Brothers and Sisters,
This morning, I found myself in Esther 7 for my daily devotion.
In case you haven’t read Esther in a while, that’s the chapter where evil Haman gets his comeuppance. Thanks to Esther, his plot to kill the Jews is foiled, and the gallows he built to kill Mordecai ends up as the site of his own execution.
“Hoist with his own petard,” Hamlet might’ve said to describe Haman’s fate.
This scene in Esther set me off thinking about our current cultural moment, specifically the confusion we’re experiencing over gender and sexuality.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen…
- smart, capable people struggle to tell us what a woman is;
- educational “experts” instruct teachers to hide students’ changing gender identities from their parents;
- cultural influencers go to bat for teachers’ “right” to teach kindergartners about sex and all the colors in the LGBTQIA rainbow.
What hath any of these things to do with Haman?
Theologically speaking, our culture’s rejection of biblical views on gender and sexuality bottoms out in sinful rebellion against the Creator and His design (Rom 1:21ff.). God’s Word lights the way to true human flourishing, but there are powerful voices who believe that what we believe is regressive, harmful, and worthy of cancellation by any and all means necessary.
As these voices grow louder, though, their message becomes all the more ridiculous. As it turns out, most of our neighbors know the difference between a man and a woman. They believe parents ought to know what’s going on with their kids. And they don’t think teachers ought to be explaining human sexuality to somebody else’s 5-year-old.
I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I think we’re nearing an inflection point. The absurdity of the ideas meant to vanquish and replace our “antiquated” sexual mores is becoming more plain for all to see. Reality is resisting rebellion, and many of our unbelieving neighbors are pushing back on the new cultural orthodoxy.
Hoist with their own petard, we might say with respect to the cultural revolutionaries.
I write this to encourage you but also to offer an admonition. Creation is “speaking up” for itself, but the eloquence of God’s world must be supplemented by the illuminating speech of His Word. We’ve got to speak the truth in love to help people see that God has much to say about who we are and how our sex and gender fit into His big story.
Nature abhors a vacuum. As progressive views on sexuality “jump the shark” and our unbelieving neighbors find themselves mugged by the reality of God’s design, let’s be ready to step in and fill the gap with truth. To do that, of course, we need to know the truth. But we also need to know the people we’re talking to.
So, brothers and sisters, crack open your Bibles and your front-doors. Let’s get into the Word and into our neighbors’ lives so that, when the cultural insanity becomes even more glaringly obvious, we can be there to point them toward the sanity of Truth.
In Christ alone,
Kenny
