Cruelty Cloaked in Compassion
It is cruel to lock women behind bars with violent rapists. It is cruel to force teenage girls to change in front of young men in their locker rooms. It is cruel to force traumatized rape victims to sleep in dorms with men. And it is cruel to demand that women accept their own demotion and dehumanization, reduced to crude terminology to avoid offending the cross-dressers in charge. You can put a man in a dress, and he is still a man. And you can dress up cruelty in a cloak of compassion—but it is still cruelty, and we should say so.
A November 3 post on X (formerly Twitter) from J.K. Rowling caught my eye recently. It was her comment on the decision of an Australian court to mandate that the ‘preferred pronouns’ of people identifying as transgender be used as a “matter of respect” to ensure “public confidence in the proper administration of justice.” As Rowling noted: “Asking a woman to refer to her male rapist or violent assaulter as ‘she’ in court is a form of state-sanctioned abuse. Female victims of male violence are further traumatised by being forced to speak a lie.” Indeed, forcing a woman to refer to the man who abused and raped her as ‘she’ seems a particularly grotesque form of gaslighting.
Rowling’s comment gets to the heart of something that is not commented on often enough: the manifest cruelty of the transgender movement. I’m not referring here to the mobs of trans-identified men that so often threaten violence towards women who dare to speak out—or, as in the case of Posie Parker’s visit to New Zealand earlier this year, actually perpetrate it. Nor am I speaking of the torrent of vile threats of rape that women like Rowling face from these vicious men in dresses. I mean the cruelty of the practices and policies imposed by those in power on women and girls in the name of the transgender movement, which have swept virtually every Western country in under a decade.
“Sad, Powerless, and Confused”
Many manifestations of this cultural shift have a sinister, totalitarian air about them. Scenes of men like Dylan Mulvaney winning female awards—Virgin Atlantic’s “Woman of the Year” is the latest—while being applauded wildly by men and women in the audience remind me of the crowds forced to give minutes-long standing ovations to dictators for fear of being recognized as dissidents. The cultural overlords are watching, and you’d better think this is fair and good and a bold step forward for ‘transwomen’ if you know what’s good for you. Mulvaney isn’t a one-off example, either—as of March, nine men have won ‘Women of the Year’ awards.
Then there are the high school males winning prizes like Homecoming ‘Queen,’ once reserved for those Walker Percy memorably described as “football girls in the fall with faces like flowers.” Now we are treated to photographs of pretty girls clustered around a jut-jawed gangly young man in long hair and a dress—it seems sadistic, somehow. The girls must smile; must affirm that this young man—who is so obviously a man—is a pretty girl, prettier than they are, a flower among flowers. The press and the LGBT movement and the idiots who chose him, of course, are wild with celebration—and there is more than a little warning in their cheers. Say he’s beautiful. Say it like you mean it. If you don’t, we’ll make you a national news story.
Of course, that only happens after the girls have been forced to share changing rooms and bathrooms with these young men. Girls have risked urinary tract infections rather than use the bathroom with boys. Girls have pled with adults to keep the boys out of their changing rooms, but even their tears do not shake the idealogues in charge.
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Light in the Darkness: A Story of Human History
Human history, since the fall, has been shrouded in the darkness of human sin, and all that causes hopelessness and despair is a result of the same. So let us be reminded that our God is light, and that his eternal plan is the accomplishment of redemption to the glorification of the name of Christ as we are ushered into the culmination of all things and bathed in the glorious light of his presence forevermore. God’s plans and purposes have not changed, and they cannot be thwarted. Christmas is a reminder of God’s omnipotent power in accomplishing his purposes in his own way and in his own time.
As December gives way to January and the nights become longer, a new year looms. The specter of war, economic stagnation, and a new political cycle portend hardship and difficulty disconsonant with the supposed season of joy. Words of joy and cheer are uttered from hearts filled with “Bah humbug.” As God’s people gather to celebrate the glorious incarnation of our sovereign Lord, we are looking for joy, peace, hope, and more. We are looking for light in the midst of personal and civic darkness, and we need the reminder that the darkness has not and will not overcome the light. Creation begins with light (Gen. 1:3), and light is an essential ingredient in the history of the cosmos. In fact, all of human history can be explained through the lens of light and darkness, and in the midst of our very real darkness, what we need is a fresh glimpse of the light. Lean in and see.
In the beginning, God spoke the heavens and the earth into existence. At the center of God’s creative masterpiece, he fashioned human beings—male and female—in his image and likeness. God planted them in a glorious garden sanctuary where they were to extend the dominion of God over the whole earth (Gen. 1:28). Perfect peace—the rest of God—pervaded the glorious visage as Adam and Eve had everything they could ever want or need (Gen. 2:8). All that was required was obedience to the good commands of God (Gen. 2:15–17).
In spite of God’s gracious provision, temptation came upon Eve through the lips of a serpent, and Adam and Eve rejected God’s authority, God’s goodness, and God’s loving fellowship (Gen. 3:1–7). The penalty for such transgression was death, and God passed judgment on the man and woman and cursed the serpent (Gen. 3:14–19). Darkness came upon the world as humanity plunged into slavery to sin and death. Work became toil, and the excitement of birth and new life was tinged with pain and suffering. To this very day, all of our hardships are connected to the fall of our forefather Adam as humanity continues in his footsteps, walking as inheritors and participants in his rebellion—extending the dominion of darkness rather than the dominion of God (Rom. 5:18).
From the midst of this sin-cursed gloom, a glorious note of promise rang out, reverberating through the chorus of human history. The serpent’s temptation would not be the final word, for God promised that through the seed of the woman a redeemer would come. God would provide a man to crush the head of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). The light would shine out of the darkness, and the darkness would never overcome it (John 1:5).
As human history rolled on, the curse rolled on and darkness pervaded. Humanity gave way to barbarism (Gen. 6:11), which brought God’s judgment through the waters of the flood. Seeking to usurp God’s throne, humanity was cast into lingual chaos (Gen. 11:1–9).
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Review: Turnaround
He shows how leaders must cultivate trustworthiness, cherish the teams they put in place, and insist on accountability for themselves and others. He writes about stewarding money well, communicating clearly, and fostering just the right kind of culture. He continually uses the turnaround at Midwestern as an illustration of these principles in action. I have long observed that some of the most effective books are those that describe principles through the lens of narrative, and in this book Allen does that with great effectiveness.
There are a lot of people in the world who are in positions of leadership, but there are not a lot of true leaders. There are many people who achieve positions of prominence, but few who can back up that position with the ability to lead. And though the shelves of bookstores are groaning under the weight of all the books dedicated to the topic, and though they seem to sell in such vast quantities, still few of us can say we are being led well.
New to those shelves—the shelves, at least, of stores that sell Christian books—is Jason Allen’s Turnaround. For the past 10 years, since he was 35 years old, Allen has been the president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He took on the position at a time when the seminary was in grave peril—it was mired in controversy, burdened with debt, and financially upside-down. Its campus facilities were in a state of disrepair and its faculty undistinguished. Little wonder, then, that there was talk of closing it down.
Today, though, MBTS is a thriving and world-class institution that is financially solvent, that has strong campus morale, that features some lovely new buildings, and that is the envy of many other seminaries.
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Jesus Christ the God-Man
God grafted human nature into His divine Son. The result was not a hybrid demigod like Hercules or some kind of Superman. Rather, both the divine nature and the human nature retained their individual, essential properties. But now man was joined to God in one living Person, Jesus Christ. In Him, believers draw life from the divine root and bear fruit for God’s glory. In botanical grafting, two plants of the same genus or of like nature are combined. The miracle of the Incarnation is that God grafted the finite into the infinite. Thus, the Infinite One became bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh.
Teaching is hard work. When Jesus and His disciples got into a boat after a full day of teaching, the disciples were not surprised that Jesus fell asleep. The gently rocking waves of the Sea of Galilee might have lulled them to sleep, too. But on their way across the big lake, a terrible storm arose.
The southern end of the Sea of Galilee is a deep valley lined by cliffs. Wind can suddenly come roaring into that valley and whip the sea into a storm.[The Reformation Study Bible, ed. R. C. Sproul (Orlando: Ligonier, 2005), 1422. Thanks to Paul Smalley for his assistance on this article, which is slightly enlarged from an address I gave for a regional conference of the Philadelphia Conference of Reformed Theology (PCRT) in Quakertown, Pennsylvania on November 12, 2010.]
Andrew, Peter, James, and John had seen many storms in their lifetime of fishing, but this one overwhelmed them. The wind howled and the waves crashed. The boat began taking on water. It rode lower in the water so that each wave threatened to fill it. Fear gripped the men. Their boat was sinking; would they all die?
They turned to Jesus, who was still sleeping, and shouted over the roaring sea, “Master, carest thou not that we perish?” Jesus stood up and rebuked the wind and the sea. In an instant, wind and sea were stilled. But the men were still terrified. “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” they asked (Mark 4:35–41; cf. Pss. 65:7; 89:9).
Why was Jesus asleep in the midst of the storm? Why didn’t the storm awaken Him? The obvious answer is, His humanity. He was tired. He was worn out after a long day’s work and needed rest to renew His strength.
How did Jesus calm the storm? Again, the answer is obvious: His deity. Jesus had such power over creation that His words instantly changed the weather. He did not use technology, magic charms, or rituals. Jesus didn’t even pray. He just said to the storm, “Be silent!” Christ has the power of God, and His disciples recognized it when they said, “Even the wind and the sea obey Him.”
But the mystery here is whether Jesus was tired or all-powerful. Was He drained of energy or full of energy? Was Christ limited so He needed restoration, or was He infinite in ruling over creation by His mere word? The answer, according to Scripture, is both. Jesus is both limited in His humanity and infinite in His deity as Lord over creation.
Jesus Christ the God-Man
John 1:14 says, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” As is typical of him, John uses simple words to express a very deep truth. Incarnation is a Latin word that means “becoming flesh.” In the Incarnation, God became human flesh.
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