We serve an exponential God. He who made everything out of nothing does not increase through addition, but through multiplication. We move from faith to faith, from grace to grace, from blessing to blessing. The more we grow in grace the more blessed we are. The more blessed we are, the more we grow in grace. All of this reaches its crescendo when we reach eternity. We will be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.
This exponential reality, however, applies to His woe as well as to His weal, to cursings as it does to blessings. For those yet outside of Christ one of the gravest judgments over sin is being given over to sin. Those outside the kingdom find themselves circling ever lower toward that vortex that is the Lake of Fire. Consider Pharaoh. Here is a man deeply blessed of God, not only made the ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, but blessed with an entire nation of priests to instruct him. He, however, remembered Joseph not, and hardening his heart, enslaved those priests, God’s people. So God hardened his heart and in His grace sent a prophet. Pharaoh’s heart already hardened, he would not hear God and hardened his heart. God returned the favor once again.
The same is true for those caught up in that peculiar perversion that Paul addresses in Romans 1. He tells us that though they knew God, they suppressed that truth in unrighteousness. They hardened their hearts. So God gave them over, that is, He hardened their hearts. And so they lusted after one another. This lusting, however, isn’t the root desire of the homosexual. The primeval desire is to rage against God. Since He is out of reach, they rage against His creation. They do what they do precisely because it is an abomination. It is its very vileness that makes it attractive. They are less caught up in an all consuming and merely misdirected libido, and more shaking their angry fists at God.
Which puts them in a rather damning dilemma. The cultural push, or putsch if you prefer, of the homosexual movement is for acceptance. They keep promising us all will be well if we would just get over the heebie-jeebies we feel over their behavior. As they succeed, however, they fail. For the more the culture accepts their behavior, the less it works as spitting at the sky. Which drives them in turn to more and more flamboyant and perverse behavior. The next time you are tempted to conclude that these folks are just like straight people, but with one crossed wire, watch five minutes of a Gay Pride Parade. The rage is the meta.
Until the church begins to understand this we will continue to lose the cultural battle over homosexuality. Some Christians want to lob Bibles at these folks, arguing merely that God said it’s a sin, and that settles it. Others want to take a more natural law approach, pointing to suicide and substance abuse rates, and low life expectancies among the homosexuals. The truth is the God who wrote Bible and made nature condemns this behavior, which is why they do it. What the culture needs is what we all need, to cease suppressing the truth, and to repent and believe. That will happen when we in the church cease suppressing this disturbing truth about our relationship with the Queer Nation- there but for the grace of God go we. Not because thankfully He didn’t cross our wires, but because thankfully He changed us. Our nature was to rage against Him, to suppress the truth. But He came and remade us, so that now we move from grace to grace, from faith to faith. We must call to all the lost not to cease from perversion, but to cease from rage. Our Father, prodigal in His love, delights to turn death into life, hatred into repentance, rage into peace.
Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr. teaches at Reformation Bible College in Sanford, Florida where he also serves as a teaching fellow for Ligonier Ministries. He is a contributing scholar to Kuyperian Commentary.
This article was originally published here.<>
