God's Guardrails on Gender #2

We are talking about a direct collision of worldview and ultimate truth claims. And we, as Christian people, we have to step up to the front lines of the battle and assert God's truth in dependence upon His Spirit and in explanation of His Word. Scripture reveals God's moral will for us.

He clearly lays out absolute truth and absolute morality in every book of the Bible. But now, we're facing the blatant contradiction of moral relativism in our day. Hi, I'm Bill Wright, and on The Truth Pulpit, Pastor Don Green will continue a series titled The Bible and Transgenderism. And Don, why do you think many Christians are silently watching this happen with gender in our culture?

Well, Bill, I suppose there are different reasons for the different kinds of silence. For some people, it's family considerations, and they don't want to disrupt family relationships. For others, they don't see the problem from Scripture.

For others, they don't want to engage a conflict. That's why we're doing this series is to help people understand, people like you, my friend, to understand why these issues are important and why we, as Christians, must engage these matters of transgenderism. We need to be able to help those that are confused in that lifestyle. And more importantly, we need to glorify Christ by honoring the pattern that he established in creation. So stay with us as we try to do these things today on The Truth Pulpit.

Thanks, Don. And friend, let's dive deeper into the topic of God's guardrails on gender on today's program as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word from the Truth Pulpit. Well, we return to our series on the Bible and transgenderism. We must remember what I've been saying all along through this series is that the Holy God of whom we have been speaking here this evening, that God himself created the distinction between male and female, and he embedded it in the human race. For now, what does the Bible say about transgender behavior?

That's the million dollar question for this evening. And for that, I want you to turn to Deuteronomy chapter 22. Deuteronomy chapter 22 in verse 5. And again, beloved, I don't mind telling you it, it makes me tremble to read these things in light of what is happening all around us. And in light of what we have said already this evening about the high holiness of God, Deuteronomy chapter 22, verse five, a woman shall not wear man's clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman's clothing for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.

This is frightening to think about in terms of the headlong rush that society is making in the opposite direction. God's word condemns cross gender behavior in the strongest possible terms. He abominates it. It is repulsive to him. It is loathsome to him. It invokes the reality of his judgment. Listen carefully here.

Listen carefully here as I'm speaking, trying to anyway, speaking with great precision in what I'm about to say. God condemns any effort by a man or woman to intentionally present themselves in a way that their culture interprets as the opposite of their biological sex. Let me say that again. It's a complex sentence. God condemns any effort by a man or woman to intentionally present themselves in a way that their culture interprets as the opposite of their biological sex. This is very serious. Men or women who intentionally, and I think the word intentionally is important here, men or women who intentionally blur the distinction between male and female or blur their own biological sex by the way they present themselves are committing acts which invoke the judgment of God upon them. This is no minor matter.

This is not child play here. This is the view of God on things. Now the question is why is this so important to God?

What's a few pieces of clothing? Why is this so important that it would be classed by the same word with homosexuality and idolatry and child sacrifice and deceitful lips and all those things that we looked at before? Why would this fall under that condemnation?

Well beloved, here's what I want you to see. This is part of the guardrails that God has put on gender. We're not to go off this road and to jump over the cliff on these things because, beloved, it pleased God to establish a created order for humanity. And the pleasure of God was that humanity would be distinctly male and female. Therefore, anything which starts to blur that line that violates what God established in creation is fundamentally going against His very created order and the moral order that He has established for mankind to live by. It is an attempt to hide, disguise, and disfigure that which God declared to be very good when He created mankind male and female. Genesis chapter 1, right?

God looked at all that He had created and said, this is very good. The whole specter of transgenderism comes along and says, I think I'll change that. Now, as long ago as the 19th century commentators saw this point, the 19th century commentators of the famous commentary on the Old Testament, Kyle and Daleitch, said this about Deuteronomy 22 verse 5, and I quote, they said, the divine distinction of the sexes was to be kept sacred in civil life by the clothing peculiar to each sex. The immediate design of this prohibition was to maintain the sanctity of that distinction of the sexes, which was established by the creation of man and woman, and in relation to which Israel was not to sin. Every violation or wiping out of this distinction was unnatural and therefore an abomination in the sight of God, end quote.

This is unnatural. The wiping out of this distinction is an abomination in the sight of God. The sanctity of this sanctity of the distinction between the sexes was to be respected. And I would say, for those of you that have been with us, this is simply an outworking and a consequence of the things that we said when we taught on the biblical view of sex and gender. All that we said there about the biblical view of gender from creation, from Christ, and at conception, those three things that we talked about, that's the positive nature of the teaching, you could say. That's the biblical perspective on it.

That's how we see it and recognize it. What we're seeing tonight is the fact that God takes that seriously and establishes guidelines that are not to be violated so that that distinction of the sexes would be respected, that it would be recognized, that it would be honored by man. More recently, Walter Kaiser, in his book, Toward Old Testament Ethics, said this about Deuteronomy 22 verse 5, echoing what's already been said here tonight, and I quote, The maintenance of the sanctity of the sexes established by God in the created order is the foundation of this legislation. The tendency to obliterate all sexual distinctions often leads to licentiousness and promotes an unnaturalness opposed to God's created order. This provision in Deuteronomy 22 verse 5 aims mainly at one's clothes as an indication of one's sex, end quote.

The language there can be interpreted even more broadly than just clothing, but we're focusing on clothing here just to keep things simple for this evening. The point for tonight, the thing for you to see is that God's word, the Holy Scripture, confronts the spirit of our age. One other writer says, and I quote, We are to signal our recognition of both the God-given differences between men and women and our grateful embrace of our own biologically given gender, end quote.

This is what we're to do, and so people with male biological anatomy should not be presenting themselves as women, creating an act of deception by which people will mistake them for the other kind, for the other sex, and likewise with women. We're so quickly getting accustomed to this that we're losing any sense of moral outrage at it, and that's why it is so important for us as church for you individually to understand and to grasp these things, that we would not be sucked into this, and that as God gives us opportunity and platform that we would be prepared and equipped to speak these kinds of things in love when the occasion requires it. I'll go back to what Al Mohler said in the title of his book on these and other issues. We cannot be silent. We have a unique responsibility as those who have been born again by the Spirit of God, who have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, who belong to Christ by right of redemption. It is our responsibility, it is our obligation, and it is our privilege, beloved, to speak forth on his behalf what his word says about these things with clarity and without compromise.

That is what we are to do. No matter what people think about us, no matter what the consequences may be, we leave the consequences to God on these things. If it costs us our livelihood, it costs us our livelihood. How could it be any other way in our perspective? If our salvation costs Christ his blood and his life, what price would we pay in a grateful response to the blood of Christ?

What price would be too high? What price would be too unfair for us to pay to be loyal to the one who went to the cross on our behalf? We have to think about these things rightly. We have to think about them clearly. Our primary loyalty is vertical to our Lord.

Everything else is secondary. We live in a day and age where for the first time it is medically possible to alter your outward body to try to conform to transgender desires. People administer puberty blockers to kids, cross-sex hormones, and eventually even plastic surgery to try to attach things to women or to amputate things for men in an effort to go along with this transgender mindset.

Now look, this is all a delusion. There is no such thing as a real sex change. That does not happen.

It cannot happen. But we have all of these medical things that people can pay a lot of money for and which the transgender medical industry makes a fortune off of. We have all of these things medically that can be done that go beyond cross-dressing and alter the appearance even more, further the personal delusion and to further the deception that is perpetrated on the people around.

All of that simply to ask this question, beloved. If in Deuteronomy 22 verse 5, cross-dressing is an abomination to God, I ask you, how much more serious is medical intervention to alter gender identity? If these doctors, as I like to say, these doctors with knives in one hand and an invoice in another hand knew what awaited them for tampering with God's design and creation, surely they would tremble at the thought unless their greed and their love for money just so overwhelms them that they cast all fear of God aside. But there is an accounting coming for these things. Beloved, we have gone as a society far beyond cross-dressing. We celebrate children who claim to be transgender. We put them on television.

CNN recently featured one to give a question at a Democratic presidential debate. This is insanity. And children who are not old enough to drive, old enough to vote, old enough to drink are given drugs, hormones, and eventually have healthy tissue amputated from their bodies because at an early age, a boy says, I think I'm a girl.

A girl says, I think I'm a boy. And what children's hospitals, including Cincinnati's Children's Hospital, does in the name of transgender medicine, I'm talking about all this next week, it is abhorrent, it is despicable, and someone needs to say something against it. And I'm grateful for the men on whose shoulders I stand that have laid the groundwork for me to be able to say the things to you that I'm saying here tonight. The point for this evening is this, is that God's word rebukes that revolt against creation. And it doesn't matter how widely accepted it is. It doesn't matter how many billions of people are Catholic or how many billions are Muslims or anything like that. None of that, we don't count noses in order to determine truth.

It doesn't matter if there's a whole industry that's doing this. That says nothing about whether it is true and whether it is right. Those questions are answered by God's word alone. And so all of this transgenderism that we see going on around us is under the judgment of God because it is a fundamental rebellion against the nature of truth, God's word, and the fundamental order that he assigned to creation and to life.

My friends, this is no minor matter. God must vindicate his holiness against this assault. Now, if everything that we said tonight is true, and it is, if God has placed these kinds of guardrails on gender and he takes his creation of humanity so seriously and is so intimately involved in it that he determines the sex of every baby that is conceived, why then does God tolerate this? Why does he tolerate this assault on his created order?

Well, I want to give you a couple of answers to that particular question. First of all, just in general one of the consequences, one of the outworkings of this, of God's delay is this, is that we are getting a picture before our very eyes of the exceeding sinfulness of sin. We are getting an idea of how dark sin is, how black it is, that when it takes over the mind of a society, that society will abuse children in advance of their interests. Children who have no idea what they're talking about become pawns in a greater game played by adults to further their agenda. And just briefly to warn you and to caution you that the activists, the doctors who get involved with this, gladly separate your children from you and will interrogate and question your children deliberately excluding the parents from the process.

This is stated on the website of Cincinnati Children's Hospital as the way that they do it. Parents are continually being removed from the decision-making process. That's how wicked it is. But why does God allow this? Well, everything that I was just saying there gives us an idea. You get a sense of how utterly wicked and dark this is.

This is really, really bad. And when we see, when the fullness of this sin is manifested, when God eventually brings His judgment on it, beloved, I want to tell you in advance that there will be no questions about the justice and the righteousness of God in bringing judgment down upon it. When His justice is displayed against this, everyone will have to acknowledge that is righteous because the darkness and sinfulness of sin will have been so manifested that there will be no arguing about extenuating circumstances.

The rebellion of man will be manifested in all of its great ugliness for all to see. But there's a gracious side to this as well. And what I would say if somehow this message falls into the hand of a troubled, beleaguered, transgender individual, for all that I've said here, I speak as your friend, not as your enemy, though that may seem hard to believe. Someone has said, the one who tells you the most truth is your best friend.

The one who hides truth from you is not a friend to you at all, even if they act nice to you and tell you what you want to hear. The doctor who hides the cancer diagnosis when it is imminently treatable is not doing you any favors. Why does God delay?

Oh, turn to 2 Peter. God's glory will be vindicated in His judgment, but it will be shown even more in the grace that He shows to some that have practiced and taught and advocated transgenderism, just like God has been gracious to you in your sin. Why does God wait? Well, it's not for a lack of ability to deal with it.

It's not because He approves of it. No, no, God has gracious purposes in His delay. 2 Peter 3, verse 9, the Lord is not slow about His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. God waits while sinners sin against Him, knowing that in His timetable, He has an intention to bring the gospel to some, that He intends to save some out of the fire, as it were. He intends for men in that darkness to come to repentance, to come to salvation in Christ. And if He exercised His judgment now, some that He intends to save would be lost.

And so He waits. He does not exercise His judgment prematurely. He doesn't exercise it in accordance with the provocation against His holiness. He acts in His way and He acts in His time with a spirit of patience toward sinners that those who are invited to Christ might have time to come. What a gracious God! What a wonderful God He is that men who violate the very heart of His holiness are, even as they are violating it, are on the receiving end of grace as He waits, as He delays, as He withholds His judgment. God delays His judgment because He would call people to Christ that they might be saved and not experience the judgment that their sins deserve. This is a universal principle.

This goes far beyond transgenderism. This is why you are saved here tonight, right? Didn't your sins deserve immediate judgment? And God was gracious to you. God waited. God didn't exercise the demands of His holiness against you.

Instead, He was gracious to you. He worked in someone's heart to bring the gospel to you. The Holy Spirit opened your heart to believe, and you were saved from your sin.

Well, take what God did to you personally, Christian brother, Christian sister, and realize that that's His intention in delaying His judgment in these matters of transgenderism as well. His delay is an expression of grace. Grace to allow time for His Word to go out.

Grace to allow men time to repent. But, beloved, a day of judgment is coming. Look at verse 10 of 2 Peter 3. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up. Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness?

Speaking to Christians, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning and the elements will melt with intense heat. Christian friends, as His people, we recognize these things. We trust His promise to keep us and we grow in holiness today. Look at verse 13. But according to His promise, we are looking for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, spotless, and blameless.

You and I, we trust Him. We guard our hearts and we grow in grace together. Look at verse 17. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity.

Amen. In a culture where confusion causes people to try and change their outward appearance, we must always remember God has created guardrails concerning gender. He clearly knit each of us together with specific, unchangeable DNA and gender.

But what we can change are spiritual issues of the heart. So join us on our next program as Pastor Don Green answers some practical questions on gender confusion as we continue the series The Bible and Transgenderism here on The Truth Pulpit. For now, here again is Don with a special message. Well, Bill, this whole matter of transgenderism is something that just breaks my heart.

The world says it's a matter of freedom and self-identity, but the truth is that it's a matter of false advertising and many lives and families are being torn apart by it. It's hard to find clear answers, my friend, and that's why we're offering the complete pulpit series for free at our website, thetruthpulpit.com. Thanks, Don. And friend, I'm Bill Wright inviting you to join us again next time as Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word here on The Truth Pulpit.