Recently I observed that there are two issues which many preachers today avoid, under duress from the hostile culture in which we live.
These are the issues of sexuality/gender, and creation/evolution.
Usually the excuse is: “I don’t touch on issues like this because it could turn some people off. They are not gospel issues. I’m just sticking to the gospel. I just preach Christ.”
Yet in this they are mistaken, or worse.
Issues of sexuality/gender, and creation/evolution underlie, or are addressed in, the teaching in nearly every book of the Bible. They cannot be bypassed by the faithful preacher when they arise in such passages.
As Martin Luther is supposed to have put it:
“If I profess with loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except that little point which the world and the Devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Furthermore, these go to the heart of gospel itself.
Attacks on creation and attacks on sexuality/gender are ultimately attacks on the gospel.
Creation/Evolution
“Many in evangelical churches insist that they believe the Bible and yet either avoid dealing with the foundational message of a recent creation or brush the topic away like a pesky doctrine that doesn’t matter.” (Henry M. Morris)[1]
And, as noted above, this goes to the heart of gospel.
The gospel is about how we can be reconciled to God.
Paul summed up his own gospel ministry in these words:
“We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Cor 5:20)
Which God?
The God who created us! The God behind the message in every book of the Bible.
And why do we need to be reconciled?
Because He created us and we have sinned against Him. We are accountable to this God because “it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves.” (Psa 100:3)
If, on the other hand, we are not the created products of a personal God, but the product of Blind Chance, then we owe God nothing. We are not personally accountable to Him for our sin.
In fact, there is no such thing as sin – and hence, no need for a “gospel” to “save” us.
This is ultimately why men reject creation, since the thought of creation makes them accountable to the Creator.
Ever since the Fall, Man in his natural state has rebelled against being accountable to anyone, especially a personal, all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere-present God.
George Bernard Shaw summed up mankind’s native hatred of being held accountable to such a God when he complained “how insufferably the world was oppressed by the notion that everything that happened was an arbitrary personal act of an arbitrary personal God” (whom he went on to caricature as “dangerous, jealous and cruel”).
For this reason, he concluded: “You will understand how the world jumped at Darwin.”
But (some argue) could not God have used evolution, over millions of years, as the means of “creation”?
After all, we know that “God, in His ordinary providence, makes use of means.” Also, He is “free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure.” (Westminster Confession ch 5, §3)
But the “millions of years” is a problem.
In fact, two problems:
1) When did God “create” Man?
The usual explanation put forward by “theistic evolutionists” is that God waited millions of years for some primordial slime to evolve into some form of “life”; then waited millions of more years until that proto-life evolved into an ape-like creature resembling something remotely human – and then implanted a soul in it.
And in the meantime?
Death! Death everywhere for millions of years!
But death is God’s judgment on sin.
“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’” (Gen 2:16-17)
Adam sinned! “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin.” (Rom 5:12)
As a result, not only Man, but “the whole creation groans and labours with birth pangs together until now” as it waits to “be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom 8:21,22)
So if death reigned for millions of years, by the time a creature appeared that was sufficiently evolved that God would own it/him as “Adam” it was a creature already subject to corruption; death was never the result of rebellion and sin.
But then, the death of Christ, supposedly to meet the penalty of sin, becomes meaningless.
2) When did the world begin? When will it end?
This is also a gospel question.
The gospel requires those who hear to respond, because the world is going to end in judgment:
“God now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30-31)
When will that be? When will the world end?
Inevitably, that question is bound up with the other question: When did the world begin?
The American Museum of Natural History states confidently: “Today, we know from radiometric dating that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.”
This, they themselves observe, is bound up with the Theory of Evolution: “Had naturalists in the 1700s and 1800s known Earth’s true age, early ideas about evolution might have been taken more seriously.”[2]
But if we are talking such vast, unimaginably long periods of time, it is only natural to assume that the end is similarly a long way off: “The most probable fate of the planet is absorption by the Sun in about 7.5 billion years.”[3]
And, if it is so far away, why worry?
Indeed, that is the very way of thinking Peter encountered in his own day:
“Scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.’” (2 Pet 3:-4)
If the beginning of the world is so far removed, it is difficult to get excited about Christ coming and the world ending any time soon. Everything continues as business as usual.
But “this they wilfully forget”: It has never been business as usual since the beginning.
God’s intervention in judging the world already in a universal Flood (a universal event often disputed by “theistic evolutionists”) disproves that. (2 Pet 3:5-6)
Christ is coming again when “the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up.” (2 Pet 3:10)
And, no, not in billions of years; but any day soon.
That is an essential part of the gospel we preach.
Sexuality/Gender
Back in 2017, before the plebiscite on same sex “marriage”, I was surprised that some Christians wondered why I and others were so concerned.
They naively believed the advocates of SSM, many of whom said, “This is all we want; nothing else will change.” Satisfied with that, they just wanted to forget about the issue and “get on with preaching the gospel.”
But, of course, it was never going to be all it was about.
Instead, it opened the floodgates to all manner of corruptions of God’s original design in creation. So that, now issues of sexuality and gender are, more militantly than ever, being promoted by an an ever increasingly intolerant society and government – even among little children just beginning school.
See eg. here.
But, in the end, this attack on God’s created order is an attack upon the gospel.
Of course, it is not surprising that the world around us is in rebellion against God.
What is surprising is that so many preachers keep quiet on these issues for fear of offending the world around them, and (so they say) losing already diminishing opportunities to share the gospel.
In this I share Alistair Begg’s concern:
“What is most alarming to me is not that that view [on sexuality and marriage] exists outside the church but that that view is beginning to exist inside the church. That within the realm of Christendom, those who apparently profess to believe the Bible are now, for whatever reason, prepared to tamper with the Bible – to readjust the Bible – in order to accommodate oneself to the thoughts and mores of the day.”[4]
Gender issues are a creation issue: “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness… So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Gen 1:26-27)
Jesus believed and taught this Himself: “Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning “made them male and female”’” (Matt 19:4)
Then Jesus went on (quoting Gen 2:24) to teach that this is the only basis for marriage:
“‘For this reason [i.e. we are made “male and female”] a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’. So then, they are no longer two but one flesh.” (Matt 19:4-6)
How is the rebellion against God’s design for marriage evident today?
“It’s redefined in our jurisdictions in our own nation so as to legalize what God has never designed. And it is absolutely clear from the Bible, no matter what government legislates, that any other relationship other than a monogamous, heterosexual relationship cannot be and is not a marriage before God. You may call it whatever you choose to call it, but it is not marriage before God as God has constituted men and women and the structure of society, and that from the very order of creation. From the very beginning, God has ordained that these things would be true.” [5]
“What God has established from creation, no culture is able to destroy. I guarantee you! No culture has ever destroyed it, and no culture ever will destroy it. The culture will destroy itself before it destroys God’s design. Hence the fall of Rome. Hence the fall of Greece. Hence the fall of so many of these empires, because they said, ‘We will have no god to rule over us. We will do it our way. This is what we believe about this.’ And so it is that a destroyed culture will eventually stand and have to acknowledge that God is God. Because from the very beginning, what is declared is not culturally contained or limited; it is timeless and it is universal.” (Alistair Begg)[6]
Yet marriage in its Biblical form is more than the only form good for society.
Marriage in this form is a beautiful picture of the gospel itself.
Concerning marriage, Paul hits the nail on the head when he states: “This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” (Eph 5:32)
This, I believe, is what is behind the Satanic attacks on marriage, gender and sexuality today: Satan hates the gospel.
This theme of marriage as a picture of the gospel runs right through the Scriptures, from cover to cover.
The ultimate goal of salvation is the fulfilment of the promise that God makes to us: “I will be your God, and you shall be My people.”
And this is finally accomplished when God’s people, i.e. “the New Jerusalem, comes down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
Then:
“God will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev 21:2-4)
So:
“Every Christian marriage, with its stresses and its strains, with its difficulties, with its disappointments, with its faults, and with its failures—every Christian marriage points, by God’s grace, to the ultimate marriage, if you like, made in heaven, which is the marriage between Christ, the Bridegroom, and the church, his bride.” (Alistair Begg)[7]
Heterosexual marriage, male and female in union, points to the fulfilment of the gospel.
“Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife.” (Rev 21:9)
This is ultimately why Satan, and by him the world around us, hates Biblical marriage.
And this is why we must – we must, for the sake of the gospel – preach a Biblical view of sexuality, gender… and marriage.
“Do what is right and do not give way to fear.” (1 Pet 3:6)
[1] https://www.icr.org/article/gospel-starts-with-creation [2] https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/the-world-before-darwin/how-old-is-earth [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#:~:text=The%20most%20probable%20fate%20of,beyond%20the%20planet's%20current%20orbit [4] https://www.truthforlife.org/resources/sermon/marriage-introduction/ [5] https://www.truthforlife.org/resources/sermon/marriage-introduction/ [6] https://www.truthforlife.org/resources/sermon/word-wives/ [7] https://www.truthforlife.org/resources/sermon/word-husbands-part-one/