Have You Not Read-Sexual Immorality & Post Modernism

You folks are used to this kind of stuff and the white stuff that falls out of the sky and everything else. So those of us from Phoenix are expecting to see the Ark float by here any moment. And we'll just see how all that works.

But anyway, I was thinking earlier, as I considered this evening, I was thinking about my grandmother. I only knew one of my grandparents. And she was really your old style Baptist preacher's wife. And I cannot imagine that she could ever understand why we would be having a conversation like we're having this evening.

Why there would be a need in a church to be talking about male and female, and the issue of gender, and all of the challenges that we're facing today. She could not have understood it, and I'm thankful that she went to be with the Lord when she did, because I think she would have truly struggled with it.

And even my own mom, who died ten years ago, was clearly becoming distraught at much of what was happening. And I think now as I look back, I think I know why she was becoming distraught at those things.

She was doing what I do now, thinking about her grandchildren and the kind of world that they would be facing. But it is without question, at least in my experience, in my background, the idea of having to discuss sexuality, gender, male and female, and God's intentions in making mankind in the way that He did, really illustrates very, very clearly the depth of the attack upon everything that God has given us that is good, stabilizing, tends toward flourishing and happiness and fulfillment.

These gifts that God has given to us are under tremendous attack because of the fact that what we see around us has been appropriately identified as the culture of death. There is a culture of life. There is one who came to give life.

And then there is the culture of death, which is the negation of everything He came to do. And I do believe that as we consider what's going on around us, as we consider pretty much every single day, you get up and there is some new kind of astonishing statement being made that I guess in decades past people predicted it would go that far, but we're all like, no, it just never could.

And now it's like people are racing each other to see who can come up with the newest, wildest, insane thing and call it good. And I know that there are many people, I would say by common grace and by simply the fact that we're made in the image of God, that sit back and realize there's something wrong with all of this, but there's a tremendous hesitancy to speak out.

Scripture, the Spirit, and a Foundation for the Next Generation

And so what I'd like to do is I want to start this evening in Scripture. I believe that when I think of our young people, our precious young people who will in a very short period of time be the ones bearing the brunt of the reaction of our society.

Jesus said, the world's hated me, it's going to hate you. And we are seeing more and more and more a withdrawing of the hand of restraint that God has placed upon this world in its expression of its hatred toward God's people.

And I think of our young people, and when I think of them, I realize they need to have a foundation that will be absolutely unchanging. That's the greatest gift that we can pass on. We want to pass on to the next generation and the generation after them eternal truths that are not based upon some type of subjective experience, because we're not going to be around.

You know, I think of Paul writing to Timothy, and that second Timothy, knowing his time is short, he's going to be focused upon what is absolutely central. When you're writing a letter to someone, and you think you only have a matter of days or weeks to live, you don't waste your time.

You don't talk about the weather, you don't talk about how the Utah Jazz are doing, which is normally a depressing subject for you folks anyway. Almost every time I watch a highlights video on YouTube, the people getting beat are the Utah Jazz.

It's just, I mean, Michael Jordan's thing and Kobe Bryant's last game, you know, where he dropped 60. Who did they beat? The Jazz. It's just really strange, but you're not going to waste your time with that stuff.

If you think your time is short. And so, when you consider that, and when I think about what to pass on to these young people, it has to come from outside of this created world. It has to have some kind of transcendent reality to it.

And that which the Christian church has, that remains solid and true and unchangeable from decade to decade, from generation to generation, century to century, is, as it describes itself, God speaking by His Spirit.

It is the Scriptures, and yet, remember as Jesus once put it, as the Holy Spirit spoke by David. And so we have the Spirit. Believe it or not, Reformed people do believe in the Holy Spirit of God. People sometimes think, you never talk about the Holy Spirit of God.

Well, we try to be biblical in how we speak about the Holy Spirit of God, but we absolutely believe in the Spirit of God. In fact, we believe that without the Spirit of God, no one will ever be saved.

That we can accomplish nothing without Him. So we have the Spirit, and what does the Spirit drive men and women toward? That really is the issue, and it is the Scriptures. And one thing that has been special for me is I had the opportunity, up until a few years ago, to travel around the world, was to see that love of Scripture and that submission to Scripture all around the world.

Didn't matter what language, didn't matter economic standing, it was the Word of God. And so we need to know what Scripture says on this, and I know you know where I'm going to go. You all know these texts.

I hope you know these texts very, very well. But before we look at what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 19, I want to introduce it in a somewhat unusual fashion. Years ago, there was a young man in our church, and he was done with the high school level Bible studies, and so he was in the adult Bible study that I would be teaching on Sunday mornings.

And he was in there, I don't know, three or four years, and he went off to college. And he went to a Christian college, and he came back after one semester, and he came up to me after a Sunday school class, and he said, you know, I wanted to thank you.

He said, over the years, you would keep saying, now you go off to college, you go off to university, and they're going to say this, this, and this. And you'd frequently apologize. Sorry, I just want to make sure that everybody here is ready for what you're going to run into out there.

And he said, I'll admit, there were times I sort of tuned out because it's like, oh, there he goes again. But he said, even at a Christian college, I got hit with everything you said I was going to get hit by.

And you had prepared me for it. If I had not been prepared for it, I don't know how I would have responded to it. And so when you turn to Matthew chapter 19, let me mention something to you. It's easy for you and I to turn to this text of Scripture.

We recognize it's Scripture. We recognize God has preserved it for us over the years. We recognize it's theanistas. It's God breathed. It's not just simply men thinking about God. It's not just a Jewish fellow who lived sometime in the first century who was specifically focused upon issues related to the nascent Christian church and the Jews.

What the world's going to tell you and what we need to be prepared for before we even get into it. And you need to have an anchor put down on this. Because we very frequently, we don't get hit with an immediate pushback to what we're saying.

But we need to realize in our day, if we make the statement that this is what Jesus said, promoting this could be illegal in a very short period of time. Ask the people in Finland, who though they were just, what would be the term, found not guilty.

The state, within I think two days, announced that they are going to refile under appeal to try to get them convicted on hate crimes legislation. This isn't a western country. This isn't a country that has had extensive Christian history to it.

Still has a state church. It is a deader than a doornail state church, which in many ways is a bad thing. But that's happening right now. And so when you look at Matthew chapter 19, here's what you're going to get hit with.

Why should you believe that Jesus ever said these words? All you have is an account from one person, and he had his own agenda. He had his own interest. In fact, if you're familiar with the background of Matthew chapter 19, this is a situation where the Jews are attempting to bring Jesus into the midst of a current dispute amongst the two major Jewish factions that would have been there in Jerusalem.

The followers of one rabbi who were more on the, shall we say, liberal side, if we can use that kind of terminology, and those following another, the Hillelians and the Shamites, if you're familiar with the background, that would be more conservative.

And so one side was saying you can divorce your wife for any reason at all. In fact, if you look at verse 3, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all? That's the exact phrase that was being used in the debates amongst the Jews.

And one side said, yes. Burns the toast, she's out. Washes your favorite tunic and it shrinks, she's out. Any ground whatsoever was valid for divorce from their perspective. The other side is like, no.

Moses's law would limit the grounds for divorce to pornia, to idolatry, obviously. I mean, there were a bunch of things under the Old Testament law that would result in stoning. That's a divorce. But then there were other things that would allow for divorce that didn't include capital punishment.

So they were trying to draw him into the very heart of their argument. And so the argument that might be presented to you would be, see, this is just Matthew putting words in Jesus's mouth. We don't know that Jesus ever said these things.

See, most of us didn't end up going to a liberal seminary and get hit by this regularly. I wondered why the Lord had me going to what was a seminary way to my left. Most people that are way, way, way to my left would think about that seminary as if it was way to the right.

But anyway, I wondered why that was. Now I know why it was, and I'm thankful for it. I wasn't thankful at the time, but I'm thankful for it now. But most of us have not run into that kind of thing. And if you've not ever even thought about it before, you can be really hard-pressed to know how to respond when someone challenges you and says, why would you even believe that Jesus ever said these words?

And so you need to be prepared for that kind of approach, because what that is fundamentally saying is we don't have any idea of anything that Jesus actually taught. Because you can bring up those types of a question about anything that Jesus said.

Does anyone remember what was called the Jesus Seminar back in the 1980s? I mean, it's technically still around. The Westar Institute is still around. A guy named Robert Funk organized it initially. I am very proud to say that on a radio program on KFYI in Phoenix in the 1980s, Robert Funk told me to go to hell.

So there you go. I'm sure he's told a lot of other people that too, but I'm one of the only living ones left. But actually, he's the one that's already gone, so that's the other issue. But the Jesus Seminar is made up of wildly left-wing scholars that would get together and they would say the Gospels and they would present papers on, let's say, this particular, what's called a pericope, this story of Jesus' life.

And then they'd pass a bag around and you'd have marbles of different colors. And you would put these marbles into the bag, depending on whether you thought Jesus never said it, Jesus might have said it, Jesus probably said it, or yes, Jesus said it.

I think there were four or five different colors. And then you count up the marbles. It's really a temptation to talk about people losing their marbles, but we'll skip that for now. And they actually published the Scholar's New Testament and would put the various parts of Jesus' words into different colors, and like in the Gospel of John, there's only one thing Jesus ever said.

Now this is just a bunch of people expressing their opinions, but that's all you have left once you embrace that level of skepticism. That's all you've got. You have no way of actually looking at anyone seriously and saying, Jesus said such and so.

And so if someone were to say that to me, I would first want to find out if they are at all consistent in exercising that level of skepticism toward everything in history. Do they think Caesar existed?

Well, you can do the same thing to Caesar. Well, there's a monument someplace. Yeah, well, there's monuments to all sorts of fantastical and people that did not actually exist in the past. And we know that, but people thought they did 100 years later, and so they put up monuments.

Once you engage in that level of skepticism, then there's nothing to know about history at all. You cannot even begin to know what happened even a very short period of time ago. But the reality is what we have in Matthew chapter 19 is in harmony with Mark, with Luke, with John.

They are separate witnesses that speak harmoniously together. And unlike so many other works that were written in the first century, for some reason, we have the greatest preservation of these books. They have been preserved for us in a downright miraculous fashion.

And the main thing to remember about Matthew is, and this was the early church's response too, what did they point to when people questioned Jesus' authority or the authority of the gospel? Fulfilled messianic prophecy.

One of my favorite things to do at Christmastime is to go back to Isaiah and to read those words written 700 years before Christ. And, of course, all the liberals say, nah, maybe 400 years. Okay. As long as it's 100 years, it's still a prophecy.

And it's still supernatural. And it's still fulfilled in Christ and in him alone. And so there's lots of reasons when you look at the scriptures as a whole or in individual parts, to recognize the foolishness of the hyper skepticism of our modern day.

But with that said, then, we do have this incident. Some Pharisees came to Jesus and they were testing him. And they were saying, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all? The subject is about divorce.

I've had people say, you're stretching this, it's all about divorce. That's true. But what is foundational to that subject? Well, a divorce of whom? A man and a woman. That was the only context. You cannot find any other context in the Jewish system than a divorce between a man and a woman.

So, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all? And he answered and said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female? And said, for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife.

And the two shall become one flesh. Consequently, they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. They said to him, why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?

He said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning, it has not been this way. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, pornaya, and marries another woman, commits adultery.

The disciples said to him, if the relationship of the man with his wife is like this, it is better not to marry. But he said to them, not all men can accept this statement, but only those to whom it has been given.

For there are eunuchs who are born that way from their mother's womb, and there are eunuchs who are made eunuchs by men, and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

He who is able to accept this, let him accept it. Now, there is a lot here, but there is one obvious reality that we have to start with that preceding generations never even had to think about. Everything about divorce, marriage, male, female, father, mother, leave your father, leave your mother, cleave to your wife, and the entire discussion about, well, better not to marry, well, there are eunuchs.

What does all of this assume? It assumes the gender binary. Now, there are people trying to turn eunuchs into transgenders today. That is an amazing stretch, but you shouldn't be overly surprised that there are people willing to go that far.

All of this assumes the same creative reality that is found in Genesis, because that's where Jesus is quoting. He's quoting, and of course we know, he's quoting from his own word, but he's quoting from the very beginning of God's revelation.

And what does that tell you? Well, as he said, have you not read, first of all, he holds them accountable not to their traditions, not to their arguments with one another, not to their great leading rabbis, many of whom claim to have Mosaic tradition orally passed down to them.

No, he doesn't go there. He bypasses all of it, and he says, have you not read? Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female? The Creator, that the Creator from the beginning, male and female, and the terms male and female there are not generic, malleable categories.

They are very specific. He uses arson and thelu. And these are, you could have asked a Greek physician, and a Greek physician could have answered the question that someone in our Supreme Court can't, and would have used arson or thelu to answer those questions as to what a male and a female is.

But the point is that from the beginning, see, he's going back past all of the arguments they're trying to drag him into, and how does he do that? There's only one way to access that for us.

Scripture.

Scripture gives us access. And he says, He who created them. And there's our problem today. There is our problem today, and there is our problem in the church today. What do I mean? We don't have a Creator anymore.

Oh, I know, I know.

Even the people at Biologos will call God Creator. But the idea of God actively creating for a purpose to fulfill His divine decree for His glory?

Come on.

Who really believes in anything like that anymore? And I say to you, any society that does not have a Creator is a society that will create one in its own image, and the result will always be murder and death.

If you don't have a Creator who can define for you who you are to be, and how you are to behave, and what your purposes are, the state will become your Creator. And the results, have we not seen it over and over and over again?

Once that Creator is gone, that vacuum has to be filled by something, and it will be filled by those who will not honor the life of their fellow creatures. They will use the lives of their fellow creatures for themselves.

From the beginning, He who created them.

It's amazing.

If you understand Neo-Darwinian Micromutational Evolutionary Theory, and I fought that battle all the way through school, I would sit at lunch with one of my biology professors in high school, and he would photocopy scholarly papers for me.

Even when I went to a Christian university and majored in biology, I was the only creationist in the biology department at a Christian university. And so, I read the books, I know the theory very, very, very well.

And in its pure form, it does not leave room for any kind of teleology, any kind of direction, any kind of end point. It has to be truly, completely random for it to fit into the Neo-Darwinian system.

But the funny thing is, not only can scientists not avoid using bad words, like beauty and order and design, but there's just simply something about us that we recognize that if that's really true, then there isn't any purpose at all.

There is no reason. There is no purpose. Just use others if you wish. Because there's no judgment. Seriously, on a genetic level, the best you can do within a Neo-Darwinian model is to make sure to get as much of your genetic material into the next generation as possible.

So, having only one wife? That's silly. We do know that there was one man in history who had so many offspring that there are entire nations in Eastern Europe that are descended from him. I mean, this guy, he was a busy man.

I don't know when he slept. I really don't. But his name, as you know, was Genghis or Genghis Khan. And genetically, you can trace back a huge number of people to that one man. How you conquer countries and then father 20 children a night, I have no earthly idea, but that's basically what he did.

And from a Neo-Darwinian perspective, thumbs up to him. He did it right. In fact, a society built upon a Neo-Darwinian platform would say, that's the way to do it. That makes him the genetic master.

And so what he did, and believe you me, it was not consensual with most of those women, was the right thing to do. How else could you even put it? He proved the correctness of his methodology by the results.

Many, many, many generations later. That's Neo-Darwinism. There is no foundation for value of human life, and covenant of marriage, or any of that kind of stuff. Nothing. And yet, the left today, which is absolutely wedded to the whole concept of the evolutionary theory, does not actually believe what it says.

They have recognized how empty that is, and so they've started to try to develop ways of saying, well, let me give you just a really obvious example. Homosexuality in a Darwinian system is self-defeating.

It's self-defeating. And so politically, what has ended up happening is, there have been certain geneticists and scientists who have done studies, or had studies funded for them. You always have to look at who funded the study, because that's pretty much going to tell you what's going to come out the other end these days.

And they've come to the conclusion that, well, you know, there can be for a population a genetic benefit in having certain members of the population that do not enter into the normal binding ceremonies and relationships, and can be free to be of service to others, and that can help the whole population.

And they're trying to find a way to not have to be consistent Darwinians, because if you're going to be a consistent Darwinian, you're going to do what the Nazis did, and you're going to put the homosexuals in the gas chambers along with the Jews.

But they don't want to do that, and so they try to find a way around it. And that's their explanation. And who's going to fund the studies on the other side? I mean, that's the problem. As long as you don't have a creator, you can do anything to anyone.

You can create any kind of a society you want, in your own image, by force and by power. So, to me, it's vitally important to recognize that Jesus' first words is to, first of all, point us to scripture, have you not read, and then is going to say that he who created them from the beginning.

You have to start with the creator. That's why the answer to all of this stuff, and it's the answer to everything the church is called to address, is not for us to pretend like we're just like the world.

The answer to all this stuff, ready? It's going to be a shocker to you, is the gospel. Because who's going to believe the creator, until you've been made right with the creator? So, you can muster all the arguments you want, as long as you're talking to a person who will not recognize that they themselves are a creature, you're beating your head against a wall.

You're beating your head against a wall. So, he starts with scripture, he goes to the creator, and that's the only way to have true knowledge of man. And you must understand, for you and I, this is so outside the realm of the world.

They look at us and say, you are cretins. And many of them today are saying, you are holding the rest of us back.

For the good of the whole,.

Because we're all in this together,.

For the good of the whole,.

You need to be removed from society. Minimally, you need to be silenced. But, the reality is, once you give all power to the state, I can think of all sorts of other ways that they can get rid of you too.

And one of the greatest fears they have, one of the greatest fears they have, is that you and I, some of us, we're already a little bit, you know, Jason here, much younger than I am, much younger than I am,.

But we're a little bit,.

The time when they can fix us. But what they are afraid of is that we're going to pass our horrible, backwards ideas on to the little ones. Why do you think they want the little ones? Have you seen, have any of you been paying attention to the videos online in response to what happened in regards to Disney and Florida?

And these people, this is their religion, folks.

This is their religion.

There are so many people that are absolutely sold out to making sure that our young people have a positive role model of queerness in their teacher.

That's what they want.

And they are just,.

They are crying their eyes out that they can't talk to five-year-olds about their same-sex lover. And I'm sitting here going, last time I was in school, somebody like that would have been in grave danger of their lives, let alone being stuck in prison.

What happened?

How did it happen so fast? It's astonishing. He who created them from the beginning made them male and female. You see, from a Darwinian perspective, that's just simply in our tree of life,.

And by the way,.

When you think of a tree of life in Darwinism, we think of it going up and up and up. It's not a matter of up and down. It's just, it's random. There can be no purpose. There can be no direction within Darwinism.

So our branch, which we just happen to be a part of, uses bisexual reproduction. There's two sexes. And look, there are living creatures that do not have two sexes.

That's true.

So from their perspective, we simply happen to be male and female because our ancient, ancient, ancient, ancient ancestors, not on a whim, but by accident, by mutation, adopted that methodology of reproduction.

Now just, by the way, the idea that that could ever be the result of a simple mutation, or even multiple mutations at the same time, we know genetically is so absurd that it's laughable. But we still end up believing it because we have to.

Because we have to. You talk about a strong delusion, you talk about not willing to believe the truth because of level I. There is so much evidence of the design complexity of life right in front of the eyes of so many people, but they don't see it because to acknowledge that means that I have to adopt an understanding that would require me to acknowledge God.

And that's one of the, that is the door that Darwin kicked open. That's the door that Darwin kicked open. Because even when we think of the pagan religions, you know, Caesar, and all the temples in Rome, and Corinth, what did they all have in common?

Well, we know that they were false gods, we know that they were idols, but they can never get away from there has to be an origin of life. There has to be a Creator. And you could twist His worship and you could do all the things that you do, but it finally took Darwin to kick the door open and say, here is the way to escape the gaze of God.

Now we can say that life could arise without God. Now I'll be honest with you, anybody who really knows that field knows that that's not what they've come to. But they've convinced themselves of that and it becomes a religion.

And that's why anybody who discovers, anyone who talks about intelligent design and documents its reality and stuff like that, you're not going to get a job at any big place.

You're out. You're done.

You have to protect this great religion because it's given us so much freedom. So much freedom. He who created them from the beginning made them male and female. It's not a random reality. It's the purposeful design.

And it comes from a Creator, which means that purpose transcends you and I. In other words, when I teach this to my children, when I teach this to my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, it's true for me, it's true for them.

It becomes that valuable reality that we can then communicate from generation to generation. It provides stability. It provides purpose.

We look around.

I see young men.

At 30 years of age.

In our culture.

That have less idea of who they are and what they're supposed to be doing and how to find fulfillment than in my generation we had at 10.

It's astonishing to me. It's astonishing to me.

It's because that reality that you are made in the image of God, you have responsibilities before God, and you have responsibilities before your fellow man. It's been stolen from them. Stolen from them.

They thought it was giving them freedom. It doesn't give you freedom. It gives you slavery. Slavery to self. I am astonished. I'm old enough, and I've been doing this for a few years already. I'll sit down with young men.

I sat down with a Muslim man in London that I had gotten to know years earlier. I won't give names right now so I don't embarrass him because it was a private conversation. But I sat down with him and we were just talking about stuff and I knew what he was doing in school and stuff like that.

I said, how old are you?

Um, 29.

Why aren't you married?

I'm a Christian man talking to a Muslim man.

Why aren't you married?

He sort of chuckles. I've been pretty busy.

I said, yeah? Let me tell you something.

I got married at 19. She was 18. I was raised, I don't know how in the world my parents taught me this, but I was raised to believe that when I was 18 years old, I was responsible for myself. And so I needed to make plans.

And I needed to have some idea of where I was going and how I was going to get there. And my wife and I at that time had been married 30 some odd years, 40 years, a couple months. And I said, you're 29 years old.

Do you ever want to, do you ever even want to have grandchildren? Do you ever want to see them?

Well, yeah.

I said, we'll get to it, man. That was just that straightforward. Within a year and a half he was married. So I felt pretty good about that. But the point was, look at our society.

I mean,.

I am so thankful.

That my daughter.

Knew my mom.

She's so much like her.

And she knows she's so much like her because she knew her. She doesn't have to hear that from me. I don't have to tell her stories. She remembers it. Even now she'll do something and go, oh man, that's my grandma.

I love that.

That's beautiful.

And most of the generations before us grew up in the same house. They had those relationships. Oh, I know they could be broken relationships. I get it. I know. There's still sin. But there is beauty in those things.

And let me tell you something. There is also a recognition of the patterns of life. That is, you'd see your grandparents die. And it would remind you, your life isn't going to go on forever either. We hide death from everyone.

We don't take kids to funerals. What does the scripture say? Better to spend a day where? In the house of mourning than in the house of feasting. We hide death from people. And we wonder why our young people just resist the idea of taking responsibility and growing up, male and female, and said for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother.

Let me tell you something, my friends. Those words had meaning when Jesus spoke them. And woe to any people that decide they can change what those words mean. The idea of multiple mothers and multiple fathers shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife.

That makes him what? A husband. I don't care if they chuck me in prison for doing it. I am not going to look at two men and use the term husband. Or two women and use the term wife. Because I know what a husband is.

And I know what a wife is. I know what a father is. And I know what a mother is. And I am not respecting my wife when I call someone else a wife who can't be a wife. Or a mother who can't be a mother.

I will not do it. And I'm not going to try to bind somebody else's conscience, but I don't understand how any Christian could engage in that kind of acknowledgement of a fundamental profaning of the relationships that God ordained by creation itself.

If we give in on this, could you please explain to me?