Aug. 31, 2015 Show with Dr. Albert Mohler

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with 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 hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host, Chris.

Arntzen. Good afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 31st day of August 2015 and I am thrilled beyond description today for having for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr. R. Albert Moeller, Jr., to discuss his very important and latest work, We Cannot Be Silent, Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong.

If you have any questions for Dr. Moeller, email them quickly because he can only be on with us for the first half hour of this two-hour broadcast and co-hosting with me today is my friend, Pastor Ron Jorlach, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Maryland.

He is going to be with us for the entire two hours and our second guest after Dr. Moeller leaves us will be Dr. James R. White of the Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, Arizona, and we're going to continue discussing We Cannot Be Silent, Dr. Moeller's book for the entire length of the program, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr. Albert Moeller.

I'm very glad to be with.

You, Chris, and Ron Jor, both. I'm glad to join the conversation. Great, and we are.

Both excited as well, and Ron Jor has been telling me all afternoon how enthusiastic he is about this interview as well as I am, and just want to say that this book is a very challenging book, a very informative, and a very important book.

The Supreme Court Decision on Same-Sex Marriage

Dr. Moeller, first of all, when it came to the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, were you expecting that to happen, or was.

This any kind of a surprise to you? Well, the actual decision in terms of ordering the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states was not a surprise, but Chris, I have to tell you, the actual written documentation of the opinions of the majority in this case were actually worse than most of us expected, even those of us who were watching the court for a very long time.

It's almost impossible to overestimate the damage this represents, and that raises the question, how in the world could this have happened? Yeah, well, if.

You could, from your own knowledge of history in the United States and the sex revolution and so on, what do you think are the major factors that led us to.

This shocking and horrific point? You know, that's really why I wrote the book, because I think there are far too many biblically minded Christians who think this just came out of the blue, and of course it didn't.

We've been in a period of moral rebellion openly, and an intellectual rebellion for the better part of the last couple of centuries in terms of Western civilization, and the sexual revolution's been a part of that.

It was just limited to the elites for at least a century, and then in the 1960s it broke out into mass culture, and you know, I firmly believe that what we're looking at in terms of the developments in the law and developments in public policy, that's just what sociologists would call the rationalization of new behavior.

In other words, that's just a way of trying to come up with arguments, therapeutic explanations, psychological and psychiatric evasions, and legal supports for what is nothing less than a complete repudiation of not only biblical morality and sexuality, but of any kind of binding moral authority when it comes.

To human sexual behavior. Yes, and obviously this kind of headway by the homosexual left in their gain of political power, they did not do this on their own, obviously. The homosexual portion of society, or those actively involved in that behavior, is a very tiny percentage from what I'm understanding, and perhaps you have different data, but how on earth did they pull this off other than the powers of darkness themselves?

They obviously had a lot of aid from.

Heterosexuals to get to this point. Yeah, you know, there's a basic biblical worldview principle at work here, and that is that the immediate drive of sin is to rationalize that sin. It is to basically come up with a way of saying, I'll call your sin other than sin if you'll call my sin something other than sin.

And you can't possibly have had the revolution on the issue of homosexuality if you hadn't had a complete moral collapse on the question of marriage at the issue of divorce. And so, you know, we had no-fault divorce.

Divorce was very difficult to get throughout all of Western civilization, all of American history, until the very early years of the 1970s. I mean, so we're talking about less than, well within my lifetime, divorce went from something that was almost ungettable to something that now doesn't in some states even require someone to show up in court.

And, of course, that led to an incredible release of immoral behavior. And then there was the sexual revolution largely driven by the pill that enabled both adultery and non-marital, premarital sex to become just routine.

And, of course, behind that was an intellectual elite deliberately trying to replace Christian biblical sexual morality with the new sexual morality that was held by the elites for a long time, but broke out, as I said, into the mainstream in the sexual revolution of.

The 60s. Now, many evangelicals, even theologically reformed Christians, as long as it's used in the confines of marriage, have no problems at all with contraception. Was the more frequent acceptance of contraception a part to play in this, do you think, in this whole loosening of sexual morality?

Contraception and the Contraceptive Mentality

Yeah, I mean,.

This has gotten me in trouble before. You know, I will simply say I don't think the Christian worldview requires us to say that no married couple can, under any circumstances, use true contraception. But it does mean we can't consider contraception to be anything other than a moral challenge.

And we certainly have to understand that when it comes to contraception, the biggest effect of contraception has not been to allow happily married faithful spouses. It's allowed people to have sex outside of marriage without consequences.

That's been the larger effect, and I think, morally speaking, just about every honest person recognizes that. So I would say this. Christians can't enter into what we call the contraceptive mentality, can't just believe that children are an elective, can't believe that the human autonomy means to reject the contraceptive mentality that sees children as an imposition.

We have to see children as God's good and gracious gifts to be celebrated whenever there is a child conceived. And so, yeah, Christians, Evangelicals, far too many Evangelicals thought it was a Catholic issue.

Our argument has, actually, is very different than the Catholic argument. But, you know, frankly, most Evangelicals weren't even considering this a major issue.

The Civil Rights Analogy and Sexual Orientation

Yeah, and Pastor Rondra, you can chime in anytime you'd like with a question, but we had done, Pastor Rondra and I had done a program on the hijacking of the civil rights movement by the homosexual left to make this a more palatable revolution for them in the minds of many heterosexual people.

How could America, in fact the globe really, have been so deceived when they themselves may not have no proclivity towards that behavior to be welcoming this like never before into the realm of not only acceptability but celebration.

In our culture? Yeah, you know, the first argument was, and it was, thanks be to God, a winning strategy in the sense that we can look back and say it was nothing less than sin to discriminate on the basis of skin color and ethnicity and what is most often called race.

And we come to understand because there is no moral significance to any of those things. And from a biblical worldview standpoint, there is no moral or theological significance to skin color whatsoever.

And thus it's a sin against the fact that God created every human being in his image to make any such distinction. But the same Bible that makes that very clear also makes very clear that sexual morality is not merely some kind of human invention.

It's not a human social construct. It is it is God's instruction to his human creatures about how we are to use the gift of sexuality and and and even of sex itself in terms of gender, man and woman, that he has given us.

The people that hijacked the civil rights movement for this knew a winning argument when they saw it. And that's why they went at redefining homosexual behavior as a sexual orientation and arguing that it was simply a natural phenomenon, just like race.

Persons are born with a skin color. They're also stamped with a certain sexual orientation and thus it is invidious, that's the Supreme Court's word, invidious discrimination against persons who simply are that way.

And of course the biblical worldview doesn't tell us that there's nothing to the concept of sexual orientation. It tells us that sin is always more deeply rooted than we'd like to think. But it is equally clear that there is no what God intends for every single human being.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Bible says there is one and only one proper expression of human sexuality, not just of the sexual act, but of sexuality. And that is that which is represented by the faithful monogamous lifetime union of a husband and a wife, a man and a woman.

Right. And Pastor Ranger? Dr. Mohler, it's great to have you here on the show. Regarding this revolution, you said of course it started a few generations ago, what exactly is the endgame? Is the endgame what we're experiencing now in terms of the legalization of homosexuality, or is there a bigger.

Prize to be won with this movement? You know, Roger, I think that is a brilliant question. I'll simply have to say, I think, and I'll tell you the greatest evidence for that is the transgender phenomenon.

Because the front page article in Sunday's edition of the New York Times, and it was just a couple of days ago, in which a transgender judge of long services, I mean it's a multi-thousand word article, but one of the things documented in there is how the mainstream lesbian and gay movement did not want to include the transgender movement.

And now they're not sure what to do with this. The transgender revolution doesn't even have a plausible way that its own logic works out. Eventually it's a meltdown. And I've had major homosexual leaders, that is leaders of homosexual organizations, tell me to my face they have no idea where this is headed.

And you know what's really interesting is that some of them are already worried about where it's headed. Really? As one major activist said, you know, we just got the right to get married, but it was nearly destroyed before we got the right to get married.

And in other words, they have started and aided and abetted a moral revolution. They wouldn't, as I said, it started long before, but they've certainly been driving it. And I don't think there is an endgame, but I'll tell you a short term, because I don't think it's an endgame, short term, one of their immediate goals is to silence the church.

Period. Not just to silence the church on this issue, but to silence the church. And that's why so many secular elites who have nothing to do with the gay rights movement have jumped on this. And that is the front line war or battle that we're confronting right now.

It's not just to silence the church on sex. Yes, and it's.

Not just tolerating people who disagree with us on sexual morality. They want, in fact, they insist that we celebrate this. People are not going to get away with merely tolerating this. I mean, you even see it on every major news broadcast whenever a same-sex couple is announced, if they're in Hollywood or so on.

The beaming smiles that are on the faces of these anchor people, even congratulating them, you know that people's careers are on the line if they.

Don't join the party. It's as fresh as the headlines, but it's as old as Romans chapter one of God upon those who not only sin, but those who give hearty approval. And let's face it, that's what every sinner wants.

We all want that. If you're a rebellious ten-year-old, you want somebody to tell you, yeah, that rebellion is noble and good and your parents are crazy. You know, if you're involved in non-marital sex as a high school student, you want people to tell you, yes, that's exactly what's cool.

You want hearty approval for your sin. That's the way every sinner is. And that's what's being demanded of us. And that's why the middle ground is going to disappear. I mean, you guys, that, I mean, that's why all these, you know, kind of left-wing, the folks who want to call themselves left-wing evangelicals or progressive evangelicals, I'm writing an article even right now, today, in which I'm saying, you know, they want, they're, they are already less likely to try to claim anything to do with evangelicals simply because there is no mushy middle on this.

You're either going to celebrate this moral revolution or you're going to be considered an outlaw. We do have a.

Listener in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, CJ, who says, do you think that the church is far too soft today on issues like homosexuality because they are trying to do damage control for our sins of the past of genuinely being pharisaic, cruel, and unforgiving, which is why no doubt many women within the evangelical church who had been pregnant out of wedlock may have had abortions for the sheer fact that they know that they would be shunned, unforgiven, and the families of the pregnant girls would be embarrassed, and that was more concern than the human life within the pregnant girl.

Church Discipline, Sin, and the Gospel Response

Yeah, well, that's a good question, and in that question is an indictment. We're often just not good at this, are we? I mean, the balance of knowing how, at the same time, to truly respond in the gospel to sinners, I don't think the church has ever found that easy to pull off.

I think that's why you've got Paul writing to Timothy in 1 and 2 Timothy some very direct advice. I think that's why you've got so much of the New Testament after the Gospels, where the church is trying to figure out exactly how you do this, and what's really interesting, and by the way, in the Pauline epistles, is that Paul is concerned that the church is going to be too tolerant of sin, that it will fail.

I mean, just look at 1 Corinthians 5, 6, and 7. I mean, clearly Paul is writing to a church that was actually too tolerant of sin, and yet was made up entirely of those who knew themselves to be sinners, saved by grace.

That's why Paul goes through an entire list, and he says, but such were some of you, but you were washed, and you know, I think this is the perpetual challenge to the gospel church, and that is to respond with the full power of the gospel, and the full authority of Scripture, and to respond with, I guess the only thing I know to say is a courageous humility.

We've got to have the courage to speak the truth, and one of your callers' most important points is that it doesn't take denying the Bible to faith right now. They believe homosexuality is sinful, at least they think they do.

They're not bending there. We are silent, and that's why the title of our book is, We Cannot Be Silent. That's actually not an option. At the same time, we're bearing, and we just need to acknowledge this, we are bearing the legacy of a moralism that wasn't the gospel.

I mean, there are far too many people in Christian churches, and maybe even Christian pulpits, who would just wish the issue would go away, and that's not a gospel response. You know, we are given the challenge of preaching the gospel in season and out of season, knowing the horrible power of sin, and that the gospel is the only remedy of sin, and so we don't want people to behave.

First of all, we want them to believe, and then believing, we want them to find in the law of Christ, true freedom, and the true binding of a man who now belongs to Christ. And we do have.

Another listener, Christian in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that wants to know, do you have any advice for overcoming the frequently used argument that even though there are only a tiny minority of people who are medically conceived or born as hermaphrodites, or other types of deformities, that since those people have lives to face that may not involve marriage, that we should be more welcoming to transgenderism, etc., how do you overcome that kind of an argument?

Intersex Conditions, Gender Identity, and the Authority of Scripture

Yeah, well, first of all, genetic abnormality, and that's a situation that calls for the full measure of grace, and medical wisdom. I mean, because sometimes, just in terms of how the child is going through basic bodily processes of elimination and all the rest, it's going to require some intervention that's going to be different than would be normal.

But that is such a tiny fraction of the population. That's not the issue that's in the transgender movement at all. The transgender movement is rooted in the fact that people say, my true identity is different than my embodied state.

I mean, they're not saying I'm confused about my genitalia, they're saying I don't think it matches up with who I believe myself to be. That's a fundamentally different thing. By the way, there could be a biochemical, genetic link to that.

It wouldn't be a soul-sufficient explanation, but it could be, as does Romans 8, that biblically-minded Christians should be the last people to be surprised by that. But that doesn't mean that the is, in that case, tells us what the ought should be.

And instead, the Bible tells us what the ought should be. That our body is not an accident. Our body is one of God's gifts to us, because our body is actually the temple of the Holy Spirit. The body is actually the physical frame that demonstrates the image of God, the glory of God.

We're made man, who God made us to be. It's authority to say, I am not who God made me to be with my body. Now, pastorally, if someone has a deep contempt, something that ought to cause us sympathy, and someone might face any other kind of challenge, but that doesn't mean that we deny the authority of Scripture to define what is true here.

And it doesn't mean that we suppose the only remedy, and the only way out of this, and which, by the way, is very important for us. We shouldn't expect any sinner to be any less confused about sin, except.

For the gospel of Jesus Christ. And Pastor Rondra Locke has a question for you.

Responding to Christian Affirmation of the Sexual Revolution

Yes. Dr. Moeller, how do we as Christians respond when other Christians seem to speak of an affirmation of the sexual revolution? So, say for instance, in just in recent news, the First Baptist Church in, I believe it was Greenville, South Carolina, they had announced their affirmation of, I believe it was both homosexual and transgender persons into their ministry, and so on there.

And also Union University, they broke fellowship with the CCCU, which was their group of Christian colleges and universities, over the issue of homosexuality as well. How do we as Christians respond when other Christians.

Are obviously speaking an affirmation? Well, I feel like I need to say immediately, I know you meant this, that Union University did the right thing. They actually separated from a group they didn't think was taking a clear position, and even today, Oklahoma Wesleyan University joined them, and I know others are going to join as well.

And you know, when it comes to a church, the reason I wrote the big article I did on the First Baptist Church of Greenville is in order to say this, let me mince the words, a church that will endorse what the Bible condemns is an apostate church.

And here's what I'd want your listeners to think about. I have yet to find a church that really affirms the total truthfulness and authority of the Word of God, that affirms the inerrancy of Scripture, that affirms the gospel in terms of how the reformers reaffirm the gospel in terms of sola fide, sola scriptura, as authority, going all the way down through the sola gratia, and you look at all of this and you recognize, I've never seen a church that affirms the faith once for all delivered to the saints, that has advocated this biblical morality.

By the time the church gets there, you can count on the fact they've already made theological jumps that are very clear. Now what's going to be interesting is there are some out there who are trying to say, look, we still consider ourselves biblical Christians, and we have come to a different position here.

But when you actually define the issue, as is our responsibility, if they're going to be apostate on this issue, this is not the first doctrinal violation, the first doctrinal compromise.

They've made. We have a listener in Birmingham, Alabama, Shane, who asks, Dr. Mohler, what is a proper biblical response to scientists if they discover a biological cause for being homosexual or transgendered?

Biological Explanations and the Effects of Sin

Yeah, no, that's a.

Very good question. And you know, those claims have been around for almost 20 years now. Simon LeVay out in California was making the claim he found a specific genetic marker that was related to sexual orientation.

A later investigation demonstrated that there might be something to it, but that can't be the sole sufficient explanation. So it's really interesting that even in the secular medical community and the psychiatric community, there's the recognition that even if genetics would play a part, it's not the only explanation.

There would have to be environmental factors, other kinds of factors. But the Christian worldview response to that is, no matter what they claim or no matter what they find, is that we are told that the world shows the effects of sin.

And that's why I went back to Genesis 3, when God brought his judgment upon Adam and Eve for their sin, it clearly had consequences genetically for all of their descendants, and frankly for the world around us, right down to the fact that I get bitten by mosquitoes and there are venomous snakes that will bite us, the lion and the lamb are not at peace with each other.

And all of that is a sign. In other words, we should expect our genetic structure shows the effects of sin. And that means that anything short of the glory of God is a demonstration of the power of sin and God's judgment on that sin.

Romans 8 tells us that all of creation is groaning, waiting for the appearing of the sons of God. And that tells us that there's nothing medical science can find that will be evidence of anything other than the fact that sin is a bigger problem than many of us have understood.

Yes, I've even seen documentaries, and whether they were accurate or not, but that people, men with higher level of testosterone are more prone to violent and murderous behavior. That doesn't mean we're going to accept it because it's.

Biological in nature. And you know, that's a very good point, because think of all the things they claim there's a genetic predisposition to. I was actually given a scientific journal a couple years ago to which they claimed that excessive television viewing has a genetic link.

Well, for all I know, maybe it does, but that is not a morally significant finding. Right. And before.

You go, there are many Christians who, when we speak out against things like homosexuality, they will say, who are you to judge? We're all sinners. Sin is sin is sin. Now, obviously, if all sin had the same weight to it, we could never even elect a man to the pastorate, because all pastors are sinners.

How do you respond to that kind of thing that seeks to blend or blur the distinction between.

Distinguishing Sins and the Pastor’s Higher Standard

Various sins? Well, we are warned not to be judgmental, which does not mean that the very same Jesus, who told us to be very careful about judging, and then, of course, you have the Apostle Paul making the very same point.

He then instructs Timothy how to judge behavior. There's a difference between judging the heart. That is not our ability. The heart's condemned by God, not by any of us. It's not condemned by the church.

The church is told to be very judicious in making judgments on the basis of behavior. And, you know, the same thing's true for a parent. You know, you've got a ten-year-old boy, and he disobeys you and breaks the rule.

Well, that's sin, and it's got to be dealt with. But then, if he compounds that with a lie, that is fundamentally different. And then, if he, to your face, flouts your authority, even to deal with his behavior, that's another thing.

And so, we don't, even as parents, we don't deal with every sin or every act of misbehavior in the same exact way, because they don't have the same significance. And they don't have the same effect. That's the other big thing that's really important here.

You know, no sane person believes that all sin is equal in its effect. And that's one of the reasons why a pastor is held to a.

Far higher standard. Providentially, our guest, Dr. Albert Moeller, completed his final word of his last sentence in response to my final question during this interview, before technical difficulties rendered our second interview with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries inaudible.

The only thing we were unable to record from Dr. Moeller's interview was his saying goodbye and his comments about desiring to return as a guest on Iron Sharpens Iron in the future. God willing, we'll have Dr. James R. White back on this program in the near future, to be interviewed again on the same topic he intended to discuss here.

Thanks for listening to Iron Sharpens Iron.