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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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Can you trust the government to protect you and your family?

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A lot of Democrats have been raving about banning guns and self-defense over the last week, in the wake of another school shooting by another fatherless child. We know that they refuse to confront women over their choices with men and sex. Choices that cause the fatehrlessness that results in violent young men. But what do they offer to protect the people who pay their salaries from threats?

Well, they don’t want armed security in the schools. The schools are filled with people who are terrified of guns, so we can’t have armed security. Instead, we should ban guns and self-defense. Then, when the fatherless boys commit crimes, we just call the police, and wait for the professionals to arrive and save our loved ones.

Does it work? Consider this article from The Federalist.

It says:

As more details emerge about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, it’s becoming hard not to conclude the worst about the local police response: Uvalde cops apparently stood aside and did nothing while the shooter killed 19 school children and two teachers inside a classroom.

A shocking news conference on Friday revealed that more than an hour passed after the shooting began and before an elite team of Border Patrol agents, whom Uvalde police had prevented from storming the classroom earlier, decided to ignore those orders and confront the gunman, ending the massacre.

During this time, about 78 minutes, as many as 19 police officers were reportedly in the hallway outside the classroom, while multiple students inside the classroom called 911 begging for the police to be sent in. But none came.

Why did no police go into the school? Someone in the police hierarchy made the decision that they should not go in. They knew that there were children still in danger inside the school, but they did not go in.

More:

All this comes as news reports in recent days, along with video footage posted to social media, have detailed how desperate parents gathered outside the school during the shooting and demanded that police officers there go in and engage the shooter.

One woman, Angeli Rose Gomez, a mother whose two children were inside the school, was apparently handcuffed by police for insisting they take action. When she eventually talked her way out of the handcuffs she sprinted into the school, found her kids, and rescued them herself. That was after she drove 40 miles from her workplace after she heard about the shooting.

“The police were doing nothing,” Gomez told The Wall Street Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

The first thing to note about big city police is that the police chiefs are usually politically correct. So, during the Black Lives Matter rioting of 2020-2021, you would often see the mayors and the police chiefs wanting to “give space” to the rioters. The police at the bottom of the hierarchy might believe in right and wrong, and self-sacrifice. But the people at the top often believe in black lives matter and critical race theory and banning guns and arresting parents at school board meetings. The people at the top are often soft on crime.

The second thing to note is that Democrats often exacerbate crises in order to drive public opinion towards the policies they want. So, that’s why Democrats are taking action now to make health care expensive (with regulations, and by important millions of illegal immigrants who use emergency rooms for health care, etc.). They want the price of health care to go up, so that people will look to the government to “fix the problem” with single payer health care. And why Democrats are raising gas prices to make you buy electric cars, and support wind and solar power. Companies that are often owned by Democrat “bundlers” who get Democrats elected. For them, you have to “break a few eggs to make an omelet”.

Broward county sheriff Steve Israel and Hillary Clinton
Broward county sheriff Steve Israel and Hillary Clinton

Do you remember the Parkland shooting, and the Florida Sherriff Scott Israel, who went on CNN and demanded more gun banning?

Here is The Federalist article about it:

During a heated CNN town hall last week, Israel admonished National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch for daring to suggest his department had failed to follow up on huge red flags regarding the suspect. At the time it was believed the department had responded to 23 calls regarding the shooter. Yesterday BuzzFeed reported that there were an additional 22 calls, bringing the total to 45. The shooter wasn’t just a blip on the radar, he was a blimp on the radar.

Israel claimed that none of these calls led to anything actionable by the department. But we now know that the suspect made a specific threat to commit the school shooting and that the sheriff’s department was not only aware of it, but they passed it along to the school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas. That threat was actionable, yet no actions were taken.

[…]The day after the CNN town hall, information emerged that the school’s armed resource officer under Israel’s command, Scot Peterson, had failed to enter the building and confront the shooter during the massacre.

The Sherriff is a Democrat. He almost seemed to want the shooting to happen, so he could go on CNN and demand a gun ban, and more funding for his unionized police department. Democrats really struggle with holding people accountable. They prefer to arrest concerned parents at school board meetings, than to have to go into a building and stop an actual crime. There’s often no accountability for these unionized police workers.

With a few more school shootings, people will become more supportive of gun bans and gun confiscations. People will distrust individuals, families, churches and small businesses, and turn to the government to “fix the problem”. When government becomes the monopoly provider of services,  then society will be more “equal”. No one will have the privilege of defending themselves from criminals. Everyone will have the same equal response: call the police and wait an hour for them to arrive. They have to let you suffer a little, in order to get the egalitarian society they feel is best.

It’s for your own good. Just let the experts make your decisions for you. Trust the people with the non-STEM degrees. They are more virtuous than you are. They care about your kids more than you do.

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Thinking practically about the gospel with an illustration from a war movie

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The city of Mogadishu, in Somalia, Africa
The city of Mogadishu, in Somalia, Africa

I decided to re-post one of my favorite posts for Memorial Day.

First, let’s get an overview that helps us understand the context and goals of the mission we are going to discuss.

The scene is set in Somalia, Africa, in 1992. There a civil war between two warlords: Ali Mahdi and Mohammed Farah Aidid. The war has destroyed agricultural operations, and the people are starving. The United Nations are trying to help, but Aidid hijacks the food from UN aircraft so that he can use the food to gain control of the people. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis are dying of starvation. The UN requests American military forces to secure the air-dropped supplies so they can be distributed to the starving people.

In December 1992, President George H.W. Bush answers the call, sending 25,000 troops to Somalia to protect the food from the Somali warlords. However, in 1993, Bill Clinton is elected. He orders that the number of U.S. troops be reduced to 12,000. Following an attack by Aidid on Pakistani peace-keepers, the U.N. issues a resolution to capture those responsible. The U.S. armed forces have the arms and training to battle evil, so they get the call to capture Aidid and his lieutenants.

In late August 1993, Task Force Ranger is deployed to Mogadishu to capture Aidid and his lieutenants at the Olympic Hotel. The U.S. force consists of 440 troops from the Army Rangers and Army Delta Force special forces, commanded by General William Garrison. Garrison requested light armored units (Bradley Infantry Fighting vehicles) that would offer more protection than the unarmored HMMWV Humvees. Garrison was denied the light armor by the Clinton administration. Garrison requested heavier air support (AC-130 Spectre gunships) that would offer better fire support than the UH-60 Blackhawk miniguns. Garrison was denied the air support by the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration did not want the American forces to appear too heavily armed for the peace-keeping role.

The actual mission turned out to be much harder than it needed to be, because of the resources denied by the Clinton administration. Although the Aidid lieutenants were captured, Aidid himself escaped. Eighty-four American soldiers were wounded. Eighteen American soldiers were killed, and their bodies were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. This was shown over and over by the media, and it undermined American resolve to help the Somali people. As a result, Clinton had the excuse he needed to retreat the American military.

(Source: Nova Online)

Two heroes lost their lives

Today, I want to talk about two of the men who lost their lives in Operation Gothic Serpent. They are Master Sergeant Gary I. Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall D. Shughart – a Delta Force sniper team.

Here is a clip from the movie Blackhawk Down, which shows what happened to them:

The pilot of the downed Blackhawk was protected by the two men who volunteered to go in after him. They requested that they be inserted at the crash site, even though they knew that reinforcements were likely not going to be there in time to save them. They made the request to go and help the pilot three times before being allowed to go in. Their first two requests were denied by their commanding officer, because the odds against their survival were so overwhelming. The rescued pilot was later released by his captors, and the two heroes were awarded the Medal of Honor for their brave actions.

A Congressional Medal of Honor
A Congressional Medal of Honor

Here is a description of the requirements to be awarded a Medal of Honor:

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration that may be awarded by the United States government. It is presented by the President of the United States, in the name of Congress, and is conferred only upon members of the United States Armed Forces who distinguish themselves through conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty:

  • While engaged in action against an enemy of the United States;
  • While engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or
  • While serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.

You can read the official details of their actions.

The point of this post

It is important for Christians to be familiar with real-world examples of people giving their lives in order to save the lives of others. When we see real-world examples of self-sacrifice, it helps us to understand what Jesus really achieved for us, and what he must have felt making that hard choice to volunteer to go in and rescue us. In general, my philosophy when it comes to the Bible is to make every effort to connect what the Bible says to the real world. We must not push Christianity into some far-off world of piety and feelings. We must make connections to real evidence and real life, so that what the Bible says becomes practical, and so that we have a deep friendship with and sympathy for God revealed in Jesus Christ. In real life, being willing to give your life to save someone else is hard. Understanding how that really happens will help us to value what Jesus has done for us.

Bible verses

I saw this verse on the ground outside the Airborne & Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville, NC, where I went for my summer vacation in 2015.

Isaiah 6:8:

8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

Here is the picture I took (yes, that is my running shoe):

“Here am I, send me” Isaiah 6:8

When confronted with an opportunity to imitate Christ in his self-sacrifice, we should think less about ourselves and our own desires, and take the opportunity to serve others effectively. We do not do what makes us happy, and we do not pursue fun and thrills. We do what heals, we do what helps others. We do not push away our responsibility to imitate Christ by caring for those in danger. Christianity is not just about “not doing bad things”. It’s the good things you do because of your relationship with Jesus that show your real allegiance, and give you the experience of being a Christian in deed.

And here is another good verse:

John 15:13:

13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

If you get a chance to watch the movie Blackhawk Down, then do so. I highly recommend it. You can also read the book that the movie is based on.

I love the Medal of Honor books by Edward F. Murphy. He writes about all the people who have been awarded the Medal of honor in different wars: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

If you check my reading list, you’ll find that I usually read two military books for every one book on another subject.