By Faith On Sex, Gender, God’s Glory, & Hope

 

Continuing our series.  

8. God uses our sex and gender struggles for His glory and our good.

We must understand that our experience of sex and gender is not always as God originally intended. All of us live with broken and misplaced desires. While these are difficult and sometimes strong, we are to endeavor to glorify God and experience the fullness of our humanity by living out biblical faithfulness in all areas of our lives, including sex and gender. 

 

True! However, the Bible in Romans 1 is very clear that the human body is not the epistemic warrant for worship & sexual ethics.    How so?  The natural teleological use of the Creation is to know & understand that God Himself is the only properly non-arbitrary epistemic warrant for faith & practice, life & living. 

Romans 1:19–20 (ESV): For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world.

***God’s*** image & authority define reality correctly, not **ours.***   When we run to the Created Order to do our theology of sex & gender & human sexuality via using our internal psychology or our anatomy & physiology as the epistemic warrant for faith & practice, we have abandoned the natural use of the Created Order in favor of its unnatural use.  

God does not reason from the state of the Created Order to His moral principles, so why would God instruct us to do such a thing?   When we stop using our own image & authority to underwrite faith & practice, we wind up with God prohibiting sexual activity & gender bending that is cultic in nature only. There are no moral commands to refrain from contending with God & neighbor over sex & gender regardless of your motives.  Neither are there any moral statements relative to homosexual behavior regardless of our motives. 

God says that the way is narrow that leads to life, & broad is the road leading to destruction.  Testing ecclesiastical tradition & abandoning it based on the correct exegesis, exposition, understanding, & application of Scripture - refraining looking to our internal psychology & intuition to warrant our ethics, & eschewing deploying our own image (anatomy & physiology) & authority - constitute the Narrow Way.    

When we do that, we avoid the pitfalls of Situational Ethics in which two sets of people appealing to ecclesiastical tradition, human intuition, & human anatomy & physiology reach 2 different conclusions & then go to war sociopolitically & set about destroying each other & society in the process. That’s the road to angry religious bigotry & looking for ways to avoid obedience to Matthew 5:41 & living by way of Situational Ethics. 

In so doing, we recognize that when God does not rescue us from battling these broken desires, He is at work to redeem us and to walk with us through our struggles.

The Charleston Presbytery & others in the PCA should take note of that last sentence, because the author is absolutely correct.  Instead of calling for an Inquisition to root out those whose sanctification isn’t up to snuff, they ought to have been less merciless.  

If an elder or elder candidate views his sexuality as a besetting sin like Chris Yuan, then he’s unqualified - but sanctification is not designed by God to be ideal as if we are all on an upward climb. How so?Sanctification, even for elders, is a messy business. 

If a PCA elder like Ben Milner or Austin Pfieffer of Salem Presbyterian in Winston-Salem can talk about their personal struggles honestly within their Session or from the pulpit by way of admitting that they are too competitive or they’ve had an epiphany about race, that’s called honesty & applauded.  After all, parishioners ought to know their elders are flawed, not “Superapostles.”  

However, if the elder is an elder in AL who teaches the tradition bound view of human sexuality from his pulpit & is anything other than heterosexual (or at least silent on his sexuality), he is viewed as less than heterosexual &, in some circles, less than a “real man.”   Moreover, in the PCA, they will come for him & deny him office. 

They say it’s not about keeping up appearances,  

but if an elder behaves as described above, the conversation turns toward the way describes himself.   Elders shouldn’t do that.  Never admit your moral failings…yet Paul wrote,

1 Timothy 1:15 (ESV): The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. 

9. God is with us in our struggles as we wait for them to end

The good news is that God in His grace offers redemption and restoration to all those who confess and turn from their sexual sin, seeking His mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ. We know, too, that living the life of Christian discipleship in this still-sin-marred now-but-not-yet-fully-realized kingdom of God is always difficult. It requires sacrifice and involves continued self-denial and struggle. Yet, as disciples of Jesus Christ we live and struggle with great hope as we await that final and full rescue we’ll know when Jesus Christ comes again to restore all things for all eternity, including sex and gender! (Revelation 21 and 22)

All true, but given the faulty, unsound reasoning processes that a great many Christians are deploying these days & the cycle of mutual distrust & war that has even resulted in Sinclair Ferguson of all people being abused by his peers, I fear we are all going to be held deeply accountable for teaching the traditionbound perspective, doctrinaire propagandizing that runs through a great many parachurch organizations, & the politicization of psychology & public health, we are going to be surprised by what God says.  It’s going to be really embarrassing if it turns out that there are people born a particular sex & socialized to adhere to particular gender norms & roles who wind up being biologically not their birth sex nor the gender expression into which they were socialized as children. 

10. There is help for you when you struggle with sex and gender

In Romans 7, the Apostle Paul tells us about his first-hand struggle with sin. His struggle is so great that he even cries out, “What a wretched man that I am!” But he also knows who to run to. He asks, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And then he answers: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” God is with us in our struggles. That’s why we can never stop running to Him. Never stop immersing ourselves in God’s Word. Run to it. Live in it. Engage with it when you are alone and when you are with your Christian friends. Whenever you feel Satan trying to derail you, run — RUN! — to Jesus and God’s Word to remind yourself of what God has really said. There is grace, strength, hope and forgiveness for all who turn from their sin and put their trust in Jesus Christ.

True, & because God says we need Him to properly understand the objectively true state of affairs, we need to learn how read, understand, & apply God’s Word.  The tradition bound view falls apart when we deploy sound reasoning & exegetics.  We need to teach children & teens - all people, really - how to read & interpret the Bible correctly. 

This bears repeating…

God says that the way is narrow that leads to life, & broad is the road leading to destruction.  Testing ecclesiastical tradition & abandoning it based on the correct exegesis, exposition, understanding, & application of Scripture, not looking to our internal psychology & intuition to warrant our ethics, & eschewing deploying our own image (anatomy & physiology) & authority constitute the Narrow Way.    

When we do that, we avoid the pitfalls of Situational Ethics in which two sets of people appealing to ecclesiastical tradition, human intuition, & human anatomy & physiology reach 2 different conclusions & then go to war sociopolitically & destroying society in the process.  That’s the road to angry religious bigotry & looking for ways to avoid obedience to Matthew 5:41 & living by way of Situational Ethics.