The Bible can seem so unclear to us because we have rejected the ground of clarity in the goodness of God. Of course, that struggle is even more painful because of our own natural finitude and the cultural distance between us and the authors, but the start of it all was a human refusal to cling to the goodness of God. We have a moral problem obscuring the clear light of Scripture. We need to see God’s glorious goodness in the pages of his book to rightly understand it, but our hearts have been blinded by our love of idols. 

Ironically, the main reason why we talk about the clarity of Scripture is that it often seems so unclear.
Even though Scripture says that it’s intelligible in part and whole, and even though we know theologically that God’s goodness grounds the clarity of his communication, we still bang our heads against the unforgiving concrete of hard texts. Zophar’s diatribes, Moses’ “bridegroom of blood,” and John’s Apocalypse can feel unsurmountable. John Calvin didn’t preach Revelation, and likewise, Martyn Lloyd-Jones never finished Romans. And the apostle Peter himself says, “There are some things in [Paul’s letters] that are hard to understand…” (2 Pet 3:16).
If the Bible is so clear, then why is it so unclear?
One way to begin answering this question is to make a distinction between the intrinsic clarity of Scripture and the extrinsic clarity of Scripture. God has spoken clearly, but that doesn’t mean that we will always listen clearly. We can intentionally and unintentionally misinterpret Scripture, or cultural and historical factors outside our control can make interpretation difficult. None of those communicative barriers prevent God from inspiring a clear biblical text, but they do make the text seem unclear to us. Scripture is intrinsically clear but can be extrinsically unclear.
A few illustrations may help. If I tell my kids to “clean up your toys,” and they choose to interpret that as “don’t clean up your toys,” the obscurity does not lie in the speech but willfully in the hearer. Or, if you send a clearly worded email to a client who earnestly tries but fails to understand it, then the fault could unintentionally be on the hearer’s end as well. Or, an English speaker may turn on the radio and hear a song being sung clearly and beautifully in Spanish; he hears the clear words, but because of his cultural distance doesn’t know what they mean. While there may be intrinsic clarity all the way through, there can simultaneously exist extrinsic difficulty in interpreting those clear words.
While such categories about obscurity may be philosophically useful, we need to find out if they are biblically grounded. If it’s true that God’s clear Word can be mangled by our misinterpretation willingly and unwillingly, do we see that borne out in Scripture? And if so, where did obscurity in communication begin?
To see the genesis of our unclear interpretations, we need to head back to the garden.
Did God Actually Say?
Moses writes, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?’” (Gen 3:1).
According to Scripture, this serpentine deceiver is the source of our obscurity. And he delivers his poisonous confusion in two attempts aimed at Eve, Adam’s wife.
The serpent (identified as Satan in Revelation 20:2) begins his attack with a plain falsification of God’s command to Adam. No, God did not say they couldn’t eat from any tree. He said almost exactly the opposite (Gen 2:15-17)! Satan is hoping, it seems, to suggest that God is hardnosed and miserly, unwilling to share his good creation with his image-bearers. But, in fact, God is immensely generous, liberal, and kind-hearted with his newly-minted world, and Eve remembers that, albeit with some modifications of her own (3:2-3).
Satan’s first attack is bound up in the word “really,” which translates two little letters in Hebrew. Implied by that word is something like, “Would God really do such a thing to you? How horrible! I’m shocked! Why would he be so tight-fisted with such a wonderful servant as yourself? I almost can’t believe that he would be so stingy. Did he really say that? How un-Godlike of him.”
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Mary’s pregnancy was not a normal situation, for it did not result from natural means. It was miraculous—like salvation! And God initiated it with a promise so that he could then accomplish it by his power. The Bible is full of miraculous stories. If you’re going to isolate a biblical miracle and say, “That didn’t happen,” then how long will it be before you’re getting rid of other miracles too? As Christian readers of the Bible, we should embrace the reality of the miraculous. There is a God, and he does wonders.

God’s acts are purposeful. If the Scriptures teach that the Holy Spirit overshadowed the womb of the virgin Mary so that she conceived and bore a son, we should reflect on reasons for this virginal conception.
First, there seems to be a connection between the virginal conception of Jesus and the sinlessness of Jesus.
Exactly how that connection exists is debated. According to the angel Gabriel’s words in Luke 1:35, “the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.”
The human nature of Jesus is without corruption, without sin, like Adam’s nature when God created him in Genesis 2. The sinless and uncorrupted nature of Jesus is important to the New Testament authors (see Heb. 4:15; 1 Pet. 2:22), and it’s normal to wonder about an explanation for this teaching. The doctrine of the virgin birth has explanatory power for the sinless nature of Jesus.
The language of Luke 1:35 doesn’t mean that sin is only biologically transmitted through a human father. Mary was a sinner with a sinful nature. However, the work of the Holy Spirit ensured that the human nature of Jesus in the womb of Mary was holy and without corruption.
Second, the virginal conception ensures that Jesus was not born “in Adam.”
This second point builds on the first. Because the conception in Mary’s womb was not the result of intercourse between a man and a woman, the lack of a human father seems significant. In fact, no conception in the history of humanity had occurred in the manner of Luke 1:35.
Something distinct was evident in Jesus’s birth. He was not born “in Adam” like we were. Everyone before us had descended from Adam and “in Adam.” But Jesus was not “in Adam,” spiritually speaking.
Jesus was a new Adam.
Third, the virginal conception brings together both deity and humanity.
According to the angel’s words to Mary in Luke 1:26–38, Jesus is the “Son of God” (1:35). And, at the same time, Jesus is someone who will be born—and offspring are born. The virginal conception invites us to reflect on the presence of true deity and true humanity.
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Written by Dr. Peter Jones |
Friday, July 1, 2022
The church must either announce the holiness of sex publicly through clear Gospel preaching about the person of God, while showing love to both God and the neighbor (the essence of Twoism); or it must remain silent under the culture’s determination to eliminate all distinctions and to call gospel preaching hate speech (the essence of Oneism). Christians speak the truth about God not for the sake of “Christian nationalism” but for people to meet the love of God both in the person of God as their Creator and Redeemer. 

This irony is a warning for all Christians who are quite capable of similar sinful actions and who are constantly reminded that sinners in the hands of an angry God, including androgynous practitioners, can also know his forgiving grace if they turn to Jesus, God’s Son, confess their sin, and own him as their only atoning sacrifice.
The Gods of Sex
Why is the LGBTQ agenda now proudly affirmed as a valuable lifestyle choice? Why must kindergarten children be taught how gays think and act? Why does Disney risk losing the parents of their young customers by promoting the LGBT agenda in its movies? Why are there huge annual pride parades in so many large cities? Why are Drag Queens reading to children in our public libraries? Why is Baylor University (among other Christian colleges) happy to make its mark on Christian higher education by chartering Prism to create an LGBT student organization on campus?
In order to answer these questions, please allow me to go back a little in my own experience to show you the roots of the fruits we see so richly exhibited on the branches of paganism through which we walk today.
Pagan Spirituality Lands on Western Shores
Homosexuality is but one option in what might be called “androgyny.” Embedded in the ever-thickening LGBTQ+ alphabet soup is a wide variety of sexual options, all of which erase the male/female distinction: homosexuality, bi-sexuality, transgenderism, a-genderism, drag, and cross-dressing, to name but a few.
The open practice (one might say worship) of androgyny is a relatively recent development. I came to the States as a young European believer in 1964. I found a culture peppered with thriving Christian universities, seminaries, publishing houses, and television and radio stations. Churches were on every corner, pressing the truth of the Christian faith on the culture. Androgyny was nothing but an obscure word used by scholars of the Greek myths. There was no televised Ru Paul Drag Race; no eight-year-olds being encouraged to choose their own gender.[1] But shortly after I arrived, this began to change, as the Cultural Revolution welcomed Eastern spirituality.
Bob Dylan’s astute 1963 song caught the “eschatological” character of the cultural change— The Times They Are A’Changin:
Come mothers and fathersThroughout the landAnd don’t criticizeWhat you can’t understandYour sons and your daughtersAre beyond your commandYour old road isRapidly agin’Please get out of the new oneIf you can’t lend your handFor the times they are a-changin’.
“Changin’” in what way? By the late Sixties, I was a young theological student studying “Death of God” theology. I, my fellow students, and even our professor concluded that the times were at a high point of atheistic secularism. Like Nietzsche, the atheists were killing God. However, in 1974, David Miller, one scholar in the Death of God movement, wrote a book called The New Polytheism, in which he triumphantly announced that the death of God would stimulate the “rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”[2] In the same vein, a generation later, Jean Houston (spiritual counselor who supposedly brought up the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt for Hilary Clinton in the White House) declared: “Now open your eyes and look at all the gods in hiding.”[3] In other words, the so-called “Death of God” was the death of the God of the Bible but also the demise of secularism. It was the beginning of the postsecular era and the rebirth in the modern world of the old pagan notions of the divinity of Nature and of the self. It hailed the New Age epoch where people learned to say: “I am spiritual but not religious.”
What is the essence of New Age spirituality? It is historic paganism. Two thousand years ago the Apostle Paul accurately described the only two religious options we have: “worship of creation” or “worship of the Creator” (Romans 1:25). This distinction is known in theology as the Creator/creature distinction. I have come to use the terms Oneism and Twoism to describe these options. Oneism is the worship of all things created and relies on belief that there are no ultimate distinctions. Twoism holds that distinctions are knitted into our existence, with the fundamental distinction being that between the creation and the Creator. From this “otherness” flow all the distinctions embedded in the creation.
Eastern Oneism’s popularity in the West has caused many Westerners raised on biblical Twoism to take up yoga, trust the enneagram, walk the labyrinth, practice mindfulness mediation or seek the philosophical meaning of life in the teachings and practices of Eastern Buddhism and Hinduism. Multiculturalism seeks to bring all ideas together but, alas, Oneism and Twoism are fundamentally opposed. It is this irreducible conflict that causes the major divisions of contemporary culture.
Pagan Cosmology
Pagan Spirituality
In the early stages of our culture’s newfound curiosity about Eastern religions, people were seeking to come to terms with their personal sense of meaning, but before long there came a yearning for a much fuller expression of this individualistic spirituality. The Jungian and Gnostic scholar, June Singer, made a programmatic statement that others have since put into practice: “What lies in store as we move towards the longed-for conjunction of the opposites [the joining of the opposites]?…Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?” [emphasis mine].[4] Singer called for a coherent, all-encompassing, attractive and religiously pagan account of the nature of existence, which she saw as essentially one, based on androgynous sexuality. She realized that a cosmology or worldview would not function without an essential place for sexuality. She saw androgyny as a means of erasing distinctions and accomplishing “our own new alchemical opus.” She saw androgynous sexuality as being a “witness” to “primordial cosmic unity.”[5] Singer is a true Jungian, conscious of promoting the important sexual element in the coming “new humanism” that Carl Jung envisaged: “The androgyne [the human being aware of being both male and female] participates consciously in the evolutionary process, redesigning the individual…society and…the planet.”[6]
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