just like their selfish and stupid parents have been. And, since the American church is full of such people they don’t realize how defiled and foolish they are.
And yet, these are the kind of men that American girls seek to marry, those who don’t live with their parents/family. And this just tells you how much wisdom or total lack of it these women have. Let me tell you this, I was 36 when I got married and I was “still living with my parents”, but it would have cost me 100 times less if I lived alone. I got married, I have kids, I don’t “own” a home, I rent, and I can tell you now that I spend 10 times more money for my kids every month than those individualstic ones do. And almost every churches that I have attended in the past, usually with 50 or so attendees/members, I was in most cases giving %10 and in some cases %25 of the total church tithes. LOOL. This is not even counting my separate ministry of translating christian literature and printing, which is wholly financed by my own funds to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I bring these numbers for comparisons between those who move out of their family home, or are driven out, and those who stay with their parents untl they get married.
Of course, people have all kinds of reasons to move out of their family home, some might be ready to do that and it might end well for them, but generally speaking it’s one of the worse things that can happen to a person. These people are orders of magnitude more likely to get into all sorts of abominations and get into future divorce situations than those who live with their families and communities. And there are some who say that when they get out of the house and move 1000’s of miles from them, they can find a church family and other older people who can be as parents to them. Really? Those older people have driven their own kids out of their homes, what makes you think they are going to adopt other people’s children? But, it’s not uncommon to hear such absurdities from these category of (modern) people. No one is going to adopt you, no one is Paul in modern America dominated by pre-millennialism and a-millennialism. Your church pastor (or elders) IS NOT your father. And you can have 1000 very intelligent church pastors, they can’t replace your father. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:15 that you may have 1000 teachers in Christ, but they can’t replace one true father, who is worth more than 1000 pastors and elders.
I also believe that that life of “independence” has created one other substantial behavior in people, this time in women, who left their families and lived alone for many years before marrying, and now they are hundreds of thousands of miles away from their parents. It’s the effect of middle aged mini-skirt wearing women in church. Daughters do not (usually) wear mini skirts to church if their father or mother or brother are in their presence in church. But with the many years of living outside of their home, and after marrying and continuing to live far from their father’s home, a lot of these women are dressing pretty shamelessly. I have seen in numerous conservative churches where the elders’ middle aged (or even aged) wives come to church on Sunday morning in mini skirts, and they sometimes have to bend over to pick up something or to pick up their kid from the floor, and you are treated to live soft core pornography show. Some years ago a friend of mine told me that the only day in a week that you can know what color of underwear the wives of elders are wearing in most so called reformed churches then you should attend those churches on Sunday morning. They will voluntarily flash their underwear several time on Sundays, every Sunday! When pagans produce a movie they follow ratings standards, and label their movies as G rated, PG rated, R rated or X rated or whatever. But if you suggest in a church that there have to be dress codes, they will label you as an L, a Legalist, and a dangerous legalist. Or, they will say “pious spiritual” things such as,
1.. “well, you have to understand that the bible teaches that sin originates in the heart of man, not outside of the man”. It’s basically your fault and not the fault of the woman who has decided to do an X rated sex show in church on a Sunday morning. Or,
2.. “maybe you should go and sit in the front pews to avoid seeing such things and keeping your mind pure”.
OK, these 2 points are what you call the wisdom of man, or the words of carnal men, with the appearance of spirituality. They do not take into account what these 2 solutions that they offer will do to the unity and fellowship of the saints in that local church if people follow thru with these absurd advices. Or, here’s my short and effective soviet style solution: If your eye causes you to stumble then pluck it out, and if it doesn’t help then take the gun and aim it with your other remaining functional eye and shoot the harlot in the head, that’s causing you to stumble. It’s better that your body rot in prison and from there your soul go to heaven, rather than for your whole body and soul to be thrown into the lake of fire. (ok, some of that was humor and exaggeration to make a point).
Eschatology Matters
Is there a theological reason why the church people often choose to send their kids down the toilet drain of a life of loneliness away from their families, and why themselves are total self-absorbed losers ? I believe there is. I believe that one of the root causes of this is the teachings of Pre-Millenialist and A-Millennialist eschatologies, which I personally believe are pretty disgusting and demonic teachings. These are the beliefs of lazy and cowardly people. These are two different escatologies but they both lead to the above mentioned modernist pagan choices that these people make. And it’s one of the main reasons too that I believe that they don’t give a shit about raising wise and godly and mature children thru christian homeschooling and personal involvement. To show that, I can bring my own example of post-millennial faith. I believe that my own children are a gift and inheritance that God has given me so that I will raise them to be godly adults and try to support them as much as I can until I breath my last. God has given them to us so that we can be joyful, so we can mature, but most importantly God has given them to us so we can increase the Kingdom of Christ on Earth as it is in heaven. By simple calculation, if I have 5 kids and raise them to be christians and do everything for them to support their faith, and if this trend continues and my 5 kids grow up and marry christians and each one of them raises 5 of their own christian kids, then within 500 years I will have 250,000 descendants who are Christians, with massive influence in the world. Also, I spend a lot of time and money to properly cloth my children and take them to places (more money) where they can gain more experiences and wisdom and maturity under my and my wife’s constant supervision, and it takes me a ton of time and money to buy them school supplies and educate them myself, which means I am always intently watching their growth and maturity and I am %100 invested in their salvation and sanctification and earthly successes. This means that in the future when they grow into adulthood, if they tell me they want to go to this and that state university or city to live there alone, I’ll sit down with them and have a very long conversation as to why they want to do that and why they want to go and live far away from their parents and siblings. People who love each other don’t live far from each other. As adults, they are going to have total freedom in whatever they want to do, but these decisions aren’t going to be taken lightly. We are not gypsies to constantly move from one place to another, like Cain did, wandering around away from the presence of the Lord.
Amen.
PS.
My original article was about 40 pages, as I delved into the doctrine of the Trinity and how all of the above problems are caused by practially neglecting the Trinitarian principes of marriage and family, but I truncated the article to make it less than 20 pages. Maybe in the future I’ll have a part 2 of this where I discuss this aspect of the subject.