The sins for which repentance is so hard to find are those that give the greatest pleasure and fullest satisfaction. The bible speaks of the “pleasures of sin for a season.” If sin did not provide some immediate gratification at least, no one would sin.

If possible, it is even more difficult to sorrow over those things the bible calls sin and our society calls virtue. This is bound to make some folk uncomfortable and others down-right mad, but here I go. I’m talking about family. In the bible, there is but one family system: husband, wife, and biological and adopted children. Within this biblical family system, the primary duty of the man is to provide food, clothing, shelter, and security to his family, and the primary duty of the woman is to support her husband in his duties and to incubate, nurture, educate, and prepare the next generation through the miracle of motherhood. Madness! Sheer madness! Do I not know ours is an enlightened society in which people can form any manner of relationships and call them, “families”? And do I not realize how out-of-date I sound by saying a dual income couple supported by the state through its childcare and public education system is not biblical?

Let me address the complementarian family gifted us at Creation. A family that does not strengthen its mutual bonds and instead relies upon the state to provide for it is a weak social structure that is easily fractured by economic or political hardship. Our society promotes a form of self-reliance in which we are not mutually dependent within the family but rather are dependent on the state to provide our basic needs. The biblical ideal is a mutual dependence within the family and self-reliance without.

So let me say categorically that no “family” other than the God-given one is a family in the biblical definition. Pete B. and his partner are not a family. An unmarried woman who has children without “needing” a husband is not a family. A legal union of a man and a woman of separate families who are joined as a step-family because earlier marriages or cohabitations didn’t work out as hoped is not a biblical family. Yes, widows and widowers can unite and form a biblical step-family. While not the foundational union that is the basis of a strong church and nation, they are honored as mutually sustaining and supporting family units. But they must be the exception and not the rule. A biblical family is a man and a woman bound together in a life-long union with their biological and adopted children.

Let me go farther into this snake pit. Jesus said that anyone who divorces for any reason other that absolute marital betrayal and marries another is an adulterer/adulteress. (And less you are looking for an escape clause, stepping out of a marriage and entering into a series of long and short-term sexual relationships is adultery as well, and if there is an economic incentive attached, rent paid, vacations taken, gifts bestowed, it is prostitution.) I don’t know how to fix this one for the nation at large. Our society does not regard the marriage bond as unbreakable. If a woman is unhappy in her marriage, she is encouraged to break her vows and seek after happiness in another relationship. We are surrounded by the shipwrecks of failed and abandoned marriages. And, let’s be honest, those new relationships may be healthier and more fulfilling than the marriages cast aside. A 40-something is often, not always but often, a little wiser when it comes to understanding another’s character than a 20-year-old in the heat of passion. They may find greater happiness in forming step-families. Try repenting of that! Seriously, this is what the gospel calls us to. Jesus said, “Repent and believe the gospel!” And when called to repent of something that gives me great joy – it’s “Come on, man!” It’s going to take more than an academic exploration of the text to bring us to repentance. God himself must plant repentance in our hearts. We have to be brought to an understanding that as much as we might find individual happiness and mutual encouragement in this relationship, God indicates it to be against the interests of future generations within the Church and society at large. Broken marriages place greater demands on the state to meet the needs of women and children and in meeting those demands it becomes more totalitarian in its governance.

As I heard someone say recently, the War on Poverty has not eliminated poverty; it has created a poverty industry employing thousands of workers whose livelihood is found in perpetuating poverty, not finding ways to guide the poor out of their poverty. So, it is as well with the divorce industry. There is no money to be made strengthening marriages and making men, women, and children less dependent upon the state for their daily bread.

The Democrat-controlled Congress is debating and trying to pass Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. When you look at it closely, it is designed to make divorce more available and attractive, and to entice women to abandon their homes and children to the care and instruction of others and find fulfillment in the workplace. Who benefits? Definitely not the children, and not their mothers either. Fathers are made irrelevant. They are no longer essential to the survival of the family and they find meaning in sexual conquest, sports fanaticism, drug abuse, and urban violence. Womanhood is reduced to being an object of sexual pleasure, a womb to incubate a infant, and cheap labor to feed the consumption economy. And Children? They are barriers to their mothers’ psychological fulfillment and sources of wealth to the childcare and education industries. Everyone wins in the Build Back Better program except the American family.

I can’t lay the blame for the disintegration of the family on the Democrats alone. They are only marginally more anti-family than their Republican co-religionists. The family was first attacked by the serpent in Eden, and his assault has been unrelenting since. The devil hates the family because he hates the Creator who mad it in his image. Many of the great heroes of the Old Testament had little regard for a mutually sustaining union of a man and a woman facing the challenges of a sin-broken world together. Abraham was a polygamist. Jacob, aka Israel, was a polygamist. David was a polygamist. And who can forget Solomon the Wise, with his 300 wives and 700 concubines. (A concubine being a mistress or second-class wife who didn’t have to raise her own rent money.) But in our generation, the push to eliminate the biblical family as the basic social unit is accelerating. Bastardy has risen across all ethnic and social groups in America since the 1950s with its greatest damage being done in the Black urban and White lower classes. This weakened social structure makes Build Back Better a “necessity” and further erodes individual autonomy and freedom.

What then are we to do? Have we gone too far from God to return? I think not! None are so far removed from God’s will that they are beyond his reach. God has long arms! Can we repair what we have broken? No. When I was 18, I went down to Doc Webb’s Tattoo Parlor in San Diego and got a tattoo on the bicep of my left arm. Fifty-seven years later that tattoo is still there. It has lost much of its color and the design is faded, but it’s there and it will be there until this body decays in the grave and I am given a new, unmarked body at Christ’s return. But I never got another tattoo. So it is with the family. You may have sinned against God, your spouse, and your children. You may have formed a family that is not a family by bible standards. That’s not fixable. But you can repent. And by the grace of God, you can say from this day forward I shall live in the light of God’s word and his plan for my life. You can tell your children you wronged them and you can do all in your power to recover that which has been lost and not pass your failure to future generations. Set your mind on hewing as close to God’s ideal as it is possible for you to hew. Do not excuse yourself. If you are married – stay married. If you are now single – stay single. No wed; no bed. No one has ever died from lack of sex, but millions have died from it. Take the oath, “As for me and my house, from this day forward we will serve the Lord.”

Two Red-billed Oxpeckers were arguing about where they should steer “their” rhinoceros as he walked about on the African Savanna.

In case you’re not familiar with Red-billed Oxpeckers, they are a bird that lives in a symbiotic relationship with rhinos. They ride along cleaning the rhino of ticks and other parasites that attach themselves to its hide, and serve as sentries providing aerial surveillance to give the rhino the alarm when hunters and other predators are nearby. In return none of the oxpeckers’ natural enemies are going to mess with them as long as they are on their living tank and they always have a plentiful supply of tasty treats.

So here were these two oxpeckers arguing about whether they should take their rhino to the watering hole where they could get a drink and hang out with some of their kind, or whether they should take him to the shade of the acacia tree where they could get out of the sun and maybe grab a snack on something other than ticks. Meanwhile the rhino grazed on oblivious to the heated discussion taking place on its back. He had more important things to occupy his time than listening to a couple of birdbrains jabbering over watering holes and acacia trees. He would go to the watering hole when he was thirsty, and he would go to the acacia tree when he was in the mood for a little shade and a nap. But the oxpeckers squawked and screeched and just knew they could drive their tank wherever they willed.

Humans are the oxpeckers riding on the back of this planet. Those who see themselves the gods of this world, the politicians and “scientists”, think they are in command of the earth’s changing climate and just know they can control viral infestations. But in truth, the climate changes regardless the human component. If we are to accept the current view of geologic time, the earth cycles between ice ages and tropical warmth, and it is presently at the tail-end of an ice age – a period within the cycles when life as we know it is optimal. So here we are with a slowly warming planet with no real control over how its climate cycles, and like those oxpeckers, those who preen themselves as the lords of the universe chatter and squawk about carbon (an element essential to our very existence) and weather patterns. They cannot steer the rhino but they pride themselves on being able to do so.

As with the climate, these gods are absolutely powerless in the face of a new virus. They flutter about telling all the other oxpeckers how they can control it. But instead of making life better for their fellow creatures, they worsen the situation. A virus that would cull the herd of its weak and old and then join the roster of annoying infections becomes a means of tearing down the social structures that have served us well for generations and creating a society that better serves these gods. Millions are in economic distress, children have been deprived of educational and social development, people are starving for meaningful connection and are suffering mental illness with its consequent drug abuse and suicide all thanks to the oxpecker gods deluding themselves that they can control the rhino.

Humans are endowed by their Creator the ability to adapt to the world, but not to adapt the world to themselves and when our gods attempt to do so they usually create a mess. They are just oxpeckers chattering loudly as our rhino goes where it will.

Revelation 13:15–17
And it (the beast with lamblike horns) was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. (ESV)

King County, the county just north of where I live, has a six-month mandate that no one may enter a public space like a restaurant or sports arena without a vaccine certificate, aka vaccine passport, or a recent (3-day) negative Covid test. Imagine that! A six-month mandate! Now almost 1/3 of all Washington residents live in King County and what happens there infects the rest of the state, so while my county hasn’t gone that far into insanity YET, it may not be far off because we now have a Destructocrat-majority county council as well.

Anyway, whether the insanity infects my county or not, I was watching a news segment last night as one of the local newsies was interviewing fans going in to watch the Seahawks as well as patrons of a sports bar across the street from the stadium. They were just singing the praises of vaccine passports and masks. Now, of course, the newsies are lickspittles of the governor and the county executive and this reporter no doubt sought out the most enthusiastic supporters of the mandate – plus those who refuse to submit are staying away from Seattle’s restaurants and arenas and coming into my county to eat and drink, yet the enthusiasm of the interviewees astounded me! They loved being told what to do to keep themselves “safe”!

Now let me hasten to say the Covid mandates, as coercive and anti-science as they are, are not the Mark of the Beast. They do, however, let us know how easily the Mark will be imposed upon those who are not marked as Christ’s own. Imagine for a moment how this world of ours will react when a series of natural disasters occur that put the survival of the race in doubt. And then imagine a “savior” arriving who tells the remaining governments of the world that he has come to save the race IF they will do exactly as he tells them. And what he tells them will cause all who comply to reject the lordship of Jesus Christ. I don’t know exactly what he will say or what he will do, but bowing to his mandates will make perfectly good sense – to all who are not guided by the Scripture and the Holy Spirit.

The Mark of the Beast has both a physical component and a spiritual component. It will be similar in nature if not in fact to the offering of incense on Caesar’s altar; the incense was physical, the offering of it acknowledged Caesar’s divinity. Just as the vaccine passport is the physical evidence of obedience, the willing compliance with the mandates is the spiritual component. If people so willingly comply when the threat is minimal, imagine the rush to receive the Mark when the race is dying in the 100s of millions.

The question before us, however, is not whether we’ll be vaccinated, or wear a mask, or kiss the hand as we bow to the mandates. The question is, what are we doing with Christ right now, today? If Jesus Christ is not the most important one in your life today, odds are he won’t be when the Mark is imposed and you will either embrace it wholeheartedly or take it just to live a while longer. But rejecting Christ is to reject life because he gives eternal life to all who belong to him, so don’t go down that road.

Why are people so interested in the Gabby Petito case?

Gabby was a petite, relatively attractive as all fit youth are, woman who incidentally was white and who was living the feminist dream. (I mention her ethnicity because it is true that were she of one of the minority ethnicities, say a black or brown one, it would have merited no more than a column inch or two in the local paper. It is sad that the only women valued in our over-sexed culture are young, petite, and white, but that’s just a fact.) Her death, (probably) at the hands of her lover, makes a lie of the myth that a woman can do anything a man can do, and do it safely and without regard or regret. My Body, My Rules only works when you have the muscle to back it up.

The big lie that has infected American women and all others who live in the so-called West, i.e., those nations that are heir to the democratic philosophy that was birthed by Christianity, is that there is no reason to honor and respect the biological and psychological distinctions of the sexes. The idea that God created our race male and female, and endowed these two sexes with distinctives that make their mutual support essential to the survival of the race is treated as an anachronism from the age of dinosaurs. The full weight of opinion makers and government is dedicated to erasing the thought that women are not men’s physical equal, and that they are such to ensure they are available to birth and nurture the next generation as their husbands provide protection from the elements, enemies, and want. Mr. Biden’s social infrastructure trillions are dedicated to making the family unnecessary and to further the idea that men and women do not need each other for the race to survive. Women were not intended by God to be competitors with men but their complement. Women complete men and men complete women in marriage and in community.

So Gabby was out there on the road living the dream. Marriage and family? Who needs it? She was a free spirit spreading her wings. And she was with a man who had the same disdain for this most essential of human relationships that has been passed down to us from the Garden. I don’t know why he (probably) killed her; most likely in a fit of anger over some minor matter. But regardless their mental and emotional state at the moment of her death, what is absolutely true is neither of them honored their created purpose in their relationship. They had built their life together on shifting sand when they needed a life built on the Rock, and in that tempestuous moment her feminist ideals were no match for his brute strength.

I have great sympathy for these now dead young people. They believed the lie. They believed there was no higher authority than their own dreams and desires. Rejecting the family that God had established in Eden, they rejected both his authority and his grace to guide and direct their lives. And they paid the price for that rejection. Theirs, thankfully, is a relatively rare outcome of kicking God to the curb, but no one can do so without cost. Think of all the children slaughtered in the womb. Think of all the children born into fatherless homes. Think of the senseless violence in our communities as feral youth roam our streets raised without the stability of a marriage and without purpose and without hope. Think of women battered by men who need not do better. My list could go on ad nauseam, but the picture is clear: a life lived outside the boundaries established by an all-wise Creator is a life destined to failure, pain, and death – not always in the here, but assuredly in the hereafter.

But back to the initial question: why are people so involved with Gabby’s death? Why are there protesters waving signs outside the home of Brian’s parents? My answer is this: feminist women (mostly) and others with a there-is-no-god-but-me attitude have been hit with the reality that no amount of human laws and institutions can protect a person from the consequences of rejecting God. Laws “protecting” women from the consequences of their lifestyle choices do no such thing and it is illusory to think otherwise.

Why did God institute the family? Is the system of father, mother, and offspring the best basic building block (love that alliteration) for a healthy society? Or is it a relic of a patriarchal past? That is the question, the one after, “Is the God who revealed himself in the bible real or is he a leftover of a more primitive past?” that most clearing defines what it means to be human and how we as humans are to organize ourselves to best fit in the world around us.

You have no doubt seen the picture of Mr. Biden’s Transportation Secretary and his fellow sodomite lounging on a hospital bed with the infants they had purchased to be their children. They are the secular ideal of the American family. And this is the family vision that Mr. Biden’s 3.5 trillion-dollar plan is designed to support. Virtually every feature of his “human infrastructure” plan is designed to undermine and subvert the family structure God instituted.

I know it is not a popular thought, but the family structure outlined in Genesis 3 & 4 is the one best suited to build healthy communities and societies. In the God-designed plan, husband and wife have distinct and complementary roles. The man is to labor to put food on the table, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads. The woman is to bear the next generation and to raise and nurture those children that they might become responsible adults carrying those roles for future generations. The man is not more important than the woman, nor the woman the man. Their roles, though different, fit together to make a perfect whole and form the basic building block for every system of family, clan, community, state, and nation.

So, what’s wrong with Mr. Biden’s plan? It replaces family with state. In the name of freeing women from the drudgery of raising children, the state will provide subsidized or free infant and childcare so the mother can enjoy the freedom of the office or the warehouse instead of the confinement of the home. Mr. Biden would replace the education of the young child at the feet of its mother for indoctrination by the state in pre-school or early childhood education. Instead of the child receiving and reflecting the teachings of its parents, it will reflect the state-approved principles and practices of a godless secularism.
The state giving a child payment sounds like a good idea, right? Who doesn’t was to see children clothed, fed, and housed! But where’s the father in this formula? Mr. Biden’s plan is designed to make fathers inconsequential at least, and unnecessary to the well-being of their women (I was going to say, “wives,” but marriage with all its responsibilities and pleasurable duties ceases to have value in this plan) and children. By replacing fathers as the primary providers for, and protectors of, their families, it makes men the equivalent of those males in the animal kingdom whose only function is to demonstrate their reproductive benefit by dominating the other males of their species, and to provide sperm to propagate the next generation. We have feral young men in our urban areas (and some rural ones as well) whose only function in life is to dominate through violence and to plant their seed in every receptive womb. They contribute nothing to the family system other than the occasional sperm and nothing to society other than mayhem and murder. But the Biden plan subsidizes this vision of society.

And then the part of Mr. Biden’s plan that “should” be near and dear to my heart: eldercare. Having made the state the primary provider of childcare instead of the family, his plan would make the care of the aged the responsibility of the state as well. Now this does a number of things. First and foremost, it tells adults that they do not need to marry and form families in order to have the time immemorial system where parents provide for their children while they are young, and the children provide for their parents when they are old. No, the state will replace parents for the young, and adult children for the old. Then it is also a great wealth transfer system. Instead of keeping resources at the most elemental level possible, in the family, the Biden scheme transfers wealth from the family to the eldercare industry. His scheme makes it advantageous to put the old into warehouses designed for the purpose and paying for it through taxation. The eldercare and medical industry then enrich the political hierarchy through political contributions and wealth transfers. (How many well-placed politicians leave office poorer than when they entered?) Ultimately it finalizes the breakup of the family by making the family unit subsidiary to the state instead of foundational to it. There is no need of family to support one another. This will all be done by the state, although admittedly, by the prevailing moral standard of the state. It will determine what support is appropriate and to whom it should be given.

Much has been said about the benefits the Biden scheme will confer upon “people of color.” Well, POCs only need the benefits because of the havoc previous Democrat schemes such as Mr. Johnson’s “Great Society” have done to the Black and Brown family. They, and every other family, would benefit far more from policies that reinforce the family of husband, wife, and children, than from policies that demolish the family and create an artificial, overarching state to replace it.

In the Mosaic Law there were instructions on how to deal with mildew infestations of the house. The first step was to thoroughly clean the infested area. If the mildew returned, the portions of the house that were contaminated were to be removed and replaced. Finally, if the restoration process was unsuccessful, the entire house was to be demolished and the rubble discarded away from human habitation. America is infested with progressive “mildew.” If it allowed to spread it will eventually take over the house and the only way to cleanse her of this disease will be to tear it down and build back better.

Today is a “Make Your Decision” day. We can allow Mr. Biden and his team in the Congress force policies upon us that guarantee our eventual decay, decline, and destruction, or we can tell him and his cohorts of chaos that, No, we will maintain the social order established by God and not replace it with the Frankenstein of their creation.

Long live the God-given family!

“Murderers must die!” is a divine command.

When reading the bible one must ask, “Why is this here?” The bible isn’t just some random collection of folktales from a bygone and more primitive age; it is a holy history lesson. It was written to inform and enlighten those who would come later of how and why to live.

Genesis 9:6, God’s statement of why the flood, is clear: anyone who takes the life of another for any reason other than accident or self-defense (as made more clear elsewhere in the law) is to pay for his crime with his own life.

The first murder in human history is recorded in Genesis 4. This murder of Abel by his brother, Cain, is also the first human death recorded. Sin was new to the race and these new sinners had no concept of how sinful sin really was. To guide the race in its understanding of sin, God commanded that the guilty go free in this instance. As an aside, whenever we wonder why God allows the wicked to prosper and sin to flourish, we need only look to the first 11 chapters of Genesis. The absolutely worse thing we can do to someone who has embraced sin is to leave them to the consequences of their desire to be their own god. Sin pays a terrible wage in sorrow, disappointment, cruelty, and death. A sinner left unpunished will take an entire civilization into the pit. And so with Cain. He was not immediately punished for murdering his brother and the consequence was such degradation and depravity of the race that God’s only recourse was to push the restart button and begin afresh.

Murders are up almost by 1/3 this year over last. I was listening to the district attorney for Philadelphia decrying the prevalence of guns on the street and the senseless slaughter of men and women on the streets of the City of Brotherly Love. If I could, I would have shouted at him, “When was the last time Philadelphia executed a murderer within two years of the crime?” The answer would be, “Decades ago.” The secular left have used the law against the people by protecting murderers from the due penalty for their crimes. Where the Proverbs makes clear that God hates both the condemnation of the innocent and the acquittal of the guilty, the “enlightened” progressives in both church and law have determined that the innocent should suffer at the hands of the guilty.

Philadelphia is not unique. Texas is executing a man for a murder he committed 30 years ago. Executing 30 years after the fact is not justice. Justice demands immediate retribution. Our cities are awash in blood for two reasons: 1) because justice goes crying in the street and men with guns set out to bring about the justice the law denies them; and 2) the law is a toothless nag.

America is in need of a spiritual revival and a legal reset. Progressivism must be rejected as proven never to work when embraced. It must be rejected by the church as an attempt to make man appear wiser than his creator, and it must be rejected by the people as always leading to social disintegration and decay.

Crime must be punished appropriately by the people for the protection of the spirit as well as the body.