If the Foundations Be Destroyed

Gathering of Pro-Life Pastors NCW
October 18, 2017

(Genesis 2:21–25) So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

If you were charged with the task of toppling a tall office building, would you attempt to do so by shooting out the topmost windows with a BB gun, or by blowing up the foundation upon which the building rested?

This is what we call “a rhetorical question.” Of course, you would topple the building by demolishing its foundation.

The first ten chapters (especially the first three) of the Bible are foundational for everything that follows, including, and especially God’s triune nature and the meaning and import of salvation. Our enemy knows this to be true. And so, it is no coincidence that he has devoted much energy to attacking the Biblical principles concerning gender, marriage and the taking of human life.

A plain reading of Genesis indicates that God created his image bearers “male and female” accompanied by a charge to multiply their numbers within the protective covenant of a monogamous and heterosexual marriage. In the beginning of chapter four, Cain takes the life of his brother, Abel. And before the close of the chapter Lamech is boasting that he has outdone Cain’s bloodshed by a factor of eleven! These murders were, no doubt, a part of the “continual evil” that provoked God to flood the world in judgment. And the reason why God specifically prohibited murder when he renewed His covenant with Noah in chapter nine.

Recently, a large number of faithful, Bible-believing, Christian theologians, leaders and pastors signed their names to a document entitled, “The Nashville Statement” upholding what the Scriptures clearly teach about gender and marriage.

This document, along with the Christians who authored and signed it, were almost immediately denounced, deplored and abhorred by people without, and sadly within the Church. And all in the name of love, tolerance and exegetical superiority (i.e. the assertion that their newly-minted interpretations of Scripture overrule what the vast majority of God’s people have believed and taught for millennia.)

But make no mistake here. The issues of gender and marriage, coupled together with the issue of abortion; specifically, who gets to define gender and marriage, and who gets to determine who lives and who dies, are foundational issues. And they are foundational because everyone involved in the debate understands, at least at some level, that whoever decides and determines these issues is God.


Our current state of confusion and rampant rebellion is simply a repeat of Genesis 3, where our first parents attempted to elevate their own notions of “good and evil” over and above what God had clearly revealed. It was not simple disobedience. It was an attempt to dethrone God, as God, and to take His place as the arbiters of good and evil. So how do we go forward from here?

Sometimes sometime the quickest way forward is the way back. As C.S. Lewis observed:

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”

So, where did we go wrong on the issues of gender, marriage and abortion? What were the pre-conditions of the gross sins that we see in our modern society?

Gender
With the rising tide of Feminism, the church at first begin to downplay what the Bible clearly teaches about masculinity and femininity, and very soon after that began apologizing for or explaining away the parts of God’s Word that address the different roles that God has assigned to men and women. We encouraged men to be smooth-faced, softer and kinder. And we encouraged the women to be harder, stronger and tougher. And doing so, we agreed with the world that it is up to every person, not God, to decide what sort of person they will be; what sorts of traits they will favor, be they masculine or feminine.

Homosexuality
As we read in Genesis, “What God has joined together, let no man separate.” With the advent of the contraceptive “Pill” we effectively divorced procreation from the pleasure of sexual activity. And soon afterwards, pleasure became the focus; the reason; the primary pursuit in sexual activity. And for the most part, the church blithely went along with this separation of what “God has joined together.” But, if sexual pleasure is the point of sexual activity, and procreation is largely irrelevant, then who you engage with is optional. And now, when we Christians try to assert that homosexual activity is wrong because it cannot produce offspring, worldlings can say to us, “Look, we already decided that God doesn’t get a vote in this. We already agreed that pleasure and procreation don’t go together. Remember?”

Marriage
With the advent of “no-fault divorce” (divorce for any, or no reason) we denied what God said about marriage. We agreed with the world that we, not God, get to define what marriage is, what marriage means and the necessary conditions for divorce/re-marriage. And having conceded that crucial point, we now find it very difficult to argue that we all need to submit to what God says about who marries whom.

Abortion
If you understand that the unborn are created in God’s image and are valuable for that fact alone, then abortion is repugnant. But if you believe that the unborn are simply a convenient arrangement of atoms and molecules, just like the mother who carries them, then abortion makes perfect sense. Evolution is a faith religion today. And its priests demand full adherence to its tenants. And to the extent that the church has capitulated and compromised on this issue; to the extent that is has apologized for, or explained away the, “God said, let their be light, and there was light”… “God flooded the entire earth”… “the children of Israel walked through the Red Sea on dry ground”…. “an axe head floated on the water”… “On the third day of the week, Jesus rose from the grave” verses of the Bible, then we have paved the way for people to regard themselves and the unborn as simply the products of time, chance and matter.

(Psalm 11:1–3) In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to my soul, “Flee like a bird to your mountain, for behold, the wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart; if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

Brothers, we need to keep contending for life and leaning against the culture of death in our beautiful valley, and crying out to God to heal our land. But we also need to keep thinking through the pre-conditions of our current sinful state, so that we are not parts of a solution that “heals the wound slightly.”

As always, the way forward is a return to studying, believing, preaching and teaching everything that the Bible says (even the “pointy parts"), apologizing for nothing and explaining nothing away with our fancy Greek this and Aramaic that.

We are under attack, and our enemy is not shooting out the windows on the top floor of the building. He is going for the very foundations of Gender, Sexuality, Marriage and Life. And “if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

Gene Helsel, pastor
King’s Cross Church