Earthquake Ladies

Dannah Gresh: A biblical view of gender and sexuality is important. But Mary Kassian cautions us:

Mary Kassian: God’s good design is not something we bash people over their heads with. Our goal is not to make people heterosexual, our goal is to introduce them to Jesus, the Lover and the Redeemer of their souls!

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, coauthor of True Woman 101, for Wednesday, January 26, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I’m no construction expert, but I’m told that the higher a building has to go, the deeper the foundation has to be. Also, the less stable the ground around it, the deeper it needs to be. And what a great metaphor for life. When everything around us is shaking, we need a solid foundation in order to withstand the shaking and movement. These are shaking times. I don't know if it's ever been more important for our lives to be grounded in God’s Word, grounded in Christ, grounded in the gospel.

Yesterday, we heard part one of a message Mary Kassian shared last fall at Revive '21. She was talking about our need to stay grounded in God’s good design for male and female. She talke about the shifting values in the arena of gender and sexuality. You know what I'm talking about if you're reading any news, reading any commentary, if you are having conversation with people you know. You are hearing this talk of changing values in the area of gender and sexuality. It's a lot like the tremors of a strong earthquake. It can seem pretty daunting, pretty overwhelming and confusing. But if our foundation goes deep, if our lives are built on the rock of God's Word, we don't have anything to be afraid of.

If you missed part one of Mary's message yesterday, you want to be sure and go to ReviveOurHearts.com or the Revive Our Hearts app so you can hear that. I believe this was a timely and timeless message that we need to hear in these days. Today, we want to listen to part two of Mary’s message, as she continues talking about some of the history of the seismic fault line we have come to call feminism.

Lord, these are troubling days, they are troubling times and troubling developments in our world. We do feel the earth shaking around us as it relates to issues of gender and sexuality. I pray that You would give us. Help us to ground our thinking in Your Word and Your ways.

Thank You for my friend, Mary Kassian, and for the wisdom and insight that You have given her on this subject. We are talking about hard things here, but I pray that You would open our hearts and our ears and our understanding to grasp Your ways and to say, "Yes, Lord" and then to be ambassadors of Your beauty and good plan as we share it with those around us. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Here's Mary Kassian.

Mary Kassian: Society’s acceptance of feminist ideas contributed to the sexual revolution in the 60s:

• An increase in promiscuity, immorality, and adultery.
• The divorce rate went up, the rate of marriage went down.
• Abortions increased, the number of births decreased.
• Women’s commitment to self-actualization and career got moved front and center, and marriage, children, and home got moved to the sidelines.

To this day, we are feeling aftershocks of that ideological quake.

But the ideas of second-wave feminism could not have gained momentum without the technological advancements that supported them:

• Invention of the birth control pill.
• The proliferation of Planned Parenthood clinics.
• Television as a mechanism of mass communication.
• Computer technology and the proliferation of white-collar jobs.

Without these advancements, the quake would have only been a tremor.

It’s the same with third-wave feminism. The foreshocks of third-wave feminism began in the 1990s, in the riot-girl, feminist punk movement. Then those ideas were popularized for the next generation of women in Jennifer Baumgartner’s 2000 classic book Manifesta, and in Jessica Falenti’s 2017 book Full Frontal Feminism. 

These authors expressed legitimate grievances about how some men treat women, but their solutions moved women and society even further away from God’s design. It was another shift. Third-wave feminists introduced the idea that women could be as sexy and as raunchy as they wanted to be, and that sex and raunch—acting and dressing like a prostitute—was in fact a political statement and a mark of girl power.

Third-wave feminists pushed Kimberly Crenshaw’s gender and critical race theory, which claims that women can’t just fight against oppression along biological lines of their sex, they also need to fight against gender oppression.

The third wave encourages women to deconstruct all rules about gender and sexuality. Women can be lesbian, bisexual, asexual, trans-sexual, a man can become a woman—anything goes. “It’s my body, my experience, my sexuality, my choice.”

In the past ten years society has witnessed hundreds of third-wave feminist marches and protests. The most prominent of which are the women’s marches motivated by Trump’s inauguration and renowned for women symbolically wearing those pink knitted hats. Do you remember those? Contrary to what many participants and observers think, the ideology behind these marches is not benign. The organizers aren’t just making a statement about boorish men who crassly put down women, nor are they just making a statement about the horrors of abuse and rape. No. These protests push an ideology that leads to a deconstruction of the male-female binary. “My body, my experience, my sexuality, my choice. I kissed a girl and I liked it.”

Second-wave feminism deconstructed the roles of male and female; third-wave feminism deconstructs the very category of male and female. It’s no longer a woman, it’s a “menstruating person.” There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed Chastity transition to “I am Chazz,” Bruce transition to “I am Kate,” Jared (whose parents helped him start the process at age four) transition to “I am Jazz.” We’ve seen a biological male honored with a Woman of the Year award. We’ve seen men who identify as women gain the right to access women’s washrooms, be housed in women’s prisons, and compete against women in sports, even in the Olympics. We’ve seen a male-to-female trans MMA fighter break a female opponent’s skull, only to be lauded by the media as the bravest athlete in history.

The current shake-up in gender and sexuality would not have been possible without advances in medicine, in plastic surgeries, in hormone therapies, nor would it have been possible without the explosion of cell phones, iPads, Internet, and the tremendous influence of social media.

Nevertheless, I want you to understand this: with regards to the fundamental fault line in our sexuality, there is nothing new under the sun. The shaking that we are experiencing with regard to gender and sexuality is only new inasmuch as modern technology has provided sin more opportunity. 

History has witnessed shake-ups like this before. The problem stretches all the way back to the massive fracture that occurred when Adam and Eve decided that it was a good idea to listen to the serpent.

Okay, that’s how we got here. Now, how do we respond?

About ten thousand people each year are killed in buildings that collapse in earthquakes, and one of the main reasons that buildings collapse is the failure of the foundation. A strong foundation with piles driven deep into the ground is one of the primary ways to earthquake-proof a building. In the same way a strong foundation protects a physical building from being damaged by an earthquake, you can protect yourself from being shaken by quake-proofing your mind with God’s foundational truth about gender.

Verses 1–2 of Genesis 5 contain a succinct and profound summary of what is true when it comes to gender and sexuality. There are five rapid-fire truths contained in these phrases. First, “When God created man . . .” Here’s the truth: God created you! You are not an evolutionary accident. God formed your inward parts and knit you together in your mother’s womb. He puts an incalculable value on your life, and He’s involved in the process.

Number two, He made you in the likeness of God. Here’s the truth: God created you to bear His image. The reason you can think and dream and reason and make moral choices is because you are an image-bearer of God. That doesn’t mean you bear His image well. Sin can mess things up, and sometimes badly. Nevertheless, though God’s image in humanity has been effaced, it has not been erased; therefore, every human being deserves to be treated with dignity. From the drag queen in the library to the cross-dresser in the grocery store, from the cisgender missionary to the transgender activist, we are all made in the likeness of the Almighty God.

Number three, “male and female He created them.” Here’s the truth: God assigns you to one side of a binary: male or female. There are two categories—only two—and the category He puts you in depends on the plumbing between your legs at birth.

What about intersex people? Well, 0.018 percent of babies are born with a birth defect. Their chromosomes and genitals are undifferentiated or don’t match, and blood tests can’t give them information about whether it’s a boy or girl. In these incredibly difficult and painful situations, doctors and families have to do their best to figure it out. But in 99.982 percent of births there is no question whether the baby is a boy or a girl.

Here’s another truth: God’s binary applies to sex and gender. It doesn’t just apply to our hardware, it also applies to our software. Society tells us that sex and gender are two different things that can be dissected from one another. But God designed our bodies, our souls, our spirits, our identities, our sexuality, and sexual behaviors to function as part of a unified whole. Whether we agree with Him or not, He’s only given us two tick-boxes.

Number four, “He blessed them.” Truth: God created manhood and womanhood for our good and for His glory. It can be tough, admittedly, to view womanhood as a blessing, especially when we consider the abuse, rape, trafficking, mutilation, and the degradation experienced by our sisters all around the world. But the horrors of sin and evil do not change the fact that God’s creation of male and female was good, very good.

As humans, we flourish when we step into who God created us to be. In doing so, we bear witness to the great cosmic love story of Christ and His Bride and the eternal union to which gender and sexuality point.

Five, He named them man when they were created, which in Hebrew is Adam, meaning mankind. Now, God gave humanity as a whole the name Adam to indicate that we all inherit the sin nature of God’s firstborn human, Adam, and to foreshadow the redemption that would come through Jesus Christ, the firstborn over all creation, the last Adam.

This statement gets right to the nub of the matter, doesn’t it? Who has the authority and the right to name? Who gets to say what humanity—maleness, femaleness, sex, and gender—is all about? If we’re to believe the Bible, the answer is crystal clear: God has that right and we do not.

In Ephesians 3:15, Paul bows his knees before the Father, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” God does the naming. God has the right to tell us who we are, how we should live. He’s the Potter, we are the clay. Isaiah 29:16,

“You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay. Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘You did not make me?’ Can the pot say to the potter, ‘You know nothing?’” 

If you do not anchor yourself to these foundational truths about gender, you will not be able to stand firm against all the shaking that’s going on. How can you respond? You can quake-proof your mind, and I challenge you to become an earthquake lady.

Lucy Jones was two years old when an earthquake struck not far from her family home in Ventura, California. As the ground lurched, her mother took Lucy and her siblings and guided them into a hallway and shielded them with her body. That event impacted little toddler Lucy profoundly. When she grew up, she became a seismologist, and for forty years she has helped people in the state of California deal with earthquakes.

They affectionately call her the earthquake lady. She frequently appears on TV, educating and warning them about earthquakes and telling them what they can do to prepare. She coaches Californians on how to prepare for the big one, and she is the motherly voice of care and concern and calm that they turn to whenever the earth begins to shake.

I suspect that Eve learned how to be an earthquake lady. After the earth-shaking trauma of Cain murdering Abel, she bore another son, and she named him Seth. God’s promise that He would crush sin through Eve’s child had seemingly died with the murder of the godly Abel, but Seth was a bright ray of hope. Cain’s kids were becoming increasingly wicked, but Seth grows into a man and begins to have kids of his own. Look what it says in verse 26:

At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.

The increasing wickedness made them desperate for God; it made Eve desperate for God. You moms and grandmas with prodigals know that feeling.

There’s something else tucked into this passage that really excites me. Chapter 5 starts with the words, “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” and then it traces Adam’s family line from Seth to Noah.

Now, in the Bible, family records are introduced with these words: “These are the generations of so-and-so.” In Hebrew, this record is called a toledot. There are lots of toledots throughout Scripture, but this one is unique. It adds a phrase that is absent from all the others. It says, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” There’s only one other toledot in all of Scripture that uses those words, and it’s found in Matthew 1:1. “This is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

Luke traces Jesus’ human ancestry back even further. We find out that Jesus Christ is the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

So in the Bible there’s the book of Adam and the book of Jesus, the last Adam. Jesus Christ is the exclamation point at the end of Adam’s wild and crazy story. Cain was Adam’s firstborn son, but he isn’t listed in Adam’s toledot. After Seth was born, Adam and Eve had lots of other kids and grandkids, but they aren’t listed either. Seth’s family line, which pointed forward to Jesus, was the only storyline that mattered.

Every person in the human family has been born in a fallen condition, in the likeness of Adam, but Jesus rescues us from Cain’s fate. He redeems the massive fault line that sin has created in human sexuality. The incredible hope to which even this passage in Scripture points is Jesus.

God’s good design for human sexuality is not something we bash people over the heads with. Our goal is not to make people heterosexual, our goal is to introduce them to Jesus, the Lover and the Redeemer of their souls!

So, how do we respond to the cultural shaking that’s going on in gender and sexuality? We quake-proof our minds in truth and we become spiritual earthquake ladies. Earthquake ladies love people. They love others; they are compassionate, and they lovingly help others withstand the quake. They pass on truth from generation to generation to generation, to all their physical and spiritual babies and grandbabies.

Earthquake ladies call upon the name of the Lord. They are intercessors who wrestle on their knees for this generation, for their children and children’s children, against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of the dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms; because, it’s a battle.

In Colossians, the passage that Nancy talked about, we see that there is a battle for our minds. Human philosophy wants to pull us away from the truth of the Word of God. Earthquake ladies—and this is the most important point—always point people to Jesus, because Jesus is the only one who has the power to recreate and to redeem.

This is a tough topic. We are going to go out into the world, and this is not a popular stance—that God created us male and female. Many of you in this room have had quakes in your heart along this fault lines of sexuality. Maybe it isn't in regards to your gender, maybe you are very firm and convinced in who you are as a woman. Maybe it is in terms of other sexual behavior. That's your point of vulnerability because of the Fall. But because of Jesus, He wants to take that and write a new story.

Do you want to be an earthquake lady? Would you stand for a moment? I’ll pray over you.

Heavenly Father, I pray for each woman with arms raised, that she may be the voice of truth and compassion, that she may hold that balance between truth and compassion and love in hand. Heavenly Father, I pray that You will strengthen her, give her courage, make her strong, help her put her confidence in You, and be bold and very courageous in this world that is shaking. May we be earthquake ladies who point people to the only answer that is found in Jesus. Amen.

Dannah: Well, I never thought I would want to be called an “earthquake lady,” but after listening to Mary Kassian, I’m on board with this concept. Mary gave that message last fall at Revive '21. It’s called “Grounded in God’s Good Design,” and you’ll find a link to be able to watch it in the transcript of this program, at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Mary Kassian and our host, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, wrote an excellent Bible study together on this subject. It’s titled True Woman 101: Divine Design. You can use it on your own or you with a group of friends to learn more about what the Bible says about maleness and femaleness and how that affects life today.

This week, we want to send you a copy of True Woman 101 as our way of saying “Thanks so much!” for your donation of any amount to support the outreaches of Revive Our Hearts. To give online, head to ReviveOurHearts.com and click where you see “Donate,” or call us at 1–800–569–5959. Ask for True Woman 101 when you donate.

Tomorrow, we’ll hear from a woman who has learned to embrace God’s good design for her, even after enduring many years where she hated being a woman. Laura Perry shared her story at Revive '21, and we’ll hear her testimony tomorrow. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Calling you to be an “earthquake lady” and to find freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.

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