As the lunacy of hate crimes legislation wends its way through our corridors of power, more and more wise believers are hunkering down for difficult times. Soon the denunciation of real sin from the pulpit — always unpopular with Christians — will be illegal as well. We are in that part of the movie where we are trapped in a room with the bad guys trying to get in, and we are piling furniture against the door. Well, carry on with that everybody, but please allow me just a few observations in the meantime.
In times like these, it is crucial that we learn to make careful distinctions — even though it might seen like a time when careful distinctions appear to be a waste of time. One might even say that making and keeping careful distinctions in a time like this was even unfaithfulness. Well, no, not if the distinctions are crucial to how we present the love of God as manifested in the gospel of grace. The gospel is for sinners and unless we understand certain categories of sinners, we cannot understand how the gospel is to be presented — in this, a time when the gospel must be presented.
The central distinction we must learn to make here is the difference between sin in the sense of shortcoming and failure, and sin in the sense of high-handed rebellion. This especially includes sexual sin. This division between failure and rebellion should not be understood as one marking the difference between forgiveable and unforgiveable. Saul of Tarsus was guilty of the latter, and God converted him on the Damascus road anyway. And many live their lives in the former, drifting in a slow spiral as they circle the rim of Hell. So we should understand that lethargic refusal to repent of moral failures is something that will harden into a high-handed and everlasting rebellion. But in the meantime, the difference is not one of forgiveability.
So what is the difference then? The difference can most readily be seen in the attitude that the Church should take toward the practitioners and advocates of those sins. Practitioners of sins are those who commit them. Advocates are those who present the way of sin as though it were a new gospel, which, in their confused world, it is. The Church must always have her doors open to any refugees from the world, no matter how tattered or mangled they may be (Jude 23). Are you a practitioner of sin? Then welcome. Have you wasted your substance on hookers and cocaine? Then welcome. Are you the ultimate of sexual losers? Then welcome.
Are you the adulterous woman who wipes her mouth and says she has done no wrong? Then here is the door. Are you among those who call good evil and evil good, who substitute male for female and female for male, calling upon the UN to enforce your fundamental human right to hump whatever you please? Then good bye. Are you a Jezebel, teaching believers that fornication is part of Christian liberty? Then God will cast you into a bed of tribulation. There is no tolerance of that kind of hellish doctrine thing here.
This distinction must be held out and publicly maintained constantly. If the distinction is blurred, even slightly, then we are preaching a false gospel to our children, those who are growing up in our midst. Without this distinction, the more clearly we fight the apostles of a false sexual gospel (as we must), the more we are going to confuse and terrify those afflicted by lust who know that their lust is sin. Those who know that their sexual failures are sin are in a different category than those who want to remake the world in a way that conforms to their lusts.
We often complain (and we have something of a point) about the overt sexualization of entertainment for children, and in conservative churches we have done a good job in maintaining the standards of propriety and decency, at least as far as public discussion goes. So far so good, but the problem is that often the pagan discourse is more honest than the Christian discourse, not in the content of what they say (because they lie constantly), but in the fact that they have it on the agenda. The teen-age boys in your congregation are thinking about sex pretty much all the time, just like pornographers do, and the chances are good that many of them believe themselves to be the only pervert in the entire church, because nobody else at church ever even thinks about this. Right? Well, wrong, and that’s the problem.
Jesus did not come to die on the cross in order to save those who had succeeded in sinning just a little bit. Growing up in a household with biblical standards of sexuality, as I did, while at the same time growing up with an thoroughly simplistic understanding of process of biblical sanctification, as I also did, I can assure you that the results were enormously confusing and disorienting. My understanding was terrible and I knew myself to be terrible, and would not suspect for many more years that a large part of the problem was the Church’s pressure-cooker-lid approach to the whole problem. “That’s a sin. Don’t do it” is no help at all when you are looking for resources to help you understand why you want to do the things you want to do. So the desires welling up inside your children come from Adam, not Hollywoood.
Summarized another way, sin as rebellion is thrown into Hell. Sin as confessed failure is ushered into Heaven with a fanfare of trumpets. This being the case, the Church — a foretaste of what God is up to in all history — should reflect the same set of values. In the New Testament, false teachers and their corruptions are escorted to the door and are handed their hat, and the “such were some of you” Corinthians are escorted to the Table, and are bidden to sit and eat. In the modern church, confused as we are about this, we reverse this. We shove the failures aside roughly, and treat the scholars of sodomy with far more respect than they deserve.
So then, in conclusion, if the hate crimes legislation is passed and signed into law, every faithful pastor in America will make sure he commits a “hate crime” the following Sunday in his pulpit. And in that same message, if he is worth his salt, he will extend the hand of grace to every struggling sinner there. Come, and welcome, he will say, to Jesus Christ.