Mrs Räsänen was not asking for her defence to be based on the Bible; she was asking for the freedom to quote the Bible and to defend biblical principles. It was the State who was seeking to prevent her from doing so. Bear in mind that Mrs Räsänen was a senior politician, having been Finland’s interior minister from 2011 to 2015. This case was not a random one, but one designed to intimidate and send out a signal that the new secular morality must not be challenged.

There is good news this week from Finland. The Finnish Christian MP, Päivi Räsänen, together with a Lutheran bishop, Juhana Pohjola, have been found not guilty of hate speech charges, while the prosecution has been ordered to pay 60,000 EUR in charges. That is the good news and to be warmly welcomed.
The bad news is that the case was brought in the first place. This was despite the police saying there was no criminal case to answer. This trial was a political trial brought for ideological reasons and there are important lessons for the Church throughout the West to learn from this case.
Mrs Räsänen was accused of making derogatory comments on three occasions including in a 2019 tweet, opposing the Lutheran Church’s participation in the Finnish Pride week, and using Bible verses to argue her position.
Sin Banned?
The state prosecutor had argued that using the word “sin” could be “derogatory” and “harmful”. This is an astonishing argument. Using the word ‘sin’ could be derogatory for any group. Is the prosecutor really saying that the State should ban sin – or rather speaking about sin?
Being accused of sin can be upsetting. I recall one man who was furious at me for suggesting that his racism against Pakistani people was a sin; and another at a public meeting who was so furious that I was speaking of sin in general that he got up and started shouting and threatening me!
Yet sin is essential to the teaching of the Scriptures. It is the message of Jesus that he came to save sinners from their sin and plenty of people found that message offensive enough – they crucified him for it!
Harmless?
The notion of ‘harm’ is an interesting one. It is a word that is often used, and rarely defined. Harm comes on a spectrum. All of us would agree that killing someone is a ‘harmful’ act – but is challenging someone’s beliefs, philosophies or lifestyles really harmful? Who gets to determine what is harm at that end of the spectrum? In reality, it means that those in power can use the idea of ‘harm’ to blame, shame and control those with whom they disagree.
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“Unhitching” our doctrine from our pastoral care makes sense if the goal of the Church is simply to help people live better lives. Reducing the Church this way only elevates the self. Ministry, once unhitched from doctrine, devolves into idolatry. Like the golden calf worshiped in the time of the Exodus, it is possible to claim God’s name while losing all moral direction.   

For the last few weeks, all eyes, at least evangelical eyes, have been locked on Atlanta. When North Point Community Church announced the “Unconditional” conference, held this past weekend, many noted that two of the speakers were men “married” to other men. Many of the rest were on the record as “affirming” same-sex relationships, recognizing LGBTQ as legitimate categories of human identity, and describing their work as hoping to convert Christians to their ideas about sex, identity, and marriage. Would this conference mark Andy Stanley’s final departure from historic Christian teaching on human sexuality?  
Stanley, who is among America’s most prominent pastors, defended the conference and choice of speakers due to the focus of the event. In his Sunday sermon, he responded to the criticism, stating that this conference was not about the theology of human sexuality, or even about talking someone out of an LGBTQ identity. Rather, he said, it was aimed at “parents of LGBTQ+ children and ministry leaders looking to discover ways to support parents and LGBTQ+ children;” in other words, parents who had already tried (and failed) to talk their children out of these identities and now only wished to stay in relationship with them.  
Even if the conference was intentionally designed to not address the questions of the morality of same-sex relationships and alternate sexual identities, as apologist and “Unconditional” conference attendee Alan Shlemon noted, it answered these questions “by virtue of who they platformed, their resources, their recommendations. It’s a confusing message at best, and at worst it’s … saying that homosexual sex would be permissible, (and) satisfying transgender ideations would be permissible. (To hear more of Shlemon’s perspective, watch his interview with fellow apologist professor Sean McDowell here.) 
On Sunday, Stanley maintained that the conference successfully met its stated goal without implying any kind of moral or theological shift. This is possible because of something Stanley has said both about this conference and about the overall work of the Church.
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He will rescue some LGBTQ people from the domain of darkness (Colossians 1:13) and qualify them “to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light” (Colossians 1:12). When that happens, and when those who once proudly draped themselves in a rainbow flag are now clothed in the righteousness of Christ, will you be ready to minister to them? To teach, train, and disciple them? To spur them on in their newfound faith? To walk alongside them?

For the past two decades—a relative blip on history’s radar—a new month of celebration has been forcibly entered into our digital calendars, splashed across our screens, and slipped into our common consciousness. That month is the month of June, which LGBTQ advocates have called “Pride Month.”
Now, as the clock prepares to strike midnight each May 31, an angsty mix of emotions sweeps through churches, homes, classrooms, boardrooms, businesses, and government agencies as decisions have to be made about which side of the fence to sit on, how much virtue signaling to engage in, how not to be accused of saying too much (or too little), and how many colors of the rainbow flag should be flown.
In the midst of all the hand-wringing over concerns about being canceled, and the politicking involved in what has become a hot-button issue in our day, a very simple question is often overlooked: what does God think of all of this? What is the Lord of Heaven’s take on the whole idea of “Pride Month”?
This article presents ten truths about God’s perspective on the LGBTQ movement as a whole, and His assessment of our culture’s wholesale devotion of an entire month each year to worship at the altar of “Pride.”
First, God has given us clear directions and prohibitions on a variety of subjects, and related to a variety of sins, in His Word—the Bible.
God has made no mistakes in anything He’s said in His Word. He wasn’t half-in and half-out when He gave us His Word. He didn’t stutter when He gave us His Word. He hasn’t moved on from what He has said in His Word.
On the contrary, God has spoken clearly, directly, and timelessly in His Word. And this means that each of the behaviors, practices, tendencies, predispositions, attractions, and feelings that any of us have—no matter how societally accepted they are or have become—must be held up to the penetrating light of God’s Word.
What God says, goes. What we want, what we feel, what we crave, and what we desire, ultimately doesn’t matter. What matters is what God says, what He has said, and how He wants us to live. “O send out Your light and Your truth, let them lead me.” (Psalm 43:3)
Second, God has clearly outlined His design for marriage, sex, and procreation in the Scriptures.
His design is laid out with simplicity and clarity in Genesis 2:24, which says: “a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”
That is, a man, a biological male (the only kind of man there is), and a woman, a biological female (the only kind of woman there is), are to be joined together in marriage. They then will grow their family through the addition of children, playing their part in fulfilling God’s mandate to populate the earth (Genesis 1:28), and then their kids will go on to start their own families and do the same.
These God-honoring (not to mention species-preserving) cycles of procreation may not be in keeping with what is being taught on college campuses or through the mainstream media these days, but going back to the first truth mentioned above, ultimately it makes no difference what professor so-and-so or a talking head or Elon Musk thinks. It’s God’s perspective—and His alone—that matters.
Third, God has clearly condemned as sinful any corruptions of His design for sex and gender and marriage.
And contrary to the arguments of those who would like to argue that God was grumpily anti-gay in the Old Testament, but that by Jesus’ day, He had evolved into a more friendly, more LGBTQ-affirming “god,” consider the divinely-inspired words of the Apostle Paul, who wrote the following in the New Testament:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.1 Corinthians 6:9-10
Fourth, “there is no partiality with God” (Romans 2:11).
Or as it says in the King James Version, “God is no respecter of persons.”
So, while the sin of homosexuality is, in fact, enumerated as a sin in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, it isnot the only sin listed there. It is not the unforgivable or unpardonable sin.
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