I am not surprised to see those outside of Christ in abject rebellion toward normal gender roles and sexuality. I have never been surprised by that. It didn’t come as a shock when the SCOTUS decision on Obergefell vs. Hodges went contrary to the biblical mandate of marriage between one man and one woman. It hasn’t been unsettling to the biblical worldview, which has aptly demonstrated an astounding, historical-cultural commentary on the practice of man’s rebellion toward their maker from the Fall.
It is very likely, especially given the pop-culture creed we confess in these great states – conservatives will lose out once again with transgender bathroom rights. In the midst of this whole debacle, I’m not even remotely perplexed by the blatant hypocrisy of progressive celebrities and big business, which are using their platform, as they always have, to elevate themselves to the status of an expert. But let’s forget about their lucrative business ventures overseas where these same principles by which they are making themselves out to be stateside martyrs are swiftly condemned.
It seems as if forward thinking bears little place in the greater culture – yet even moreso within the broader church who deny the very faith they claim to bear. For the Christian, transgenderism, homosexuality, and sexual deviance of any sort are to take no place of honorable mention. These are things clearly denounced from the standpoint of scripture, wherein it seems to display a rather alarming capacity for liberal or progressive Christians to hide behind the auspices of love and tolerance in order to ignore the commands and truth of the Bible. In other words, the Bible only holds so much authority for them.
For any who read the scriptures with even minimal regularity, Romans 1 ought to come to mind immediately in this scenario. This is a generation revealing the wrath of God by their suppression of the truth, through the gleeful boasting of futile, foolish, hostile, and darkened hearts. They have been given over to a debased mind so that they may fill themselves to their heart’s content with sexual impurity, the degradation of their bodies, unnatural sexual relations, and every kind of wickedness. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the plain and simple doctrine of man’s greatest feat: ignobility. So all that we see in the greater culture war is simply this doctrine taking flesh; God-haters and backbiters will continue to do so unless the grace of God intervenes, which it does, all the time (1 Cor. 15:2).
Thank the Lord even, that we are being continually covered by that same grace, lest we find ourselves with immeasurable pride in self-deduced righteousness.
Yet the fiercest of words is to be reserved for those who claim to be the bride of Christ. We can debate the true numbers of who is actually in Christ and who is not – but Paul has no qualms with addressing simply those who claim Christ. He takes them at their word often and so will I for the purpose of this piece. There are expectations upon those who claim Christ that are not laid upon the unbeliever.
The book of Romans continues in addressing the hypocrite – and by this it is plainly meant the one who practices and advocates abject rebellion toward God, even though they know God’s righteous decree that such things deserve death (Rom. 1:32). In this specific example, this would serve as a warning to the one who claims Christ yet sanctions homosexuality, transgenderism, or any of the counterparts to the LGTBQIAPD ideology which are opposed to the sanctioned norms of biblical sexuality.
The underlying assumption that God got it wrong and you, a mere mortal, have somehow managed to grasp hold of truth through the titillating nonsense of the likes of Vines, et al., is patently false. Social constructs and ideologies of our current day do not define biblical morality or interpretation. No good student of classic Greek literature seeks to understand the intent of meaning in Homer’s The Iliad through modern Western eyes. What we have then are those who claim to be proponents of biblical Christianity who have maintained a sweeping biblical illiteracy, a lack of hermeneutical method (how you read particular genres of literature), but most importantly – a plain refusal to submit to the text.
In this case then, it seems to present a bitter decry, from many who claim Christ, as if there is a personal vendetta against God’s decree – and a robust delight in conscious rebellion to it. Then there are others who mystify the biblical text as if it is superbly difficult to understand any of it whatsoever – and others still who reject the remainder of scripture outside of the quoted words of Christ. Incidentally, this is a hilarious misnomer because they refuse to understand that those books of scripture weren’t written by Christ and those words are attributed to Him by the disciples; even most reputable atheists see through the smoke and mirrors of the red-letter nonsense – they are simply more honest about their rejection of the authority of the scriptures.
The point in all of this simply being: if you claim Christ, you will obey His commands (1 John 2:3). If you don’t obey Christ’s commands, you cannot remain in the love of Christ Jesus (John 15:10). The call of salvation is not one which we continue on in by the renewal of our minds through being conformed to this dying age. We are to be renewed in the spirit of our minds through the scriptures which God has lovingly given us to in order to know His good and pleasing will (Rom. 12:1-2; Eph. 4:17-24; Col. 3:10).
Scripture is not something which give us the inherent right to deny it whenever we please. It makes claims we must reconcile with – claims which are vastly unpopular and have always received the criticism of being behind the times. It bears moral culpability upon those who would claim the faith, a transformed life and mind, and leaves no room for one to deny tenets they find unfavorable or unlikable. We shall either find ourselves in full submission to the text, or we will be slaves to whatever we feel is right in our own minds – the end of which is death.
Image Credit: Contra la LGTB-Fobia by Chainless Photo; CC 2.0
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