Alan Dunn
We’re going to continue in our examination of culture and what we believe to be our biblical responsibility, as shepherds, to make analysis of the cultural landscape, the social climate, and the societal climate in which our people live and work. So, with that topic once again before us, in this hour, let’s bow and ask the Lord to give us instruction.
Our Father, we come thanking You that You give to us light from Your Word that illuminates the path before us, that we might walk in obedience in every sphere of life. We pray, in particular, for discernment, and that we might accurately assess the workings of the Evil One; that we might accurately understand and refute the teachings that come from the doctrines of demons; that we might yet recognize man as Your image, fallen in sin, deceived. Father, that we, with the love of Christ, that we would reach into the lives of our fellow citizens with some sense of understanding as to why they think as they think and why they act as they act. Lord, that we might be faithful ministers of the Gospel, faithful to men’s souls. Grant us Your grace, in this hour, as we continue to examine the landscape of today’s modern culture. We pray that we would have wisdom that comes from above, that we might live and labor with fruitful service to Christ in whom we pray. Amen.
Well, yesterday we considered culture, as well as the matter of life in two kingdoms. We saw that when the Scriptures talk to us concerning powers and principalities, that we are dealing with the Spiritual dynamics that influence cultures and societies. We looked at the basic questions that comprise a worldlife view, and we saw that all cultures have at least three main components to them. They all present their citizens with an ultimacy, some transcendent in relation to which they are living that gives some definition to what life is, some code of ethics. If you’re going to pursue that ultimacy, that transcendence, there’s going to be a way of living that’s accepted and not accepted, and then there is, of course, an eschatology. There’s a goal for which you are living, there’s a hope to which you are driven.
We saw that there are two kingdoms. There is the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. We learned about the redemptive history that the Scriptures teach us of. Even last night, Pastor Meadows, in dealing with the whole issue of the social media, he sought to address that subject in the context of redemptive history: of Creation, Fall, and then again of redemption and ultimate consummation. So, how do we approach any aspect of culture in our life? We find ourselves within the context of those foundational perspectives of Scripture. We learned that we live in a world of tension. The world of man, the kingdom of man that is visited with both common curse and common grace, but ours is the kingdom of God, which is explicitly a redemptive kingdom. That kingdom has been revealed through the course of time as God has dealt with His servants through covenants, through the course of redemptive history, culminating now in the New Covenant in which we live in union with Christ.
We learned something, briefly, about the three main institutions of society. That there is the church, the family, and the state, and that we, as disciples of Christ, as those who are citizens of Heaven, are to bring resurrection life into those various areas of our lives. We are to bring resurrection life and love and gospel truth into our marriages and our families. We are to bring resurrection life and gospel truth in dealings with society and our jobs and our interactions with our fellow men. We are particularly identified as those citizens of the kingdom in our worship as a new creation, a new man, as a new people who are the church of Christ. In this hour we’re going to look at some issues concerning contending with culture for Christ. We’ll look around at some of the things that are threatening us, and look, at the end at our time, at one phenomenon in particular that I think is very urgent for us to deal with in a way that is sensitive to Scripture or insensitive to men in their sin.
There’s a lot of things that are changing in our day. We could talk about the geopolitical changes that are occurring as America no longer is taking that place of prominence in the world’s stage, and Russia, China, Iran, becoming far more prominent on the geopolitical stage. Did you know we’re almost out of antibiotics? Did you know that the medical world is frantic? We’re concerned that if we don’t find some new antibiotics to deal with bacteria we could be back to a pre-penicillin day. We could be moved back to a time of dealing with diseases and sicknesses that we haven’t known in over a century.
There’s a lot of things that really concern us in a changing world roundabout us, and we could become so frightened, running around with our hair on fire and just frightened at everything! We have to remember: the biggest enemy to faith is fear. Our concern is to deal with those speculations and every lofty thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God that Paul tells us about in 2 Corinthians 10:5. We enter into the arena of spiritual warfare with the weapons that are powerful, from God, for the destroying of fortresses and for bringing every thought captive in obedience to Jesus Christ.
So, I want us to come to some understanding of how the mindset of our day is presently going through some changes, moving from what has been called “the Enlightenment” or “the modern period” to the postmodern or after the modern period. There’s a shift, and we’re experiencing it in the various people that come into our churches: that there are perspectives and assumptions and values that are imported into the church, and then we’re judged by those values. It’s helpful for us to understand why that is. We’re talking about, as we said last time, that German word the zeitgeist, it’s the spirit of the age. It’s a common way of looking at life, a common philosophy, a common value system that permeates any culture at any given state of its history.
In all of those things, apart from the kingdom of God, we’re dealing with thought systems of fallen men. We—as Christians, even with renewed minds—we must learn to take every thought captive in obedience to Jesus Christ. We must endeavor to focus in upon the importance of the mind and the thinking and informing our judgements that we’re to have our minds renewed in the Scriptures, by the power of the Spirit, so that we can learn to think biblically and to perceive biblically.
Paul tells us that we have the mind of Christ, but we are, nonetheless, influenced by the climate of the day and by the values and the mindset of the culture in which we find ourselves. Not everything about common-grace culture, not everything about the kingdom of man, if you will, is bad! There’s an awful lot about common grace and there’s an awful lot about culture that we can affirm, as Pastor Meadows did when he talked about social media. He said it’s a gift from God. It’s a good thing, and we can use it, as Christians, wisely. It’s part of common grace; it’s part of that creative product of man as image of God. We can find a lot, as well, that’s not very good. We need to have discernment. We need, as Paul prays in Philippians 1: 9-11, to have all discernment so that we may approve the things that are excellent. So, when we look at this transition from what is called modern era, or the Enlightenment as it’s transitioning into the postmodern era, we can find things in the Enlightenment, in that mindset, in that philosophical approach, that we can agree with and say that yes, indeed, in common grace there is a truth that is articulated.
Likewise, also, in the postmodern perspective. There will be things that we can see from those articulating a postmodern perspective, especially in their critique of the Enlightenment, that we can concur with. But, both of these systems that have characterized Western thoughts, in recent days, are systems that are rooted in fallen minds, in minds that are not harnessed by the Scriptures and are not regenerated by the Holy Spirit. So, we’re dealing, in both instances, with a worldview that is intent upon rebellion against God and against His Word. If you are going to consider man in his rebellious orientation toward God, you look at man at the point of the Fall. Creation, Fall, redemption, consummation. Here we’re looking at man at the point of the Fall.
We see man coming to that tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, having been told not to eat of it, under the threat of death. He is an immature but innocent son of God, and now he is preyed upon by this lying, speaking animal that is animated by Satan. He’s enticed that if he were to disobey, being like God, he would then know and have knowledge and his eyes would be opened. I can’t explain it, it makes absolutely no sense, but Adam took the fruit and ate, and his eyes were opened. His eyes were opened as a dead man, and he saw a world now encompassed with death, a world that had now fallen into a curse. If we look at man at the point of his taking of the fruit, I think there you see the mentality of the Enlightenment. He is autonomous, “I can know like God! I can be law unto myself! I can be god unto myself! I have the assumption that my eyes will be opened, and all I need is the knowledge of whatever is out there.”
The Enlightenment is arrogant man grabbing the fruit for the prospect of having the supremacy of his knowledge, the supremacy of reason. Well, postmodern man—that’s Adam after he’s eaten the fruit and he’s opened up his eyes and he realizes, “I’m no longer connected to anything here. This death has separated me from everything. I look at myself and I’m naked!” For the first time in human existence, it’s as though a man can stand outside of himself and make himself an object of his own inspection. Divided even within his own psychology! He looks at his wife and says, “She’s naked.” He looks at the animals and the plants.They’re in rebellion, one of them’s talking and he hasn’t done anything about it.The plants which were to be harvested and to be used for the glory of God now become a barricade to keep God away, and he builds a fig leaf in order to separate himself from his wife and refuses the mandate that God had given to him. He hides behind a tree and builds a fortress against God by the plants, because now he is separated from God. He runs and he hides, and everything is disconnected, everything is separated, everything has fallen apart.
The one who was the namer, who would give names, who would give words, and his words connected to external reality and his words had meaning and significance. Now he finds himself in a situation where his words don’t seem to have the same connectivity, and his knowledge falls in on itself. It becomes disoriented from within himself and to the world outside of himself. That’s my basic understanding of modern man/postmodern man. The arrogant man who’s going to grab knowledge, and the postmodern man who, after he has eaten, discovers that he can’t hardly know anything anymore.
The Enlightenment grew out of the Renaissance, the Renaissance had already put man at the center of all things. You remember the circle with the pentagram, man standing with its five extremities? The Enlightenment began in the mid-seventeen century, the emphasis was upon scientific discovery. It was a rebellion against religious knowledge, based in revelation that was housed particularly in the Roman church. The medieval man, as Anselm said, “I believe that I may understand.” The enlightened man says, “I believe what I can understand.” Medieval man submitted his reason to revelation. Modern man submits revelation to his reason, and he looks back upon the medieval man and says, “He lived in the Dark Ages, we’re now enlightened. Reason is going to be our new Bible.”
Characteristics of the Enlightenment are many; I suggest four. That reason is superior to superstition. Man can know and control this external world, there is objective truth to be known and to be controlled. Nature and natural law displaces God and divine law. The world is a machine, we just have to figure out how the laws—how the mechanisms work, and then we can control it for our own betterment. Because man, thirdly, is autonomous, he is law to himself. The Enlightenment was, in many ways, a rejection of the Calvinistic view that man is inherently evil or depraved. The Enlightenment says, “Oh no, no, no! Man is good! Man is good! All we need is to learn how to control the mechanisms of nature roundabout us, and we can lift ourselves up by virtue of our newly acquired knowledge and our innate goodness.”
Then there is this belief in optimism, this optimistic belief in progress: things are naturally, continually getting better. Science, technology—we’re going to build a utopian society, because things inherently get better and better. They naturally progress toward that which is an improvement. It is called “the dialectic.” It’s a dominant concept of the Enlightenment thinking: that A merges with B, they come together and advance to a new level of C that emerges with D, that comes together and matches to a level of E, and you keep getting these movements, this dialectical movement that progresses on to higher and better.
Hegel promoted the dialectic of spirit and philosophy, Karl Marx promoted the dialectic of materialism, and Charles Darwin promoted the dialectic of biology. That was the mindset. It became characteristic of the church, as well. The missionary movements and all of those 19th century/20th century phenomenons—it was a commitment of progress, a commitment of moving to something better. There was this thing called World War I that came along, and then after that World War II. As I said to you yesterday, it was after World War II theologians started to scramble as to how could that happen, where an entire culture could be deceived by this slick orator and be convinced that the holocaust and the wiping out of an ethnic group of people had virtue to it. What is that? Theologians started to say, “Ah, that’s the powers and principalities; those are the activities of the demonic.” That was a very unenlightened thing to say, but you see, by the 20th century, modernity and the enlightenment were beginning to wobble, beginning to get weak.
Postmodernism means after the modern period. It’s more of a mood, it’s more of an attitude. I’m not talking about a B attitude, I’m talking about a bad attitude. It’s an attitude of rebellion; it’s an attitude that is deeply cynical. You can be characterized by a suspicion of reason. Where the enlightenment-elevated reason—postmodernism is suspicious of reasons, capability, of understanding everything. It doesn’t have confidence that there is, indeed, an objective truth that can actually be understood by man’s mind. When you consider those three elements of the ultimacy and the ethic and the eschatology of a culture, postmodernism looks at the ultimacy and says, “It’s whatever you want it to be.” So, you get the concept of pluralism: every religious notion has equal legitimacy, as well as no religious notion. “You want a God? You want an Atheist? It’s all the same, whatever works for you.” It’s the pluralistic view of ultimacy. So then, when you come to the area of a standard, an ethic, well, that becomes relativism. It’s all relative to what it is you want to live for. “If it’s good for you, that’s fine as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody.” Which I don’t understand, because maybe it’s good for me to hurt somebody.
Then, when it comes to the matter of eschatology, well, that’s where we become very very depressed. That’s where we become very sad, because we really don’t know if history’s going anywhere. We really don’t know that there’s a goal or a purpose or an ultimate. “So, let’s just eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die, and what’s on TV?” There’s also not only a suspicion of reason, but a suspicion of science and technology. The postmodern mind is much more open to the idea of spirituality and the idea of the mystic. After all, what did science give to us? The atomic bomb! After all, what has our technology brought to us? Global warming and pollution! Yet, with this apprehension about technology, the postmodern man is always on the social media.
Then, in particular, this matter of words—this characteristic of the postmodern mind—he does not like words. He advances what’s called literary deconstructionism. He, like Adam after eating the fruit, he realizes his words don’t connect anymore. His words don’t work, they don’t explain himself and they don’t connect to the outside world and he’s separated from any sense of meaning that can actually be named, and so, he’s suspicious of words. He thinks words are actually tools of tyranny. “If you are giving me a definition, and telling me that that definition of the word has to be embraced by me, I think you’re trying to manipulate me, you’re trying to tyrannize me.”
Words, if they mean anything, they only mean something within the circle of your interpretive community. You can only speak common vocabulary with the subset group with whom you identify, maybe your race or your gender or your sexuality. Those words only have significance within the particular story of your group, and there’s all kinds of stories. There’s no one big story. See, what we would say, “There’s Creation, Fall, redemption, consummation, and that’s the big metanarrative, the one-overarching story.” The postmodernist says, “There’s no such big story, everybody has a story. What’s your story? Now, don’t judge your story, because it has just as much legitimacy as my story or his story.” They like narratives; they don’t like propositions; they don’t like assertions.
So, when you look at knowledge it all depends. It all depends on what your ethnic group is. It all depends on what your particular community is. So, you’re not just going to study history, you’re going to study black history or you’re going to study feminist history or you’re going to study some other subdepartment. You’re not going to study history, you have to make it relative to everybody’s different perspective on what is transpiring. In a certain sense, brethren, as a Christian we can embrace so much of that, because we bring a truth which is absolute into the story of everybody. We bring that truth to every man, tribe, people, and nation whose backgrounds and cultures all differ. Each one brings that truth into their particular setting, and we recognize particular settings. But the postmodern man does not recognize a truth that is relevant to every particular setting. So, the mood of postmodernism is anti-authority, it is an intellectual violation of the fifth commandment. It does not like the exercise of authority. Doctrinal assertions, propositional statements, those things are tyrannical. Definitions that have objective meaning, that’s just not allowed. Any institution that conveys authority is suspect, because somebody’s doing something to manipulate, somebody’s doing something to gain control. Authority is always not to be trusted, because it’s tyrannical.
So, anti is the mindset of the postmodern. So, when you are opening up your Bible—and we haven’t done that yet—but when you open up Matthew chapter 7 and you’re preaching the words of Jesus Christ, they get suspicious. Hearing the words of Christ in Matthew 7:28-29, “When Jesus had finished these words, the crowds were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes”—you get visitors that come into the church and they hear you preaching the Word of God with an intensity of passion, with an expression on your face that’s serious. You may move your body in such a way that is communicating to them in automacy and determination, and they look at that and say, “I don’t like that, that man is doing something bad.” They hear the tone of authority, they put it in reverse and they’re immediately suspicious of it. They’re more into stories, they wouldn’t like confessional statements: London Baptist Confession of 1689.
For the postmodern: “we like the stories, and we’re able to live with contradictions that hold together. We build our knowledge on fragmented snippets of things. You see, we experience life like we watch television: in little bits and portions that’s interrupted with commercials. We live our life surfing on our social media, and we download a video, we look at a video and say, ‘This video is going to take 6 minutes and 18 seconds, who’s got that kind of time? I’ll watch one for two minutes maybe.’” A little thing, and then next a little thing, and then next a little thing, and it’s fragmented, disconjuncted, disconnected. So, knowledge is more impressionistic, it’s more fuzzy, it’s more oriented towards feelings, as opposed to definitive, propositional statements. You learn more by watching videos than you do by reading books. The postmodern man is much more with the eyes than he is with the ears. It’s very hard for him to pay attention to speech. Words don’t come easy to him, and to follow logical propositions and statements. It’s too rigorous. He needs a commercial break.
He’s opposed to organized religion, you see, because it’s an authoritative imposition. He would prefer spirituality over religion. He values relativism and pluralism. Every perspective is legitimate, not one is supreme. For you to assert that there is an absolute truth, that there is only one God, the postmodern would say, “Well, you’re an idolater. You’re not allowing the gods of all men to be validated. You’re idolatrous.” It’s a twist! The postmodern god really is himself. His worship is self-olatry. He’s opposed to structure and tradition. He values spontaneity and freedom. He doesn’t like tradition. He doesn’t care if this has been around since 1689 or whenever. He wants what’s immediate; he wants what is now. He’s not impressed by the fact that generations previously have always interpreted a certain thing the way they’ve always interpreted it. “So what if marriage has always been between one man and one woman for millennia?” That doesn’t make any difference to the postmodern. That doesn’t carry any weight with him. He’s at free. He doesn’t have to be bound by traditions.
He likes community. In fact, he’ll form churches that give more emphasis on community than doctrine. Doesn’t matter what you believe, just as long as you feel part of the group. At root is a suspicion, a doubt, a cynicism that leads the thinking postmodern to nihilism: that life is truly meaningless. So the best way to get through whatever this is is to just courageously capitulate to death and own up to it. So, your fun now consists of how close you can get to death! You throw yourself mountains with little wings underneath your arms. You see what extreme sports are doing, and it seems that the best thing you can do in life is to get right next to death. And you just courageously embrace it.
Nietzsche wrote about Zarathustra. Zarathustra was his literary Übermensch, his “Superman”. He was the man that was able to come to terms with the fact that God is dead. Zarathustra is walking one day and he comes up to this shepherd, and the shepherd is holding a poisonous snake and he can see that the snake has just bit the shepherd’s neck, and he realizes that the man has been poisoned. The shepherd starts laughing hilariously, demonically, and he takes the snake and bites its head and starts laughing. Zarathustra, Nietzsche says, “I want to learn how to laugh like that. I want to learn how to bite the head off the snake, drink its poison, and laugh in its face while I die.” It’s a very cynical, very depressing outlook on life. “You just have to do it,” Nietzsche says, “by your will to power, by the strength of your determination.”
Donald Carson, in his helpful book The Gagging of God, writes, “At its root, postmodernity is deeply anti-authoritarian. Having elevated self to the place where God no longer is needed, self now proclaims that language is inadequate to talk about that objective reality, God included. Having damned interpretation for being manipulative, God, if He were to speak, becomes the arch manipulator. The gagging of God is complete. From a Christian perspective, this is not simply misguided, but lurks tragically at the heart of all that is evil.” And that’s the postmodern mind. “You can speak, you can speak, you can speak, he can’t speak. God is gagged, because He doesn’t comply with our standards. He says things authoritarianly. He says things like He’s the only true God. He says things that are true for everyone, and that does not meet with the postmodern mindset. We have to shut Him up. We have to silence God.”
Now, the second point has to do with the Christian in the midst of the cultural flux. There is a one-size-fits-all gospel, brethren, but there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach in response to culture. We have to have discernment about how we interact with our culture, by understanding what the culture’s disposition is towards us as Christians. In 1951 Richard Niebuhr wrote a book, called Christ and Culture, in which he presented five different stances of Christians in relation to culture. He talks first of Christ against culture, where the Christians use culture as pervasively fallen, it’s evil, we-don’t-want-anything-to-do-with-culture. Or the Christ of culture, where Christianity so accommodates culture that Christ can become the representative of the values and virtues of that culture. You have Christ above culture, where Christ is seen as disconnected, but sovereign and acting over and through culture. You have Christ and culture in paradox or in tension, in which believers enjoy the residual goodness of common grace while yet contending with culture’s pervasive fallenness. Then Christ as the transformer of culture, where Christians approach culture in order to change the culture, to redeem the culture.
How are we to respond to our culture? It depends, brethren, and here I might sound like a postmodernist. It depends on any given culture, at any given time, relative to their perspective on Christianity, and that’s determined by the extent to which common grace is in any given culture. The more common grace that is found in a culture, the more that culture will find itself aligned with the morality and the values that at least echo biblical truth, and, thereby, that culture will be more accepting, if not even approving of the church and its testimony. The more common grace, the better it is for special grace. The less common grace—now you have a situation in which the morality, the ethics of the culture will be adverse, will be in conflict with biblical morality, and, as a consequence, will not be accepting and will not be welcoming to the biblical religion of the church.
I remember when I was a young pastor, and I had a woman that came for counseling. I recognized that she was in a situation in which she had gotten herself by virtue of her sin, and her conscience was bothering her. So I opened up Hebrews chapter 12 and spoke to her about our Heavenly Father. “We had earthly fathers who disciplined us for our good, so to our Heavenly”—and I, out of the periphery of my eye, I see her shaking her head no. I say, why are you shaking your head no? She says, “My father never disciplined me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I can’t comprehend God as a God who disciplines me in love, because I did not have the benefit of a common grace family, where there was a father who disciplined me in love.” The absence of that common grace limits and cripples that person’s ability to understand the workings of saving grace.
Marriage. When there is a culture that enforces and encourages marriage, there is going to be a better understanding of Christ’s relationship to His church. When you have a culture that supports a good work ethic, you’re going to have a better economy, you’re going to have a better understanding of the God who created all things and who works and who is active. Not like—as Pastor Meadows said—Allah, the god of Islam, who’s not personal, who’s not involved. He’s a monad, he’s just some distant, abstract entity. If there is, in the culture, just laws and equitable punishment for criminals, there’s going to be a setting in which the doctrine of justification is going to be better understood. But where common grace errodes, well then, culture’s conscience hardens.
If you look at your Bibles to 1 Timothy chapter 4, it’s very significant that Satan’s strategy of attack is not directly at the points of saving grace, but at the points of common grace. In 1 Timothy 4 Paul says in verse 1, “The spirit of explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer.”
What is Paul saying? When you have doctrines that attack the integrity of marriage, doctrines that build an ethic around diet regulations, those are the things that God established in Creation. The Evil One can confuse man at the bottom foundation of who he is as image of God and what the nature of God’s good Creation is, then he sets himself up to attack the truth as it is in Christ. Doctrines, teachings, propounded from the demonic liars that bring a culture to the place that our culture has become! Where we no longer understand the definition of the word marriage! We no longer understand the definition of the word family! We have teachings that advance doctrines contrary to God’s common grace goodness of who we are in our common humanity.
Now, all cultures, to varying degrees, have manifestations of common grace and common curse. Islamic cultures extensively violate the ninth commandment. Truth is trampled in the streets. They extensively, generally, have a poor work ethic. The fourth commandment: “six days you shall labor and do all your work.” Very bad work ethic, extensively, but strong family values. At least, in appearance, a strong and hospitality ethic. The West? We are extensively in the violation of the seventh commandment. We are a sexually impure people, but, by and large, we have a good work ethic. Cultures differ in their ethics, as it reflects God’s common grace.
D. A. Carson writes in his book Christ and Culture Revisited that you can’t approach culture one-size-fits-all. He says, “Culture frequently ignores Christ and Christians. Sometimes cultures explicitly contradicts Christ and Christians. Sometimes culture persecutes Christ and Christians. On occasion, culture very selectively approves or disapproves Christ and Christians, and the response of the Christian correspondently must adapt sometimes wisely, sometimes unwisely, to such varying cultural stances.” So, you want to ask yourself: what of common grace is enforced and supported in our culture? That’s a platform upon which to speak to a man’s conscience, and to bring him into the orbit of the gospel.
When we come to the issue of authority and the issue of the government, we’re to have a Romans 13 disposition towards the government. It’s a minister of God. It’s established by God, but we’re also to be aware of a Revelation 13 possibility: that the beast of the sea, the religious authorities, joins with the beast of the land, the civil authorities, and combine together to make oppositions against biblical, Christianity; and, again, that’s what you see in Islam. It’s perverse theocracy. It’s the union of religious authority with civil state authority. In Pakistan, the Christian fears opposition that’s going to emerge from the Muslim population. That mindset that is going to infiltrate the state, which is supposed to give Christians their civil rights and their civil liberties, but the problem is the religious mindset that can come out from the population. In China it’s different. In China the opposition comes from the state down, and it’s the authorities that you have to be concerned about, as a Christian there. They view Christianity as a threat, because of its eschatology. You see, Marxism has eschatology. It’s driving everything to its materialistic utopia, but Christianity says, “No, our eschatology is the return of Christ.” That’s an ideology that threatens the government.
So you have to assess the government and the culture and its values. The challenge for us is how we are to gain balance in a time that we live in, in which there is such rapid flux and change, and we need to be aware of the kind of culture that we live in. Now, in America—American Christians are really getting disoriented, because God has blessed this country and this culture in a very unique way. There have been two, maybe three, substantial times of revival in American history. The Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and many would point to the Jesus movement of the mid-twentieth century. There is an extensive—used to be anyway—an extensive knowledge of Scripture, and some concept of the truth. Those blessings of God upon our culture has even confused many Christians to the place where they think that America somehow is a Christian nation. Now, you’re appeasing the Reformation, but that was in the 16th and 17th century. There are other parts of the world where there hasn’t really been a time of revival that we have seen in our state, in our country.
We’re disoriented, we’re seeing a Judeo, Christian value system and a legal structure being discarded. Christians can become disoriented, because they forget that to be a Christian means to live the resurrection life, and we get too concerned when we connect our Christianity to our culture and our culture starts to change and throwing off Christian values. We get disoriented, and we should remember that we are of the kingdom of God. We get concerned, because we see things that are changing, and the culture’s view of the church is becoming more confrontational, more adversarial. Don’t be surprised if we soon see our tax exemptions leaving us. There are a lot of factors that go into answering the question “what’s happening to Western culture?” Why is there this apparent collapse of so much that used to be so familiar to us? I’m not talking about three generations ago, I’m talking about things that have changed in the past fifty years. Secularism has permeated the social structures and institutions of our culture, and there is an increasingly, consciously anti-Christian mindset that has permeated our culture and our society.
I conclude with the examination of one phenomenon in particular: a test case on the matter of homosexuality. There’s a lot of sociological factors that are at work in order to bring what we are witnessing. The past three decades in our country has witnessed an unbelievably fast moral transformation of the conscience of the average American citizen. How do you explain that? You could look at the church and say, “Well, you can go back in the 19th century when the church lost confidence in the authority and inspiration of the Word of God with the higher critical movement, and all of the ways in which the Bible has been removed even from the pulpits of our land.” That’s true. You can look back to the 90s and see about the compromise and pragmatism, Evangelicals and Catholics together. You can look back and see how there’s been a loss of Reformational truth: of the salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. You could say, “Well, evolution is at the root of it,” and, certainly, there’s truth to that!
You know, Christians today are more embarrassed about the doctrine of Creation than ever before. You talk to Christians about Creation and you’ll see them sort of get a little bit unsettled. They’re embarrassed about Creation! Remember, Satan attacks the Creation ordinances. He attacks Creation, but I think homosexuality represents a test case of how the doctrines of demons have been able to so infiltrate and radically transform a culture in the span of just less than one half of a generation.
Back in 1973, I was a student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and I saw in our school newspaper that there was going to be the first meeting of the homosexual group that was going to meet on our campus, in 73’, at a particular room, in this particular place. So, I put my Bible under my arms and I went to the meeting, and I listened to what they had to say and how they were going to organize themselves and so forth and so on. Then they opened it up, “Any input from the audience?” I stood up and read from Romans chapter 1, verse 24 to verse 27. I told them that their main concern was not what their sexuality was, their main concern was their theology, that they were rejecting the God who created them. Well, for the rest of the meeting I became Exhibit A as to the kind of person that they had to silence, but, brethren, it wasn’t me that they had to silence, it’s God that they wanted to silence.
In the 1980s, the gay movement swelled. Marshall Kirk, a researcher in neuropsychiatry and Hunter Madsen, a public relations consultant, set the gay agenda in 1989 with their book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. They set out an agenda for gay activists to target three main sectors of our society: the media, the judiciary, and the institutions of education, and they advanced a six-point strategy. One: talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible; two: portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers; three: give homosexual protectors a just cause; four: make gays look good; five: make the victimizers look bad; and six: solicit funds from corporate America, and major foundations in support of the homosexual cause.
The onslaught of AIDS on the 1990s set the stage to promote this profile of victimization. With AIDS, it was very easy to see a group of people who were being victimized, who were easy to be sympathetic with, and the language of personal rights started to be employed. Previously, it was the language of personal preference that was used to discuss homosexuality, but now the language of personal rights began to be used, and there was this alignment of homosexuality with civil rights. Civil rights that needed to be validated and protected with legislation. The media, the judiciary, and the educational institutions soon became the conduits of the gospel of gay in opposition to the gospel of God. The argument emerged that now has won the day: they’re born that way. It’s called “sexual orientation.” It’s part of your biology! It’s part of your nature! We no longer talk about homosexuality as something that people do, we talk about homosexuality as something that they are, because of their sexual orientation.
You see, sexual preference of the 70s and 80s, that indicated too much of a personal responsibility in this, but sexual orientation puts us as “now we’re the victims of our biology.” “We’re the victims of nature. This is the way we are, we need to be accepted.” It’s a relativized ethic. it has more to do with biology than behavior. Al Mohler’s book Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance in 2008 speaks of the gay strategy concerning first to physiological strategy. We are to not concern ourselves with the behavior and activity, but with this issue of sexual orientation, thereby, removing accountability. We’re to look for the medical strategy, for homosexuality in 1973 was psychologized in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, when the American psychiatric association moved homosexuality from being a mental disorder into an alternative lifestyle. That was done, brethren, not because there was some new scientific discoveries, it was done because of political pressures from gay activist groups.
There is then the political strategy, as we now learn of our leaders in the highest places of our government “evolving” on the issue of homosexuality, and, of course, evolution is not a bad thing, is it? So, if you’re evolving, that’s alright too. Certainly, your morals can evolve. Then legalities, this legal entering into the judiciary, and we have activist judges now. That even though the population has legitimately voted the majority opinion on the issue of homosexual marriage, an activist judge is going to come in and say, “No, we’re still going to have homosexual marriage, regardless of what the legal proceedings are.”
The educational curriculums, the educationalist strategy, targeting the very young, normalizing homosexuality so that the conventional wisdom on today’s American university campus is extensively pro-homosexual. The cultural strategy that targets the media and the entertainment industries. They’re in these platforms, all of them, adamantly equating anti-homosexual views with racism! That’s our cultural view of someone who does not approve of homosexuality. You are the equivalent of a 1960s racist. Someone who does not approve of homosexuality is the moral equivalent of the KKK. That is an unbelievable fast transformation of a culture’s ethic! Behind that is the theological strategies.
When I was in seminary, back in the 1980s, the big threat, the big push, was for getting women into the ministry. I went to a Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, graduated in 1982. In my preaching class there were several women, and we had to record ourselves preaching and then watch ourselves on TV and have the class critique our television preaching. When I went to get myself recorded, the camera broke—so if that breaks you know why—and I just told my professor, “I don’t think I’m going to be a televangelist, so we don’t really have to worry so much about this.” One of the young ladies in our group—we gathered around the TV to watch her preach. We hear this classical music start playing, an empty stage, and all of a sudden this girl starts, from the side of the screen, coming out in a pair of leotards and I want to tell you—she shouldn’t be in leotards! They don’t flatter her, and she’s dancing and she twirls around and she ends up in some pose and underneath her comes J-O-Y. Joy. Screen goes off. Now, my preaching professor was a confessed, reformed man, and he and I had already been having discussions about some of these things. He looked at me and says, “I don’t know what to say.” I said to him, “There’s nothing to say. This should not be allowed!”.
You see, the arguments that were being used back then to bring women into the ministry are the same arguments that are being used today to bring homosexuals into the ministry. That’s what’s so scary, because the Evangelical church is vulnerable to this very thing. These ideas that are equating anti-homosexual convictions with racism are beginning to take hold on the young people of the Evangelical churches. This year, February 2014, Rosaria Butterfield, who wrote The Secret Thoughts of An Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith in 2012, was the speaker for the chapel service at Wheaton College, and she gave her testimony of her conversion out of the lifestyle of lesbianism into Christianity. She is now the wife of a PCA pastor. When she was completed with her testimony there was a gathering of students on the stairs of that building, at Wheaton College, with signs protesting her. They did not like the fact that she asserted that a conversion to Christianity required repentance from her lesbianism! They didn’t think that that was necessary.
Two weeks ago, April 22nd, graduate of Harvard theological seminary, a man named Matthew Vines has published a book called God and the Gay Christian. Matthew claims to be an Evangelical Christian. He claims to hold a high view of Scripture, and he argues that the Bible is not at all contrary to a monogamous homosexual relationship that’s formed within a Covenant commitment. In other words: the Bible endorses homosexual marriage, and that’s from the mouth of a man who says, “I believe my Bible is the Word of God, the inspired Word of God, and I believe that I’m an Evangelical Christian.” How does he do that? Well, he does that by saying, “You see, the problem with Paul is that Paul didn’t know about this thing that we now know about today. It’s called sexual orientation. He didn’t know about the biology behind homosexuality. He just didn’t have enough scientific understandings, and Paul couldn’t have known about that. We know about that, though, today, you see.” Then he goes back to the image of God. Male and female. He says, “This issue of headship, of male leadership, that’s not the right way to read that. God could have easily have made a man to satisfy Adam’s need for companionship. The issues of propagation,” he says, “that’s really not forefront in this story.” He destroys the Bible’s teachings on gender.
Now, the Evangelical church extensively, outside of solid conservative and reformed churches, have already by and large capitulated on the issues of gender. They don’t have any argument that will stand the onslaught of homosexuality, because they have already capitulated on the foundational issues of Genesis and the Creation. That’s where Satan attacks! That’s where he attacks! Now, there have been numerous responses. I would recommend a free book, that should wake you up, a free book! You can go online and Google “Al Mohler God and the Gay Christian?” That will take you to the website of the Southern Baptist Seminary, where some of the faculty members have made a response to Matthew Vines book. It’s in a pedia format, you can download it, it’s small, it’s easy to read, and I recommend it to you.
How do we get here in forty years?! Since the 70s? Well, the answer to the question of the rose of the homosexuals in the 70s and 80s has to do with the rise of the free-love, anti-Bible mentality of the 60s. You see, the 60s generation was a sexually promiscuous generation in our culture. Any sexual, promisive generation has absolutly nothing to say against a sexually perverse generation. The promiscuous can’t argue with the perverts, and that’s what Paul tells us in Romans chapter 1.
You know the reading, the writings of the Apostle in Romans chapter 1? It is a description of abandonment. It’s the description of God’s wrath presently, now evident among men. He tells us in Romans 1, verse 18 to the end of the chapter, that what you are looking at in the following verses is a revelation of the wrath of God. Here’s how the wrath of God looks today in any given culture. So that if you see a homosexual man who is impenitent and persisting in that perversion, you’re not looking at someone who is going to face a future wrath, you’re looking at the manifestation of present wrath, because that is already evidence of an abandonment. That God has left him; God has stood back from him. Three times, in the text, God gave them over, and that’s a legal term. “God handed them over.” It’s a term of the court. He gives them over to the repercussions of the operations of justice against them, and He gives them what they want! He gives them their sin, and then their sin wrecks havoc as part of God’s massive manifestation of His wrath.
The roots, verses 18-23, is idolatry, worshiping the creature rather than the Creator. Again, you see, Creation! In verse 24 there is a giving over to sexual promiscuity. Verse 25, it’s a capitulation to lust. The second abandonment, in verse 26, is an abandonment to sexual perversion. Where men and women in homosexual relationships—what are the doing? They are abandoning the natural function for that which is unnatural. What are we talking about? Creation.
Ephesians chapter 2, verse 3, talks of the lusts of the flesh and of the mind, and when you look at verse 28 and following, you see God giving them over to an intellectual delusion. It’s because of a theology, they do not acknowledge God any longer. There’s an apostasy, a falling away from the knowledge of God, and they are haters of God. Even though they know the ordinance of God, even though while they are committing a sin that they know deserves the penalty of death, they encourage others and they want others to approve of them. “So, let’s legislate this! Let’s get ourselves vindicated in our sin, and we’ll make laws that give us legitimacy.” Paul goes on then in chapter two and says, “Look, your capacity to judge others indicates you have capacity to judge yourself. Don’t you realize that you’re coming to judgement?”
If you put the past three decades of American culture and impose it on top of Romans chapter 1, you’re going to see a culture given over to idolatry, manifest in the 60s and 70s, in sexual promiscuity, and then manifest in the 80s and onward in sexual perversion. The history of my generation is right there in Romans chapter 1. My lifetime is explained to me right here in Roman chapter 1, and it has to do with the gagging of God. “We will not have God in our thoughts,” and you get postmodernism. It’s like the scarecrow. Which way to Oz? He talks contradictions, and says things that are opposite to each other. He’s fine with it, because his mind is broken.
Well, brethren, my last point of our time together is to encourage you, just briefly from Psalm 27. As I said to you at the beginning: our greatest threat to faith is our fear. Now, the world wants us to think that our greatest threat to faith is reason. That’s not true. The Bible makes it very clear that the greatest threat to faith is fear.
In Psalm 27, David finds himself surrounded by enemies. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defense of my life; whom shall I dread? When evildoers came upon me to devour my flesh, my adversaries and my enemies, they stumbled and fell. Though a host encamp against me, my heart will not fear; though war arise against me, in spite of this I shall be confident. One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to meditate in His temple. For in the day of trouble He will conceal me in His tabernacle; in the secret place of His tent He will hide me; he will lift me up on a rock. And now my head will be lifted up above my enemies around me, and I will offer in His tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord. Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice, and be gracious to me and answer me. When You said, ‘Seek My face,’ my heart said to You, ‘Your face, O Lord, I shall seek.’”
What is going on? David is surrounded by his enemies, and where is he? He’s in the tent designated for worship, and he’s intent upon praising God and communing with God, because he knows with God in his midst, he is protected and safe. He is his shelter; He is his fortress; He is his shield; He is his defender. With God in our midst, brethren, we are safe. Where is it that we experience God in our midst? In biblically regulated, Holy Spirit-invigorated, Christ-centered, gospel-proclaiming, worship as biblical churches. Who we are, as the shepherds of God’s people, bringing them together to offer a worship of God, is giving to them safety, security, stability, and protection. Because when they look up beyond the walls of His tabernacle, everything is moving in flux. As Isaiah says, in Isaiah 33:6, “He shall be the stability of your times, a wealth of salvation and wisdom and knowledge. The fear of the Lord is your treasure.” “He shall be the stability of your times,” because, brethren, we live in unstable times. But we come into His tabernacle and we seek His face and we have nothing to fear. Let’s Pray.
Our Father, we pray that these considerations would be helpful to us to gain perspective, to stimulate further study, to be discerning and to approve that which is excellent, even the fear of the Lord and the exaltation of Your praise. Work in our hearts; work in our minds; work through our ministries, that we might be faithful to Jesus Christ in our generation. These things we ask, in Jesus’ name, amen.