If we will not speak up on behalf of this most basic creational truth, the glorious distinction between male and female, will we speak up for anything? Our culture is seeking to willfully shred reality into something unrecognizable and despicable.
Radical Corruption
Throughout history, at various times and in manifold ways, God in His providence has ordained that certain philosophies and worldviews take hold of the masses, seemingly to ensure that His people learn to take His word seriously. Even the most orthodox of Christians hold certain teachings of Scripture with a kind of looseness, teachings which we prefer to soft-pedal, which we may even affirm with our lips but which our hearts do not fully embrace. Among the most common doctrines to which Christians do not grant due weight is that of total depravity, or more accurately, radical corruption.
The issue here is not with the clarity of Scripture, which plainly and throughout emphasizes and provides examples of the depth of sinfulness inherent in every human heart (Gen. 6:5, Rom. 1:18-32, 3:9-18); no, the issue is with man’s unwillingness to understand the ramifications of this truth. Perhaps it is because we, even as born-again Christians, do not want to look at the naked and exposed heart and all the sinfulness present in it. Perhaps it is that we see the fruit of God’s common grace and merciful restraint such that even the most ardent of unbelievers are capable of caring for others and working towards a “greater good.”
While thankfully it is true that God has prevented men from behaving as sinfully as they have the capacity to, there are certain historical times when God lifts the restraints, when He allows all the sinful potentiality of the heart to become actuality, and when He does, it serves as a sober reminder that no matter how evolved and progressive society may appear, the Bible is still true. Men are still depraved sinners.
Creator vs Creature
At the heart of all unbelief lies one common and fundamental rebellion—a denial of the Creator-creature distinction. All the idolatry of the pagan world, whether it be men bowing down before carved images they had made, honoring the Greek and Roman gods who manifested strikingly similar qualities to those of the Greeks and Romans themselves, the worshiping of nature, money, or monarch, all alike serve something created and something which they like to imagine is more or less in their image. In our present day, we do not bring our daily sacrifices to an altar or offer blood to a statue, but we nevertheless have a modern idolatrous religiosity that seeks to throw off any trace of creatureliness, and instead create a God after our own image.
If man is to be consistent in his rebellion against God, he must do his utmost to annihilate these inescapable marks of being made by Him and in His image. The common grace of God toward mankind is in large part thanks to this fact of being in His image. This reality means that there are certain qualities in man which by nature point back to God as Creator. This is expressed in Romans 2:14-15 when Paul points out the fact that even lawless Gentiles at times act in accord with God’s law, thus betraying the truth of their nature.
Indeed, whenever unbelievers get married and have children, go to work and earn a living, comfort an injured child, seek restoration when they’ve been wronged, or do so many other things we consider “natural,” they show beyond a doubt that we are not mere biological happenstance but are the very image of the God who is love, goodness, grace, and justice. Of course, all of these are severely tainted and distorted by sin yet they do serve the providential purpose of restraining the law of sin and death which reigns in the unregenerate heart. This is especially the case in cultures wherein the gospel has had an influence, however, when rebellion takes hold when revolt against God is fully mobilized, it is these things, formerly considered the assumed norm, which must be questioned and ultimately torn down.
The “New Soviet Man”
One such period in history where this rebellion was clear, especially in retrospect, was during the Communist Revolution in Russia which gave birth to the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union. The truth discovered by the intelligentsia and the ideologues of the Bolshevik Party is that people are generally content in their anonymous and supposedly mundane lives. People enjoy the blessings of stability, of family, of work, and of community. Rebellious revolutions always struggle to stir up enough discontent to convince people to jeopardize the comforts of their lives for some nebulous larger cause.
It was in light of this reality that the Communist thinkers began to figure that perhaps the average man was not biologically suited for communism and from this, the concept of the “New Soviet Man” was born. He was to be a man whose primary drive was to spread revolution wherever he went, who was not dragged down by emotional concerns, not distracted by the petty cares of private life, not numbed by a-scientific religion. The ambition, the recognized necessity for spreading this godless ideology, was for man to be fundamentally altered—the man made in God’s image torn down and replaced by a man made in the image of the Revolution.
For more than a generation now, ideologues and thinkers in the United States have been seeking to implement a re-imagined American lifestyle of their own conception. What began with sexual liberation and radical feminism has evolved into critical race ideologies, queer theory, transgender ideology, and varied other “new” and critical ways of thinking, all of which have ripped through every American institution, from the university to the church. The point of all this is, at root, to throw off every vestige of God’s rule and order remaining in our culture. To turn inward, to bury one’s head in the sand, is not an option.
Satan is not a libertarian. He is not content to “live and let live.” He will not allow the option to politely decline. No, Satan, if given the opportunity, would lead all humanity into total war, rebellion, and revolution against its Creator. He desires no less than complete victory and will not settle for any other. This is the spiritual reality underlying the fact that lifestyles and ideologies which were, in the not so distant past, considered fringe, and are now applying pressure upon society at large to affirm and to fall in.
The “New American Androgyn”
Being a cisgender heterosexual—or to use the old manner of speaking, a person who lives in accord with how he was created—is increasingly considered old-fashioned, passé, archaic, boring, and even oppressive and harmful. This worldview allows people to say that they yearn for a day when no one will have to “come out” as queer because it will be taken for granted that gender and sexuality are purely subjective, fluid, and variant from person to person without any rules, norms, or even categories. Yet, all that this aggressive push accomplishes is to unmask the hideousness that was present all along. This is the natural progression of things—if man insists on war against God, then the immovable object he must eventually encounter is the fact of being made in His image. And so sinful man will either bend the knee to Christ or will defiantly pursue self-destruction. America has chosen the latter.
As the Soviets discovered, man does have innate qualities which do not conform to the wicked pursuits of secular, atheistic thinking. America has found the same and as the USSR imagined and sought to create the “New Soviet Man”, so many of the loudest and most influential voices in our nation are seeking to construct the “New American Androgyn.” Neither male nor female, neither hetero nor homosexual, completely liberated from all the restrictive chains imposed by the Creator. Free to live and present as is pleasing, and desperately in need of affirmation from every fellow creature in order to be convinced that the war has been won, that God has once and for all been driven from the battlefield, never to return.
We who know Scripture, however, know how this ends.
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. (Psalm 2:1-4)
It is incredible to consider for a moment that the visceral cultural warfare we are presently experiencing, the absolute madness of the movement we are witnessing, and the real danger that it all poses, is something that God laughs at. Not laughing in the sense of being flippant towards the real damage being inflicted, but laughing at the sheer stupidity of tiny creatures of dust thinking that they are overthrowing the eternal King. Laughing the way that Elijah did when the prophets of Baal cut themselves all day to get the attention of a figment of their imagination.
What Christians Must Do
The first thing for us to do as Christians is to calmly look to God’s word. We must trust faithfully in both the accomplishments of God—namely the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus—and also the promises yet to be fully realized: that Christ will conquer every enemy, that we as His people are joined to Him in His victory, and that no created thing, whether forces of nature, our fellow man, medical advancements, or artificial intelligence, will separate we the elect from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Secondly, though, we must fight. We live in God’s world, we are bound to the confines of His creation, and so we have no right to redefine or re-imagine that created order, nor can we live as if no order exists.
Christians must not be lulled into embracing these lies. We must not grow weary of insisting on the truth at all costs. We serve the living and the true God and we worship Him in spirit and in truth. Our Lord Jesus is the incarnate truth and so we cannot willingly become complicit with lies. So if “going along to get along” means using female pronouns to refer to men, pretending that there is nothing perverse about fully developed men competing against women in sports, and standing by silently while the state seeks to remove children from parents who will not feed into their fantasies, then this is not an option.
If we will not speak up on behalf of this most basic creational truth, the glorious distinction between male and female, will we speak up for anything? Our culture is seeking to willfully shred reality into something unrecognizable and despicable. It is the duty of Christians to be the unceasing reminder to those rebels that the world belongs to God, to warn desperately of the inevitable destruction at the end of this road, and to point them towards the cross, the true and only hope of deliverance.
The writer of the article shows an inadequate knowledge of Communism and Marxism. I say this as a Christian Fundamentalist and one who politically leans toward Marx.
Perhaps one of the best critiques of Marxism and Communism, though Soviet Union Communism should never be confused with Marxism, is by Martin Luther King Jr in his book Stride Toward Freedom (see pg 92-95 in http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/aahistory/Pilgrimage.pdf ). Though King himself conflates the two, he did something that we should all do, he included with his criticism of communism a brief but effective critique of the system in which he grew up and lived, Capitalism. He then said the following:
Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth-century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.
BTW, what King said of 19th century Capitalism still applies today to an economic system that revolves around the shareholder.
The point is this, in criticizing theories that are foreign to us, we often do so by conflating God’s Word with the theories and practices we grew up with. King didn’t do that. He also strived to see the truths in the opposing system. And not looking for the valid concerns and truths in those theories and approaches that are foreign to the life and experiences of us Christians, especially us older ones, along with presuming the righteousness of the theories and practices in which we grew up is the weakness of the above article as it seeks to criticize the most recent theories and approaches.