This is the last of my three-part intro to deception in the Church. Last time I touched on the spiritual aspect to our deception. So, before I wrap this up, I want to expand on that and the connection it has to the dramatic change we’re witnessing in sexual practices and attitudes within the Church. Due to length, I’ve split this post over three pages.
Even while these people were worshiping the Lord, they were serving their idols.
They rejected his decrees and the covenant he had made with their ancestors and the statutes he had warned them to keep. They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless. They imitated the nations around them although the Lord had ordered them, “Do not do as they do.”
Therefore the Lord rejected all the people of Israel; he afflicted them and gave them into the hands of plunderers, until he thrust them from his presence.
2 Kings 17: 41, 15, 20
How did we go from the orthodox belief, the biblical belief, that sexual immorality was to be avoided to the belief that denies sexually immoral practices are actually immoral? How does your small group leader, your worship leader, your best friend and full-on Christ follower come to the conclusion that it’s okay for them to sleep with their boyfriend, or their lesbian lover, or to soak in porn and then, unrepentant, act as a holy priest to God – which is what all of us are called to be?
I’m not talking about unbelievers or people who are struggling with their sin. Nor am I implying that sexual sins are in some kind of especially heinous class of their own. Paul lists the sexually immoral along with swindlers, the greedy, and drunks, and says that none of them will inherit the kingdom of God. The Church should be confronting all unrepentant sin in its midst.
Having said that, sexual immorality (unlike stealing, for example) defiles the place where God’s presence dwells. All other sins are outside the body, but sexual sins violate the sanctity of God’s temple (1 Cor. 6.12-20).
So how did we get to the place where this is excusable – excusable to ourselves and excusable in our churches? (And by “excusable” I mean that we know it’s going on but do nothing about it). Clearly, there are multiple contributing factors: fear of judging or seeming judgmental, a failure to understand that real fellowship involves dealing with sin, or simply not knowing what to do, among others. But after I encountered a disturbing case of immorality in our church, God began to speak to me about the particular relationship sexual immorality has with deception. I hinted at that relationship last time but now I want to lay it out plainly.
Idolatry & Sexual Immorality
Pick anywhere in the Old Testament where it talks about idolatry and you can be pretty sure sexual immorality isn’t far away. In scripture these things go hand in hand.[1] It isn’t mere coincidence that as we fail to honor God, both in our Christian lives and in our societies generally; as we increasingly “exchange the truth of God for the lie” we are seeing an explosion in sexual immorality. And it’s not simply that sex pervades nearly every aspect of life, from early childhood education to sales of cheese, but that every kind of perversion of sexuality is now promoted. Sex in the 21st Century has been stripped of all moral and all natural bounds.
Behind what might seem to us to be the purely normal goings on of life lie what Paul calls dominions, thrones, principalities, cosmic powers, rulers of this dark world, and spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. The sexual immorality taking place in the Church today is directly connected to these dominions and powers. That’s where this story comes in.[2]
Yoked to a Spirit
While Israel was staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, 2 who invited them to the sacrifices to their gods. The people ate the sacrificial meal and bowed down before these gods. 3 So Israel yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor. And the Lord’s anger burned against them.
4 The Lord said to Moses, “Take all the leaders of these people, kill them and expose them in broad daylight before the Lord, so that the Lord’s fierce anger may turn away from Israel.”
5 So Moses said to Israel’s judges, “Each of you must put to death those of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor.”
6 Then an Israelite man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting. 7 When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand 8 and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped; 9 but those who died in the plague numbered 24,000.
10 The Lord said to Moses, 11 “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal. 12 Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. 13 He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.”
14 The name of the Israelite who was killed with the Midianite woman was Zimri son of Salu, the leader of a Simeonite family. 15 And the name of the Midianite woman who was put to death was Kozbi daughter of Zur, a tribal chief of a Midianite family.
16 The Lord said to Moses, 17 “Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them. 18 They treated you as enemies when they deceived you in the Peor incident involving their sister Kozbi, the daughter of a Midianite leader, the woman who was killed when the plague came as a result of that incident.”
(Num.25)
No matter how you look at it this is a deeply disturbing tale: from the sinfulness of the people, to the devastation of the plague God sends, to the appalling violence of Phinehas’ response.
Other than some grotesque shock value, it seems to have little relevance for us today. In fact, it’s the kind of Old Testament tale that turns many modern Christians off. But the writer is trying to tell us something important. He doesn’t spell it out. Instead he leads us through the story, dropping clues through the text. And if you skim through or tune out, you miss it.
In verse 1 we’re told that the people indulge in sexual immorality, and it looks at first as if that’s all that’s going on. So our natural response is to wonder why Phinehas got so worked up about it and why God was so pleased with him for doing so. After all, aren’t the people just doing what people everywhere have done down through the ages.
But the writer tells us they become “yoked” to Baal. By engaging in immoral behavior they become ensnared, and their sexual immorality and submission to this idol create a spiritual bondage (25:2-3). It’s not just that they made a mistake and say to themselves, “Whoa, better not do that again!” They have created a bond they’re unaware of and that they can’t break. These aren’t people who want to break free from sin. These are people who have chosen to sin, believing it’s okay with God. And as a result, they are reaping the bondage they have given themselves over to.
In Hosea we’re told that the people “consecrated” themselves to Baal Peor (Hos.9.10). That word means they became separated to Baal in the same way a Nazirite would take a vow to be separated to the Lord. That is, knowingly or unknowingly, they came under the authority of Baal and were no longer under the authority of the Lord.
Although it may seem relatively harmless to Christians today, this was far bigger than a little sexual playtime. It was the inadvertent rejection of God’s rulership over them and their subjection to a spiritual ruler of this world. They had taken themselves out from under the protection and power of YHWH and placed themselves under the power of one of his enemies. The people of God become bound with what is vile in God’s eyes, which is why Hosea goes on to say “they became vile” themselves.
Many Christians today are unaware that the world’s thinking has so pervaded their minds that they are utterly deceived about sin. They absolutely, one hundred percent believe that what they think and do is totally fine with God.
- Ten percent of Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual Americans identify as evangelical Christians.[3]
- Seventy-three percent of British Anglicans say there’s nothing wrong with premarital sex,[4] and sixty-one percent of US Christians have said they would have sex before marriage.[5]
- Forty-five percent of U.S. Millennial evangelicals are in favor of same-sex marriage.[6]
- Fifty-five percent of Anglicans see nothing at all wrong with same-sex relationships.[7]
And perhaps as partial explanation for these statistics:
- Only 17 percent of self-identifying Christian adults in the US say they would “be interested in receiving input and wisdom from the Bible on romance and sexuality.”[8]
I know Christians who have stated publicly that homosexual marriage is a demonstration to the world of what real love is. They’re so saturated in group-think, in the world’s demand for tolerance and rights, that if you questioned how that statement could be true from a biblical perspective, they simply label you a hateful bigot and walk away. Such group-think has come to pervade even our conversation. You’d think I was deranged if I spoke approvingly of “Pedophile Christians” or “Christian Fraudsters”, yet we readily speak of “gay Christians” and employ euphemisms like “sleeping together”, as if two people are only sleeping – together. Premarital sex has become so common in the Church that it’s passé. Homosexuality isn’t far behind. Next to be de-stigmatized will be pedophilia and bestiality.
Unsurprisingly now, if you asked the Christians in these surveys how they reconcile support for premarital sex, homosexual behavior, and same-sex marriage with the statement in Hebrews 13 that God will judge any sexual relationship outside of biblical marriage, their answer is God loves everybody, so it’s all okay.
In case you’ve been in a coma for twenty years and you think I’m making this stuff up, earlier this week there was a story in the Christian Post about a (self-professed) Christian contestant in some American TV show who gladly admitted that she’s had sex with the other contestants – but Jesus still loves her.
“Regardless of anything that I’ve done, I can do whatever, I sin daily and Jesus still loves me. It’s all washed and if the Lord doesn’t judge me and it’s all forgiven, then no other man, woman … anything can judge me,” Hannah B told Entertainment Weekly.
“Nobody’s gonna judge me, I won’t stand for it.”
“Jesus loves us” has become for professing Christians some kind of talisman against the holiness of God. It’s a trump card I can pull out whenever I do something scripture says is sinful or filthy or evil. God’s no longer bothered about sin, we subconsciously tell ourselves. He doesn’t judge it; the church doesn’t judge it; so why should I judge it?
But “God saved us”, Paul writes, “and called us to live a holy life…. that was his plan from before the beginning of time” (2 Tim.1.9). God’s plan was never just salvation; it was a calling. Not just “Jesus loves me” but how am I called to live? God doesn’t call us to something that isn’t possible. We were saved in order to be holy – something the Israelites and this misguided contestant didn’t understand or simply didn’t care for.
Jude writes about people “who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality” as this woman has done – as thousands throughout the Church are now doing. He says they “deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.” Of such people he says, their “condemnation was written about long ago” (Jude 4).
How do they deny Jesus? How can I say they do, when Sunday after Sunday they roll into church, lift up their hands, and call him Lord? If you read the rest of Jude you see that it’s not by what they’ve said but by how they live that they have denied him.
We might blithely say “Jesus still loves me”, but when we deny Jesus Christ by our lifestyle, when Jesus is no longer the only Lord but has to share his sovereignty with our sexual pleasure, then we might find we belong to a rather ignominious group “whose condemnation was written about long ago.” I would endeavor to not belong to that group if I were you.
Some of you believe you’re safe. You believe that God doesn’t care about these things; that compared to corporate greed, or carbon emissions, or war crimes, who you have sex with and when is of little concern to God. I want to tell you that you are mistaken. Deceived. You are believing a lie that thousands upon thousands of Christians today are happily embracing because it means they can have their cake and eat it too. They can have Jesus and the sexual pleasure of their choosing and they don’t have to exercise any self-control or feel any guilt whatsoever.
But there are worse things.
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