Some people see the whole chessboard, and some people don’t. Some people want to know what would be so unChristian about moving that pawn right there to that other spot, while others understand what the Scriptures teach (authoritatively) about the whole game.
InterVarsity is in the middle of capitulating on the issue of sodomy, which you can read about here. The link is to the fourth post in a series of five, but it contains links to the other four. Read them all, and you will see how and why a large segment of the evangelical movement now needs to be dubbed as the double-e movement (erstwhile evangelicals). Harumphing from national headquarters will tell us nothing about whether IV is going to deal with this in a spirit of repentance. Disciplining their ranks will.
As Tim Bayly put it in an email to me, “People who deny God’s Order of Creation–guess what?–deny God’s Order of Creation.” If you understand that sentence, you have taken your eyes off the solitary pawn and looked at the whole chessboard. And when you do that, a lot of other things make immediate sense.
Why is Hell an issue all of a sudden? Because the Bible teaches that unrepentant sodomites go there (1 Cor. 6:9-10). And lest I be arraigned on hate crime charges, let me hasten to add that unrepentant fornicators go there too (1 Cor. 6:9-10). And thieves. And drunks. And pot smokers. It turns out that sin is generally a problem. Sodomites fight the doctrine of Hell the same way that students who won’t write the term paper fight the deadline.
So you can heterosex your way to Hell if you want, and the fact that we always have to say this now shows that the sin of sodomy has been successfully politicized. If I were sharing the gospel in some thieves’ kitchen or other, and I were telling them that the one who steals should steal no longer, and one of them said, “So are you saying that child molesters just waltz right into Heaven?”, my response, right after huh?, would be that somebody clearly does not want to deal with what the Spirit of God wants him to deal with.
The cathedral spire in Hell has bells all right, but they toll in a grim and deadly kind of way. They summon people there, people who ought to be terrified, and so the only attractive thing about it is what they pretend to give you licence to do on the way — with double-e types patting the back of your hand and saying to go ahead. No, more than that — go ahead in the name of Jesus. Go to Hell, they say, in the name of Jesus. Something got cockeyed somewhere. But when you get there you discover that even that pleasure on the way has been taken away from you. There is no room to store anything pleasant, not even the wisp of a memory. A popular book in airport bookstores these days is I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Something cold, wet, and good in Hell? You wish. The book should have been titled I Hope that Hell Isn’t Hell, but it turns out that it is.