Snatching Souls from Sexual Sin, Part 2 | Snatching Souls from Sexual Sin

Selected Scriptures

There are those who think that they can chart a safe course through this culture of perverted sexuality by compromising with it. We’re seeing this in the LGBTQ phase of the modern sexual revolution, and I call it the LGBTQ phase. You could add QRSTUVWXYZ and you know, it’s all there, all that phase, this is only part four or 18 or whatever of a sexual revolution that was started many decades ago. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that now’s the time that it’s bad. It’s been bad folks. So we’re seeing in this current phase of the modern sexual revolution, there are professing Christians who are teaching people that it is perfectly legitimate and probably even helpful to refer to themselves as Gay Christians. They say it’s not only acceptable, but it’s even good to use the adjective, Gay or Lesbian or Transgender or whatever the term is as a defining characteristic of their identity as a Christian.

 December 3rd of 2021, an article was published in Christianity Today. It’s not my Christianity that they’re representing, but they are talking about something that’s going on in Christendom today, and they’re promoting this same view. They’ve been promoting it. The author, Becca Mason, she describes herself as a Gay Christian in an article titled, Side B Christians Like Me Are an Asset, Not a Threat.

If you’re not up to speed on, Side A, Side B language, Side A refers to those who claim that God makes people gay and he blesses their LGBTQ sins and lifestyles, okay? Side A. Side B differs from them, and it refers to those people who think they can walk a middle road. They say, oh yeah, that’s sin, but they try to distinguish between sexual activity and sexual identity. So the LGBTQ behaviors are sinful, but LGBTQ identities are not sinful. They’re actually in some cases even helpful because of our evangelism, because you can identify with those people better. So it’s fine to be a Christian and still identify with LGBTQ sins. So Gay Christian, Lesbian Christian, Transgender Christian, all okay, even good. Okay, so that’s Side A, Side B.

In her Christianity Today article, Mason says that she and others like her have an elevated sense of what it means to follow Jesus. In other words, and she says this, you can hear it throughout the article, this tone that she and others like her are better than people who don’t struggle with any of those temptations. She writes, “We stay in the church based on principle, not for abstract political gains in a mostly abstract language war.” End Quote. Is that what this is an abstract language war?

She’s bringing, with that kind of language, and that kind of viewpoint, and promoting those kind of views, she’s bringing disunity to the church. She’s using, us versus them, language. She’s promoting a tribalism based on identities, identity politics, that fractures unity, it doesn’t build it. Drop the adjectives. If you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian, period. She goes on to speaks disparagingly about good churches, saying quote, “It’s hard to be a gay Christian in a theologically conservative church.” End Quote. Number of things we could say about that, but listen. Good theology is exactly what people struggling with sexual sin need. Bad theology leaves them in their sin.

In reading that article, I want to believe that Becca Mason is simply misguided; her and others like her. I want to help her out of her gospel confusion, her ecclesiological and definitional confusion into true freedom through an unqualified identity in Jesus Christ and in him alone. I want to help her understand that adding adjectives like Gay to the word Christian is like carrying around the chains that bound you to your old sins.

This Side B compromise does not provide freedom, it keeps people shackled to a sexual perversion as an identity; so-called, middle ground, positions are always like that, they promise freedom, but they are built on compromise. Because of that, they’re always deceptive, and they keep people bound to sin and confusion and error, because freedom from sin is first and foremost a matter of defining sin as sin. Freedom comes from the truth, and you’ve got to define the truth, and clarify the truth, and understand the truth. Comes from understanding truth, defining sin as sin, and then repenting of sin, identifying with Christ and Christ alone.

It should be enough for us just to say, just look at the pattern that God set for sexuality in the first marriage. It should be enough for us to just say that. But due to the deception of Satan, the one who taught our first parents to second-guess God by asking, “Did God really say?” Well, because of that, and because we’re born in sin, and because we’re born with a proclivity towards sin, and because we always are born questioning God, and we grow up questioning God, God has been so gracious to respond to that not by snuffing us out immediately, but by providing more instruction. He’s been gracious to reinforce the marital blueprint of creation, and he does it by positive affirmation and by negative prohibition.

So negative prohibitions, for example, turn to Leviticus chapter 18. Leviticus 18. God told Moses to prohibit, write down laws that prohibit alternative forms of sexuality. They are, in God’s eyes, detestable, and abhorrent, and abominable sexual practices that were practiced among the nations of the world. So look at Leviticus 18, verse 1. “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying ‘Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, “I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan to which I’m bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes.”’”

So where you’ve come from and where you’re going, bad. Do not look to the culture as an example. We’re pretty good, aren’t we, at looking at other cultures and seeing differences, and we can see differences in practices in pagan lands, and we say, oh, that’s terrible. Boy they do that? Oh that’s, that’s awful. We need to take a very careful look at our own culture, because what’s been exported from this culture and around the world, well, frankly, let’s just call it what it is, it’s pornography, it is filth.

It was back in the 90s when I spent a little bit of time in the Middle East. I was talking to Muslims who said, yeah, of course we think that America is the great Satan. Why wouldn’t we? You undress your daughters and put them on big screens and little screens and you export it around the world. Couldn’t argue with that. I mean, they’re no better. They’re covered in hypocrisy and shame and guilt and stuff as well. Look, let’s not think we’re moral, Christian, because we come from this country. What we’ve been exporting from this country for decades has been vile. And so God says, verse 4, Don’t look at the culture you came from or the cultures you’re going into and want it. You keep away from that. “You shall follow,” verse 4, “My rules, and keep my statutes, and walk in them. I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a person does them, he shall live by them. I am Yahweh, I’m the Lord.” You know me by name.

As you keep reading, you see that verses 6 through 18 of that chapter forbids sexual contact among close relatives, sexual activity during a women’s menstruation, that’s prohibited in verse 19; sexual contact with someone else’s spouse is forbidden in verse 20. In verse 22, sexual activity among men is forbidden, by implication among women too. And in verse 23 sexual activity with animals is forbidden.

You go to the next chapter, Leviticus 19:29, and God forbids prostitution as well and that’s an interesting one because it’s talking about anything that would turn sex into a commodity. Anything that would monetize sex and turn it into a commodity, you have to objectify sex. You have to objectify the other person and treat them as nothing more than a tool. So I’ll say this: To objectify another human being, to treat another human being as nothing more than a means to an end, as a tool for genital stimulation, for self gratification, anything like that is rightly forbidden by God. How sad to treat another human being created in the image of God like an object, like a tool. So this principle obviously forbids pornography, as does God’s design for sex between a husband and a wife that forbids pornography as well.

Reflect on, just in a positive way, reflect on the beauty of sexual intimacy in marriage, especially in the Song of Songs. And you’ll notice in the Song of Songs, how the Song of Songs veils the beauty of sexual intimacy in the marital relationship. It uses images, and figures of speech, and metaphors, and pictures, nature and all the rest. It’s absolutely lovely. Carefully covers that which is meant to be kept private between a couple, what should be treated with careful and tender discretion.

By contrast, when God wants to portray the vileness of spiritual adultery, he uses sometimes the most graphic images of sexual immorality. Can see that in several chapters in Ezekiel. Pornography offers an evil, vile counterfeit to God’s good design for sex, not only by displaying on a screen all the vile practices, sexual practices that God forbids, but Romans 1:32 and Romans 2:3 condemns those who view that kind of thing and thus thereby approving of the sin. You say you don’t practice those kinds of behaviors. Really? Do you look at it? Through pornography, bearing guilt along with those who commit the physical acts. It’s terrible thing.

And there’s a more insidious evil at work in the sin of pornography. Pornography is a disembodied experience. Disembodied sexual experience. It defies what God intends for sex and marriage as embodied personal experience. Pornography is dehumanizing. Sex within the covenant of marriage, with its procreative design, is inherently humanizing, it’s procreative, it’s life affirming. Pornography is inherently self-centered, driven by lustful impulse to gratify the self. Marriage is totally the opposite of that, its intent is on pleasing one’s spouse, and it’s driven by love.

Pornography creates all kinds of false expectations based on lies and delusions, and it destroys other people. Sex in marriage is not that, it’s a very real and a practiced and a learned experience between a couple, a man and a woman where expectations are set lovingly and shaped tenderly.

There’s nothing degrading, nothing shameful in marriage, but for pornography and for all other extramarital sexual desires and behaviors, those that are practiced among the Egyptians and the Canaanites, those that are practiced among the sodomites and the Babylonians, those that are practiced among the Canadians and the Europeans and the Americans, all of it vile. God says in Leviticus 18:24, if you still in Leviticus 18, that they make people unclean. They are abominations before God. They are perversions of God’s good gifts and his perfect design.

Let me be clear about another point. Any thought, desire, fantasy, longing, imagination, any desire to do what God forbids or to refuse what God commands to do, these thoughts and desires are sinful as well. David writes in Psalm 36 verse 1 and verse 4, “Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart. There’s no fear of God before his eyes. He plots trouble while on his bed. He sets himself in a way that is not good. He does not reject evil.” Prophet Micah says same thing in Micah 2:1, “Woe to those who devise wickedness, who work evil on their beds.” Let’s acknowledge that, then, up front: It’s not just the physical act of sexual immorality that falls under divine condemnation. It’s also the imagination of it. It’s also the thinking about it, the fantasizing about it, the planning of it. The thought life is fully under the scrutiny of God as well.

It’s what Jesus tried to teach his people, the Israelites, in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5. You think it’s just the act? Oh no, no, no. Go down to the heart, the root of the act in the heart. That’s under God’s purview, even to be tempted by these sins. And we’ve all got to admit there’s a temptation in the heart of every single person here towards some of these sins, to be tempted by these sins. The fact that any sin, for that matter, is able to tempt us, that any sin, any covetous desire, is able to entice us or allure us, the fact that we are temptable, tempted internally by perversion, is a clear indication of our fallen condition, isn’t it?

There’s one who was never tempted like that internally. So we don’t ever want to say, well, to be tempted is human. No. The Lord Jesus Christ never tempted internally by any sin and he is the utmost of humanity. That’s who we want to be like, pure from the inside out and none of us are. Temptations reveal our need for deep regeneration. A conversion that doesn’t just deal with the outside, it deals with the soul. Temptations in and of themselves, on any matter that is against God’s command, reveals our need for repentance and faith, reveals our need for forgiveness, for cleansing, for complete and total redemption.

Back to Leviticus 18, Leviticus 18:30. God warns for our good there, he says, “Keep my charge never to practice any of these abominable customs that were practiced before you, never to make yourselves unclean by them. I am Yahweh your God.” And the reason why to do that? Two verses later, next chapter, Leviticus 19:2, “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” We’re not after happiness. We’re after holiness. If you put happiness before holiness, you’ll get neither. If you put holiness first, God will add happiness to your life as well.

Leviticus 20, God prescribes punishments for each of the sexual sins that he described in the earlier chapter. In the case of adultery, verse 10, incest, verses 11 to 12, homosexuality, verse 13, sex with a mother and her daughter, verse 14, and bestiality, verses 15 and 16, those sexual perversions, those are so serious, they bring such defilement, that they require the death penalty.

What’s the message here? What do we discern from that? What is God saying when he prescribes such severe penalties for Israel in these sexual sins? Message is this: Once these forms of sexual perversion take root among a people, it’s game over for that society. Sexual depravity signals the end of a culture, so God says, cut it off or else your whole culture is dead. So he prescribed the death penalty in Israel for some sexual sins: adultery, incest, homosexuality, sex with mother and daughter, bestiality, and the intent is to preserve Israel as a nation chosen from among the nations of the earth.

For the rest of the nations of the world, however, God hands them over to their sins, and he does that as a consequence of their idolatry. Turn over to Romans chapter 1, Romans chapter 1. And we see how God thinks about sexual sin with the rest of the cultures of the world, with the non-Israelite cultures. Same principle is true in Israel as well as other cultures. But in Israel they had a law that would deal with those things. In the rest of the world, the descent into depravity is evidence that God has handed a people over to the consequences of their idolatry. You can be sure that whenever you see sexual perversions prominent in a culture, i.e., as we’re seeing right now in Western culture, you can be sure that those cultures will not survive very much longer.

Look at Romans 1:18, “Wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes; namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, so they’re without excuse.

“For although they knew God, they didn’t honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking. Their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, and birds, and animals, and creeping things.” So God says, fine, you want to exchange me and my glory for the lesser glory of my creation? I’m gonna hand you over to it. There’s going to be an exchange of everything that’s good for everything that’s bad.

Should be no question that a society like ours, one that untethers people from divine authority, that denies the Bible’s origin story, one that claims human beings are nothing more than advanced animals at the end of a long chain of evolutionary processes, the product of blind chance who move from simple to complex, and we’re continually evolving. This is the argument of the transgender revolution, saying, “This is an evolution, this is the best me.” This is the secular myth that’s used to justify all kinds of animalistic, gross perversion.

The Bible condemns this myth, along with all other myths as “suppressing the truth.” Those who believe it, they refuse to honor God as God. They refuse to give him thanks. This myth, our myth, their myth, it’s a lie. Exchanging the glory of the immortal God for an illusion and imagination that’s nothing but futility, darkness, and folly. There are consequences for that, for embracing the lie. Look at verse 24. Therefore, God said you want to exchange me for that? Okay, I’m going to hand you over, “God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.”

What is that about? That’s about promiscuity, sex before marriage, sex outside of marriage. It’s about divorce and remarriage, and divorce and remarriage, and all the rest. It’s about adultery and porneia and all kinds of vileness. Why? Verse 25, because “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and they worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who’s blessed forever, Amen.” So God says, you wanna worship that? Have at it. Throw your whole body, soul into it. See what happens.

It’s not merely a punishment that’s intended, just rub their noses in it. It’s a punishment that rubs their noses for the purpose that they smell it, and it stinks, and they wake up and say, no more! Somebody save me from this body of death. When they don’t do that, verse 26, “For this reason, God gives them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for that’re contrary to nature, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

Some people say, see there’s AIDS right there. No, the due penalty for their error, what’s due, what is appropriate, what’s fitting for their error, is that they would look at mirror images of themselves and want that lustfully. God says again, you wanna worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator? You want to abandon me for the creation? You wanna be in love with yourself? Look in the mirror and that’s what you’re going to defile yourself with. That’s the due penalty. It’s degradation. I mean, diseases have been flowing through the heterosexual, homosexual community for decades, all the way since from the beginning of time. Flesh eating diseases and all the rest. It’s gross, it’s consequent, it’s connected. The due penalty of their error is, you love yourself so much and don’t love me? Fine, have at it.

What is the point? Why is God handing them over? To awaken them to their need for salvation. Notice that that language not only describes the acts of sexual immorality, the behaviors, it also describes the desires of the heart, the wanting to engage in immoral acts.

God’s Word makes it plain that every extramarital sexual desire, thought, behavior is sinful. It’s everything we’re seeing in our world today. Hits like a tidal wave, results in the destruction of culture, the dismantling of all society. Look what results when a people refuse to wake up and repent of sexual sin. Romans 1:28, “Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.”

Listen, you’re not a Gay Christian. You’re not in your own class. You’re not suffering your plight among the happy heterosexuals in your stuffy theological conservative church prison. You are a Christian. Your identity, praise God, is the same as every other Christian. Same! You’re in union with the same Lord Jesus Christ, and your salvation, like everyone else’s, is by the power of the Spirit of our God. You’ve been set free.