The connection between these two passages is transparency. David chose to be honest and open about his sin—can’t get much more open than writing a song about it. And Philemon was forced to be open and honest about his need to forgive Onesimus.

A friend of mine started a church in Canada years ago that God blessed with many conversions. It became over 500 hundred attenders that were mostly new believers. Laura and I were able to do two marriage conferences there over the years, and it was so encouraging to see how teachable and hungry the people were. Often what we taught was the first time they had ever heard it, and they just assumed that if the Bible says that, they need to obey it. It was so much fun.
This same pastor friend said that one time they started a small group for men struggling with pornography. Again, lots of new believers who don’t know how church is done. They don’t know they are supposed to pretend they don’t struggle with lust. The church announced it and put a sign up on the church bulletin board and MEN SIGNED UP! I cannot imagine that happening in the churches I’ve known. Most Christians are way too private about their spiritual lives, and especially their spiritual failures. Would men sign up at your church where others could see their names?
I’ve been thinking about two passages in the Bible that seem to have a commonality that I never noticed before. Psalm 51 is a familiar psalm that we recognize as David’s song of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. I’ve read it many times for my own soul’s benefit, and I’ve pointed others to it to encourage repentance.
But recently I thought about it as an example of David’s transparency about a major failure. The superscription says David wrote it after Nathan came to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba. The superscription is not subtle—
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Written by C. R. Carmichael |
Thursday, July 14, 2022
According to the latest information from the Pew Research Center, Christians suffer more than any other religious group from various governmental and societal hostilities around the world today. Because of this reality, we should have the empathy to be more mindful of our Gospel call to comfort others who are in any affliction (2 Corinthians 1:4), and to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves” (Romans 15:1).

Have you noticed the ugly trend of certain ideologically-driven factions painting their opponents as less than human? Or the ruling elites and angry protesters calculating a person’s human worth based on their perceived usefulness to society?
Recent examples of this kind of behavior may surprise you. They include an abortion advocate who painted the words “Not Yet Human” on her exposed, very-pregnant belly; a prominent church leader tweeting out: “Whiteness is an unrelenting, demonic force of evil”; and a Rutgers professor who pronounced that white people are “committed to being villains” who need to be “taken out.”
Such vile attempts to strip away the intrinsic value of an individual or group in order to legitimize their social banishment or destruction is called “dehumanization,” and it is re-emerging as a potent force in our toxic culture these days.
Figuratively speaking, it is like trying to eliminate someone with the cold precision of a sniper’s bullet. Dehumanization, in both its passive and active forms, is attempting to erase a person. It attempts to erase a person’s purpose, erase their unique gifts, erase their value, erase their morality, and equate them with expendable animals to be caged, experimented on, or swiftly put down at the perpetrator’s discretion.
One might rightly ask how this immoral act can exist in our so-called enlightened age. You would think that the attempt to relegate a group of people to a subhuman or abstract category would be considered abhorrent in our modern society—especially after the travesties of American slavery, the Holocaust, or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Surely the emphatic statement, “Never again!” has been the foundational declaration of a wiser, more compassionate world over the last century, has it not?
Yet here we are in the midst of a sweeping new “cancel culture” of hate.
Dehumanization Emerges From Spiritual Disease
If you go by a majority of prevalent “woke” attitudes in American society today, dehumanization is the preferred weapon of choice—especially in the Wild West of social media and rage-filled protests. White people, political conservatives and the unborn appear to be the popular new targets, and are now sharing space with historically-oppressed minority groups. Yet the hatred directed at them still reeks of the age-old spiritual diseases of racism, bigotry, and rebellion against God.
Needless to say, it is astonishing to find how easily these twisted, hateful attitudes have become the endorsed rhetoric of our time. The latest diatribes against another race or creed is no more acceptable than when they were spoken against the Jews in Nazi Germany or African-Americans in the Old South. And yet such similar malevolence against certain brothers and sisters of our society is often celebrated by our ruling elites and propagated by corporate mainstream media as a way to control the populace through division or to intimidate those who stand in the way of their influence and power.
Today’s virtual murderers, regardless of their particular ideology or political bent, utilize the evil process of dehumanization so they can justify their violent behavior towards their “enemies” in the hope of erasing their opposing ideas from view. As journalist Slavenka Drakulic once explained it, “When a person is reduced to an abstraction, one is free to hate him because the moral obstacle has already been abolished.” Or as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.”
The problem with using dehumanization as a vehicle for righteous indignation, however, is that it doesn’t have a shred of moral integrity in its makeup. The Bible, the God-breathed standard for morality and ethics, doesn’t allow for this kind of evil among men. Why? Because the Bible has revealed to us this great truth: human beings were created in the image of God!
Dehumanization Disrespects The Image Of God
Indeed, from the beginning of the Biblical narrative, we are told that mankind is unique among creation because men and women, unlike the other living creatures on Earth, have been created in the likeness of God. “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
This is why murder is considered so heinous. The shedding of human blood is a rebellious assault against the unique and sacred relationship between God and those who bear His image on earth (Genesis 9:6).
What an amazing thought to know that we all bear, in some profound way, the image of God regardless of race, creed or societal standing.
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Over the last few years, following a strategy that proved effective for advancing pro-life protections, states like Texas have been laying creative groundwork to hold adults accountable for experimenting on young people struggling with gender identity. Having these laws in place is incredibly important, given the astronomical rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender and how quickly transgender ideology went from being unthinkable to unquestionable in so many aspects of society.  

In Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden told young people with gender dysphoria that he will “always have (their) back.” Though he didn’t specify what exactly that means, presumably it had something to do with extending Title IX protections to include allowing men full access to women’s facilities and sports; extending mandatory insurance coverage for “gender reassignment” surgeries; and restricting any counseling, treatments, or public advocacy that does anything less than fully affirm one’s gender dysphoria.  
Immediately following the President’s late-speech shoutout was a call to pass the Equality Act, something that remains (at least for now) dead in the Senate. The Equality Act would be a kind of legislative nuclear option, rendering the approximately 250 so-called “anti-LGBTQ” bills under consideration across America pointless, and leading to serious restrictions on religious liberty, especially for religious schools.  
Over the last few years, following a strategy that proved effective for advancing pro-life protections, states like Texas have been laying creative groundwork to hold adults accountable for experimenting on young people struggling with gender identity. Having these laws in place is incredibly important, given the astronomical rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender and how quickly transgender ideology went from being unthinkable to unquestionable in so many aspects of society.  
For instance, the field of so-called gender-affirming “medicine” is the only example of medical treatment that attempts to alter the body to accord with the mind, as opposed to helping the mind align with biological reality. That was a $316 million industry in 2018. By 2026, it is projected to be a $1.5 billion industry.  
Children, in particular, are the subjects of these social experiments, which are only one example of how reality is being reimagined along the lines of sexual autonomy. 
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