Here, I expound on the second of eight main points I’ve personally observed to help explain how one thing after another has sabotaged (ruined) my generation. And at the end of each section, I’ll try my best to provide a solution because, I know…these sound like excuses. But I haven’t given up. I still have faith.
1. The Hook-Up Culture (Non-Monogamous Dating) 2. Tinder (Dating Apps) 3. Cat-Calling and False Accusations 4. Gynocentrism 5. Brett Kavanaugh and Weaponizing Women 6. The Rise of the Manosphere 7. The Sisterhood 8. Leaving Christianity at the Door
I’ll never forget back in 2012, when a girl vying for my interest told me about Tinder. With a smile on her face, she said:
“Rock, have you heard of this app called Tinder?”
“No, what is it?”
“It’s a dating app that basically shows you the location of people in your area who want to have sex with you. You just pull it up, and if you check them off and they check you off, you can meet and have sex.”
The life of King Solomon is one of my favorite wells to soak in inspiration and wisdom. It’s easy to gloss over the complexities when you read the Scriptures, but there’s so many layers to unpack. It’s a story of lust, strategy, triumph, and tragedy. Not to mention, captivating. Makes “Game of Thrones” look like child’s play.
When it comes to Solomon, we’re a talking about the son of one of the most powerful kings who ever lived, whose mother was seduced, and her first husband was sent to his death. We’re talking about a man who witnessed as his family turned on each other for the sake of greed or revenge. A man whose sister was raped by a half-brother. A man who received the greatest wisdom and wealth ever bestowed…and yet he threw it all away by putting the love of women before his love of God.
So, let’s back it up and really dive into who he was and what he saw as a young child that shaped the king he’d grow up to be.
The Adultery of David and Bathsheba
King David…Everyone knows the story of David and Goliath. It’s a childhood classic. The smaller, younger David defeated the 9-foot giant of a man in Goliath by slinging a stone to the Philistine’s head. Of course, it wasn’t David acting on his own. God (Jehovah) was with him. It was God who guided the stone that killed Goliath.
But even before he killed Goliath, hahaha! You get a sense of David’s zeal when he visited his older brothers on the battlelines and saw Goliath taunting the Israelites to combat.
Young David’s response in 1st Samuel 17:26 was “What shall be done for the man who kills this Philistine and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”
“If you feel like you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.”…If you agree with this statement, step one is recognizing that there are people who are smarter than you. Can you do that?
It’s funny…because I’ve been called arrogant. I’ve been called egotistical and too full of myself. But unlike the people who called me those things, I actively seek out people who I perceive to be better than me, smarter than me. I’m not offended or discouraged by them. They inspire me. Instead of belittling and diminishing them so they can feel like they’re down at my level and we’re equals, I’m inspired to better myself so I can rise up to theirs.
If you’re a high school basketball player and you want to improve, you don’t go scrimmage with a bunch of novice 5th graders. No! You seek out the best players on the block who are all college material. Being on the court with “superior” athletes, forces you to up your game if you want to compete.
That’s what reading the Bible and talking to other Bible scholars has done for me.
If you Google “Smartest Person in the World,” you’ll see pictures with the likes of Marie Curie, Voltaire, da Vinci, and Einstein. It’s interesting…on this list of “Top 40 Smartest People of All Time”…you won’t find names like Solomon, Hezekiah, Samuel, or Isaiah.
In 1st Kings 3:12, God himself said, “Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you.”
…none like you has been before you and non like you shall arise after you…God said that about King Solomon. Therefore, it is my opinion, that Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. But still…what is wisdom? There’s a school of thought that “wisdom is the best application of knowledge to attain one’s goal.”
Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Most Holy One is understanding.”
I’ll Have My Fun Now and Get Religious Later…Would that work?
In this essay, I answer that question and describe the difficulties Christians face when it comes to resisting temptation, while trying to find that elusive good Christian mate if you’re not part of a congregation.
I’ll Have Fun Now and Get Religious Later… – A Theocratic Essay By Rock Tennie
When I was a kid, I must have been thirteen when I looked around the congregation and saw that it was mostly filled with older people. Aside from my brothers, about two other families had kids our age. There was hardly anyone in their 20s and 30s.
My parents became religious Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was eleven, effectively ending the fun things we used to enjoy, like celebrating birthdays and holidays. So, it was only a matter of time before I asked them.
“How about this? How about let me enjoy life and have all the fun I want while I’m still young. And then when I get older, that’s when I’ll get super religious and dedicate my life to God?”
My mom said, “It doesn’t work like that. Because you have the knowledge now. You can’t claim ignorance.”
At the time, I felt this was very cruel of them. I didn’t ask for that knowledge. It was thrust upon me. So when I went to school and saw my peers being able to join sports teams and hang out with each other after school, peers who could talk to each other over the phone and get together for fun events on the weekends…part of me felt jealous and left out, like an alien amongst humans.
Stage In The Sky 