Have You Not Read | James R. White

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. Even my own mom, who died 10 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.

And so what I'd like to do is I wanna 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 gonna 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 and 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 gonna be around.

You know, I think of Paul writing to Timothy, and that second Timothy, knowing his time is short, he's gonna 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, you know, Thang 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 gonna 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, 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 gonna 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 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, 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 gonna say this, this, and this.

And you'd frequently apologize. You know, sorry, I just want to make sure that everybody here is ready for what you're gonna run into out there.

And he said, I'll admit, there were times I sort of tuned out, because it's like, oh, you know, there he goes again.

But he said, even at a Christian college, I got hit with everything you said

I was gonna 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 theonistos, 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 gonna tell you, and what we need to be prepared for before we even get into it.

And what you're gonna, you need to have a 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 gonna 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 interests. 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 three, 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 pornaya, 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, they're 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'd present papers on, let's say this particular, what's called a pericope, this story of Jesus's 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've 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's words into different colors, depending upon, 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 when someone, if someone were to say that to me,

I would first wanna 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 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 to it.

Once you engage in that level of skepticism, then there's nothing to know about history at all.

You can't, 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 Christmas time 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, pornia, 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's 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're 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, and 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 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.

If we, you know, 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, and I went, 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. There was absolutely no, 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. Find, 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've 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, okay?

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 gotta look at who funded the study because that's pretty much gonna tell you what's gonna come out the other end these days.

And they've come to the conclusion that, well, you know, there's actually, 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 gonna be a consistent Darwinian, you're gonna do what the Nazis did and you're gonna put the homosexuals in the gas chambers along with the

Jews. But they don't wanna do that and so they try to find a way around it. And that's their explanation.

And who's gonna fund the studies on the other side? I mean, you know, 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's 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 gonna 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 we can, 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,

Jason here, much younger than I am, much younger than I am. But we're a little bit past the time when they can fix us.

But what they're afraid of is that we're gonna 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 there's, 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 so you'd be caused a 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,

Caesar and all the temples in Rome and in Corinth, and 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 gonna 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? 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. Well, you'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 where I was going and how

I was gonna 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 gonna 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 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 do not, 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, please, how you can explain the death of Christ on the cross to propitiate the wrath of God in regards to his broken law?

Because that entire law is based upon what? God created us and gets to determine what represents his nature, and his holiness, and how we then are to live.

If we can't do, if we can't hold firm here, there's no place left to hold firm. There is no basis of defending the very propitiatory atonement of Christ.

You can't. You've lost all meaning, you've lost all the ground. God's law is broken, and God undertakes to pay the penalty of that broken law to his own glory for a specific people in Christ Jesus.

All of that becomes completely undefinable, uncommunicable, indefensible.

Once the basic categories of man, woman, father, mother, husband, wife are lost, and look at the denominations that are collapsing on it.

Look at the denominations that are collapsing on it. Where are they going?

Do they have even a semblance of a gospel message? Of course not. And I don't know about anybody else, but I think it was

Brother Jason that sent me the clip from General Conference where one of the 12 talked about the, what was it, not alliance, but partnership,

I think? You know what we all are.

Alliance, partnership, something like that that they had forged with the LGBTQ community. Hey, I was down there.

Coalition. I was down there in the 90s when the gay

Mormons showed up for the first time. And there wasn't anybody in those black suits that were working on a coalition at that point in time,

I can assure you of that. I have been stunned at what is going on up here.

Stunned. I've admitted that's another place where I've been wrong because I would have thought of all the religions around, the

Mormons have a gendered God. He's literally male. And if you can't figure out male and female any longer,

I don't know, I don't know. Everything that Jesus quotes from the scriptures assumes the gender binary, the goodness of that gender binary, the createdness of that gender binary, the purposefulness of that gender binary, and the utter necessity of the continuation of that gender binary.

It is God's purpose, it is God's intention, it provides the very foundation and fabric of culture itself.

And so is it any shock then that we have such clear evidence today of how people are seeking to take our young people, our young ones, and as soon as they can, twisting their understanding of the most basic relationships?

Consequently, Jesus says, having quoted from his own word, they are no longer two but one flesh, what therefore

God has joined together, let no man separate. They are no longer two but one flesh.

Now, as Paul will say, this is a mystery, and certainly it is. And I don't think there's gonna be any husband or wife in this room that is going to claim that in your life, you have perfectly embodied what it means to become truly one.

Sin impacts those things, impacts that reality.

And yet, I know one thing. It's a sad thing, but sometimes you have to rejoice in sadness.

My daughter, between her freshman and sophomore years of high school, we were paying more to have them in Christian school than we were paying on our mortgage.

And one day coming home from church, Summer says from the back seat, she says,

I wanna go to Cortez. Cortez is the local public high school. And we're like, why?

And she says, because I prefer my unbelievers straight up, thank you. And we're like, what?

And she says, I only know two Christians at my school. I only know two people in my class at my school that I consider to be

Christians. All the rest of them are just playing at it. So I'd rather be where the unbelievers are open about being unbelievers than with the unbelievers that play religion every day and that I have to go to chapel and pretend we're all, ooh, you know, stuff like that.

Well, I had survived and it had been an important part of my life. She would tell you today, that would no longer be an option.

But what she experienced in so doing was very formative for her.

And those of you who know her know what I mean by that. As someone said on Twitter recently, they said, that's

Summer Yeager, that's James White's daughter. And in that case, the apple didn't fall very far from the tree.

And they meant that as an insult. And I'm like, that's right.

And so, but one of the first evidences was within the first week of going to Cortez, she came home, and because she hadn't been in freshman class, she had to, as a sophomore, take

PE, that wonderful experience we all remember so well.

And she came home and she said, man, man, I found out today that I am the only girl in my

PE class that is living with her natural parents.

With both her natural parents, I'm the only one. Every other girl in my class. Divorces, living with grandparents, whatever.

But I'm the only one. And then a few years later, after she had graduated and she was working at Starbucks, she told us, she said, we got into a conversation last night at closing while we were cleaning up or something, and when

I told them, this was like 15 years ago. What, 15 years ago? Yeah, right around that, right about 15 years ago.

When I told them that you guys had been married 25 years, nobody believed me.

Nobody believed me. There was no one working there that had parents that had stayed married for more than about 10 years.

And they just thought I was making it up. And I was like, nope, that's the way it is.

Consequently, they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore

God has joined together, let no man separate. May I say this for the benefit of the recordings so that my trial in the future, this will not be a question, but there is no blessing of God of the joy joining of two men and two women together.

There cannot be, there never will be. And that is said with the authority of Jesus Christ, period, end of discussion.

If you're gonna throw me in jail for that, do so, but realize someday you will stand before him and you will be judged.

And the jail you will be thrown into is a whole lot worse than the jail you're throwing me into. The state that thinks that it can override

Jesus's teaching that God joins together a man and a woman is a state that is in open, clear rebellion against Christ.

And this nation has had more light about Christ's teaching than any nation has ever had on the face of this earth.

And therefore, if Jesus's teaching is true, that it would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for Chorazin and Bethsaida because it had

Jesus walking in its midst, good Lord, what is gonna happen to us? Unless God works a miracle and changes the hearts of this people, we have had more light than any of those nations ever had.

And if we are now standing up, if we are now taking our eight -year -old children and injecting them with puberty blockers that stops their mental development, how can we look back on Joseph Mengele and condemn him?

How? It's astonishing what

God has joined together. Marriage is divine in its origin because it is a part of God's purpose for mankind's continuation.

It's so sad when you think about what people are taught today.

Once you embrace the secular perspective, marriage is nothing more than a reproductive, it can be reproductive, it doesn't have to be reproductive, it's nothing more than self -fulfillment.

It has no transcendent meaning. In the Christian worldview,

God joins together and he does so for his own purposes and for his own glory.

You can survive, when you survive a marriage where there are difficulties, you are glorifying

God in your obedience to him. There's nothing like that in the secular worldview. That's why there's no reason to stay together.

Kick the bum out. Five divorces, 10 divorces, who cares?

You see? What God has joined together, let no man separate.

Well, what about the fact that Moses did allow for the certificate of divorce? Hardness of heart, hardness of heart.

Well, if that's the case, then maybe it's better not to marry. Think about what that meant. Think about how in even the disciples' experience, they had lost the beauty of an understanding of how

God had made Adam and Eve and the fact that she is etzer k 'negdo, help meet that corresponds to him, different but corresponding to.

They had lost that. Even the disciples, wow, better not to marry.

Huh? What? Fatherhood, motherhood, the companionship of life, better not to have that?

What? Better not to marry. No. Then Jesus makes reference to the fact that there were eunuchs in that day.

And he mentions the different types. Today, in the transgender craze, any time, any time you raise the issue of God making men male and female, what are you gonna get?

Well, and this happened to me when I was on, when I was on CNN, the

Dr. Drew show a number of years ago. Yeah, but what about this syndrome and that syndrome?

And I studied genetics in college. I was part of the fellow of anatomy and physiology and so I read a lot about this kind of stuff.

And there is a very, very small percentage of people who do have genetic abnormalities that involve those chromosomes.

Very small. They are not the ones pushing the transgender movement by any stretch of the imagination.

We know what Bruce Jenner is. We know what the admiral dude is.

We know what Will, what's his face, the swimmer is. That's why he doesn't even have to breathe hard to beat all the ladies.

They don't have any genetic abnormalities at all. When you have those situations, you deal with those situations.

But that's not what this is about. This is a wholesale saying God does not get to define. God does not get to define us, we get to define ourselves.

Now in those days, what was a eunuch? What were, who was the Ethiopian eunuch?

Why was he even, why would he even be around? He would be in that state, either having been born that way or made that way via castration.

It's one way to do it. Obviously came from the East in the, having men who would be able to take care of the king's many wives.

And the king wanted to make sure that any offspring from those wives were his offspring and not a guy's offspring that he's not keeping his eye on.

And so you had eunuchs. And those men frequently rose to have tremendous levels of power.

Frequently rising in the government or in especially in the keeping of the king's treasures because if you can trust somebody with your wives, you can probably trust them with your treasures as well.

So the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts, probably where that one comes from as well.

There's nothing here about transgenderism. There's nothing here about women dressing like men or men dressing like women.

There's nothing about filling bodies with hormones because they didn't know anything about them and they couldn't do those things.

There is a recognition that in this fallen world, there are going to be those types of situations where, hey, didn't

Samuel warn Israel? You don't want a king. This is what the king's gonna do. Well, once you got kings, then you got stuff like this happening too.

That's how it works. That's how the world works. But it stuns me that the apostles, most of whom were married, could have such a debilitated view of marriage itself.

They needed to hear this. It's not just the Jews that were trying to trap him into the divorce argument.

The apostles needed to hear what Jesus was saying in this passage because it called them to a much higher understanding of what marriage was.

Hey, they came out of that Jewish milieu where these are the types of arguments.

Well, you can divorce her for anything. That is not a biblical view of a woman by any stretch of the imagination.

There was correction offered there. Jesus rarely gets credit for the high view of women and the noble way in which he interacts with them.

John chapter four, the woman, the well. And what lays behind this, he rarely gets the credit that is due him because he's simply reflecting the proper understanding of the scriptures that came before him.

And people hate what those scriptures say. Ah, it's patriarchy. It's patriarchy, it's terrible.

I remember when I preached through the law of God, the holiness code, I was stunned how many times the law specifically existed so as to protect the woman.

It was fascinating how that was a part going all the way back. It's real easy to see how men building men's traditions could minimize those aspects and maximize the ones that give them the most power.

But when you allow Jesus to interpret scripture, he's very good at it because he wrote it and that's why.

So what about us today? What about you and I? We have a solid foundation from Genesis.

Jesus tells us by interpreting it here, we can trace this into Paul's discussion of male and female and marriage and family and children honoring and obeying their parents and the importance of the family structure.

We can look at the qualifications for the elders in the church.

And again, you can't begin to understand what's said there outside of the created good continuing gender binary, you can't even begin to understand the words.

Can't do it. And so it is consistent. That means you and I need to realize, not so that we can turn ourselves into victims, but you and I need to realize that what the world is saying to us is you bow before our idol of gender and sexual identity and deny what

Christ says. That is our only choice. There is no way to bring these two things together.

And the thing that really disgusts me the most is when I see people claim to be

Christians. When I see these churches with these transgender flags and LGBTQ flags flying outside the churches, synagogue of Satan, stay out of the way so when the lightning falls and the fire falls, you don't get splattered.

It's amazing. The people that have to give an answer someday for that,

I can't even begin to understand it. But we need to recognize, we need to have deep personal commitments ourselves on these issues.

Not only so we can communicate them to others. Not only so that our children can recognize, yes, my parents were focused on this and they communicated to me the reason why.

It wasn't just because of their traditions. It was because it's vitally important to who

I am. And what my future is. And I need to be communicating this to my children someday.

And we need to recognize, I know it's an overused phrase, it's a gospel issue. If we cannot define what sin is, if we cannot define what human beings are, then

Jesus becomes nothing more than another teacher of man's philosophies, ethics, and morals.

But He doesn't become the incarnate Son of God. He doesn't become the one that we can live our lives completely in service to Him.

Can't do it. He's not big enough if He's not truly the incarnate one, if He's not giving

His life for us, and we can't discuss any of that if we take such a loose view of Scripture that we cannot stand on this issue.

And say to the world, you will not experience fulfillment and joy as long as you continue to deny how

God has made you and that it is a blessing. It is a good thing. And it is a necessary thing.

So there are some of my thoughts this evening for you. Thank you for listening to them.

I know that's not an uplifting, joyous message. But we live in a day where that which should be uplifting and joyous to us is being profaned.

It's being profaned openly, and we are being told that we must rejoice in that, and we can't.

We have to pray for our nation, and we have to use a word that a lot of people don't like to use anymore.

Repentance. Repentance. I've been in seminaries where in the church growth classes, lists of words you should never use in the pulpit were taught to people, and repentance was one of them.

Well, we're seeing what happens. We're seeing what happens. Now, we have to live in it if we're gonna tell other people to live in it.

We have to illustrate it in and of ourselves. But we cannot withhold from the world around us the one word they need to hear, though we know that they will laugh.

Well, the majority will. In fact, some of them will actually sue you for using it. Well, lose your coat.

Get sued. Because the ones laughing at you, that's one thing, but you never know who's listening.

The quiet person that God will use and bring them to repentance, and then they'll start proclaiming that message.

God's gotta start with somebody. Needs to be us. Needs to be us. So, with that, let's pray.

Father, we do pray for the boldness and yet the meekness that is required of us at this time.

It's a hard balance for us, Father. Our egos become inflated. Knowledge puffs up, as Your Word says.

But we need to be bold in this day to proclaim Your truth and to call men and women to repentance of their rebellion against You.

And yet we need meekness and gentleness and grace to protect us from adopting the attitude of the

Pharisees. And so, Lord, give us, by Your Spirit, that boldness, that understanding of Your Word, that deep conviction in our soul that what we're saying is true.

And then give us that opportunity to proclaim these truths to those around us, to the honor and glory of Jesus Christ.