Sunday Night, October 11, 2020 PM

After that brief interval of fellowship together, I invite you to head back to your seats and hopefully you've got a handout for tonight. And you'll see that we're going to be looking in Genesis and Matthew and Romans here in a little bit, so you can start getting your ribbons well-placed.

Let me pray for us and then we'll get started. Father, I thank you for the time you have afforded us tonight. We pray that you would help us to make the most of it as we submit ourselves to the truths of your word and following after Christ.

I pray that you would help us to rejoice in your wisdom and in your truth and that you would give us an ever-increasing confidence in how good your word is, good for everything.

In our lives.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. So we come back to our study, Sons of Issachar, and we're going to be studying something of a fairy tale tonight. But before we get to that, a reminder that the title of our study, Sons of Issachar, comes from 1 Chronicles 12, where the sons of Issachar knew what to do in ensuring that David, God's anointed, was established upon the throne over all the people of God.

They knew what Israel should do. They understood the times, and that's what we're trying to do as well. We are reminded in the Scripture that our wrestling is not against flesh and blood. But we do wrestle, and a big part of our spiritual warfare is described in 2 Corinthians 10, and verse 5, it says, we are destroying speculations.

We're going to be talking about some speculations tonight. Destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

Every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, such as His worthiness, such as His authority. 1 Peter 3 .15, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence.

The Gender-Bred Person and Pagan Sexual Alchemy

So, the title of tonight's lesson is, Sons of Issachar, the Gender-Bred Person. No, this is not off the Babylon Bee. This is someone, this is something that has been invented by someone and is used in the education sector, amongst other places.

The poster you have on your handout is an actual curriculum developed by Sam Killerman four to five years ago. It is utilized in education, public education, private education, from kindergarten all the way up to the college level.

It is often introduced as an anti-bullying aid, as a part of an anti-bullying curriculum. As we talked about with critical theory, the idea is that anybody who is identified as a minority, in this case a sexual minority, is going to be oppressed by the establishment, therefore they are being bullied and left out, and therefore this kind of approach is introduced not in like a health class or not in other things, it's introduced sometimes as an anti-bullying curriculum that everybody has to take so that nobody is hating anyone else.

Actually, what it does is it teaches the witchcraft of sexual alchemy. Paganism, you have to understand, paganism operates on a principle of oneness, so that everything is tied together in a big group of one.

This is why in witchcraft, in animism, in all kinds of the pagan worldview, one thing can become another thing. It's just simple. That's alchemy, that's witchcraft, you can turn this thing into something else.

Why?

Because it's all the same stuff at some level, you can just turn one thing into another thing. Usually by use of what?

Words.

You speak words and turn this into that, right? Abracadabra, I turn you into a toad. We laugh at that, oh that's so silly, oh it's so cartoonish, but the idea is that you can use words and change this into that.

That's witchcraft, okay? And what you're looking at in the gender-bred person is a fairy tale, but it is witchcraft. How does it work? Well, you see that there are five different continuums, five different continuums labeled gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, sexual orientation, and commitment style.

This is gender-bred person version 5 .0. It's telling that in about four years they've gone through five versions because they have to keep on updating it and changing it and tweaking it because such is the speed of man's imaginations.

And so some of the mock-ups that they have of these posters, and they are varied, you see these five things listed. They will list all of those things, and in between them they'll put the not equals sign, you know the equals with the slash through it, not equal, so gender identity is not equal to gender expression, is not equal to biological sex, is not equal to sexual orientation, is not equal to commitment style.

Meaning that each one of these five continuums are independent from one another, which means that you can locate yourself somewhere on all five continuums at different levels, and they don't have any real connection to each other, and that's why people are talking about 60 different genders.

And so you see the continuums different ways that everyone, the kindergartners, the second graders, the sixth graders, the sophomores in high school, and the university students are being taught how to identify themselves.

Look at all the different options you have. Why don't you explore and find out and quit submitting yourselves to the repressive scheme where you're either just male or female, right? Okay, so this is what we're, now that's not likely to show up in many Christian schools or on the walls in a church Sunday school class, but I think it is helpful for us to see how pagans are trying to process God's creation while in full rebellion to him.

This is about as imaginative, this is about as imaginative as the different eras of evolution, you know, the Mesozoic era and everything else. You know, this is about as silly as that. This is the imagination of men, that's all that is.

But the idea is, once you reject the truths of God, what are you left with? I think it's important for us to recognize how they're trying to process these things, but it's also important because evangelicalism seems to be intent on developing a synthesis between Christianity and paganism, and so at some point someone's going to talk about the Christ-like way to respond to a gender-bred person, and that if you're not taking full stock of all five continuums and where they are expressing themselves, then we're not being Christ-like.

So it's good to know what's on the horizon. Now let's talk about our conviction, thankfully this is a very simple matter, our conviction. God specially created man as male and female for marriage. Now that's unpopular on several levels, but that's just reading Genesis 1 and 2.

So Genesis chapter 1, verses 27 and 28. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea.

2, 24 and 25, leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh and the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. So the way God made it was perfect in the beginning and there was no shame, no shame about the gender binary, male and female created for marriage.

And Genesis tells us that God specially made man male and female. He specially made Adam and Eve. Not only did he specially create everything by the power of his word in six days, but he also created Adam and Eve in a special fashion, forming Adam from the dust of the earth and breathing the breath of life into him and forming Eve from a rib of Adam as he slept and then closing up the wound in its place and brought her to the man that they would be married.

That's how it happened.

So God specially created man as male and female, and he created them for marriage. That's the first part of our conviction just straight out of the scripture, and there's plenty of other places we could go to look at it.

But also this, God does not approve modifications or aspired changes to his design. Well, how do we know that? Oh, just look at the way that Christ handles the word of God. So we go to Matthew 19 and look at how Jesus handles questions concerning the matter.

And the matter is, of course, how many modifications and in what conditions and how can we change things up? And then we see Jesus' response in Matthew 19. So some Pharisees, verse 3, so some Pharisees came to Jesus testing him, testing him, asking, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?

I mean, their debate was serious reasons. There's several, but serious. And then other was like, you know, the guy has full scope of whatever he wants. He can just, for whatever reason at all. And so that was their debate.

And they want him to take sides on the debate. They also want him to get in trouble with political officials who were divorced as well. And he answered and said, have you not read, Pharisees, have you not read what that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

And it said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So again, the question was, how can we modify marriage? Right now, was divorce part of God's design?

Was that in Genesis 1 or 2?

Right.

So God didn't, like, create divorce as part of his marriage design. Didn't do that, did he? So they're coming to Jesus and saying, well, concerning the modifications that man tends to make on marriage, what position would you take, you know, lenient or conservative?

And then Jesus says, let's go back to the word of God and read what it has to say. That shows us our process about how we do these things. And then he points at the word of God and then concludes, verse 6, so there are no longer two but one flesh, but therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

And you notice the period. You notice the period, right? They said to him, well, why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away? When you go back and you read the passage in Deuteronomy 24, verses 1 through 4, Moses didn't command them to get divorced.

He said, when one of you writes a certificate of divorce to your wife and she goes away and she marries another man and then he does the same thing to her and she comes back to you, you can't marry her again because you're spreading immorality.

But Moses is saying, you've got all this stuff going on in the camp. You've got all this immorality spreading in the camp. And what he said, when this stuff happens, there's so much adultery and immorality going on that I'm telling you to stop, back up, quit spreading the immorality.

Notice verse 8. He said to them, Jesus is rightly interpreting the text. He says, because of your hardness of heart, Moses permitted. Notice he didn't say commanded, not commanded, but permitted you to divorce your wives.

But from the beginning, it has not been this way. Notice the period again. Where is Jesus getting his cues from? And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality and marries another woman commits adultery.

So the disciple said to him, if the relationship of the man with his wife is like this, it's better not to marry. They said, well, if you're going to be all that strict on it. I don't really know if I want to, you know, be that committed.

And then 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 were born that way from their mother's womb. And there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men or also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

He was able to accept this, let them accept it. He's like, okay, yeah, there are some exceptions. But what are the reasons? Some sort of hand, some sort of deformity by the way you were born. You were made a slave in some context.

And then you just decided to stay single, you know, like the Apostle Paul for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Those are the reasons why you might choose that way. But I don't think that was the answer they were looking for.

But Jesus is simply saying, look, God doesn't approve modifications or aspire changes to his design. You're asking me what side am I on, conservative or liberal, when it comes to divorce? And he's in, you know, it's like the answer of the angel of the Lord to Joshua, no.

You're missing it, okay. In addition to that, Romans chapter 1, verse 24 to 27 will round out a very short, but I would say ample establishment of our convictions on the matter. Romans 1, 24 to 27, therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.

So the lusts of their hearts is where the impurity begins, isn't it? The lusts of their hearts is where the impurity begins, and then it expands so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchange the truth of God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

Amen.

For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. For the women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. Notice again, the passions first, and then the acts of sin. And in the same way, also the men abandoned the natural function of the women and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

Notice also that there is something called natural, and there's something called unnatural. That there is a natural that God has designed, which is by basic definition good, and then there is unnatural, which by basic biblical definition is abomination.

So God has determined what is considered natural, okay? That's pretty much heresy today, but it's in the Scriptures, so. Now, I think the world and the church are obviously at odds with this matter and have been for quite some time, but the usual suspects desire a synthesis between the world and the church, and so we need to use our methodology to clarify our terms, to run the reductio, to offer Christ, and to stick with the Scriptures.

I think we need to clarify terms. You'll notice the living out church audit that was done a few years ago. Those of you who went through my class on flat earth sexuality a little over a year ago will recognize this.

But I bring it up now because things are moving at a pace where these kinds of things only intensify in their importance, okay? You know, if you're in a cable car going up the side of a mountain, right, because you can go skiing or something like that, okay?

And you're in the cable car going up the mountain, and you're up, you know, let's say a third of the way, and you begin to hear creaking and snapping and popping above your head. And you look to the cable car operator, and you say, excuse me, and he says, oh, it sometimes does that.

Every once in a while, it'll stop, and this car particularly has been known to fall off. Okay, when I'm a third of the way up, that is some degree of concern, is it not? But if I sit there for another few minutes, and now we're halfway up, my concern has what?

Increased, hasn't it, right? And so that's why I want to revisit this. There's a Living Church, Living Out Church Audit. Living Out is an organization that was founded by Sam Alberry, Ed Shaw, and another guy, I can't remember.

But they, in concert with Tim and Kathy Keller, with a very special conference, issued this audit, something that all of them wanted to be used throughout the PCA and throughout other churches to see whether or not we were godly in the way that we accepted others.

So question number one, your church family meetings include people who could be labeled LGBTQI plus slash same-sex attracted, alphabet soup. If you don't, then you're probably suppressing people from identifying that way, and you're doing that in an ungodly fashion, and or you're not actively seeking to include them, and if you're not, you're not trying to be a diverse church.

That was their, there's a whole bunch of curriculum that comes with this, so you can check it out for yourself. Derogatory language or stereotyping attitudes towards sexual minority groups, now where does that come from?

We studied critical theory, didn't we? That comes from critical theory. Sexual minority groups, that's queer theory. Identifying people as minorities, these are the oppressed. Derogatory language or stereotyping attitudes towards sexual minority groups would not be tolerated either up front or in conversation between church family members.

And of course, we can agree that there's no call for being derogatory about people, but what is the inserted assumption here? The validity of the language, sexual minority groups, right? You have to accept that as part of the truth.

All in your church know that we all experience sexual brokenness, and we are all being encouraged to confess their own sexual sins. This was a big part of the study that I did, was that there was an attempt to normalize all sexuality as equally broken.

There was no degrees in the brokenness. We were all equally broken, so there should be no complaining about it. So, look at the genderbred person. Here's how we begin to apply. So, if you put your finger on man, masculine, male, heterosexual, monogamous, you would have what the Bible would call normal.

Or woman, feminine, female, heterosexual, monogamous. That would be what the Bible calls normal, okay? And then, but what this is saying is that you need to understand that every single combination on this list is equal in its brokenness.

It's all equal.

And so, we just need to clarify the terms. You got to clarify what's being said here. I'll skip ahead a few, but let's look at verse 9. Verse 9, number 9, verse 9. Church commandment number 9. Church family members instinctively, you have to do it instinctively now.

If you don't do it instinctively, if you're being forced to do it, you're a bunch of prejudiced.

People.

Church family members instinctively share meals, share homes, share holidays, festivals, money, and children with others from different backgrounds and life situations to them. So, you need to equally instinctively share your children with sexually confused people.

If you don't do that, you're not being godly in your acceptance of others. And then, no one will be pressurized, which is a fun British word, into expecting or seeking any healing, and they have that in quotation marks in their audit, or change that God has not promised any of us until the renewal of all things, which is part of the line that people who are sexually confused are not really confused.

It's just the way that they are. They need to be accepted and not be pressured to change in any way. So, Tuesday night, if you go see the movie put on by First Stone Ministries, you're going to hear lots of glorious stories about people who, such were some of them, and God saved them and brought them up out of slavery and bondage and sin, and they are gloriously saved.

So, you're going to see a lot about that. First Stone Ministries, we support them on a monthly basis. We've had a conference here with Stephen Black, and so now they've got their big movie coming out, so that's something to go see.

Now, so that's a living out, that's an audit for your church to see whether or not you are godly in your love for others. Now, I use that because I want, this is a bridge being built between pagan views of sexuality and the church.

This is one of those things that tries to syncretize and bring these things together, and we have to be aware of that. Mark Yarhouse wrote a paper called A Christian Perspective on Sexual Identity. It's being, it's a position paper used for Christian ministry to sexual minorities, mostly in context of college campuses and so on, where they're all learning the gender bred man or gender bred person and all that, gender.

And so he writes, this is very interesting to me, he writes about the various types of affections that someone might have, and he wants to avoid using language that makes it seem like either or. And he says, this is The Christian Perspective on Sexual Identity.

We've got to be writing more about a continuum, a continuum. Does that look familiar? You're on a scale somewhere, but it's not either or. It's a scale for everybody. And he says, the Christian morality is really about behavior, it's not about your affections.

Okay, it's about your behavior, it's not about your affections. So he writes, reported changes are best thought of as gains along a continuum of attraction rather than categorical changes from homosexual to heterosexual.

That's exactly what the movie is going to deal with. Christians understand that change is also not directly relevant to the moral debate. Any change of your affections has nothing to do with right and wrong in regards to sexuality.

He says, the church would do well to expand the vision of the Christian who is navigating the sexual identity issues beyond the expectation of complete heterosexuality or the expectation of marriage. Even if a modest number of believers do experience a more significant shift, many others will not.

A Christian's measure of spiritual depth and maturity does not hinge on the eradication of same-sex attraction or an increase in attraction to the opposite sex. If a believer does not experience heterosexuality or a significant reduction in homosexual attractions, he or she has much to experience in the life of the church and in a personal walk with God.

For all believers, single and married, heterosexual and homosexual, notice that, for all believers, singled and married, heterosexual and homosexual, there is a more fundamental consideration that we live our lives faithfully before God, committing ourselves to him and growing through the Holy Spirit's work in our lives to greater Christ-likeness.

One more, just for example, and your house would probably be, you know, far and away not normal for some of it. But there is plenty of other expression. It was a couple of, almost a couple of years ago, a lot of this was garnering attention due to the Revoice Conference in 2018.

And J .D. Greer, who's still the president of the Baptist Convention by merits of COVID, sought fit to address this particular issue. And so, he wanted to talk about, first of all, that all sins are equally depraved.

They're all equally sinful. There's no difference between one sin and the other sin. But then within the space of about 225 words, he does say that the religiously proud and the greedy are worse than anybody else.

And the reason, why does he make the difference? He says, in terms of frequency of mention and passion, it would appear that quite a few other sins are more egregious in God's eyes than homosexuality.

Jim Wilkins says that we should whisper about what the Bible whispers about and shout about what it shouts about. The Bible appears more to whisper on sexual sin compared to its shouts about materialism and religious pride.

Isn't that great? So, we should whisper what the Bible whispers. So, I counted. It annoyed me so much that I counted. And when all the biblical references to extortion, swindlers, unjust gain, trusting in wealth, loving money, oppressing the poor, greed, coveting, theft, and stealing.

I use all of those as 161 instances in the scripture. And then I did a search for haughtiness, hypocrisy, arrogance, and pride, not even referring it just to religious. And I got 213 references. But when I did the same kind of work on sexual immorality, it was 340 references.

So, I couldn't square Jim Wilkins' whisper theory with the biblical data and or the idea that the less the Bible says about a matter, the less serious it is. So, I did one on that. I looked around for different lists of sin, different types of sexual sin.

And I ended up with about 20, 23, 24 on heterosexual lust, about 15 against prostitution, about 11 against rape, 9 against homosexuality, 7 against incest, 2 against bestiality. And I couldn't find a single verse against pedophilia.

So, since the Bible doesn't say anything about it, I guess we shouldn't either, right?

How does that work?

Is that a great way of interpreting the Bible? It sure gets you points with people who don't want to deal with those things. So, I don't think that works. And the approach needs to be more about what the Bible does say.

And I don't think that we're actually called to interpret whether God was whispering at that moment or shouting or how much energy is behind the words. And that determines how much we ought to obey or not.

And I decided to remix. This is under the idea of running the reductio. And I know we know what they're talking about. I wanted to remix your house about this issue of greed, right? Greed and covetousness and desire and that kind of thing.

Let's just apply the same kind of approach, you know, to greedy, covetous Christians as we would to gender-bred Christians, right? As a gender-bred Christian, they have this way of approaching that situation.

Let's do the same thing for covetous Christians, shall we? The church would do well to expand the vision of the Christian who is navigating ownership issues beyond the expectation of contentment or the expectation of possessing only your own stuff.

Even if a modest number of believers do experience a more significant shift, many others will not experience the same degree of shift. And a Christian's measure of spiritual depth and maturity does not hinge on the eradication of covetousness or an increase in contentment.

Is that working so far? If a believer does not experience contentment or any significant reduction in covetousness, he or she has much to experience in the life of the church and in a personal walk with God.

For all believers, poor and rich, content and covetous, there is a more fundamental consideration. We live our lives faithfully before God, committing ourselves to him and growing through the Holy Spirit's work in our lives to a greater Christ-likeness.

That doesn't really work, does it? So why make special exceptions for one sin and not for another? What's our standard? The concern, of course, is this, that when it comes to the attempted evangelical synthesis of the gender-bred person into the church, I've been saying that the only real concern is behavior, it's not about the affections.

The affections being what they are has no real connection to your morality. The problem is that they look at something called sin and they say that's not sin. All right, that's the main problem. To make it a little bit more quantifiable, I wanted to read a quote from Ed Shaw.

He wrote a book called Same-Sex Attraction in the Church. This was handed out at T4G 2016. I went there. It was handed out to like 12 ,000 conference goers as this is a good way to faithfully handle these issues in your church.

I didn't read it because I was like, I got other things to read. I had no idea what was going on. But one of the things he writes, he says that godliness is not heterosexuality. He says that's a misstep.

People believe that godliness is heterosexuality. And he says that he had a thought revolution on the matter when he was listening to a conference speaker share his ideas during a panel discussion and this guy was leading his church's support group for those identifying as LGBTQI plus attracted Christians.

And he said, here's the quote that Ed heard and blew his mind. He said, we most of all want our boys to grow up as godly and mature Christians. Some of the most godly and mature Christians we know are same-sex attracted.

So why would we be so afraid of them growing up as same-sex attracted? Shaw was thrilled because that's how he identified himself. This is Shaw now. He says, it finally blew apart my wrong presumption, my wrong presumption that same-sex attraction and godliness like oil and water don't ever mix.

It made me recall that some of the most godly people that I have ever known are those who also experience same-sex attraction. False teaching tells folks what they want to hear, but when it hits, it's like watching someone shoot up with heroin.

I mean, what's the results? So we have to understand what is godliness? What are we talking about here? What is being said is that the desire has nothing to do with sin or not. There's no culpability to desire in this case.

So you can have whatever particular desires you have, but you're only responsible for how you act on them and nothing else, okay? The sin does not lie in the desire. It lies in the behavior. So the problem is that if we say that there's no sin, that that desire is not sin, then there's no forgiveness for it.

There's no cleansing of it. There's no hope for it. You've just classified it as something other, and there's no gospel hope for it at all. Here's what 1 John 1, 8 says. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us, right?

If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he himself is the propitiation for our sins and not only for ours also, but also for those.

Of the whole world.

Not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world. That's good news. We've got to offer Christ in the situation. The bridge in is to take aspects of the gender-bred person and say, this isn't sin.

All of this is in some way natural. There's no real categories here to be concerned about. But the way to offer Christ is to name sin as sin. This is sin, but there is forgiveness for your sins. Not only forgiveness, but there's also cleansing.

And not for those of us who are currently here at our church, but also for those of.

The whole world.

So, I mean, you too.

You too.

Not just people who've maybe grown up in a healthy model of a family and so on, but for people who are not like me and have different background, have all these other things they're struggling with. Yeah, see, the gospel's for you too.

Cleansing for you too. Forgiveness for you too. You need to offer Christ. And then just stick with the scriptures as we've talked about when I just counted. There's all sorts of things that are being said about the Bible and about the current views on sexuality.

All we've got to do is just go look. I did a very silly thing. I felt kind of silly doing it, but I just went and counted. I mean, we've got concordances. We've got Bible programs. You can search. I mean, I can search on Google and find scripture.

I mean, we are without excuse. We have so many Bible study tools. We can just go find that for ourselves. Don't listen to somebody else's expertise on the matter. Go look. Just go look for yourself. Stick with the scriptures.

They're going to come with statistics. They're going to come with stories. Just go check it out for yourself in the Bible. And what is our hope? We've already kind of talked about it, but our hope is in Christ.

We have a word in 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11. Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Such were some of you. That used to be your identity. It used to be, you know, your way of talking about your sexual minority group or whatever. That used to be, such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God.

There's our hope. There's our hope. The hope of what God can do. With man, these things are impossible. But with God, all things are possible. And that's our hope. All right, well, let's close by singing the doxology.

Raise.