The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy: Article VI
All the “parts” of Scripture hold together in one organic whole, in a way similar to how all the parts of creation hold together in one organic whole. The Trinitarian God—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—are true unity and diversity simultaneously, and all their works bear the imprint of their unity and diversity. Our thinking goes astray from God’s word to the degree that we set unity and diversity off against each other.
“We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration. We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can be rightly affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.”
In 1985 The Jesus Seminar was founded by a number of biblical scholars who sought to “renew the quest for the historical Jesus.” That is, they sought to determine what parts of the Gospel accounts could actually be attributed to Jesus, and then to draw definitive conclusions regarding the true identity of the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels. Their conclusion? Only about 18% of the sayings and 16% of the deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospel accounts are authentic. Of course, one is completely valid in asking: By what standard did they draw these conclusions? By what beliefs did they analyze the Gospel accounts in order to sit in judgment of them in order to decide what was truly authentic to those accounts? How did they arrive at these beliefs that gave them the ability to decide which parts of the Gospel accounts are “authentic”?
Such questions not only highlight the presuppositional nature of thinking—that all thinking is dependent on or controlled by one’s most foundational beliefs that drive the rest of one’s thinking—but also reveal that one must choose by what authority one is going to sit in judgment of that text that claims to be the only word from the only living and true God.
Article six of the Chicago Statement reminds us that those who adopt the approach represented by the Jesus Seminar do so in direct violation of the authority of Scripture as The Truth from the only living and true God that is unavoidably united in all its “parts.” God’s written word is irreducibly complex because it is from the only living and true God who is Truth.
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No Private Real Estate: Our Desires and Attractions Belong to Jesus
Jesus is holy and demands our full allegiance while graciously giving us his full protection and provision. No matter what form of suffering, temptation, or failure we have personally experienced, we increasingly experience life rightly ordered when we surrender our desires to him—even desires concerning sexuality and relationships: “And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:22–23).
“I just don’t understand why God won’t allow me to have the two things I desire most: to serve him and to be in a romantic relationship.” The college student’s pained, confused question gave me pause as I grappled with how to respond. Though attending a conservative Christian university, romance, for this young woman, could only be found in the arms of another woman.
How would you have answered her sincere question that arose from her heartache within? I don’t remember what I said, but, years later, I discovered that she had in fact embraced a gay identity. Her faith had faded into the gray background of her life while she fully engaged in what felt like vivid-color freedom, following her desires to her “true” self.
Sexual Attractions and Following Jesus: No Private Real Estate
Recently, I’ve had many conversations about a freeing, gracious aspect of the gospel that isn’t popular these days: the lordship of Christ. Jesus explained that life in him means death to self in exchange for a glorious, new life lived under his loving care and ownership. Luke 9:23–24 says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
To be sure, Christianity isn’t only about denying ourselves! However, what my young friend didn’t want to face is that life in Christ requires humbly surrendering to God as Lord, Creator, and Savior over all areas of our lives. There is no part of our being on which we can plant a flag that says “Mine!”—including our relational desires and sexuality.[1] There is no private real estate for followers of Jesus.
Christians are caving to the worldly pressure to latch onto a false gospel of self-fulfillment, which includes the destructive heresy that sexual and romantic desires do not need the radical redemption of Christ. This is seductive and enticing because it promotes the idea that I can take up my cross and follow Jesus, denying myself here and there, but not in my sexuality and identity. It whispers that I can love and follow him on my own terms, having whatever kinds of romantic and sexual relationships I desire.
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What the Garden of Eden has to do with Your Calendar
God still loves His children and knows what is best for them. In His love, He has given us limitations. Limitations like our need for sleep. Or like the fact that the sun comes up and goes down in a regular cycle signaling the time for rest. Or that He explicitly set aside one day a week when no work was to be done, and even went so far as taking a day off Himself even though He was not tired so that we would do as He did. But in our rebellion, we refuse to honor those limits and justify our unwillingness to do so.
Most everyone knows the story, even if they don’t believe the story. In the beginning, there was only God. Nothing else. And then God spoke, and “nothing” became “everything”, including human beings.
Everything was good. Very good, in fact. All creation existed in perfect harmony, and at the center piece of everything was the crown jewel of creation. The man and the woman lived in perfect fellowship with God, walking without guilt, shame, or any other hindrance with Him. God gave His creation the twin gifts of freedom and constraint, all summarized in this simple statement:
You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die (Gen. 2:16-17).
The first people did not trust the Lord and His Word and chose their own way, and with that choice everything that was good and right and harmonious was corrupted. It is, of course, a well known story. Maybe the best known story. And at least for the Christian, it’s not only well known but essential because it is through this story that we find the answer to the question of what is really wrong with the world.
Yes, there are all kinds of answers to that question, depending on the person you ask and the particular issue at the forefront of a person’s mind, but those are all downstream answers. The upstream answer – the one at the source of the trouble – is sin. That’s what’s wrong with the world. And this moment in the garden is when it all started.
Knowing this story, then, is an essential part of knowing who we are and what is wrong with us.
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Celebrating Abominating?
Supporting the LGBTQ movement is tantamount to endorsing rebellion against God. Saying nothing is not only cowardice but a rejection of God’s good commands and character. It is a declaration that we value man’s approval over God’s precepts and laws. By promoting and celebrating these lifestyles, or even by remaining aloof and watching from a distance, we align ourselves with wickedness, we allow the rot to continue, we call what is evil good and what is good evil, and we let fester what will kill this society and leave it languishing under God’s culture-ending judgments.
The LGBTQ Mouth Funk
There are many diseases that can kill you, from things like cancer, heart disease, or kidney disease, but few people consider the perilous bacteria-laden threat that gum disease presents. And this, of course, is for obvious reasons. Gum disease, or gingivitis as it is commonly called, begins in the early stages with very mild and easily treated symptoms, such as redness in the gums, irritation, and swelling. It might reveal itself with a little blood in the sink when flossing or a darker hue of pink upon the gumline, but with a commitment to brushing regularly and perhaps a routine visit to the dentist, it is entirely reversible and will not become a long-term issue for you.
Yet, if it is ignored for long enough and left untreated, gingivitis will turn into periodontitis, which is a much more significant and pesky version of gum disease. After years of gingival neglect, the gums will begin pulling away from the teeth and pockets, where bacteria can settle, will form, infection will set into the gums, and if ignored for long enough, will erode bone structures and even lead to death. What could have been a routine fix ends up polluting the entire mouth and eventually toxifying the whole body, which should be instructive as we enter into the month of a thousand rainbows, or more accurately, stain-bows and shame-bows.
Every year, we are thrust into an entire month filled with an ever-changing flag devoted to the sickest forms of moral deviancy; we have advocacy groups slamming the worst content down our throats from woke companies who virtue signal their way through June, such as Target selling women’s bathing suits last year with penis pockets, or Budweiser – an already piss-poor excuse for beer – putting Dylan Mulvaney, a piss poor excuse for a man, on its can. This is the month when the Whitehouse invites biological men with breast implants to stand on the south lawn and flash manufactured saline flesh sacks at children to the applause of adults. This is the month when people lose their jobs over social media posts dedicated to Biblical fidelity and the month where if you are not an ally of the alphabet gang, then you will be canceled.
Like gum disease in its most advanced stages, our culture has become thoroughly toxified by what was once a fairly routine infection. A couple rogue LGBTQ germs implanted themselves into the base of America’s gumline about 60 years ago, and now the stink or death has settled into the face of our culture.
How did we get here? One too many rainbow Twizzlers without a commitment to Biblical fidelity, and what you have is the makings of a full-blown face-rotting disease. You see, in the early twentieth century, as our culture crested the hilltop of Christendom, its first exposure to the LGBTQ movement was tasted. With organizations like the Society for Human Rights in 1924 and the Mattachine Society of 1950 being founded to advance the rights of gays and lesbians, the earliest signs of gum chaffing were beginning to flare up in the mouth.
A generation later, in the sexually debauched and psychedelic drug era of the 1960s, this mild irritation multiplied into a full-blown condition known as the Stonewall riots of New York, which brought the LGBTQ movement into the national conversation. Suddenly, what was once a minor inflammation that should have been dealt with by the church and the broader culture had morphed into a technicolored blood bath in the sink every time a little brushing was employed.
Sadly, the movement gained unnecessary momentum in the 1970s and 80s because the dispensational church stood idly by, waiting to be raptured while ignoring the odious smell of swamp breath in the mouth of an infected culture. As we transitioned to the 90s, the cultural gums were already pulling away from the teeth as the AIDS crisis ravaged the homosexual community, demonstrating the damning effects one will receive in the body for violating God’s law.
Since then, the pesky infection – which would have been curable at every step along the way – has burgeoned into a full-blown septic tank in the soul of our nation, polluting everything it touches, from the legalization of sodomite marriages to the widespread acceptance of pedophiles twerking in dresses for cheering mothers and children to the Mr. potato head trans movement that swaps out genitals faster than you can upgrade your transmission. Evidence of this putrid and aggressive rot is now all around us, and what could have been cured quickly and easily now requires the most potent medicine we have, or this society has no hope.
To that end, I would like to offer the most vital medicine available, which is found in the Word of God. Instead of celebrating the abominating, becoming allies with the cancer that is killing us, I want to do what so few squishy men will do and simply say what the Bible says and pray that the Lord would use it as an antiseptic to help bring healing and revival to our land. Our only hope as a society is radical repentance and a return to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Without that, our rampant sexual disorders, child sex slavery, and human trafficking, the killing of our babies in the womb, our furbies and two-spirit-pangolins, our trannies, sodomites, and Gomorrah whorings, will collectively put a once proud nation into the grave with every other society that refused to honor God.
So, in what follows, instead of standing idly by while the culture and fake Christians go on with the celebration of abominations, I want to offer the Biblical antiseptic that will hopefully reverse the rot and bring healing to our land. To do that, I want to talk about what abominations are in the Bible, what kinds of sins qualify as abominations, how those sins paralyzingly infect a people, and why repenting and turning to Jesus is our culture’s only hope!
What Is an Abomination?
When we speak about abominations, we are talking about the very worst classification of sins in the hamartiological corpus. These are sins so vile and detestable that they provoke God’s furious wrath like nothing else. These aren’t minor slip-ups or trivial mistakes; they are full-blown rebellions against the Almighty’s very good design and order in Genesis 1, making them creation-bending and breaking sins. Needless to say, the Bible doesn’t mince words here, and neither should we.
According to the best Hebrew linguistic data available in the best lexicons money can buy, an abomination is something that causes loathsome hate or violent, repulsive disgust in the viewer. When it comes to God, an abomination is something that enflames our Creator’s disgust to such epic proportions that the only response He can give is unbridled fury because it offends Him so profoundly, overturns His perfect creation and design so thoroughly, and violates His holy character so flagrantly. The Hebrew Word for abomination is “תּוֹעֵבָה” (toʿevah), which translates to something morally disgusting or detestable. Think about your reaction to a rancid steak infested with week-old maggots being served to you on a dirty plate, and you are getting close to the kind of reaction an abomination produces. Understanding this, an abomination isn’t about a subjective feeling or a cultural preference; these actions are foundationally repugnant and noxious to God, and they ought to be repulsive to us as well. They utterly pollute cultures, defy His Holy commandments, defile His image-bearing people, and warrant the harshest judgment imaginable.
With that, abominations are not run-of-the-mill sins that naturally arose in a fallen world because of our penchant for rebellion. We know from the Bible that every sin separates us from God and pays the wages of hellfire and brimstone, so in that sense, all sins are sort of the same. But abominations are also different. In Scripture, they are set apart as land polluting and divine fury inducing in ways that other sins are not spoken about. Also, in Jewish literature such as the “Book of Enoch,” abominations are described as otherworldly sins, so sinister and unnatural that they must have come from outside of the world, from fallen angels foisting them upon humanity like festering leaking boils, that caused God to destroy the earth in a global flood. If the Book of Enoch is correct, fallen angels taught humans abominable sexual sins that produced the cursed race of the Nephilim, that infected towns like Sodom and Gomorrah, and is the reason God thoroughly decimated the deviant lands of Egypt, Canaan, and Bashan.
Nonetheless, the Hebrew words translated as “abomination” are often used in association with things like idolatry and false gods (Deuteronomy 17:2–5; 27:15; 29:17; Isaiah 66:3; Jeremiah 32:34; Ezekiel 5:9; 11:18; Hosea 9:10), which lets us know that abominations, especially sexual sins, are also religious sins, since, as Paul tells us, that underneath every mute idol statue is the power of oppressive demons, we can understand that abominations are sins offered in the service of the demonic. They are lude disgusting offerings to Satan and his minions, which is why they are so detestable to God. For instance, in 1 Kings 11:5, the god Molech is called “the abomination of the Ammonites” (ESV). Why? Because Molech was the God that ate your children. He required you and your wife to get pregnant, have the baby, and then roast the screaming writing baby alive in the fires of his belly in a dank oven that sat in the center of the idol. The genuinely vile part of this, if the former were not appalling enough, was that you were supposed to wildly cheer and go on to participate in detestable orgies while the smell of your infant’s charred carcus choked out the breathable air. This is what being given over to demons looks like: the total, wanton participation in, and celebration of, human desecrations.
Occult practices are also called abominations in Scripture, further linking demonic and Satanic power with this most unholy class of sins. Sins such as child sacrifice (Deuteronomy 18:9–12; 20:18; 2 Chronicles 28:3), ungodly sexual relationships, cross-dressing, bestiality, and pedophilia all fall under this category. These sins are never described in mild terms; they are always referred to with adjectives like “abhorrent,” “loathsome,” “unclean,” and “rejected.” The root concept of the word “תּוֹעֵבָה” (toʿevah) probably derives from a root that denotes the idea of inviolability or untouchability, which could imply either holiness or abomination. This dual meaning underscores how deeply offensive abominations are to God—they represent a profound violation of His holiness.
In summary, abominations in the Bible represent the highest degree of moral and spiritual corruption. They are actions and attitudes that not only transgress God’s laws but also challenge His sovereignty and disrupt the harmony of His creation. The severity of God’s response to abominations reflects the depth of their offense. They are not just sins; they are existential threats to the divine order, and as such, they incur the most severe judgments from God. Understanding this helps us grasp the seriousness with which we must approach our own moral conduct and the attitudes we must have in response to our societies’ abominations. To say it simply, it is not righteous to love what God hates. It is not virtuous to permit what makes God vomit. When we think that being Christian is akin to not offending anyone and allowing filth to go on in our streets under the banner of winsomeness, we offend our God and become an ally against God with the abominable and the damned. It is better to be viewed by the world as hateful but to be clean and loving in the eyes of God.
With that, let us detail what specific sins are called abominations. I am only going to be talking about the rainbow-colored ones in this post since we are about to enter the throes of another June dedicated to the worship of Molech.
Taxonomizing Abominables
Gay and Lesbian Sex
Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.”
Homosexual acts (and desires) are a direct assault on God’s design for human sexuality. These acts pervert the natural order established at creation and are called abominations by the Holy Scriptures. This isn’t a matter of interpretation, nor something that was simply cultural in the ancient world; it is obvious from the text. Ignoring it requires a heart of stone, and participating in it is to invite judgment upon your own head, both in this life and in the life to come. Furthermore, the normalization of gay and lesbian relationships in our culture represents the most flagrant rebellion against God’s created order possible. The undermining of the sanctity of marriage is a giving of the middle finger by our nation unto God. And, as they celebrate these abominable acts, they look down the barrel of God’s 44 magnum and mock Him that He has patiently waited to pull the trigger.
Bestiality
Leviticus 18:23-26: “You shall not have intercourse with any animal to be defiled with it… it is a perversion.”
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