The Nazarenes reject the Levitical texts because, according to them, such texts fail to show the love of God. Instead, they come from “ancient cultural biases.” The authors of “Why the Church” base their subjective argumentation on the power of love. God’s love must be shown to practicing homosexuals; to determine that their sexual practice is against the law of God is to show them hatred rather than love.

We are now obliged to hallow an entire month of Gay Pride celebrations of homosexual practice. Nude men and drag queens parade through our cities, while children look on. Children attending parades used to climb on the fire engines or walk next to a police officer. Now the police are obliged to march in step with the agenda, while military representatives wear a “pride patch” on their uniforms.
How and why has our culture come to accept such perverted sexuality as a ho-hum reality? No doubt the new DEI social justice theory of “oppressed and oppressor” has identified minority sexual identities as one of the oppressed communities. In this “pride” month I discovered a 469-page book with the intriguing title, Why the Church of the Nazarene Should be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming by Thomas Jay Oord and Lexa Oord (SacraSage, 2023). The authors are a pastor and wife couple, members of the Nazarene church. They found some 90 key church members and leaders to write short chapters encouraging the Nazarene church to accept LBGTQ+ practitioners as members and elders of the church, and to adopt the full practice of same-sex marriage.
The Church of the Nazarene: Beginnings and Current Beliefs
The Church of the Nazarene is an evangelical Christian denomination that emerged in North American Methodism and the 19th century Holiness Movement/Revival. The name was born of a genuine desire to emulate Jesus’ compassion for the poor, as well as to follow the passion for the poor exhibited in the life of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. The “Articles of Faith” in the Manual of Church of the Nazarene, states:
We believe in one God – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:

That the Old and New Testament scriptures, given by plenary inspiration, contain all truth necessary to faith and Christian living.
That man is born with a fallen nature and is, therefore, inclined to evil, and that continually.
That the finally impenitent are hopelessly and eternally lost.
That the atonement through Christ is for the whole human race; and that whosoever repents and believes in the Lord Jesus Christ is justified and regenerated and saved from the dominion of sin.
That believers are to be sanctified wholly, subsequent to regeneration, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
That the Holy Spirit bears witness to the new birth and also the entire sanctification of believers.
That our Lord will return, the dead will be raised, and the final judgment will take place.[1]

It is a major loss for Christian orthodoxy to lose such a powerful denomination. Alas, the mother-church of orthodox Methodism, namely United Methodism, is collapsing. United Methodism’s governing General Conference, from April 23 to May 3, 2024, deleted (!) the “denomination’s specific disapproval of adultery, premarital/extramarital sex, and homosexual behavior from its Book of Discipline.” Nearly two million conservative African Methodists have resolved to exit United Methodism.[2]
How to Read Scripture
Those favoring the normalization of homosexuality have a strange way of interpreting the Scriptures, since they consider them to be divinely inspired. Their reasoning is this: Methodism found a way of interpreting Paul’s teaching on the ordination of women, and there are now women pastors throughout Methodist churches. Methodism must now find a way of interpreting not only Paul’s teaching on sexuality, but explicit texts in Old Testament passages such as Leviticus 18:20–23, which includes homosexuality with incest, child sacrifice, and bestiality as examples of Canaanite (pagan) abominations:
And you shall not lie sexually with your neighbor’s wife and so make yourself unclean with her.
You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the LORD.
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion. (Lev 18:20–23)
Since this text is concerned with the holiness of God (and thus Israel’s holiness) it also includes reminders to Israel in symbolic practice in everyday things.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
The very same Son who was to submit to the humiliation of incarnation, of gestation, of birth, of obedient suffering and death, who was to be raised for us and and who intercedes for us now at the right hand was with his church even before the incarnation because there is one covenant of grace in multiple administrations. 

When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” And he said, “No; but I am the commander of the army of Yahweh. Now I have come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, “What does my Lord say to his servant?” And the commander of Yahweh’s army said to Joshua, “Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so (Joshua 5:13–15).
One of the more profound points of disagreement between some Particular Baptists and the historic Christian and Reformed understanding of the history of redemption (historia salutis) centers on the question of the nature of the covenant of grace before the New Testament. There are more moderate Baptists who see the covenant of grace as actually present in the Old Testament (i.e., Gen-Malachi). The school of thought that concerns us here, however, is the more radical strain of Particular Baptist theology who reject the idea that the covenant of grace was actually, substantially present in the types and shadows of the Old Testament. In this view, the covenant of grace is only actually present in the New Covenant. In this view, there is a witness to the covenant of grace in the types and shadows and believers under the OT might be said to have apprehended Christ and the covenant of grace by faith but the covenant of grace itself remains wholly future relative to the types and shadows. Indeed, some proponents of this view have argued that all the covenants (including the Abrahamic) before the New Covenant were, in essence, covenants of works and that only the New Covenant is the covenant of grace.
One counter argument that I have been offering to the more radical Particular Baptist view is to say that such a view cannot account for significant events in the history of redemption nor does it account for the way the New Testament itself interprets the Old Testament. In other essays I have noted how much Paul’s appeal to the history of Israel (in 1 Cor 10:1–4) relies on a substantial continuity between Israel and the New Covenant church. I have also observed that in (the most likely textual variant of) Jude 5, it is Jesus who “saved the people out of the land.”1 For these discussions see the resources below.
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Our bodies may be driving us back towards the dust, but at the same time the Holy Spirit is inwardly pushing us along to glory. He will continue sanctifying us, until the final day, seemingly at our weakest, when our body succumbs to its physical death, we will behold the greatest victory! The beautiful chain of God’s work will be fashioned, and the sin that plagues our hearts will be cast off forever (Rom. 8:30). We will finally grasp freedom from the grief, pain, and loss in our sin-cursed world. And on that day we’ll be face to face with the one who also willingly walked towards weakness, so that we would be able to walk towards glory. 

My eyes catch a glimpse of the fingers slowly dancing across my keyboard. Wrinkles web across the surface, highlighting every bump and lump. They weave up towards the rounded knuckles—the ones that gripe at me from time to time. The thinning skin that’s weathered years of toil reveals blue veins beneath. I wonder if, or when, arthritis will come to stay?
I recline in my chair and slowly roll my shoulders back and forth, attempting to free the pinched nerve from the previous night’s sleep. It’s been happening more often. The sound of grinding muscles reverberates through my head, as I try to release the tightened offender.
I’m thirty-four years old, but I’m already acutely aware of the way my body is changing. It surfaces in spurts—when I wake up, crawl out of bed, and stretch only to suffer the consequences for the rest of the day. I feel these changes when I attempt a spinning ride with my children, leave a dish too spicy, or find myself unable to keep my eyes open in the evening. Things are not as they were.
Our culture tries to convince us we can all drink from the fountain of youth. Actresses in their seventies zip themselves into the latest fashion and appear on magazines and screens. They perpetuate the con that a little makeup, Botox, and a fitness regimen can keep your youthful zeal forever. Yet it’s nothing but smoke.
The graceful arms of our favorite movie icon can no longer do all they used to do. The intelligent wit of that actor has slowed, and some of their neural connections are now non-existent as memories slip from their mind. No matter how much pampering, clean eating, or willpower we commit to on this earth, our body will continue to weaken. The curse of sin demands it. Each day we wake up, our bodies walk toward death.
Pilgrimage to Dust
As much as we don’t like to admit it, we know weakness hangs in our future. We feel it with each funeral that hits our church. We see it in our grandparents and parents who force us to view the fragility of their bodies up close. We see it in ourselves. The writer in Ecclesiastes tells us no one can escape. We all go to one place: “All are from the dust, and to dust all return” (Eccles. 3:20).
We can hide, deny, or try to avoid it, but the reality remains that our entire life is one of increasing debility. We begin our lives helpless, as babies who begin to grow in strength and power. Yet with each day, our bodies begin to cycle back to the beginning, in a rhythm that releases whatever strength we accrued in this life. Our toned muscles will eventually deteriorate. Our neural connections will gradually wane.
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