Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Owen Strachan - Christ, Scripture & the LGBTQ+ Movement

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis: Big Questions, Biblical Answers, is a series that seeks to provide biblical answers to some of the most prominent and fundamental questions regarding God, the Gospel, and the BibleIn this episode author and Professor Owen Strachan discusses Christ, Scripture & the LGBTQ+ Movement.Watch VideosVisit the Website Follow on InstagramFollow on Twitter

Hey guys, my name is Johnny Artavanis and this is Dial In. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Owen Strand and discuss the core tenets of the LGBTQ plus movement. Believers, I hope this episode equips you to be able to proclaim the truth in love and boldness to people that desperately need Jesus Christ. Let's dial in. Owen, thanks for sitting down. You know, I wanted to ask you a question that many people think through, might have some sort of a biblical conviction in regards to this subject, but maybe a lack of understanding and maybe a lack of really the information necessary to be able to effectively witness and share Christ with this group of people. And really, it's the cultural movement.

And I want to talk to you about the LGBTQ plus movement. It's something every single day, if you're socially active, you'll see something, read something, watch something that is in reference to this movement. But can you explain, and maybe we'll start with just an understanding of what it is. And I reference it as a movement because I think that's what it actually is. And I want to hear you define it and maybe how it got to where we're at today that is just pervading all areas of our life. Yeah, the LGBT movement is broadly a movement to normalize and promote homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, lifestyle, sexual lifestyles or proclivities that are the opposite of what we would call biblical sexuality or traditional sexuality. So the LGBT movement comes out of the sexual revolution

of the 1960s, excuse me, and it builds from there in the last few decades to push not just for some acceptance of, for example, a gay and lesbian mentality, but to accept gay marriage as equivalent to heterosexual marriage. And now, more recently, the movement is pushing the normalization of what's called transgenderism, such that we would not understand that your body tells us your identity, but rather that you have a true identity that may well differ from your biological identity, your bodily identity. You have to go way further back, though, than the 1960s to understand LGBTQIA+, however you want to frame that. You really have to go back to Genesis and the creation and recognize that in Genesis chapter 2, God makes the man, and then he tells us that it is not good for the man to be alone, and so he makes a woman,

he makes Eve for Adam, and she's Adam's helper, and God brings Adam and Eve together in heterosexual marriage, one man, one woman marriage for life. And so that's God's design. It's very important to note that that is God's design, because the Bible isn't always going to say a given sexual proclivity or activity is wrong. In a lot of cases, it does. But when God is giving us divine design, that in a real sense is the Bible's answer to something like being married to multiple people or polyamory or different forms of sexual perversity. Part of why we're against a man having four wives is because in Genesis 2, God brings one man together with one woman, and that's marriage. And then in the New Testament, of course, in Matthew

19, 3 to 6, Jesus upholds the Genesis 2 design for marriage. So God gives us biblical sexuality in his word. God tells us what sexuality and identity, bodily identity, glorifies him. It's not what we ourselves cook up. It's what he lines out. The movement that opposes biblical sexuality from the beginning is what we can call paganism. Paganism is a sexual identity that is not driven by divine design. It's directed by our own internal lusts and desires. And paganism from, man, the ancient Near East all the way into today seeks to normalize what the scripture calls sinful. And that quest to normalize paganism takes different forms throughout history. In our time, in our context, I believe that paganism is back with a vengeance. And so what we're up against when we're talking about an LGBT movement or identity is not just a late blooming of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when people really

start pushing back against marriage and against heterosexuality and against manhood and womanhood. What we're up against is really Satan's twisting of the body and identity and sexuality and marriage for his own evil ends. And when a society moves away from the biblical framework and divine design, it's always going to move toward something pagan. And that's what we're seeing in our time. We're seeing the spread of neo-paganism, new paganism, such that nowadays, Joni, people really don't think of themselves at all, I think a lot of people, in terms of God, in terms of a design or a script for their sexuality, in terms of their identity, being a man or a woman dependent on their body. Today, in a kind of post-truth, post-Christian

context, people think that they make up their identity. They form it themselves as they see fit, and then they express it as they see fit. That's called expressive individualism as a worldview. And in that worldview, you don't tell me anything about who I am. I look into myself. I follow my heart, if I can quote Disney for a minute, and I determine who I am based on my strongest desires and impulses and passions. And then I form my identity from that, and then I act expressively about that, and that tells you who I am. And your duty is not to challenge me or rebuke me or correct me, certainly not to call me to repentance in the name of Jesus Christ based on his personal work. Your duty as somebody who says they love me is to affirm me. So you're

supposed to affirm who I perceive myself to be. And that is... And if you don't, you hate me. Yeah. And if you don't, you are the most hateful being imaginable. And that helps us to situate things today and understand why people kick back against Christian witness on sexuality, the body, manhood, womanhood, and so on. They think, they've been taught, and they think per their own sinful nature in a modern way that there is no God above them. They are effectively their own sinful nature in a modern way, that there is no God above them. They are effectively their own God, and that's what paganism yields. It yields everybody being their own little deity and living their own self-described, self-chosen way. So, Owen, we've previously talked about how we live in a post-truth environment.

And obviously you hear about the LGBTQ movement and the response of many people is maybe just to hide away from the truth or to proclaim it, you know, boldly. What is the best way in your mind to preach the truth in love in an environment where preaching truth is hateful? And how do we operate in a biblical fashion by exhorting people and pointing them to something that is objective when they live their entire life in a notion of subjectivity? How do we do that? Because our goal isn't just to know it, know the truth, it's to be able to win people to Christ. As ambassadors of Christ,

we're supposed to, Jesus Christ makes his plea through us. So what's the best way to do that? What would your input be? Yeah, it's fascinating because you think about the fact that God could have shouted his truth from the heavens to the human race after we fell in Adam, really and truly in historical terms in Genesis 3, but that's not what he ultimately does. It takes some time in the biblical storyline, but he doesn't ultimately just shout. He ultimately sends his Son to incarnate and to become human and to then die paying our sin penalty on the cross, drinking the wrath of the Father so that we would not have to as the just consequence of our sin. The incarnation then is not just an abstract fact of Christian theology. Huh, Jesus incarnated.

How cool. Put that on your refrigerator as a magnet. No, the incarnation is a sign to us of God's response to a sinful world. God wants there to be a truthful witness, but not on a Wikipedia page. God didn't start his own Wikipedia page and just leave it there. God gives us his perfect word, his inerrant word, but he sends Christ who is the incarnate truth of God and who reaches out proclaiming the truth to sinners in love. So man, the stakes are so high with regard to incarnation. Now we're not the son of God. We're not called to be that, but what we are called to do is to be salt and light in a Matthew five sense. We're called ourselves to be a living witness of divine truth. That's not dependent on you and me.

That's not a matter just of storing up facts. That's a matter of us knowing the word and then living according to the word. And that's really what the world needs. The world needs living witnesses of God's truth who feed on the truth, who are shaped by the truth, who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, who guides us into all the truth, who are shaped by the truth, who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit,

who guides us into all the truth, John 16. And then we reach out and love, emulating our Savior, and we try to engage unbelievers every chance we get. And look, Johnny, there's no perfect formula for doing this. There's no Gnostic secret to winning the LGBT community or any other community, any other group of people, any other group of sinners who choose to find their identity in something wicked. The only marching orders we have are to be those who are speaking the truth and love every chance we get, Ephesians 4.15.

So we don't want to be standing far off from fellow sinners, nor do we want to think that we can nicify people into the kingdom by just smiling at them and never challenging them. We are instead called to be something of a fusion where we stand on the truth and we proclaim the truth, and then we defy people's expectations by actually trying to love them as best we can, trying to actually treat them with kindness, with respect, with dignity, never compromising our witness, always preaching the gospel, always calling them to repentance every chance we get, and yet not shrinking back from them and treating them as if they're a leper colony in their sin. They're under God's judgment, but as those who are under God's judgment, we want to

be near them. I think of C.T. Studd, who famously said, some want to live as far away as they can, basically paraphrasing from darkness. I want to live within sound of a chapel bell in hell. I want to live as close as I can to the gates of hell." And there's something about that mentality that we need to think very carefully about as Christians. It's because people got close to us that we are members of Christ's body. It's because somebody preached the gospel to us and then stayed close enough to us to be a living witness of grace and truth, that we're here, that we're headed for heaven. And so we got to be clear that unbelievers may not feel loved by us, okay? Even as we try to act in love to them, preaching the truth and acting in love, they may not like

that. They may be happy for the act in love part, but not the truth part. We can't lose either one. But even though unbelievers may not find our own witness, the witness they want, it's the witness they need. And it's the witness that we've been given by Christ to proclaim. So we do that in obedience as well. We do it in obedience. And in all of that, we're loving our neighbor. But loving your neighbor doesn't mean thinking or doing whatever your neighbor wants you to do. There's been a corruption of the concept of love of neighbor in recent days, recent months,

even in the evangelical community. Loving your neighbor means standing on the truth of God and then reaching out to sinners just like you in grace and truth. There's going to be overlap between the actions your neighbor chooses to undertake and those you do. Yes. But in a lot of cases, our neighbor is not going to feel loved by us loving God and loving God's truth, honoring and obeying the first commandment in order to obey the second commandment. When we refuse, for example, to use transgender pronouns, let's say somebody we know in our neighborhood goes through a gender surgery and a man becomes a woman, or at least that's what's said is to happen. When we continue to use the pronouns that correspond to their God-given sex, this is a man who is a woman, they will not feel loved. But we are called

to live by the truth. We are a people of the truth. And what would be your biblical, I think that's important, like what would be your, because that's going to become more and more prevalent in the next X amount of years. If someone's saying, well, why wouldn't I just call them by their desired pronoun? What would be your biblical reasoning to say, no, we stick with God's design? How would you respond? Yeah. In the Old Testament, I would go to a passage like Deuteronomy 22.5, which teaches us that we shouldn't wear the clothes of the opposite sex, for example. That's in the old covenant law. So that's a sign to us that God wants his people not to live like the pagans live. He wants them to live and present themselves according to God-given truth. You think in the new covenant of a passage like 1 Corinthians 11,

how men and women are supposed to present themselves differently, men with shorter hair, women with longer hair, at least when they can. And you recognize, again, same principle, God wants the sexes to honor their God-given sex. You know, there's not a passage that says thou shalt not use transgender pronouns, but part of witness to unbelievers in pagan contexts is not to allow them to live in the delusion of their paganism. And that it's normal. And that it's normal, that it's okay, that they can live any way they want. It is instead to call them out of their pagan ways, out of their expressive individualism, and to tell them the truth. This is the ministry of truth that we're in. This is what pastors exist to declare. This is what the

whole church exists to declare, is the truth of God. And so that's where I would ground that conviction. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, John 14, 6. So anyone following Jesus better be about the way, the truth, and the life. Well, and that's really helpful. And I, you know, as believers, Jesus says, you know, we're called to be shrewd as serpents. And yet sometimes I think people run and hide from any sort of difficulty and questions that they might not have answered or even how to respond to it biblically. So it's really helpful what you've provided for us. And I think obviously included

in this is just to live a life of dependency upon God and asking God for wisdom because we lack it. And I'm thankful that he gives generously to those who ask because that's what believers are going to need as we move into an environment that is going to be only increasingly hostile towards those who live a life committed to the truth and to God's design for sexuality. So thankful for your help and input on the subject. Praise God.