Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Honoring God by Being Thankful for the Fundamental Grace of Life is the Only Way to Solve the Identity and Gender Crisis

The transgender bathroom controversy (and other identity crises) runs deeper than the obvious perversions suggest, nonetheless, they are amazingly easy to resolve.  But when even many Christians admit they don’t know who they are in Christ, how can we expect the world to define themselves properly?

The root of the problem is a matter of focus and union.  Only Christians focused on self separate themselves from Christ and make themselves wonder who they are in Christ.  Christians focused on Christ—those “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of...faith” (Hebrews 12:2) perpetually—are, by that sustained focus in perpetuity, cementing their union with Christ and obtaining for themselves a new identity derived from the name and house of their Bridegroom.

I hear way too often from Christian pulpits and lips, “We need to know who we are in Christ!”  It bristles me, not because it’s not factually correct, but because I discern the selfish and erroneous spirit it is spoken from.  Who we are in Christ is the byproduct of knowing Christ.  Our identity is therefore derivative and relational, not original and exclusive.

It is an established principle that feminine beauty be derived and defined from a masculine perspective.  This is no commentary about the equality /inequality of the sexes, except to distinguish mankind’s posture from God’s.  We are the bride of Christ, and we need His masculine posture to define our feminine one.  Our eternal beauty is only a reflecting one of His.  He beautifies by His love; we are worthless, unloved, and without our own internal beauty without Him first loving us. This is an unequivocally established principle throughout Scripture and much ancient literature.  I believe Byron, in She Walks in Beauty is saying exactly this; the innocent heart at peace within the seat of emotional man is best described as “she” in the “tender light” of “the night” which the “gaudy day denies.”  She walks in beauty which walks in less than the full light of enlightenment, and the feminine posture is the posture of faith—that posture we must all walk in (both male and female)—if we ever expect to arrive at our gender specific and individual destiny (which is only found in context with, and relationship to, God and others).

To throw aside gender identity is lethal to affirmation.  Our sex is primal and one of the fundamental stamps of our identity.  This is obvious even in its perversion.  The key to solving the identity and gender crisis, however, is simple and profound.  Only by acknowledging and honoring God truthfully do we align ourselves correctly to the fundamental stamp of our form and function as made individual and original by our Creator alone.  Just as primal and fundamental as is God’s stamp on us, however, is God’s judgment against those who pervert this foundational basis of life.  Paul said that “Fools...exchange the glory of the eternal God for an imitation”; I say, sages exchange themselves for Christ.

Since I cannot say it better than Paul, here is the apostle’s take on the matter:
“Now the holy anger of God is disclosed from Heaven against the godlessness and evil of those men who render truth dumb and inoperative by their wickedness. It is not that they do not know the truth about God; indeed he has made it quite plain to them. For since the beginning of the world the invisible attributes of God, e.g. his eternal power and divinity, have been plainly discernible through things which he has made and which are commonly seen and known, thus leaving these men without a rag of excuse. They knew all the time that there is a God, yet they refused to acknowledge him as such, or to thank him for what he is or does. Thus they became fatuous in their argumentations, and plunged their silly minds still further into the dark.  Behind a facade of ‘wisdom’ they became just fools, fools who would exchange the glory of the eternal God for an imitation image of a mortal man, or of creatures that run or fly or crawl.  They gave up God: and therefore God gave them up—to be the playthings of their own foul desires in dishonoring their own bodies.

“The fearful consequence of deliberate atheism

“These men deliberately forfeited the truth of God and accepted a lie, paying homage and giving service to the creature instead of to the Creator, who alone is worthy to be worshipped for ever and ever, amen. God therefore handed them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged the normal practices of sexual intercourse for something which is abnormal and unnatural. Similarly the men, turning from natural intercourse with women, were swept into lustful passions for one another. Men with men performed these shameful horrors, receiving, of course, in their own personalities the consequences of sexual perversity.  Moreover, since they considered themselves too high and mighty to acknowledge God, he allowed them to become the slaves of their degenerate minds, and to perform unmentionable deeds. They became filled with wickedness, rottenness, greed and malice; their minds became steeped in envy, murder, quarrelsomeness, deceitfulness and spite. They became whisperers-behind-doors, stabbers-in-the-back, God-haters; they overflowed with insolent pride and boastfulness, and their minds teemed with diabolical invention. They scoffed at duty to parents, they mocked at learning, recognized no obligations of honor, lost all natural affection, and had no use for mercy. More than this—being well aware of God’s pronouncement that all who do these things deserve to die, they not only continued their own practices, but did not hesitate to give their thorough approval to others who did the same” (Romans 1: 18-32 PHILLIPS).