While people condemn the blasphemy laws in God’s law as being barbaric and severe, every society has blasphemy laws. These are the laws that tell you what you can and can’t say about certain people and subjects; “gods” you must worship or, at least, refrain from criticizing. These laws are not arbitrary. They tell you who defines the culture and what the culture is. They tell you who the gods of the culture are; that is, what or who is worshiped. Sometimes these laws are codified and enforced by authorities. At other times they are general cultural practices that are endorsed by the authorities’ unwillingness to stand against injustice. Pressure by activists is put on companies to conform to their morality. If they don’t conform, they will be canceled or attacked. Whether codified or passive among government officials, or a loud, powerful, cultural movement, blasphemy laws exist, and violators will be prosecuted.
Recently a new blasphemy law was codified in Canada: C-4, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). The law criminalizes the advertising and encouraging of “conversion therapy” directed at those who identify as LGBTQ+. The official explanation of the law states, “that everyone has freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression” and “It would not criminalize conversations in which a person expresses an opinion on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, unless that conversation forms part of an intervention designed to make a person heterosexual or cisgender. Interventions that support an individual’s exploration and development of their own identity would not be prohibited, provided that they are not based on an assumption that a particular sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression is to be preferred over another.” While licensed counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors in the US cannot promote “conversion therapy” to their patients in many states, Canada’s law is sufficiently broad so that if the church, for instance, proclaims that these sexual practices are deviancies of which a person must repent in order to be converted and transformed, then those who proclaim this are subject to imprisonment. These sexual gods cannot be blasphemed. The church must burn incense at their altars or suffer the penalty.
But “conversion therapy” is, in the proper sense, what the church proclaims, not only for the sexually immoral, but also for the covetous, thieves, liars, adulterers, drunkards, and those gripped by many other sins (see 1Cor 6.9-11). We are not biased toward one particular set of sexual sins, but neither can we … or will we … leave out one particular set of sins because the gods of our societies have proclaimed them “righteous.” They don’t have that authority.
The church must not back down from proclaiming the seriousness of these sins, not only for an individual’s soul health but for the health of society. There is a reason why Paul places sexual sins at the height of mankind’s decadence in Romans 1. These sexual sins are the inversion of man-as-God’s-image declared in Genesis 1 and 2. We are created male and female in order to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and have dominion over it. We can only fulfill our God-given purpose and have the life that God promised as we understand and accept ourselves as male or female and then relate to one another as such. Sexual sins, especially those of homosexuality and transgenderism, destroy the most fundamental aspects of our humanity. We can’t survive, much less thrive, when we seek to erase what is most fundamental to our identity. When society normalizes, praises, and even codifies laws that vindicate these aberrations, that society is signing its own death warrant. Not to speak against these sins and call people to repent of their sins and pledge their allegiance to the Lord Jesus, being transformed into the renewed image of God (Eph 4.17-24), is the epitome of hatred of mankind.
In order not to blaspheme the true and living God, we must blaspheme the gods of our age.
May God grant us the courage to do what we must.
