Hunting Sin
Whenever the catechism speaks of a saving grace it means that the subject under consideration is a fully orbed gift from above. The Lord in His love for you has not only given the means for sanctification, our being renewed in the image of Jesus, but He has granted to you the ammunition to keep killing sin like Rambo in a southeastern Asian triple-canopy jungle.
This week in our catechism time we only have one question to look at, and this will be true for our next lesson as well. In this part of the SC we are in the midst of talking about what it means to believe in Jesus, and how we are to follow Him as His disciples. Not only that, but specifically how that hope goes about affecting every area of our lives. The writing out of the Ten Commandments and all the implications they touch on is meant to encourage us to consider the way we are living and walking in light on the glorious work of our Trinitarian salvation won unto us by the decree of the Father, the work of the Son, and the application of it all by the Holy Spirit. Jesus speaks more about the fruit born of redemption than just about any other topic.
Believers ought to have no problem understanding that when we confess Christ as our Lord and Savior that this is not a one-time event. At least, they shouldn’t. However, many cultural Christians have this idea that as long as they get baptized, sign a card, say the magic words “I believe in Jesus” that whatever they do after that is immaterial. They said it publicly, or at least intimated it by attendance at a church building for a while. Maybe even their name is still on the register as a member somewhere, that ought to be enough to get into Heaven. Right? Well, no. Our Redeemer is pretty clear that if there is no fruit which follows faith than there is no there, there. As the old saying goes you are no more a Christian by taking up space in a pew than you are a car by sitting in a garage. If there is anything that drives unbelievers away from considering the truth claims of the Christian religion its false confessors who deny its power. Why should they want to be a Believer if it apparently makes no change in the lives of the people they meet?
We need to understand that if you have truly placed your trust in the Son of the Living God than you’ve entered into a citizenship in a new kingdom which has with it new responsibilities, well not so much new as in never before seen, but in the sense of a fresh relationship to the person and work of God, especially in His commandments. No longer do they have the ability to kill you dead, and no longer do you desire to be saved by them. To expand on that a little we see this language of new meaning new to you in the Psalms for example when the Psalmist in Psalm 96 uses the term new song.
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The Biblical Responsibility of Christian Parents
Children need regular biblical teaching just like adults do, and the fact is that children can often grasp more truth than we give them credit for. Certainly some deeper theological truths may be challenging for a child to comprehend, but we must teach the core truths of Scripture to our children from the earliest ages so they will come to truly know God.
Do you have a mission statement for your family?
Every successful business has a mission statement that carefully articulates the company’s central vision and primary objectives. Yet the mission statement does not exist simply to be placed in an employee manual or on a plaque in the conference room. It exists to set the parameters for the structures and methodologies the company employs in pursuit of that mission.
In a similar way, to determine what is best for our children, we need to begin with consideration of our end goal. Every family needs a mission statement.
All Christian parents want to rear children who trust Christ for their salvation and live lives committed to him. Every church wants to disciple children who grow to be faithful servants of Christ. Yet to establish the best way to accomplish these goals, we need to have a sound biblical picture of what we are trying to accomplish.
Perhaps the best place to start is with the core confession of faith God gave to his people in the Old Testament. Known as the Shema, from the first word of the confession in Hebrew—“Hear”—this statement encapsulates a valuable model for what it means to be a true follower of God:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
(Deut. 6:4–6)
To Know God
The Jewish confession begins with a requirement to believe certain things. The first of these affirmations is that the Lord, the God of Scripture, is our God. We believe in him, we affirm him as our God, and we trust in him. But then Moses adds an additional qualification. Not only is the Lord our God, he is the only God. There is one and only one true and living God. In other words, only one being in the entire universe deserves to be worshiped. The one true God is the Lord, the God of the Bible.
At the core of our desire for our children is that they truly know this. We want them to know God, to believe in him, and to trust him. We want them to know that he created them and what he has done throughout history. We want them to know he requires perfect obedience and does not tolerate sin. This very desire informs our intent to give them biblical teaching so they can understand truth about God.
The New Testament, of course, adds the complete revelation essential to salvation, and that is that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through [him]” (John 14:6). Jesus is both God and man, and thus knowing him is the only way to truly know God. Our children need to be taught that since sin deserves everlasting judgment and prevents us from having fellowship with God, they must come to God through Christ, who died to pay the penalty that sin deserves. We need to teach them that those who repent of their sins and trust in Christ alone for their salvation will be forgiven of their sin and given everlasting life.
This is why the Word of God must be prominent in the lives of our children from the earliest of ages. This was true of Timothy, to whom Paul says, “From childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). Timothy’s grandmother and mother had faithfully communicated truth about God from the Scriptures to him as a child (1:5).
Children need regular biblical teaching just like adults do, and the fact is that children can often grasp more truth than we give them credit for. Certainly some deeper theological truths may be challenging for a child to comprehend, but we must teach the core truths of Scripture to our children from the earliest ages so they will come to truly know God.
To Obey God
The immediate context of the Jewish confession in Deuteronomy 6 is the giving of the law to the people of Israel, the “statutes and the rules” God gave to Moses. God required certain things of his people, and their adherence to those requirements resulted in either blessing or curse. In verse 3, Moses told them to be careful to obey these things.
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Sleeping on Rocks Right Now? Jesus Is Right There
Jacob had betrayed family and God and had lost everything. Yet God was working right then even in Jacob’s betrayal and desolation to fulfill his promise. God was there, heaven and earth were joined. God’s ministering servants rushed up and down for Jacob. How gracious God is! How kind, patient, and longsuffering. How wise and mighty that what we intend as evil he intends for our good (Gen. 50:20).
Weeks after winning my license, I crashed my car. It was a wet night and my friends and I decided it would be fun to drift around corners with wheels spinning. I lost control, the front of the car hammered into a high curb, and the steering was wrecked.
I limped the car home, too ashamed and embarrassed to tell my parents. I drove it first thing in the morning to the repairers in town. The mechanic hoisted it up and showed me how I’d bent the wheels and steering arms. Repair would be very costly.
I remember pacing the wet streets car-less, wondering where on earth I would find the repair money and still too ashamed to tell my family. For just a few hours I felt unusually helpless, almost nauseous with worry and loneliness. Looking back, I see how unnecessary my suffering was. All the help in the world was all around me, and I was blind to it.
So it is with Jacob in the book of Genesis.
Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran (Gen. 28:10).
What tragedy we read in these few words. Jacob was born into a rich and loving family. But he tricked his twin brother out of his birthright (Gen. 25) and then pulled a seriously devious and nasty deception on his blind father, tricking Isaac into giving him Esau’s covenant blessing (Gen. 27). So now Jacob is fleeing Beersheba, his home in the south of the Promised Land, to Haran in the strange and distant north: beyond Galilee, beyond Syria and Damascus, right up near Assyria and the Euphrates River.
Jacob means “Grasper.” Grasper had betrayed his family. And by lying and cheating and dishonoring his father, he had also dishonored God. What had he accomplished? A family in humiliation and disarray. He himself running, alone, and far, far from home.
Remember, this is the father of Israel. According to the principle of corporate identity as explained in Hebrews 7:1-10, the entire nation was physically latent within him at that moment. Jacob is Israel. Grasper personifies the church. What is true of him is true of the church.
What is true of Jacob is true of the church.
And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep (Gen. 28:11).
After fleeing all day, night falls with no motel or friendly house nearby. In verse 20 Jacob prays for “food to eat and clothes to wear.” So we see a lonely, guilty, destitute man. He lies in the open air with a rock for a pillow. He is exhausted physically, morally, spiritually, and relationally. This by nature is you. This by nature is your church.
Sleeping on rocks gives anyone strange dreams. God gives Jacob a vision. It is a kind of apocalypse; God pulls aside the curtain to show Jacob what is going on behind his desolate circumstances.
God showed Jacob a staircase joining heaven and earth.
And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac” (Gen. 28:12-13a).
God cast our rebellious parents, and thus us, out of Eden. Cherubim wielding blazing swords barred the way back (Gen. 3:24). Humanity, and not least Jacob at this point, live within the desolation of that separation. But God showed Jacob a staircase joining heaven and earth.
The people of Babel attempted something like this, to build a tower to reconnect heaven and earth, to manufacture greatness and security (Gen. 11:1-9). But it was human-made and prideful, and God razed it. If God separated humanity from heaven, what can we do to bridge the gulf?
We cannot reach up to God, but he can reach down to us. That is the staircase.
Why are angels dashing up and down it? “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” (Heb. 1:14). They rush down with God’s word and salvation (Heb. 2:2), and rush back up with our prayers (Rev. 8:4). The staircase establishes communication between Jacob and heaven. It is a conduit of help—of salvation.
The One who speaks to Jacob is “the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac.” He made that unbreakable promise to Abraham:“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Gen 12:1-2)
At that point Jacob must have doubted those promises. “Land? Great nation? Great name? Blessing? I’m an exile from the land. My ‘great name’ is Grasper. I’m cursed, not blessed!” Jacob had betrayed family and God and had lost everything. Yet God was working right then even in Jacob’s betrayal and desolation to fulfill his promise. God was there, heaven and earth were joined.
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It is My Business
The emergence of sexual liberation as a rising public value and an essential human right means that Christians are accused of “bigotry,” “hatred,” “homophobia,” “heterosexism,” and “heteronormativity.” As gay people believe that their gayness is “who they are,” an in-born aspect of their essential personality, there will be an inevitable clash between biblical truth and personal rights. Inevitably, the Christian view on sexuality will become a major reason for persecution of Christian believers. Rarely could two sides stand in starker opposition.
I recently heard a sermon that gave me deep concern. It was on 1 Peter 4:12–13, a text that predicts serious suffering for Christian believers. Peter, who was crucified upside down by the “civil” authorities of Rome, wrote: “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.” Peter was writing to Christians under persecution for not worshiping the Roman emperor, who believed himself to be god. As I listened to the sermon preached in 2021, I couldn’t help wondering what Christians will suffer and are already suffering in our time and in cultures around the world.
A few days before hearing that sermon, I received an email from Christian Concern, a UK legal defense ministry similar to the Alliance Defending Freedom. The article described the experience of Rev. Dr. Bernard Randall, 48, an Anglican minister and a chaplain at Trent College, a Church of England school of “protestant and evangelical” traditions for children up to 18 years of age. A student had approached Dr. Randall, asking him to give a chapel talk on the subject of LGBT sexuality, since Dr. Elly Barnes, a leader of Educate and Celebrate, had been invited by the school to train staff on how to “equip you and your communities with the knowledge, skills and confidence to embed gender, gender identity and sexual orientation into the fabric of your organization.” In that training session, Dr. Barnes had openly called on the school to chant: “Completely smash heteronormativity.” We can hear cultural echoes of the Sixties chant by radicals and friends of President Obama, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn’s slogan: “Smash monogamy.” Addressing the students from a different perspective, using a different tone, Dr. Randall stated:
Now when ideologies compete, we should not descend into abuse. We should respect the beliefs of others, even where we disagree. Above all, we need to treat each other with respect, not personal attacks – that’s what loving your neighbor as yourself means. By all means discuss, have a reasoned debate about beliefs, but while it’s OK to try and persuade each other, no one should be told they must accept an ideology. Love the person, even where you profoundly dislike the ideas.”
Dr. Randall nevertheless proceeded to argue principles:
But there are areas where the two sets of ideas are in conflict, and in these areas you do not have to accept the ideas and ideologies of LGBT activists. Indeed, since Trent exists “to educate boys and girls according to the Protestant and Evangelical principles of the Church of England,” anyone who tells you that you must accept contrary principles is jeopardizing the school’s charitable status, and therefore it’s very existence.
For the beliefs on marriage, sexuality and gender, he pointed to the Church of England’s public liturgy, especially the Book of Common Prayer and Canon Law, specifically naming heterosexual marriage as an essential Christian belief.[1]
How was Randall’s balanced approach received by school authorities? Following an interview with the headmaster, the school reported Dr. Randall to the government’s counter-terrorism watchdog, Prevent, which seeks to “prevent people being drawn into terrorism.” The Rev. Dr. Randall is being treated as a potentially violent religious extremist. He was also reported to the Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) as a danger to children (essentially treating him as a pedophile). At the next staff training day, the school announced that it had fully adopted the “LGBT inclusive curriculum” including a section for 3–5 year old nursery children, proposed by the afore mentioned expert and well-known lesbian, Elly Barnes. Approval of homosexual practice is spreading like an out-of-control virus throughout the Anglican Church of England. Previous church disputes were over the two natures of Christ and other weighty theological issues; now this historic church is split over sexuality.[2]
This could not happen in America, right? Al Mohler in his Briefing of August 17, 2021, described the powerful push for LGBTQ+ training in all schools, whether private or public. Children are being taught the various methodologies of sexual intercourse and how to intelligently watch pornography! An article in USA Today asks: “…do we teach our children what is true in reality and history and nature, [regarding] queer, inclusive sex, or do we teach them what we want them to know?”[3] The choice is proposed between objective LGBTQ+ reality and parental closed-mindedness.
This emphasis on sexuality is international. The current US State Department is in league with the United Nations Human Rights Council, which affirms the “fundamental duty of [each] State…to recognize every human being’s freedom,…including children of any age…to determine the confines of their existence, including their gender identity and expression and the human right to alter their gender entirely by self-identification.”[4]
PROGRESSIVE SEXUAL IDENTITYIdentity politics has emerged as a major point of conflict in both the culture and the church. Specifically, sexual identity is one of the most important aspects of a person’s life. Clothing itself in the contemporary moral values of diversity and social difference, homosexual identity presents itself as an expression of Critical Race Theory. An oppressed “sexual minority” does no harm in its good-hearted celebration of all things queer. Each individual is understood as having the inviolable right to determine his, her, or “their” own sexual option. Even non-religious conservatives like Tucker Carlson never say a public critical word of the LGBTQ agenda, whatever they think in private. Scores of conservative politicians sent an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting same-sex marriage.
The emergence of sexual liberation as a rising public value and an essential human right means that Christians are accused of “bigotry,” “hatred,” “homophobia,” “heterosexism,” and “heteronormativity.” As gay people believe that their gayness is “who they are,” an in-born aspect of their essential personality, there will be an inevitable clash between biblical truth and personal rights. Inevitably, the Christian view on sexuality will become a major reason for persecution of Christian believers. Rarely could two sides stand in starker opposition.
A massive 2019 study that analyzed DNA samples and lifestyle information from 477,000 people (the largest such study to date) found “no clear patterns among genetic variants that could be used to meaningfully predict or identify a person’s sexual behavior.” [5] This study indicates that “non-genetic factors—such as cultural environment, upbringing, personality, nurturing—are far more significant in influencing a person’s choice of sexual partner.”[6] This surely means that the only biological determinant is heterosexuality. Other forms are self-imposed or chosen. Homosexuals often say they are “born that way,” but this is not true when it comes to biology, though some people struggle with homosexual attraction from a very early age.
Neither objective biology nor the rights of God as the divine Creator are recognized in our increasingly anti-biblical contemporary society. Sexual identity has become the ultimate expression of human autonomy. Identity politics cannot be questioned. “It’s none of your business!”
BIBLICAL EVIDENCEProclamation of the gospel requires a clear description of the human person as a glorious, though fallen, being made in God’s image. The human being is so noble that the eternal God sent the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, to enter into the human lot, take on human form, and save us from our sins by his atoning death. Part of the glory of God’s image is his creation of both male and female, a warm and amazing reality that reflects both unity and distinction, just as the divine Trinity expresses both unified love between the three persons and distinct functions. Distinction is essential; humans carry within themselves an expression of the deep distinction between themselves as created beings and God, their totally “other” Creator. This binary value, what I have called “Twoism,” is the basis of all creation. Sexual complementarity is bound up in our biology as male and female, in our genetic make-up as either XX or XY. This is what both Jesus (Matthew 19:1–6) and Paul (1 Corinthians 6:9 and 16 and Ephesians 5:31–32), taught, referring back to God’s creative act in Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them; and Gen. 2:24: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Both Jesus and Paul understood that the “image of God” is expressed both in sexual unity and in sexual distinction. They understood that since we are specks in a vast universe (which we did not make), we cannot begin by defining reality by how we feel. With gentleness and understanding, believers must find a way of telling gays that sexual sameness is not who they are, even though they believe it represents the deepest part of how they feel. We need the wise approach of Dr. Randall, but remember how he was treated!
A CAUSE FOR SERIOUS PERSECUTIONTacitus (AD 56–118), an early Roman orator and public official, is often described as the greatest Roman historian of the ancient world. I have often wondered why he, of all people, called the Christians of the second century “haters of humanity” (Tacitus, Annals 15.44), even though Christians were known as honest citizens who took care of the sick and rescued abandoned babies. Some believe this harsh judgment was because of the exclusivity of the Christian faith, but it may also have been because Christians refused to celebrate the Roman norms of homosexuality, abortion and adultery. The ancient world everywhere honored homosexuals as religious shamans because they affirmed Oneism or sameness in their sexuality— that is, the pagan notion of human sameness with the divine, thereby denying the Twoist image of God.[7] As we become more like the ancient Roman culture and as Washington’s Potomac and Rome’s Tiber meet head on,[8] the subject of sexuality becomes increasingly sensitive and deeply controversial. On one side, progressives assert the autonomy of human beings and are incensed by the very idea that a Creator could determine human behavior. On the other side, biblical Christians make equally massive statements about human sexuality, based on their understanding of its relationship to the being of God the Creator. In this sense, sexuality is an unavoidable issue in Christian witness and will doubtless grow as a cause of opposition and eventual persecution. The Equality Act, which the Democrats are planning to pass, legalizes the LGBTQ+ agenda and imposes it everywhere, while specifically denying on this subject any religious freedom of opinion. Thus, a serious clash with Christian orthodoxy seems unavoidable. In their discourse regarding the being of God the Creator and the nature of created human beings Christians cannot be silent (though we must not generate unnecessary antagonism as in the Westboro Baptist’s—”God hates f…s” approach). The gospel does not pick out one sin, because while presupposing the dignity of all human beings, it affirms that we are all sinners. At the same time, all sins must be named, including sexual behavior that opposes the will of God the good Creator—A Father who desires human flourishing.
May God grant the church of the twenty-first century understanding, clarity, boldness, courage, humility, and compassion as it enters days of great persecution. “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.”
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.[1] See https://www.newsweek.com/uk-chaplain-sues-college-discrimination-after-his-dismissal-sermon-questioning-lgbt-policy-1590269.
[2] Virtue, David W. Who Blinks First? Rowan Williams Challenges Peter Akinola on Homosexuality (10 Aug 2021). https://virtueonline.org/who-blinks-first-rowan-williams-challenges-peter-akinola.
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2021/08/05/sex-education-importance-lgbtq-inclusivity-
[4] https://outlook.office.com/mail/deeplink?popoutv2=1&version=20210802002.13
[5] Kelland, Kate. “No ‘gay gene’, but study finds genetic links to sexual behavior.” Reuters (29 Aug 2019). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-sex/no-gay-gene-but-study-finds-genetic-links-to-sexual-behavior- idUSKCN1VJ2C3.
[6] Kelland, “No ‘gay gene.’”
[7] See my article: Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal; https://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/43/43-3/43-3-pp443-469_JETS.pdf
[8] Stephen D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, 2018).