Tag: political

I Was Not Assigned

What is at stake with our words? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Last week, there was an announcement made at the chapel service here at NOBTS about free flu shots being given out for students. All we had to do was go to the student center and there would be some nurses there ready to give us our shots. Being one without health insurance now (Financial realities of being a seminary student), I decided to go and get one.

Now this was a Christian hospital organization that was giving out the shots and so they had to ask me several questions, which I understand. I get the legal requirements. I don’t blame them and I realize the sad reality of what many businesses are going through, but as an individual, I did take a firm stand.

So in the middle of the usual questions that I expect, I get the one of “What is your gender identity?” I consider this to really be a nonsense question. Identity has no purpose here. How I feel about myself does not affect what I am at all. I can feel like I’m a cat and it’s not going to change I’m a human. For a more realistic example, as one going through a divorce, I can feel numerous negative things many times. Those things are not true. Many Christians can struggle with feeling God doesn’t love them. Doesn’t make it true. The reason many people commit suicide is often connected with a negative feeling about them or their future that just isn’t true.

I am a man. That is it. I can take a look at my body and the way that I came out and realize that yes, I am a man.

My next question I was asked was “Were you assigned that at birth?”

At this I think my eyes glare, not in anger at the nurses. They have to do their job. It’s in anger that this question is on here. I gave a direct answer. “No. I was born a man.” I realize we could say I was born a boy who grew into a man, but the sex that I was born as was not something that was just decided. It was known when I was born.

I also realize some people can bring up people who are intersex, but intersex and transgender are two very different things. One is a very physical condition and we have never sought to change our laws and society based on this condition. The other, transgenderism, is a psychological delusion and we are changing our society and laws to play along and real people are being the victims.

Friends. This is a hill we cannot budge any on. This is about a battle for reality itself. I consider the far-left movement in our society to be in a war against reality and trying to eliminate any idea of male and female. It’s as if we are being pushed into a political monism.

The biggest aspect of this battle to watch is our words. I will use longer and clunkier terminology to avoid granting any grounds to the other side. I will not speak of a “same-sex marriage.” A marriage by definition is the unity of a man and a woman. No. Something like polygamy doesn’t change this, though it is wrong, as it is just one man with several women, but the man-woman aspect is there. The same would be for one woman with many men.

When you say “same-sex marriage” you are speaking of a contradiction. You are speaking of a man-woman unit that is not man-woman. If we also make the definition of marriage fluid, we can make it to mean anything and then it means nothing. Why limit it to two people? Why make it consensual? Why make it lifelong? The word marriage has to mean something specific.

I prefer to not even speak of a homosexual anymore. It makes homosexual more often an aspect of the person’s identity and surely that won’t change. It becomes something innate. I will easily instead speak of a person with same-sex attraction. What is central here is that this is a person.

We must absolutely watch people who want to control our words and tell us there are things we cannot say. We have seen part of this when any monitoring is done of questions about vaccines or the 2020 election. Even if you think both of those are crazy conspiracy theories, it would be better to have them talked about and the ideas discussed. Shutting down discussion on any topic convinces more often people who think there is a cover-up.

Keep in mind that in 1984, the goal of the editing of the language was not to come up with new words. It was to eliminate as many words as possible. Control the words people say and you can control the ideas that they are allowed to think about.

The language war is essential.

No. I was not assigned male at birth. I was born that way. I could jack up my body with as many hormones as doctors say and mutilate it with surgical procedures, and I will look like I am playing a part, but it won’t change reality. Barring the return of Jesus Christ, I will die a male. Nothing will change that.

There is too much at stake. Whenever you encounter language that is meant to shape what you think, do not give an inch to it. If you have to use long and clunkier phrases, that’s fine. I would rather do that and be minorly inconvenienced than give in to fake reality and be majorly inconvenienced.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Thanks To Our Veterans

How do we honor those who have given so much? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Today is a day that we remember our Veterans. I fear in our country we are moving away from that. My boss at the post office at the seminary, which is not an official government post office, hence we are working today, and I realized just a while ago that I forgot that the mail won’t be coming in today. That saddens me that I lost track of that considering my boss and I are both very politically minded.

It’s one of the realities that it’s easy to take certain ideas for granted. We who are Americans live in a country where we can’t imagine anything being any different. Reality will always be the way it is. This country will always be here. I have no guarantee of that. One generation can change everything and more and more I get concerned that that generation has come.

But I don’t give up either. Chesterton said the last thing the pagan Roman Empire did was become Christian, and I keep hoping we could be on the verge of an awakening. Perhaps we have to hit a rock bottom. I don’t know the future, but it is a hope.

Either way, the reason we have lasted so long and any time we will last in the future is because of our veterans. If we did not have people willing to fight for this country, we could not have a country. Such people can be thankful they still can go home and be with their families, but they also have no guarantees of that when they go into battle. They can leave home and have no guarantee that they will be coming back.

I make it a point that whenever I see someone who was in the service out in the public,  I thank them for their service. The same applies to our policemen. There is utmost respect for those who are willing to take a bullet or any other form of death so I will be less likely to. It takes guts. Anyone who is entering this kind of field knows that they can lose it all.

So today, we say thank you.

Courage should be a virtue we as Americans celebrate. It was something that led to the founding of this country. Our founding fathers risked their lives so that we could live free. Signing the Declaration of Independence was essentially putting a target on them. They knew it. They did it.

We are the major beneficiaries of that action. We live in a nation of great freedom today, a freedom that must always be defended, a freedom that I fear is more and more in danger. If we take it for granted, we are only making it far more likely that we will lose it.

If you are one of our veterans reading this, thank you. If you see a veteran today, thank them. They are fine men and women who should get to enjoy a day dedicated to them.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

(Also, I want to let anyone know that if you are interested, I have started a substack for political thoughts. There will naturally be some overlap on both sites, but the substack is a paid service and I wanted to go as cheap as I could on it which is $5 a month, but if someone becomes a Patreon at $2 a month and wants to be a subscriber, I will give a gift subscription.)

 

The Rush To Hate

Is the word used too easily? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Something I tire of in the world today is the quick rush to hate and the condemnation of hate. If there is disagreement against someone, it is assumed that the hatred of the person must be the cause. Accusations of moral turpitude are too easily thrown out there. (Hint to my leftist friends, and even enemies: I have heard the terms racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, bigot, etc. that nowadays I no longer take them seriously.)

Unfortunately for an age where we talk about unity and tolerance, immediately jumping to hate is not going to help us in discussions. How can you have an honest discussion with someone if you think they hate you? Now in all fairness, maybe they do, but shouldn’t that be checked on and not just assumed?

If all we are judging someone on is isolated actions without a context, we could be making really poor judgments. Suppose at my workplace I see a parent snap off to their child. Now i could be assuming that this person is a horrible parent and doesn’t really care about their child. I could be right. However, it could also be that they’ve had an extremely stressful time recently or gone through a personal crisis and their kid is just on their last nerve and they will regret the way they snapped at their kid later.

Here’s a good rule to consider. Always consider that it’s more likely that the other person’s motives are more pure than you think they are. Always also consider that your motives are less pure than you think they are.

Along those lines also, keep in mind good motives don’t always mean good actions and good results. It could be like the boy wanting to set the butterfly free without realizing his breaking the butterfly out is killing it. The butterfly needs to break free on its own so it will be strong enough to fly.

There are also people in fiction known as antiheroes who do good things, but do them for the wrong reasons. We just often don’t have enough information. That’s why accusations of moral turpitude are always serious.

Also, not all hate is bad. There are some things you ought to hate. Why is it that it’s not a good thing to be called a Nazi? Because you ought to hate Nazism. If you don’t hate Nazism, there’s something wrong with you. That doesn’t mean you will always feel hatred, and I hope you don’t, but you know who the bad guys are. At the same time, you shouldn’t hate Nazis. You should love them. You should love them so much you want them to see the error of their ways.

You should hate plenty of other things. You should hate sex trafficking. You should hate child abuse. You should hate rape. You should hate people unwillingly living in poverty. You should hate disease. The list could go on and on.

I also know conservatives do this as well. You won’t find me doing it. Hate is a word that describes something real, but I don’t use it as much as others do. I could on my own personal opinions of something, but I don’t generally express them.

Tomorrow, I plan on looking at an accusation of hate and see if it holds up.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

What Are The Gospels?

Do the gospels tell the gospel? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

With the Inerrancy debate going on, a lot of people are getting introduced to the idea that the gospels are Greco-Roman biographies. I have no desire to challenge that idea. I even agree with it. I’d like to come from a different perspective. Are the gospels really meant to teach us the gospel?

If you mean the idea that we have today that you need to believe in Jesus Christ for forgiveness and turn to him, then I would actually say no. That is not the point of the gospels. A possible exception could be at the end of John of course, but I’d like to suggest a different purpose that could include that and yet goes beyond it.

In Mark 1, right off the start, we have Jesus after his baptism and temptation saying the the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news. If good news there means “gospel” as we often take it to mean, then this is strange because there is nothing in there about turning to Jesus for forgiveness or believing in Him as God and Messiah.

The same happens in Matthew 4:17. In neither of these cases, Jesus has not preached a sermon yet. We have no idea what His message could be, but I’d like to suggest a different approach.

N.T. Wright wrote about how in Josephus there is a reference to someone telling someone else to repent in the meaning of “Come over to my side.” I find this to be a fascinating consideration. Jesus is telling Israel to repent, Israel that already believed they had forgiveness.

In fact, Jesus doesn’t really speak out against the system of forgiveness. He speaks against its misuse. He tells the people what God really desires more is mercy and faith, but He never goes against the system as a whole, which is interesting since Jesus was very quick to point out other areas that he thought the Jewish system was deficient.

Let’s suppose this isn’t about forgiveness per se. What could it be about? The connection with both texts is the Kingdom. Jesus is telling people that the Kingdom is here. In Matthew, we have more clues. Matthew starts off with Jesus being seen as “God with us.” Matthew has prophecy being fulfilled left and right and John the Baptist showing up marks this as a time of high eschatological fulfillment. God is doing something and He is doing it in Jesus.

When Jesus is doing His ministry, it is not just a ministry but a political statement as it were. Let us compare it to modern campaigns. There were several Messiahs running around town. Jesus was another claimant and Jesus had to show He was the real deal. Not only was He showing who He was, He was also showing what the Kingdom was like. What is the Sermon on the Mount? It is a message about what people under His reign are to be like. What are the miracles? They are showing what the Earth will be like when Jesus is fully in charge.

We have just gone through an election cycle. We should know what this is like. Each candidate goes out to the masses and presents Himself. Jesus is presenting Himself to the people as the person that they should “elect” as their Messiah and in saying repent, He is saying “Identify with me and recognize me as your Messiah.”

This is also why He tells his disciples to go to only the lost sheep of Israel. It doesn’t make any sense to go anywhere else to proclaim yourself as Messiah. What good would it be to go to a place like Greece and say “The Messiah has come!”? The people would wonder what exactly that meant. It only makes sense in Israel. Israel gets the first vote as to whether or not Jesus is the Messiah.

Unfortunately, Israel votes no.

What is the resurrection? God votes yes. Note the resurrection does not mean Jesus is the Messiah because He rose again. He is the Messiah because He claimed to be and the resurrection is God’s stamp of approval on His ministry. It is God saying “Yes. I support Jesus as Messiah.”

And the one vote of God counts as a majority.

It is after the resurrection then that all authority is given. Israel may have decided they did not want to participate in the reign of Jesus, but He still reigns and now the Christians are to go out with a new message. Jesus is the king of the world. Jesus is the ruler of all. It’s no shock the Romans weren’t happy with this message.

What does this have to do with forgiveness of sins? For those who are concerned about it, as I’ve said elsewhere not everyone was, forgiveness is found by recognizing Jesus as king. If you recognize Him as the one to trust in, you get the favor in that He forgives your crimes against Him. This trust is what we call “faith.”

The good news does include forgiveness, but not just that. The good news is that Jesus is the king right now and we are to prepare ourselves for His total reign one day. When you are evangelizing, you are campaigning for people to recognize Jesus as king. Make a good case.

In Christ,
Nick Peters