Almost Persuaded – Part 4 of 4

This is the final of this series.  I always allow the pastor to have the last say.

In submission, our women line up and take off their clothes and lie down in the pit, waiting for the shouts to ring out.

“Male Headship!” “Male Headship!” “Male Headship!” 

But wait.  One woman is rising from the pit and has grabbed her clothes and is running off into the woods.

Quickly you must make a choice.  Do you pursue her and drag her back and throw her down into the pit? Or do you run to the pile of clothes and grab them and throw them to the women and reach down and begin to pull them out of the pit?

The moral of the story is that God allows individuals to make a choice of how we will treat our fellow human beings.

The holocaust was the most terrible thing in modern time. The part that I was comparing women to is the fact that woman are like the Jews who took off their clothes and lay down in the ditch so the Germans could have their clothes and shoes without blood, and they waited to be shot.  It was submission that I am referring to.  It is submission where women are being mislead.  I hope to see the day where women refuse to take off their clothes and lie in the ditch. 

Doctrines, meaning teachings, have changed down through the years within the Baptist churches.  At one time we taught that slavery was Biblical. We taught that a person could not work on Sunday, that our youth could not play sandlot baseball on a Sunday.  We sent the deacons out to speak to a member of the church who was sinning.  I have the church minutes from 1935 to 1969 from my hometown Baptist church.  My father went many times to speak to a wayward member.  Some members confessed their sins, and some even requested that the church withdraw their baptism.  We don’t do that anymore.   The basic doctrines we have relating to Jesus Christ are mostly the same, I suppose, as I can’t know all the churches’ doctrines.  But the way we carry out those teachings are constantly being changed.  We don’t preach hellfire and damnation anymore.  We don’t hold revivals anymore and beg sinners to repent.

And, someday, we will recognize that women truly were created equal by God.

You insist that I say this.  So I will.  I acknowledge that there are well-intentioned, loving Christians who do not believe that women are equals before God in the church and in the home because of certain interpretations of the Scriptures.  There.  It didn’t hurt me to say it, because it is true.  It is also true that these same people have closed their minds to those scriptures.

Paul said it this way: 1 Corinthians 13:11 (Holman Christian Standard Bible)

¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I put aside childish things.