The Seed of the Woman Has Come: The Real Reason for the Season (Genesis 3:15)
The goal of Christmas is not to merely coo over baby Jesus, but to bow down before him as the King of kings and Lord of lords. For it is the victorious Christ whose birth we celebrate. And we celebrate his birth because in his life and death, we finally see the head of the serpent crushed, just as God promised at the very beginning.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
— Genesis 3:15 —
When we lived in Indiana, our parsonage was located next to the church. The church sat at 1200 North Ewing, our home was next door at 1202 North Ewing. At the same time, our house sat next to a snake pit. And to be clear, I’m not talking about the church. Rather, I am referring to the swamp-ish depression that ran alongside the parking lot, what we might call 1198 North Ewing.
Indeed, right next to the church building, the place where the bride of Christ would gather every Sunday, there was a nesting-ground for snakes. It was very much like Genesis 3. And how did we know that we had a snake infestation?
Well, every year, we had snakes in our garden, on our driveway, and in our house. And during the five years we lived there, I became quite skilled at picking up the shovel and beheading the snakes that drew near.
Now, why do I bring up snakes, especially as at Christmas time? The answer is that Christmas is often filled with trees and lights, but not enough trees and snakes. It’s like we get our messaging about Christmas from the Victorian Era of Charles Dickens, instead of letting the victory of Christ over the serpent be the reason for the season.
And so, to make Christmas more meaningful, I suggest we add a few pictures of dead snakes to our holiday decorations. Let me know if you have a crafty friend on Etsy who can work that up for us.
For as strange as it sounds to think about snakes at Christmas time, the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15 is why we celebrate the birth of Christ. His birth in Bethlehem is but the first step for the Son of God towards the cross on which he would hang like the bronze serpent (see John 3:14–15).
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Do Not Deprive One Another
Traditional marriage is a covenant where parties pledge to give to the other what is needed. We’ve lost the idea of marriage as two people working for the common purpose of building a family and a home, furthering the life of their people another generation, exhausting themselves, laughing, crying, and enjoying each other in every way, as they do it. Feminism has killed all the magic and romance of marriage with its dour obsessing over consent, labor, remuneration, etc., turning wives into lawyers and men into beggars. Away with all of it.
If you have spent any amount of time at all observing online discussions or popular teaching in the churches about marriage relationships, especially in regard to intimacy, you have likely noticed that the default setting for all discourse is that what women need from men is completely reasonable and can never be denied them, but what men need from women is a gross imposition and Herculean task they should never be obligated to perform. In one such recent online pontification from a woke pastor, the claim was made that “Husbands are never entitled to have sex with their wives. I don’t care if it’s your wedding night, your anniversary, or your birthday. Love is patient.” Rhetoric like this abounds from pastors across the theological spectrum, usually to a chorus of ‘stunnings’ and ‘braves.’
Now, I have developed a heuristic to quickly sniff out if a statement about marriage or sex roles is accurate or just another attempt to manipulate Christians into adopting contemporary, unbiblical attitudes. That heuristic is this: “Can I apply this statement, mutatis mutandis, to the other sex with the approval of the party making it?” If not, then it’s probably not a biblically sound idea, and we are being played.
So upon reading the above claim about sex and entitlement, I immediately applied Mallard’s Razor©. It is generally agreed that husbands are more needy in the realm of conjugal relations and wives are more needy in the realm of emotional support. So I shot back to the author, “Wives are never entitled to have emotional support from their husbands. I don’t care if it’s been a hard day, you are overwhelmed, or you really just need to be heard. Love is patient.” The response from the author, and a great many others, was both predictable and telling. Of course, they would not have it. The idea that a husband could withhold emotional support from his wife provoked an enraged response, with a flurry of accusations about how much of an incel and spousal abuser I must simultaneously be. Mallard’s Razor: Don’t get on Twitter without it.
I could go off from here into various aspects of the digital battle that ensued, as many came to defend my exposure of the original statement, and all manner of silly cavils about men and sex were thrown out against us. But I want to focus on one idea that kept coming up in the arguments. Multiple times in the replies to my post I’ve now been told that emotional intimacy is definitional to marriage, while sex is optional. Thus, it would be faithless, a dereliction of duty, for a husband to not render emotional support to his wife if she needed a sounding board or a shoulder to cry on. At the same time, a man has no claim at all upon his wife sexually, it seems. This idea is, in the words of quite a few angry people, “very rapey.”
And here, any competent Bible student can see that the feministic stance on the sexual and emotional obligations of spouses is exactly the reverse of the case, if anything. The Bible, and the Christian tradition as a consequence, clearly holds that sex (and the fruit that ordinarily comes from it) is the primary, distinctive feature of marriage. Marriage is designed to be the place where sex happens. Marriage and sex are not the same thing, but the latter is a necessary condition and the primary reason for the former. Marriage is meant to channel the incredible power of human sexuality into a constructive force- biologically, psychologically, and socially. When the heat of sexuality is allowed to run outside of marriage, it is inevitably a destructive fire. And of course, having a marriage without sex, is like building a forge to do basket weaving. So it shouldn’t be controversial to say that by design sex should be happening in marriage. Which means spouses owe conjugal relations to each other. They are in fact entitled to sex with their mate.
The Westminster Confession of Faith says “Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife [which could possibly entail sex], for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, and of the church with an holy seed [which definitely entails sex]; and for preventing of uncleanness [again, definitely entails sex].” (24.2) If all someone is looking for is good advice or help around the house, other arrangements, from friendships to hiring a handyman, will do. But marriage has more in view than that. If you think this is just some extreme Puritan take, the words of the Book of Common Prayer (1662) give us the same three purposes:
“First, it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name. Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body. Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.”
For Puritan and Cavalier alike, marriage has the same purposes. And of course, these are all purposes clearly drawn from Scripture, notably 1 Corinthians 7:2-5:
“Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.”
With the above in view, a marriage where sex is withheld by one party permanently, apart from reasons of physical or other impairment, is tantamount to abandonment and grounds for divorce. In the aftermath of the online spat noted above, a wise person suggested that just as porn use can rise to the level of divorceable adultery, denial of conjugal relations can rise to the level of divorceable abandonment. Again, Mallard’s Razor is useful here. I wonder how many evangelical feminists that chafe at the idea that a wife otherwise capable of rendering due benevolence who persistently refuses to do so is in violation of the marriage covenant and liable to be divorced would fully support a wife divorcing a husband with a porn addiction. So then, without ongoing conjugal generosity, a marriage is effectively killed. It is a form of desertion.
Let me briefly note that unwed people who cannot or will not have sex with their espoused when married should not be permitted to wed at all. Without any consummation, there is no marriage. This was uncontroversial in past ages, when the idea of a merely companionate, non-sexual marriage was unthinkable (I hope those who hold to the perpetual virginity of Mary can at least agree that hers would have been an utterly unique situation). Let me also add that nothing I have said thus far should be taken as applicable to those, who for reasons of infirmity, after marriage, have lost the ability to safely engage in sexual intercourse.
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A Seeker-Driven Church Would Fire Jesus
The seeker-driven church movement may have a formula for drawing a crowd but don’t for a second think it means they’re drawing people to Christ. Countless people are attracted to programs, entertainment, and even the casual nature of anything deemed “worship.”
I recently met a pastor in passing who offered me encouragement regarding our upcoming church plant. He pastors a massive church (several thousand) so he took the opportunity to overflow some of his wisdom in our direction.
After the brief conversation, I quickly realized that his methods weren’t exactly going to help me grow a church spiritually, but they would certainly help me launch a social club. Here are 4 of his heavy-hitting growth tactics:Drop all churchy language. The Bible is old and dated. Try to use slang whenever you can.
Play golf with influencers more than you study. Preaching doesn’t matter, just use sermons from other preachers and focus on hanging out with people. Playing golf with influencers grows the church. Preaching isn’t that important.
Put sports on all the TVs around the church campus if you have one. Men will come to church and hang out for that.
Make children’s ministry a party. If the kids have fun everyone comes back.In that list (which is not exaggerated), there are a few ideas that aren’t bad. Golf is a great chance to bond with brothers, we all want children to enjoy church, and some pastors would do well to explain things in simpler language. But, that’s not the driving motive behind advice like this. The goal of this advice is church growth. It’s pragmatism; the idea that if it works it must be good. Or in the church world: if it works it must be God. In this sphere of thinking the Bible is a footnote, Jesus is a good luck charm, and the church is a social gathering for suburb folks who dabble in soft moralism.
Is that what Jesus died for? Is that what discipleship is? Did He call His Church to turn on the playoffs to make His house more attractive?
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Five Books to Help You Give Your Children God’s Word
Parents of young children feel the pressure of Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old, he shall not depart from it.” This word of encouragement can easily be twisted to a word of guilt—as if my children’s belief in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and their love for his word and his saints is all up to me.
But there’s good news: you, dear parent, you are not alone! God has given you his word, and wherever God’s word is, there Jesus is! God is with you in his word.
Here are five books that can help you give your children the word of God and the faith that comes through hearing the word of God (Rom. 10:17). Make a routine of reading books like these—or the very words of the Bible—with your children. You may not see it right away, but you’re planting the seeds of God’s word in your children’s heart (Mk. 4:26–32; Is. 55:10–11).
1. The Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible
Age range: 2–5 years old (Click to View Product)
There’s no shortage of children’s storybook Bibles, but The Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible stands out among the crowd. In short, friendly, and bright prose, Jared Kennedy recounts fifty-two Bible stories (twenty-six from the Old Testament and twenty-six from the New Testament). Every story ends by pointing to Jesus: how does this story show our Lord Jesus and the good news that he forgives our sins and gives us his life through his death and resurrection. Trish Mahoney’s vibrant illustrations provide children enough to look at and wonder while they listen.
Each story takes about two minutes to read, so it’s easy to read a whole story every day. (Although my own children like to interact with some of the stories and so sometimes it’s more like three or four minutes.) Jared’s words help draw out the reader in every parent—helping us to read with energy and excitement.
2. Jesus and the Lions’ Den: A True Story about How Daniel Points Us to Jesus
Age range: 3–6 years old (Click to View Product)
Each book in the The Good Book Company’s Tales That Tell the Truth series presents a simple and friendly biblical theology—sometimes by telling a specific Bible story (e.g. when Jesus calmed the storm), sometimes by presenting the full arc of the Bible (e.g. creation, fall, redemption), sometimes by focusing on a Christian practice (e.g. prayer). All of the books are filled with Catalina Echeverri’s vibrant colors and inviting imagery!
In Jesus and the Lion’s Den, Alison Mitchell shows children and their parents how to read the Bible as a book that gives us Jesus. Mitchell walks through the story of Daniel being sent to and delivered from the lions’ den. Throughout the story Escheverri has hidden a lion symbol that lets readers know a “Jesus moment” is present. The book ends by setting each Jesus moment in the story of Daniel next to a story from Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Now parents and their children can try finding the Jesus moments in the Bible on their own!
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