Is Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Law Christian? Is Theonomy?

Is Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Law Christian? Is Theonomy?

Aug 12, 2023 | Culture

According to Christianity Today and Russel Moore it most certainly is not! Moore used to be the President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC and left there to become Christianity Today’s Editor in Chief last year. He also writes for left-wing publications like the Washington Post, The New York Times, Atlantic Magazine, and can be seen as a commentator on left wing cable outlets like MSNBC and CNN. So I wasn’t surprised he wasn’t a fan of a country banning homosexual activity via law. Many Christians, unfortunately, find such a thing positively abhorrent. It’s not easy to find commentary defending it, but I found one at LifeSite News, and there are others if you look. I don’t want to debate that here. Overall from a Christian perspective of course it’s a good thing, even if I might not agree with everything in the law. Christians, along with every other person in the Western world has been so indoctrinated in the pro-homosexuality agenda that even to question whether it should be legally allowed in society is beyond the pale. Positively un-Christian! And Uganda is now persona non grata among the “enlightened” nations of the world.

What I want to address here is God’s law and the secular myth of neutrality. I saw another piece about this at American Reformer with the title, “Why Russell Moore is Wrong About Uganda.” Knowing Moore has become a welcome guest in polite (leftist) society as the house “conservative Christian” drew me to that piece like a fly to light. The problem with the author’s disagreement with Moore is that it assumes as Moore does this secular myth:

Nowhere does the Ugandan Act argue against homosexuality from Scripture, let alone for theonomic or theocratic reasons. Moore has imposed this framework upon the issue because he determined beforehand it was wrong and had to find a pious and “biblical” reason for his Philippic. Instead, the Anti-Homosexuality Act argues from reason, nature, and tradition: it seeks to protect the Ugandan family from “internal and external threats”; it wants to preserve the “cherished culture” and the “legal, religious, and traditional family values” of the Ugandan people; and it wants to combat the “values of sexual promiscuity” being imposed upon them in order to protect “children and youth” who are “vulnerable to sexual abuse through homosexuality and related acts.” This is an imminently reasonable position compatible with Christian doctrine and ethics, but knowable apart from divine revelation. Any adult human who has not yet been indoctrinated into the Gay Cult should be able to understand these things.

The author, who goes by a pseudonym, argues for, or implies that basing a nation’s laws on Scripture is illegitimate. To him, something that is “theonomic or theocratic” is even more off limits than Scripture. What exactly do those two words mean? God’s law and God’s rule. Seems strange for a Christian to argue that Scripture and God’s law, His rule, is not a legitimate source for creating the legal code of a society. What is? According to the author, “Reason, nature, and tradition.” So, as Christians we’re supposed to set aside Scripture and God’s law and rule when we debate and legislate laws in society? Talk about fighting with one arm behind your back!

Most Christians in America today buy into the secular myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. The idea is that religion doesn’t have a legitimate, forbid an authoritative, role to play in public life, specifically government and law. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” place, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence. Specifically verboten is citing Scripture as an authoritative source. If a Christian dares do such a thing, or God forbid, pun intended, a country like Uganda, cries of “theocracy,” Spanish Inquisitions, and Salem witch trials are soon to follow.

Christians must realize a religiously or morally neutral nation cannot exist, yet people like Russel Moore and the author at American Reformer believe it does. For the latter neutral sounding ideas like “Reason, nature, and tradition” are legitimate appeals in the public square or regarding the laws of a nation, but not Scripture or God’s law or rule. As he says, what is a legitimate appeal is whatever is “knowable apart from divine revelation.” Think about it. Here is a Christian telling us “divine revelation” is off limits when we’re arguing for what the laws of a nation should be. To me this is positively shocking. Yet most Christians who write and think about these things, including Evangelical “leaders” and most pastors, agree with him. The secular myth of neutrality has neutered them. Think about that as well. The word neutered comes from the same root as neutrality and can mean castrated. That’s what the church has done to itself in the modern age. The Christian church is a eunuch in Western culture! Powerless to make any real, substantive impact. No wonder everything is a disaster and a secular mess. When you take the salt and light out of a culture what do you get? Out of its government and its laws? We’re living in it.

Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization states an obvious truth too many Christians miss:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

Secular neutrality isn’t neutral because it can only have man as the “final source of authority,” and if it is man then it is not God. It’s one or the other. Francis Schaeffer wrote a book in 1981 that should be required reading for all Christians in the 21st century, A Christian Manifesto. In the first chapter he says our worldview determines what this “final source of authority” is, and in the West there are only two options. As he says, “these two worldviews are two total concepts of reality standing in antithesis to each other.” These two “total concepts” are diametrically opposed to one another and they inevitably produce different results. This was obvious in 1981, but it is indisputable now. We are living with the deadly fruit of secularism, and Christians are contributing to it.

The secular, although he doesn’t use that word, is “the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.” Those who embrace this view tell us we can’t bring our “religion” to bear upon issues of public policy. The Bible as a source or authority is not allowed, and Russel Moore and many Christian leaders agree. It’s no wonder the church in America is powerless when it comes to influencing the culture—it has mostly accepted the secular culture’s assumptions. That’s not good. As Christians we look around and bemoan how bad things are, but at the same time refuse to shamelessly declare God’s Word as the ultimate source of authority for all things, including our government and it’s laws.

Thank God for Uganda and it’s leaders who are willing to stand fast in the face of the criticism of the secularist woke globalist mob. They refuse to be intimated because divine revelation in Scripture is their north star, their final source of authority for the flourishing of their nation. It is supremely ironic that Africa which was not too long ago completely pagan and God-less is leading the way to advance God’s kingdom in the face of opposition from what was once the Christian West.

 

Christianity is Now Hate and Bigotry, and the Hope that Brings

Christianity is Now Hate and Bigotry, and the Hope that Brings

Jun 16, 2023 | Culture, Eschatology

In case you weren’t aware of it, if you’re a conservative Christian, believe the Bible is God’s actual word of revelation to mankind and the truth about human sexuality, you’re a bigot filled with hatred for “sexual minorities.” Yes, no better than any garden variety racist. No better than the Klu Klux Klan burning crosses in your black neighbor’s yard. I’m sure this is not news to anybody. But among our cultural “elite” and the lunatic left (those currently running the United States government, all the organs of culture and corporate America) it is commonly accepted. The word Christian slips off their lips with a condescending smear, and to them we are second-class citizens in our supposedly enlightened queer nation. Leftists (what almost all liberals have become) started out playing the victims. Then they asked for tolerance, and got tolerance. Next they demanded acceptance, and got acceptance. Finally, they demanded celebration, and those who refuse to celebrate will be made to pay by the alphabet mafia. Welcome to 2023 America! And what a grand place it is.

I saw this clearly coming during the runup to some unelected judges in black robes on the highest court in the land re-defining marriage in 2015. A large section of the less diplomatic and careful left branded those who didn’t support gay “marriage” as bigots and haters. Those pushing this perversion of marriage at a legal and PR level on an ambivalent population we’re much more careful. They told blatant lies sweetened with honey that went down easily with the unsuspecting and ignorant. It’s all about tolerance, just letting homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals. How could anybody be against that? The more prescient knew it could never stop there, and once marriage was redefined and homosexuality completely normalized, the transgender insanity circa 2023 was inevitable.

I was reminded of this unpleasant reality not only because it’s so called “pride month” (which God says goes before destruction) and daily shoved in our faces, but also because I read this article about a women who was a big name in Hollywood, thus appropriately left wing most of her life, and who became a conservative and Christian and now “has her friends mystified.” That’s almost funny, and speaks to how insular the woke left is. They live in an echo chamber only ever encountering people exactly like them and dismiss as unworthy ideas they disagree with. Such people are also deeply self-righteous and judgmental. Anyone who doesn’t think like them is unclean and unworthy of respect. Conservative Christians are modern lepers to them, and it is such people who hold almost all positions of cultural and government power in America today.

All of this is stunning, but completely unsurprising to anyone who knows the history of Enlightenment rationalism that in due course rid the world of God and His word. Once that started happening it led inexorably to the suffocating secularism of the modern world with the help of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, et al. The 20th century gave us progressivism, cultural Marxism a la the Frankfurt School, “the 60s” and the sexual revolution, so called, radical feminism, no fault divorce, and eventually it had to get to homosexuality and their “rights.” Marx’s two primary goals of perpetual revolution and his communist Utopia was to be realized by the destruction of the family and religion, i.e., Christianity. The woke left in our day, the cultural Marxists, are his progeny, and even though he would be surprised the economic version of Marxism he predicted failed, he would be pleased as punch at the cultural version that hasn’t. It’s creating all the chaos, confusion, suffering, pain, and misery he could have ever hoped for, the conditions for communism’s perpetual revolution.

The article I mentioned above is definitely worth reading because it’s instructive of just how deeply ingrained this pathology is on the secular left, and it is important to realize the threat they pose to everything that is godly, good, and right. The goal of their push for sexual perversion, and that includes any sex outside of a married man and woman, and erasing biological sex, is and always has been the destruction of the family. You can look at the writings of leftists since the 1930s and it’s all there. The difference today is that all vestiges of Christian leaven that once made Western civilization flourish and prosper and held back wickedness are gone. In addition, we have a generation of leftists in cultural and political power today who are effectively woke zombies who can’t help themselves. They are compelled by generations of very effective brainwashing to silence or destroy any who get in the way of cultural revolution, their greatest enemy being Bible believing conservative Christians. If you’re also white and male, you get to the top of the list.

This is the bad news which we all know. The good news that most fail to appreciate is that because zombies aren’t subtle, normal people, which is the vast majority of the population, are waking up to just how pathologically evil and abnormal all this is. For Christians, this reminds us of the fundamental irrationality of evil, and that it is built and sustained on the pretzel logic of lies. God’s created reality, as for God Himself, cannot be mocked, people reap what they sow. Sooner or later it will bring the consequences of God’s judgment which happens whenever His law is transgressed. But God’s judgment isn’t an end in an of itself—it is revelatory as well. In such an environment the ugliness of sin and man pretending he can be God contrasts powerfully with the beauty of God’s law and the gospel of His grace in Christ. We have the answer to all the chaos and misery! And it goes through the cross.

We have something to sell that’s attractive and it works! All of Christian history proves it. And it doesn’t just work in our private lives or in churches, but it works for entire civilizations. Many Christians, and all secular people, don’t realize that what turned the ancient pagan world where, in Thomas Hobbes words, life was nasty, brutish, and short, into the modern world where it generally is not, was Christianity. Without God’s word, and God’s law, the gospel and the Holy Spirit, there would be no rule of law, no hospitals, no human rights, no universal education, no science or technology, no capitalism and wealth, and all the blessings that can bring, and much more. Secular culture, however, paints Christianity and God’s law as constricting when it is the most liberating thing that’s ever existed, in fact the only thing!

I’m currently reading a wonderful book that makes this case by an Indian named Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. If you’re wondering what it is we’re trying to do in the so-called culture wars (and politics and everything else), you’ll find what that is in this book. We’re not just trying to save souls so people can go to heaven when they die. Rather, we’re part of Christ’s charge and mission to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Before Jesus ascended into heaven to the right hand of God, he said all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, not just people. And this means, he says, teaching them everything he had commanded them. We need to get busy!

 

Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Nobody Wants to Die, But Nobody Wants to Get Old

Apr 20, 2023 | Culture

We recently visited relatives and spent some time with my wife’s mother and father who both live in elderly facilities, and also visited my mother who does as well. I don’t know how other people respond to being around a lot of older people, but it depresses me. Seeing people aging and their bodies having to endure the ravages of time is not something I can just blow off, like it has no implications for me and everyone around me. I know, they know, you know, we all know, they will be dead soon, but it’s not a pleasant topic to contemplate, so people, old and young alike ignore it. It’s even less acceptable to discuss openly, and if you do, people will think you morbid or negative.

For me, though, the topic is never far from my mind, and I have a story that is so indicative of that. When our granddaughter was about to be born (Jan. 22, 2022), I told my wife, “Just think, in 2100 she’ll be 78 years old!” And she replied, perfectly, “Can you just let her be born first!” It was hilarious. But as I told my daughter, who knows me very well, as soon as Eleanor was conceived, she was condemned to death. And given she isn’t shocked by my Woody Allen like obsession with death, she shook her head in lamentable agreement. But unlike the atheist Mr. Allen, for those of us who trust in the resurrection of Christ, death for isn’t the end, but only the end of the beginning of blissful life eternal with our Savior and all those who have preceded us in Christ. How do we know this? That’s a big question, but before I get to that, we need to establish that our mortality is something we need to think about all the time. I know, it’s a tough sell, but bear with me.

When I’m around much older people (I’m no spring chicken!), like in a retirement community, I don’t think about people much differently than if I’m in a restaurant in a chic part of Miami Beach, for example, where I’m surrounded by young, good looking “kids” in their 20s or 30s who are in great shape. It’s less depressing and easier to get sucked into the illusion that life isn’t a death sentence in such an environment, but it’s a lie, a bold-faced horrific lie that the devil uses to lead people to hell. I can hear Satan whisper in their ears, “Hey beautiful, hey, handsome, isn’t life great now? No need to worry about what happens after this life, get all you can, eat, drink, and be merry because, well, it’s fun!” I’m convinced most young people, I’d say prior to entering their 40s, are under the illusion that death happens to other people, not them. As Fraud argued, human beings cannot imagine their own deaths. It is, literally, inconceivable to us, unless that is, we are reminded of that fact, over and over and over again.

This widespread illusion in the modern world, or should I say delusion, is a “gift” of the secularism we’ve inherited since the seventeenth century Enlightenment. There have been many deleterious consequences of this movement in Western intellectual thought, but the most pernicious is related to epistemology, or how and what we can know. In our secular culture, thinking about or focusing on anything beyond this life is waste of time because, well, we really can’t know anything about it; we are bound, most people assume, to the physical world. This kind of thinking began to seep into the stream of Western thought with the work of Immanuel Kant (1774-1804). Simply put, Kant stipulated that there are two realms, one called the “noumenal realm,” and the other the “phenomenal realm.” The latter is material reality, the one we can know, while the former is the meta-physical realm (above, outside of the material), and beyond our ability to know. (Here is a great short video of R.C. Sproul describing how Kant paved the way for agnosticism, that we can’t really know, which is the faith choice of our age).

Given we are all drenched in a secularism that programs agnosticism into us from birth, most people figure why bother with that after life stuff; we can’t know it anyway, and it’s all guesses and “faith.” Which is why we need to remind ourselves, all the time, that death can find us at any moment. For example, no matter how well we take care of ourselves, what great shape we’re in, how perfect our bloodwork is, an airplane can fall on our house tomorrow, that’s it, we’re gone. Echoing Isaiah, the Apostle Paul says, “God gives all life and breath and everything else,” and he can take that breath anytime he pleases. So it’s best we approach life in humility and treat it as the precious gift it is, one for Christians that will continue forever, a life without pain, sorrow, sin, sadness or death. Yes, that is as inconceivable to us as our own deaths, but that is why faith (i.e., trust) is required, and there are an infinite number of reasons why this faith is justified.

In a recent post where I laid out some of the reasons that compel me to accept the trustworthiness of Christianity, I assert that “everyone lives by faith, which I define as  trust based on adequate evidence. I trust based on more than adequate evidence to me that Christianity is true.” The question is who and what will we trust. I trust the man who rose from the dead, who claimed he was “the resurrection and the life,” and that whoever believes in him will live even though he die, and whoever lives and believes in him “will never die.” Do you believe this? I do. And Isaiah 25 gives us a glimpse into what this promise will look like when it is fulfilled:

6 On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

9 In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

This is a program even Woody Allen should sign up for: no more death.

 

School Shootings: The Triumph of Secularism

School Shootings: The Triumph of Secularism

Mar 30, 2023 | Culture

It has happened again, this time at a Christian grade school in Nashville. When I first heard about it, and it was reported a female was the shooter, that didn’t compute. Women are never mass shooters. Then I learned this:

 Three adults and three children were killed and the shooter has been identified as a female, which has shocked many people. She was killed on the scene.

However, unfortunately, things turn even darker. The unconfirmed, but widely reported story is that the shooter is a biological female who identifies as a male. Her name is reportedly Audrey Hale.

The three children were nine years old, one the daughter of the pastor of a PCA church I believe was associated with the school. It is heart breaking and distressing. The Revolver piece I linked to above points out that people who suffer from gender dysphoria, or who are culturally bullied into it, are mentally ill. The woke left pushes the transgender mania as the civil rights issue of our time, and lives are destroyed, mentally, emotionally, and physically. But according to woke leftists, guess who the victim is in this tragedy? That’s a rhetorical question. There is reporting the shooter, who attended the school, was driven by resentment against Christianity. Supposedly she penned a manifesto the authorities have in their possession. We’ll see if they have the guts, and integrity, to release it. Resentment, anger, rage, hate, poison is what the left stokes 24/7, and not just against Christianity, but against any traditional value based on it, and anything associated with Christian Western civilization.

 

As I had finished this post I came across this video of Tucker Carlson on his show talking about how the trans movement is targeting Christians. It’s only nine minutes and I very much encourage you to watch/listen to it. It’s kind of shocking YouTube hasn’t deleted it.

I thought as I prayed for God’s comfort and grace upon that community, and repentance per Jesus himself as the proper response for those who don’t know him, I was angry. This didn’t used to happen in America! Then I thought of our church, which used to be a PCA church, calling for a prayer time last night. I appreciate that, and of course prayer is always necessary, but it’s not enough. I’ve heard our pastor and an elder/teacher disparage the so-called “culture wars,” and that always bothers me. Once in a sermon preaching on the importance of regeneration, the pastor said if we’re focused on the culture wars, we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Frankly, that infuriated me. It does so even more now as more senseless violence cut short three precious children’s lives, and three adults in the prime of their lives. Christians lost the culture wars, this is what happens. When Christianity’s influence dominated American culture, “school shootings” did not happen.

The regeneration of the human soul and fighting for the health and flourishing of American culture are not mutually exclusive goals, and I would argue, naturally compatible. Culture wars are not a distraction, but modern conservative Evangelical Christians tend to over spiritualize everything. The great Francis Schaeffer’s life and ministry was dedicated to fighting against a two-story Christianity, the upper story or spiritual reality, and the lower story, the mundane stuff of everyday life. In this take, the upper story is the important area of life where we should focus on spiritual, eternal things. The lower story is not spiritual and thus less important. There is a long history to why we are tempted to view reality and culture this way, Schaeffer even goes back to Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Arguably, it was the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century when saving souls became divorced from Christianizing culture. In fact, the saving of souls should lead to a culture becoming more Christian, whatever culture it is, wherever it is.

The great lie of secularism, however, is the myth of neutrality, that there is a space in culture and politics where religious values are irrelevant, unnecessary, and must be only private because they lead to antagonism and violence. In case we haven’t noticed, all secularism seems to give us is antagonism and violence. Not to mention how secularism gave us progressivism which eventually embraced cultural Marxism that we now call wokism. For decades the left accused conservatives and Christians with being obsessed about sex, about what goes on in people’s bedrooms. That’s a lie. It’s the left that has been obsessed with sex for almost sixty years. From the so-called “sexual revolution” to no-fault divorce to gay “rights” to redefining marriage and now the evil insanity of the transgender mania, it’s always about sex for the left

At the 1992 Republican National Convention Pat Buchanan gave what came to be called “the culture war speech.” He had run against President Bush in the primary because Bush came from the moderate wing of the Party, what we used to call Country Club Republicans. Culture War issues embarrassed them, and Buchanan would have none of it:

Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.

Even though Buchanan endorsed Bush, that wing of the party mocked and ridiculed Buchanan, along with Democrats and their media allies. Guess which word was used most against Buchanan? Divisive. Because he simply identified what had been a fact for decades, a worldview-religious war in this country, he was the bad guy, a narrow-minded religious bigot.

Less than seven years later we had the first of what has come to be called mass school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in April, 1999. According to that ABC news piece I linked to,

If a mass shooting is defined as resulting in the death of four or more people, not including the perpetrator, 175 people have died in 15 such events connected to U.S. schools and colleges.

Buchanan was mocked and ridiculed by American elites on the left and right, but he was absolutely correct: the contest in which we are engaged is for the soul of America. As he says, this culture war is about the kind of nation America shall be. It will either be a Christian nation, as we once were, or we will be a nation where we have to fear for the lives of our children every day we send them to school. There is no in between.

 

What is a Revival? Asbury And What Revival We Need

What is a Revival? Asbury And What Revival We Need

Mar 24, 2023 | Culture

There has been a lot of news recently about a revival at Asbury University, a Methodist school in Kentucky. In The American Conservative, Rod Dreher asks, “An extraordinary movement of the Holy Spirit at a Kentucky college chapel — is it for real?” By real he means “visceral experiences of the presence of God,” and he thinks as many do that this is a movement of the Holy Spirit and is real. I would tend to agree because I don’t feel qualified to determine whether what someone says is God moving in their being is real or not. But that is not my question here. I’m more interested in what revival accomplishes in the place in which it happens. I guess the question really is, is revival merely a personal religious experience, or does it have cultural implications. The answer should be obvious, but for many Christians it probably isn’t.

If we go back to the first great revival in history, and I’m not talking about the first Great Awakening in America in the 18th century, there were societal transforming implications. I’m speaking about the revival that started at Pentecost when God poured out his Holy Spirit because Jesus had accomplished redemption for his people and ascended to the right hand of God, according to the Apostle Paul, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” He also said Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” That means in this life, in this fallen world among fallen people in societies filled with such people.

If we go back to that first great revival we see the beginning of the transformation of Western civilization from fully pagan to Christian in seed form. We might even say mustard seed form. It took almost 300 years until the conversion of Constantine the Great for paganism to begin its slow demise as the dominant worldview in the West. By any measure, a modern person would have to agree the world produced by Christianity is far superior to the ancient pagan world.  Historian Tom Holland, not a Christian, wrote a book about this called Dominion. The subtitle makes the point: How the Christian revolution remade the world. That is what a revival does, it remakes the world. What does that look like? Read Holland’s book and you’ll find out. The spiritual war against paganism goes back to Yahweh calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and the Lord making a holy people for himself in Israel. God’s promises to Abraham would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ 2000 years later, and now His holy people is us!

When “the last days” came upon us with Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension, the war against paganism broke out of a small geographical area in the Roman Empire to encompass the entire earth. When that phrase “last days” is used, most Christians go right to Paul in I Timothy 1:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

Then they look at our culture and conclude this must be the last days Paul was referring to, and it is! But these indications of the last days have been with us in all recorded history. Have people gotten any better or worse in the last several thousand years? Obviously sinful human beings are every bit as sinful today as they’ve always been. But “last days” from a redemptive-historical perspective is the advance of God’s kingdom and the building of Christ’s church by the power of the Holy Spirit. We find prophetic descriptions of that throughout the Old Testament, but we find it defined in two important passages in the New. One is in the first Christian sermon given by Peter at Pentecost in Acts 2:

16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:

17 “‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
18 Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.

The other is the first few verses of Hebrews:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

And Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 what Jesus is now doing at God’s right hand, ruling

far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

These are the last days we inhabit. And Paul points out that the purpose of Christ’s rule is the Father placing all things under his feet appointing him to be head over everything for the church. As I often say, God is moving in a mighty way to advance his kingdom and build his church. These are two different things working in symbiosis for the good of God’s people and His glory. So real revival apart from the personal salvation and experience of individuals is going to change the culture in which it happens. Not immediately, but in due course. In addition to the mustard seed metaphor I linked to above, Jesus also used the metaphor of levin in a very large batch of dough. The influence and manifestation of both grow slowly but inevitably.

That inevitable growth is what we as God’s people are part of, and the result of true revival. When God gave man, male and female, and the first Adam, the dominion mandate, they failed. Whereas the last Adam most certainly did not. Christ is now taking dominion of His world through His body, which is in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit (Zech. 4:6). That means our Christianity influences everything we do, literally every single thing. From how we make a living, to how we raise a family, to how we do art, music, politics, business, law, science, health and medicine, entertainment, architecture, education, farming, gardening, everything. And there is no culture war that is not spiritual war. Our pastor once said those focused on the culture war are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. He isn’t alone in such sentiment, and he could not have been more wrong.

Christ came to save not just individuals so they could go to heaven, but the world itself, and people in it for a very specific reason. I’ll leave you with the Apostle John in Revelation 5:9-10 who tells us what that is:

9 And they sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
10 and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth.”

 

Matt Walsh, Voddie Baucham, The Trans Guy, and the Reality of Stigma

Matt Walsh, Voddie Baucham, The Trans Guy, and the Reality of Stigma

Mar 11, 2023 | Culture

I stumbled on the video below about the drama surrounding Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to some guy pretending to be a woman. You have to see this guy pretending to believe he is actually a sexy woman to believe it. Appropriate words fail when you encounter something so wrong. It’s like watching something so nauseatingly evil that you’re dumbfounded, literally struck dumb, unable to speak. Like watching old films from the end of WWII and the allies coming upon the death camps with piles of bodies, that kind of nauseating. What can you say about such a thing other than feel anger and disgust and a yearning for justice that feels like vengeance. No, I do not believe a transgender male pretending he’s a woman is in any way comparable to genocide. There are obviously gradations of evil, and while these two examples are significantly different on the scale, transgender sin is deeply evil and elicits in us revulsion, and it should!

The reason I decided to comment on this is because it’s a critical cultural moment for the church and America. I encourage you to watch the 13-minute video to better understand the issues I’m addressing. If you watch through to the end you’ll see a touching video of a girl who now wants to be called Mike reading a letter from her grandmother telling her she cannot do that because of Jesus, but affirming how much she still loves her. Walsh is the one who plays the video, so he’s not the heartless monster his critics say he is. Some of these critics while not saying he’s a “monster” do think his tone and words were unfortunate, not winsome, and basically counterproductive. I couldn’t disagree more because the two examples are apples and oranges: the dude playing the woman needs tough love, and the struggling young lady just needs plain old love, and guidance. This gets to the cultural issue.

 

The word stigma was dropped a long time ago as a remnant of a hostile and intolerant religious (i.e., Christian) past in America. The simplest definition:

An association of disgrace or public disapproval with something, such as an action or condition: synonym: stain.

Oh no, we certainly wouldn’t want to do that! Stigmatizing “the other” was so last century before we entered secular Utopia and became tolerant of others’ lifestyles in the 1960s. Now in American culture we’re tolerant of all lifestyle choices, and accept everyone for who they decide to “identify” as. Only, we’re not. Far from it. Let’s use a simple example of why this “narrative” is a lie.

What are the two most common criticisms of Christians? We hate homosexuals (we’re intolerant), now including trans people, and we’re hypocrites.  Even though the first one is demonstrably untrue, and the second one is true of every human being (nobody lives up to their own standards let alone those of a perfectly holy God), what do these accusation do to Christians? Why, they stigmatize them! We’ve seen a growing phenomenon over the last several decades that has become as obvious as a Mount Everest in our midst. Those who are supposedly the most tolerant among us are the most blatantly intolerant people imaginable. It was not too many years ago when liberals were, well liberal. Here is one definition of the word liberal that makes one laugh out loud thinking we used to call these people liberals:

Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym.

The most narrow-minded bigots in America today used to be called liberals. They are more commonly called progressives now, but any honest person would call them communists. As ex-communist and leftist David Horowitz has accurately said, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” This is an especially virulent form of communism, though, informed by a cultural form of Marxism, in popular parlance, wokism. This isn’t the old style communism a la Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s hit man who had a penchant for shooting people in the back of the head, but a more subtle form of political murder. In 2023 we call this cancel culture. Another word for this? Stigma.

In the olden days in America, women who got pregnant out of wedlock (what an antiquated word that is!) were stigmatized. Now this is perfectly normal. When I was growing up the phrase, “living in sin” meant two people not married were living together, and people actually used it. If you used that phrase today to anyone under 40, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. Divorce was an embarrassing reality for some families. A man not having a job and living on the government dole was a disgrace. Those who lived on the street were bums, not “homeless people.” People who got drunk often were drunkards, now their alcoholics and supposedly have a disease. And I could go on.

Now, everything in America has become morally inverted. What was once stigmatized and considered immoral, is considered perfectly “normal,” and morally good. What is stigmatized is anyone who questions the morality of such things, those who do are considered intolerant; they must not be tolerated! Free speech, speaking what you think, is now considered by our progressive, woke cultural elites as “dangerous.” If it goes counter to the accepted moral standards of the woke cultural elites, it is hate. How convenient.

Which brings me to the video and Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to cultural power to the trans guy who claims to be a sexy woman. What Walsh is doing it attempting to re-stigmatize what ought to be stigmatized. In the upside-down, inside-out world of progressive Alice in Wonderland, what should be stigmatized isn’t, and what should not be stigmatized is. There is no moral neutrality in the universe. The idea is a myth of the secular lie. Christians are especially susceptible to the lie because they often buy into the secular cultural stereotype of Christians as Big Meanies who hate “sexual minorities” or some such thing. Those in the video criticizing Walsh as a Big Meanie are blind or naïve, and have no wisdom about the brutality of spiritual warfare in a fallen world.

Which finally brings me to Voddie Baucham, the great Christian culture warrior. At 7:48 and 10:08 in the video, he tells us about the Eleventh Commandment Christian, a phrase I’d never heard before. These well-meaning Christians, he says, believe “that every problem in the world is a result of Christians not being nice enough.” Whenever the “controversial” topics around sex are brought up by Christians or Christian pastors, they die the death of “a thousand qualifications.” As an example, he uses Christian pastors preaching on adultery, and it’s spot on. Pastors would never qualify the evil of adultery so they don’t offend the adulterers in the audience, but on the topic of homosexuality, that’s a different story.

The importance of this cultural moment is that we have two choices as we encounter the cultural hostility to all things Christian the left hates, and that’s pretty much everything. We either call a spade a spade, even if some Christians think that’s “mean,” or the left will continue to try to stigmatize us out of existence. We must culturally re-stigmatize any sex outside of marriage, for example, among many other things. There is no “getting along” with the woke elite. As Ronald Reagan said about the Soviet Union when asked what victory would look like, he answered, “We win, they lose.” The mutually exclusive worldviews of cultural Marxism (wokeness) and Christianity cannot coexist.

The spirit of “the 60s” is at its cultural and political apex; it has no higher to go. But as I argued in my previous post, the fall of the left is inevitable because nothing built on lies can last. It is the examples of Matt Walsh and Voddie Baucham who show us the path to victory and the advance of the kingdom of God.