Allen Jackson - Sovereignty of God and Gender - Part 1
I want to continue a series we began in an earlier session with a general heading of «Ideas, Understanding & Revelations». It’s a little abstract because it’s really a collection of ideas that I want to process with you, things that have become an important part of my own understanding and our community’s understanding, really, of faith and life and spiritual growth. Our faith is not a one-time experience. I don’t believe it’s intended to be such. It’s intended to be a journey where we grow and learn and mature just as we have to through our lives physically and emotionally. So I’ve called it «Ideas, Understandings and Revelations». From time to time, I will say, «I’ve had an idea».
And for the people who work with me, that’s usually uncomfortable. For my poor wife, it’s often… requires medication, because not all my ideas are good ones. I’ve just had another one. They’re rather infrequent. Every few years one drifts through, you follow what I… But understanding is a little different. It’s an idea that has been framed by experience. It’s no longer just a thought or a concept. There’s enough experience around it that it has some guard rails to it. And from giving exercise to ideas, you gain some experience and from that, hopefully, we gain some understanding. And then from time to time God sovereignly gives us revelations. He gives us insight and understanding, not something that we gain by hours of study or diligence or self-discipline. It’s as if somehow God pulls back a curtain and something that’s been obscure or unclear comes with a clarity, maybe not fully understood, but with a clarity that you didn’t have previously.
I’ve benefited from all of those. You’ve, I’m sure, experienced that. You read your Bible and you’re reading a very familiar passage and you happen to read it on a particular day, and it’s as if it’s illuminated. God’s given you a gift. The Spirit of God has given you not just understanding, but he’s given you an insight beyond research. Well, there’s some ideas, we’re living, I refer frequently to current culture as the theater of the absurd. And we’re living in a time when observable truth is often denied in the public square. And it’s disorienting. It’s like you’re looking, it’s like the sun’s coming up in the east and there’s some talking head with lots of letters at the end of their name going, «Oh, actually it comes up in the south».
Yeah, and so understanding the principles of scripture and the Word of God, we looked at that in the previous session, are so valuable. In this session, I want to take a few minutes and explore a couple of ideas. The first one has to do with the sovereignty of God in gender. You know, one of the fundamental principles of scripture is that God is sovereign. It’s kind of a fancy word. The simplest definition for that means that I know is that God can do what he wants when he wants, and he doesn’t need anyone’s approval. And there are aspects of our lives that reflect the sovereignty of God. Excuse me, they don’t reflect our choice, our preference. It wasn’t something we worked up to or we earned or we qualified for. It’s not about good or bad. God made a choice: our parents. God chooses them.
That’s what makes that commandment where you’re supposed to honor your father and mother. God chose them, they’re not all great. I’m not talking about your mama. Everybody getting a little tense, man. You don’t wanna meet Pastor at the church. Well, I mean, it’s a mixed bag, but the reality is God and his sovereignty chose our parents. A few years ago I went with a medical team to the Amazon basin in South America and we were really in some very remote places traveling by boat down rivers and I remember walking into the jungle and I met people who have no routine access to things like electricity. Many of whom will live in a very limited arena for their whole lives, and it was so real to me that the only difference in their life and my life happened to be the circumstance of my birth.
And I didn’t choose that. I had nothing to do with that. It’s the sovereignty of God. It’s why a just God is ultimately our judge because it requires an ability beyond anything we possess to level all of that. But God is just. There’s such hope in that. When you see someone that you think has some unfair advantage, don’t be angry at them or some system understand God is just. We’ve entrusted our lives to him. There’s such freedom in that. It helps me offload selfish ambition that’s so determined to get myself first and to be ahead and to demand my way or my rights because I trust the sovereignty of God and the justice of God, the integrity of God, the character of God. One of the awkward things we’re watching these days is people that have been asking for authority to lead us have been robbing us blind.
And that’s not about one party or another, folks. The people that have had their snouts in the trough have worn all sorts of labels. It’s uncomfortable. Another expression of the sovereignty of God is our gender, our biological sex. We don’t choose that. And it’s one of those observable truths that at the moment has been muddied in the public square.
People say, «Well, how do you identify»? It doesn’t really matter. I mean, I could identify as an eagle, but it doesn’t mean I could jump off the roof and fly. And I don’t say that to make light of or to mock people who would have some confusion around their biological sex. I say it to mock a culture that says you can choose that. That’s insane. It’s about the sovereignty of God and it’s not about lesser or greater, weaker or stronger. Because I promise you a just God, a God of righteousness and holiness and purity, will treat us in a way that is appropriate. Now I understand human civilizations don’t do that and cultures don’t always do that, but God does. He’s the ultimate arbiter.
So I wanna walk through that. There’s so much confusion. I picked, I’m gonna, and we can’t do the whole thing in any single session, but I wanna start at least with something I didn’t finish in the previous session. We were talking about men, husbands, and fathers. They’re three roles that are available to the male of the species. You know, one of the things that’s happening right now is language is being manipulated. The definitions are being changed and it creates tremendous confusion. And you have to pay a little bit of attention because they don’t usually announce, you know, with like a «I’m gonna change the meaning of this word». But marriage is one of those words that’s been redefined. Well, marriage, that’s not a political topic. It doesn’t begin with our legal system. It’s a biblical concept. God initiated marriage. He said, «For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother».
Marriage between a man and a woman was God’s idea. It’s not a political idea, but the assignment then of the people of God is to introduce those God ideas into the cultures in which we live, no matter what nation we come from or what system we find ourselves in, because in God’s design, it’s the best possible way for human beings to make their journey through time. It gives our children the best opportunities. Yes, there’s some data to support all of that, but without the data, it’s God’s design. And understanding our roles as men, husbands, and fathers is not just a message for the men because the women have to be on board with it. If you hate it, if you resent it, if you oppose it, if you fight it, not only is it disruptive in your life and your relationships and your family, you find yourself in opposition to the purposes of God.
I’m not asking you to agree with me. I’m asking you to take time to give enough attention to the Word of God that you understand what a sovereign God has handed to us so that we can flourish in our journey through time and to acknowledge that our culture for quite some season now has been very aggressive in opposing these biblical worldview ideas. And tragically, we’ve even been training our ministers in this way for several decades now. I’ve had that privilege of sitting in some very celebrated institutions while they were training people to lead churches in the most ungodly things. We shouldn’t be shocked at that. It’s why so many voices for truth these days are not emanating from churches.
Truth is being told, tragically not as frequently from the churches as we would like, but it’s being told. I would submit to you that one of the reasons that we’ve arrived at a place where gender confusion, gender dysphoria, or that we have men competing in women’s sports and we say absurd things like, «There’s no differences between men and women physically,» with like, straight faces and people with PhDs and important positions, and I’m like, «Huh»? But if you say anything, there’s punitive responses and anger and resentment and labels start to get attached to you.
And so many of us have been bullied into silence and intimidated into acting like we don’t notice that the emperor doesn’t have any clothes. But I think the way we got here is because the church stopped talking about gender roles. We were so co-opted by secular ideas and values that we came to church and we would sing our religious songs and we would recite a sinner’s prayer because we’d like to go to heaven, but we’ve been so indoctrinated, so co-opted by culture that we stopped holding out the biblical principles and now the culture has reached a point of absurdity and it’s gonna take a bit of a lift. It’s gonna take some courage.
My dad was a veterinarian. Most of you know that, or many of you do, and for years he had a little bulletin board in his clinic, and when you came in, when the clients would come in, the bulletin board was there for a lot of reasons, but there was a cartoon on it for years. And it was a dog in the backseat of the car and the owners were taking it someplace and one of the other dogs wasn’t getting to travel. So the dog in the car has his head out of the window and he’s taunting the dog that’s still in the lawn and he said, «Ha ha. They’re taking me to the veterinarian and I’m gonna get tutored».
I was involved in a lot of that through the years with dogs and cats and horses. Well, if you’ll allow me, one of the challenges we have in the contemporary church is too many of the men have been tutored. I can start with the science. You neuter an animal typically for one of two reasons. You want to inhibit reproduction or you want to reduce aggression. And a lot of times it’s really the second that’s more important. Well, I would submit to you just a casual observation of the church today would suggest that what we laughed at is really supported by the evidence. Our ability spiritually to reproduce, the church participation is at the lowest levels in history as the percentage of our cultures.
My lifetime corresponds with one of the most precipitous declines of Christian influence in any culture in the history of the Christian church. Our values: they took prayer out of schools and it wasn’t a big deal because we’d already taken it out of our homes. They said, «We don’t wanna post the Ten Commandments anymore in our schools,» and we didn’t say much. We put in metal detectors. They told us not to bring our faith to work, that it wasn’t welcome in a corporate setting, and so we took off our Christian images and removed our Bibles from our desks and we said yes. I mean, I could give you example after example after example. For all of our talk and our boasting and our preening and our posturing about how we care for children, they’re less safe today than at any time in my lifetime. That’s the truth. And that’s not the politician’s fault. That’s not the culture’s fault.
That’s not some political party’s fault. That’s not the university’s fault, folks, that’s the church has stumbled. And the primary responsibility for that has to begin with men, but before the women elbow their husbands, we need the women to help us rear, guide, and release godly men to become godly husbands and godly fathers. I mean, the other side of this visit, our birth rates are at historic lows. Masculinity is labeled toxic in the public square, and we just all kind of shrug our shoulders and go, «Yeah, we’ll try to be more sensitive». Gender confusion, ignoring the sovereignty of God, we put people on the Supreme Court, the most important legal body in our nation, that are unwilling to define what a woman is.
Then we stand around going, «That makes perfect sense to me». No, it doesn’t. I’d rather somebody not be making significant decisions that doesn’t have the courage to identify biological sex. But I wouldn’t point that at any single individual. It’s a much larger issue. Those people are voted on, supported, they reflect the opinion of many. I mean, you’ll hear absurd things say that, you know, we don’t want to even refer to men and women. We want to talk about birthing people or we’ll talk about someone who’s biologically male having the ability to nurse a child. I mean, we are addled and confused. We have truly turned our back on the design manual. And the church has been very reluctant to talk about gender roles. One of the shifts that’s taking place is how we define, how we even define a good father. You know, these aren’t new ideas. We’ve had men and husbands and fathers for a long, long time.
And the 21st century didn’t make us so enlightened that we can cast off all of the previous learning from all the previous generations. Even science stands on the shoulders of those who preceded it. It’s about observation and implementation of observable, measurable facts. I’m an advocate. But we’ve redefined it. I’ve sat down with a legal pad and made a rather lengthy list of the characteristics that are current cultural discussions of good fathers, and I don’t really disagree with very many of them. I’m not suggesting to you that they’re evil, but I’m suggesting to you it’s a significant shift in how it’s defined. I’ll give you a short sample. We’re told that a good father will attend all the ball games. Makes you a good father. Just be there. We’re not gonna talk about your morals. We’re not gonna talk about your ethics, just put your butt in the bleachers. Be present when the babies are born.
Now I don’t mean in the hospital or in the parking lot on your, I mean in the room. We talk about it as if we had the baby. Now I’ve helped deliver a lot of things. Puppies and kittens and calves and foals. That’s pretty a single, I mean, you may have been in the room, but somebody else did the work. But we’ve expanded it because… we even extended them in the invitation. It’s common practice to give them an opportunity to connect with that new arrival. Maybe they want to slip off their shirt and lay the baby on their chest to have that physical contact. Again, I’m not saying it’s evil, but we’re redefining things. We tell the men they have to be more sensitive to needs around them. It’s very common even in church circles to say, «There’s nothing more important than my family. I see the whole world through the filter of my family. Every question I answer, every decision I make, begins with the filter of my wife and my children». Really?
Well, I would submit to you that if we could resurrect our grandparents, if you’re old enough that they’ve already passed, they wouldn’t understand your list. It would confuse them. And I’m not prepared to say they didn’t know anything. Now I’m not telling you the list is evil. I’m telling you there’s a very intentional shift to weaken our homes, to diminish men, to diminish our children. They are relabeling things that should be our objectives. I’ll give you some examples in a minute. But fundamentally, what drives that is a self-centered approach to life. And it’s taken root, and it’s growing with the enthusiasm of kudzu in the South. It’s giving us permission to be selfish to do the things that we enjoy and then we’ll hide behind our children. I don’t call that being good men. I call it cowardice. Our selfish attitudes are expressed in what we want.
I would submit to you that man, husband, and father are all primary expressions of your faith. They’re more important to me than your systematic theology. How you function as a man, do you do it in a godly way, in a God-honoring way? Are you under the authority of a sovereign God? Do the people who know you and care about you and make the journey with you, do they understand that? As a husband, do you treat your wife and your family under the principles from scripture? Or are they defined by our culture? As parents? It’s very important. We walked through some of these notions of the role of father in a previous session. I don’t wanna belabor them again. I’ll run out of time again. But I mean, one of the fundamental principles of scripture that we shouldn’t miss is that one of the revelations that’s given to us, it doesn’t come from study or learning, is God revealed as Father.
It’s a very fundamental part of Jesus’s incarnation. His assignment, he came to make known to us God as Father. When Jesus taught the disciples to pray, they said, «Teach us to pray,» and he said, «Okay, pray this way: 'Our Father, who’s in heaven.'» God as Father is a very powerful image. I understand it makes some people very unhappy and they begin to scream about patriarchal systems of authority. The revelation God has given to us is of God or Father. I understand for some people that’s difficult because we’ve had very inadequate human fathers. But just as if when our human parents are inadequate, I believe God is capable of restoring and redeeming what human beings failed to make available to us. I also believe God is capable by his Spirit of helping us when our earthly fathers have been less than adequate, giving us a revelation of himself.
God as Father is a very significant, this notion of fatherhood spiritually is very, very significant. When Jesus was talking to the religious leaders in Jerusalem, he said to them, «If God were your Father, you would love me,» he said. But he said, «Your father is the devil». Now, he’s talking to religious leaders, Jewish religious leaders, people with a covenant, they go to temple, they offer sacrifices, they keep kosher with their meals, they’re engaged in all the rules, they know the scripture. But he says to them, «The spiritual heritage of your life is from the devil. It’s demonic».
You see, fatherhood suggests to us something that’s very important. Fundamentally, it’s about authority. What’s the authority over your life? But from fatherhood is established character and from character come the characteristics of our behavior. So if the devil is your father, the authority over your life is demonic and your character is corrupted and the characteristics of your behavior are not good. Fatherhood matters. It’s why it has to be important to all of us. Parenting, marriage, is not a competitive sport. We help one another. It’s not about lesser or greater, stronger or weaker, smarter or lesser. It’s to all of our advantage. There’s something devilish and evil and demonic that would divide us as if we’re competing, because of our biological gender or the color of our skin or the accent with which we speak. Those are expressions of the sovereignty of God, and those aren’t intended to divide us but to unify us.
We need one another. We have to help our children to become adults. That’s been understood by cultures across the span of time. In many cultures, there’s formal ceremonies, formal rites of passage, to help children become adults. In Judaism, it’s for the boys at 13 they have a bar mitzvah. They’re recognized as moving from boys to men. Thanks largely to the more liberal American Jewish community, now the women do it with a bat mitzvah. It’s not evil. I mean, it’s just, it’s an expanded, but it’s not limited to Judeo-Christian groups.
We were in Kenya some years ago for a pastors' conference, and we visited a bit with some of the Maasai. It’s a tribe. And for many, many years, generation upon generation, the Maasai boys, when it was time for them to become men, the assignment was to take their spear and kill a lion. Our sensitivities about game have changed some of those behaviors, but most cultures recognize that. We’ve lost that in our culture. We added a third lane. We no longer just have children and adults; now we have adolescents. That’s the season in your life when your hormones kick in and your body grows and you have the physical strength of adult, but we don’t ask for any of the accountability or responsibility that goes with an adult. And what has made it such a damaging concept is we’ve extended it.
There’s no longer a number around it, because parents have gotten involved and we don’t want our children to have to endure the hardship or the struggles or get the marks that some of us may have gotten as we were making our way through, so we kind of hover about and protect. And so now we have people in their 20s and 30s and 40s that still behave like adolescents. The Bible talks about it. It’s 1 Corinthians 13:11. It’s not in your notes, but it is in the book. Says: «When I was a child, I talked like a child, and I thought like a child, and I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me». If you’ll allow me, I would suggest to you it’s time to put childish ways behind us.