I realize that this will be a 180-degree departure from what I normally write, but I’ve felt it stirring in me for a long time. After researching everything I did for “Manifesto” and the roots of political correctness, I knew I had to put my thoughts to paper about this aspect of warfare…and it is warfare. I kept wondering why the Progressive Left was pressing so hard to promote sex education to kids, making abortion and morning after pill, etc. to children who can’t even conceive yet.
It’s kind of like selling ice to Eskimos…they don’t need it. Since I have a daughter entering second grade this year, I am terrified at what she will be exposed to in the subsequent years in the public education system. But I began asking myself why the current administration’s focus is so singularly fixated on the innocence at that age, and then the “BINGO-Light” just clicked on over my head.
Caveat emptor, I’m not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or clinically trained head-shrink. So I’m not an expert in the clinical sense, but I was an American boy growing up in the 70s and 80s right before society completely lost all its marbles, and in that light, have expertise on this particular subject. I grew up riding bikes without helmets, climbing trees without nets, getting into fist- fights and wrestling matches.
Dirty, scraped and bruised, and I can say that I’ve had my fair share…as, it should be. I can remember pummeling someone or them pummeling me, and at the end of the day becoming fast friends with them. I think for boys, at least, fighting clears the air between two people. Soldiers understand this because once you’ve spilt blood together the battle becomes personal. It’s no longer about politics or governments (you fight for the guy to your left, and to your right). It is a very bonding thing indeed.
I think in the growing process a boy grows up and shuns the opposite sex as “cootie-carriers” until their early teen years. At that age, you don’t know what love really means other than it is something that you say to those who you really care about. Even then, you don’t like saying it out loud for fear of being heard. I grew up having best friends between the three moves that eventually landed me in the city I would finally call my hometown, and in each instance, we did what boys do.
What you have with your best bud is not love or anything you recognize at that level. What you have is that connectedness with another living human soul. But at a certain age, you realize that even your buddies can’t provide for what’s missing in your ever-changing emotions you have within you. Girls are genetically programmed to come to grips with this at a much younger age, which is why they mature faster than boys. But what a best friend can’t provide, one comes to realize is, girls can, and voilà, girls become interesting.
But suppose you remove those boundaries away at an age before you come to this conclusion? Now boys can take what they thought was friendship and try to make the proverbial square peg fit into the round whole. You stump the tree before it’s first molting, so to speak. Study after study will show that children, who are sexually abused, often struggle with sexual identity and/or sexual security well into their adulthood. If the lines were blurred between what it is to be a boy, and a girl, by the time a kid gets into his older years, he/she may have multiple same sex relationships under their belt confounding the already confusing process of growing up into an adult.
Just this last week, California’s governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown signed into law, what I call the Free Gender Bender Rules, to children before the age that they even know what gender identification is. Its unstated goal is to create sexual confusion. Boys and girls, who had naturally established boundaries, no longer have them there. What is happening now is the government and the god of this age want to open “Pandora’s box” and blur those lines so that what was forbidden territory, is now okay to freely trespass. God help us.
I believe this isn’t just for boys, but girls as well. As a father of three girls it is becoming harder and harder to shield them from the onslaught of a sexualized society. Growing up, I was inadvertently exposed to pornography at a young age. First was at a gas station, and then again through a neighbor. It lit a fire in me that I didn’t know I had or needed. The very first time that I can remember, someone had placed an adult magazine in the comic book section. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but at that moment, I remember thinking that I should hide. Or hide what I was doing. I think I felt very much like what Adam and Eve must have in that moment they took a bite of that forbidden fruit and had their eyes opened.
I used to not understand our government these days. On one hand, they promote sex education to kindergarteners long before they know or even need to know what it is. They offer birth control to children without parental consent long before they could ever need birth control. Despite the ability to clamp down on vast pools of pornography readily accessible to the young and old on the Internet (which the government has its tentacles all over), it tolerates it. Highly sexualized ads, songs, books, movies, and television shows, blast the American public 24/7…Exposure is unavoidable.
But on the other hand, the government has come down heavy handed against child molestation, child pornography, and rightfully so. So on one hand, it is either promoting the sexualization of children through education or complicity by the toleration of it as entertainment. The government uses the iron fist treatment on those who perpetrate the acts…perpetually tolerating what it is keeping forbidden. It is a steel trap ensnaring all either by tacit acceptance or by actively participating. It is as old as Satan himself, the old “bait and switch.”
Just think about how much the government monitors the Internet. Think about all that information that is being recorded and stored in vast data vaults in San Antonio, Texas, Bluffdale, Utah, and Ft. Mead, Maryland. The potential for blackmail will be unprecedented.
Assessment
Ultimately Satan’s one goal is to thwart the spreading of the gospel. He uses guilt and sin to silence those who would spread it and uses it to destroy those who would hear it. I’ve struggled with pornography growing up. I didn’t know how damaged I was until I got married and had to really struggle (my wife and I both) to make our marriage work. Marriage is hard. It’s more than just feelings and emotions, but a commitment to God, ourselves, and to our children to make it a fight worth fighting for.
When I was a boy, fighting often strengthened a relationship with a former foe. That’s always what has puzzled girls and women on how two men can pound each other’s lights out, and then go drink a beer together afterward. I can only explain that it is what it is…clearing the air. It’s the same with marriage though. After a fight (not a fist fight), my wife and I will come back stronger than we were before because we’ve spilt emotional blood, sweat, and tears over whatever it was we were arguing about in the first place. But first we go to the Lord in prayer. Lots of prayer.
Granted, this doesn’t work for everyone. I think first and foremost, a marriage has to be sanctified in the eyes of God for it to have a snowballs chance in heck of making it…especially in today’s world. Adam and Eve had it easy…they just had one tree to contend with. We have it on every corner. I think God knew that ahead of time, which is why our age has been deemed the “age of grace through faith” rather than a continuation of rules and regulations. But because our salvation is so simple, and eternal, those who reject it in this age will be judged the harshest.
Jesus told His disciples that the men of Sodom would rise up in condemnation of their generation if they rejected the Messiah to His face. The Queen of Sheba would mock those in Jesus’ day because one greater than Solomon had come, but they would resist him. Yet today, we have the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and the complete Word of God at our disposal. We have history. We now have the technology to be able to know with relative certain knowledge how we got to where we are. Although our temptation is greater than ever before, so too, is our ability to learn and know.
God is not the author of confusion, Satan is. He wants to get as many people as sexually confused, compromised, and enslaved as possible to prevent the gospel from going out. I’d say he was doing a darn good job too by the looks of it. So how do you fight what seems overwhelmingly impossible odds.
Gettysburg
In Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a line popped out at me and resonated on a level I had never fully appreciated before. As Christians, we are to die daily to ourselves on the battlefields of our life. We are to give that last full measure of devotion daily, by crucifying the flesh in order to become that good, acceptable, perfect will of God. Jesus didn’t say pick-up your sword and become a gladiator. He didn’t tell us that we would achieve spiritual perfection once we learned the art of spiritual warfare. Rather…He said:
“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” (Luke 9:23).
We can’t fight for the soul of a nation, if we continue to fight the civil war that rages within each of us…that being the flesh versus the spirit. I understand more clearly the words, which Paul wrote in that “in our weakness, He is made strong.” It is to die daily to self, and by doing so we tear down the strongholds of sin in our own life. Truly, it’s not the flesh we wrestle against as much as the principalities and dark forces which stand in opposition against the believer every day. It is hand-to-hand combat, sweaty and grimy guerrilla warfare fought over the victorious life we so often seek, but rarely find. Our enemy knows he can’t defeat us, because we’ve already won, but he can take the fight out of us by using the arsenal of tools he has at his disposal: pride, guilt, sorrow, anger, lust, hate, and apathy.
As that day draws closer, the god of this age is increasing his intensity because he knows time is running short. He has been given more control over the governments of our day, so it should not perplex the Christian. This is not all accidental. Satan needs the US removed from power in order to bring about his Antichrist’s world government. He had to go after the “heart and soul” of a one-time Christian nation. We should pray for our leaders. Pray for those who seek to take innocence away from the innocent, and pray that they soon see the errors of their way. With over 50 million abortions, millions more damaged by sexual abuse and predatory legislation, our nation is quickly storing up wrath on a scale that could only said be inspired by Satan.
Remember what Jesus said…
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).
How much longer will He hold His hand of judgment back?
All I can say is: Maranatha…come quickly Lord.