Memory is More Important Than Learning
In the Christian life we are called to remember that regardless of how forsaken things might seem to the eyes, the heart knows different. We know that whether we are high or low, safe or in prison, to give glory to the Lord.
Christopher J.H. Wright has described the book of Deuteronomy as the heartbeat of the Old Testament. Along with Isaiah and the Psalms it is the most quoted book by Jesus and the Apostles. It is filled with electric passages that describe the love of Jehovah for His covenant people. There is so much gospel flowing from the fingers of God’s prophet as he writes that the book would not be out of place in the least in the New Testament. Just as Christ has His Beatitudes so too does Moses. With this it also has in its scope a number of warnings from God to the Israelites concerning how they are to behave and believe once they cross the Jordan and go to conquer the Promised Land. Over the next several months we are going to be spending time meditating on what we at Bethany can learn from this portion of Holy Scripture. In the Hebrew the title is literally “These Are the Words”. Our English name comes from the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. There the authors call it, “deuteronomion”, which means the second law. It gets that from the fact that a good portion of it is a retelling of the book of the covenant in Exodus 21-23. There are some added thoughts from Moses to help the generation which had come of age in the Wilderness understand with clearer minds the requirements God provides His people to follow. As we walk through each of the sections every Lord’s Day the goal of the sermon series will be to grow our appreciation for the beauty of God’s law, His wisdom, and how He cares for His Church. Our LORD is as interested in preparing us for our entrance into the Heavens as He was the Israelites to cross the Jordan.
In our first sermon from Deuteronomy we are going to hear a call from Moses to give to the LORD in act of worship the first fruits of the harvests that come from the initial crop which will be produced after the Canaanites, Amalekites, and others are defeated by Joshua and God’s army. As part of his testimony to the Israelites Moses majors on helping the people understand that everything that they now have is a gift of Jehovah. Everything they do in the present and in the future is to be informed by the fact that He has brought their current wealth out of His good will and love for them. There is one particular part of the ceremony of the feast that is worth noting in this morning’s worship and prayer help.
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Why Russell Moore Is Wrong about Uganda
Natural law directs us toward genuine human happiness, but this is understood within a theological and moral context of mankind having a finis ultimus and summum bonum that can only be finally fulfilled in knowing God. One cannot merely haphazardly invoke the rights of “life, liberty, and happiness” divorced from their original political, moral, and theological moorings in order to hamstring criminal law and justify the right of citizens to engage in sexual immorality with impunity. This is careless, ignorant, and foolish on Moore’s part.
Western authorities were in an uproar last month over Uganda’s new bill criminalizing homosexuality. A supplement to Section 145 of Uganda’s criminal law (Penal Code Act, Cap. 120), The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2023 stipulates more clearly what is meant by homosexual criminality and the punishments incurred. What has most people upset is a later amendment to the bill that makes “aggravated homosexuality” punishable up to death. Western LGBTQ Regimes struck back against the bill with condemnatory statements from The White House, The Department of State, Amnesty International, UNAIDS, and every major news outlet. Even supposedly staunchly conservative politicians piled on. They have decried the law as a gross violation of “human rights” that is violent and discriminatory, and that constitutes an imminent threat to the lives and well-being of Ugandan homosexuals.
Notwithstanding the godless political forces arrayed against us, Christians should accept the Ugandan bill as a legitimate civil policy for Christians and non-Christians alike. Yet our mighty, godly, and fearless Christian leaders shake their heads and wag their fingers at us: we should not, in fact, support Uganda because it is unchristian and goes against the gospel. At least, that is what Russell Moore argues in a recent article. In his theological mini-lecture, Moore informs us that the death penalty for sodomy was a culturally-bound penalty meant only for Israel and that the context of redemptive history and the New Covenant do away with the Old Testament “theocratic civil code.” While the moral content of the Old Law remains valid (homosexuality is wrong, according to Moore), the Church no longer enforces Mosaic criminal codes for violations of the moral law. Instead, because Jesus treated sinners with mercy and called them to repentance, this should characterize the stance of American and Ugandan Christians as well.
Moore is wrong. Nowhere does the Ugandan Act argue against homosexuality from Scripture, let alone for theonomic or theocratic reasons. Moore has imposed this framework upon the issue because he determined beforehand it was wrong and had to find a pious and “biblical” reason for his Philippic. Instead, the Anti-Homosexuality Act argues from reason, nature, and tradition: it seeks to protect the Ugandan family from “internal and external threats”; it wants to preserve the “cherished culture” and the “legal, religious, and traditional family values” of the Ugandan people; and it wants to combat the “values of sexual promiscuity” being imposed upon them in order to protect “children and youth” who are “vulnerable to sexual abuse through homosexuality and related acts.” This is an imminently reasonable position compatible with Christian doctrine and ethics, but knowable apart from divine revelation. Any adult human who has not yet been indoctrinated into the Gay Cult should be able to understand these things.
Thus, Christians should oppose Moore and support Uganda for three reasons.
First, homosexuality is immoral and harmful to society. Homosexual relationships are against nature and God’s design for human love, marriage, procreation, and flourishing. Advocates for gay relations seek to normalize such degeneracy by claiming that “Love is Love.” Slogans like these reveal the stupidity and irrationality at the heart of homosexuality. Statements of identity tell us nothing about what a thing is, what it is meant for, whether it is good or bad, and whether civil governments should encourage or discourage them. It’s like arguing that because “sex is sex,” therefore, rape is good. How stupid.
Behind the rise of homosexual acceptance (and all things related to LGBTQ, especially the current transgender movement) is a false anthropology. Instead of understanding mankind as being created by God as rational animals (a rational soul and physical body in a single, unified substance) whose reason is designed to constrain, guide, and channel the sensitive elements of our corporeal passions toward objectively good ends (understood from the natural and divine laws, as well as reason, experience, and custom), modern anthropology inverts the human person. Following the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, the human is essentially conceived of as an appetitive creature, driven by passions and desires. Reason functions in a purely post hoc way, as a “scout and spy” (Hobbes) or a “slave” (Hume) of the passions, scheming ways to fulfill the desires or in later rationalization or justification for disordered longings and behaviors. In this view, whatever one feels is indicative of their true and authentic Self. The physical world around us tells us nothing about the nature or order of things but is putty to be molded to actualize (re: deify) the Self, or, if that cannot be done, an obstacle to be conquered and swept away. This assumed, love is not an act of the will ordered toward human and divine goods, but becomes a kind of emotive urge that baptizes every lust as a loving virtue. How perverse.
Homosexuality is not love but a living death. No homosexual relationship is capable of reproducing humans or propagating the species. For this reason alone, evolutionary natural selection (if true) would eliminate homosexual relations as anathema to the species’ drive for survival. Yet homosexuality not only cannot create new life, but it also kills existing life. Homosexual behavior consistently leads to higher rates of cancer, sexual and intestinal diseases, and premature death. In many cases, serial homosexuals can see decades shaved off their life expectancy. These facts are sufficient to demonstrate that homosexual acts and lifestyles are disordered and dangerous to individuals and society alike.
Second, Christians should support the Ugandan act because such laws have long been part of our nation’s moral and legal history. Sodomy was a criminal offense at common law, and colonial law ubiquitously punished homosexuality, with death being the most severe penalty. In 1776, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, all thirteen colonies prescribed the death penalty for male homosexuals, although many also had prison sentences. After the Revolution, penalties for sex crimes were reduced and relaxed, and the death penalty for sodomy faded away. Yet the prohibition and criminalization of homosexuality continued: in 1868 after the Fourteenth Amendment, 32 of 37 states had criminal sodomy laws, and by 1961 all 50 states had outlawed sodomy. It did not matter that these homosexual acts happened between consenting adults in the privacy of their bedrooms.
In the 1986 Supreme Court case Bowers v. Hardwick 478 U.S. 186, the Court declared that there was no “fundamental right” in the U.S. Constitution for homosexuals to engage in sodomy. Writing for the majority, Justice White reasoned that homosexual sodomy was neither a fundamental liberty “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” nor “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” (cf. Palko v. Connecticut 302 U.S. 319 [1937]). In addition, it was not public majority opinion that constituted the rational basis for the law, but objective “notions of morality” apart from the changing tides of popular opinion.
However, seventeen years later, Bowers was overturned by Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558 [2003]). In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment implies a more extensive concept of liberty than Bowers appreciated. Relying upon his previous assertions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (505 U.S. 833 [1992]), Justice Kennedy argued that due to the “dignity” of homosexuals as free persons and the crippling stigma that would result from criminal prosecution and conviction, acts of homosexual sodomy are protected under the liberty granted by the Due Process Clause that forbids government intervention in the private, consensual, and intimate behavior of its citizens. Since no minors, predation, or coercion were involved in these relationships, singling out homosexuals for criminal prosecution would amount to class-based discriminatory legislation. For Justice Kennedy, “liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct” that ensures “constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education.” Justice Kennedy averred that homosexuals should be afforded these protections, even though “same-sex marriage” is a metaphysical impossibility, contraception makes no sense for homosexual sex acts, and homosexuals cannot procreate, grow a natural family, or rear and education their own children.
Channeling a Hobbesian and Humean anthropology of the absolute rights of the private and autonomous Self, Justice Kennedy was nothing but a jurisprudential agent of the modern Libertarian and Gay Regime—a black-robed High Priest of godless “liberty” and perverse sexuality that not only has succeeded in terraforming American society, public morality, and citizenship, but has been the vanguard for the GAE—the post-communist Global American Empire—that, in an act of arrogant and oppressive neo-colonialism, imposes LGBTQ ideology and custom on other nations, bullying and intimidating them into acquiescence. Uganda is resisting this gay colonialism, and American Christians ought to stand with them in opposing their own government’s evil, global oppression.
Moore might concede the moral and historical arguments against homosexuality. But, he assures us, civil power hath no jurisdiction here! Why so? Because, according to him, “not everything that’s a sin is a crime.”
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Giving Thanks for the Goodness of God
The goodness of God should stir us to grateful worship. For, in God, “infinite cheerfulness attends infinite goodness” (to quote Charnock one more time). “Who will show us some good?” the Psalmist asks. The answer is the Lord who shines the light of his face upon us. “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound” (Ps. 4:6-7). The God of infinite cheerfulness and infinite goodness is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the heavenly Father of all those who call upon him in the name of his Son.
One of the first things we learn about God is that he is good. “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.” Many of us grew up hearing this prayer at the dinner table. It’s good theology—simple and true.
It also highlights an attribute of God that is surprisingly hard to define. We think we know what it means for God to be good, until we try to explain it. Then we usually start listing other attributes (God is loving, God is gracious, God is kind) or resort to platitudes (God helps us). It takes some reflection to understand all that we mean—or should mean—when we confess that God is good.
Defining Our Terms
Before coming to a simple definition of what God’s goodness is, we must say what it is not.
By goodness we do not mean that God is relatively good. If we say, “That hotdog is good,” we mean, “Of all the hotdogs out there, this is one of the better ones.” This is not what God is like. God is not good because he compares favorably to other gods. There is none like the LORD; he alone is God (Ps. 86:8–10).
By goodness we do not mean that God is morally exemplary or ethically upright. Of course, that’s gloriously true. But “goodness” should not be confused with “holiness.”
Nor, by goodness, do we mean that God is merciful. We see in Exodus 33 that these two things—goodness and mercy—cannot be separated, but strictly speaking, God’s goodness extends further than his mercy. Mercy may be the ultimate expression of divine goodness, but it is not the only expression. God shows mercy to some, but his goodness extends to all.
So, what do we mean by God’s goodness? Divine goodness is the overflowing bounty of God by which he communicates blessing to his creation and to his creatures. God’s goodness is the opposite of harshness and cruelty. To experience divine goodness is to enjoy the sweetness, friendliness, benevolence, and generosity of God.
Goodness is the broader category encompassing several of God’s moral attributes. His goodness toward those in misery we call mercy. His goodness to forebear with those deserving judgment we call patience. And his goodness to those who are guilty we call grace.
Three Aspects of God’s Goodness
Theologians speak of God’s goodness as necessary, voluntary, and communicative.
God’s goodness is necessary in that God cannot be other than completely, perfectly, and unalterably good. Goodness is what God does, but it is also who he is. Good and upright is the LORD (Ps. 25:8). Good are you LORD, and you do good (Ps. 119:68). Jesus told the rich young man, “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). Of course, Jesus didn’t mean that human beings are incapable of doing good things or possessing relative goodness. Jesus meant that only God in himself is originally, infinitely, and immutably good. God is good in the highest degree. His goodness can never increase nor decrease. He is all good and unmixedly good. He is like the sun—all light in whom there is no darkness. That’s what we mean when we say God is necessarily good.
God’s goodness is also voluntary. This may seem to contradict the previous point, but it does not. God’s eternal and intrinsic goodness is necessary, but his will to make known this goodness to others is voluntary. In other words, it was necessary that whatever God would create would be good, but it was not necessary that God create in the first place. As Stephen Charnock puts it in The Existence and Attributes of God, “God is necessarily good in his nature, but free in his communications of it.” God did not have to go outside of himself to be good, nor did he have to create the universe in order to be conscious of his own Trinitarian goodness. The fact that God willed to display divine goodness is a further expression of that goodness.
This leads to the third point: God’s goodness is communicative. Whatever good we have or whatever good we enjoy is because God has willed for his goodness to be known and enjoyed. Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights (James 1:17). Food is good, marriage is good, friendship is good, health is good, peace is good, prosperity is good, work is good, recreation is good, rest is good—because God is good. He is a benevolent Creator, making his sun rise on the evil and on the good, sending rain on the just and on the unjust (Matt. 5:45). Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, every excellent thing is owing to the overflowing goodness of God (Phil 4:8). God communicates his goodness not with miserliness, but with great delight. God loves to make his goodness known. The supply of his goodness is inexhaustible, and the sharing of it knows no end.
Three Areas Where God Displays His Goodness
If the nature of God’s goodness is threefold, so is the manifestation of his goodness. We see the display of God’s goodness chiefly in three areas: in creation, in providence, and in redemption.
First, we see God’s goodness in creation.
Think of the constant refrain throughout the creation week: “And God saw that it was good.” We come to the climax of the sixth day, with the events of Genesis 2 already having taken place—with the creation of the man, and then the creation of the woman, fit for the man—and then we read: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).
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Avoid Every Appearance of Evil!
If we look at the broader context of the New Testament as a whole, we see that Paul was certainly not speaking about avoiding every appearance of evil in 1 Thessalonians 5. His own mission was governed by the mantra, I have become all things to all people, so that by all means I might save some (1 Cor 9.22). Further, consider the life of Jesus. The distinct impression one gets from the gospels is that Jesus simply did not have the same scruples about his associations that the religious leaders of the day had. They avoided the appearance of evil at all costs; Jesus seems almost to have had the opposite approach to life and ministry (see, e.g., Luke 7:39). Even his disciples had been oppressed by all the rules and traditions of men. But Jesus freed them from such nonsense.
Christian Leaders and the Gray Areas of Godly Life
When Christian leaders talk about how to live a godly life, they eventually turn to the gray areas those things that are right for some but wrong for others. You know the list: drinking, smoking, watching R rated movies, playing cards, dancing, using colorful language, listening to Country-Western music (OK that last one is not a gray area; it should be taboo for everyone), etc. That’s the short list.
Initial Freedom in Christ: Articulated and Appreciated
And the way the instruction on such matters goes is all too often along these lines: First, our freedoms in Christ are articulated, clearly stated, appreciated.
Qualifiers to Freedom: Comfort, Judgment, and Love
Next come the qualifiers: but don’t exercise your freedom in Christ if it will make someone uncomfortable, cause someone to judge you, is not entirely loving, etc. This would be bad enough if it just ended there. By the time all the qualifications are stated, the freedoms that we allegedly have are almost all stripped away. Paralysis begins to set in.
1 Thessalonians 5:22 – A Verse Used as a Weapon
But the coup de grace comes with a single verse from 1 Thessalonians, utilized as a weapon against all those who enjoy their lives in Christ: But even if what you do is loving, makes no one uncomfortable, doesn’t cause anyone to judge you, remember that you are responsible to avoid every appearance of evil. So, if in doubt, don’t do it.
Questioning the Interpretation: “Avoid Every Appearance of Evil”
That’s how the verse reads in the KJV: Avoid every appearance of evil. It’s 1 Thess 5.22 and it puts a damper on everything. But does it really mean this? Does it really mean that even if something looks like it’s evil to some, we can’t enjoy it? Hardly.
True Meaning: Abstaining from Every Form of Evil
The Greek text really should be translated, abstain from every form of evil. There is a genuine correspondence between form and evil: that is, stay away from evil things. But the reason that form (or, in the KJV, appearance) was used is because Paul is speaking about false doctrine.
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