Category: Essay

Biblical Patriarchy Against the Feminization of the Church

My gut feeling on the patriarchy is that it is biblical and my gut feeling on the feminization of the church is that it is not biblical. However, I didn’t understand what the issues really were nor would I have been able to justify those gut feelings until I listened to some of Mike Richter’s videos at The Heroes’ Forge. The theme of The Heroes’ Forge is “Men want to be heroes, and women want to be with heroes.”

The history of the feminization of the Church as Mike Richter outlines it in the video below begins with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848. Today, the feminized alternatives to biblical patriarchy fall under terms like the covertly feminized variations of “complementarianism” or the overtly feminized variations of “egalitarianism”.

What makes the various positions of complementarianism and egalitarianism unbiblical are verses, such as, Ephesians 3:14-15, Acts 2:29, Hebrews 7:4, Matthew 6:9, Genesis 2:7, 22, 1 Timothy 2:12-14, Genesis 18:19, Ephesians 5:22-24, and Matthew 7:16. Mike Richter refers to these verses in the video below beginning at 13:48 showing how they stand as a rebuke against the feminized church.

This Is a Test

Are you defensive about those verses above when they refer to “patriarch” or God as “Father” or when they talk about a wife’s submission to her husband or a husband’s responsibility as head of his family or that there are consequences when these verses are ignored that are seen in the fruit of a family’s life? Do you realize that these verses are not optional?

If you need to repent, now is always the best time to do so.

The feminization of the Church has much in common with Darwinian and big bang evolution: They are all a corruption of Genesis 1-11.

They were introduced over the last few hundred years to undermine biblical Christianity while fooling Christians who followed them into thinking that they were still “biblical” or still “full gospel”. Many of these now Christian-in-name-only feminized therapy organizations capitulated to become the institutional “church” we see today.

Below Mike Richter interviews David Edgington. It is a continuation of the topics covered above.

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The Genesis Flood and Walt Brown’s Hydroplate Theory

Seven years ago I thought the flood of Genesis 6-9 was a local event (if not a myth). Five years ago I began considering the possibility that the Genesis flood might have actually happened as a global event.

To make sense of how it could have happened globally I studied catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT). This is a theory based upon secular plate tectonics which claims that there are plates supporting the granitic continents which rapidly subducted into the Earth causing tsunamis to flood the land. My doubts about CPT arose when I realized that it couldn’t explain the source of the mile high sediments over the continents nor could it (any more than secular plate tectonics) explain how plate subduction could have ever got started.

Then I began studying the hydroplate theory (HPT) to look for a more satisfying explanation for a global flood. With HPT I found out where the mile high sediments came from, where radioactive elements in the continental crust came from, where comets, asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects came from and why the side of the moon facing us has dark lava flows on it.

Over the past seven years I went from thinking Noah’s flood was a local event to thinking it was a global event to realizing that whatever happened it was so drastic as to leave its mark on many of the planets and moons of the solar system. If HPT were correct in describing what Genesis 7:11 meant by the foundations of the great deep being broken up and the windows of heaven being opened, what happened during the global flood (and what we are still recovering from today) was an horrific global catastrophe.

Some Resources

The 9th edition of Walt Brown’s In the Beginning is available on Amazon and it can be read online for free at the Creation Science Center.

The video below provides 1) an overview of what happened during the Genesis flood according to HPT, 2) a biography of Walt Brown and 3) a description of the reaction to HPT by some creationist organizations as seen from two proponents of HPT.

For a more detailed description of HPT see Bryan Nickel’s playlist below.

Real Science Radio is a creationist organization that has promoted HPT for some time. Below is Bob Enyart’s presentation of HPT based on the 8th edition of Walt Brown’s In the Beginning.

David Flees From Absalom

It is amazing what a map can do to bring to life events in the Bible.

Today, David P. Barrett of Bible Mapper Atlas posted a map of the events of 2 Samuel 15-16 where David leaves Jerusalem after hearing that his son Absalom has been declared king in Hebron.

Below is the map from Bible Mapper Atlas detailing the events. The events are described in more detail on the site along with links to other maps.

Map from Bible Mapper Atlas

Can the Book of Esther Be Viewed As History?

YES, it can!

In the following video Henry B. Smith, Jr from the Associates for Biblical Research interviews Bryan Windle who provides a top ten list of archeological discoveries that justify taking the book of Esther in the Bible as actual history.

As a conclusion, Windle quotes Karen H. Jobes’ NIV Application Commentary on the book of Esther:

Judaism and Christianity rest not on the inward, mystical journey of the mind and soul of the individual, but on events in history through which the Creator-Redeemer God revealed himself to people.

Biblical narratives such as Esther are the record of those events in the form of story. Purim would be a hollow religious celebration if the Jews in Persia had not truly been delivered from destruction.

Abiogenesis and Dr. James Tour

This is the final video in a course on abiogenesis by Dr. James Tour. If the subject of the naturalistic origin of life from nonlife intrigues you, it may be good to keep in mind how unlikely something like that actually is. And yet here we are. How did we get here? If you don’t like Genesis, that question is not easy to answer and so far it has not been answered.

Regardless what you might hear in the media or the hype from origins of life researchers, no one has been able to create life from nonlife in a laboratory. They have done many amazing things with already existing life, but they have not started with nonliving chemicals and produced life. There are many reasons why this problem is difficult.

  • Life requires homochirality. Molecules do not naturally separate into left and right handed versions, but biological molecules have to for a cell to function without overheating.
  • Carbohydrates are the hardest to synthesize in a modern lab. How they could have synthesized in a prebiotic environment without lab equipment or trained technicians running that equipment is a mystery.
  • Peptides are also difficult to synthesize. Any partial success in the lab involves processes unavailable in a prebiotic environment.
  • Nucleotides may be easier until one tries to link them together, because they depend on synthesizing carbohydrates to get the ribose that joins them.
  • Lipids are sometimes said to form spontaneously. Tour said that “spontaneously” is an origin of life researcher’s code word for “I have no idea how that happened”.
  • Chiral-induced spin selectivity requires homochirality. It permits cell functions without overheating while maintaining the purity of the cell’s components.
  • RNA can not replicate enough of itself to be useful. Linking parts of it together leads to errors which make it useless. It is also unstable. The RNA World hypothesis that relies on RNA alone cannot even get started.
  • Life requires a non-random DNA code that can usefully direct the cell’s functions. Not just any random code will do. So even if you get past the other problems of synthesizing a cell from chemicals, the information problem blocks the process. How does mindless nature know what a useful code sequence could be?
  • Life is highly ordered with low entropy and high energy. How does nature produce life without violating the laws of thermodynamics?

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While writing this essay this morning I listened to one of Greg Bahnsen’s audio lectures, Amoebas, Apes and Adam that SlimJim referenced in his post Free Bahnsen Lectures: Getting Down and Dirty.

Even though Bahnsen’s lecture is some decades older than Tour’s course, Bahnsen’s chemical arguments against life coming from nonlife is in line with what Tour had to say. And Tour’s objections to abiogenesis reinforced Bahnsen’s assessment of evolution in general, not just abiogenesis, as a “grand fairy tale for adults”.

Lachish

Lachish was a Canaanite city. Douglas Petrovich presents five significant archeological finds at Lachish in the process of giving you a history of this important biblical city.

The following map from Bible Mapper shows Lachish in relation to other cities during the time when it fell to the Assyrian Sennacherib.

Douglas Petrovich is active on Academia.edu where you can find many of his papers. He is also the author of The World’s Oldest Alphabet, Origins of the Hebrews and Nimrod the Empire Builder.

Finding Sodom and Gomorrah by Finding Zoar

There were five cities mentioned in Deuteronomy 29:23 and Genesis 19 that were subject to destruction: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar. Although Zoar was in the middle of those five cities it was not destroyed, because Lot fled there.

Joel P. Kramer shows the sulfur that destroyed the cities and provides evidence that these were the actual cities mentioned in the Bible. He also shows why other sites which some have claimed to be Sodom, such as Hammam, could not have been.

He reports that archeologists have even found the cave where Lot and his two daughters likely stayed (Genesis 19:30) after leaving Zoar.

Kramer has a wonderful book, Where God Came Down: The Archeological Evidence that is beautifully illustrated and clearly written.

Genesis 19:17-22 KJV – 17 And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.
18 And Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my Lord:
19 Behold now, thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shewed unto me in saving my life; and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me, and I die:
20 Behold now, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one: Oh, let me escape thither, (is it not a little one?) and my soul shall live.
21 And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing also, that I will not overthrow this city, for the which thou hast spoken.
22 Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do any thing till thou be come thither. Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar.

REVIEW: Glenn Earls, It Happened in Hell: The Victory Below

The following is a review of a book I received as an early reviewer. Normally, I post such reviews on Amazon and Library Thing where I received the book. Since I was puzzled enough by Matthew 16:181 to write a story about it, I am posting my review here as an alternate way of looking at that verse.

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This is a powerful book on many levels. It makes an argument for universal salvation of all human beings in the past, present and future. Since God wills all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:42), there are biblical grounds for this position.

This is the first volume of a proposed trilogy. It addresses the concept of the “harrowing of hell”. This harrowing occurred after the death of Jesus when He descended into hell and it was completed before He rose. This was when the gates of hell fell from the inside. They could no longer prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18) to keep the church captive. The church now included everyone on both sides of the gulf which separated Lazarus from the rich man (Luke 16:19-313). Everyone, every captive, left. Christ is the Victor, the hero of this event.

The author makes his argument by first discussing the meanings of “Sheol” or “Hades” as the place where the spirits of the dead waited for salvation, “Gehenna” as an actual garbage dump and “Tartarus” as a place for angels. He then describes the divide within Sheol mentioned in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Paul revealed that the Gospel was also for the gentiles, the people with the rich man on other side of the divide.

The victory over Hades from (Matthew 16:18) is next explained as a Trojan horse kind of attack on hell from within. He provides an early church confirmation of his position and especially noted the vision of Perpetua from 208 AD which referenced crushing of the head of the serpent.

With the above argumentation in place, the author provides a three part imaginative narrative of what happened during this harrowing. The story is powerful and brings the argument to life. You will encounter Adam and Eve, Moses and Elijah, the thief on the cross along with even Jesus’ betrayer Judas.

The last chapter goes through a history of church teaching on the harrowing of hell from the early church which took it for granted to the modern church which viewed it as allegory if at all. Indeed, I don’t recall hearing the term before. A week before reading this book, I was trying to make sense of Matthew 16:18. Was the church the rock catapulted against the gates of hell from the outside to bring those gates down? Was this an event we were still to prepare for? Those were the kinds of thoughts going through my head. I understand better now what happened after reading this book.

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  1. Matthew 16:18 KJV – And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. ↩︎
  2. 1 Timothy 2:4 KJV – Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. ↩︎
  3. Luke 16:19-31 KJV – 19 There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:
    20 And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,
    21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.
    22 And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;
    23 And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
    24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
    25 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.
    26 And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.
    27 Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house:
    28 For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
    29 Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.
    30 And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.
    31 And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. ↩︎

Review of Three Channels

About five years ago I realized I was a biblical creationist. Much before that I would have said that birds came from dinosaurs and the world was gazillions of years old.

This has been one of the most interesting rabbit holes I have EVER gone down. I know you may be glad you didn’t go down yourself, but if you ever decide to take the plunge, below are three YouTube channels that I now regularly watch and highly recommend.

Standing For Truth

This episode covers Jason Lisle’s Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) and the model which predicted before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reported back data that we would see fully formed galaxies at further red shifts that had heavy elements in them.

When JWST confirmed the predictions of Lisle’s model it falsified the big bang as we know it. A corrected big bang story will need to be devised by those who won’t give up on the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, but Lisle’s ASC model needs no modification.

Examining Origins

My first introduction to Cornelius Hunter came from this channel. He is a philosopher of science who views biological evolution as a “theological research project”, not a science, although it could become a science if it started to take itself seriously.

Since listening to him a few months ago I have read his books, Darwin’s God and Science’s Blind Spot, both of which I recommend if you are interested in biology and the philosophy and history of science.

Logos Research Associates

In this episode John Whitmore provides an overview of the Coconino Sandstone. The beds of this layer are slanted rather than flat. A flat layer can easily be seen as having been laid down by a huge water catastrophe (think, the global flood of Genesis 6-9). However, can the tilted layers of the Coconino Sandstone also be viewed as deposited by water?

Concluding Remarks

The discussions on these channels are lively. Although the hosts are creationists, many evolutionists comment to challenge them. So, it is not a totally one-sided experience.

For a quick jump down the rabbit hole, these three channels are good places to start. You might even find, as I have, that you prefer it down there.

Review: J.C. Walton’s Compact Time

Book: J.C. Walter, Compact Time: Radiocarbon Dating & the Case for a Young Earth, New Creation, 2025.

The main difference between compact time (CpT) which the author promotes and deep time (DpT) is that geological time is based on a calculated adjustment of ages provided by the decay of Carbon-14 (14C) rather than the decay of uranium or other such radioactive isotopes.

14C decay by itself provides a reliable measure of time for the past 3000 or so years and it is used in archeological research. However, for objects much older than that age it runs into problems with known historical dates. CpT is a calculated adjustment for 14C to agree with better known archeological dates.

Also since 14C is present throughout the fossil record this suggests strongly that the fossil record itself is not very old. This falsifies DpT. Soft tissue in dinosaur fossils confirms the shorter age as well. If one applies CpT to the fossil record one gets a geological time measurement that agrees with archeology and suggests a possible age for the fossil record.

A short age implies that the hypothesized catastrophes of the past forming the geological mega-sequences should be lumped together into one “giga-catastrophe” which can be associated with the biblical flood of Genesis 6-9 along with stories of the flood in many other cultures. The author puts the giga-catastrophe about 5350 years ago which is close to the estimate used by the Associates for Biblical Research for the biblical flood. The years since the giga-catastrophe is a parameter in the model for CpT given in Chapter 5.

The author provides a clear presentation that is well documented for those who would like to try using CpT or research it further.

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Interview of chemist John C. Walton by Henry B. Smith Jr of the Associates for Biblical Research