What Should We Make of Paul’s Shipwreck Narrative?
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Observations of the primary narrative tension and its accompanying resolution gave us hope that we could sift through the flood of details to discern the author’s main point in this chapter.
When our church’s team of preachers decided to preach through Acts, I knew chapter 27 would be a doozy (notice how I cleverly ignored this chapter in my interpretive overview of Acts). I have always been confused by this chapter and its role within the book, and though I’m sure compelling sermons have been preached on this text, I have yet to hear one of them. I’m used to hearing otherwise fantastic preachers punt on this chapter, in the name of practicality, to talk about “weathering the storms of our spiritual lives.” So the extraordinarily detailed travelogue of Acts 27 is reduced to a parable and a few minor observations (typically surrounding verses 23-25) seeking to inspire us toward deeper trust in Christ—a wonderful thing to be inspired toward, of course!
Therefore, since I’m in charge of managing our sermon schedule, I made sure to assign Acts 27 to someone else. Pro tip: When you don’t know what to do with a text, require a friend or colleague to deal with it instead. This resulted in one of the most exciting “aha!” moments in my Bible study this year.
A Key Structural Observation
The sucker fortunate fellow to receive the assignment was a good man and marvelous student of the word named Tom Hallman. Tom eagerly set himself to observe the text inside and out, to give him the raw materials for a series of interpretive questions. Our practice is that our team of preachers gives feedback on every sermon before it is preached. We collaborate in two phases: the study of the passage and the delivery of the sermon. So in that first phase, Tom regularly laid before us the fruit of his study for comment and evaluation.
And Tom made a key structural observation that shed tremendous light on the passage for me. In following the narrative’s plot, Tom observed that the main conflict centers on the centurion’s failure to listen to Paul’s counsel in Acts 27:11. This led Tom to recognize a few arcs within the plot:
- Acts 27:9-20: Paul speaks, and the centurion pays more attention to others. The result is that all hope of being saved is abandoned.
- Acts 27:21-44: Paul speaks, and the Romans start listening to him. The result is that all are brought safely to land.
These observations of the primary narrative tension and its accompanying resolution gave us hope that we could sift through the flood of details to discern the author’s main point in this chapter.
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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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2 Reasons to Remember that You are Called
The call of God is not only that we would be saved from destruction; it’s that we would be holy. Maybe the most clear comes in 1 Thessalonians 4:7: “For God has not called us to impurity but to live in holiness.” This is what God has called us to – it’s not a life of ease and moral mediocrity, but of being set apart and pure. Christianity is about grace, but in that grace is a moral obligation and responsibility. God has called us to a life that is very different from the world around us.
Why are you a Christian?
You might answer that question in any number of ways. You might, if you have an intellectual bent to you, say that you are a Christian because you have examined the evidence for Christianity and found it to be so intellectually compelling that you had no choice but to believe. Or you might say you are a Christian because someone you respected shared the gospel with you, and you observed in that person’s life the kind of joy and hope you were lacking, and so you believed. Or you might say you are a Christian because your family is all Christians and you were raised in the admonition of the Lord from the day you were born. All of those things may be true, and all of them are appropriate answers to the question, even if they vary from one another. But another answer you could give to that question, regardless of how the details worked themselves out, is this:
You are a Christian because God called you. The Bible tells us this again and again:Romans 1:6: you who are also called by Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 1:9: God is faithful; you were called by him into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Galatians 1:6: I am amazed that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospelThe list of references goes on and on. God called you out of darkness into light. He called you from death to life. He called you from blindness to sight.
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Song Lyrics Getting Simpler, More Repetitive, Angry and Self-Obsessed—Study
For the study in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated. “Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Zangerle summarised. The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.
You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.
Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.
A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.
Before detailing how lyrics have become more basic, the study pointed out that US singer-songwriting legend Bob Dylan—who rose to fame in the 1960s—has won a Nobel prize in literature.
Senior study author Eva Zangerle, an expert on recommendation systems at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, declined to single out an individual newer artist for having simple lyrics.
But she emphasised that lyrics can be a “mirror of society” which reflect how a culture’s values, emotions and preoccupations change over time.
“What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape—from how music is sold to how music is produced,” Zangerle said.
Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.
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