Is Male Cowardice the Story of Christ’s Crucifixion?

Is Male Cowardice the Story of Christ’s Crucifixion?

The Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, Israel iStock.com/alefbet

New York Times columnist claims the fundamental lesson was that ‘the men fled; the women stayed.’

By Stephen Flurry • April 30

Ahead of the Easter holiday, New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat took the liberty of using the events surrounding Jesus Christ’s torture and murder to attack men as being inferior to women.
In “God and Men and Jordan Peterson,” Douthat wrote, “The men fled; the women stayed. That’s the story of Easter weekend in the New Testament.”
First, the story of Easter weekend is actually about bunnies, eggs and chocolate—none of which are found in the Bible. But this writer is saying that the premise of Christ’s crucifixion is male cowardice! He is actually using the one inspired book that actually honors and upholds the office of a husband and father to denigrate and malign male authority! This is where the #MeToo movement has brought us today.
What is actually central to the events surrounding Christ’s crucifixion? Read John 19 and notice the male authority, leadership, sacrifice, love and commitment!
God’s master plan is about family, and the Head of God’s Family is the Father. John 3:16 says that “God [the Father] so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Douthat believes (emphasis added throughout):
Most of Jesus’s male disciples vanished when the trouble started, leaving His mother and Mary Magdalene and other women to watch by the cross, prepare His body for His burial, and then (with the men still basically in hiding) find the empty tomb.
But what does your Bible say? Again, read John 19. Notice verses 25-27: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! …”
By this point, Mary’s husband Joseph had died. Despite the fact that Christ was in agony after having His body shredded by the scourging, He managed to reach out on behalf of His grief-stricken mother. What love and outflowing concern He had for others, and in this case, for His widowed mother. He looked at John, the disciple whom He loved, and said, You take care of my mother!
Verse 27 concludes: “And from that hour that disciple”—that was John (a man)—“took her unto his own home.” John stepped up to serve and comfort Christ’s mother.
After Christ died, Douthat said that it was the women who prepared His body for burial. But notice verse 38: “And after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave. He came therefore, and took the body of Jesus.”
Mark’s account says, “Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus” (Mark 15:43).
It was Joseph of Arimathaea, a wealthy disciple of Christ (and a man), who went to Pilate boldly! The Jews were in a frenzy about crucifying Christ, so this would have taken a lot of courage. It took a courageous and honorable man to retrieve the body of Christ and prepare it for burial.
Notice who else was there to help Joseph prepare the body for burial. “And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight” (John 19:39).
We first encounter Nicodemus in John 3, when he came to Christ by night because he was afraid of being persecuted. But here, these two men were seen boldly preparing for proper burial the body of a man who was viciously hated by the most powerful people in Judea.
“Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury. Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews’ preparation day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand” (verses 40-42).
Your Bible makes it very clear that late Wednesday afternoon, Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus (two men) prepared Christ’s body for burial.
Douthat then used his distorted view of the gospels to make a point about male absence in religion today. There are about 10 percent more women than men attending Christian churches and denominations in the United States. But as the Federalist’s Matthew Cochran pointed out in response to Douthat, the dearth of male leadership is not limited to religion alone. It runs through our entire society!
“We’ve long been observing the same kind of sex gap in higher education,” Cochran wrote. “According to recent numbers, women make up a 57.3 percent majority of college students.”
What we are seeing in our society is the fulfillment of Isaiah 3:12: “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.”
Why is all this happening? It is the result of broken law. Ephesians 5 provides teaching and instruction about how marriages should be conducted in order to produce happy families and, in turn, happy societies. God makes it clear that the husband is to be the loving head of the wife, and the wife is to be in loving submission to her husband.
Cochran concluded his article by writing:
God’s instructions to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5 is probably the most hated Bible passage in America. Without exception, both in church and at seminary, every time I have heard Ephesians 5 taught, the “husbands, love your wives” part was laid out straightforwardly with a healthy dose of shame for men who do not aspire to love their wives as Christ loves the church.
This is as it should be—flattery of men is not the solution here. Nevertheless, when those same teachers taught the part that instructs wives to submit to their husbands as unto Christ, they spent the entire time hedging—explaining nothing while piling up (often dubious) exceptions until submission had no tangible meaning at all. And that’s if they didn’t just gloss over it entirely.
This is poor instruction, particularly when we consider which part our culture is most apt to rebel against. If we teach the female half of our congregations that God’s instruction is to be carefully avoided, the male half is going to learn the same lesson—and they won’t be oblivious to the blatant hypocrisy.
If Douthat wants to use the Bible to make a point, he should acknowledge the fact that the disciples whose lives were in danger forsook Christ and fled. He should acknowledge the fact that the often-maligned Scriptures highlight the roles of women here in the gospels and elsewhere. (Other articles at the New York Times and elsewhere often ignore the honor that the Bible gives to women and their roles.) But he should also acknowledge the faithfulness of some of the men on the scene. And he should acknowledge the heroic faithfulness of Peter and the other apostles who went on to dedicate their lives to the living Christ: Peter went on to be crucified himself for his faithfulness to Christ! The New York Times should acknowledge the other 99 percent of the Bible that establishes the godly role of men and the godly role of women! And it should acknowledge the perfect, godly, masculine example of Jesus Christ Himself.
Cochran pointed out that our people don’t believe and obey the instructions of God contained in the Bible—we just pick and choose what we want to believe. Douthat’s article is certainly proof of this.
If you would like to learn more about this subject, I discussed it at length on my April 13 Trumpet Daily Radio Show. If you would like to know more about the most momentous event in human history, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, read our reprint article “When Was Christ Crucified and Resurrected?”

Two Thirds of Millennials Don’t Know What Auschwitz Is
Children at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland, on the day of the camp’s liberation by the Red Army, Jan. 27, 1945 Alexander Vorontsov/Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images
The tragic results of the decline in education
By Stephen Flurry • April 24

For two minutes in Israel last week, everything stopped. Cars came to a halt on busy highways. Pedestrians stood still. Other than the eerie wail of air raid sirens, the normally noisy and bustling streets of Israeli cities were blanketed with a heavy silence.
April 12 was Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day, the whole nation honored the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
For these Israeli citizens, this history is real. But for many Americans, the Holocaust is a distant memory—or something they don’t know anything about.
A recent survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany discovered just how ignorant many Americans are about the Holocaust. Forty-one percent of Americans don’t even know what Auschwitz was. The numbers get even worse when you consider only the younger generation. Two thirds of millennials interviewed—people between the ages 18 and 34—don’t know what Auschwitz was!
Auschwitz was perhaps the most infamous extermination camp in World War ii. More people died in Auschwitz than at any other death camp. You would think that if people remembered anything about the Holocaust, then Auschwitz would at least ring a bell.
The Jerusalem Post wrote:
The study found that 11 percent of U.S. adults and over one fifth of millennials (22 percent) hadn’t heard, or were not sure if they had heard, of the Holocaust. While approximately 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust, nearly one third of all Americans (31 percent) and over 4 in every 10 millennials (41 percent) believed that 2 million Jews or less were killed during the Holocaust.
Almost half of U.S. adults (45 percent) and millennials (49 percent) could not name one of the over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust.
This is comparatively recent history! And yet a shocking percentage of Americans know literally nothing about it.
Why is that? A big part of the issue is the American educational system. A recent article from The College Fix showed that university campuses today are becoming immoral wastelands with rampant sexual promiscuity and no intellectual curiosity. As one scholar put it, our colleges are becoming “profoundly unintellectual” (emphasis added throughout). Today, it’s more about “accumulating gold stars” than gaining a real education.
When you put that lack of real education together with some recent news stories about the rise in anti-Semitism, a disturbing picture forms. Our young people are not learning the history about the Holocaust—or any other history, for that matter. If we don’t learn from our history, then we are doomed to repeat it.
Breitbart News ran a story on April 12 titled “Europe’s Jews Facing Resurgent Anti-Semitism, Highest Levels ‘Since the Second World War.’” The article stated:
Jewish communities across Europe are enduring a level of mainstream anti-Semitism “not seen since the Second World War,” the European Jewish Congress has warned.
That chilling message was delivered just hours after Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center Report on Anti-Semitism Worldwide 2017 was released on Wednesday, which noted that while the number of violent anti-Semitic incidents dropped in 2017 by 9 percent, to 327 cases, all types of incidents—ranging from harassment, vandalism, to assaults—have jumped.
Some of the Trumpet staff went to hear a speech from Melanie Phillips in London on April 12. Her topic was Jews in Britain and Europe, and whether or not it is time for them to leave because it is no longer safe. Well, is it? Are they in danger today the way they were in the lead-up to World War ii? Thanks to our educational system, more and more people are unaware that anything even happened to the Jews in World War ii!
It’s a chilling message, and there are a lot of studies like the one from the Jerusalem Post to back it up. On the one hand, you have widespread ignorance of history—even basic history from as recently as World War ii. On the other hand, you have the alarming rise in attacks on Jews in Europe. Then consider the situation in the Middle East. Tensions are so high there that they are poised to explode into a hot war at any moment. Israel is surrounded by neighbors whose main goal is to destroy the Jewish nation. But if you listen to the mainstream media narrative, it’s all Israel’s fault.
The most recent flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the march against Israel’s border by Palestinians in Gaza last week. More than 30 Palestinians have been killed over the past few weeks. But as the Jerusalem Post brought out, 80 percent of the “victims” were terrorists. Still, Israel is considered the bad guy: What about the 20 percent? They’re killing civilians too!
An article from the Federalist asked:
Imagine, if you will, tens of thousands of Houthi rebels amassed on the border of Saudi Arabia and trying to cross over from Yemen.
What would be the Saudi response? Better yet, consider the Kurdish population of northern Iraq marching on the Turkish border. Do you think President Erdoğan would be greeting them with sweets and flowers?
In both cases, the ensuing firepower would be devastating and the carnage incomprehensible.
It’s a double standard. Israel is seen as the bad guy for trying to defend its borders. And when civilians die because terrorists use them as human shields, those civilians are the only ones you hear about. The Federalist wrote: “Hamas traffics in the death of civilians, preferably women and children, sometimes real, sometimes staged, always to pull the heartstrings of Westerners.”
We’re so easily duped! So many in the West are products of educational institutions that don’t even teach about the Holocaust or Auschwitz. We are forgetting that history! This is dangerous.
In Hosea 4:6, God says that His people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. These news stories point to a dangerous lack of knowledge in America today. It’s sad and shameful what so many of our young people are receiving in their university educations. If we don’t learn from the terrible mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them.
America doesn’t remember the Holocaust. Israel does. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen again—or that it won’t.
To learn more about the importance of knowing our history, watch my father’s Key of David program “Fatal Danger in Not Teaching History.”

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The Comey-Obama Alliance
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks with new FBI Director James Comey during Comey’s installation ceremony in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 28, 2013.
The swooning continues.
By Stephen Flurry • April 23

https://soundcloud.com/trumpetdaily/comeys-higher-loyalty-was-to-barack-obama

“When they’re near him, they lose their minds sometimes. They start behaving in ways that are juvenile, and amateurish, and they swoon.”
Michael Hastings, the late investigative journalist and contributor to Rolling Stone, said this in a 2013 interview with msnbc (emphasis added throughout). He was talking about the way the press corps reacted to former President Barack Obama. Hastings even commented that he had also been caught up in this behavior around the former president. The interviewer asked him if he had ever acted that way in Obama’s presence, and he replied, “I do. I totally—oh man!”
Recent revelations from James Comey show that Hastings and the press corps weren’t the only ones affected. Throughout all levels of government and the media, President Obama’s charisma and control were evident—and they’re becoming more and more evident as time goes on.

Yes, everyone loved President Obama—just as much as they correspondingly hate President Trump. This was one of the things that caught my attention in Comey’s five-hour interview with abc’s George Stephanopoulos last week.
Comey was very open in his interview about the way he felt about President Obama. He talked about his final meeting with President Obama, during the transition period before the inauguration of President Trump. Comey said:
[President Obama] held me back after one of the very last meetings I had with him, after the election, and said … “But I want to just tell you something generally. I appointed you to be fbi director because of your integrity and your ability.” And then he looked me in the eye and he said, “Nothing has happened, nothing, in the last year that has changed my view of that.”
And, look, he wasn’t telling me, “I agree with what you did.” He wasn’t telling me, “You made the right decision.” He was telling me, “I know where it came from. I know you’re not a partisan hack. I know you’re trying to do the right thing.” And it meant a lot to me. I mean, I had not been a political supporter of President Obama’s. I came to deeply respect him, and his higher loyalty to the values I care a lot about. And I—I almost got emotional in that moment ’cause, … having the president of the United States say, “I still respect you for the reasons I did originally,” meant a lot to me.
That is a revealing exchange. Yes, it is true that Comey was in a difficult position in 2016. Hillary Clinton was going forward as the Democratic presidential nominee. It looked like she was going to win. He had to find a way to walk the tightrope—making sure that Clinton wasn’t convicted, while still giving the appearance that he wasn’t taking sides. So it meant a lot to him that President Obama, a man he “deeply respected,” said that he knew Comey wasn’t a partisan hack. Quite the pat on the back from an outgoing president.
Comey also said that he told the president, “I think my wife would kill me if I didn’t take this chance to thank you, and to tell you how much I’m going to miss you.”
Compare this with the way Comey talked about President Trump in the same interview. He called President Trump a mafia boss! Comey told Stephanopoulos that Trump “turned” on him after Comey criticized Trump for not speaking out more strongly against Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2017.
But the real story here is not when President Trump supposedly turned against Comey, but when Comey and many other agents, investigators and bureaucrats at the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation turned on President Trump. That happened long before Donald Trump even became president!
In the same interview, Comey said in that last meeting with President Obama that he told the outgoing president, “I dread the next four years. But in many ways, I feel great pressure to stay to try and protect the institution I lead.”
Why would the fbi director dread the next four years? He said, “Well, I had some sense of the nature and character of the new president of the United States. And I worried very much that there would be an effort to erode the independence of the fbi.”
So Comey had deep, deep respect for President Obama. He saw Barack Obama as a loyal man who had the same values he did. He told him he was going to miss him. But President Trump, in Comey’s mind, was a mob boss!
Who turned on who?
And think about this: Comey’s final meeting with Obama would have been at the same time he was directing the investigation of Donald Trump. He authorized the fisa applications that opened the way for the fbi to tap phones at Trump Tower. And this was while Obama was still president!
Comey talked a lot in his interview about how disappointed he was in President Trump’s reaction to the news of Russia’s probable election meddling. Apparently, President Trump was mostly worried about the public relations angle of the story, instead of asking what could be done about it.
But here again, it’s the Obama administration that stood down while Russia meddled—not Trump. As cnn reported in March, the White House director of global engagement, Brett Bruen, warned the Obama administration back in 2014 that Russia would meddle in U.S. elections, just like it had done in Ukraine. And when it happened in 2016, it was Barack Obama who was more concerned about public relations than he was about fighting back! He and his officials thought that Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag, and they didn’t want to shake the faith of the American people in the U.S. election process. As cnn reported, “Whatever the reason, the warning of the looming Russia threat was not shared across the Obama administration.”
According to the new book, The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, knew all about Putin’s attack on America’s election process. She reportedly told White House cybersecurity officials to “stand down” and stop working on cyberespionage countermeasures. She didn’t want them to get out in front of the president on this sensitive issue.
As we now know, President Obama knew all about Russian meddling, but he opted not to do anything about it because he was certain Hillary would win. And he didn’t want to draw attention to anything that might cast doubt on the election result.
Comey writes in his new book about his “higher loyalty” to his ideals. But where is Comey’s higher loyalty, really? The evidence shows that there is no higher loyalty than to Barack Obama. The deep state has spoken: President Obama was a saint, but President Trump is a morally unfit mafia boss who must be removed from office by any means necessary.
Barack Obama has been out of office for over a year now, but the swooning continues. At the same time, President Trump is being vilified and viciously attacked from every direction. My father wrote in a recent article: “Something diabolical was going on until Mr. Trump was elected—and it is still going on behind the scenes during his presidency. And the media aided and abetted the whole process! The more stories that come out, the clearer this ugly reality becomes.”
If you want to understand more about this issue, please read my father’s booklet America Under Attack. It was written in early 2013, but it gains deeper meaning in light of recent revelations. You can also request a copy of his booklet Great Again. All of our literature is free.

https://youtu.be/yA5wlAOK0-I

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