Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

[In Wil’s January 28 sermon, he referred to Rosaria Butterfield’s 2023 book, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age. The lies are: Homosexuality is Normal, Being a Spiritual Person is Kinder than being a Biblical Christian, Feminism is Good for the World and for the Church, Transgenderism is Normal, and Modesty is an Outdated Burden that Serves Male Dominance and Holds Women Back. Here are some excerpts to ponder. I found especially helpful her discussion of the difference between acceptance and approval (p. 279 and following). Page numbers are in brackets.]

What exactly does it mean to be made in God’s image? An image of yourself is what you see when you stand in front of a mirror. God is the object in the biblical creation account, and we are the reflection. Therefore, to reflect God’s image accurately, we need to look at him through the mirror of the word of God illuminated through the Holy Spirit. [28]

Homosexual orientation, a nineteenth-century Freudian invention (Sigmund Freud, 1856–1939), is an unbiblical category of personhood and an antagonist to the creation ordinance because it redefines sinful desire as something that defines who you are rather than how you feel. Lie #1 claims that the word of God doesn’t apply to homosexual orientation because homosexual orientation represents a person’s core truth…. We must ponder why God’s attribute of immutability has been embraced by the LGBTQ+ movement as an attribute of homosexual orientation…. When we hear “homosexual orientation is fixed and immutable—it never changes,” this is only imaginable in a world that has already exchanged the worship of the Creator for the worship of the creature, of God for an idol. “Gay Christians” … teach that you can’t repent of who you are, how you feel, or even what you desire. They believe that homosexual orientation is morally neutral, separate from one’s sin nature, cannot be repented of, and rarely changes over a person’s lifetime. This is a lie. [32]

“Coming out of the closet” and describing yourself by sin will never help you to repent from it, flee from it, and be delivered from it…. The idea that you should always “come out” and share with everyone your sinful desires happened because homosexual desire was transformed from sin (which demands repentance) to a morally neutral category of personhood (LGBTQ+), which demands affirmation and celebration…. All atheistic paradigms of personhood hate the very people they claim to love by denying them soul care. [44]

[After telling of how a pastor’s family invited her to dinner and shared Psalm 113 in evening devotions] And so it was that Psalm 113 changed my life. I looked into its mirror, and I saw how short I had fallen from God’s will. God used the offense of God’s word for the good of my soul…. Instead of lesbianism being who I was, I now understood it as both a lack of righteousness and a willful transgressive action. I was no victim. I was no “sexual minority” needing a voice in the church. I needed to grow in sanctification—just like everyone else in the church. I learned that we repent of sin by hating it, killing it, turning from it. But we also “add” the virtue of God’s word. It is light that changes darkness. The Bible calls us to mortify (kill) and vivify (enliven). I realized that Christians are given a new nature, yet we have sin patterns that we need to kill, to be sure. [63-64]

[In interacting with the pastor’s family, Butterfield realized that she did not know any women who were homemakers] Mothering was a fascinating job, not terribly unlike being a research professor: you must do one thing at a time well, and you must have flexibility and good humor as you carry on. [65]

[Puritan pastor] Thomas Watson say[s] that in the life of a true Christian, while we cannot “see” faith (and therefore we cannot see into the heart of others), we can see repentance. And if we don’t see repentance, we have no reason to believe that there is faith. [89]

When I sin or desire to sin, as a new creation in Christ I am now acting against my new nature. Sexual sin is a bear because of the body memories that it leaves in its wake, but body memories are part of my biography, not my new nature in Christ…. It exerts the same kind of temptation that the Israelites experienced in wanting to return to Egypt in the wilderness. [91-92]

Psalm 51 reveals that the Christian must fight even unchosen sin. [96]

Genuine Christians repent of all sin (including the sin that feels natural and good) because they trust Jesus more than they trust themselves. [104]

(Wil quoted this passage) It all comes down to this: Do you trust your feelings, or do you trust the word of God? Do you perceive your feelings through the word of God, or do you perceive the word of God through your feelings? Do your feelings know you best, or does the God who made you? [106]

[Jesus asks an invalid,] “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). Let that linger for a moment. Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made well on Jesus’s terms or your own? Does the Christian who calls himself gay want to be made well on God’s terms?… For the man to be healed, he needed to embrace the terms that Jesus was going to set. [111]

The mature Christian life is one of constant fleeing to the throne of grace for mercy, grace, and forgiveness of our sins. [114]

If the Bible is false, flawed, semitrue, or just true in the red letters, then none of it is true. If you aren’t convinced of that, then the minute the Bible crosses you, that part you will declare an ancient bias and no longer binding. [116]

[When biblical truth first appealed to her] At this point in my life, there was no room to believe it, because I already believed other things, and those other things left no room for Jesus. My complex belief system was important to me. I wasn’t a blank slate open to God’s word. I was filled to the brim with chaos and sin and anxiety and people who looked up to me…. I realized that my own feminist worldview was more than just a set of ideas. It was a religion. [147-149]

We must deal with sin at its first occurrence because the second will always be worse. [155]

[Calvin’s Institutes 1.1.2] “Because nothing appears within or around us that has not been contaminated by great immorality, what is a little less vile pleases us as a thing most pure—so long as we confine our minds within the limits of human corruption.” [157]

When feminism is the interpretative tool for reading Scripture, the powerful, supernatural word of God shrinks into an easily manipulated tool of sociology, revealing power plays and oppressors and offering no hope beyond its creation of new possibilities and new words to express one’s never-ending hurt. [178]

We need to ask the question, If the biblical account of creation cannot be trusted to teach us about what makes women distinct, where ought we to go for this insight? This is where the usefulness of feminism as a gospel frame crumbles in the foolishness that it is. It wants an essential and distinct women’s voice at the same time that it rejects a biblical origin for what makes a woman distinct. [187]

Transgenderism will be the final nail in the coffin of feminism. Why? Because you cannot defend the civil rights of a woman if you don’t know what she is. [191]

Real love confronts the lie that suffering people can’t help but envy others. Real love does not envy (1 Cor. 13:4). [202]

We live in a culture that ascribes truth to feelings and perceptions, and it fears hurting people’s feelings more than encouraging them to permanently mutilate their bodies. [213]

[Puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughs in The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment] reminds us that the real question is not “What do I need?” but rather, “What is my duty?” Burroughs asks it like this: “What is the duty of the circumstances that God has put me in?” [244]

[Reflecting again on her first experience of sharing a meal in a Christian home] This night became for me a mirror. I looked into it and saw ugly things in myself and lovely things in God’s family. The first had to do with diversity—an important word in my lesbian community. While I proclaimed the value of diversity, the reality was that I had spent the past decade around people just like me—white, thirty-something, humanities PhDs in lesbian relationships. The mirror of this night was dramatic irony at its best. It was at my first experience of a Christian family feast, held at the straight, white, male pastor’s house, where I found myself in the most diverse crowd I had inhabited in years, maybe a lifetime. Men, women, children of every age. [251]

Our social media–saturated world encourages Christian women to replace modesty with exhibitionism.  [258]

The difference between acceptance and approval: Acceptance means living in reality and not fantasy. If your daughter calls herself a lesbian, you need to accept that. If your son Rex calls himself Mathilda, you need to accept this. He really is living in such a dangerous state of delusion and deception. That is reality right now. Acceptance is an important step in seeing the person you love in the sin pattern in which he is trapped. Acceptance, however, does not include believing his interpretation of how he got here or what it means. Acceptance does not include believing that Rex really is Mathilda. Acceptance does not include being manipulated by the therapist who asks, “Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?” Acceptance does not lose sight of Jesus and the cross he calls us to bear. Approval means that you give the whole situation a blessing. Approval means more than loving your daughter in her sin. It means calling her sin by another name (“grace,” “blessing,” or “illness”) and compartmentalizing and shrinking your Christian life in the process. [279]

While acceptance is not approval, acceptance is a great kindness. Acceptance means dealing protectively and gently with the person who is lost. [283]

Don’t give your prodigal reasons to run. And don’t take responsibility for your prodigal’s decision if she does run. [283]

[Speaking to parents of a prodigal child] You must get to a faithful church for the sake of your own soul. You need more help than you think. You are more vulnerable than you believe. Church is not a social club; it’s training for war. Like it or not, the theater of this spiritual war is your home and your heart and your family. [284]

Have you read Christopher Yuan and Angela Yuan (son and mother cowriting team) in their memoir of faith, Out of a Far Country: A Gay Son’s Journey to God. A Broken Mother’s Search for Hope? If not, please do. This book is our most faithful trail guide for accepting and loving, but not approving of, your beloved prodigal. [285]

Going boldly to the throne of grace requires daily repentance of your own sin, but this means not taking on your prodigal’s sin as your own. It means repenting of the sin of self-pity. Satan wants you to feel responsible that you have a prodigal child. He wants you to think that it is all your fault, and that God is punishing you. He wants you to look at other families and covet what they have. Nothing that comes from Satan is helpful or true—even half-truths are lies. If you have fallen into sins of covetousness, repent and ask God to help you love your calling as a prayer warrior for a prodigal. [285]

It is the church that holds the keys to the kingdom, not the HR department enforcing transgender pronouns. Things have changed—and we need to discern how those changes impact our lives. But the gospel hasn’t changed. God hasn’t changed. Here at the Butterfields’, the gospel still comes with a house key. [She then tells a story of a frank but gracious interaction with her gay neighbors about the Bible, vaccines, and spheres of authority.] [293]

Do You Know the Scriptures and the Power of God?

Do you know the Scriptures and the power of God?

Matthew 22 records Jesus’ interaction with the Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. These opponents speak of a woman who had been married successively to seven brothers, each of whom died, then ask: “In the resurrection … of the seven, whose wife will she be?” (Matthew 22:28) Through this story, they suppose they have shown the resurrection of the dead to be absurd: A woman can’t be married to seven men simultaneously, as she would be if they all were resurrected!

Jesus responds: “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). He goes on to show that the Old Testament Scriptures teach the resurrection of the dead, and thus God has power over death.

Let’s consider Jesus’ statement more broadly: Why do we need to know both the Scriptures and the power of God?

Consider first those who know the Scriptures but not the power of God. That is, they have studied Scripture, they may have memorized much Scripture, they may know the original languages, they may be familiar with commentaries and grammar and the history of interpretation – but they do not know God’s power. They do not believe that He is sovereign, that He is a Redeemer, that He is the Judge.

The Sadducees were somewhat like that, as Jesus brings out Matthew 22:31. He says: “Have you not read what was said to you by God,” and then quotes Exodus 3:6, “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” God originally spoke those words to Moses – but Jesus says God spoke them also “to you,” to the Sadducees.

The point: God spoke all Scripture to you! He spoke all Scripture to me! And unless we read the Scriptures that way, we do not know them – even if we can quote the entire Bible from memory.

So when you read Scripture:

  • If you primarily think, “That sheds light on the customs and beliefs of Jews two thousand years ago,” you haven’t heard Scripture correctly.
  • If you primarily think, “That’s a key statement in the historical development of worldwide religious thought,” you haven’t heard Scripture correctly.
  • Even if you primarily think, “Boy, my friend really needs to hear and apply that truth,” you haven’t heard Scripture correctly.

Now, all those statements may be true. But God speaks the words of Scripture to you! So hear them that way! Plead for insight into them. Conform your mind to them. Submit your actions to them.

Second, consider those who know the power of God but not the Scriptures. They may be impressed by the majesty of creation and ascribe that to a Creator. They may have prayed for the healing of a loved one – and it happened! They may witness natural disasters and believe that a god controls them.

Such knowledge, however, often results in thinking of God as a genie in the bottle (I rub the bottle, make my three wishes, and – voila! – I get what I want!), or as a random, dangerous force I need to bargain with and appease (“Here, I’ll offer you this worship and this contribution if you’ll refrain from harming me”).

Only from Scripture can we know of both God’s power and His redeeming love, of both His justice and His saving grace, of both the power of temptation and the greater power of His life-giving Spirit, of both the dangers of this present age and the security we have in Jesus, of both death as the last enemy and Jesus’ victory over death.

So, once again: Do you know the Scriptures and the power of God? Commit yourself to knowing both. Only in this way can we be “imitators of God, as beloved children, … walk[ing] in love” (Ephesians 5:1-2).

Luther on the Authority and Clarity of Scripture

[Tuesday marks the 500th anniversary of the event that many cite as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther’s nailing 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. While the Theses primarily address the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church, the underlying issue was the relative authority of Scripture and the Roman Church. The issue of the authority of Scripture remains of vital importance today; we’ll focus on it this coming Sunday as we celebrate 500 years of the Reformation.  To honor Luther’s role in the recovery of Scriptural authority, here are some of his own words on this topic – Coty]

[When Luther was under trial in the city of Worms for his writings, after being commanded to recant:]

I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

[Luther’s enemies mocked him for this stance, yet clearly recognized his position on Scripture. Here is part of the Edict of Worms, the final judgment from that trial:]

This devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle and has invented new ones. . . . His teaching makes for rebellion, division, war, murder, robbery, arson, and the collapse of Christendom. He lives the life of a beast. . . . We have labored with him, but he recognizes only the authority of Scripture.

[Luther was the first to translate the Bible into German. He wrote these words on the flyleaf of a German Bible:]

God will not be seen, known, or comprehended except through his Word alone. Whatever therefore one undertakes for salvation apart from the Word is in vain. God will not respond to that. He will not have it. He will not tolerate any other way. Therefore, let his Book in which He speaks to you be commended to you. For he did not cause it to be written to no purpose. He did not want us to let it lie there in neglect, as if he were speaking with mice under the bench or with flies on the pulpit. We are to read it, to think and speak about it, and to study it, certain that He Himself, not an angel or a creature, is speaking with us in it.

[Luther’s response to Erasmus’ claim that Scripture is obscure. From Bondage of the Will:]

God and his Scriptures are two things, just as the Creator and his creation are two things. Now, nobody questions that there is a great deal hid in God of which we know nothing. . . . But the notion that in Scripture . . . all is not plain was spread by the godless [without evidence.] . . . And Satan has used these unsubstantial specters to scare men off reading the sacred text, and to destroy all sense of its value, so as to ensure that his own poisonous philosophy reigns supreme in the church. I certainly grant that many passages in the Scriptures are obscure and hard to elucidate, but that is due, not to the exalted nature of their subject, but to our own linguistic and grammatical ignorance; and it does not in any way prevent our knowing all the contents of Scripture. For what solemn truth can the Scriptures still be concealing, now that the seals are broken, the stone rolled away from the door of the tomb, and the greatest of all mysteries brought to light—that Christ, God’s Son, became man, that God is Three in One, that Christ suffered for us, and will reign forever? Are not these things known, and sung in our streets? Take Christ from the Scriptures—and what more will you find in them? . . .

The profoundest mysteries of the supreme Majesty are no [longer] hidden away, but are now brought out of doors and displayed to public view. Christ has opened our understanding, that we might understand the Scriptures, and the Gospel is preached to every creature. . . . I know that to many people a great deal remains obscure; but that is due, not to any lack of clarity in Scripture, but to their own blindness and dullness, in that they make no effort to see truth which, in itself, could not be plainer. . . . They are like men who . . . go from daylight into darkness, and hide there and then blame . . . the darkness of the day for their inability to see. . . .

The truth is that nobody who has not the Spirit of God sees a jot of what is in the Scriptures. All men have their hearts darkened, so that, even when they can discuss and quote all that is in Scripture, they do not understand or really know any of it. They do not believe in God, nor do they believe that they are God’s creatures, nor anything else. . . . The Spirit is needed for the understanding of all Scripture and every part of Scripture.

[From Luther‘s exposition of Psalm 45:4, delivered as a lecture to his students. He here comments on the words “go forth and reign” (translated “ride out victoriously” in the ESV):]

Everywhere there is nothing but misfortune: outside they persecute the Word; among us they despise and neglect it; pastors almost die of hunger and receive no other reward for their godly labors than ingratitude and hatred. Where is the prosperity here? Certainly only in the spirit.

Therefore rouse yourself. Do not give in to evils, but go forth boldly against them. Hold on. Do not be disheartened either by contempt or ingratitude within or by agitation and raging without. . . . It is in sorrow, when we are the closest to despair, that hope rises the highest. So today, when there is the greatest contempt and weariness with the Word, the true glory of the Word begins. Therefore we should learn to understand this verse as speaking of invisible progress and success. Our King enjoys success and good fortune even though you do not see it. Moreover, it would not be expedient for us to see this success, for then we would be puffed up. Now, however, he raises us up through faith and gives us hope. Even though we see no fruit of the Word, still we can be certain that fruit will not be wanting but will certainly follow; for so it is written here. Only we should not be discouraged when we look at present circumstances that disturb us, but we should much rather look at these promises.

 

The Authority of Scripture, Part 4: References

The argument presented for the authority of Scripture in the three previous posts is non-standard and idiosyncratic. Here are some references that provide more standard arguments, as well as addressing many points that I don’t mention:

(For printing these references together with part 3, download this pdf file.)