Saved and Unsaved

 John MacArthur has a talk titled "What's Wrong With Everybody?" about the current miserable state of affairs we're all living through so very unhappily..  He makes the distinc ction between saved and unsaved, the redeemed and the fallen nature into which we are all born and remain until we are saved if that is to be our destiny.  It's a dramatic difference he describes, not the usual rather vague distinction that leaves us scrambling to figure out of if we're saved or not. 

AIt's hard to recognize the difference because even when we are saved we still have the "old man" or fallen nature in us and are still capable of falling into our old sins.  Neverteless we do have the new life in us, which is what salvation is, which is what redemption is, a real transformation, a new birth out of a state of what is called death into the life of god.  Because of our believing the gospel we have this new life planted in us, god Himself has come to live in us.  I think of a couple of book titles:  Man the Dwelling Place of God, and The Life of God in the Soul of Man.  That's what salvartion is.  

I'd been thinking about the Burning Man event and how it is such a concentrated distilled essence of fallennness, the fallennness into which we are all born but without most of the usual restrains socieity puts on us.  At least in some departments of sin, mostly the sexual.   One way I am persuaded of my own salvation is through the recognition that I used to share in those \\\\the mentality that seeks those experiences.  Even if I can still fall into them from time to time, and I don't know if that's even true any more, but even so it's clear to me that that is no longer my mindset.  

When I became a believer, God became the most intensely attractive center of all delights and desires.  For long periods He eclipsed every other interest.  But the world and the flesh can still take over and when my focus changed to wore wordldly concerns such as politics and even the debates about creation versus evolution, my mind got drawn back into those old sources of pleasure.  Still, when I picked up the Bible, or heard it preached or heard a powerful devotional message, something in me would just melt, I'd "pant after God" and experience that other level of my being at least for that moment.  

It is a dramatic transformation, a massive transformation as MacArthur puts it.  It's not always at the forefront of our experinece but it is of such a diffdrent nature it has to be described as radically other than the experiences of this world and the flesh we start out so accustomed to.  A radical difference, a radical transfomrmation.    And the things of this world can be distressing in ways beyond even the distress everybody else is feeling these days.   

the world is not always a perfect reflection of fallenness.  There are restraints in place through laws, police agencies and the like, and people do seem to have a moral code, at least in some places at some times.  Certainly in America in the early years, as the Founders often affirmed was the reason we could be trusted with the fragile rule of the sort of republic they crafted for us.  eric Metaxas describes this early mentality, how for instance Alexis deToqueville saw us as a very religious nation, which was our strength.  

Well, fallenness has since then certainly reasserted its own nature over us and we are now headed into a police state, which is the only possible outcome when the people have lost the moral foundation that controls us individually.    that kind of moral self control is possible with an education toward that end, which was powerful in the days following the Great Awakening under Georlge Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and lasted maybe a century and a half until the Sixcties, oh yes the Sixties, brought it all crashing down.  We are no longer America.  Without that moral foundation we can't be.  Metaxas makes that point clearly.  Deuoquevill e saw it.  Can we get it back?

Itg's probably tgoo late, but on the other hand, there is nothing else worth doing,.

Staggering Statistics on Women in the Clergy

 John MacArthur lays them out in what I suppose is a recent sermon although of course I can't see anything that would tell me when it was given so I don't know how recent.  Anyway he says some fifty percent of Masters of Divilinty students or graduates in the seminaries these days are women.  That's pretty staggering.  I don't remember the other numbers but in the twenties I think for women actually pastoring churches and so on and so forth.  Of course this is a heresy.  He says that many evangelicals, eighty something percent I think, are OK with a woman pastor.  What sort of evangelicals are these?  Do they not know what scripture has to say about it, or do they and deny it?

As always I come back to my theme of the woman's head covering.  I really don't know if it can be said to be the starting place of this fall into feminimism, I don't, but I think it must be somewhere back there at the beginning of it.  I suppose the Marxist influence might be the general starting place.  But abandoning the practice of covering the head in church continues to strike me as a pretty big deal.  It was practiced for almost the entire tewo millennia since Christ and abandoned only in the mid twetnties century.  

On eaxtremely flimsty grounds.  Yet men like MacArthur accept those grounds.  Why?  Because of the credentials of the man who wrote the essay that has become the foundation for all of this?  The idea that Paul wasn't really dtalking aboutg aliteral head covering that all women should adopt, but about cultrual practices that distingtuish women from men, the head covering being one of those in his time.  Thomsas Shriner made this his artubument against the head cove3ring in his very influential essay and ever since then that's been the abiding perspective and women gave up covering their heads in church.  Except for a very few churches that insist that no, Payl really was talking about a literal head covering.  Rare churches indeepd.  Marginalized you could say.

I spent quite a bit of time studying the question and came to the conclusion that Paul meant a literal head covering.  And myu pastor told me that binds me own consience to wear a head covering, which is fine, but of course I think if it's true then I'm certainly not the only one who should be wearing a head covering in church.  

And I think it's pimportant.  Maybe very very important.  Look, the passage, First Corinthians Eleven, two to sixteen, is about the literal human head, the head that sits on stop of the shoulders.  It is treated in that passage as a symbol of authoirty, the person's authority.  God is Authority over Christ, Christi is authority over men, Men are authority over womehn.  That's the worder of what is known as "headship."  There's the literal word "head."  This is not about femininity syjmbols, this is about the head and about the hierarchy of headship or suthority granted by God.  It is called a Creation Ordinance, like Marriage, something given by God at the very beginning of the creation.  We reject Gay Marriage because of the creation ordinance that defines marriage as between a man and a woman, but e ignore the ordinance that gives man the headship position over the womahn.  

I always come back to a particular simple point:  we require men to remove their headgear when they come into church, on the basis of this very passage of scripture which says mmen's heads should be uncovered, but we no longer require the other part of that passage, that women's heads are to be covered.  

I wish men like MacArthur would rethink it instad of falling bak on Shrinkers analysis, which has all sorts of flaws in it part from the central mistake of renying the importnt of the head as such, and I've written about those flaws in my blog on the subject, Hidden Glory.  

It is not treated as importnat by some I've talked to, as a trivial thing even if I'm right, but it can't be trivila if it's a creation ordinanyc of God, and isn't it glaringly obvious that it has implications galore for the position of women in the clergy that MacArthur is lamenting?  Isn't that just downstream of the abandonment of the head covering?  

There are a million things that the church needs to straighten out these days so why focus on this one?  The Lord is probably coming back before we could get to any of them with any effet anyway.  True, unfortunatley.   But shouldn't we be about the business of getting it right no matter what?