Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Oct 18, 2022 | Culture

What percentage of Americans self-identify as gay or lesbian? I asked some friends and family several years ago, and the answers ranged from 25 to 40%. They were surprised when I said the actual number (according to a massive CDC study) is under 2%. Just the other day I asked a young Christian friend, and she said 30%. Whatever the actual number, it’s a small fraction of the population. Why the disconnect? The simple answer is popular culture. What we know as “Hollywood” is relentless in its determination to normalize homosexuality, and I’ll make up a word, ubiquitize it.

My latest encounter with this comes from the Netflix series I recently wrote about, The Sinner. God is pretty much persona non grata, especially in any way it would help the hapless scarred and broken people in the stories. If anything, he lends to the scarring. It’s a secular show written by secular people for a secular audience, thus no positive portrayal of God, but you can be sure we’ll see positive portrayals of homosexuality! In the third episode of season 4, we see two men kiss at the end of the episode. I threw the clicker at the TV, metaphorically. The scene was completely gratuitous. There was nothing, no mention of the two guys whatsoever in the next episode. It was  blatant Hollywood homosexual normalizing. Whether intended for this purpose is irrelevant; it is what they are doing nonetheless.

Does my visceral response mean I’m “homophobic” or hate homosexuals? Moral judgment doesn’t necessarily indicate fear or hatred. In fact, there but for the grace of God . . . . I’ve now had 44(!) years of God helping me (forcing, actually) to take the log out of my own eye, so the specs in others’ eyes are less offensive or threatening to me. So, it’s not homosexuality per se that ticks me off, it’s producers and writers imposing it on every story. Entirely too many shows have an agenda, and it’s exhausting.

As a Christian I believe homosexuality is a moral evil, but in the Apostle Paul’s words it is also unnatural, different from heterosexual sin (Rom. 1):

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

The word Paul uses in Greek for unnatural is exactly that, what is not according to nature. Back when the Supreme Court was redefining marriage, I had a friend who was convinced the Bible didn’t condemn homosexuality, and no amount of quoting verses would convince him otherwise, so I used a different tack. I asked him if he’d ever heard of the word telos, a word Aristotle uses for the purpose or end of a thing. He said no. After I explained it, I asked him, isn’t it apparent that the particular body part male homosexuals use was designed for the specific purpose of disposing waste from the human body, and not sexual pleasure? He gave me a puzzled look and said, “I never thought of that.” Of course you haven’t.

The Bible couldn’t convince him, but Aristotle did!

God through Scripture doesn’t identify sin whimsically, or arbitrarily, as if the only reason something is wrong is because God says it is. That is true, but it’s also the way he created the structure of reality to work, the way it’s supposed to work, as is the moral order a reflection of his being. Thus homosexuality is a perversion against God’s creation. But from 21st century entertainment we would think it’s not a perversion at all, but every bit as natural and normal as sex between a man and a woman. It is obvious it’s not, and everyone knows it.

We have to be programmed to think perversion is normal, vice a virtue, and that’s been Hollywood’s plan for a long time, at least since the TV show Friends, which started airing in 1994. A culture’s entertainment is a powerful tool to shape a people’s worldview.

When I was writing my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I used homosexuality (along with smoking) to show how the secular culture transforms our plausibility structures about things, or what we see as real and normal and just the way things are. The plausibility structures we get through the culture determine for us what seems normal to us, just the way things are, and more importantly, how they’re supposed to be. When we watch The Sinner, the message we’re supposed to absorb is that homosexuality is normal, good, and common, and Hollywood has been hugely successful in that endeavor. Just ask your friends the question that began this post.

Illustrative of how effective the propaganda is can be seen in Barack Obama. When he ran for president in 2008, he had to lie, claiming he was against same-sex marriage. His left-wing base knew he didn’t believe that, but he had to say it because the American people weren’t ready for the homosexual is normal, good, and common message. Another indication they weren’t ready happened the same year. Voters in the reliably Democrat state of California passed Proposition 8 which defined marriage in the California constitution as between a man and a woman. Yet, by 2015 the American people had been so successfully indoctrinated by Hollywood, among other cultural messaging, that a Supreme Court case giving same-sex couples the “right” to marry was made the law of the land.

Many conservatives and Christians Chicken Littles at the time wailed that the sky was falling, but marriage had been eviscerated decades before with the passing of no-fault divorce laws and the “sexual revolution.” And because homosexuals are in fact a tiny percentage of the population, and very few want to be married, especially men, it’s completely irrelevant to almost all Americans. Unless, of course, you watch TV. Then it’s everywhere.

 NOTE: Picture is from The Sinner

Uninvented: Why Miracles in the Bible Read Real

Uninvented: Why Miracles in the Bible Read Real

Oct 16, 2022 | Uninvented

When I wrote about miracles in Uninvented, I pointed out how rare they are in redemptive history, which might surprise those who have never read the Bible. The basic secular consensus is that the Bible is all myths and fairy tales, so secular people tend to think the Bible is full of miracle stories. Only, it’s not. It starts with the greatest miracle of all, God creating all things out of nothing, creation ex nihilo, by speaking all of it into existence. If you buy that, the rest of the miracles in the Bible are instantly plausible, and easily believable.

The first miracles we encounter surround Moses, the Exodus, and Israel entering the promised land in approximately 1400 BC. Then, after 500 or so years, the prophets Elijah and Elisha perform miracles, and it would be another 800 years until the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles. The Lord spoke to his people, kings and prophets, but we’re not told how that happened. Outright miracles are rare.

Nevertheless, most people being immersed in secularism from birth don’t see miracles, however rare, as the least bit plausible or believable. In time, they develop what I call a question begging anti-supernatural bias. Simply put, they assume materialism or naturalism (matter is all there is, or the “natural” world runs on its own), and thus miracles can’t happen. So, when they read the miracles in the Bible, they conclude they must have been made up, invented by the authors. Since 95% of people believe God exists, it isn’t difficult to get them to believe the miracles in the Bible can be or are real. At the least, they won’t dismiss them out of hand because the existence of God makes them possible.

The most important thing we can encourage a non-Christian to do is read the Bible while being aware of the inherent, and unquestioned, anti-supernatural bias that secularism has programed into their minds. That should be rather simple. If they believe in God, in whatever way they might conceive him, the possibility of miracles naturally flow from that. If they don’t, just having them posit God as a possibility is all they need. Then, they will be more open to see the verisimilitude in the text, the realness in the stories. At the least, they will have to conclude what they’re reading is not myths and fairy tales, and not even close.

As I’ve written here before, I started listening to Christian testimonies some years ago. Something I consistently heard was how simply reading the Bible completely changed their inaccurate conception of Christianity. I believe the Bible is literally the word of God because that’s what it claims to be (chapters 2 and 3 in the book are what make this plausible, the Christian concepts of revelation and inspiration), so what the Lord declares through the prophet Isaiah (55) is true:

10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

God’s word, and The Word, are the only things that can open a sinful human being’s heart and mind to saving trust in Christ. In philosophical terms, God is the primary cause, but as we see throughout Scripture, God uses sinful human beings to accomplish his purposes, or secondary causes, and that would be us! So, it is important to educate non-Christians on what the Bible claims for itself, which is divine revelation from God, and true history.

We should encourage our friends to start reading the stories of the One whom the entire Bible is about, Jesus of Nazareth. The gospels are incredibly powerful stories and have brought innumerable people to Christ over the last 2,000 years, including me. As a freshman in college, I was invited to a Bible study about “what the Bible says about who Jesus is.” That’s how I remember it being put to me, and it was the perfect question because that was something I wanted to know. The gospel we studied was John, a very good choice for any non-Christian to read, but any gospel will do, and Acts as well. I heard a testimony of an ex-atheist recently, and he said as he was reading Acts, he thought there is no way that it could be made up. Bingo!

One thing our non-Christian friends might not expect is how miracles are portrayed. They are never hyped or embellished, but are a simple part of the narrative, something you would expect from eyewitness testimony. Also, encourage them to notice the psychology of the people who encounter Jesus and his miracles. Everything he does is unexpected, which is why I argue he would be impossible to invent. In the book I call him the conundrum that is Jesus.

The Jesus in the gospels is a Messiah that would have been impossible for Jews to have made up because he was so unexpected. This includes not only his miracles but his teaching and personality. Jews never expected a miracle working Messiah, although the miracles confirmed he came from God. I love the way the gospels portray everyone who encounters Jesus. He just confuses the heck out of them.

The most impossible miracle for his disciples to have “made up” is the most important, the resurrection. There are many reasons for this I explore in Uninvented, but the impossibility of invention is from both sides of the ancient civilizational divide. Pagans wouldn’t make up a resurrection because their goal was to escape material reality. Jews wouldn’t either because resurrection was only something that happened at the end of time. You can see this in the interaction Martha has with Jesus when her brother Lazarus was still in the tomb (John 11). There are also significant psychological reason they would never have made it up, the most obvious was that Jesus was hung on a tree, and that meant he was under the curse of God. The Messiah? Impossible!

 

 

The Sinner

The Sinner

Oct 13, 2022 | Culture

Despite what you think, this post isn’t about me, although the title might imply that. It’s about a Netflix series called The Sinner which my wife and I have recently been watching. We just finished season 3, and I learned season 4 is coming to Netflix this week. The show stars Bull Pullman as Detective Harry Ambrose, an emotionally scarred detective, thus the title, and he has the perfect vibe for the character. He does what typical detectives do, but his emotional baggage allows him to connect in a unique way with the also emotionally scarred people he’s investigating. He kind of reminds me of another detective those of my generation would be familiar with, Columbo, but with a lot of problems. His issues, coming from his dysfunctional upbringing, help him to relate in some way to those he’s investigating, which in turn helps him deal with his own demons.

Dealing with terribly broken people, the show has themes of redemption and forgiveness, and the ongoing effects of sin. It reminds me of what Moses wrote in Numbers 14:18:

‘The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’

At first reading we might consider this is unfair. Why should children suffer for their parents’ sins? When we think about it for a minute, though, how could it be any other way. He isn’t saying the Lord visits punishment arbitrarily down through the generations, but that the sins of parents have implications in the lives of their children, and their children’s children and so on. It’s an obvious fact of life, and one portrayed skillfully in The Sinner. Sin always has consequences, even generational consequences.

What is not in the show, however, is God, not even a hint, except in the third season which is an interesting exploration into the nihilistic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. So God, in effect, becomes a character by his absence. I couldn’t help thinking of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and his character Raskolnikov who took his God-less view of the universe to what he thought was its logical conclusion. I appreciate that a TV series in 2022 would tackle something like that. You wonder if Bill Pullman’s character in response might see God as an answer to his emotional pain and confusion, but he doesn’t, or at least he hasn’t so far.

While the title implies something religious, The Sinner is a typical secular modern drama, a broken and messed up man trying to figure things out as he interacts with other broken and messed up people. God obviously isn’t relevant to that process. That’s how secularism on a cultural level perpetuates itself. God isn’t denounced a la the angry atheist, he’s just irrelevant. That is powerful cultural messaging, even though the writers don’t intend it to be. They’re just secular people writing secular drama for other secular people who would never think to ask, a la Where’s Waldo, where’s God? As Christians, we think leaving out God is as dumb as making a Where’s Waldo picture with no Waldo! He’s gotta be in there somewhere, right? Nope.

The writers and directors of secular entertainment don’t intend to program secularism into those who watch, but it happens at a subconscious level, nonetheless. As I’ve written here before, that’s how plausibility structures are built in the modern human mind. Unless someone gets a consistent dose of counter programming, secularism is what seems real to them. Watching The Sinner, they would never think to ask, why isn’t God part of this drama. Like most people outside the church in the Western world, they are seeped in the secular stew all their lives, so God is an afterthought at best.

Almost everyone in the West “believes in God” because they know intuitively that atheistic materialism (matter is all there is) is absurd. They can’t believe everything came from nothing, but whoever or whatever God is, he’s just not relevant to their lives. This is inconceivable to we Christians because life without the constant presence of God in our thinking isn’t life. But as Christians, we need to be aware of the secular programming of the culture because it affects us, and we too are immersed in that stew; there’s no escaping it.

A rich vein of examples of such programing could be mined in our lives, but The Sinner offers one up with no digging required. The message we would take from the show is that the problems in our lives are not inside of us, not in our sinful human inclinations and rebellion against our Creator God but are outside of us, and primarily caused by others. If not by others, then by circumstances beyond our control. We are, to put it another way, victims. Thus, Detective Ambrose is consistently looking back at his upbringing, his psychologically disturbed mother and absent father, and the memories haunt him. But there being no Jesus, no mercy, no grace, no unconditional love of God in Christ, no divine rationale for forgiveness, he grapples as best he can. Season 3 ends with him weeping uncontrollably over the death of a nihilistic murderer, and we’re left to wonder why exactly he would do that.

As Christians we realize the answer Detective Ambrose is looking for is the gospel, which is the good news that can give him the only answer to all the emotional pain life has dealt him.

Last Sunday our pastor in the sermon said something that gets to the heart of that answer. He said, our problem isn’t others sinning against us, or us sinning against others, but our sinning against a holy God. Once we are reconciled to our Creator God in Christ, we’ll be able to see that it is not the effects of sin that is our problem, or the people or circumstances that cause those problems, but that we’re the problem. King David after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed to try to cover it up penned Psalm 51. In it he wrote these amazing words that indicate he understood the essence of our sin, that it is primarily an offense against God:

4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.

When we too understand this, no secular programing of an irrelevant God will tempt us to see ourselves as victims. That is good news indeed!

Uninvented: Elijah and the Prophets of Baal

Uninvented: Elijah and the Prophets of Baal

Oct 9, 2022 | Uninvented

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is the story of Elijah and the Prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18-19). Even though I’m more than a little familiar with the passage, even having written about it in Uninvented, it continues to amaze me. Because of the supernatural element, this story would be rejected out of hand by those who come to the text with an anti-supernatural bias, but if you don’t come to the text with such a bias, it reads so real. We call that, as you may know, verisimilitude.

What makes it so believable are two things. One is the psychology displayed by all the characters involved, from Elijah himself, to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, to the prophets of Baal, and the people of Israel who witness and respond to this contest of the spiritual forces of darkness and the living God. It’s also funny, with more than a little sarcasm and mockery that makes it even more realistically compelling.

The other reason it reads real is because of how perfectly it fits in the scope of redemptive history, illustrating in dramatic fashion the entire history of Israel’s struggle with idolatry. This struggle starts from the moment of the Exodus when the people of Israel come out on the other side of the parted Red Sea. As soon as the Israelites get a little impatient with Moses, they pressure Aaron into making a golden calf and say, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” And that was just the beginning.

The Lord through Moses made it clear he was bringing them into the land of promise to rid it of false gods and the wickedness associated with them. Even though Elijah’s encounter with the prophets of Baal was a kind of culmination of hundreds of years of Israel’s rebellion, it didn’t end it. It’s interesting that in the intertestimental period, the 400 or so years from Micah when prophecy stopped, to John the Baptist, there is no indication of the Jews worshiping other gods. I’ve been reading I and II Maccabees (c. 150 BC), and the Jews of the time wouldn’t think of sacrificing to Baal, but consistently called on the Lord, and the same is true of the Pharisaical Judaism of the gospels.

Prior to that, however, the people of Israel looked to heathen idols, and like our modern versions of false gods they can’t deliver. It is the futility of idolatry which makes the narrative so powerful. Baal was one of the most prominent false gods throughout Israel’s history, and one of the nastier. At this period, Israel was ruled by the wicked King Ahab and Queen Jezebel who gave Baal and his worshippers free reign in the country. Basically, Israel was no different than all the heathen nations that surrounded it. Throughout Israel’s history, the odds were always stacked against those faithful to Yahweh, the true Elohim (God) of Israel, and in the days of Elijah it was as stacked as it gets.

Being a prophet in ancient Israel was a tough job because speaking truth to power often resulted in torture or death, while being a false prophet was a good gig because it meant telling those in power what they wanted to hear.

Elijah went to meet Ahab, and his greeting indicates which kind of prophet Elijah was: “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?” Elijah replied it is not he who is the troubler, but Ahab who has “abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals.” That was gutsy, but Elijah decides to put it to the test, to see who the real Elohim of Israel is. The Bible is often sparse in details, so we don’t know how this challenge was put to Ahab, but Elijah said:

19 Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel. And bring the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table.”

And then:

21 Elijah went before the people and said, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”

But the people said nothing.

We have to fill in the blanks, but I can imagine the people thinking to themselves, Elijah, why rock the boat? Things are going fine, the economy’s doing well, no big wars, why don’t you just leave it alone. A true prophet of God can’t do that, so he explains the challenge to them, and they reply, “What you say is good.” I can also imagine them thinking, Baal has served us well all these years, I’m sure he’ll do fine.

Elijah tells the prophets of Baal to prepare a bull for sacrifice and call on Baal to rain down fire to consume it. If he’s really Elohim, should be a piece of cake. They call on him for hours, “But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made.” Then at noon, Elijah started to taunt and mock them. He suggested maybe they should shout louder. It almost verges on comedy when he says, “Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.”  After doing this most of the day, they get desperate and slash themselves as they danced “until their blood flowed.” The next sentence is pure sarcasm:

But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention.

Oh, how that is the story of all false Gods! Elijah said, ok, it’s my turn. The way that scene is set up is narrative perfection. Needless to say, fire came down from heaven and consumed the offering; God is no false, worthless idol. When the people saw this, in today’s vernacular we might say, they freaked out, fell on their face and cried out, “Yahweh, He is Elohim! Yahweh, He is Elohim!” Maybe Baal ain’t so great after all.

You’ll have to read the rest of the story to see what happens next, but it reads so very uninvented, especially as Elijah flees for his life from the king and queen, goes out into the desert and prays that God would just kill him and get it over with. God doesn’t answer his prayer, and in fact, Elijah is one of only two men in the Bible who doesn’t taste physical death, but maybe that’s a topic for another post.

Uninvented: David God’s Chosen King Counts His Fighting Men, and 70,000 Die!

Uninvented: David God’s Chosen King Counts His Fighting Men, and 70,000 Die!

Oct 5, 2022 | Uninvented

In previous two posts I argued that King David’s life is counter intuitive to typically religious sinners who basically equate “religion” with moralism. Naturally, we think the purpose of religion is to be more moral, do more good than evil, more right than wrong, and that if we do, God will like us. If not, he won’t. God specifically chose David to be king of Israel because he was “a man after his own heart.” We would naturally interpret this through the lens of moralism, that it means, to be this man, David would do more good than evil, more right than wrong. But that is not the man we find in the pages of 2 Samuel, not at all. Therefore, in the title of my book, David had to be Uninvented. Somebody, anybody, making up the life of David would not make up the terribly flawed David that actually existed, the one who God declares is “a man after his own heart.”

I’ll briefly reiterate below the profound theological lesson we learn through David that culminates in the life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, but first let’s take a look at what is to me the most disturbing event in David’s very imperfect, sinful life. Most Christians focus on David and Bathsheba, as I did in my first post, and that’s bad enough. In my second post I focused on David as a pathetic father and leader, how he mishandled his son Amnon’s rape of his half-sister Tamar, and his son Absalom’s attempt to overthrow his father’s kingdom. All of this is merely prologue for what I consider the greatest sin of David’s life, something that caused the death of 70,000 of David’s innocent subjects. I’ll also briefly deal with the theology inherent in these disturbing events.

We read about it in 2 Samuel 24 (and a parallel account in I Chronicles 21). Because I want to focus on the theology, I’ll only briefly explain what happened, but here is an excellent short explanation from the Senior Minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia (where my wife and I attended when we were in seminary). David gave a command to “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah” so he could “enroll the fighting men, so that I may know how many there are.” Joab, the commander of David’s army begged him not to do it, but the king overruled him. Bad idea.

As I was reading this story yet again, I found it distressing. It took nine months and twenty days (I love the specificity, which is an indication of the story’s veracity) of counting, and the whole time David was oblivious to his sin and the coming judgment of God for it. That’s a long time in which David had to reconsider what he was doing, but he never did. Hubris will do that to a man, which indicates the great sin David committed: he did not trust God, Yahweh, who created Israel, and promised to sustain her.

After Joab returns with the results, then David gets it, too late:

10 David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the Lord, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done. Now, Lord, I beg you, take away the guilt of your servant. I have done a very foolish thing.”

The bastard knew all along what he was doing was wrong! That makes me angry because he doesn’t seem to have cared if it was. But we see in his immediate response why he was “a man after God’s own heart.” Unlike King Saul who he replaced, when David was confronted by his sin, he repented. While he didn’t trust God in the most obvious of ways, he did trust God in the most important, to take away his sin. In this, he points us forward to the gospel. We cannot attain acceptance with God by obedience to the law; nothing we can do or not do will ever make us any more acceptable to him than we are in Christ, who is our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.

Unfortunately, though, there are consequences for sin, and as we’ve already seen in his messy life, there are here as well.

The Lord says as punishment he will give David three options: three years of famine, three months of fleeing from his enemies while they pursue him, or three days of plague in the land. David responds in a way that again reflects his trust in God:

14 David said to Gad, “I am in deep distress. Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into human hands.”

The plague came, and 70,000 people died, not just one because of his sin with Bathsheba. That’s why to me David counting his fighting men is the far worse sin, yet most Christians don’t know about it while everyone, including many non-Christians, know the story of David and Bathsheba.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around this story because it seems so blatantly unjust. David sinned, yet 70,000 innocent people died and not him? As I come across things like this in Scripture, I always go back to Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 32:3, 4:

3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
Oh, praise the greatness of our God!

 

4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
and all his ways are just.

 

A faithful God who does no wrong,
upright and just is he.

I don’t get to determine what is just or unjust because of the way it seems to me from my limited, finite perspective. If the Lord does it or allows it, it is just, or if he allows injustice, it is for a greater good, or something we can’t conceive.

Many reject the of God of Scripture because they think they have the right to judge what they read in the Old Testament (seldom do they argue against the New, except to reject miracles). No God, they assume, would act that way, or cause a people to act that way. Really? How would they know? Based on what standard? Whose standard? Is there even a standard? The only reason we know a line is crooked is because we know what a straight line is. Where does morally straight come from? Well, the God they reject! This idea of condemning God by the standard that comes from God himself is a fascinating study, and beyond the cope of a blog post, obviously. But when I come to things in Scripture that make no sense to me, like David counting his fighting men, and 70,000 people dying as a result, I accept something else Moses said in Deuteronomy 29:

29 The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

And boy, are there a lot of secret things!