Christians who use the moral lens of LGBTQ+ personhood are not merely a “soft presence” in the enemy camp. Their malleability makes them pudding in the enemy’s hand. They make false converts to a counterfeit gospel that bends the knee to the fictional identity of LGBTQ+. This wolfish theology cedes the moral language to the left by using transgendered pronouns as a moral lens (“respect, courtesy, hospitality”). They reject the clarity of the word of God and replace it with garbage. By doing so, they have rejected the gospel truth that Jesus is the only way to salvation. 

A civil war erupted within broad evangelicalism, and the idol of LGBTQ+ is dividing the house. This issue is personal, political, and spiritual for me.  In 1998, I became one of the first crop of so-called “tenured radicals” in American universities, proudly touting my lesbian street cred. In 1999, Christ called me to repentance and belief, and I became a despised defector of the LGBTQ+ movement. But progressive sanctification came slowly, and I have failed many times during these past decades.
After I have learned lessons, I have earnestly tried to course-correct.
And that’s the problem.
My use of transgendered pronouns was not a mistake; it was sin.
Public sin requires public repentance, not course correction.
I have publicly sinned on the issue of transgender pronouns, which I have carelessly used in books and articles.
I have publicly sinned by advocating for the use of transgender pronouns in interviews and public Q&As.
Why did I do this? I have a bunch of lame and backside-covering excuses. Here are a few. It was a carry-over from my gay activist days. I wanted to meet everyone where they were and do nothing to provoke insult.
When the Supreme Court decided in favor of gay marriage, the danger of my position started to come into focus. The codification of gay marriage and LGBTQ+ civil rights launched a collision course between LGBTQ+ and the Christian faith. The LGBTQ+ movement’s understanding of itself as ontological and morally good conflicts with the biblical account in Genesis 1:27. Which is it? Which side was I on? Is LGBTQ+  a normal option in the ever-expanding menu of sexual orientation and gender identity, needing a little Jesus to aid human flourishing? Or does LGBTQ+ come from Satan as a reflection of the world, the flesh, and the devil? Is it part of God’s creational design or rebellion against the creation ordinance?  It’s one or the other because the Christian faith is inherently binary, not non-binary.
And getting this wrong is not a matter of personal liberty.
How is using transgender pronouns sinful, you might ask?
Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against the ninth commandment and encourages people to sin against the tenth commandment.
Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against the creation ordinance.
Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against image-bearing.
Using transgendered pronouns discourages a believer’s progressive sanctification and falsifies the gospel.
Using transgendered pronouns cheapens redemption, and it tramples on the blood of Christ.
Using transgendered pronouns fails to love my neighbor as myself.
Using transgendered pronouns fails to offer genuine Christian hospitality and instead yields the definition of hospitality to liberal communitarianism, identity politics, and “human flourishing.”
Using transgendered pronouns isn’t a sin because the times have changed, and therefore, using transgendered pronouns isn’t sinful today but a morally acceptable option in 2012.  Sin is sin. The Bible defines this as sin.
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God’s purpose for calling out a people for himself and unifying them together into one body under Christ is that his great wisdom might be marveled at by supernatural beings, ultimately bringing him supreme glory. Now what does it take for supernatural beings to marvel? It takes something supernatural, and God’s eternal plan of regenerating sinful people and uniting them together in one body is clearly that kind of supernatural act that would cause supernatural beings to marvel at the manifold wisdom of God.

What makes the events of Paul’s mission work in Philippi (Acts 16) so interesting for us is that this one of the first times that we are introduced to specific individuals who are converted and joined to the body of Christ. Luke takes note of a few individuals earlier in the book such as Paul himself or Sergius Paulus on Crete, but most of the time he just tells about groups of people who accepted the gospel. In Acts 16, Luke records the conversion of three specific individuals—Lydia, a slave girl, and a jailer.
The record of the salvation of these individuals serves a greater purpose than simply to provide interesting conversion stories. The fact that Luke, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, chose to record the conversions of these three specific individuals was to teach us some important truths regarding the power of the gospel and Christ’s plan in building his church. Comparing and contrasting these three individuals help us to draw some conclusions regarding the nature of the gospel and the purpose of the church.
The Universal Appeal of the Gospel
Christ could hardly have chosen three more different people to save than Lydia, the slave girl, and the jailer. Notice how different they were.
Nationality
First, their nationalities were different. Philippi was quite a cosmopolitan city. It was fairly large and influential, it was a common retirement spot for Roman military men, and it attracted much commerce. Lydia had evidently come to Philippi for the reason of commerce. Verse 13 says that she was from Thyatira, which was a city in modern Turkey. Thyatira was known for its fabric dyes, and evidently Lydia had come to Philippi to deal in dyed cloth.
The slave girl was likely a native of Philippi, and so she was probably Greek. As we’ll see in a moment as well, she was a worshiper of the Greek god Apollo, so that further indicates that she was probably Greek.
The jailer was a Roman soldier, maybe even a retired Roman official who had retired in Philippi.
So here we have three individuals who come to Christ, each of different nationality—West Asian, Greek, and Roman.
Gender
It probably goes without saying, but these individuals differed in gender as well. This may seem like a mundane point to us, but in that day women were looked down upon, and here Lydia becomes an influential member of the church, one of the few believers to be named in Paul’s letter to the church here. In fact, many scholars believe that Lydia was wealthy, and that her home was the meeting place for the church here.
Social
Which leads to the next difference. These three individuals were of completely different social status. Lydia was a business woman. She was likely wealthy. Not just anyone would have had space in their home to entertain guests like she did in verse 15.
The girl, as verse 16 tells us, was a slave. You couldn’t get much more opposite to a wealthy business woman than a slave. The girl was a member of the lowest class of their society.
The jailer fell somewhere in the middle. Being a soldier in the Roman army, he would have been your average middle-class worker.
Religion
The religious beliefs of these individuals differed as well. Lydia, according to verse 14, was a worshiper of God. She was a Gentile proselyte to Judaism. You might remember that on Paul’s first missionary journey it was his practice when he first entered a new city to visit the Jewish synagogue there. Now that his second journey had found him further away from Israel, the city of Philippi evidently had no synagogue. In order to have a synagogue, a city had to have at least 10 Jewish male heads of households in the city. So even in a fairly large city like Philippi, there were not even 10 male Jews. So Paul found the next best thing. As verse 13 tells us, on the Sabbath they went down to the river, and found several women who had gathered there to worship, and Lydia was among them. She had probably converted to Judaism in Thyatira where there was more Jewish witness, and when she came to Philippi had joined with other God-fearing woman in their Sabbath worship.
Once again, you could not get more opposite to Lydia in terms of religion than the slave girl. Verse 16 says that she had a spirit of divination. It literally says that “she had a spirit of Python.” According to the Greek myths, Zeus, the king of the gods, brought into existence at the town of Delphi an oracle, a place where the gods could be consulted. The oracle was guarded by Python, a female serpent, and answers from the gods were obtained through a priestess. According to mythology, Apollo, the son of Zeus, killed the serpent and took control of the shrine. He made the priestess, known as the Pythia or Pythoness, his servant. As a consequence, Apollo became known as the god of prophecy. Sometimes the name “Python” was associated directly with Apollo.
Based on the myth, at this time, there was an actual shrine and a succession of priestesses at Delphi, which wasn’t too far from Philippi. There are ancient pictures of the Pythoness sitting on a three‑legged stool over a cleft in the earth from which the oracle was supposed to proceed. When about to prophesy, she would go into a kind of ecstatic trance and utter a stream of unconnected phrases and obscure words. People would come from all over Greece to the shrine to enquire of the oracle, especially concerning the future. A priest would put their questions to the Pythoness, and her utterances, which were supposedly inspired by Apollo, would be interpreted by the priest and presented to the questioner, often in an ambiguous form.
The prophetic powers of Apollo, supposedly manifested in the priestess at Delphi, were also thought to be present in other women. Like the priestess, their utterances would be accompanied by convulsions or other abnormal behavior, which were assumed to be evidence of the presence of a spirit from Apollo, or a “spirit of Python.” In some cases, such behaviors may have been self‑induced; in other cases, they may have arisen from mental disturbance, or physical defects in the brain. Usually such a woman would be a slave, often owned by a group of men, who charged clients for her services.
So in Acts 16:16, the “slave girl who had a spirit of Python” was one of these women supposed to have similar powers to those of the Pythoness at Delphi, and to whom people came seeking the future. And evidently in this case she actually was demon possessed, which made her do things that people thought proved she was a Pythoness.
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Written by Robert D. Hasler |
Thursday, October 24, 2024
When we understand that spiritual warfare is more than a metaphor–that it is a fundamental feature of reality–it should cause us to rethink what values we want to cultivate within ourselves and in our communities. One such example is grit. Christians in a spiritual war need to be able to take a punch without losing the will to fight. Grit also encompasses the willingness to “rejoice in our sufferings” as Paul says in Romans 5:3. Gritty Christians rejoice in hardship because they know it’s the trials that produce and reveal true character and that God’s grace is sufficient when they fail. 

Imagine you were tasked with preparing for an impending battle. What would be your strategy? What kind of soldiers would you want?
They’re important questions, but not the first question. Before ever considering how you would win or with whom, first you would have to answer this fundamental question, What kind of war am I fighting? How you answer that question informs your answer for everything else.
The first time that I taught The Gospel of Mark, I had my students take out a piece of paper and answer a single question: What is the Gospel?
This being a class of well-catechized teenagers from Reformed families, the answers were fairly predictable. Words like justification and atonement were ubiquitous. Each student had his or her own unique spin, but they all basically boiled down to a singular theme: Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sins so I could have eternal life with him.
Their responses to my prompt were not terribly surprising. In fact, it is a common summary of the Gospel in most evangelical circles today. But, as I did with my class, let’s compare that definition against Jesus’s own words in the early verses of Mark’s Gospel:
“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel’” (Mark 1:14-15).
Herman Ridderbos once said that the arrival of the kingdom of God is “the central theme of the whole New Testament revelation of God.” Why then does it so rarely get a passing mention in our Gospel presentations? In a word, our hermeneutics. It is so tempting to make our individual selves the central character of the Bible–as if all roads in Scripture culminate in my personal salvation by my personal Savior.
While the ordo salutis and one’s individual justification are important, reading the Bible through such an individualist lens blinds us from appreciating the kingdom of God as the essential biblical theme that it is. In short, it causes us to misunderstand the kind of battle we’re in, and the second-order effects are enormous.
For example, limiting our conception of the Gospel to the forensic declaration of individual justification produces Christians with values and characteristics to match. The “cage-stage Calvinist” comes to mind who is overly bookish, pedantic, and argumentative largely because his hermeneutic requires him to be.
But what if we understood our individual justification as one piece of a story bigger than ourselves? What if we understood it as one battle in a larger war? How might that change our character?
In his book Creation Regained, Al Wolters rightly expands our horizons to see the cosmic scope of the biblical story. From the Old Adam to the New Adam, the Bible describes an epic contest between two regimes, God and Satan, both of whom “lay claim to the whole of creation.”[1]
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