Scripture and the LBGT Agenda

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I normally take some time, I will take just a moment to say this. The church has been caught out on this subject because it was a subject that we did not address in previous generations because there are just certain things you don't talk about in the church, and there are certain sins you don't talk about in the church.
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You know they're there in the Bible, and you just sort of mention them, and you're sort of embarrassed when you have to read through those texts when you go to that part of your
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Bible reading, and you move on from there. It is very true that the non -Christian view of marriage that many of us have embraced because of our culture is also behind why the church has been so ineffective in its response to the rise of the
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LGBT, and I hate using those terms. I hate using the term the homosexual community or the
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LGBT community because I don't believe you define communities on the basis of very, very different things.
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Male homosexuality is very different than female homosexuality, which is very different than bisexuality, which is massively different than transgenderism, and nobody on this planet knows what the
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Q means anyways. Seriously. Well, is it queer? That used to be a term they would use.
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Is it questioning? What does any of that mean? Nobody has a clue. It's completely dependent upon the person who's using it as to what meaning they're going to put into it.
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How do you define a community based upon vastly different things like that? It really doesn't have any meaning, but no one seems to want to talk about that.
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It's just the idea of erotic freedom and our ability as human beings to define who we are in abject rebellion against the reality around us.
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In my land, there is a man by the name of Bruce Jenner who has decided he's a female, and in fact,
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I just found out as I was traveling down here that he is going to appear nude wrapped in an
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American flag on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing the gold medal he won in the decathlon in 1976 as a man, but as a woman.
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Now this represents the pinnacle of human autonomy.
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Human autonomy, because now we're being told that you're just artificially assigned a gender at birth.
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Now I remember when my kids were born, and that doctor, as soon as that baby came out, said, you got yourself a little boy.
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With the second child, you got yourself a little girl. Now we're being told that they shouldn't do that.
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We're actually being told that you shouldn't tell your child what they are. Let them find out for themselves.
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Wonderful. Are any of these people parents? It's shocking, but what is behind all of this?
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What is behind all of this? There is a fundamental rebellion in the secular worldview.
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There is a verse in, we're not projecting this yet anyways, so I can go ahead and go up there.
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There is a verse in Psalm 12, and in Psalm, the 12th
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Psalm is one of my favorites, especially in this day, because it ends with the cogent observation, the wicked strut around when what is vile is exalted amongst the people.
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When what is vile is exalted in a society, the wicked strut about, and they're proud in their wickedness.
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But before you get to that, verse 4, have you ever noticed Psalm 12, 4? Verse 4 includes this question on the lips of the rebellious, who is
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Lord over us? Who is Lord over us? Can you just hear the insolence of the rebellious?
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It goes on to say, our lips are ours. In other words, we will say what we want to say.
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We have no one ruling over us. This is the very essence of human autonomy, and that's what we're experiencing in our societies today.
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That's what we're experiencing in our societies today. It is the logical outgrowth of the secular worldview that there is no objective truth, even to the point of the...
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Even though scientifically, 99 .999 % of all human beings either have an
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XX or XY chromosome. Maybe that's what we have to put on the doors now, XX, XY.
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That's what you put on the doors to the restrooms. There is a tiny percentage of people who have a genetic abnormality of that particular chromosome, and those people should be welcomed amongst us, and every effort should be made to assist them in dealing with the physical difficulty that is theirs.
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But I can guarantee you, there is nothing genetically wrong with Bruce Jenner. Has nothing to do with genetics at all.
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It has to do with the idea that despite the reality of my genetics, between my ears,
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I identify as X, Y, or Z. And it is literally X, Y, or Z.
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I mean, there are people who identify... Well, you've seen the 52 -year -old man that identifies as a six -year -old little girl, and has been adopted by a family, and wears little dresses and skips around.
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He's a father. Can you imagine his children? It's amazing. But this is the logical outcome of viewing ourselves as uncreated, as masters of the world around us.
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I can identify as anything. And I think as we deal with this issue, we need to remember a couple things.
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First of all, the church has been compromised. For many in theological education, there is no consistent biblical teaching on sexuality, because there's no consistent biblical teaching on anything.
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But be aware, even those who admit there is a consistent sexual ethic from Genesis to Revelation, and on this subject, there is.
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There really isn't any question. Anybody who wants to actually be honest with the text will come to that conclusion. There has even arisen a movement called revisionism.
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And what I'm going to do is I'm going to play a little clip for you. I mentioned this, either this morning or last night, when they all start melding together, maybe both.
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This is the Fuller Seminary professor. And this is the debate. I mentioned it this morning that I attended, the day after I got back from being here last
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September. And I want you to listen. I'm going to put the microphone down over the speakers, so hopefully this will work.
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It normally does. I want you to listen to what this man says. Here's his argument.
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This is why the church should embrace homosexuality as a gift from God and why the church should embrace homosexual marriage and everything else.
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Here's why we should do so. This is a new move of the Spirit of God. And just as the
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Spirit of God moved to allow us to bring the
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Gentiles into the church, which, by the way, was prophesied in the Old Testament. But anyway, just as the
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Spirit led us to do that, now in our day the Spirit is leading us to change this and to bring homosexuality into the church and so on and so forth, just as Gentiles were brought in.
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And how do you make that work? Well, here is... Well, I'll just let you listen to it, and you'll see.
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What I'm saying is this, that God is doing something now.
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That to say we have gay and lesbian, bisexual sisters, brothers, and other siblings is to say
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God is giving His Spirit in a way that we have to see, recognize, and respond to.
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God is doing this now in the 21st century. It's the time that was given to us. The flip side of that coin is this isn't what
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God did in the 1st century. And I might wish, as somebody who's now open and affirming, that God had done so so that the
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New Testament evidence might be more explicit. But I would also say it was no more wrong for Paul to be a 1st century
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Jew than it's wrong for us to be 21st century Christians. But it might be wrong for us to continue saying the things that Paul had to say as a 1st century
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Jew. And it might be wrong for us to say even the things that Jesus probably thought as a 1st century
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Jew, because it was not in their day that the church was given the gift and the responsibility of responding to the fact that there are gay and lesbian sisters and brothers, children of God, right here alongside us.
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So there's the voice of revisionism. There is the voice of a professor.
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Now, Fuller did deny him tenure, but they didn't fire him. They're allowing him to continue teaching there at Fuller Theological Seminary.
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We have to have a solid foundation. We have to have a positive foundation. Last summer,
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I appeared on CNN's Dr. Drew show twice, once by Skype.
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I realized that was not the way to be on a program because they can just talk over you and nobody will ever hear you. So when they invited me on a second time to talk about the transgender issue and Bruce Jenner, I flew over to Los Angeles and was in the studio, which made them very uncomfortable because they couldn't talk over me nearly as much.
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You could just tell it was sort of like, oh, we have a freak amongst us. Think about it, folks.
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I was the freak, and I was surrounded by transgenders, and I'm the freak. That's what's going on in our culture today is the
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Christian minister is the weird person in our culture today. But one of the things
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I attempted to do in the first program when I was on via Skype was to lay a foundation as to Jesus's authority to address the subject of human sexuality.
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And I wasn't given really much of an opportunity to do so, but I did at least have the opportunity of directing people to Jesus's words in Matthew chapter 19.
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And from my perspective, if you have just a few moments, rather than going to one of the six very clear passages in the
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Bible that address the subject of homosexuality. Now, the homosexuals call them the clobber passages.
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There are more than six places where the subject of homosexuality comes up in the Bible. But these are the six that are pretty much undisputed that it is made reference to.
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And I will admit, I've admitted many times, I finished my first degree, my first graduate degree with, you know, graduate in seminary.
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I could not have told you what these six verses were because that was 1989, and it just wasn't yet the issue that it has become so quickly since then.
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And I wonder how many of us sitting here today, how many of you sitting here today would feel very confident that you could identify what the six texts in the
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New Testament on the subject of homosexuality are, just off the top of your head? Anybody?
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I know the moderator of the debate with Graham Codrington had better be able to do that, probably about maybe one person.
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Entire books have been written seeking to revise the understanding of even those texts, and yet most
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Christians don't know which those texts are anyway. So we are behind the curve.
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There's absolutely no two ways about it. But even knowing what those six are, we're going to look at them briefly, but even knowing them, those should not be the first texts we're going to.
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We need to present to the world a positive Christian view of human sexuality and marriage before we get to the negative.
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And those are the negative side. Unfortunately, we've primarily focused upon just a couple of those, and that's why the world just simply views the church as quote -unquote anti -gay, rather than having a positive message which is based on the authority of Jesus Christ.
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Because you'll hear all the time, Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. Right? Ever heard anybody say that? Said all the time.
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Now, anybody who says that doesn't have a clue, does not have a clue about Jesus' teaching.
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Because there was never a Jew before Jesus, during the days of Jesus, or for a millennium after Jesus, that ever questioned the fundamental understanding that the
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Mosaic Law condemned homosexuality as a grievous sin in the sight of God and a total forfeiture of the covenant.
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Not a one. Nobody. Absolutely not a single person. And so every time
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Jesus extolled God's law, said that the least in the kingdom of heaven is the one who teaches anyone to break the least of these commandments, he was repeating the exact perspective that the
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Jewish people had always held. But he also spoke positively. And so in Matthew chapter 19, beginning at verse 4, some
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Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and asking, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? And he answered and said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?
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Let me just stop there for a moment. Have you not read? Sounds familiar. We talked about that last night.
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Remember Matthew 22? Have you not read what God spoke to you? Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?
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Maleness and femaleness is a good gift from God. To reject that is to reject the goodness of fatherhood, the goodness of motherhood, to empty words like husband, wife, father, mother, groom, bride of any meaning whatsoever.
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God intended us to be made male and female. But if you're raised in a secular worldview, maleness and femaleness is just simply the arbitrary reproduction method that our particular undirected line of evolution happened to have taken.
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It's not a gift. It's not good. It's not bad. It's irrelevant. It has no meaning. That's why it can be abandoned.
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That's why it can be replaced by 45 different gender types on Facebook because you don't have a creator.
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There's no meaning to any of this. Once you die, you're dust. It's all over with. Don't worry about it. Once you have that kind of worldview, everything else goes along the way.
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He who created them, a society without a creator will not place value upon the creation.
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And certainly, when that creation represents the creator and his good gifts and purposes for mankind.
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And so it's easy to understand why we're seeing what we're seeing today is we're starting to see the full -blown results of generational secularism and generational acceptance of the idea that we are simply evolved animals.
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And I won't even say highly evolved because high assumes a direction. And if you know anything about evolutionary theory in its fullest form, there is no direction.
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There is no directionality. There is no purpose. It has to be completely random for it to be true micromutational evolutionary theory.
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So he who created them from the beginning, that is, his purpose has always been that they are male and female, and said, for this reason, and by the way,
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Jesus is quoting from that very disputed text in Genesis 1 and 2, and 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.
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So, they are no longer two, but one flesh. What, therefore, God has joined together, let no man separate.
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And so, here you have the incarnate son of God's interpretation of God's purpose in creation.
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It involves the goodness of human sexuality, male and female. It involves the establishment of the very first human institution by God, the family.
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You have father and mother. You have the natural outcome of that being children.
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Now, I realize there are some couples that can't have children. And what has the biblical view always been of that? That that's not a good thing.
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The natural thing is to have children. It's amazing that we live in a land today where no one thinks about the future.
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No one feels the slightest concern about raising up the next generation.
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It's all about me. It's all about my fulfillment and my happiness. And again, that fits the secular worldview, because why should you care about what comes behind you?
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How is that going to improve anything for you? I mean, there's no evolutionary benefit for you. It just doesn't make any sense.
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But that's the situation that we face today. And so, here you have
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Jesus' own words that the family is established by God. It is natural for there to be the children that result from this union.
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And the man leaves his father and mother. He's joined to his wife, and the two become one flesh.
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That is not limited solely to sexual union, but it cannot abandon that or ignore that either.
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It is a part of what is in view in both the Genesis narrative and then in Jesus' interpretation, because he's answering the divorce question.
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And he says, So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.
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And so the Sadducees and the Pharisees were trying to, specifically the
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Pharisees here were trying to drag Jesus into a dispute of their day. There were two schools, that is, the schools of Shammai and Hillel.
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And one school believed that you could divorce your wife for any reason whatsoever. And the other said that there had to be a specific fault, a violation of the covenant of marriage, something serious in her for you to do this.
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And of course, the woman did not have a right in that culture to divorce the husband for pretty much any reason whatsoever.
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Jesus' answer drives straight to the heart of the matter, the God -ordained, original, creation -mandated purpose and form of marriage.
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And so Jesus lays out for us positively what marriage is to be and that there is a foundation and that it's appropriate and proper for mankind to recognize these things.
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Now again, my time is just far, far, far too short for being able to cover all these things the way
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I would like to, but I do want to make sure that you know what I call the fence passages.
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As I said, they call them the clobber passages, but as I see them, the specific identification of homosexuality as sin is meant to put up a fence.
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We have the positive assertion of what the family is to be. The fence passages help us to see where the boundaries are, where going beyond this is going into that which is destructive of the human being.
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Homosexuality is not a life -affirming lifestyle. It does not produce life and cannot produce life.
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No child has ever been born to two women or to two men. Oh yes, they have. Not naturally. And I don't care even if we so mess up the world that we find a way of perverting our own created nature so as to get around the male and female issue.
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Even if we did that, God forbid we should ever be allowed to do so, but even if we did that, it still would not make this a life -producing and life -affirming lifestyle.
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And in fact, every study I have ever seen on the subject of homosexuality has borne out the same thing, that there is a substantial and fundamental diminishment of life expectancy amongst practicing homosexuals.
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Now part of that is due to the fact that amongst male homosexuals, it is almost unheard of for there to be a monogamous male homosexual, or a male homosexual relationship.
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Almost unheard of. And the level of promiscuity amongst most male homosexuals in the world is absolutely outlandish.
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I mean, we're talking hundreds to thousands of partners in a lifetime. So the result of that, in most studies
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I've seen, has been minimally a 20 -year diminishment in lifespan between the average active male homosexual and a male heterosexual married man of the same age range.
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Over 20 years. I mean, it makes smoking look like a health kick in comparison.
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It really does. So, it does not produce life.
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It diminishes life. The number of suicides, which is now being blamed on us, you would think that most people, thinking logically, would look at a lifestyle that does increase the number of suicides and go, this may reflect a fundamental problem with the lifestyle.
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You're not allowed to say that anymore. It's not the lifestyle. It's the reaction of you bigots to the lifestyle. In any other area of behavior, no one would ever think this way.
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Except this one area now. This one area now. It's truly, the level, it's insane.
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Anyway, very quickly, the three Old Testament passages, Leviticus 18 .22 and Leviticus 20 .13,
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the two texts in the Holiness Code, all I can say to you in the time frame that we have today is if you are ever going to cite these passages, please, please, please be ready for the standard refutation.
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I don't think I have it in here. No, I don't. I need to insert it in here. There was a television program in the
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United States years ago called The West Wing. Did it play here? Oh, okay.
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Well, you may recall an episode where there was an encounter between the president and an actress who was representing a well -known woman at that time in the
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United States, a Jewish woman. And it was based upon a letter that had gone viral written by a homosexual.
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And he went after her in this meeting. And he was quoting all these texts from the
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Old Testament law. And he was saying, you know, so you identify homosexuality as an abomination before God based upon Leviticus 18 .22
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and 20 .13. You know, my daughter is a senior at Georgetown. She speaks fluent
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German. I'd like to sell her into slavery. What do you think a proper price would be based upon? And he quotes a text from Deuteronomy.
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And he says, and you know, my brother -in -law keeps violating the Sabbath. Do I have to call the cops to kill him or should
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I do it myself based upon quotation from the law? And then he says, you know, the Washington Redskins, you're not supposed to touch the flesh of a pig, according to this text in Leviticus.
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If they wear gloves to throw the football, is that good enough or just what? And it's just mockery, mockery, mockery, mockery.
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She's silenced and everyone just feels so vindicated. And I've seen that happen to Christian after Christian after Christian.
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I mean, almost everybody in this room is wearing clothing that is of mixed fiber. I bet nobody in this room looked at every tag on everything you put on this morning to go, hmm, am
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I mixing fibers here? You weren't allowed to do that under the Old Testament law. And for most of us, we actually haven't all read
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Leviticus, or at least all of it, or we got through it once and said, never again. I survived that stuff on leprosy, but I'm not touching that again.
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Right? The idea of studying it, understanding the flow of it, mapping out
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God's law, understanding why certain texts say the things they say, that's just not something most evangelicals do.
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And so if you're going to mention Leviticus 18 and 20, then you better realize what you're getting into.
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You should be able to mention them. There's all sorts of stuff in what's called the holiness code,
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Leviticus 17 through 22 or so. I'm just about done with a sermon series on the holiness code.
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I've already done all the stuff in Leviticus. We're in Deuteronomy right now. And it's lengthy and extensive and has been some of the toughest stuff
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I've ever had to deal with because there are some difficult texts in these passages.
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No two ways about it. My sermon series is on Sermon Audio if you want to look it up and sort of get up to speed on those things.
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But if you're going to look at those texts, if you're going to cite Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, and it's a good thing to do because there's lots of positive stuff in there.
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Leviticus 19 is sort of between 18 and 20. That's how the number system works. And I remember this one particular advocate for homosexuality, he was saying, we shouldn't be teaching people that you should be following obscure laws from the book of Leviticus.
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We should be teaching people to love their neighbors as themselves. Now, how many of you are laughing because everybody else did?
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You know, that sort of, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I better laugh because something funny was said.
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Hopefully, we all realize love your neighbor as yourself. Where is that found? Leviticus 19, right between 18 and 20.
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I couldn't believe it. Here's a scholar, a leading ethicist at Mercer University. We shouldn't be teaching people to follow obscure laws from the book of Leviticus.
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We should teach them to love their neighbors as themselves. And he was just demonstrating the utter incoherence of this particular perspective.
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It really is. But what's the other text in the Old Testament? Well, Genesis 18 and 19, Sodom and Gomorrah.
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Now, again, I wrote a book in 2001, co -authored a book in 2001 called
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The Same -Sex Controversy. I did the section on Genesis 18 and 19. The book's a little dated, 2001.
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My goodness, think about what has changed in 15 years. We're going to try to update it sometime in the future, but I have so many things to get to.
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One of the brothers was asking, so could you maybe answer all the other questions people ask by email?
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And I'm like, yeah, when I get done with the book that I'm a year behind on, I'll get right to that, which means it'll be sometime around 2025.
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And half the people won't be around anymore by the time I do that. But, again, if you're going to go to Sodom and Gomorrah, there is every excuse written by man for these texts.
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There really are. But it is very clear that that which is an abomination in the issue of Sodom and Gomorrah, yes, they did many things wrong.
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Sodom and Gomorrah is condemned for many things in Scripture, but one specific thing that is called toevah, abomination, is the issue of homosexuality.
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There really isn't any question about that. Now, most of you, hopefully, when you were thinking about it, did think of Romans 1.
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And Romans 1, especially verses 26 through 27, is really, even the pro -homosexual writers recognize that this is the key text, and it certainly became the key text in the discussion between myself and Dr.
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Codrington last September over in Joburg. For this reason,
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God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman 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.
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Again, my suggestion to anyone is, merely citing these texts as if they are a list of prohibitions is not enough.
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As was illustrated in that debate and in every debate I've done on this subject, the weight of Romans 1 is fully felt when you understand that Paul is using this as an illustration of how rebellion against God fundamentally impacts every aspect of the human existence, including even the internal element of that existence.
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If you can follow, and this is, and Rudolf was there, he can tell you, this is where the power is.
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When you can follow the argument of Romans 1 all the way through to these verses, now you've provided with the proper context to be able to understand them and see what's being said.
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If you don't have the context, there is going to be a dozen different ways of redefining what's being said in this text.
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But when you start with verse 18 and follow it all the way through, it makes perfect sense, it's seamless with what comes past it, and it's an extremely, extremely powerful text to deal with.
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And so Romans 1 is where you want to go. And so we've got Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20,
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Genesis 18 and 19, the three in the Old Testament, Romans 1 and our last two, 1
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Corinthians 6, 9 through 11, 1 Timothy 1, 10. And they are related to one another because they are both using the singular term arsenikoites, arsenikoites.
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Now arsenikoites is a term that Paul or some
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Jewish rabbi before him coined. It's not found any time before Paul's utilization of it.
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And where does it come from? Well, hopefully you realize that the Bible of the early church was the
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Old Testament because the New Testament was still being written. But what version of the
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Old Testament was the Bible of the New Testament church? Well, given that the New Testament church expanded very rapidly outside the realms of where Hebrew would be a language that could be read or utilized, the vast majority of citations of the
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Old Testament in the New Testament come from the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Greek Septuagint.
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And when you look at the Greek Septuagint in Leviticus 20, 13, when you look at the exact language of the
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Greek Septuagint, Paul is drawing straight out of Leviticus 20, 13 and creating the word, it is two words, arsenos and koiteo are right next to each other.
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He puts them together as one word, men who lie with men in bed, and he coins the term himself.
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And so in, for example, 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11, most translations will say something like effeminate and homosexuals.
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The ESV, however, simply says homosexuals. Now why would it do that?
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Because the ESV translators, their understanding, and I think they got this right, their understanding is that the two terms together are referring to the active and passive partners in male homosexual relationships.
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And I think they're right. And so what does 1 Corinthians 6 say? Those who practice such things.
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And there's, it's a whole vice list. The only reason we're talking about this is because there's an entire movement out there of people saying that this is a good thing.
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And then they make the accusation that we somehow are imbalanced. Well, we've got to respond to what is being said to us.
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We are being told we have to change our views on this. Well, the problem is, according to 1 Corinthians 6, such were some of you.
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Such were some of you. Here is, this is actually the Greek right here. And if I could find, ah, there it is.
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Right there, that word, oh, it's not showing up there. Well, that's interesting. The second
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Greek word on the second line, vital passage of hope and evangelization, καὶ τὸ τὸ τῆν ἔττα, ἔττα means were, not are.
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Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of our
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Lord Jesus Christ in the spirit of our God. And so there were those in the
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Church of Corinth that these descriptives would have described them in their past life, not in their present life.
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Something had changed. Something radically had changed. Now, there in my country, laws are being passed in certain states where counselors are not even allowed to say that.
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You are not allowed to say that you could change. Even if someone doesn't want to be a homosexual, you're not allowed to say, well, here's how you could do that, or here's the process, or here's some things you might want, you're not even allowed to do it.
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That is how enshrined the homosexual movement is becoming. It's a good thing, therefore you cannot say it's a bad thing.
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But the scriptural teaching is such were some of you. Now, I'm out of time, but let me just very briefly mention this.
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I do believe that there is a small, small number of people who experience exclusive, throughout their life, exclusive same -sex attraction.
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Very small. I believe the vast majority of homosexuals experience something in their life, and they will testify to this, that fundamentally changed their understanding and orientation toward sexuality.
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But I do believe that there are some people who from the very beginning, not because of abuse or anything else, their sexual orientation is toward the same sex.
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Does that make it right? Well, only if you believe experience makes things right. There's a bunch of people who naturally are oriented toward thievery, anger, gluttony, massive sexual debauchery, in a heterosexual fashion.
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There are some men, there are some sports players, that are proud of having bedded down 500 or 1 ,000 women in their lives.
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One of the men running for president in my own country has written a book about himself and how many married women he's had an ultery with.
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And he's now one of the two candidates for president of the United States. Isn't it wonderful? But does that make any of those things right?
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Just because you are born with a propensity toward something, as a Christian, you look to God's word to define what is pleasing in His sight.
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You don't look to your desires and say, well, this must be good because this is all
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I've ever known. I know some people who, for example, struggle mightily with pride.
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Well, if it may be all you've ever known, that doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it right. So, just a few thoughts.
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Just a few foundational things that maybe will make your viewing of the debate with Dr.
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Codrington a little bit more understandable and useful for you. So, I went three minutes over.
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Sorry, I'm doing the best I can. So, I'll just leave it to you to let folks know how we're going to handle this.
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Thank you. Okay, first question. Do you believe that same -sex couple relationships can show the fruit of the
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Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self -control? No.
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Now, let me explain why. The terminology has been developed.
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I think it's an appropriate terminology that describes homosexual desires and relationships as disordered.
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And if we look at what the Scriptures teach, Jesus' positive teaching in Matthew 19, the teaching in 1
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Corinthians 6, these disordered desires do not lead to human flourishing.
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They are in opposition to what the Spirit of God would bring into our hearts and our lives.
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And this is a gospel issue. This is a gospel issue. Why? You say, well, Jesus never said anything about homosexuality.
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Yes, he did. He affirmed God's law, and he affirmed God's law's ability to define what sin is.
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And if you come to the conclusion that God's Word is insufficient to even define what sin is, how can you proclaim a
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Savior from sin if you can't define sin anymore? It is a gospel issue.
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We are being told by Caesar, bow the knee to Caesar rather than to Christ.
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We are facing the exact same decision that preceding generations of Christians have faced when it comes to what our ultimate authority is going to be.
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And according to the Scripture, all of those things that are the fruit of the Spirit are the application of God's law, which sanctifies us by the
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Spirit of God to our lives, and therefore to say, well, that could exist in a relationship that is fundamentally based upon the rejection of God's law is to make the activity of the
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Spirit separate from the Word of God. And once you separate the Spirit from the
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Word, you no longer have New Testament Christianity. You've got something else, whatever we're going to call it, but it's not
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New Testament Christianity. Next question. Do you believe that it's possible to be a
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Christian and support slavery? If not, do you believe that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards were not actually
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Christians because they supported slavery? One of the things that, in going through the
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Holiness Code, I mentioned to the folks in my church was that one of the sections, one of the subjects that we need to tackle is the subject of slavery.
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But I can't figure out how to do that in a sermon. I mean, seriously, some of these sermons have been pretty bad as it is.
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And so to try to, I mean, it's a subject that can be handled in the Sunday school. It's a subject that can be handled.
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I haven't done it yet. I've started the research on it, but I haven't actually done it yet because I'm not sure how long it's going to take, and I've just been busy with many, many other things.
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The subject of slavery raises all sorts of emotional issues in every land today, but especially in my own land, in light of what was called the
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Civil War and things like that. As you know here in Africa, there are all sorts of different kinds of slavery practiced, especially black -on -black and black -on -European and all sorts of things like that.
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And if you know your history at all, you know there is a fundamental difference between that and Roman slavery.
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There were different levels of Roman slavery. There were different reasons for Roman slavery. There were some slaves that rose to positions of tremendous power within the
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Roman Empire. And hopefully you know your Bible well enough to know that there were different kinds of slavery in the
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Bible itself. Unfortunately, most people just look at slavery as slavery, and they ignore its history, and they ignore all the differences that existed.
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For example, if you look at the Old Testament, what was the year of Jubilee? What happened in the year of Jubilee?
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You had to release all of your slaves. So you could sell yourself into slavery knowing that, and in fact, there was even methods of recognizing that next year was the year of Jubilee.
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So it would be a very temporary situation. And so the whole issue was there weren't any bankruptcy courts.
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You couldn't just say, oh golly, I'm sorry that I'm 4 million rand in debt. I'm just going to file for bankruptcy and oh well.
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And that's all there was to that. There was no such mechanism like that. And so the
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Bible, the Old Testament law, regulated slavery, and in many cases, slavery was the final means of keeping someone alive.
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It was actually a method of saving life. It was the last ditch method, but it was a method of saving life.
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It wasn't like the chattel slavery that existed in the American South in the 1840s and 1850s.
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But people don't realize that, and they just simply say, well, it's slavery. And so they'll look at someone, well, they'll look at the
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Bible. They'll say, see, the Bible's horrible because the Bible did not abolish slavery. Well, the Bible actually laid the foundation for the abolition of slavery, and it did specifically prohibit any type of concept of slavery based upon race and nationality in that sense.
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There is no basis. There was never a basis. I don't care who argued for it or who didn't. There was never a basis for reading the
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Bible in saying that the amount of melanin you have in your skin is relevant to your humanity or to your status before God.
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Never. There was never any way of defending that. And you look at those who tried to defend such things, and the eisegesis is absolutely horrific.
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But the argument seems to be, well, there were people of God in history who accepted this form of slavery or that form of slavery.
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Look, the apostle Paul freed a slave, but he did not call for a general rebellion against the
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Roman Empire to end slavery because to do so would have been to limit where the gospel could go.
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What Paul's gospel did, however, was radical because in the Christian church, you were to greet one another with a holy kiss.
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That was a sign of brotherhood and sisterhood in the family of God.
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And who did you have meeting in those meetings? Both masters as well as slaves. And so it laid the very foundation for the eventual destruction of any system that would be based especially upon racial preferences, racial issues, and things like that.
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And so when the question asks that normally, and I don't know if this person's asking this, but normally when someone raises the issue of slavery, certain issues regarding women and things like that, they're saying, well, the church has been wrong in the past, and it had to change, and so now this is just another one of those issues.
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That is a coward's objection. You know why it's a coward's objection? Because not a single person that has ever said that to me has been able to deal with any one of those texts
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I just looked at you in any meaningful fashion. Not a once. Not a once. So it's, okay,
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I don't really want to deal with those texts, and so let's just go vague and say, well, people in the church have been wrong about stuff in the past, so maybe they're wrong about this.
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This is a fundamental issue of whether God created man as male and female and can define the proper relationships between the two or not.
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Stop trying to parallel it to anything else. Just don't do it. It's an abuse of the word of God.
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Just two questions I'm going to lump together for you because I think they relate well. How do you practically deal with siblings and a child that suffers from same -sex attraction?
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What do you think the result would be if you told a straight teenager in the church that even if he dated or if he ever dated someone he liked, held someone's hand, kissed someone, or married, they would be rebelling against God?
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I didn't get all of that. So the first one is how do you deal with a sibling with same -sex attraction?
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Well, the question would be what's the origin of the same -sex attraction? Is it that extremely rare individual that has only experienced that, cannot point to any type of traumatic sexual abuse in their life or divorce in the family, all sorts of things that can fundamentally impact our relationships with others.
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Let's just be honest. I imagine I'm talking to some people in this room that you know that your adult relationships, your marriage, has been impacted by the state of what your family was.
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And if there was brokenness in your home, that has impacted your relationship with your wife or your husband.
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Is it something that comes from that or is it that small minority of people that have always experienced that?
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And when you say how do you deal with that, well, how did the
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Apostle Paul deal with the Corinthians? If you have someone who comes to your church who recognizes that same -sex attraction is disordered, they experience it, they know they experience it, and they want help with that, that's one thing.
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Dealing with someone who comes to the church and says, I have same -sex attraction, it's a good thing, and you need to change your beliefs and allow me into leadership in your church, is something completely different.
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For the one person, there should be great extension of grace and mercy and patience and coming alongside and all the rest of that.
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For the other, there needs to be a very firm rejection of anyone coming into the church and saying, you need to change your beliefs to adapt to my desires.
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That is not a Christian attitude. Now, as far as on a practical level, are we talking about a person who claims faith or doesn't claim faith?
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If you're talking about someone who doesn't claim faith, you're talking about dealing with sexual sin the way you deal with any sexual sin, though in our culture now, this is a sexual sin that is being exalted and being made a good thing rather than a bad thing.
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That's obviously different than dealing with a person who claims to be a believer and maybe has been deceived by some of the revisionist material or some of the books out there that says, well,
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Romans 1 is only about pederasty, it's not really about homosexual relationships or things like that.
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There's certainly a way of disabusing them of the misinformation that they've been given along those lines. So it depends on whether they claim faith or don't claim faith as to what direction you would be going there.
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I recognize in a lot of churches, a lot of our churches still really struggle to know how to respond to this issue.
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And as a result, it still remains the shh, let's not talk about it topic, which can make it very difficult to try to bring someone in who is actually needing to deal with these issues openly and publicly.
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Next question. How do we respond to polygamy when used as an argument that the
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Bible does not give us a view of monogamy as a biblical institution and rather sees it as a modern social construct?
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I have a feeling that we will have polygamy in the
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United States within a year or two. That's just the direction it's going. The Obergefell decision by the
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Supreme Court opened the door. There really isn't any other way to go. So we're going to be having that.
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But biblically speaking, when someone raises the issue of polygamy, I go right back to Matthew 19.
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What did Jesus say? From the beginning, one man, one woman. Every instance of polygamy in the
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Old Testament resulted in a diminishment of the family situation. Look what happens with Abraham, Sarah, the birth of what happens with David and his wives.
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You've got what happens on the palace roof with many of his wives. Look what happens to Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines, etc.,
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etc. You have tremendous internal strife that is created by the degradation of the intended created order that the
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Lord Jesus himself indicated. When it comes to interpreting the Old Testament, I think Jesus is sort of the final authority.
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And that's why I find Matthew 19 so useful because he said, from the beginning, he made them male and female, father, mother, man, wife, none of this polygamy stuff.
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Certainly in the period prior to the Lord Jesus Christ, this was allowed, it was circumscribed and controlled, but it was never the ideal by any stretch of the imagination.
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So only a person who doesn't understand biblical hermeneutics and who thinks that as long as something is mentioned in the
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Bible, that means it's a good thing, could come to the conclusion that the Bible's recognition of that lower state was somehow what
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God was prescribing for people to experience. This one is in two minutes.
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How should we relate to homosexuals in the workplace, especially in light of our work policy about homosexuality?
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Well, I don't know what the laws are here. I know that in the United States, in certain places, for example, in New York, I think you can already be fined if you use the wrong gender pronoun of someone.
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So if you want to be known as Z instead of he or she, and if you don't refer to someone as Z, then you can now be fined up to $25 ,000, which is what, about 250 ,000
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Rand or something like that? Yeah, it's a whole lot more. So in the workplace, in the
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United States, especially with large corporations, already there are members of my own church have experienced indoctrination.
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They're just indoctrination sessions. My own wife works for a major airline, and they get indoctrinated, specifically brought in and told that these things are good and transgenderism is good and you can't say this, that, or the other thing.
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And so obviously, if we can continue working in those places without compromise, that's one thing, but the reality is the time is going to come when we are going to be forced to compromise when the government says you need to celebrate this, you need to do that, and that's when we're going to have to start making decisions about employment and where we can be employed.
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I mean, in the United States right now, if you want to be a photographer, if that's where your heart is, it's pretty much been proven that two homosexuals can force you to use your skills to celebrate their union, and you may not be able to do that anymore.
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That just may be part of the judgment upon a nation. Obviously, I don't know what your laws are here, but what you want to be able to do is, in an uncompromising fashion, be able to speak to someone about God's intentions as creator.
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Whether you can do that at the job or not, I don't know, but obviously that's a starting place where you want to go.
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If you love this person, then you must understand the lifestyle they're in is not life -producing.
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It is not life -affirming. If you want them to have true life, you're the one that has the message they need to hear.
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Are you willing to pay the cost? That's the question that all of us are going to be facing on one level or another, because the world's definition of love and the
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Bible's definition of love are not the same thing. They are not the same thing, and that's going to be a real issue for us to be facing.