We are in a series on the fulfilled family, God’s design for marriage and the family, all those things that need to be understood for us to be fulfilled in our marriages and in our homes. And since that’s where we live most of our life, fulfillment at that particular level is so absolutely crucial. We have laid some foundation over the last couple of weeks, and I want to build on that foundation, if I might, in our message tonight. We stated the fact that for good marriages and a good home, there are some prerequisite spiritual considerations, according to Ephesians chapter 5.

Let’s go back there, because we’ll at least launch our thoughts tonight from that same passage, which will be our touchstone throughout this series. In Ephesians chapter 5, starting at verse 18 and reading through verse 21, we have read: “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father; and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.”

Now, we have basically looked at those verses as prerequisite and foundational to the instruction that begins in verse 22. Having laid that foundation, the apostle Paul then speaks to the wives, in verses 22 through 24, and to the husbands, starting in verse 25. And starting in chapter 6 verse 1, he speaks to the children, and then in verse 2, to the parents. But all of those specific instructions related to wives and husbands and children and parents are built on the foundation of the principles of verses 18 to 21.

And we noted for you there four things make for sound relationships: being Spirit-filled, being filled with joy, being thankful for everything, and being submissive to one another; and we’ve gone over those very, very important prerequisites. We talked about - finally in the last lesson - the fact that though God has designed us to be mutually submissive, He has still designed in the family an authority and a submissive role. The man is given the authority in the marriage, and the wife is to follow. The parents are given the authority in the family, and the children are to follow.

There is spiritual equality. There may be intellectual equality. There is equality often in wisdom, and many other areas. But when it comes to the responsibility, it is the man’s responsibility to provide, to protect, to shelter, to nourish, to cherish, and the wife’s, to come alongside and enjoy the fullness of that kind of loving leadership. She submits because he submits his authority to her greatest needs. He submits to using his strength and energy to meet her needs, and she willingly submits to that kind of provision.

We said that in Genesis chapter 3, after the fall, God cursed man, and in the cursing, the curse obviously found its way into the marriage. And in a marriage, you have a woman who desires to rule – typically, fallen women want to take charge - and you have a man who wants to dominate in an insensitive and an overbearing way, and that’s why there is marital conflict. It all started in Genesis 3 with the curse, where God said, “From now on, her desire will be to rule over you and you will subdue her,” and therein lies the conflict.

So, conflict began in Genesis 3, but it really continued to escalate all the way through the book of Genesis. Let me remind you of something - in chapter 4 and verse 23 of Genesis, you have the first case of polygamy, and God’s original intention of one man and one woman for life was violated. Polygamy became a common thing, as we know, throughout Old Testament times, and still today, in many cultures of the world, is practiced. In chapter 9 and verse 22, you have the first lustful look; pornography, you could say, begins in chapter 9, and it corrupts the purity of single-minded devotion.

In chapter 16 verses 1 to 3 in Genesis, you have the first case of adultery. In chapter 19, you have the entrance of homosexuality, with all of its perverseness. In chapter 34 verses 1 and 2, fornication is introduced. In chapter 38 is the first case of incest. In chapter 38 verse 24, is the first prostitute, the first woman to sell her body. In chapter 39, the first specific incident is recorded of a seduction. So, before you ever get out of Genesis, marriage and the family is under a major satanic assault.

No wonder marriages face such terrible conflicts. A woman struggling to gain rule over her own husband, a husband dominating unkindly his unruly wife, both exposed to the influence of a satanic society, both possessing unredeemed flesh, which is pandered to by the society in a myriad of temptations. They are exposed to polygamy, evil thoughts, vile words, adultery, homosexuality, fornication, incest, prostitution and seduction. And you could ask the question, “What chance does a marriage have?” And in our day, slim.

To make it worse, the worst of all of that is exalted in our culture as acceptable and normal, and in most cases, even desirable. That kind of behavior, which we just described - polygamy, adultery, homosexuality, fornication, incest, prostitution and seduction - makes up much of the theater of our time, the movies of our time, the books of our time, the songs of our time, the television of our time. People are bombarded with a fantasy world of super-beautiful stars and images and super sex, all designed by Satan through the world system to create discontent with your spouse.

And in our day, this particular and diverse and specific attack on marriage continues with tremendous force; tremendous force. It is one of the - it is one of the great ideologies that we have to assault today. Look for a moment with me at 2 Corinthians chapter 10, a passage that is of great importance for us as Christians. You can be thankful it is here, because it is so instructive. In verse 3 of 2 Corinthians 10, Paul says, “Though we walk in the flesh” - that is, though we are human; he simply means we’re human, and we have all the limitations that our humanity imposes on us.

“And though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh” - we are engaged in a battle. We are engaged in a warfare. We are engaged in a great conflict. And he says, “We cannot fight in that war in human strength.” We cannot fight with human wisdom. We cannot fight with our own initiative and our own ingenuity. We engage in a war that cannot be won with fleshly weapons. Verse 4: “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh” - they’re not human. You can’t fight this battle with human wisdom, human cleverness; it can’t be won that way.

You have to fight it - verse 4 - with weapons that are “divinely powerful”; “divinely powerful”. In other words, you have to have supernatural weapons. You have to carry - if I can borrow Paul’s expression in Ephesians 6 – “the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God”, if we are going - at the end of verse 4 - to engage in “the destruction of fortresses”. Now, Paul depicts our enemy as very strong and fortified. We’re fighting against a formidable foe. You can picture some massive granite stone fortification somewhere on an acropolis, a high place in the ancient world, an impregnable fortress.

And he says that’s what we have to lay siege against. That’s what we have to assault; and you can’t do it with just your human strength. You have to fight against those fortresses with weapons that are divinely powerful, or mighty before God. They carry the very might of God with them. And then - notice, please - he says “the destruction of fortresses”, and then he tells you what they are. Here’s what the fortresses are. “We are destroying speculations,” first of all. That’s ideologies, philosophies, systems of human thought, as we talked about a few weeks ago.

That’s what we are assaulting. We are attacking these great ideologies, these great philosophical systems, these moral systems that men establish. He further describes them as “lofty things” - that is, they are characterized by proud, human intellectualism, further described in Romans 1 with the words “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” In reality, they are fools, but in their own mind they are intellectuals.

And so, we are destroying these ideologies, these philosophies, and every element of proud, human intellectualism that is raised up against the knowledge of God. We are attacking everything that is contrary to the Word of God. We are engaged in that war. Paul reminds us in Ephesians 6 that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in the heavenlies” - that is where the battle is fought.

It is a spiritual and supernatural battle of ideologies – listen - ideologies that men have concocted under the influence of demons. Satan concocts the ideologies, they become the doctrines of demons, they are espoused through those who represent Satan’s domain. Fortresses are built out of these ideologies, they are solid in their foundation, they are rooted in the world and in the culture, and we have to go after them with supernatural weaponry. And what is our goal? End of verse 5: to take “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”

We’re dealing with thoughts here, folks. We’re dealing with thinking, concepts, ideologies, philosophies, viewpoints, and we have to assault those and take them prisoner. We have to get them out of those fortifications and bring them under the authority of Jesus Christ. That’s evangelism. It’s part of our evangelistic strategy to assault these fortresses, and to take captive those that are there, and bring them into the captivity that is called here the obedience of Christ. This is a tremendously formidable task.

One of the great fortresses that exists today I want to address tonight. It is the feminist agenda. Three years ago - or maybe a little more than that - when we were going through Titus, we talked about some of these things, but I want to remind you of them again, because they are absolutely crucial. But before I talk about this ideology, let me just remind you of what our text says. Go back for a moment to Ephesians 5, because I want to set in your mind what the Word of God says; what obedience to Christ is, as revealed in Scripture, with regard to women.

Ephesians 5 - I’m going to read verses 22 to 24. “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their own husbands in everything.” Wives submit - that’s the idea - to your own husbands, just as the church does to Jesus Christ. Comparing with that, 1 Corinthians chapter 11 verse 3: “I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ.”

God, the head of Christ, Christ, the head of the man, the man, the head of the woman. The man has the authority, the woman submits. I want you to turn then to Titus chapter 2, because in Titus chapter 2, we have further instruction with regard to the role of the woman - Titus 2 and verses 4 and 5: “The older women are to teach the younger women” - and what they are to teach them is this, verse 4 - “to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind” - here it is again – “being subject to their own husbands, that the Word of God may not be dishonored.”

I think the most simpleminded among us can grasp what I just read. The man is the head of the woman, the woman submits to the husband. The woman loves him, gives her life to her children and her husband, maintains sensibility and purity, works at home, all of this with an attitude of kindness, that the Word of God may not be discredited or dishonored. Over in 1 Timothy chapter 5 - and I’m just going to read these, ’cause I want to set them in your mind - it talks about a widow.

She is one who has been a one-man woman, verse 9 says – “the wife of one man.” It doesn’t mean that she only had one husband - she may have had one die, and another die - it simply means a one-man woman; chaste, faithful, pure. Verse 10, this widow must have a reputation for doing good works, the very thing that Titus instructs the young women to do. She is to have brought up children, shown hospitality to strangers, washed the saints’ feet, assisted those in distress, devoted herself to every good work.

And you can see from that, that’s the kind of woman that fulfills God’s design. Go down to verse 14 - he speaks here about younger widows. They need to “get married, bear children, keep house, and give the enemy no occasion for reproach.” A woman finds her place under the authority, the loving authority, of a man, raising children, caring for the home; that’s God’s design for her. Now, all of that is very, very clear; there’s really no way, scripturally, to evade those things. But it’s amazing to me how confused women are today, even in the church, about their role.

And they are confused because there is a massive effort - the troops have been sent out from the fortress called the “feminist agenda” to spread their philosophy throughout this society. Radical feminism has so brainwashed our culture that church leaders and church members have even capitulated to the lies. And as a result, marriage and the family, the primary building blocks of social and moral order, are in shambles.

Much of this can be laid at the feet of the feminist movement, because it has overturned the thinking of women so dramatically that they have abandoned their God-intended role, and consequently, the family has felt the consequences. Unthinking believers, untaught Christians, have become prey to the ideology of the feminists. And frankly, most of us probably have no real idea of what the feminist agenda is at its core; it is frightening, and it is fatal.

What the public sees is that women want equal pay. Well, you can’t really argue against that. What the public sees is that women want to be free from certain social strictures. Well that’s certainly reasonable. But it goes way beyond that; way beyond that. A cry for equality, a cry for opportunity, a cry for equal privilege to use their abilities unhindered and unrestricted, and the rhetoric sounds fairly sensible. But the real agenda is much more serious - listen to it.

Gloria Steinem - editor of Ms. Magazine - quote: “By the year 2000, we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.” Satan’s ideologies can’t ever just stop with social issues; they always go to theological ones. It can’t just stop on the social level, it’s got to assault God; because unless God is dethroned, and the God of Christianity is eliminated from their thinking, they’re going to have to deal with the Bible, and that’s a problem. So, we get rid of God and everything supposedly attributed to Him; the Bible is out of the picture.

Radical feminist leader Sheila Cronin - and you’ve heard the name, I’ve heard it so many times - she says this: “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women’s movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.” As far back as 1971, there was produced by these feminists a document called “The Declaration of Feminism.” It says this: “The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women.

“Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not live individually with men. All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft.” I’ll say more about that. By the way, this is largely lesbian-led, and that’s why they have that attitude toward men. Annie Laurie Gaylor, writing in The Humanist - and I’ve given you several quotes in the last month or so from The Humanist - writing in The Humanist, July/August 1988, has an article called “Feminist Salvation.”

This is what she says - and this affects the elite thinkers at the university level, and it gets taught to the students in the system, so it works its way into the culture - she says this: “Let’s forget about the mythical Jesus.” Again, it never stops with a sociology; it always has to ascend to a theology, because you’ve got to get God out of the picture, so you can make the Bible a non-issue. “Let’s forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women.

“Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist salvation of the world” - end quote. Get rid of Jesus; the real salvation of the world is not in Him, it is in feminism. Dr. Mary Jo Bane, the feminist and Assistant Professor of Education at Wellesley College - a elite women’s college - Associate Director of the school’s Center for Research on Women - there’s a deadly think tank - says this: “In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.” We’ve got to get them away from any male influence.

Margaret Sanger - founder of Planned Parenthood, leading the parade in abortion - said, “The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is kill it.” Now, the reason we have to take these ideas seriously is because they constitute the fortress - they constitute the speculations, the ideologies, the proud intellectualism - that is erected in this culture and has a formidable place. They are influencing law. They are influencing the courts. They have a massive influence on education.

All you have to do is realize that this is how the university system thinks; that’s where the school teachers are all trained, and you see how it filters all the way down through the educational system. They’re creating laws at the highest level in our land, laws we have to live by, laws that are obliterating all sense of historic culture. They’re being taught through every avenue to our young people, and even Christians, as I said, are falling under the spell of the feminists.

Sheila Cronin - again, one of their most respected leaders - says, “Since marriage constitutes slavery, we have to attack marriage” - attack marriage. And from the National Organization of Women Times: “The simple fact is, every woman must be willing to be recognized as a lesbian before she is fully feminine.” This isn’t something - this isn’t something philosophical; this is something theological. But it’s not just philosophical, social and theological, it’s moral.

What you’ve got here is the perversion of lesbianism, mixed with all of this ideology, driving something that is at every point satanic. From the standpoint of the social, it destroys the family. From the standpoint of the theological, it destroys God. From the standpoint of the moral, it destroys the normal human relationship, and replaces it with an abnormal, wicked homosexuality. Now, most people would say, “This is new. This is a new movement. This is something brand new.”

But the truth is, it is very, very old; very old. In fact, it’s Satanic, and its origins came very early after the fall. You remember Eve? Liberated herself from Adam’s authority, plunged the whole human race into sin, wanted to operate independently without the headship of her husband. That’s precisely what Satan wanted, and that’s when it all got cranked up. So that you’ll understand it, I want to take you a little bit deeper into the feminist agenda, if I can, and share some things with you. I think you’ll find them shocking and very helpful.

Feminism, with all its assorted features, is an old, old heresy, meant to destroy God’s design on every front. It is an ancient form of paganism - in fact, the very same one that Paul faced in the first century A.D. When Paul’s talking about - in 2 Corinthians 10 - the ideologies of his time, they wouldn’t be any different than what we face, even in this. In fact, the best way to understand it is that it is a repackaging of what we know - if we study church history and the history of religion, ethnology, the history of peoples - this is what could be called ancient Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is from the Greek word gnōsis, to know. In ancient times there were always people who said they had the higher knowledge, they were in the know. They had ascended beyond the mundane, the frivolous, trivial, low-level thinking of most people -  particularly Christians. In fact, today, you even have books being written such as The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which attempts to debunk - it’s written by a man who claims to be an evangelical Christian, and he is upset about the mindless stupidity of those who hold to traditional fundamentalism.

We’re getting assaulted always by those who have the higher knowledge, the secret knowledge, the elevated knowledge. But Gnosticism was more than just a sort of generic idea that you could have superior knowledge to Christianity, to make Christianity look base and simplistic and foolish. Gnosticism became a somewhat technical term, a broad term - best way to understand it is a broad term to describe false anti-God religion; false anti-God religion.

They would say, “That’s the simple, basic, foolish stuff that the Bible teaches, but the ascended knowledge is far beyond that.” We call it today the New Age, but it’s the old age. Ancient Gnosticism was a kaleidoscopic mixture of all kinds of traditions and all kinds of viewpoints. It had the rationalism of the Greek West, it had the mysticism of the Eastern religions, and it was all mixed up; and we see it today replicated in the New Age philosophy. The parallels, by the way, are very, very striking.

At the heart of ancient Gnosticism was a central myth - a central myth that drove the whole gnostic heresy, in all of its multitudinous viewpoints. And it’s hard to pin it down when you study it, because it could be almost anything; as long as it wasn’t the truth, it could be error in any form or formula. But at the heart of ancient Gnosticism was the central truth that drove the heresy. That myth was that the physical universe was never intended to exist - you got that? The physical universe was never intended to exist.

The only thing that was ever to exist was a spiritual existence; and Greek dualism had that concept, that spirit is good, and matter is evil. What happened was, the foolish, stupid, creator God of the Bible created matter, and did a stupid thing. Much of the ancient gnostic literature attacks the creator God and mocks Him with a disdain that borders on hate. According to one recently discovered gnostic text, God the creator is presented as blind, ignorant, arrogant, the source of envy, and the father of death.

Creation in interpreted in all gnostic texts as an act of unspeakable pride and self-will, for which the creator God will be punished severely at the end of the age. The Gnostics taught that the God of the Bible is not the true God, He is that foolish creator God masquerading as the true God; He is a bungling, bungling individual. Gnostics believe that this fake God, this false God, somehow accidentally - that’s all they can say - accidentally infused into humanity some sparks of divine life.

In other words, if He created, they’ve got a problem. If you say the bungling, stupid creator God created, then you’re the bungling, stupid creation that He created. So, you’ve got to get above that, right? I mean, you don’t want to live with that kind of self-image. So, they say that accidentally, while He was bungling around creating matter, somehow, He infused into humanity some sparks of divine life, and that’s why we’re so wonderful in spite of His stupidity. But the problem is, we are these wonderful divine beings imprisoned in evil matter, and we have to find a way to escape.

By the way, there’s no such thing as sin, so there’s no such thing as salvation - except delivering us from the bondage of the prison of the flesh. Historically, the Gnostics escaped by throwing off the shackles of the Old Testament law, the God of Israel and everything He said, and they did the same in the New Testament times, also. In other words, they just did anything they wanted to fight against their own physical existence.

They would engage in anything, anything at all, that they believed - follow this - somehow liberated their spirits, such as drunkenness, sexual orgies, all those bizarre things that we talked about in the Bacchanalian feasts and festivals – anything - and there was no sin. The early Gnostics maintained bizarre lies as their system of belief, including lies that always elevated women above men. Again, that’s what you would expect. Here’s what they said: Eve was a spirit-endowed woman who saved Adam. They just said whatever they wanted to say.

Eve was a spirit-endowed woman who saved Adam, and final deliverance for the whole of mankind from the bondage of the flesh will be brought through female power. Now, you would expect Satan to do this, wouldn’t you? If I didn’t know what God’s plan was, and you showed me Satan’s plan, I would know God’s was the reverse. So, if Satan wants to elevate women to this level, you can be sure he’s going against God; you can conclude by that if you never had the Word of God on it, what God’s plan is.

The heavenly Eve entered the snake and taught both Adam and earthly Eve the true way of salvation. The snake they call in gnostic literature “the instructor”, and the snake was wiser than everyone else, so the snake is the ultimate hero. The snake is the incarnation of Dame Wisdom, the heavenly Eve. She instructs Adam, she instructs the earthly Eve. Gnostic literature says the snake is the redeemer and the God of Scripture is the evil usurper.

Gnostic literature goes so far as to say this: the snake in the garden is the true Christ. Now, this is redemptive history stood on its head, isn’t it? Peter Jones, in his excellent book on this subject, writes, “Though caught in matter” - the physical – “humanity can once again become part of the universal whole by a process of self-knowledge and self-realization.” So, what they’re trying to do is just liberate themselves by self-realization, self-knowledge - which means the freedom to do whatever you want to do and be whatever you want to be.

There’s no such thing as a moral offense against a holy God; no such thing. The only offense is the limitation of human potential. Jesus has no place in gnostic literature; not at all. In fact, gnostic literature says this: “The real Christ actually sat on the branch of a tree watching and laughing at the earthly Jesus dying.” This stuff is deep stuff, and demonic, believe me. The “Apocalypse of Peter,” a gnostic document, says this - I’m quoting: “He whom you saw on the tree glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus.

“But the one in whose hands and feet they drive the nails is the fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. Be strong, for you are the one to whom these mysteries have been given, to know them through revelation, that he whom they crucified is the firstborn, and of the home of demons, and the stony vessel in which they dwell of Elohim, of the cross which is under the law. But he who stands near him is the living Savior.”

That kind of strange, bizarre, mystical talk is intended to sound very secretive, very mysterious, very esoteric, very lofty - in reality, it mocks Christ. Redemption is not the gracious, miraculous transformation of a person through the death and resurrection of Christ; redemption is from self-understanding and self-realization. We become fully divine when we ascend to the purest kind of self-knowledge.

Gnostics are saved - quote: “When they realize who they are, when they realize they’re part of the divine, when they realize they possess the kingdom within them, when they realize they’re capable of doing anything, untrammeled by human traditions, creational strictures or divine laws. It is self-redemption, and self-redemption occurs when you reject biblical norms. Furthermore, the gnostic, when reaching full self-knowledge, becomes the only Christ there ever is.”

All this bizarre teaching doesn’t coalesce very well, and it’s not consistent, but Satan’s kingdom is divided against itself. It’s in confusion and chaos. Gnosticism is the blasphemy of God, the blasphemy of Scripture, the blasphemy of Christ, the blasphemy of the gospel. They say the true God - the true God, not this bungling creator, sub-god, but the true God - is unknowable. The true God has no personality. The true God is untouched and untouchable. The true God is nothing more than what Paul Tillich, the liberal theologian, used to call “the ground of being”, or “the source of being.”

And all of this is just satanic, lying heresy, to confound and contradict God’s truth; blasphemous doctrine of demons. This is the stuff that is central in the philosophy of feminism. Eve dominates Adam. There are no rules for human sexual conduct. There is no such thing as sin. There is no such thing as salvation. There is no such thing as Jesus Christ being God incarnate, dying to redeem us. We redeem ourselves by elevated knowledge. Gnosticism exalts lesbianism, advocates that the divine revealer was actually feminine.

The divine revealer says - and I quote from one of their, one of the documents: “I am androgynous, I am both mother and father, since I copulate with myself.” You look at some of the rock stars today, in a very direct effort to be androgynous; to rub out all sexual distinction, all sexual lines; to blur what maleness means, to blur what femininity means. That’s all out of the gnostic heresy. That’s a part of the whole package. One writer refers to some gnostic text where God the creator is castigated by a higher feminine power; this is the ultimate feminization of God.

The early Gnostic Marcion was excommunicated from the church in A.D. 150. He established his own church, and immediately appointed women as bishops and priests. How many denominations in Protestantism have followed that? In Valentinian Gnosticism, women functioned as teachers, evangelists, healers, priests and bishops. So, Gnosticism rejects the creator God of Scripture, says He’s blind, envious, malicious. He committed the most heinous blasphemy – or they, I should say, committed the most heinous blasphemy of all: they literally called the creator God, Satan, the devil.

The true God is the unknowable, impersonal force, the unified sum of all the separated parts, both the source, the ground of being, and everything that exists, in a pantheistic mentality. The divine being is feminist, but is best expressed by androgyne, because feminism isn’t content with feminism, it wants androgyne. Feminism assumes that there is maleness; androgyne assumes neither. It’s sort of like being a mule. The idea was to become sexless, a radical refusal to accept sexual differentiation as God had designed it.

You’re telling - listen, you have to understand, when it says in Genesis 3 that women sought to take charge, boy, they really did, and they developed these incredible ideologies - a diabolical path to destroy God, and the Bible, and Christ, and the gospel - and men. And if men through the ages have been somewhat chauvinistic in fighting back, you can understand how the battle that started in Genesis 3 escalated. That’s what’s behind what’s going on today. In New Age thinking, the female power is the key to the salvation of mankind.

No less a theologian than Shirley MacLaine dedicated her New Age book – she has a book called Going Within - see, that’s where you go, you go within. That’s where you find redemption and salvation because you escape the strictures of biblical law and societal demands in self-knowledge and self-realization, and you ascend to the androgyne. You wipe the men out of your world - and Going Within - she dedicates the book, here’s the dedication: “To Sachi Mother Kathleen and Bella and all the other women and men who seek the spiritual feminine in themselves.”

In Hinduism, the savior god - and there are millions of gods in Hinduism, but there is also a trinity at the head of it - the savior god in the trinity is a goddess. Radical feminism is moved along today by this gnostic viewpoint; it is moved along by the idea that the woman is the savior of mankind. As in Gnosticism, the creator God of Genesis, the foolish God, has to go. He is male. He is tyrannical. He denies basic human liberties, demands total obedience, threatens punishment for evil deeds; consequently, He’s got to go.

Feminist liberation releases all of us from God, releases us from all His evil male values, which He’s dumped into men. And by the way, the only hope is for women to become fully feminist, and for men to become feminine; then you’ve got androgyne. We’ve got to wipe out roles. We’ve got to wipe out marriage. We’ve got to get rid of family authority. We’ve got to get rid of stifling morality. The serpent Eve wants to set free; the false God of the Bible wants to enslave.

This is the ideology that reigns in the feminist agenda of our time, and it is a fierce, fierce and aggressive effort on their part. One gnostic document says, “Christ is the same force as Lucifer.” In other words, as you in your society conceive Lucifer to be Satan and the devil that messes everything up, that’s really Christ. This kind of stuff just throws people’s minds into total chaos about Scripture. And there are literally thousands of feminist philosophy books that have come out in the last 20 years. They’re still being written today, espousing this same stuff in one form or another.

Human redemption, says the gnostic literature, is achieved at the price of death, but not the death of Christ on the cross, but the assassination of God. You want liberty, assassinate God. That’s why universities are atheistic. As I said to you before, it isn’t intellectual, it isn’t because it’s not reasonable to believe in a creator God; it’s moral. They love their wicked sin. They love their vileness. They love their perversion. They want their freedom. They don’t want anything they do defined as sin. They don’t want to bear any guilt or responsibility.

You know who the prototype New Age personality of the ’60s was? Charles Manson. And he led his followers in the bloody massacre of Sharon Tate and her friends, and said everything he did was good; and for this reason, his followers saw him as who? Christ, and Satan - the same. Evil and good are just one big part of the whole effort to escape. Carol - interesting last name - Christ, C-H-R-I-S-T, probably pronounces it Crist - said this: “I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely.”

The path to the New Age involves destroying the biblical male/female differentiation. Lesbianism, homosexuality, androgyne, sexual alternatives, let them happen. It’s not popular to say so, but you get the feeling that the true, purest, feminist lesbians don’t really care even if male homosexuals want to destroy themselves with AIDS. It’s an unbelievable mentality. A New Age author, Charlene Spretnak, has written a book called The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, published by a pretty standard publisher, Doubleday.

The same publisher, by the way, who published the Anchor Bible Commentary series; they’ve got a lot of discernment. This book by Spretnak is a call to bring to an end Judeo-Christian religion altogether, to replace it with a feminist-nourished goddess worship and witchcraft, which purposes to overthrow the global rule of men. Don’t tell me that the curse in Genesis 3 didn’t involve women trying to dominate men; it’s the story of the world. Feminism is demanding revenge.

Its real ideological goal is to - is to literally obliterate any recollection of creation and the Bible, Christ and the gospel. It’s a theological agenda, because they want to live as wickedly as their lusts cry out for. George Gilder recognizes their agenda, and he says this: “The revolutionary members of the women’s movement say that our sexual relationships are fundamental to all our other institutions and activities.

“If one could profoundly change the relations between the sexes, they contend, one could radically and unrecognizably transform the society.” And some unwitting person might think, “Well, maybe we do need to change some relationships.” They’re not talking about getting along better. They’re talking about completely undermining God’s design for how we relate as men and women. It’s a life and death issue to them. “The feminist agenda,” warns Gilder, “even in its most moderate version, is leading our society to doom, to years of demoralization and anarchy, possibly ending in a police state.”

Our government witlessly, foolishly just marches down the path to execution, playing right into the hands of satanic lies. They do everything they can to rid this nation of gender differences. They put it in everything. They write it in everything. They demand it everywhere. They want to get rid of any discrimination against any gender. They want to get any discrimination against any sexual preference out of the way. They have bought into the satanic ideology.

I suppose we could safely say there was a time when the thinking part of our country - both at the university educational level and at the political level in the leadership of our land - fought along the lines of biblical morality, but my friend, that is not the case. And they may have vestiges of denominational linkage, they may still go to church here and there, they may pronounce themselves to be interested in historic Christian religion, etc., etc., but the agenda betrays any of those claims.

When you even go to the very most influential people in our nation, the President and his wife, you see what their agenda is. They have bought the whole thing hook, line and sinker. And they’re being led along with everybody else, by Satan, driven to promote androgyne, to promote homosexuality, to promote the feminist agenda, to overturn the moral standards of Scripture, to mock God, to mock Christ. And, you know, it doesn’t seem to me to be a big deal for Antichrist to kick the door open and walk in. He’s not going to have a lot to fix.

No less than Vice President Al Gore has written a book called Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. It’s pretty esoteric title, actually. Gore’s involvement in ecology is an expression of his belief. His belief is in the connectedness of all things - he says “in the great value of all religious faiths” - and his hope that – listen – “ancient pagan goddess worship will help bring us planetary and personal salvation.” Oh, that’s great. Ancient goddess worship will bring us planetary and personal salvation.

And he’s a maniac for ecology: save the planet, save Mother Earth. This is blatant New Age stuff, this is blatant Gnosticism, and undiscerning Christians just kind of waltz along. I mean, you need to know what you’re voting for, folks. You need to know where things are going. You need to understand some of these matters. And I’m not saying for a moment this is something that’s inimitable to the Democratic Party; believe me it isn’t, far from it. Undiscerning Christians are witlessly falling victims to these hellish heresies.

I mean, you even have an organization of Christians - many organizations of Christians calling for the same kind of freedoms. It’s tragic. It just finds its way into Christians’ thinking, and they’re totally lost. There’s another component in the resistance of women following the path that God has laid out in Scripture, and that is the fact that women see children – now, this is really frightening - women see children as somehow the path to self-fulfillment.

That’s really a poor way to consider having a child, but that’s the mentality of today’s woman, that the child somehow is a part of her fulfillment. And so, into the world comes this kid, whose whole reason to be here is to help fulfill his mother. Boy, is that a reverse. Children come into the world to help nobody, right? They come in here to be helped. That goes on forever. But that’s what parents are for. My children - and I’m sure you’re the same way - my goal with regard to my children is that I might be used by God to help fulfill them.

So, the battle of the sexes rages, and rages, and rages. Satan’s lying wicked gnostic system, that’s been around for a long, long time, has now found its way into being fortified in the philosophy of our culture, and this is what we’re dealing with. Let me tell you how this fleshes out. You better be very, very aware of what your children are learning. You better be very aware of the subtleties of this communication in our society.

Madonna said - I read this in a magazine on an airplane - she said that she had the experience of seeing somebody - I think it might have been David Bowie or somebody like that, who purports to be androgynous - and she knew what her calling in life was, was to become androgynous. She has amazing influence. You better be aware of what they’re listening to. You better be aware of what they’re reading. You better be aware of what they’re being taught in school. You better be aware of what university you allow your child to go to.

Humanistic, materialistic, feministic, New Age, Mother Earth -  that’s pantheism. It’s the worst of everything; it turns all of Christianity upside down. It turns God into an evil, wicked, bungling sub-deity, and Jesus Christ into a fool, who is really no other than Satan himself. This is damnable stuff. Some of it is blatant, some of it is overt, some of it is very subtle, and the subtler it is, the more dangerous it is.

I tell parents all the time, when you’re thinking about sending a young person to the Master’s College, and sometimes they’ll say, “We don’t know if we can afford it, so I think we’re going to let them go to a state school,” I say, “You cannot afford to do that, whatever the price is, unless there’s some pretty extenuating circumstances, and awfully strong faith and strong convictions, and unless you focus that young person into the right area.”

I was talking to a student at the University of Oregon. He said to me - I said, “What are you taking?” He was telling me he was in some kind of a science field. He said, “Well, I’m taking multi-culturalism this semester.” I said, “You’re taking a whole semester of multi-culturalism?” He says, “Yes, it’s required of every single student that comes to the university.” Multi-culturalism sounds fine - hey, that sounds great, we’ll all get along, you know, everybody will be one, all the cultures will mesh - that’s not multi-culturalism.

Multi-culturalism is an attack on Western history; it’s an attack on Western civilization, Western history, English literature, American literature, American history. Now, when you go to the university, there’s no core curriculum; you don’t have to take Western Thought, History of Western Civilization, American History, English Literature, American Literature, The Romance Languages of Europe. That’s our culture; that’s where our culture comes from, born, of course, in the Reformation, and it comes out of that.

It carries the ethics, the morals and the values of Reformational thinking - along with a lot of other stuff - but that’s the heart of it, that’s where our culture came from. Multi-culturalism says, when you come to the university, there’s no core curriculum; you can pick whatever courses you want out of 4,000 options, because there is no standardized truth. Two or three generations going through that kind of training, and nobody remembers our history at all - and that’s the point; that’s the point.

It’s so severe that a new accrediting association has come into existence in the last few months, called AALE, American Academy of Liberal Education - a brand new accrediting association for the express purpose of accrediting only those schools, universities, who are committed to a core curriculum for the preservation of the great truths of Western thought - so we don’t all treat Hinduism equal with historic Christianity. But that’s under massive attack. This accrediting agency, by the way, is going to make its voice heard.

They came to us at the Master’s College, and asked if we would join and be accredited by them - and that’s quite a remarkable invitation, because they only accredit very elite schools that have a very strong core curriculum. There is an all-out effort to just totally get rid of all vestiges of Western Christian thought, get it out of everywhere - to get it out of the legal system, to get it out of the educational system, everywhere - as we have noted for you in past weeks.

So, we’re dealing with this kind of fortress, and it’s against that kind of ideology reigning in our society that we have to stand up and say, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” and then get ready to be bombarded. There are environments where if I said that I might not get out with my life, there’s such a fierceness with regard to this. What we have to have in engaging this ideology, we have to have spiritual weapons, and here they are - Ephesians 5:22 to 24, 1 Corinthians chapter 11:3 and following, Titus chapter 2 verses 4 and 5, 1 Peter chapter 3 verses 1 through 6, right?

Those are our weapons, because those are the truths revealed from God for the woman. When you, as a woman, come to the place where you’re Spirit-filled, heart full of joy, thankful for everything, mutually submissive, when those realities are in place in your life the curse is greatly minimized, the conflict is greatly lessened, God’s original intention is restored, and marriage becomes the best - the absolute best, the grace of life - when the battle’s over.

Lord Montgomery - the great British general - said, “I encourage young men never to think of marriage unless they had been fully schooled in the art of warfare.” Well, for many people that’s how it is, and most of them, the war blows the marriage apart. Marriage can be the grace of life, the best of life, the bliss of life, the joy of life, the fulfillment of life, when it’s followed according to God’s Word. Two people can become - as Peter calls them – “heirs together of the grace of life.”

I just wanted to tell you all that stuff tonight, so you’d know I knew it, because now that you know I know it, you can know that I don’t believe it, even though I know it. Having considered it all, it’s nothing but satanic lies. We can go back and rest in the truth of Scripture, so come next week, ladies, and we’ll get to the good part. Let’s bow in prayer. Father, it is with great joy that we thank You for how Your Word directs us with such clarity.

We read about all the foolishness and chaos and confusion of the lies that come out of hell, concocted by Satan and other demons, that don’t even agree with each other -  just the chaos of it all, to say nothing of the blasphemy of it. And there is, then, on the other hand, the simple, beautiful, magnificent purity of the Scripture - so clear, so precise, so exact - telling us exactly who You are, and how You created, and why You created, and how men fell, and how You set out to redeem them.

And how Christ came, and died, and rose again, to provide salvation from sin, and comes someday to establish His kingdom on earth, and then to create a new heaven and a new earth. O Lord, the plan is so magnificent. But, Lord, as we look at the world around us, we can see that sinners aren’t just content with their sin, they have to be able to defend it, and they go to unbelievable extremes to invent wild things.

Well, not really invent - to buy into satanic lies to justify their iniquity, to justify their godlessness, to justify their hatred of Christ, to justify their lust, their pride, their unwillingness to obey. And, Lord, help us to storm the fortress with the truth, the precious truth of Your Word, not in only saying it, but in living it, because, in the end, those people have disastrous lives, devastated, shattered, broken.

Help them to see the joy of godly marriages, the beauty of genuine love, the wonder of a happy home where Christ is king. Use us, Lord, in our time to tear down the fortresses and build strong marriages, that men and women may see the testimony of Your power in our lives and be drawn to Christ. Cause many sinners to repent of these kinds of terrible sins and bow their knee to Christ. Save some rabid feminists, and may their testimony go far and wide across this earth of what You have wrought in their hearts, and may You receive the glory, Father, in our lives in every area, in Christ’s name. Amen.