What Russell Moore Thinks about Homosexuality

Russell Moore’s Platform and Why This Issue Matters

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, for a listener-generated episode on Russell Moore's view of same-sex attraction, homosexual orientation, homosexuality more broadly.

It wasn't something I was expecting to talk about, but I had a listener who wanted to know Russell Moore's view and I'm already on a roll on this subject because I've been thinking about it. It's fresh on my mind.

And I think the thing that surprised me and one of the things that contributed to me wanting to do this is that Russell Moore's views aren't that different than some of the views coming from people that we think of as more solid.

And that, does it scare me a little bit? I suppose so, because Russell Moore has become somewhat of a barometer in evangelicalism. If you are a conservative orthodox evangelical, conservative theologically, conservative politically, because you're conservative theologically, you don't wanna become Russell Moore.

Like he's the guy who was at the top of the ladder as far as being at a conservative evangelical institution, at least one time it was considered that, at Southern Seminary and being the head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Southern Baptist Convention, obviously, having the reputation for years as being this super conservative denomination. And Russell Moore climbed to the top of this and then decided to take a left turn.

And some would say he was always a leftist in some fashion, I suppose, but he certainly became more of a leftist, even if you think that. And he's been condemned, or at least people have distanced themselves from him, especially since he became the, I forget what his position is, what is he, the chief editor or something at Christianity Today?

It's escaping my mind right now, but he's, I think he's the editor-in-chief, isn't he? At Christianity Today or the theology expert or something? Let me look that up real quick, so I don't, I should know this, and I do know it, I just forgot it.

Let's see, Russell Moore, it says, on the Christianity Today website, he is the editor-in-chief. Yes, I was right, okay. So since that time, and he kind of slammed the door as he was walking out the Southern Baptist Convention, and did a lot of damage on his way out.

And we've covered some of this on the abuse, quote-unquote, issues, which is really more the slander issue, not the abuse issue at this point. We might talk about that later in the week. There's been some developments in the SBC along these lines.

Let's just say Rachel Denhollander is being somewhat exposed, and it's a conflict of interest she has going right now that I just wouldn't wanna be in her shoes, but. So you have that issue with Russell Moore.

We've talked about the immigration stuff with Russell Moore, and we've talked about his false gospel, too. I talk about that in this book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict. I encourage you, get a copy of this, because a lot of the questions I get, I refer people to this book, because I've already written on so many of them, and it's right there.

The sources are there. So I haven't talked about this particular issue, though, and I thought, well, we'll talk about it. And so hopefully this helps some of you if you're in churches that still, for some reason, are open to platforming or accommodating Russell Moore.

I don't know why. There's been so much exposure of Russell Moore, but some haven't gotten the memo, and that's understandable if you're a busy pastor, I suppose, if you're not paying attention to what's going on online, and your only reference point is, well, years ago he was solid or something.

So for that crowd, that's kind of why I'm making this. I wanted to mention this, though. Before we get too far, there is something that I would love for you all to participate on. Well, it's really for patrons exclusively, and so I'm letting them know.

But this is happening this Friday at 8 p .m., this coming Friday, the 13th of January. We're gonna do a chat on Ideas Have Consequences, the book by Richard Weaver. And I've talked about this for a while.

I wanted to do it actually the end of last year, but things got away from me. And we're gonna do more of this, but it's a little bit of an experiment for me because I don't know how it will go. I think what I've settled on is I'm going to do it through Zoom.

So people who are patrons will have the link to the live stream. And then I will offer to people, I'll give them a Zoom link if they want to participate in the actual discussion. And that will give me some latitude to mute microphones if I need to, or give people a turn depending on how many people wanna participate, that kind of thing.

I think what I'll do is an opening kind of section, and that might be fairly long. Myself, I think my brother's gonna be involved. My father might, we'll see. But we're going to just talk about this book from a Christian perspective, what we gleaned out of it, what we think of it, how it impacted us.

And then for those of you, especially those of you who have read it, we're gonna open it up and we're gonna just talk more about it, answer questions, maybe glean some helpful information. I mean, I definitely glean from you all, not just those who are patrons or those in the audience.

I glean a lot. So I haven't decided yet whether I'm gonna do a wide release of this after we record it. But at the very least, if you're a patron, you have the unique opportunity of participating in this.

And that means you can ask questions, you can access the live stream when it happens. And so that is to your benefit. Another thing to your benefit as a patron is you will get the slideshow that everyone's going to be viewing today or listening, if you're listening on iTunes or something.

I'm going through some quotes from Russell Moore from his slideshow. And so I make that available to the patrons as well. So wanted to just let you know about that. And we'll get started here though. Let's go through some Russell Moore stuff.

Russell Moore on Same-Sex Marriage and the Church’s Response

We're gonna start here. Russell Moore's view on, or I should say his posture, that's probably a better term, on the same-sex marriage decision in 2015. How did he react to that? He was the, at the time, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention.

And he did more than just this, but this, to me, stands out quite a bit. This is Russell Moore. Just let me read it and I guess I'll give you a comment. So he said this in the Washington Post, the response is not shunning.

And he's saying that about the response to homosexuality. The response is not shunning, putting them out on the street. So if you have a homosexual child, don't put them out on the street, right? He said, the answer is loving your child.

Now, this is just representative of a number of other quotes where Russell Moore says very similar things, okay? So I didn't wanna put them all here, but this is representative of those quotes. And you might ask, why are you quoting this, John?

Don't we all agree? And that's the point I wanted to make. We do all agree, right? The response to having a child who thinks that they are, we'll say this, they're confused about who they are, their identity, right?

The response is not to put them out on the street. And I don't know of any group of evangelicals, at least in the mainstream, okay, that have any influence whatsoever that advocate or have even developed a position that advocates putting children out on the street if they happen to have, in their own minds, some kind of a homosexual attraction.

This is the kind of thing I wanna point out because it's subtle. And I'm starting with something very subtle. We're gonna get into things that aren't as subtle as we move through this, but I wanna start with something very subtle to show you this is the kind of thing Russell Moore says.

And if you're not paying attention, you adopt it, you digest it, it goes down deep into you, and you could even maybe alter your beliefs slightly, and you're not realizing that you're doing it because the error here is he's strawmanning, all right?

He's giving the impression to, in this case, the Washington Post, that this is some kind of an accepted or common reaction to children who come out as homosexual. At least that's what they think they're doing, and that's what parents do in reaction.

And that he's trying to say, in the midst of the normalization of homosexuality, he's trying to tell on a platform that's going to be read by a lot of worldly people that, hey, I wanna let the church know here.

I wanna let Christians know this is not the thing to do, to shun or to put them out on the street. You gotta love your child. Now, some of you, I don't know how many, probably very few of you, but there are probably some who are listening who said, you know, I do know of a situation like this.

I've never actually heard firsthand account. I mean, it's always been like thirdhand, or it's very distantly, it's hypothetical usually. I should put it that way. I think every time I've heard about this, it's hypothetical, that, well, a parent could do this.

I'm sure this has happened, and some of you may even put in the comments that it has. But it's not a common thing. It's not something to bring up at a time when the war is not focused on these more peripheral things.

The war at that time, especially, was on the fact that this is not just being normalized, it's being legalized. The government's putting their stamp of approval on this practice that is anti-biblical, ungodly, out of step with human nature, damaging.

The damage that comes with homosexual relationships and not just to individuals, but to society, should be the thing that Russell Moore talks about. If you read the article, though, he doesn't. He's almost sheepish about being a dissenter about these things.

I found a quote where he says in 2015, I'm a conscientious dissenter on this. But him articulating why he dissents is very surface level. It's very quick. He doesn't really wanna focus on that. He really wants to jump to things like this, to lecturing the church on what the church needs to do.

And that's where he spends the brunt of his time. It is the exact thing we did not need in 2015. And I've talked about this before. 2015 was the year for me when my eyes were super opened. Because there was two issues.

There was the marriage issue and there was the monument issue. And they're not the same in every way, but there's a similarity here in that Republicans and political conservatives decided that they would pretty much ignore both issues, that they would let the left have those issues and then downstream from those issues, when the left gets really crazy and starts trying to put females in, or males, I should say, in female sports, or when they try to start taking down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, then we're gonna try to maybe push back a little.

And it was a catastrophic decision because the very assumptions that have been used to take down our identity as a people and our identity as, so I mean, as a people corporately, but and our identity individually as men and women created in God's image, both those things were under attack in that moment.

And both of those things were given up. We submitted to a standard from the left that said, we will acquiesce our identity, our very identity, who we are, we will gut that, we will put a scalpel to it, we will attack it if we don't meet some egalitarian threshold the left has put in place.

That's what happened in 2015. And at that time, we needed warriors, we needed people with courage to lead. We didn't have it. Russell Moore is one of the biggest names of, in my mind, of someone who was on the evangelical right, supposedly, who completely failed us because he wanted to take whatever prophetic ability he had and then use it to correct the church, to call the church to repent, to blame the church.

Tim Keller does the same kind of thing, by the way. They're both very similar in this. And so they will, they'll connect, they'll make the necessary statements that you must make in evangelicalism by saying, well, I disagree with homosexual marriage.

They'll say those kinds of things. And then what happens is people cling to those and say, well, see, they said it. Okay, well, big whoop, right? If you, you have to say that if you're in evangelicalism.

I'm saying they're not genuine. I'm gonna assume that they are genuine on that. I don't know if that's true, but we'll just assume it. But that, a lot more needed to be said in those moments than just that, because we're downstream now and we can see the damage that's been done.

And it's not good. The normalization of perversion, androgyny, homosexuality, effeminacy has taken root in not just the world at large in our institutions, but in the church in particular. And I'm seeing it in all kinds of little ways.

Things that I think in probably 10 or 20 years we'll be able to see more clearly, but the notion that the pastor is this more therapeutic, soft kind of figure instead of a strong masculine figure. Things like even that.

Am I blaming gay marriage? No, I'm not. I'm saying that there's a whole move that's becoming a tsunami that's happening at the same time. Gay marriage was just one of the major, and I would say fundamental issues in that tsunami.

But the tsunami itself is just an attack on the created order. It's an attack on who God is really and what he established. They don't like it. And so I think Russell Moore does the wrong thing to put his fire towards, in that moment, towards Christians for warning them.

You better not put that person out on the street instead of looking at what was actually happening. There's plenty of time to warn Christians they shouldn't do that. But was that the time is the question, right?

Okay, so you might say, small point, John. I don't really care about that. Please get to the meat of this. And I would say to you that I understand what you're saying, but don't miss this. These subtle shifts are so key.

They are the slight shifts that turn the nose of whole entire societies and movements. All right, well, here's some more meat for you, though. And this might be a bigger deal than any of you. He really took a bucket of water and he threw it on whatever fire might've been there for taking political action in that moment.

Because that was the moment, right? 2015, that was the moment for not just, well, the Republican Party is about family values. That would have been the time to be specific and say, we are going to make it our goal to overturn this.

Now, you might say, that's a losing strategy. Well, yeah, look at the polling now. But one of the reasons the polling is the way it is is because everyone capitulated, it was a leader. They either ignored it or they didn't wanna fight it.

And they sided with the, I mean, even Trump, right? Sides with this idea too of homosexual marriage. But that was such a fundamental issue, that was the moment. If you don't fight on that issue, what are you gonna fight on?

You know, we have principles, but we won't fight on that. Like, that's pretty fundamental. I don't know what could be that much more important to you guys. So same-sex marriage is headed for your community, Russell Moore says.

This is no time for us for fear or outrage or politicizing. It's a time for forgiven sinners like us to do what the people of Christ have always done. It's time for us to point beyond our family values and our culture wars to the cross of Christ.

As we say, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This is from Russell Moore's book, Same-Sex Marriage and the Future. This is terrible on a few levels. He makes out like it's our culture wars.

Really? It's our culture wars? Christians have the possession of the culture wars. They are the ones who started them or they're the ones who continue them or they're the ones who are just all about that and focus on it.

How about, no, the world, and I would say ungodly evil people who have perverted ideas have started and continued a culture siege on those who are, even if they're not Christians, they agree with the created order on this issue.

How about that? How about we are fighting a defensive action here and we need to fight aggressively on this, but instead Russell Moore puts the blame in the wrong area for the culture war. He also says that there's no time for fear or outrage or politicizing.

So right now, you guys, I know you all wanna get up in arms. You wanna have elections. You wanna try to get some good judges in there. You wanna maybe on a state level fight this like Kim Davis did. It's not the time for politicizing, guys.

Really, that was the time. That was the time. That window has closed and now it might not be as much of the time because now we're downstream and we have these other big issues that are part of them caused because of this.

We're fighting drag queen story hour in libraries. We weren't fighting that in 2015 before the gay marriage issue, were we? But we are now and we're fighting the normalization of pedophilia. We're fighting the normalization of bestiality.

We're fighting pornography that's being mainstreamed in the schools. It's stuff from 2015 and guess what helped make that stuff more prevalent? You got it, gay marriage in 2015 and it's exactly the thing Russell Moore says not to politicize over.

This is pathetic, guys. This isn't an interview in a secular rag of some kind. This is Russell Moore in his own book on this. It's time for us to point beyond our family values and our culture wars to the cross of Christ.

Well, who's disagreeing with that? That's the other thing I have a problem with on this. I know I'm ranting at this point, but so you have an option, I guess, in Russell Moore's mind. You can either focus on the cross or you could politicize.

How about both? Russell Moore has no problem mobilizing politically for racial justice. Should I go to him and say, now Russell Moore, you know that racial justice, this isn't the time. I know George Floyd's death and all, but it's not the time to be marching with BLM or supporting any of these things.

You just gotta go focus on the gospel, Russell Moore. He would never accept it, but he will on something as fundamental as marriage. Some Christians, he says, will be tempted to anger, lashing out at the world around us with a narrative of decline.

The temptation is wrong. God, so here, I want you to, this is so key. This is so key. This is so key. Listen, listen, listen. That temptation is wrong. Hear him say it. There's a wrong temptation somewhere.

Where's the wrong temptation, John? The wrong temptation is here, that you'll be tempted to be angry about what? About same-sex marriage. So Christian, you see same-sex marriage being normalized and legalized.

You know this is evil. You know it'll cause harm. You know it'll cause pain. You know it'll cause sin. It says in the scripture, leads to death. You know this is horrible. You don't want it, and your Bible says it's wrong, and you are going to have a righteous indignation over it, but that temptation is wrong.

So Russell Moore does believe some temptation is wrong. Does he think homosexual temptation is wrong? Hmm. Being upset about homosexuality, that temptation is wrong. Isn't that interesting? So he says this.

God decided when we would be born, and when we would be born again, we have the spirit of the gospel. To think that we deserve to live in different times is to tell God that we deserve a better mission field than the one he has given us.

Let's joyfully march to Zion. So yeah, if you are upset about what happened, then you're telling God that you think that he created you for the wrong time. Excuse me. Would Russell Moore say this about the slave trade?

If you lived in England, when the slave trade was happening, and you were upset about it, you're William Wilberforce, and you wanna do something to stop it, would Russell Moore come in and say, well, listen, William Wilberforce, I think that you're just angry, and that's a bad temptation.

That's a wrong temptation. You shouldn't be angry. What you're telling God is that you wish you were born in an era when the transatlantic slave trade wasn't happening, and it is happening, and so you just need to be grateful.

Come on, guys. You know he wouldn't do it. And that's, it's like, I can't believe this. I just can't believe that people take Russell Moore seriously and think that he's some kind of a brilliant mind on these things, and I've only gone through one slide.

I gotta speed up. All right, participation in same-sex wedding reception. Here's the big, this is like, let's get as close to the line as possible without crossing it. Russell Moore says this. You know, there are situations where maybe a same-sex couple, they come back to the neighborhood after being married somewhere, and someone has a housewarming reception for them.

Well, in that situation, what are you, what you have to weigh is, is my presence there going to be confusing to the person that I am trying to lead to Christ? Yes. Yes, it is. It is, Russell Moore. Is it going, he says, to signal somehow that I have changed my mind, I am not calling the person to repentance, or is it going to be instead a signal that I disagree with you, but I love you and I wanna talk with you?

Well, sometimes those situations, you have to make those in a light of a biblically-informed conscience and on the basis of what's going to happen in the moment. So he's saying, on the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission blog, paid for by your Southern Baptist dollars that you give to the cooperative program, in the pews, guys, this is paid for by this.

He is saying, and propagating this message, that, you know, it's just, it's acceptable. If you can figure out a way to communicate that you just wanna have a cup of coffee, that kind of thing. I love these people, I wanna talk to them.

Then you can go to, excuse me, the wedding reception. This is kind of insane though, because the wedding reception is what? A celebration of the wedding. You can celebrate the wedding, you just, he says early in the article, you shouldn't attend the wedding.

This is nuts. Like this is trying to create a space where there is none. It's trying to separate things that can't be separated. He says this too, in a sign of the practical struggles Baptists face, some of the conference, and he's talking, this is a conference, I think from 2015 or 2014, that was hosted at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He says this conference focused on advice. What if you get invited to a same-sex wedding ceremony? Russell Moore, president of the, oh no, sorry, I was wrong on this. Oh, was I right on this? No, I think I was, I'm right on this.

This was at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Okay, Russell Moore, president of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the article states in Wall Street Journal, was asked, in that case, I would not attend the wedding.

Okay, so he won't attend the wedding. I would attend the reception, he said. In that way, he said, a Baptist could say, I love you and I'm here with you. I disagree with you, but I love you. Okay, so here we go.

Not only does Russell Moore open the door for the possibility of going to a gay wedding reception, but he himself says he would do it. He would do it. That's the example he's setting with your cooperative, at the time, if you were a Southern Baptist, with your cooperative program giving.

Here is Russell Moore embracing homosexual orientation. He says this in an article in the Huffington Post, the utopian idea, if you come to Christ and if you go through our program, so he's talking about reparative therapy, you're going to be immediately set free from attraction or anything you're struggling with.

I don't think that's a Christian idea, Moore told journalists. Faithfulness to Christ means obedience to Christ. It does not necessarily mean that someone's attractions are going to change. Okay, so this is the same thing Greg Johnson says.

It's prosperity gospel to say that you can change those attractions. Really guys, isn't that exactly what Jesus does? How, like, not just with this issue, but how many issues does Jesus do that with? You say, I've been struggling for years with this.

Okay, resist to the point of blood. I mean, scripture says, in Hebrews, it asks that question. The author says, have you resisted the point of blood? Are you, how, and I'm not trying to say that it's not difficult, but use every weapon you have.

And yes, I have sympathy for people that go through this. Yes, I've known people who have this and struggle with this. And yes, it's a battle, but it doesn't mean that you just give up and say, well, that's who I am, right?

You don't say, well, you know, any idea that I could be freed from this is somehow prosperity gospel, or, you know, what he says, in this case, utopian. Please, I mean, would Russell Moore, again, on the issues that he is, you know, very gung-ho about, would he say, would you say, well, we shouldn't fight racism because, you know, a world without racism would never happen.

There's always gonna be a racist somewhere. So, you know, it's utopian to try to fight this and give the impression that we can enter this world in which one day we're gonna have some kind of equality on when it comes to race in the eyes of the law or something, I don't know.

But, you know, Russell Moore would never go down this path with that issue, but he will with this. Faithfulness to Christ means obedience to Christ. It does not necessarily mean that someone's attractions are going to change.

Well, obedience to Christ is going to mean you desire your attractions to line up with his. Paul in Romans 7, he did the very thing he hated. In his mind, he's hating what he's doing and he has a desire that he doesn't want.

Guess what he does with that? He mortifies it, he fights it. And that's what we have to do as Christians. This life isn't meant to be easy, guys. It's not easy for anyone. It's not easy for non-Christians.

It's harder for them. It's easier for Christians when you have Christ to fight these things, but it's still going to be a struggle until we get to heaven and we have to rely on God every step of the way.

And Russell Moore here is giving the impression that you should just lay down your sword, I guess, on these desires, because after all, desires doesn't mean that they're going to change. So that's buying into orientation language right there.

That's saying that's the way I am, okay? I can't stop it, change it. It's actually not even sinful. He says this, in the article for the Huffington Post, Moore said evangelicals have an inadequate view of what same-sex attraction looks like.

The Bible doesn't promise us freedom from temptation, Moore said. The Bible promises us the power of the spirit to walk through temptation. Lord have mercy on us. The Bible calls us, Colossians 3, 5, we talked about it yesterday, to mortify both the pathos and epithemia.

That means the patterns of sin that you might have, the desires, actually, that you may have, those pathological desires, those deep passions that you have that you might even feel like you don't choose, sometimes, I mean, they come upon you and it just feels like you can't control yourself.

I mean, it's strong, means mortify that and just mortify epithemia, mortify desire itself. Just in that moment, when you look and you see something that you want and you know that you, right then, that there's an evil welling up from within you, there's something in you that is attracted to something that you should not have, that God has not ordained.

Mortify it. Where in that do you find that, well, the Bible promises us the power of the spirit to walk through temptation, but it doesn't promise us freedom from that temptation? Look, guys, I just got done saying that we're going, it's gonna be hard and we all have our different struggles and things in this life and different situations that we live in, there's no doubt about that.

But we live this life with the goal and the anticipation of being rid of the sin that we have. That doesn't mean perfection on this side of heaven, but it does mean that as we go through life, we are being sanctified.

That's the biblical doctrine. It's being more and more like Jesus Christ by putting to death the deeds of the flesh and walking in the spirit. So it says walk in the spirit, you will not commit the desires of the flesh.

And this is the pattern of the Christian life, okay? We got done yesterday, I would encourage people to watch it, talking about how same-sex attraction is different than opposite-sex attraction in that Romans 1 says it's both unnatural and it's the result of a previous idolatry.

In fact, it's one of the, it's what Paul chooses to exemplify how dangerous and damaging creature worship truly is and how far it will take you. So idolatrous creature worship. This isn't, you can't say that about opposite-sex desire, which is to be, and I'm talking about sexual erotic desire here, which is to be manifested and exercised in the bounds of marriage in a holy way.

It's not sinful. It's not sinful. By the way, I should say this passing comment, but some people were taking issue with my position on this. And I'm thinking, I'm still thinking through this particular thing a little bit, but I think I'm pretty, I'm getting pretty settled on it.

Like I'm, you know, scripture is very clear. Lust is for things that God has not given or ordained. That kind of thing is wrong. It's covening, right? That's a sin. And so that's what adultery, what Jesus says, committing adultery in the heart is, and that's what any sin for something that really God hasn't ordained.

But homosexuality is part of this. If you want another man in a sexual erotic fashion, and you are a man or a woman, if you were a woman, that kind of thing is wrong according to scripture, right? And as Paul talks about the epitome and passions, so the pathos of homosexuality as being something that is a result of the judgment God puts upon people who do creature worship and the descent into depravity that we just talked about.

And so you just go read Romans one, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm not making any of this up. I'm just trying to represent what the scripture teaches. But some people were, like I said, asking, well, how do you get married?

And as a fallen creature, I think it's really hard to think of a scenario where you're not gonna lust after the person that you're wanting to marry. But here's how I think about it, right? I think that God has given us, and this isn't in the perfect world, pre-fall, God has designed creation in such a way that there's going to be procreation, there's going to be children, right?

And the species will continue, and this is just part of God's goodness in creation. So getting from that point A to point B is the question, how do you go from noticing someone, let's say I'm a man and I notice a woman, to then being in the bounds of that covenant relationship, exercising an erotic kind of love, an eros for that person.

And I think of it this way, you can have an attraction for someone, and I'm not saying, this is not in the same category as same-sex attraction, because they're talking about an orientation that involves some kind of a, well, it's not in keeping with the natural order, all right, at its best day, it's not in keeping with the natural order, but it is a substitute for homosexual orientation, which was the word that was previously used.

So there's been a switch. So when they talk about same-sex attraction, that's a continuation of this term homosexual orientation, it's orientation language, right? All right, the justification they have is that they can have these desires without exercising them, and then they parallel it with heterosexuality, and so we can have these heterosexual desires too, without exercising them.

The thing is though, you can have somewhat of an attraction for someone in God's good order before you enter the covenant of marriage, without having an erotic desire for that person. I believe this. Obviously you have to have, there has to be some will at the very least, you have to have some kind of a reason for, or a will to enter that covenant, right?

If you're gonna be doing so wisely, there's gonna be positive attributes you're looking at. And I think in our context, I'll just, because people will say in the ancient world, it was arranged and so forth and so on.

But yeah, even in the ancient world, Jacob found Rachel pleasing, and she was pretty, she was beautiful, right? He saw this about her. And I know that's more descriptive than prescriptive, but that's just, that's how the world works.

So I think it's beneficial to point that out. Men are going to notice women, and they're gonna notice their beauty. In fact, what, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, really, if you read about the interactions between men and women, like I was reading this stuff on Robert E. Lee, and I was reading this stuff on Calhoun, I remember, and both were known to be very complimentary, really almost flirtatious with women.

Today it would be not something that you could really do or say, but it didn't have to be something that was sexual erotic. That's the thing. It could be something, it was an appreciation that we have little understanding for now that once existed between men and women in a society where boundaries existed that were to protect women from sexual predators and so forth.

And so it was actually good manners. Even if you're an older man complimenting a younger woman on her looks, there's a certain decency to it and chivalry to it that we don't understand today. We should bring it back, but it's hard to because everything's over-sexualized and people think that you're being a creepy man or something, but it doesn't have to be that way.

And so what I'm saying is you look at the word of God, you see that men have these desires. Women, I'm sure they had noticed men, right? And you have the Song of Solomon, which now there's disagreement over where the wedding takes place.

And I'm not an expert in the Song of Solomon. I've unfortunately been on the receiving end of multiple interpretations of it. And everything from it's justifying sexual stuff before marriage to it's not even about King Solomon.

It's about the shepherd boy and King Solomon's the villain to just everything. But I tend to think that as I was reading it yesterday, that I think the marriage has probably already taken place. It doesn't tell you in the book really where it happens.

Because I think some people think it's like end of chapter three, but I don't think that's a justification for sexual desire or even attraction. Same thing really, that's what I mean by it. When I say sexual attraction, sexual desire, I'm talking about the same kind of thing outside of marriage, erotic desire, same thing.

You do have though, Agar in, was it Proverbs 30, I think, where he says that there are things he doesn't understand. One of them is the way of a man with a maiden, and that could be translated a virgin or young woman.