One of the most devastating and destructive movements in our day is the feminist movement. It is changing not only the world, but sadly, it is changing the church. And as a result, the Word of God is being dishonored, opponents are having plenty bad to say about us, and God our Savior is being dishonored and shamed. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. What were some of the most world-changing events in history? Perhaps Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon come to mind, or the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Of course, maybe you think of the 9-11 attacks, or the recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Those events all qualify as front-page news, but there's really nothing more world-changing than what God says should happen each day in your home. But what can be so significant, so revolutionary about your family? John MacArthur explains today, showing you how an obedient Christian woman has the power to transform the culture around her. The title of John's current study, Revolutionary Living in a Dark Culture.
And now with a lesson, here's John MacArthur. Well, let's open our Bibles to Titus chapter 2. In our study of the second chapter of Titus, we are considering it under the title, The Character of a Healthy Church. In this chapter, the apostle Paul gives instruction to the church as to how it is to conduct itself.
He directs his instruction to older men, older women, younger women, younger men, selecting every category within the church and giving basically some direct and specific instruction to them. This is very crucial to the life of the church, not only for its own internal well-being, but for the sake of its witness. He says in verse 5 that this instruction is so that the Word of God may not be dishonored. Verse 8, so that the opponent may be put to shame having nothing bad to say about us. And verse 10, so that we may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect. Those are evangelistic matters. We want the Word of God honored, we want the opponents of Christianity silenced, and we want God our Savior adorned. In order to do that, we have to conduct ourselves in a godly way.
That means older men are to behave in a certain way, older women in a certain way, younger women and younger men in a certain way as well. We're looking at things that identify the character of a healthy church, healthy internally and healthy in regard to its witness. The two go together and an unhealthy church internally will have an unhealthy witness, and so it's very important for us to look at these practical instructions.
Let's look at verses 3, 4, and 5. Older women, likewise, are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips, not enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good. That they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, that the Word of God may not be dishonored. One of the responsibilities of the older women is that they are to teach the younger women, and here it is very specific what they are to teach, as indicated in verses 4 and 5.
God has designed very clearly His own order for the conduct of young women, just as He has for young men and older folks as well. If there is anything in our culture that is being attacked more viciously than any other, it is this matter of the role of young women. In fact, if I were to title this message alone, I might title it, The Feminist Attack on the Divine Order for Women.
We're going through that right now. No matter what I would say about verses 4 and 5, it would be controversial. If I just read it, it would be controversial. One of the most devastating and debilitating and destructive movements in our day is the feminist movement. It is changing not only the world, but sadly it is changing the church.
And as a result, the Word of God is being dishonored, opponents are having plenty bad to say about us, and God our Savior is being dishonored and shamed. Radical feminism has brainwashed our culture. It has brainwashed our culture to the degree that even the church has fallen victim to this. Church leaders, theologians, professors of theology who are supposed to be profound in the Scripture, as well as lay people in the church have bought the feminist lies.
Marriage and the family, the primary building blocks of social and moral order are in shambles in our country and the future is even worse than the present. Unthinking Christians, unthinking believers, not just in liberal churches but in evangelical churches, unthinking, untaught Christians are falling prey to this agenda. And the sad thing is that most of us have no idea where it's coming from. Most of us think that this is just a lot of women who really just want some liberation and some freedom and they're tired of cleaning floors and washing dishes and they want equal pay and they want equal jobs and they want to get out from under the mundane duties and express themselves in more grandiose ways than they think they can in the home.
That may be a contemporary component that isn't even remotely related to the reason for this. The real feminist agenda is frightening. The real feminist agenda is satanic and you need to understand that.
So I'm going to do something that is a bit unusual. Rather than diving right into the text, I want to give you some understanding of where this movement today has come from so that you will see that text in its proper light. We think that this is a movement about freedom for women, freedom from strictures that bind them to their husbands and their children and their duties in the home. We see it as a cry for equality in a society that is preoccupied with life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a cry for opportunity and privilege to use their abilities and their skills unhindered and unrestricted.
And sometimes the rhetoric does sound reasonable. But the real agenda is not reasonable, it is frightening. We cannot think lightly about this agenda.
We have to think deeply about it. The fact that you may feel in your heart some need to be free because you become victimized by the current agenda doesn't mean you really understand the agenda. You don't know that behind this entire feminist movement is some very satanic religious philosophy and it runs very deep in the people who are influencing our culture. They are obliterating our culture.
They are being taught through every avenue to our youth and even Christians are falling under the spell of the feminists. Now some people might think that this is some kind of a new thing connected to American democracy and egalitarianism. It is not. It is old.
It is very, very old. Though in our time, in our century, it is an expression of the anti-male homosexual women who generated it, it is not a human creation at all. It is satanic, absolutely and utterly satanic. And I want to take you back to some of its origins so that you can understand it. Feminism with all of its assorted features and its unique companionship with homosexuality is an old, old heresy that is meant to destroy God's design.
It really started in the garden when Eve, the original feminist, stepped out from under Adam's authority and thought she would act independently and led the whole race into sin, and thus the first act in Satan's feminist agenda was successful. But let's just go back, say, to the time of the New Testament. We won't go all the way back into ancient, ancient times.
We can learn enough by going back into New Testament times. When we get back into the time of the New Testament, before the New Testament, running through the New Testament and after, we have a religion that is generally known as Gnosticism...G-n-o-s...Gnosticism. And it comes from a Greek word gnosis, which means to know. Gnosticism was the religion, the mystical religion of superior knowledge. You could experience mystical, intuitive, spiritual knowledge which was higher than the Bible.
That was the whole point of it. It was an anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-biblical religion designed by Satan to lure people away from Scripture. What you see today in the feminist agenda is a repackaging, a reincarnation of ancient Gnosticism.
In fact, the parallels are very striking. Peter Jones writing in his book says, Gnosticism is a broad term to describe false anti-God religion developed before the birth of Christ as the meeting of the mysticism of the Eastern religions and the rationalism of the Greek West, end quote. That's just a broad definition. Gnosticism took Greek rationalism, that is the musings and the mind of man, and Eastern mysticism, those intuitive, esoteric, fanciful, imaginatory experiences that mystics supposedly have, and wed them together and said, this is the higher knowledge, this is the lofty knowledge, this is the superior knowledge, the Bible is mundane, earthy, common, and wrong. It's very hard to pin down specifics in the Gnostic religion because it's a kaleidoscopic mixture of all kinds of mystical things. And any time you have a mystical religion, it's somewhat amorphous or shapeless because it tends to ebb and flow in the minds and the imaginations of its adherents. Today, Gnostic religion is called the New Age philosophy, but it's Gnosticism, it's the same thing. It's a new kind of mystical, higher level of knowledge that supposedly shows the weakness, the mundane character of biblical Christianity. Now let's look at Gnosticism and get some idea of what it is. The best way to define it is by what it attacked rather than what it is, because as I said, it's so amorphous, it's so subject to imagination and intuition that it can spin off in all kinds of ways. But the one thing you do see in Gnosticism is that it continually blasts everything the Scripture affirms.
So you can know it by what it attacks. At the heart of ancient Gnosticism was a central myth, and that central myth drove the whole Pharisee. Here is that myth. The myth was that the physical universe was never intended to exist, that the physical universe was never intended to exist. It's part of that old Greek dualism that matter is evil and spirit is good.
But the idea was we were all supposed to be free spirits and free spirits with full self-knowledge would be divine and we were just supposed to float around in the mystical free world of spirit life, unencumbered and uninhibited by physical definition and confinement. But the physical universe came into being and it came into being, they said, because a foolish sub-god, they call him a demiurge, a sub-god, the foolish sub-god of the Bible did a stupid thing and he created the universe. If you read ancient Gnostic literature, you will see they attack the Creator God, they mock Him, they disdain Him with a disdain that even has components of hatred in it.
They hate the Creator God who made matter because to them matter was evil and it becomes the prison of the free floating spirit. According to one recently discovered Gnostic text, God the Creator is presented as blind, ignorant, arrogant, the source of envy and they call Him the father of death. That's the God of the Bible, the Creator God. Then they say it was done by this sub-god, they call Him a bungling, created being. This sub-god, this bungling, egotistical, stupid God, this imposter masquerading as if He were the true God, created as an act of pride because He wanted it for His own glory and when you look at the Bible, what you're seeing is not the true God who created for a positive purpose but this sub-god who for his own selfish reasons created something out of his own stupidity that has been a blight on the world. So you start out then with the fact that the God of the Bible is stupid, blind, and wicked, and self-centered and that His creation is a big mistake. Gnostics believed that this fake God somehow, and they have to believe this or their whole thing would fall apart, this fake God somehow when He created the universe accidentally infused into humanity some spark of divine life. They'd have to say that or they would have no way to fan the spark of divine life that they want to believe is in them. So that man is divine, there's a little component of divinity in him which he needs to fan until it just consumes him and he becomes fully divine.
But here is this man with a divine spark, or this woman with a divine spark, imprisoned in evil matter and he has to find or she has to find a way to escape. The Gnostics taught there's no such thing as sin because there's no such thing as right or wrong in the human realm, therefore there's no need for a Savior, there's no need for a death on the cross, there's no need for an atonement. What they needed to do to be saved was, listen to this, throw off the God of the Old Testament, this evil God. Throw off the God of the New Testament with all of His laws and all of His threats and all of His so-called punishment.
Throw off the whole Old and the whole New Testament and free yourself from the encumbering of this sub-God, this bungling Creator who did what He never should have done and created a prison for us in doing it. So you can see that the first tenet of their system was a blasphemy against God, calling God evil, bungling, ignorant. They also had some things in their system that attacked Christ, and I'll mention those in a moment.
Of course, they had to attack Christ too because that's what Satan wants to do, and the system did that. But before I look at that, the system also included, listen to this, lies that elevated women. Ancient Gnosticism focused on women.
This is what it said, for example. Eve was a spirit-endowed woman who saved Adam. You say, well the Bible doesn't say that.
Of course the Bible doesn't say that because the Bible isn't telling you the truth. They said, final salvation for the whole world from the imprisonment of matter will come through female power. And the key is female self-actualization, self-realization, self-knowledge in which a woman becomes so fully in tune with herself and so well knows herself and actualizes and realizes and fulfills herself that she becomes fully divine, and as she becomes divine, she will rescue the rest of these lame men just like Eve fully divine rescued poor Adam. In fact, convoluted the creation account, Gnostic texts tell us that dame wisdom was the heavenly Eve. There was a mystical heavenly woman named the heavenly Eve who is the same as dame wisdom, she's the source of all wisdom.
She entered the snake in the garden and she taught both Adam and Eve the true way of salvation. The snake then is not called the tempter. The snake in Gnostic literature is the instructor. The snake is ultimate wisdom.
The snake was wiser than anybody else. The snake, it says in Gnostic literature, is the Redeemer because the snake is the incarnated woman who comes the heavenly Eve and teaches the truth about self-realization, which is self-fulfillment, which is making yourself divine, which delivers you from being encumbered by matter. They also say this, the serpent in the garden is the true Christ, the true reflection of God.
So they take redemptive history and stand it on its head like a Satanist cross in a black mass. God is evil. The serpent in the garden is the true Christ.
Christ in the New Testament, the reflection of God, is equally evil and He's not the true Christ because the true Christ, the true Christ Spirit is in the snake, is the dame wisdom. Now again I say it's hard to pin all this stuff down. It's mystical stuff, but you can see not so much by what it is, the clarity of it, but by what it attacks, right? It attacks God, Christ, the Bible, creation. Though caught in matter, they say, the Gnostics, humanity once again can become part of the universal whole by a process of self-realization. They say in the book of Genesis, the lack of self-realization is really the problem that man has. And the Bible says man's problem is sin, sin, and that the root of his sin is his self-preoccupation.
So they flip that completely around. So the heart and core of Gnostic religion then is the consubstantiality of self with God. You make yourself into God.
You're the only God that exists. You get in tune with yourself. You elevate yourself, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-actualization, self-realization, self-fulfillment, whatever your self wants, that's how you become God. You just give complete sway to your own self-desire. So the human plight is not because we have moral offenses against God, but we are ignorant of human potential.
Listen to this. They say that the obedience that led Jesus Christ to the cross has no significance. In fact, there was some man named Jesus who died on a cross, but that's all the stupid Christians know about it. What they don't know, according to Gnostic writing, is that the real Christ, the real Christ Spirit actually sat on the branch of a tree watching the Christ on the cross and laughed at Him. Let me read you from the Apocalypse of Peter, one of their ancient documents.
This is from that Apocalypse. 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 the home of demons. And he who stands near Him is the living Savior.
The earthly Christ is a demon, the spiritual, mystical Christ in the tree laughing is the true Christ. Further, they said, since the true Christ never died, there's no resurrection. Redemption, then, is not a gracious, miraculous transformation of a person through the sacrifice of Christ. Redemption is self-understanding, self-axialization, that is giving sway to anything yourself wants, getting out of the strictures, getting out of the limits, getting out of the prison, being free. Peter Jones writes that the Gnostic believers are saved when they realize who they are, a part of the divine, possessing within themselves the kingdom capable of anything, untrammeled by human traditions, creational structures or divine laws. It follows that part of self-redemption is the rejection of biblical ethical norms and the promotion of the distortion of biblical sexuality, end quote. In fact, they say that when a person comes to full self-knowledge, he becomes another living Christ.
And since the serpent had that knowledge, the serpent who was the woman is also the living, the true living Christ, everything twisted perverted. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. The title of his current study, Revolutionary Living in a Dark Culture. Well, John, that word revolutionary is thrown around by people, including some Christians, who have ideas about transforming the culture. And I think what they often have in mind is some dramatic ministry work or political campaign or humanitarian effort. But the reality is the ordinary faithful work that happens in the home is what really can have a transforming effect on the world.
Yeah, there's really no other way to change the world than one person at a time. Grace to You has always had a unique commitment to the personal nature of the Word of God, changing a life, and then changing families. And that's on my heart today.
I want to offer you something. It's a free copy of a book titled The Fulfilled Family. Now, if you recognize that title, we have played that series through the years.
It may be the most popular series we've ever done. It is in a book, The Fulfilled Family. It's a simple handbook that distills the heart of what Scripture teaches about the most essential of all earthly institutions, the family. It addresses being a godly husband, wife, parent, and it lays out the fact that it's not only possible, it's required, and it's within the reach of anyone who is willing to understand and apply God's Word. The Fulfilled Family shows you how God Himself defines the roles of mothers, fathers, and children.
It's about an 80-page book, quick read, but very practical. And remember, this book is our gift to you if it's your first time contacting us. So get in touch today and request your free copy of The Fulfilled Family.
Thanks, John. Friend, for practical answers to your questions about the family, request your copy of John's book, The Fulfilled Family. It's free if it's your first time contacting us, so get in touch today. Call 800-55-GRACE or request your copy of The Fulfilled Family at our website, gty.org. Again, if you've never contacted us before, we will send you a copy for free. Just call 800-55-GRACE or visit gty.org. If you have called or written before, you can purchase The Fulfilled Family for a reasonable price.
Shipping is free when you order from Grace to You. To order, call 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. And while you're online, be sure to check out the sermon archive with over 3,600 sermons by John available to download for free. Our web address, one more time, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for joining us for another week of Bible teaching, and remember to watch Grace to You television Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, and then be back next week as John gives you more principles for revolutionary living in a dark culture, showing you how the feminist movement has harmed not just college campuses and courtrooms and government institutions, but the Church of Jesus Christ. It all starts Monday with another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
