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What is the definition of marriage according to Jesus?

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It’s Pride Month! This is when Big Corporations spend an entire month celebrating the LGBT community, and pressuring everyone else to celebrate behaviors and lifestyles that are at odds with the teachings of Jesus. So, since the LGBT activists are about to get 30 days of celebration, I thought I would celebrate what Jesus taught about marriage on my little blog.

Here’s what Jesus says about marriage.

Matthew 19:1-11:

1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”

8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.

To be a Christian, minimally, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That means that we accept what Jesus teaches, on whatever he teaches about. We don’t overturn the teachings of Jesus in order to make people who are rebelling against God feel better about their rebellion. It is central to the Christian worldview that Christians care more about what God thinks of them than what non-Christians think of them. In fact, Christians are supposed to be willing to endure suffering rather than side with non-Christians against God’s authority.

Matt Walsh had a fine article about this issue.

He said:

As Christians, our goal is not to avoid being like the big bad “other Christians,” but to strive to be like Christ Himself. This is one of the advantages to having an Incarnate God. He went around acting and speaking and teaching and generally functioning in our realm, thereby giving us a model to follow. This is the model of a loving and merciful man, and also a man of perfect virtue who fought against the forces of evil, condemned sin, defended his Father in Heaven with sometimes violent force, spoke truth, and eventually laid down His life for those He loved (which would be all of us).

[…]This is what it means to believe in Christ. Not just to believe that He existed, but to believe that Christ is Truth itself, and that everything He said and did was totally and absolutely and irreversibly true forever and always. Many Christians today — not only the ones in the video, but millions alongside them — seem to think we can rightly claim to have “faith” in Jesus or a “relationship” with Him while still categorically denying much of His Word. This is a ridiculous proposition. We can’t declare, in one breath, that Christ is Lord, and in the next suggest that maybe God got it wrong on this or that point. Well, we can make that declaration, but we expose our belief as fraudulent and self-serving. We worship a God we either invented in our heads, which is a false idol, or a God who is fallible, which is a false idol.

If you really accept Jesus as God, then you can’t think he is wrong when he explains what marriage is. Period. End of issue.

Real Christians don’t make excuses for sin. Real Christians present the gospel. The gospel is that all men have rebelled against God and fallen short of perfect submission to and obedience of him. For this, they deserve to be separated from God eternally. Jesus paid the price for this rebellion on the cross, and anyone who accepts him as Savior and Lord will be with God eternally after they die. There is no salvation apart from Jesus. That’s what Christians say. And they say it regardless of how weird they look, and how many non-Christians don’t like them for saying it.

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Knight and Rose Show – Episode 33: Are All Religions the Same, Part 1

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Welcome to episode 33 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose start a new discussion about truth in religion. Are religious truth claims the same as ordinary truth claims? How can you test a religion to see if it is teaching the truth? If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode 33:

Episode  Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss the view that all religions are equally valid paths to God. We start by talking about what truth is, why truth matters, and the difference between objective and subjective truth claims. We discuss how different religions make different testable truth claims. We look at how different religions answer the question “How did the universe get here?”. And then we look at what science has to say about that question. This is the first episode of a three-part series.

Speaker biographies

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

Podcast RSS feed:

https://feed.podbean.com/knightandrose/feed.xml

You can use this to subscribe to the podcast from your phone or tablet. I use the open-source AntennaPod app on my Android phone.

Podcast channel pages:

Video channel pages:

Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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Survey: 60 years of feminism has not made women happier

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I had a conversation this week with someone who was insisting that feminism had made women much happier than in the 1950s and 1960s. So, I thought it might be a good idea to go digging around for some data, and then blog about it so I could find it again. Well, I found some nice survey data from the 2022 American Family Survey. That’s not too long ago! Let’s see what it says.

This is from the New York Post.

First, just some interesting points about how feminism was sold to women:

In February, we will mark the 60th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique.” But given the state of modern feminism, it’s hard to imagine there will be much celebration.

Friedan’s work, which revealed women’s lack of fulfillment as homemakers, laid out the goals of second-wave feminism. Now that women had achieved the right to vote, own property and get an education (the first wave), Friedan and her cohorts argued that women should pursue higher education and careers as a way of achieving personal satisfaction. Others, like Germaine Greer, wrote that the sexual repression of women prevented them from becoming personally fulfilled. But thanks to the pill and changing mores about sex outside of marriage, women could finally achieve the freedom and happiness that had been available to men for millennia.

So, I see a few problems that feminism is supposed to solve. 1) being a stay at home wife and mom isn’t as fulfilling as having a job and putting your kids in daycare and public schools. 2) it’s not fulfilling to have sex with one man who commits to you for life – that’s boring. You need to have sex with a lot of different men, just like the tall, hot, bad boys are doing.

So that’s the offer that most women accepted, and that’s the view of the most powerful people in our society. We have massive government spending on social programs like daycare and public schools in order to make this plan “work out” to make women happier.

Now let’s see the survey data:

The American Family Survey recently asked: “All things considered, has feminism benefited American families?”

Only a little more than half (58.6%) of respondents said yes. What’s interesting, though, is the people who said yes also tend to be among the least happy and fulfilled. In survey after survey, it turns out that people who espouse a secular worldview, people who identify as liberals, and people who never attend religious services report the lowest levels of personal satisfaction, but they also report the highest levels of support for feminist ideals. Indeed, as feminism’s influence has grown over the past half century, women have become less happy.

How did we get to this point where men are expected to do more housework and child care, and women exchange being wives and mothers for working outside the home, and giving their kids to strangers to raise?

[M]any feminists would have been happy to dispense with traditional marriage altogether. If that happened, and women still did want to bear children (something many feminists did not encourage), well, someone was still going to have to support them. And so feminist leaders also demanded more government support for women.

When I was in grad school, and had a pet parrot at home, I could barely stand to leave the house. I would call home during breaks, or from the lab after classes. It’s not natural for people to leave their kids alone with strangers. I didn’t even like leaving my parrot with my older brother to go to class. Didn’t trust anyone to look after him. So, I can’t imagine how fathers and mothers can be happy about leaving young children with “child care workers” or “public school teachers”. They can’t be trusted, and they don’t reflect my values. So I can’t imagine how women could be happy to be separated from their young children.

And here’s another problem – promiscuity stinks:

In 1963, Betty Friedan was writing about “the problem that had no name.” But women’s problems in the 21st century can absolutely be named. More often, they are trying to raise children on their own, which can be exhausting even with financial resources. They are sexually liberated, but that often means they are going from one relationship to another without any sense of financial security or emotional stability.

One of the reasons why I sailed through high school and college with my chastity intact was because I knew that I wouldn’t like going all the way with a girl, and then she would just leave and I would never see her again. So I have no idea women think this is wonderful. I know that they only have eyes for tall, hot bad boys, but I don’t think those men should be emulated. If it doesn’t work for women, then they shouldn’t do it.

Men and women aren’t as different than people think. Nobody likes leaving their young children with strangers. Nobody likes being intimate with a person, and then not being able to even talk to them again when you want to. No wonder women are miserable. And as I blogged about before, it’s the progressive women who have the highest rates of mental illness and use of medication. The ones who took feminism seriously are the ones who are least happy.