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CHAPTER 2
IMMORAL MUDDLES
BIBLICALLY DEFINED
HAVE A TEMPERATURE GAUGE ATTACHED
News 290,
The Advertiser, September 24, 2003
A small 70 word or so note in The Advertiser tells us of the research of a condom making firm.
This is not for the infirm, for it reveals according to this, that one in six Australians (more precisely, 17%) "are involved in gay or lesbian relationships". This is screened for us under the heading of "sex habits uncovered", and noted in terms of "sexual habits."
This squib of an article has a vast result. There are of course questions of exactitude. Does it mean that of 20 or so million Australians, some 3 and two-thirds million engage in what the Bible in the Old Testament found worthy of death, and in the New Testament decrees, as a way of life unrepented, served as exclusion notice for the kingdom of heaven (Leviticus 18:22-23, where it is followed by a prohibition on 'mating with an animal', I Corinthians 6:9ff.) ?
The index will reveal systematic treatment on this topic (under perversion, and morals), but our interest for the moment is in the developing statistical situation and its implications. As to that, does it mean that this is the figure relates as a percentage of the population of Australia, or for those potentially 'sexually active', say from 13 or so on ? or that it applies to adults ? It may well be the last. In fact, the matter is relatively indifferent (though not at all unimportant) since the scale and scope of the thing is overwhelming in any case, and it is only the last two cases which seem at all likely. The moral implication will be vast for either possibility of interpretation of the figures provided.
There are many parallel developments, of which but a few need here to be consulted.
Thus, in Victoria, it is possible to find yourself in hot legal water, reservoirs of it, fittingly fitted with financial algae, if you upset someone's conception of religion under certain not very lenient sounding conditions, so that freedom of speech is in a CRUCIAL regard a thing of the past, or an occasion for criminal proceedings, even if be in terms of the PREFERRED RELIGION of the earliest constitution of Victoria, namely Christianity. It does not seem to matter WHAT your INTENTION is, for it is the texture of the offended heart which is the legal bauble, esteemed of great worth. It is continually astonishing to believe that what had seemed one of the sophisticated States in our Commonwealth should have stooped to indoctrination with a religion of conformity to psychic codes, emotionally interpreted and legally enforced, so that one has to be careful that someone does not even OVERHEAR one saying this or that, by one report, earlier considered (see FREEDOM and Victoria in the Index).
However, when one reflects that for years, the entrance to University Chaplaincy came through a Board with members from exceedingly varied religious bodies, so that no one of the Reformation could possibly ethically do business (Romans 16:17), and that in the Schools, a body was in charge of Religious Instruction in government schools, which made it clear that the churches concerned would not view with equanimity anything relating to infallibility of the Bible as an ingredient, and one realises, together with the consideration of the vastly dispersed doctrine in some of the major seminaries, far removed from their biblical and historical bases, that something HAD TO HAPPEN. In this legal levitation of liberty in that sadly afflicted State, it HAS happened. Is it a prison camp ? a squalid and servile procurement of wealth in exchange for spirit!
In such ways, the legal, ethical, political, ecclesiastical dynamics have long been active, and that one State is not alone in its eccentricities, as shown, for example in the atrocity which for long has been committed in South Australia in Schools (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 8), in an indoctrinative passion which must lurk in the purlieus of eternal pollution. Its investiture of authoritarian youth camp zeal in the field of education makes for South Australia, a dimness of wit and a sequestration of method from reality which makes it all but dead heat with Victoria.
Queensland in the Petersen days did far better (and conceivably does still), for in that day the word of the Minister concerned was this, that there was need to examine both creation and evolution, in their postulates, and to educate. Strange old-fashioned concept ? The fact that when you DO so examine, evolution is left as a glaring fraud in the face of scientific method notwithstanding, does not alter the valid point that at least that Queensland approach was still willing to look at reason in science, in the methodological field! (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Ch. 1). Politics did not procure a palaver instead of science.
Yes, there have been many preliminaries in law, lore, academic prostitution and the like, for this new result on the subject of 'sexual habits'. Habits now ? Is it a 'habit' if someone is inclined to kill people ? or to run a prostitution parlour ? (On the latter topic, there has been considerable recent emphasis on thinking of these matters as a form of 'profession' so that those in it would be 'sex workers', itself a further index of the rapid, if not rabid decline from BIBLICAL STANDARDS in this nation which, never perfect, is without doubt dabbling in things once viewed with considerable abhorrence, indeed as crime by many.)
The implication therefore would appear to be that whether there is male coupling, or female versions of the same, or whether it be the form of sexuality which produces (often) babies, and so assists, in this particular use of the specific physiological equipment concerned, the continuance at all of the race, the matter is merely a mode of conduct. It is like eating fairy floss at an Agricultural Show, just something one does, or does not do. There is no particular significance attached to it. Do it if you like: who cares ? It is your life.
This, it is a form of humanism, secular, unrealistic concerning equipment design, not to mention equipment protection devices which medical science avers quite clearly (AIDS - by famed and abundant write and Professor, Dr A.E. Wilder Smith puts the data clearly) to be limited to the male-female use of male and female organs; and it is intrusive. There are also twinges of law, lusting to nail those who dare to use biblical nomenclature, as here, so that more and more Australia might become not only biblically imperilled to the uttermost degree, but legally protected from any re-awakening. This is like taking an anti-anti-biotic, in order to prevent anyone who might administer an anti-biotic from delivering you from the disease. It is near, oh yes it is near. The moral requirements of DECLINE (as distinct from mere abasement) are flowing fast.
What is near ? The return of the Lord Jesus Christ, it is near. It is seen in the UNIQUE PATTERN (Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Chs. 8-9) which WAS TO BE SEEN, for it IS BEING SEEN: the political, physiological, the geological, the military, that in Israel, the unique; it is found in the religious, in the spiritual; and of course in the sexual. It is not merely the PATTERN and its precision which is point, but it is the proclivity to HATE what is good, to DEMEAN it and persecute it, while doing the evil, and to do these things with a rank and frank abandon. It was so in the case of the decline of Israel before its first major exile (cf. Isaiah 5, where it is just so); and it is so now.
Consult for example II Timothy 3:1-5, and you see what HAD TO BE, distinctively and in pattern (some of the pattern appears here), in terms of an attitude becoming mordantly manifest. It includes a brand of conduct with these characteristics ... "lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to patents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power." The other thing noted in II Timothy 3, to our present point, is to AVOID SUCH PEOPLE AS THESE. That of course is in the spiritual realm, where one has the liberty to do so (cf. I Corinthians 5:11ff.), but it has the thrust to watch any such involvements in any case, as with adders!
In Romans 1, in the latter stages of the sequential development traced from departure from God, you see these things in their place. The perversion is first of WORSHIP of God to worship of nature, following which there is a parallel distortion of HUMAN NATURE which results in its last stages, in sexual perversion on a vast and passionate scale, even to the point of becoming characteristic of such a spiritual decline, in its intensity and scope. It includes the fuming fussiness already become manifest in legal affairs in Victoria, for example.
That whole syndrome is in turn part of lacking self-control, being arrogant towards the facts and facets of your own construction, ignoring design, having designs on your own equipment for your own PLEASURE, in a reckless manner, while HATING GOODNESS whether in God direct, in His divine disposition and provision of things, in the sexual case alarmingly obvious in view of the abuse conferred on it, or in those who follow Him with lip as well as worship. It is these who then become the butts of the legal system when, this disordered in parallel, it becomes more and more a social implement for the application of immorality.
In II Peter 2, where the topic is the fallen state of morals and spiritual living, through perversion of doctrine (2:1-2), in the last times, we learn of the relevance to the situation which was there predicted to develop, to that of Sodom and Gomorrah, which God "condemned ... to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly thereafter". In what are they an example ?
It was of course a homosexuality so profound that men of that city caused a riot in their efforts to effect carnal intercourse with angels visiting Lot! (Genesis 19), and the name 'sodomy' has been their verbal epitaph. These things are condemned in detail in I Corinthians 5:9ff., as in principle in I Timothy 1:10 as exemplifying what is to meet the hand of DIVINE LAW; and in II Peter as in Jude, you see the vast panoply of divine wrath in its impact, as if from so many missiles hitting civilisation centres, in terms of repayment for sexual licence associated with arrogant disdain for design, deity and discipline.
Now when in our land, it is said that about1 in 6 (presumably adult or nearly so) persons is engaging in things so characterised in the Bible, and characterisable in terms of design (cf. SMR pp. 211ff.), and not that only, but associated to a large extent with disease because partly of the lack of natural enduement with protection for anal intercourse, in particular, if you could call it by such a name: what then ? In biblical terms, the result is in terms of sentence and divine revulsion, parallel to saying, for example, that one in six persons is a murderer. The supreme penalty is prescribed for both, and if there is any difference in the exhibition of divine wrath and intense hatred of what is biblically a crucial offence against God, murder does not appear to have any chance of being WORSE!
The language, in other words, characterising such sexual perversion is intense, scorching with wrath, dismissive with a disdain and contempt matched with odium and almost immeasurable detestation. You see it in Jude, in Romans in II Peter, on a broader scope. To be sure, adultery has divine wrath also, but when the unnatural is added, it becomes a double blast at divine order.
That in this land which was criminal thus becomes what is a 'habit', and when it becomes so blightingly 'nearly normal' that when you see six persons, statistically you might find one of them in this state of divine reprobation in a most marked and specialised manner (like murder, biblically, in terms of the severity of the divine attitude to DARING so to act on divine equipment, so to mar emotional, distinctive, attitudinal, procreative areas, allied to love in its family construction as forged for man): then you are seeing a crowding away from Christ, a dismissive elegance of indifference which rises like a mushroom cloud.
Can God see the cloud ? Alas, His eyes behold, His eyelids try (Psalm 11:5), He tests the sons of men, and the one who loves violence His soul hates (in this case, it is violence to His word, to His work and to His procedures and provisions for the race, to the body and to the psyche, contrary to the intense and ramifying realities He has created in mind, spirit and physique).
Indeed, He WORKS ALL THINGS after the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11), so making the punishment and the crime intimately correlative (cf. Romans 1:27), and yet with such passion for patience does He so often proceed, so that His word might soften as early rains the soil, that many mistake His non-knee-jerk depth for weakness or lack of wisdom or power! Not so: God is not reactive (leave that to the elements and to the superficial): HE RESPONDS, in time, with depth, with impact.
In fact, in Psalm 50, you see Him remonstrating that so far from being the Creator of a 'free' world where you can DO ANYTHING and He does not mind, without His being at all concerned or active in His own way and time, He notes this:
"Now consider this, you who forget God, Lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver.
He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honours Me; and to him who orders his way aright, I shall show the salvation of God."
The crass folly of imaging that the Creator of ear does not hear or of mouth does not speak, is reflected in Psalm 94:12-17 (bold added) -
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"Understand, you senseless among the people; |
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"The Lord
knows the thoughts of man, |
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"Blessed is the man whom You instruct, O Lord, |
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"But judgment will return to righteousness, |
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"Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? |
My soul would soon have settled in silence."
It is rather like a Primary School student imagining that because his teacher does not have a piece of paper, but only a Black Board, that she is in some way illiterate. Of course there IS freedom so to think, and even to act accordingly; and there IS patience in the Lord, to an overwhelming degree: but it is as far removed from either weakness or indifference as Pompeii from a Pacific Island (though some of the latter are being now threatened by the rising waters of our current clime!). His ways do not change, and He never fails; in mercy prodigious, yet in judgments, He can be condign when the time comes.
As then these moral, physical, spiritual, ethical, family, social and political realities fall on Australia like a plague of grass-hoppers, or mice, threatening devastation, there is Psalm 50 to be remembered, and with it, Proverbs 29:1:
"He who is often rebuked, and hardens his neck,
Will suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy."
To our present point, however, while it is good to see John Howard, and not him alone, defending the reality of MARRIAGE from being used as a term to designate what biblically are simply sexually perverted relationships, there is no such sensibility concerning other components of legality and financial aid to those who contribute to the provision of divine wrath for this land. The USA has made many errors as we have often seen on this site, and that with considerable grief, because of the good which has so often come from that land; but it is not without errors in this land, that we have to note it.
But whether it be Australia, or the USA (both are in this news item taken as comparable in the being what appears the downwardly leading edge in this immoral matter), there is the indication of a terminal trio, just as AIDS in Africa in teeming and deadly profusion has its own indications, however much these are amplified by poor hygiene, not to mention the cases in South-East Asia, in China and in Russia!
TRIO ? Yes, the combination of spiritual arrogance towards God and His word, social swagger in the indifference to all shame, and moral depravity, biblically defined, to the uttermost depth becoming a commonplace 'habit' - as if pot-holes six feet deep were found on every sixth mile of some major highway. Add this to the discoveries concerning the United Nations in Ch. 1 above, and the spiritual syndrome of terminal disorder, that arrives not merely as a symbol for judgment to come, but as an invitation to await the near return of Christ, takes its configuration.
This in turn, while far from roses, yet has the arithmetical, statistical, spiritual and moral combining form with all the other signals of our Age, traced in Answers to Questions Ch. 5, which makes it an enlivening disaster, a beckoning horror and a depravity on the one side, but one that bespeaks deliverance. Not for long do all the signals of Luke 21, for example, continue intact. Why ? For as 21:24 tells us so specifically, WHEN all this is in place together, then THE TIME IS NEAR.
What time ? Why the spiritual Spring-time of Christ's return. It is as the world becomes so spiritually impoverished, arrogant and wracked, on the way to being simply wrecked (cf. Revelation 6ff.), and this in the presence of the Jew back in Jerusalem, that unique portent (Luke 21:28), that Christians are to "look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near." That 'redemption' is the finale of Romans 8:23, the redemption of the body*1, that occasioned by the general resurrection (cf. John 5:19ff., Acts 17:31), when on Christ's return, the things that are temporary are surpassed, and the things that are eternal, no longer merely indicated but manifest, are plain ( II Corinthians 4:17-5:7).
Christians should be happy, it is Spring! Sad at the loss are we for many (Matthew 7:13ff.), but which of us does not seek with all of his or her heart, to deliver those caught, to win them to Christ, to have them glad in His grace and empowered with His peace ? If they will not, still rejoice; but if you find ANY who will repent and seek the Lord, rejoice exceedingly, with heaven itself! (Luke 15:7ff.).
"And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ I tell you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance."
God is like that: delights in mercy (Micah 7:19ff.), and loves the lost, rejoicing with heart when they return to the Lord, in the midst of His lovingkindness, to find the lost place and the present grace which is His.
NOTE
The eternal redemption (Hebrews 7:25ff., 9:12-28, 10:10-14) already procured does not as yet manifest itself in the redemption of the body. This is paid for, but not yet conferred (II Corinthians 4:17-5:7 - the body to come already prepared for those to inhabit eternity cf. John 14:1-ff.). Thus in the relevant passage in Romans 8:18ff., Paul is speaking of the preparation for the transformation of the whole physical universe, in which as yet, the creation merely awaits the manifestation of the children of God. When that time comes, then redemption is declared, just as now it is already covered in the Cross.