You can use truth for all sorts of nefarious purposes.
Lately there has come a surging interest in something called "Game" -- a theoretical approach to human social and sexual interaction. A primary term you'll encounter is "Alpha Male" as the ultimate gamer. Game Theory identifies rather accurately a lore of mythology regarding the social orthodoxy, and offers a more effective means to interacting with the opposite sex on the basis of how we actually respond. Frankly, it's most often clothed in terms of how to pick up desirable women, a sort of guide for the pick-up artist (PUA). There are related guides for women, but it's typically aimed at helping guys find their inner Alpha Male. The reason this stuff is so popular is because it's based on reality; it works.
This reality as we experience it has been subjected to the Fall. It's up to those who follow Jesus to seek a measure of redemption. What we are facing here after the Fall does not change simply because we gain eternal life. The birth of the Spirit in us changes our commitments, and offers a hope to understand reality as God sees it.
Satan understands fallen reality, as well. As an eternal being well above our level of authority, we can't pretend to understand all about him. What we are permitted is a revelation of his ways, which is easily summed up as perversion. Satan takes what God has made and perverts it. That's why we are fallen, because we listened to him and accepted his propaganda. He won't ever tell the whole truth, but perverts truth by twisting it, counterfeiting it. That's all we really need to understand about the Devil.
Most of the world swallows his lies. Truth is all one thing, but the lies are vast multiples of different things, anything but the truth. There are common themes because it's easier to get people to follow lies by herding them into groups. In any given context, what most people believe is a mixture of truth and lies, but by holding similar social lies in common, we face particular strongholds. Scripture says we tear them down by living the truth in the face of common misconceptions about reality.
The truth about human sexual behavior is not what we are told by our society. It will always contain some measure of truth, but always mixed with lies, too. We keep trying to force reality into the mold of these lies, and the frustration is part of what Satan wants for us. So we are up against a vast stronghold, a massive fortress of pervasive lies written into the very fabric of our social structures.
It leads us to make all manner of wrong choices. Even though we have the revelation of God, our vision remains tainted by this false expectation of the very nature of truth itself. Because of this, it seems we can't really use His power effectively to change ourselves, because we keep expecting things He doesn't want for us.
The same truth of human nature used by pick-up artists and other sinners can be used by followers of Jesus to enjoy the fruits of His kind of love.
Some human behavior specialists lie about humans, saying we have no instincts.
We are not a blank slate, wide open to environmental shaping. What we have are highly developed instincts, very flexible and capable of broad, even fundamental adjustments, based on what we experience. But they remain very essential to our nature as humans.
We need to breed. It won't matter how you artificially stack human needs into hierarchies; sex is a basic human appetite. But the male agenda in this is not the same as the female. Men want to pass on their genes. They'll modify behavior as needed to make this happen. Women want to build a nest. They'll do whatever it takes to build the best nest and capture the best genes for their progeny. These instincts cannot be removed, though they can be shaped and even subverted in hideous ways. Still, we have an instinctual drive to procreate.
Our minds only get involved to make it happen in the most efficient and effective manner. We find ourselves in a deeply perverted social structure, and it's a wonder families happen at all. Even when they do, the whole experience from beginning to end is loaded with unnecessary misery. It's not enough we all agree the family is under attack by Satan in this world. Part of the problem is we continue to agree with one package of Satan's lies as an antidote for some other batch of lies. The solution is to stop propagating the false basic assumptions.
Men and women are not interchangeable. We each have specific differences in our wiring. On top of that, we are fallen, and the curses from the Fall are specific to each sex. Redemption in Christ is all one thing, but males and females have different roles and, beyond the fundamental commitment of faith, take somewhat different paths to righteousness. Thus, there are overlaps and differences, and ignoring either is counterproductive, to the say the least.
The New Testament has very good reasons for treating men and women differently in the Body of Christ. We sin when we dismiss it all as simple cultural bias, when the real problem is our cultural bias.
Let's take a brief look at where our modern bias came from, and why it keeps us from reclaiming our biblical sexual redemption.
The ancient Hebrew culture was designed by God. It was not simply the net result of random events. Nor can we say simply that God chose the Hebrew culture. He designed it and built it as the best way to reveal Himself. Every step of the way in the Old Testament we see how this thing was shaped and carefully molded, sometimes with dramatic shifts for the main players. The call of Abraham was a dramatic culture shock, and result was a major step on the way. The Exodus was another massive shift in understanding. In case you didn't notice, the Hebrew people weren't too keen on this until that last slave generation were all dead. The Conquest generation was an entirely different people, with an entirely different set of assumptions about the world. Even their sins against God assumes a very different way of looking at life than we do. The difference went down to the very shape of what it meant to know something.
During the history of Israel, most events did not change the cultural assumptions very much. After the split into two kingdoms, the Northern Kingdom drifted very far, but never completely lost contact with those ancient ways. They could have repented but refused. The Southern Kingdom of Judah didn't really change much until the Exile. During that century, they were exposed to two major cultural influences -- Babylonian and Persian -- which altered certain aspects. These did not alienate them totally, because it was all still in the Ancient Near Eastern mode of thought. The really huge shock was when Alexander the Great evangelized the utterly foreign Hellenistic culture there. Many ancient civilizations resisted in various ways, the but the Judean people swallowed the intellectual assumptions.
That was the first major shock, perverting the Hebrew people away from their ancient intellectual foundations. Just about every argument Jesus had with the rabbis and rulers reflects a demand they repent from Hellenistic thinking and return to the ancient Hebrew ways of looking at things. The Greek approach to reality, to deciding what we actually can know, was pretty much the product of someone we call Aristotle. He was an ancient Greek philosopher, the intellectual pinnacle of Greek intellectual culture. He knew of the ancient Hebrew religion, and rejected it. That's because he rejected the entire business of revelation from beyond the human plane. His was a man-centered religion, the foundation for what we today call Secular Humanism. If people could not process it through the five senses and his rules of logic, it was just superstition, not knowledge, not something on which you could act.
The Early Church fought this under the guise first of the Judaizers, then the Gnostics. One led into the other, and both were a rejection of Hebrew oriented thinking, and asserted Aristotelian logic in its place. The claims of Christ were subjected to logic and observation, and it was considered the duty of man to judge those claims. The Judean religious leaders were already enslaved by this philosophy. They didn't reject revelation, but subjected it to human-centered analysis. The results of this analysis continued building up until they published it as the Talmud. Judaism today is a perversion of Moses, highly Hellenized. The Early Church was, to a large degree, eventually suckered into this by slow increments.
The Roman Empire brought it's own flavor to things, but largely adopted Greek intellectual assumptions. When Rome fell, the German tribes brought their own ancient pagan assumptions into things. The Church absorbed all of this. The Middle Ages was the result of Germans and the Roman Church compromising on how to live. During the Middle Ages, the Church completely compromised with Aristotle; we call it Thomism. However, it remained a bundle of self-contradictory mythology and superstitions alongside that logical basis. The Middle Ages ended with the Renaissance, the rebirth of interest in Classical Greek and Roman learning and art. The Reformation came out of that, in part as a rejection of the ancient Medieval Church. However, the Reformation was also Aristotelian, seeking somewhat to shed the vestiges of superstition. So it was more logical, more rational, and even less Hebrew. But they maintained the ancient form of German feudal government.
The Enlightenment was a rejection of all those things, the birth of the Modern Age as we think of it. Further developments in the Reformation were deeply affected by the Enlightenment. Most evangelicals are a reflection of Enlightenment Christianity. It's not exactly Aristotelian, because it has this deep layer of German mythology built into it. Finally, the Victorian Age came as a reaction to the immoral excesses of the Enlightenment. Today, almost all of Western secular culture is a mishmash of those two forces.
Do you see how far we've drifted from the biblical position? Right smack in the middle of this is our massive modern mythology about human sexuality, and we can't even begin to understand the biblical position on things from our modern position. Not only do we have deep confusion about what holiness looks like in terms of human sexuality, but we struggle with just the basic facts of what we could see with our eyes. When we observe human behavior, we fail to see what's actually happening.
Reclaiming a biblical understanding will be a culture shock for most of us.
Let's look at what's natural to the two sexes.
Men are designed, hard wired to seek a mission. That covers almost the whole range of human activity. Every man can discern a mission, whether it has anything to do with his daily employment or not. The man who is most truly a man is driven by a sense of mission. He recognizes he can't always do what the mission demands, but he never forgets that calling and will somehow find a way to express it.
Women are designed, hard wired to seek a man with a mission. A woman's life is fulfilled when she is supporting her man's mission in whatever way she can. That includes building the nest around that support, but her whole nature calls her that direction. Her support may be indirect, following what appears to be a totally separate calling, but the net effect of her actions will mean creating a supportive environment for her husband. A woman is most completely a woman when she is working alongside her man.
Notice this is not about being, nor precisely doing, but about commitment. There is no defined success, and it has nothing to do with roles in society or how we define ourselves. It's not even about fulfillment. It's all about a living commitment, goal posts shifting daily, drawing us forward until life itself ends.
The most attractive man knows his mission. Think about what that man would look like, what kind of character he would have. He's self-confident; he breathes an air of accomplishment. There are plenty of things where he's clueless, but he knows at least this one thing he must do, and there is no question about it.
The most attractive woman carries about her the promise to supply whatever that man needs to stay driven. Her interaction with him raises his manhood into sharp relief. Her presence is empowering.
But we are fallen. The Curse of the Fall hits each of us differently. Men are doomed to face constant and lifelong frustration. He will be deceived about his mission, and chase after things this world barely offers. He'll care too much about things which God would gladly provide, and struggle endlessly until they die. Instead of being content with what God offers, he'll chase everything under the sun for fleeting moments to paint his pride.
Women will never be able to escape that urge to build a nest and have children, but she'll never be satisfied with it. She will be driven to control all those factors affecting what she views as security for the nest, never mind how God specifically forbids her getting involved in some of them. There will always be this nagging urge to control her husband, and when she gains that control, she'll despise him. Meanwhile, the man who has total dominance and cares not a whit about her feelings will be irresistible.
Worse, the peculiar failures of each sex become magnified exponentially when they congregate with each other. They'll become even more deaf to God's voice and create a deeply sinful atmosphere which drives them farther from the truth and from the other sex. They become hyper competetive against each other, even as they become ever worse predators toward the other sex.
Sounds like modern American life, no?
Our Post-Victorian Western society is loaded with sexual mythology.
It's hard to know where to start. The primary failure is the Victorian reluctance to discuss human sexuality. It's a part of what makes pornography so powerful. You can be a total prude without blushing at typical human sin. This business of protecting children from all sexual references, as if they someday magically become capable of handling it, is total bunk. Aside from a basic modesty far greater than ours, the Hebrew culture didn't protect childhood so rabidly. It's not they were barbaric, but we are silly. We don't trust God. Kids know when they are interested and they'll ask, provided you build a home life wide open to God's truth. It's good to use clinical terminology -- you should know some -- as long as you explain to them our society is silly about such things, and then tell them about the euphemisms. We have to demystify what's dirty.
Women have been taught to demand the pedestal, yet suffer an instinctive despite for men who bring it. That's symbolic of the deep sickness of our culture. You can be respectful and nice to your wife, but a prospect has to earn it, guys. Women, you have a vast mythology to peel away, summarized under the label "feminism." It has infected Western Christianity so deeply, we find it in most common teaching materials. The revelation from God presumes a manhood rather like the nomad sheik in the desert, an Eastern Potentate. The pedastal is for the man, who then shares it with his wife.
One of the greatest threats to marital peace in the Lord is the Myth of the One. That's the false belief God made you for one man or woman, and you have to find them. Don't ever ask God, "Is this the One?" It's the wrong question. Nothing in Scripture supports this, but people read it back into Scripture as part of our Western mythology. It's not about some magical romance; it's about partnership. God will build a romantic love with any sensible partner, and quite a few who aren't all that sensible. Love always results from exposure and time, and the most hideous beast can eventually have a place in your heart after awhile. We call that the Principle of Propinquity -- nearness in space over time. In theory, anyone will do, but God's wisdom teaches you to look in the mirror and know yourself, what you can tolerate, and empowers you to avoid sorrow in a pretty package.
Women are taught to make the most of their physical assets, but they seldom care what men think. They want to know what their gal-pals think. The gal-pals will lie to her. Men will like some of what they see from this, but mostly aren't that impressed. They pretend because they have to, or they won't get any attention back. The truth? Men prefer long hair. They want a show of curves and flesh until it's their woman. Otherwise, tastes vary. Men make the mistake of thinking it really hinges upon them impressing a woman by having the good taste to like her looks. The men who do best aren't even paying attention, because they wait for the woman to take an interest. Women often find themselves puzzled by their own behavior, but now while they are in action.
It's a wonder people ever find each other, and then stay together.
It helps to be fully aware of how people evaluate members of the opposite sex, whether consciously or not.
Simply as a working model, it helps to envision two scales which are independent of each other. While they are the same for both sexes, the differences are in the details. Also, while grouping people under graded categories is popular, it won't serve that much purpose here.
The primary scale is Presence. This is a combination of physique and charm, or charisma. Despite the wide variation in tastes, there are some common elements which work for each sex because of the dominance of media portrayals of what's ideal. Yet it's never precisely down to simple looks, because the whole thing can be changed radically by the personality. Thus, we combine those into a single scale of whether people are drawn by the total Presence of the person.
The secondary scale is Handling. In the face of deep mythology about what actually works to capture the sexual interest of another person, there are some folks who know better. They use the truth, and their target's ignorance, against them. They may do this instinctively or because they have studied it. Those who know it less have a lower ranking. Awareness of human behavior, both the silly rules, and the reality, is the key. At the bottom of the scale are people who know almost anything and everything except human nature.
Obviously, one could do well on one scale and lose a lot on the other. In general, people who are physically fit within the limits of their DNA do better than those too skinny or too heavy. Men do best when they are almost too busy to notice women. Women do best when they are willing to put some work into getting the man's attention. The idea a woman should wait to be conquered is sheer foolishness for both sides, an old German pagan notion. She's wired to decide and take action; he is the prize to be won. She needs to be patient and focused. (This unfortunate situation is what's left because our society has done away with arranged marriages, in which the lady had to consent.)
Men are wired to find something they like in almost every female. Only the losers will focus on just one gal. These are the guys who've swallowed the feminist lie, and really don't understand what makes women tick. This placing her on a pedestal is a form of objectification, a form of idolatry. The biggest mistake a woman can make is showing too much skill with a man. The obvious implication is she's already had too many men. This isn't the same thing as social grace and charm. She has to make mistakes and know how to recover gracefully. She also needs to know how he handles her mistakes.
At the top end, the guys are predators. They own the room the second they walk in the door, so strong is their presence. They cynically manipulate both men and women to get what they want. They are always powerful and successful, always calculating how much they can get away with. They care only about themselves. The female predator is little different, but less interested in sampling the opposite sex, more interested in feathering her personal nest with what she can obtain at whatever cost.
At the bottom end are social wrecks, even to the point of being as dangerous as they are hideous. These are people who aren't fully human themselves, and are unable to treat others as humans. Most people are between the extremes.
The reason it matters is most people have a certain amount of instinct about their own ranking. Most women in America are deluded about their place on the scale, thinking themselves higher than they are. That's the business of women lying to each other, and men playing along superficially. Men tend to not care about their own rank, and simply work to take the best they can get. The bulk of that middling bunch spend most of their best marketing years spinning their wheels looking for something which does not exist, or is at least not within reach. The predators abuse everyone they can, because they generally have no delusions about their place on the scale.
It should be obvious we don't want to live like this. It's not the way God made us, but a deep and hideous perversion of it. We can't hope to break free until we see the prison as a prison, and understand how it holds us. Understand this crazy system because it's the truth of how our society operates.
Just knowing how this stuff works puts you miles ahead of the pack.
But there's more to know.
Women subtext. In our culture, for a woman to speak simply and honestly is a rare treat. Guys should treat this as a mark of holiness. Most women aren't even conscious of their own mental processes, largely due to the vast mythology of our culture, but also because women have a fundamental flexibility in logical processes not natural to men. The system takes advantage of this by elevating feelings over any real attempts at logic. They are then taught what they are supposed to feel, and how they should react to things, much of which has no connection to reality. Thus, most women seek some hidden meaning in almost everything, even when there plainly is none.
When men subtext, it's a feminine trait, a cultural abomination drilled into their minds. Even when they don't, too many men struggle to untangle a woman's subtext, and frequently get it wrong. Most men can be sarcastic, and love kidding people, but subtext is simply not likely coming from a man. And most women don't know that. So she'll ask a subtext question and he'll miss it, giving the wrong response. You should recognize the infamous, "Do I look fat?" It almost always means something else.
But guys don't have to play those games. Sometimes the woman will seek domination through a challenge. It's an instinct, a fallen impulse, but men should take it in stride. In our Western world, women are drowning in the demand they "be equal" with a very sinister meaning behind it. So it's rare when they don't seek dominance. The proper response depends on the man's level of perception about women, and his verbal skills under fire. If she presents a no-win situation, relax guys. it won't matter because you can't win anyway. Stick with your mission and let her stew. You cannot take responsibility for her feelings simply because she can't control them, either.
If she chooses a more social setting for this challenge, it gets a lot more complicated for you, guys. The best defense is raising the issue long before she gets a chance. Women tend to behave somewhat deceptively until they have that wedding ring, so you aren't likely to see this during courtship. It's an act of betrayal, but don't respond to that part of it. Take it as the rough edge of immaturity; don't let it get to you. If you lack the verbal talent to riposte with humor, then simply turn to ice and refuse to be vulnerable, refuse to be hurt. Let the emotional turmoil be hers alone. She's chosen to step outside the covenant and is not your wife for those few moments. If she stays on that path, it's over. Portray that. Wait for a private moment to make a more distinct verbal warning, remaining totally devoid of emotion. Any other type of response and Satan wins.
By the same token, men can be abusive, too. It ranges all over the place. The primary weakness is trying to control details which shouldn't matter. Taking little things personally means you have a little boy on your hands, ladies, a fragile ego you cannot trust. During courtship, gals, it helps if you can detect the symptoms of repressed rage -- raised pulse and darkening of skin color (flushed), dilated eyes, changes in respiration, sudden increase in clumsiness, etc. It's one thing if you catch yourself raising a challenge to his manhood, but quite another if he takes offense at something petty, something entirely within the range of standard human variation. The range is simply what you know you can handle.
For both sexes, honesty remains the best policy. If there is a mismatch, your failure at self-honesty will bring you into bondage to a living nightmare.
Our Post-Modern world is deeply confused about what Scripture tells us should be the roles of men and women.
There are no cookie cutters here, as one size and shape does not fit all. What we have lost is the fundamental issues of commitment to God and to each other. We tend to reject God's commandments as quaint relics of a forgotten past. This contributes to an unusually high divorce rate in the churches. God cannot protect you from Satan unless you stand close to Him. We cannot rely on popular mythology so deeply burned into the cultural Christianity of our day.
The only role denied a woman is spiritual leadership over men. Paul warns Eve was deceived, but Adam was simply being stupid. This is something hard wired into women. She is granted by God a flexibility of teaching and logic highly suited to following her man where he is led. The man has the mission; his perception of the calling may change. She has to be quick to respond and stay with him. Yes, some men are flighty and can't be trusted. Some women refuse to obey God, too. If we don't understand the ideal, we can't begin making things better. She can help him remember his commitments and things he has said before, but the final spiritual decisions are his.
Her focus is upon effects, and to keep an eye on life support. The New Testament makes references to female elders. When it comes to organizational matters, keeping the human activity on course, there are no limits to female leadership. We all need a mother figure to keep certain things before us, things for which women alone have the proper instinct. There are a whole range of things the man should relegate to his wife's authority, and pretty much let her have her way with it.
We also have male elders because there are certain things men are called to handle in the human side of the church body. Eldership is a matter of knowing the implications of God's Law Covenants, and how they exemplify God's kind of concern. The church was intended to be an extended family, almost like a clan. But instead of shared DNA, we share the Spirit of God. Our family identity is a shared spiritual identity. A family has both male and female leaders, and will organize flexibly according to their own context. The intent was a man would hold the final veto, regardless of his level of involvement in the process up to that point. It is the Dad's role to identify the root spiritual issue in every thing; God does not permit him to pass the buck.
When selecting a life partner, we are torn between the demands of the flesh and the requirements of the Spirit. At the very least, while remaining fully aware of the dynamics of how we all tend to act, we should hold forth a higher standard and seek to discount the voice of the flesh. There is no perfection here, just recognizing we are inherently broken and striving for what's better.
Don't restrict God by restricting yourself to mere fleshly inclinations. Most of us know what we like, but we have to submit our appetites and tastes to God's Spirit. Learn what those signals leaking into your conscious mind are supposed to do for you. Never, ever forget God can create a marriage between you and almost any number of other people, because the Principle of Propinquity has never failed in human history. Choose a partner based on what God is doing in your life at that time.
Propinquity can just as easily be your worst enemy. Women in particular have this urge to see the potential in a man, not what he actually is. Huge mistake, to the point we can call it sin. The man is your mission; reforming him is not. Never enter courtship until that person is already what you know they have to be for you to stay with them. It's not about how they make you feel, but what you know God requires of you.
Beware of cathexis, the dramatic and overwhelming collapse of ego boundaries. If your encounter with someone makes you feel higher than a kite, you are in deep danger. Your integrity before the Lord is compromised in that condition, and you'll do almost anything to keep that drug coming. This affects both sexes, and causes a complete loss of focus on what really matters in the Kingdom. It's almost a sure thing that feeling is a lie, and the object of such affection is the wrong choice. The least you can do is wait until your ego boundaries come back and you can think clearly about them.
Learn how things are supposed to work, and don't be trapped by thinking you somehow have a right to the same kind of fantasies as everyone else.
By Ed Hurst
29 January 2012
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