April 21, 2026 Show with Joe Owen on “Sex, Gender & the Gospel”
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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer
George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend
Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,
Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,
Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on the 21st day of April, 2026.
And I'm thrilled to have back a returning guest on my program today.
Many of you may have heard my most recent interview with Joe Owen on the
Gospel According to Marks. By the way, the audio is now uploaded to ironsharpensironradio .com,
and you can download that and listen to it if you missed it when it was aired live. And please, of course, wait until after this live show is over.
But today we have Joe coming back to discuss another book that he has written, and equally important,
Sex, Gender, and the Gospel, God's Design in a Confused World.
And Joe is the Spanish ministry manager for the ministry of creationist apologist
Ken Hamm, Answers in Genesis, teaching at various Bible institutes, seminaries, and universities, and speaking throughout
Latin America and Europe. And today I am so much looking forward to interviewing you on Sex, Gender, and the
Gospel. Welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Joe Owen. Well, thank you for having me back.
It's a pleasant surprise. And I think that I may have committed a cardinal sin, if evangelicals can have cardinal sins, or is that respected to Catholic cardinals?
I don't know. The cardinal sin of my show in that I forgot to have you provide—I'm almost positive
I forgot, I'm not 100 % sure—that I forgot to have you provide a summary of your salvation testimony the first time you were on the show, which is something that I traditionally always ask first -time guests to do, and somehow it slipped my mind the first time you were on the show for me to ask you to do that.
So I'm asking you to do it now, brother. I'd love to hear a summary of your salvation testimony that would include the kind of religious atmosphere, if any, in which you were raised, and the kinds of providential circumstances our
Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved Him—saved you.
Yeah. Well, yeah, I would do my best, I would do something very summarized.
So my parents, they met at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. That's where I was born.
My father from Birmingham, Alabama, my mother from New Hampshire, they met there. And so we were raised in a home where we would frequent church, but the home—my mother left when
I was about 14, and my family broke apart, including me.
There's five of us, five children, they have. And there are many things with respect—you know,
I want to be respectful, too. I was just saying, we did not see some living out of faith, especially on the maternal side.
And then my mother left, and none of us walked in with the Lord. And so I had the
Bible Belt background from my youth, but it depends on who asked me if I would say
I was a Christian or not. So I remember when I was in the Navy, and somebody asked me what
I believe. I'd say I'm Christian because I'm not Buddhist, or I'm not Muslim, or Arabic, or I'm not an
Islam. And so just a non -believer.
And I married a Mexican lady when I was 19 or 20.
And she was religious, Mexican religious, which is syncretism, syncretistic beliefs between the icons of Roman Catholicism mixed with animism of Latin America.
So is that anything like Santeria? Is that like Santeria? Yes. Yes. Is it exactly
Santeria? In the Caribbean, and in some places in the
Caribbean, like Haiti, but mostly in Brazil, it's a lot more syncretistic.
In Mexico, there's still some orthodoxy to the Catholic faith, Roman Catholic faith, and you just see it mixed in in the smaller villages.
Like in Mexico, we have Saint Death. It's a huge grim reaper that the cartel and other people, they pray to.
They have a cartel saint, this guy from the 1800s, who's now, they made a saint.
So it's, yeah, I mean, when people speak of Santeria, they mostly, I think here they refer to Brazil and some in like Haiti, but here in Puerto Rico.
My late wife was born in Puerto Rico, and she said that Santeria was rampant in the rural village that she was born in.
Yes. And so I think like, technically, when you speak of Santeria, you're speaking of some of the
African pagan religions mixing with Catholicism.
But in Mexico, you have the native ones here, not coming from Africa, mixed with Catholicism.
But it's kind of the same thing, though. If a historian wouldn't like me to say it's the same thing, but on a theological level it's the same thing.
And so, and then when I was in the Navy, this guy kept sharing the gospel with me, Sean Burden and his wife,
Chantelle, became friends of ours. And just kind of to make it short, I kind of made fun of them and said, you know, these religious freaks.
I used to tell my wife that. And I'd say, you know, who is this guy to judge me? And of course,
I'm a Christian, he doesn't know me. And I just, you know, I have my own way of understanding the gospel or understanding who
God is. You know, the same thing that everybody tells me now when I share. But then maybe two years after that, my marriage and our life was just kind of falling apart as four years married, expecting our third child.
And August of 2003, the Lord, just one night, he brought that gospel back to me. I was convinced of, convicted, my wife too, and the
Lord saved us. And yeah, so it's been quite, it's been quite the journey.
And you know, one thing now, though, I know the Lord. I know him. I've seen the glory of God in the face of Christ, as in 2
Corinthians 4, 6. And I've never been the same ever since.
How low you, how did you come to discover the doctrines of sovereign grace? Oh yeah, that's a great one.
So, this is great. I'll be very careful that I won't regret how
I said this later. So as a new believer, within a year and a half,
I was already in the undergrad, trying to focus on theology with minors like in worldview, world religions, and apologetics in Atlanta.
We moved to Atlanta, started studying, I wanted to serve. And just really having a hard time, everything
I was reading, and nothing seemed to fit. You know, my professors couldn't stand me, all my questions.
And then I got to, and then at the mother, I was planning Spanish -speaking churches, and I was a new believer.
It was too, you know, it was too early for all that. And then the American church that was kind of hosting us, they bought these
Rick Warren books. I think you know which one I'm talking about. 40 Days of Purpose?
Yeah, the Purpose Driven Life. Oh yeah, that's right. His program was 40 Days of Purpose, right?
Yeah, it's a 40 -day program. Yeah, so I started teaching that to this newly, you know, and within like two or three weeks of it,
I said, I just can't teach this anymore. I just started having like a crisis of faith saying, it seems like everybody's playing the same game that I know this is not what the
Scripture is teaching of what I understand so far, but everybody's like playing a game, like making this old and antiquated document relevant, because this has nothing to do with what they're saying with what
I see in the Scriptures. And so is the church today, is it just a game, a cultural game to make relevant and old antiquated document?
And I really started doubting on many things in my faith. And I was reading everything I can find, and one day in a
Goodwill store, I found this book from J .I. Packer called Knowing God.
And, you know, I don't agree with everything in that book, but boy, I tell you what, by chapter seven, it has 22 chapters.
The first section is chapters one through six on theology proper. By the time
I got to chapter seven, I was weeping, just worshiping, I was reading it. It's like, this is the God that I came to know in 2003.
I don't know what everybody else is saying around me and what they're pushing, but that's not the gospel I came to understand, but this is it.
And it just had that ring of truth. And then from there, Packer talks about the Puritans.
So I started reading John Owen, the glory of Christ, and others, and other authors.
I discovered Martin Lloyd -Jones, Packer's relationship with him.
And then one day, a friend of mine in 2013, when I started working my answers in Genesis, he started asking me theological questions.
And I started answering him and he said, brother, you sound Reformed. And I said, what does that mean?
Of course, Reformation, 16th century. And then I didn't know, but the Lord was showing, you know, is that that crisis
I was having was just because it seemed like everybody has turned into a capitalist in post -Industrial
Revolutionary marketing. The Christian faith was just marketed. And as a new believer, I was really struggling with that because it seemed like, well, you have to play along in the game to market it out this way.
But I didn't know enough to know why this seemed all wrong. And so the
Lord was just preparing me in that way. Now I don't care what anybody says about it.
You know, they call you Calvinist. I'm so thankful that the real true
God is not the one of humanistic imagination who's a weak
God. I'm so glad that the true God is a sovereign God. Amen. I'm going to read a plug for your book,
Sex, Gender, and the Gospel, God's Design in a Confused World, by someone who's been a guest on my show,
Captain Barry Wilmore, the astronaut that everybody who, unless you're living in a cave somewhere, must have known was stranded in outer space for months.
He's also nicknamed Butch Wilmore and has been interviewed many times in the media, especially during the most recent space launch that occurred.
And I must say that I think that it was very courageous of him to write a glowing endorsement for a book titled
Sex, Gender, and the Gospel, God's Design in a Confused World, because of the fact that if the media gets wind of that, they may cease inviting him as a commentator on their news programs and so on.
So I applaud him for that. But Captain Wilmore says, enlightening and highly informative, a must read for those who are committed warriors in the battle for truth.
Amen. Tell us about what drew you to write a book on this subject when there are already a number of Christian books addressing this issue.
My friend, Dr. James R. White, over a decade ago, wrote the book
The Same -Sex Controversy. He co -authored that book. And he admits that now, since the insanity of this issue has become even more overtly satanic than it was when he wrote the book, that his book in many ways is outdated, other than some of the timeless things in there, what the
Bible has to say about sexuality. But what compelled you to write this?
And so, well, if Dr. White says that he's becoming obsolete, except for with Scripture, I wouldn't dare say that.
I love his book. Actually, I quote his book a few times in this. Great, great. Yeah. But there is something of truth of what he said, though.
It is because when he wrote his book, we were dealing with much more with the
LGBTQ on the homosexual side of it. But today, the naturalistic arguments that are given for that have been refuted with genetics.
And so it looks like the postmodern world has changed tactics to going back to France, middle of century, last century, and resuscitating or bringing into the forefront what we call gender ideology, which is an argument that goes against the arguments that were made by the world in the 90s.
In the 90s, we saw the movement, born this way, born gay, that you don't become gay, you're born that way.
And gender ideology says the opposite. It doesn't matter how you're born, it's your experiences, which is really going off Jean -Paul
Sartre's humanistic existentialism. And so Simone de
Beauvoir, who is Jean -Paul Sartre's lover—I hate using that term, but it's because it's a very open relationship, very bad and pedophilic—but wrote,
Professor in France, who is Jean -Paul Sartre's lover, she wrote The Second Sex based on Jean -Paul
Sartre's existentialism in the end of the 1940s, where she says, a woman is not born a woman, but becomes one.
And then the born gay movement says, you don't become gay, you're born that way. And so that movement did not have success with the anatomic and genetic studies.
And so it seems like they're going back and getting onto that wagon, that bandwagon, which ended up being part of the feminist movement and saying that gender and preferences and all that are something that have to do with your experiences, nothing that you're born with.
And so his book doesn't really deal with that. But I tell you what, though, I've debated using points from his book about the gay
Christian movement. I love it how Dr.
White deals with Paul's compound words used in 1
Corinthians 6, verses 9 and 10, based off of the Septuagint, that I've seen.
Katy Perry's pastor—remember the singer Katy Perry? She brought her pastor on an interview and with that one question, stopped him, and he couldn't answer in front of the whole world, saying, well, the word homosexual is a new word.
People added it to what Paul's writings, and he couldn't answer that. And I've noticed that so many people can't answer that.
And so I wanted to borrow off of Dr. White, quoting him, of course, to go into that too.
Now, I wrote this book first in Spanish for the Spanish -speaking world. It's been published for about five years in Latin America.
And I'm very happy because the publisher that published it, it was their best -selling book for a few years.
And now it just came out in English. And the reason why I'm happy it's coming out in English is, it's because the book has really kind of three main focuses.
And you said, why would we need another book? Well, we don't really need another one, in my opinion, though, my humble opinion.
I think it helps because I have a whole row of books on this subject, even from both sides, you know, even have the gay
Christian Bavines. And I've noticed that not one book deals with the three big focuses on the theological side, the pastoral side, and the apologetics.
It's either one of these three. And I think the church and parents need to deal with all three.
What is the theology of biblical manhood and womanhood in a marriage? What is the theology behind that?
And then the effects of the fall on that. And then the second part, you know, and then the history of how these movements develop.
And then the pastoral side, how do I raise my children in practical ways for the glory of Christ in their identity and sexuality?
And how do we do biblical counseling with no Freud with people who struggle in these areas?
And then finally, the apologetic side, dealing with all the arguments in the gay Christian movement, the
Born This Way movement, and all that, and responding to all those arguments. So this book has all three of those in one book.
Excellent. And it's interesting that you have said that at least predominantly, the rhetoric of the homosexual activist movement is that homosexuals are born that way.
I'm old enough to remember, and maybe you're not, you look like you're a lot younger than I am.
But I'm old enough to remember watching talk shows as a teenager, maybe
Phil Donahue or some of these other talk shows, where there would be homosexual rights activists on these programs who are declaring, no, we're not born this way.
We choose to live this way, because saying that we're born this way insinuates that it's some kind of defect or something like that.
So it's kind of, and I don't know if that was ever the majority view. But in fact,
I don't know if you're aware of this, but as Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, the co -authors of The Pink Swastika, very highly documented in their book of the rampant homosexuality that existed in the
Nazi party, especially in the earlier years of it. And there was a war going on between professed homosexuals.
You had one group that was advocating that they were women born in men's bodies.
And the other group that were Nazi sympathizers who were nicknamed the butches, because they basically were worshiping masculinity and they hated the effeminate culture and so on.
And they despised that notion that they were women born in men's bodies and so on.
So even back then, there was some division amongst the activists in that realm.
Yeah, that is, I think the born gay movement really got a strength in the mid -90s.
And basing it on biological determinism from a naturalistic worldview.
And then we hear now in the 21st century, going back to its experience lived, like you just said, what they're saying previous to the 90s.
And I believe we're seeing what people would call, in some circles, they would call this the
Kantian dualism from the Enlightenment. The idea, are we free beings?
Is there a right and wrong that we can decide on? Or is everything deterministic in a universe that is a bunch of gears and it's all just mathematically going and there's no right and wrong because anything
I do is just something acted upon me. And then what I do acts upon something else. And since the 18th century, no one has been able to resolve that, that Kantian, what they call the
Kantian dualism, because both were taught by Immanuel Kant. And that's the wonder of our faith is that we have an answer to that.
Am I a moral being or am I just a robot of the universe, a mechanic universe?
Well, to have both of those, where I am part of the natural universe that God made, but also
I'm a moral being, you have to have a transcendent dimension. And we have an eternal father, eternal
God, and materialistic understanding of the universe, they can't explain that. And so, one, the rationalism would be the deterministic one, that someone's born gay.
So they're just a product of their environment, their genes, their genetic makeup.
And the other one about my experiences, that was lived out in the 18th century in Romanticism.
So you have rationalism and Romanticism. And you can just see that now postmodernism is really based off the ideas of Romanticism, of all subjectivity, and they reject the deterministic rationalism.
That's just funny how the world cannot come to an understanding because they're trying to fit all understanding of existence in two dimensions when there's a three -dimensional world, in other words.
But we know there's more, God, transcendent, eternal God. So they can't fit it all in one.
If you don't mind me just saying, it's okay. So imagine that you have a two -dimensional board, and you draw on it a road that goes from where you're standing to about 100 kilometers in the back.
And then you have mountains. If you're going to make that portrait, you're going to draw a triangle on this board, because that's what looks like the profundity or depth in three dimensions and two dimensions.
So you could draw a triangle that looks like a road going from where you are to far away. Act like we live in this two -dimensional world, and we're always arguing, is this a road, which is a parallelogram, or is this a triangle?
So we have two groups. We have the triangularites and the parallelites, and they're both fighting over it because they have denied a transcendent dimension.
So they have to explain, how can a road be a triangle and a rectangle at the same time? And I think that's what the world is doing.
We're denying God. We're denying that we are contingent, created beings from an eternally holy, triune
God. And nobody can explain, are we deterministic or our base of experience doesn't have a free will, per se.
I am also old enough to remember that there were some—I'm not saying that this was the majority, but it may have been—there were some in the homosexual rights activist movement who wanted nothing to do with marriage.
And they were, you know, very defiantly claiming, we don't need your phony
God to bless what we're doing. We don't want anything to do with your made -up ceremonies of marriage and so on.
And that seems to have almost nearly 180 degrees turned around, where people involved in that behavior were demanding marriage.
Do you have any thoughts on how that change may have occurred? Yeah, I do, actually.
And I dealt with that some in this book, but probably a little bit more in the book we talked about last time,
The Gospel According to Marx with the Cultural Marxism. It is because if this group, if a lot of people in this group, especially the people who represent them, sometimes are not even homosexual, but the ones who are promoting a lot of this, is that they come up with this term called normativity.
So it's not enough just to say, I can be with as many people as I want. Don't put your constructs, religious constructs of monogamy on me that I have to swear on a piece of paper that we're going to stay together.
Well, that's a very individualistic kind of rebellion. But what about the mass rebellion of how do we topple that system?
You don't topple that system of marriage by just saying, I opt out.
You topple it by changing its definition. And so with this, what people call today social justice movements, which is very intertwined with the sexual revolution, almost inseparable, what they're saying is, but if we don't redefine marriage, if we just opt out of marriage, if we don't redefine it, then we are allowing what's called heteronormativity.
And that produces a binary where you have, it's normal, but the majority of people in your society are having heterosexual marriage.
And so they're forming a society that is designed to give the most benefits to privileges to people who have heterosexual marriages.
So you have to break heteronormativity. And you do that by making marriage a state institution instead of a
God -uniting institution, which no matter what anybody says, only God unites a man and woman. No government does.
And then the state, once they own it in their own thinking, they redefine it to break the heteronormativity.
So in their idea, this is the Marxist side of it, a society will be built, will create itself that has equal privileges to somebody, whether it's one man with one man, one man with three dogs, one man with one woman.
It's this non -binary utopia. And then so now, if a man and a woman are married, they have no natural privileges above anybody else.
Well, the problem with that is that, of course, there is heteronormativity abounds, because that's
God's design. So God doesn't design just ambiguously, I just feel like there should be a man and woman.
We know it glorifies Christ in the church, but also on a practical level, that's how a marriage and then a family is built and a society is built.
And so there are going to be benefits. And then this ungodly movement wants to say, wants to strip marriage of all its benefits, so it will stop being an oppressive institution.
See, I'm saying they politicized marriage. An individual would just say, well, I opt out.
I don't care if marriage is just between a man and a woman. I don't want to be married.
I can have all the men I want and as many as I want, but that's not politicizing it.
I have to politicize it because this is activism. This is collected activism.
This is not individual opting out of something. And we have to go to our first commercial break.
If you would like to join the conversation with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
Give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the
USA. Don't go away. We're going to be right back right after these messages with more of Joe Owen and Sex, Gender, and the
Gospel. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries and the Dividing Line webcast here.
Although God has brought me all over the globe for many years to teach, preach, and debate at numerous venues, some of my very fondest memories are from those precious times of fellowship with Pastor Rich Jensen and the brethren at Hope Reform Baptist Church, now located at their new beautiful facilities in Coram, Long Island, New York.
I've had the privilege of opening God's word from their pulpit on many occasions, have led youth retreats for them, and have always been thrilled to see their members filling many seats at my
New York debates. I do not hesitate to highly recommend Hope Reform Baptist Church of Coram, Long Island to anyone who wants to be accurately taught, discipled, and edified by the holy scriptures, and to be surrounded by truly loving and caring brothers and sisters in Christ.
For more information on Hope Reform Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net.
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I'm Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church, a Christ -centered, Gospel -driven church looking to spread the
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We believe in salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This salvation is based upon the sovereign grace of God, was purchased by Christ on the cross, and is received through faith alone, apart from any human merit, works, or ritual.
Salvation in Christ also results in righteous living, good works, and appropriate respect and concern for all who bear
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That's l -y -n -brookbaptist .org. This is Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church reminding you that by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.
It is the gift of God, not a result of words, so that no one may boast of the
Lord's blessing in the knowledge of himself. Dr.
Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Every Christian who's serious about the deformed faith and the Westminster Standards should have and use the eight -volume commentary on the theology and ethics of the
Westminster Larger Catechism titled Authentic Christianity by Dr. Joseph Camorcraft.
It is much more than an exposition of the Larger Catechism. It is a thoroughly researched work that utilizes biblical exegesis as well as historical and systematic theology.
Dr. Camorcraft is pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, and I urge everyone looking for a biblically faithful church in that area to visit that fine congregation.
For details on the eight -volume commentary, go to westminstercommentary .com, westminstercommentary .com.
For details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,
heritagepresbyterianchurch .com. Please tell Dr. Camorcraft and the saints at Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, that Dr.
Joseph Piper of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary sent you. And please continue to pray for Dr.
Joseph C. Camorcraft III as he continues to recover in a physical rehab facility after falling in his home a couple of months ago, which resulted in his hospitalization and then his subsequent transfer to a physical rehab institution.
Thank God, Joe is continuing to recover, but he got two pieces of news—well, actually,
I should say a piece of news that had both good news and bad news attached to it.
The good news was that he is now staying in a larger private room in the rehab facility with a big window with a gorgeous view.
The bad news is that that was done because his stay there is going to be longer than expected.
So please pray that Joe recovers soon so that he can return home to his wonderful wife,
Becky, and so he can return to his pulpit because his congregation sorely misses his preaching, and he sorely misses being behind that pulpit and proclaiming the
Word. And also, selfishly, pray that he returns home soon so he can be back on my program as a guest, since he is one of my favorite guests.
So I will continue to provide updates for Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III's recovery.
Also, I want to remind you, since we've got Joe Owen on today, who is working with and has been working with Answers in Genesis for quite some time,
Ken Ham is returning to Iron Trip and Zion Radio next Thursday, April 30th.
He is going to be paying tribute with me to our mutual friend, the late
Charlie Liebert, who was not only born and raised in the same hometown where I was born and raised,
Amityville, Long Island, although we never met there, knowingly anyway. But we both providentially became residents of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and he became a very dear friend here.
He wound up founding his own Young Earth Creationist ministry, sixdaycreation .com,
and he sadly went home to be with the Lord, but he did live a long, productive life.
He went home to be with the Lord at the age of 84, and he is sorely missed by me and those who love him, and of course his widow,
Terry, and his surviving children and grandchildren. So, please tune in for that tribute in memory of Charlie Liebert with Ken Ham.
And also, we'll be joined by Jeremy Brandenburg, the pastor of the
Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Carlisle, who was Charlie's pastor.
So, just mark that on your calendar for Thursday, April 30th. But we're now back, and we are continuing to discuss this book,
Sex, Gender, and the Gospel, God's Design in a Confused World, by Joe Owen, who is my guest today.
And by the way, the foreword to this book was written by Ken Ham. It's a beautiful hardback book. We do have a listener in Glasgow, Kentucky, who says,
How much do you blame the evangelical church at large for their failures, which
I believe led to the catastrophe we are witnessing with rampant homosexuality being celebrated and transgenderism becoming normal?
Yeah, I think it's Carl Truman and his collection of essays that's turned into a book called
The Wages of Spin. If I remember right, it's the last chapter or the next to last chapter.
He made a very good observation on this. He said, as a church, we can't even begin to start dealing with this until we first go back and establish our belief on biblical inerrancy and biblical sufficiency.
The point he was making,
I agree with that. You can see a lot of this is that the church is not standing on biblical sufficiency and authority.
Also, I have a biblical answer to that as well. In Romans 1, the apostle
Paul is paraphrasing Genesis 1. You go to verse 18,
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Dr. Weiss, I like his example, like taking a beach ball at the pool and holding it down.
You're holding it down constantly, trying to hold it down underneath water. We're suppressing the truth. Notice when you get to verse 21,
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Claiming to be wise, they became fools. And they exchanged the glory of their mortal
God for images, resembling mortal man, birds, and animals, and creeping things.
Look at this in the Greek. It seems like he's taking this almost directly from the
Greek Septuagint of Genesis 1, verses 26 to around 28, where it establishes that God made them male and female, or first male, and then he gives this order of putting man as a vice regent between God and his creation over the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, it goes all the way down to the creeping things.
Well, in the Greek, it says the reptiles, and that's what the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Genesis uses, instead of creeping things, reptiles.
And then Paul's repeating a lot of that, saying that in Genesis, God made man in his image and his likeness, image, likeness, and then put him over the creation.
And now man in his sin is making an image in his own likeness, and then instead of being a vice regent between God and creation, the man starts adoring images of those same creatures that are mentioned in Genesis 1.
And then the reason why that's so important is then you get to the next verse, verse 24, therefore God gave them up to the lust of their hearts, to impurity, to dishonoring their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator who's blessed for every man.
For this reason, God gave them up to this honorable passions for their women. Now, this uses the term, which probably can be best translated as female, all right?
The same one that Jesus uses in Matthew 19 when he quotes Genesis 1. And that's because in Genesis 1, talks about male and female, and then in Genesis 2, calls them man and woman.
It doesn't have a different meaning, but Paul is using that same word for female and male here, just as Jesus did in Matthew 19 when he quotes
Genesis 1. The females gave up the natural, which is males, for the females, and the males did the same thing, male with male instead of male with female.
And so this is all of Genesis 1 here. God created male and female. He put them in a marriage covenant, and then put them over, blessed them, and put them over as creatures.
So the point is, Paul is saying here, where you see a society being turned over to their own sin, go to Genesis 1, see the order of creation, and see everything they're doing is trying to disorder this order.
God blessed them and told them to multiply, and the woman's womb is a place of nine months of protection and of nourishment.
And then when the baby's born, the baby receives nourishment from mom through milk.
Well, now we're trying to turn the womb into a place of bloody sacrifice, for idolatrous sacrifice, of the place to kill these babies.
And then the radical feminism is to reject God's design for you, and then the homosexual, and quotes, because there's no such thing as a homosexual marriage, but people calling it that.
You see, all of that is this fight against the order of God's design and creation for the glory of God and those who are made in his image.
And so us being turned over, it kind of reminds me of, God, if there's only 10 righteous ones, will you hold back your judgment?
You know, somehow we just kind of said, you know what, we're going to take this new age understanding of religious experience, which is only mystic and subjective, and we're going to find a way to put that into the
Christian realm. So I have this privatized faith of personal mystic experiences based on feelings, but anything that would challenge the world around me, or the family, the church, and the world around me, that Jesus is king, period?
No, that doesn't sound mystic and experiential enough.
And so I believe that we have a new age evangelicalism of mystic experience and Christian garb.
And how can you stand up against such an evil world when we have a yoga
Christianity? And I'm not trying to sound over abusive with my language,
I'm really not, but I do think that as a church we need to wake up. Something I could not understand.
I came out of the world running from it and saying, the world has nothing to offer you. I still hurt remembering what it was like to have no hope and trying to find hope in this lost world.
And then in Christ, it's like, thank God, now I'm a member of this new family, this kingdom that's new to me at least, a king who's not new, but he's new to me.
And then I came into a church, even back in 2000, my first years as a believer, even
Baptist churches, and then seeing them debating on whether they want to take a stance on inerrancy of God's word, it's like, why are you trying to be relevant to a world that hates our
Lord? Isn't the gospel relevant already? Anyways, that was my little rant,
I'm sorry. But that's just something I've been trying to deal with, not only in the world, but in my own heart.
I can't trust my own heart in this. But yeah, you look at how few people in church history, their message would sting people who just wanted to live in hope and rebellion against the
Lord's societies. Their message would sting them. And our message is not stinging many people today.
And I think we're being turned over, as according to Romans 1. Yes, indeed. And our listener in Glasgow, Kentucky has won a free copy of Sex, Gender, and the
Bible—God's Design in a Confused World by my guest,
Joe Owen. Please give us your full name and full mailing address there in Glasgow, Kentucky, and that will be shipped out to you.
We have Elizabeth in the beautiful town of Bright Waters, Long Island, which
I have been in many times over the years, having been raised on Long Island. And Elizabeth says, don't we have to be careful about not going to the other end of the extreme when we seek to distance ourselves from such lunatics as the
Westboro Baptist Church and the God Hates Fags movement that they champion?
Yeah, that's something that really what you were saying, that we have gone too far in the other direction, right?
Yeah, so you just hit on the nerve of why I wanted to write this book, because I said,
OK, in this book, I give whole sections on the pastoral side—sharing the gospel, raising your children, how to deal with somebody with gender dysphoria in a biblical way, a
Christ -exalting way. Yes, one thing
I try to make clear, and this is something that Western postmodern civilization has lost, is we are tearing apart all arguments, ideas that come against the knowledge of our
Lord. We're not tearing apart people, all right? And today, you are seen as intolerant if somebody's ideas are not also embraced as well.
So we do not have a hierarchy of people. That's classism. We have one blood, one race, we're made in God's image, but not all ideas are created the same.
There is right and there is wrong, and in our relativistic world, it is very intolerant to say somebody's idea is wrong.
So we are tearing down all arguments, not people.
Most of the time, the Lord and His sovereign will puts me in front of people with these kind of lifestyles a lot, especially over the last 10 years.
And I share the gospel with them. I answer their questions. I'm firm, yes, just because the same reason that Sean Burden was firm with me when he shared with me
Matthew 7—not everyone who says Lord, Lord, because I told him, well, I'm a Christian, who are you to judge me just because I'm not an
Islamist, I'm not a Mohammedan. And he challenged me on that. Now, did I feel at the moment he was being friendly to me?
No, I was offended. I said, who does this self -righteous, pharisaical, religious
Christian not think he is? But he was not offending me. The truth of the
Word of God was offending my sensitivities because I was embracing sin. And so I want us to be very careful.
We have to be very careful there. We can't be offensive. No, I'm sorry. The gospel is offensive. It is offensive.
It's offensive to anybody who's embracing sin. So our goal is not to make it not offensive. The thing is,
I don't want my sin to add to that offense. Let the foolishness of the cross cause the stumbling block itself.
I don't need the ad to help it to do that at all. And so that was a great point to make.
That's why I wanted the book to be theological, pastoral, and apologetics. Not just apologetics, because when we only stay on the defense side, it usually just turns into a political argument, and everybody else is seen as somebody who has voted against us on that, and they're seen as an enemy.
And that's very dangerous too. And also to remember, a lot of the LGBTQ community are not activists.
Some are, but there's a lot of heterosexual people that are part of that movement, trying to push that movement.
This is something that has a very spiritual side to it. I think somebody's preference has really little to do at the end of the day with what's really going on here.
It's something a lot deeper that we have to keep doing. Tom Scott Oh, the accomplishments that the
LGBTQ community, which I just even hate saying that phrase, because they're not a community, but the strides they have made, the accomplishments and achievements of being accepted and even celebrated in society, in the world, across the world, could never have happened without heterosexuals assisting them in that mission and accomplishing it with them and for them, because there aren't people involved in this activity of not only homosexuality, but even a smaller minority involved in transgenderism.
Isn't this like a tiny fragment of society? Yes, on a world level right now, transgenderism is about 1 % of the population.
Now, homosexuality is pushed up to almost 7 % in some statistics, but you're still at 93 % of the population is neither.
We see a lot of special interest people pushing this who are not even of that persuasion or they're not even living that kind of lifestyle out.
Everything's been politicized. Sorry to mention again, I'm not trying to plug, but the book,
The Gospel According to Marks, that's the point I'm trying to make, is that we've weaponized, turned somebody's identity into a group identity, and then that group identity is now a political front for pushing something.
That's where a lot of confusion is. I quote Carl Truman in his book on The Origin and Triumph of the
Modern Self in that, and I'm not trying to say anything by this, but I even go a little deeper than he does in that, in the history of thought, all the way back to Aristotle even.
And just on that part, he goes a lot deeper than me and many others, so I'm not being careful what I'm saying there. I'm really not trying to make it sound like I could outdo that guy.
No way. But I hope people understand this. It all goes really down to then what is my identity?
What is my identity? And we cannot look inward into feelings and sensations.
Even in our society, we cannot look inward to a heart that's so perverse that man cannot even know it, as we see in Jeremiah 17 .9.
Our first question is not, who am I? No, it's a wrong question. First question is, who is God?
And then this God, the only true God, has revealed to us, as we are his contingent beings, he created us in his image.
He tells me who I am. And today, people are saying, no, your feelings.
Well, brother, I'll tell you what. The Lord has given us six children. My wife and I have been married 26 years, six children.
And I can tell you right now, if I were to find my identity based on my feelings, many times
I would have walked away from this family. Many times I would have left them to starve them growing up. Someday I woke up and I'm just not in the mood.
And I just want my freedom again. And actually, I just want to find someone who's younger. I just want to feel like my ego, someone centering on me,
I would have walked away from them. How many times? No, real people, human beings do not follow their heart or their feelings.
They would just be abandoned children everywhere, if we're to do that. Abuse everywhere, injustice everywhere.
Excellent. And by the way, Elizabeth, in Brightwaters, Long Island, you have also won a free copy of Sex, Gender, and the
Gospel, God's Design in a Confused World by my guest, Joe Owen.
Please make sure you give us your full mailing address in Brightwaters, Long Island. We have to go to our midway break right now.
And if anyone would like to join those already waiting in line to have their questions asked and answered by Joe Owen, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
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Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. I think we should touch for a moment on why the activity of the
Westboro Baptist Church—the vile hatred that they gleefully proclaim condemning homosexuals, the thrill they get out of declaring that they will go to hell—this is not
Christian behavior, and is even evidence that they are likely not regenerate. I mean, if God does not delight in the death of the wicked, and these people get an enormous kick out of that.
And, of course, people involved in homosexuality are not their only target.
They have a long list of people who they proclaim God hates, including veterans, because of the fact that all of the armed services permit homosexuals to be involved.
But anyway, what do you have to say about this very dangerous extreme in the other end, which has a facade that they are
Christian? In fact, I hate to admit it, Westboro Baptist Church actually, on paper anyway, say they adhere to the 1689
London Baptist Confession. But they are no church that I would want any fellowship with in any way, shape, or form.
But anyway, tell our listeners why this is not an acceptable extreme. And there are more people in the circles of more theologically sound churchers and leaders who are beginning more and more to resemble that kind of behavior.
You know, this pendulum kind of reacting we see throughout church history.
And I don't believe the Lord has put the church to set their stance and their direction based off of an opponent of the gospel and saying everything the opponent of the gospel is doing,
I'm willing to react from that and do the opposite. No, our lives, our thoughts, our mission is therefore exegetical.
We exegete from the Scriptures the will of our Lord and King Jesus Christ, not just reacting off of other people and what they're doing.
And that's that pendulum going back and forth that needs to stop. And, you know, speaking of exegesis, let me show you a text that shows us how we're supposed to deal with this.
And I'm going to 1 Corinthians 6, 9 -11. Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?
Do not be deceived. Now, next thing it's going to do, it's not going to mention a single sin, not one.
It's going to mention people who practice certain sins to some point that they're known by them.
Neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolaters, nor the adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality.
There's actually two, that's a combined of two. The malikos, which is soft, nor the soft, nor the arsenokoitis, which is the compound word from the
Greek Septuagint that's found in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus chapter 20. Men from two words, arsenokoitis, men who lay bed or bed other men as if they were women.
So the soft, that doesn't mean that a man who has a limp wrist, like some may say, may think, but it is the man who takes on the passive role when two men come together in that way.
And then the arsenokoitis is the man who takes the masculine or active role when two men come together that way.
They who practice that will not inherit the kingdom of God, nor thieves, nor greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
But what is Paul's point in saying this? And it's verse 11, and such were some of you.
Paul's writing to a church of people who did used to do that. They did used to practice that.
And did Paul condemn them to hell and rejoice over them burning in hell?
No, he took the gospel to them. What happened? In such were some of you.
Why aren't they that way anymore? But you were washed. They were cleaned from the shame and the guilt of sin.
You were sanctified. The yoke of slavery, the sin master over all who sin are slaves to it.
They've been separated from that master to slave relationship between sin.
It's been broken in the gospel. And you were justified. We're declared righteous through faith.
We have received through imputation of the righteousness of Christ and through imputation he took on our sin on himself on the cross in the name of the
Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God. So what is the message that we have? Such you are, but you don't have to continue that way.
You are not born that way. Even if someone is to say, well, I'm a people even I was born that way. Well, you know what?
We were all born into the federal headship of Adam. We all sinned in Adam.
And since my mother's womb, I was at enmity with God. But we don't need to reform our nature.
We need a new nature. We need this human nature. We have these to die with, these to be crucified with Christ on the cross with Christ and now need to walk in as a new creature, a new
Lord. And so seeing this, this list of sins, not list of sins, list of people who practice these sins,
I see this in 180 % in the other direction from what this group is doing by rejoicing over condemning them to hell.
Brother, I know, so I'm in Latin America, I'm in two to three countries in Latin America every month and then once a year,
I spend a month in Europe. And there's this church in Peru I've been going to for over a decade, really big church.
And at least once a year and every year when I'm preaching on Sunday, there is a deacon there, like an usher, a deacon that I greet.
He hugs me and he reminds me, you remember who I am? I say, yes. And he shows me the picture when he used to, he was operated on, lived as a woman,
I think probably even prostituting himself out in the past until he came, Christ rescued him.
Christ rescued him. He lives serving the Lord in his church. And what
I rejoice, brother, is such was him as 1
Corinthians 6 .11. But he is not that anymore. He has been washed, he has been sanctified, and he has been justified through Christ.
And that's where we rejoice as Christians, when people just like we were enslaved to sin, when people are freed from that slavery through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And I'm very offended by people who go around condemning everybody and not sharing the gospel with them.
Jesus, John 1, I think it's verse 14, says Jesus is full of truth and grace.
And it's truth and grace. They don't cancel each other out. But everything we do is in truth with grace, and grace but with truth.
Cannot divorce the two of those. It's interesting how Jesus Christ was always more harsh in his condemnation to the
Pharisees and the religious leaders who were hypocrites than he was towards people, actually in the gutter of the most scandalous and overtly wicked behavior.
Yes, sir. And we have two sides on this, it seems like today. If I say this idea, what somebody is laying out as a proposition, that is wrong.
Oh, I'm intolerant, and it's a hate speech when I'm not hating anybody, I'm talking about an idea.
But then you have the other side of people hating the person as they equate the person with the idea.
And they forget. I wonder, wow, if the Lord were to show them their own sin, they just have to hate and wish their own selves to be burning in hell.
So we stand up for truth, firm in the truth, in grace and in truth, never divorcing one from the other.
By the way, I want to plug some past interviews I've done with two individuals who once were some of these things, two individuals who claimed to be transgendered, who were saved by the blood and mercy and grace of Jesus Christ.
William Allen, who was a biological male, who actually went through all of the surgical routes to, in his mind, become a woman.
Of course, he never became a woman, he just became a mutilated man. But William Allen has been on my program several times, and he is always a fascinating guest on the show.
Just look up in the search engine of irontripandzioneradio .com, William Allen and a biological woman who was deceived into believing that she had become a biological, or that she had become a male,
Laura Perry Smoltz. I'm on the board of her ministry. You're kidding me.
What a small world. A very good friend of mine. Wow, there you go, small world. She has been on the show too, and if you're looking, you actually, if you want to just type in transgender, you'll get all of the interviews by both
William Allen and Laura Perry Smoltz. So, I figured
I'd throw that out there. We have Lowell in Sammamish, Washington, and I hope that I am pronouncing that right.
Looks like the only way that that could be possibly pronounced, Sammamish. He says, how do you respond when people bring up the very extremely rare instances of birth defects where doctors and parents do not know what kind of gender the child should be raised in, and they blow this out of proportion as if this is so common, we should be accepting the claims of transgenderism whenever we hear them.
Yeah, what a great question. That is another example of somebody trying to find something that will tip the argument.
Because of the fall, we live in a world with birth defects, with genetic copy errors.
You can see my beard is turning gray. I don't think we're designed for that. I'm 46.
I turned 47 this weekend, and I'm starting to feel it now. No one has to tell me.
I just don't feel the same way I used to be. Something's happening here. And my glasses,
I had 20 -20 vision when I was in the military, and right now, brother, if I take off my glasses, everything is blurry.
And so, the fall has affected all of creation. And with every generation, you have about 3 billion base pairs in the nuclear genetic code of father and of mother coming together, and they're a copy.
And when you have a copy, when you're making a copy, there are some errors that happen. And so, in very small percentage of cases, you can have a deformation, a genetic issue that happens on the sexual side as far as the biology.
They're usually between 0 .02 % of the born population all the way up to 0 .005%.
And so, that is very, very small percent. And some of them, it's a man whose testicles are smaller, and he is infertile, or a woman who does not have her monthly cycle.
So, that's just some genetic issue they have. But there are very few of those where, yes, you can have some tissue from the other sex.
Now, again, let's be very careful. People used to call them hermaphrodites. That is a misnomer. Even this intersection community are asking us to stop using that term.
An earthworm is a hermaphrodite. That means it has the total function of male and female for reproduction.
To date, no human being has been born who can be either mom or dad.
That never has happened. No medical findings, no testimony of that ever happening.
You either have a woman or you have a man. Now, a man, because of a genetic defect, he can have some ovaric tissues, or vice versa, woman, some testicular tissues, but it is a man or woman.
And some people can have a hormonal issue. Now, those very, very small few cases, with a physician, a pastor, let's say you're a pastor, right, and you want to minister to somebody like that, with that condition, educate yourself on it, speak to physicians, learn about it, ask the person to teach you about it.
And that person, that human being made in God's image, has a place in God's image, and it has a place in God's kingdom in Christ.
Yes, but what does that have to do with the 99 .995 % of the rest of the population?
And of all those cases, it's really a man or a woman. But that's not the end of the problem.
Okay, we would think that that 0 .004 or 0 .05 % of the population, born population, with a genetic problem and sexual organs, we would think that they would have gender confusion, and we probably empathize with that, right?
Well, do you know that less than 1 % of those people have any confusion on gender identity, or less than 1 % of them are homosexual?
And what are the numbers we looked at before? Over 1 % of the world population considers themselves to be transgender, gender fluid, and up to 7 % homosexual.
So they are much more, percentage -wise, sure about who they are than the rest of us.
So if we want to use them as an example, then actually that goes against what the movement's trying to do today, because they're more sure whether they're men or women than we are, and percentage -wise.
And so it's very, very bad, I think. It sounds like a good argument when you first say it, right?
Well, there can't be only two genders. People are trans, I mean, people, you know, intersexuality, et cetera, hermaphrodites, well, misnomer term, like I already told you.
And if you look in their statistics, they're more sure about whether they're men and women than the rest of us. So they can't be used as an example.
And by the way, that percentages I just told you, I'm quoting this from Dr. Georgia Burdum, molecular geneticist.
She's quoting a study saying that less than 1 % of them are homosexual or have gender dysphoria.
We have Devin in Hyattsville, Maryland, who says, have you studied the reasons behind the explosion of reports of so -called transgenderism and claims that individuals are in that category over the last few years?
And then from what I have heard, but I don't know it's true, the rapid decline of these reports in very recent history.
Yeah. Yeah. Notice, if you were to map out political movements on a graph, you're going to see that it follows exactly the cases of transgenderism.
So because this is a politically activist -driven movement, not a biological -driven movement.
And okay, so I'm going to give you a please feel free to tell me to go like this. I'm going to try and bring this down to a couple paragraphs.
Sure. We have got 10 minutes before we have to go to the last break. Okay. So please, everybody, if you just give me a moment to explain this, because we're going to build the foundation on a movement and it's going to take a minute, but then we're going to connect the dots.
Okay. So according to Scripture, right, we are made in God's image.
That's who my essence is. That's called an ontological question on essence and identity.
Therefore, we live out by what we're designed to do.
Okay. So the reason why I'm saying that is because I'm going to use two terms right now, and that'll help us understand the literature, the postmodern literature.
Okay. So identity, for identity in the academic literature, they call it essence.
Okay. And then how you live out, your experiences, how you feel, that's called existence.
How you exist. Essence and existence. Essence and existence. Okay. So as a
Christian, my essence is I'm made in God's image. I'm a male, I'm a man, and therefore
I look to my God who created me to see how I should live. Like what does Schaeffer say, how therefore shall we live, right?
And a woman should do the same, right? Now, okay. With the theory, which is not a theory, really, it's more of an ideology, but of evolution from a naturalistic perspective, we're going back to the 19th century.
They believed in determinism. I talked about that earlier, right? Where we're just in a deterministic way, we're just evolving animals who have become now kind of upright and balding, right?
On this deterministic evolution. So your identity, your essence is just there.
How you exist, what you do is based off of your genetic makeup relating with your environment.
And that's where Freud comes in, trying to come up with all his theories on that. Okay. Now, the reason why
I took you on that rabbit trail is if we get this part, everything makes sense.
Okay. Rationalism and materialism fell, okay? You only see it in certain parts of academia today.
It fell with Marxism beginning in 1914, all right? With classical
Marxism, it all fell. And then we have this postmodern movements coming in, all right?
I won't take you through all that, but we could go through even Italy, through Frankfurt, Germany, et cetera, okay?
But the point is, they come in and with them, you have these thinkers, and one is
Jean -Paul Sartre. He's a professor in north of France, right on the coast.
And he writes in, I think, 1946, he writes an essay called
Existentialism as a Humanism. Now, here's what he said. He said, the
Christians are wrong, and the materialists, they're all wrong, because they put essence first and then existence.
They both are making you have an identity, therefore you must live in a certain way.
And he used scissors as an example. He said, you look at a pair of scissors, how do I know how they're to exist, what their function is, by their essence, with scissors, their designer?
And Jean -Paul Sartre said this, we don't have a designer, there is no God. Therefore, he proposed something new, which is existence to essence.
There's no such thing as human nature. There's no human identity. There's no identity for man or woman.
There's no identity. We only have a human condition that we share, but when we should be able to have free decisions on living the way we want, no constraints, to transcend, that's the term he used, to a human identity.
We're creating ourselves, like we're our new gods. We're creating what it means to be a man, a human. And his lover,
Simone de Beauvoir, three years later writes the book The Second Sex, where she takes that idea to gender.
There's no such thing as a woman or a man who's born. They become that. They start with existing, that's materialistic existentialism, at least, not the
Christian kind, century before, and then we become that. And that's why parents should stop putting girls in pigtails and a skirt, because they are giving them an essence.
They should make up their own essence. See, gender is fluid. And then it was politicized then by Shulamith Firestone and the second to third feminist movement.
And then now it was Marx that she made a Marxist version of it. And then now that's what we're seeing with queer theory.
All of that, I'm sorry that I took everybody on that long rabbit trail, but you see, the question was, why are we seeing an explosion of this?
Well, especially since the pandemic, it's taken them forever to get the
World Academy all on board to teach all this, but one pandemic did it.
It finished it for the whole world. You have everybody at home. Parents don't want to put up with their children 24 hours a day, so they put them in front of the
TV, they put them in front of the series, and all the series and movies were pushing this Simone de Beauvoir idea that gender is fluid during the pandemic.
And since the pandemic, now the percentages have jumped up. And it seems like every singer in America, their children, their little children, they say they're trans.
Well, wait a second. That's only 1 % of the population. Why does it seem like if you're in Hollywood, if you're a singer, all of a sudden all your children are trans?
And how would your children know what that is? So that's being imposed on children. And sorry, so I hope that kind of helps.
Of course, when I write on it, I teach on it a lot better. I'm just trying to summarize right now. The second part of his question was, is it true that there's been a decline very recently in these claims of being transgendered?
Yeah, so what happened almost a year and a half ago? Political, big change in the
United States. Number one, even atheists were getting tired of it because it's not logical.
And feminists were getting angry about it. Yes, because now, guess what? The feminists, you have to include everybody.
Right now, as a Viking -looking, fat white man,
I can say, I am an indigenous woman, and I get all your rights that you are.
And there's nothing you can do about it because you lost the logical argument against me doing that.
And the sports, all of a sudden you have these Richard Dawkins, big enemy of the faith.
The American Humanist Society took away his prize, whatever they gave him in,
I think, the 80s or 90s. His Nobel Peace Prize? Well, their humanist prize they had given him to the
Humanist Association of America. They had given him a prize, and they took the medal away from him because of a tweet he made that wasn't too friendly to the, that was kind of questioning this gender stuff.
And then, so you had Richard Dawkins speaking out against it. You have Bill Maher. You have all these atheists, people who hate the
Lord, but are now saying, okay, I'm getting tired of this being pushed on us. Then Trump comes in, and you see this, something you'd never seen, all this red all over the map, voting for Trump.
No matter what these movements are saying, you can tell that people, there's that remnant of the image of God, that vestige of the image of God saying, you know what, this is totally ridiculous, and stop pushing this on us.
And people got tired of it, and you're seeing a big kickback. All of a sudden, it's not popular anymore. You don't get special privileges for being transgender everywhere you go, and you can't shut other people up saying any argument they have against you.
It's called hate speech. And all of a sudden, it's politically, they just lost a lot of their tsunami power, and so all of a sudden, it's dropping again.
But you see what I'm saying? If you map it out politically, and then you map out the percentages of people saying they are, they follow each other.
This is a political activist movement. Yes, and it's one of those weird times when you sometimes have the most right -wing evangelicals aligning in some way with feminists, because we were both opposed to men, biological men, being able to walk into any public restroom that they wanted to walk into, and they were opposed to female athletes who have sometimes trained all their lives to perfect the sport that they were training in, and they were being robbed of...
And men came in and just took it away again from them. Yes. Yes. So it's just an interesting thing that sometimes you happen to see the feminists and the
Christians siding together. That even happened to some degree years ago in the protest against pornography.
That seemed to stop being a feminist cause, but I'm not saying entirely.
We have to go to our final break, and if you have a question, submit it now, because we're rapidly running out of time.
ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least. City and state and country of residence.
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and mention Iron Trip and Zion Radio when you contact them. Well, we are now back with my guest today,
Joe Owen. And Joe, I want you to make sure, before we go to any listener questions,
I want you to make sure that you highlight some of the most important issues that you bring up in this book that we are discussing today, which
I'm excited to have these free copies to give away.
And also, I hope that many people who are not winning a copy, that they will purchase these books to give away to loved ones, especially those that are claiming to be transgendered themselves, or if they have children, perhaps.
But tell us what we most need to know that you have included in your book. Yeah, and great summary.
And summary, who am I? Who am
I? Who are you? Our name is very arbitrary, just as a label put on us, but who really am
I? And knowing first my Creator, and I cannot know my Creator, God, the
Father, I cannot know Him unless Christ reveals Him to me, and I need to know
Christ. And in Christ's face, I see the glory of God, as in 2
Corinthians 4, 6. And in that, I learn, and this book teaches, that even teaching children,
God made you a boy, and the boy doesn't be married and a father or a husband before he starts embracing that.
Romans 1, Paul says, they did not want to thank God, they did not want to honor
God, therefore they were turned over. So the book will teach you how to glorify
God and thank God, have a grateful heart that He made you man or woman.
That's something you embrace. What are the roles or the functions, the way that the image of God functions in the same way between men and women, and differently between men and women?
We embrace that. Then what is the theology of marriage? It's finally for the glory of Christ in His church, see
Ephesians chapter 5. And then, of course, not everybody sees it that way, because sin brings and affects us relationally, we lost relationship with God because of sin, it affects us morally, in our hearts, our hearts are darkened,
Romans chapter 1, and our reasoning is darkened and made vain,
Romans chapter 1, Ephesians chapter 4. And so, of course, people have different ideas about what identity is today.
And in the book, we see how to, in Christ, submit all thoughts to the obedience of Christ, how to deal with all these arguments that can sound complex, and how to have a
Christ -centered biblical counseling to people, whether they're your own children or people in your church, who may struggle in these areas.
And then finally, the defense, and the gay Christian movement, if I can just focus it on this one point here, the heart behind that part of the book is this,
Galatians 3, we learn in Galatians 3, what Christ's God, the Son, went through to save such wretched sinners as us.
He was damned, He was, you know,
He was damned, the holy, glorious God's Son, God the
Son was damned on the cross, and how dare I now, being made anew in Him, say, yes, now
I recognize that you're a king, but you need to share your throne with a sin.
I'm not just a Christian, now I'm a gay Christian. No, I have been saved from that.
I have no other identity besides who I am in Christ, and who He says I am. I am dead to my older self.
That guy's dead on the cross. I walk anew today. And this humanistic evangelicalism today puts your feelings and your wants, the un -crucified part of us, as coming before the glory of Christ, and that's not
Christianity. Please read the book with an open mind, open heart, and we'll see the power of Christ in our lives and lives of our communities.
Yes, the modern evangelical church gives the appearance that many of its leaders, especially those that are leading megachurches and those pastors that aspire to become pastors of megachurches, they give the appearance that they are infinitely more concerned with the feelings of humans than they are with their eternal souls.
And when is that ever an act of love when you are more concerned over somebody's feelings than in love rebuking them and warning them when they are behaving in a way that's going to kill them?
And in this case, we send you to hell for eternity. I usually challenge people when
I get the argument, well, God is love. Say, yes, He is. Thank God that He's love.
Now, count how many times in 2 and 3 John, especially 2 John, 1 John, it says, truth and love, and love and truth, truth and love, and love and truth.
Because, here's the problem, there is a type of love that leads to death.
1 John, if you love this world, the love of the Father is not in you. And so, there is a type of love, which is a fake counterfeit love, that leads to death.
And so, when I say, well, love is love, yes, that's what many people say on their way to the lake of fire.
They love this world, they love their sin, and that's a counterfeit love, because the only true love is a holy love, because God is love.
And so, I look at it this way. Imagine if somebody is blind, and they're walking towards a cliff, and I yell out to the person.
I don't have time to walk up and hold their hand and convince them. I yell to them, watch out, you're about to fall on a precipice.
And so, the other side says, you are being so unloving, how dare you raise your voice to that person?
Well, the other person who said that to me either doesn't believe there's a cliff, or does see that there's a cliff, and cares more about their own acceptance, how they're seen, than the other person's life.
That is not love, that is selfishness. I prefer you to die than one moment not to look at me and love me, and think the best of me.
That narcissistic, self -serving love is the same kind of love for this world that takes us to hell.
And if you're in that emergency situation where somebody is about to fall off the edge of a cliff,
I would use another term than precipice, because they might not know what that means. Ah, stay away from that.
You're about to fall to your death, and you can't see it. And I couldn't see it either until the
Lord took off the blinds that were blinding me. Yes. And we have Lily in Waterville, Maine, and Lily says, does your book examine how this world has been, for decades, more and more escalating in the effeminization of boys and men, even if you totally remove homosexuality and transgenderism from the equation?
And do you think that this has something to do with the rise in homosexuality and transgender claims?
Yeah, I do touch on that in this book, and the
Gospel According to Marks, I think I go a lot deeper into that point. And again, there is something about God's design in men that is so threatening to the world, is so threatening to the enemy of our souls, and to emasculate men into—and
I talk about the Overton window in my writings about how you change a society's view on something becoming too radical to even consider to be something that's even, with legislation, protected under law and promoted.
And notice the sitcoms of the 90s. Notice how all the fathers and the husbands were just idiots.
They're really good for nothing. They just sit on the couch with their hand in the crease of the pants there, and all they do is watch
TV, and they can never resolve anything. And us men, we're just taught that's what men are.
We have this whole new generation growing up that are ashamed of being men.
And men are pastors, they're providers, they're protectors.
We are supposed to be. Yeah, by design we are, and we are rebelling against that design that God has given us.
And yes, I know there's abuse on that. I see some evangelicals, which
I'm sure everybody would know if I were to start giving details, on one that's coming up to popularity again, that all he does is talk about this restored manhood, but I think he's missing the whole point of grace in the gospel as well while he's doing it.
So yes, we can, but again, that pendulum needs to stop. And yes, and another thing, the question hits on something that I deal with that usually takes people longer to either disagree with me or agree with me.
The gender ideology stuff is not really sexual in nature. The person's nailed it there on the head, and they said that in the question.
If you can feminize a man, that's gender ideology. Even our roles in the home and the church, someone may say, we have nothing to do with gender ideology, but now they say every role, like the elder, it should be equally held by men and women.
Well, that's gender ideology. That's part of the gender ideology movement. And so just because you're not teaching it or promoting it on a sexual level, well, gender ideology really has nothing, really little to do with sexuality at all.
It has to do with identity. And I hope I did not open a can of worms that we can't shut quickly, but yes, even saying that men and women should have the same roles in the home and the church, even doing that, that is part of the gender ideology movement.
Now, in addition to AnswersInGenesis .org, what other website would you like to give our listeners?
Yeah, so AnswersInGenesis .org and then Cantero Institute, it's spelled
Cantero with a C, institute, and I'm sorry, my computer's acting a little slow here.
We have been plagued by similar things today. Something is going on.
CanteroInstitute .org, I have it right here. Yeah, and that's in Ontario, Canada, and I'm an associate there as well, doing more and more with them each time, and you'll find a lot of great resources there, you know, kind of more in depth.
Not everything is as lay -friendly as Answers in Genesis, but it's good
Reformed literature, blogs, articles, conferences, and that's another page
I really highly recommend. Well, it's been a real joy to have you back on the program, even though the subject matter is disturbing.
We always have the help provided in Jesus Christ. I want to thank you. I look forward to you coming back often.
I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.