For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;(Romans 1:25-27)
We live in baffling times. The very idea that there should be national debate about whether or not Gender is determined or a mere mental construct seems insane to anyone rooted in the old Judeo/Christian consensus, but to the many in the younger generation, long subjected to intense counter cultural propaganda, interchangeable and optional gender roles makes perfect sense.
The practical outworking of these ideas; i.e. the opening of doors of formerly private places such as gender specific restrooms, has not only been widely accepted by many young, (“Whats the big deal?”), but also by huge corporations such as Target Stores. It is astonishing to me also that many otherwise seemingly conventional pundits and spokesmen also give credence to the bizarre concept, “Transgenderism”.
Not only does it seem insane, but in view of our hypersexualized , violent and perverse times, isn’t it a manifestly dangerous idea to allow disturbed men access to public restrooms? What ever happened to the wide consciousness of Amber Alerts, sexual abuse, child abuse, and awareness of sexual trafficking?
Do the “rights” of the degenerates to be reprobate, now trump the rights of little children (girls especially) to be safe from exposure to grown men? Evidently they do to our “progressive elite”.
But the sexual revolution must go on ! (Or I should say counter revolution, because as I noted in the previous article, Moses led the first real sexual revolution, when He revealed a Holy God, and desexualized worship, and as Dennis Prager so aptly told us, He put the sexual genie back into the bottle, insisting on sexuality to be confined to monogamous marriage only!).
This is a deeply spiritual problem and can only be understood, or even countered spiritually. Fortunately we have the testimony of Scripture and even History to give us a sense of what is really going on in all of this madness.
What we are experiencing is the spiritual assault predicted by Theologian Herman Bavinck in 1901″Unless we are mistaken…the twentieth century…is to witness a gigantic conflict of spirits…more serious and fiercer than ever before, the conflict is between the old and the new worldview”.
Of course the Apostles of Jesus prophesied this warfare centuries earlier through the Holy Spirit-
Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;(I Timothy 4:1-2)
One of the earliest spiritual rivals to the early church, and even to the Judaism which the church sprang out of , was a movement called “Gnosticism”. A “Gonostic” is a “knowing one”, from the greek word for ‘knowledge’, which is ‘gnosis’. In a nutshell, “Gnostic” spirituality is a comprehensive way of interpreting reality, based on hidden knowledge, revealed only to the super spiritual elites.
Gnosticism predated Christianity, but it had a way of embracing any and all religions and reinterpreting them according to the gnostic paradigm, thus morphing those religions into something entirely different.
What is this secret knowledge? It is the serpent’s lie that we are all ‘gods’ able to define ourselves for ourselves and to decide what is good or evil subjectively.
Much of gnosticism also concerns the nature of physical reality; Gnostics taught that the physical world was and is a harmful illusion. Furthermore in the Judeo/Christianized version of the gnostic heresy, the Creator God is an evil “demi-urge” binding us by the limitations of Creation.
Supposedly through the gnosis, we can reverse the bondage and evil effects of Creation by reversing the distinctions within creation.
In the Genesis account, immediately after Creation, we are told that God set about making distinctions within Creation, remember?
He separated day from night, darkness from light, Heavens from earth, waters above from waters below, land from sea, male from female, try from false, etc.. But the ultimate distinction is found in Genesis 1:1, the Creator Creation distinction.
One of the ways that gnosticism teaches we can successfully rebel against and overcome the Creator God, is to erase all of the distinctions that He set forth in the beginning.The gnostic wants to put back together what the Creator set asunder, he would reverse and erase all distinctions.
We see gnosticism worked out in the new philosophies, which deny that there is such a thing as truth and error, or in multiculturalism which denies that there is any superior or inferior culture. This heresy is once again spreading like wild fire in our education system, and seeping into our movies and entertainments.Movies like “The Matrix” are but gnostic tracts, inculcating the gnostic worldview into the souls of millions of unsuspecting moviegoers.
As of fairly recently, the world currently mourns “Prince”, an androgenous entertainer who once told Oprah Winfrey that there was another being living within him who is female. He even dropped his given name and took on an unpronounceable symbol which represented both sexes. This tormented man, who lived on a nightmarish drug regimen, finally succumbed to the drugs and the paranoia, because he refused to take a hospital room in Moline, Illinois when the doctors thought it urgent that he do so.
What the sexual anarchists are seeking to do, is to remove all of the distinctions set by the Creator and author of Life. To them there is no error or truth, no right and wrong, no male or female, light or dark, day or night, and ultimately, they believe there is no distinction between Creator and creation.
I do believe that to the extent that people remove the Creator Creation distinction, they go insane. Our society is insane. Neo Gnosticism has saturated our culture and we are seeing the madness that it inflicts. This problem is spiritual at root.
What should we the church be doing in these lamentable times?
With firm conviction and yet compassion we should ever bear witness to the Truth, particularly those truths being contested and denied by the world system at the moment. Men and Women do indeed bear the Image of God. The sexual roles are assigned by the Creator. Males and Females are equally valuable, but they are not interchangeable. We should re affirm the God assigned roles for male and female, ad celebrate once again the beauty of the original plan for marriage.
The way back to sanity, for any poor miserable individual , or for any body of people is through submitting to, believing and acknowledging the truth! The Truth can set us all free!
Pastor Bill Randles Blog 
Pastor Bill, sadly when I try to discuss these matters with other Christians they seem to just want to shy away from the subject, such as simply asking ” hey did you hear about Target” they look at me like Debbie Downer just came into the room. I too like to share about my spring garden, which homeschool curriculum to use the next year, and everyday matters, but we should also be sharing our thoughts and concerns and praying about the events happening around us!
Thank you for your postings, and also for sending me Mending the Nets. 1st John Chapter 2 really encouraged me. I am a work in progress 🙂
my pleasure, Suzanne, freely we have received, freely we give-
On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 5:58 PM, Pastor Bill Randles Blog wrote:
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Reblogged this on Smiffy37's Blog.
Dear Bill,
Your insightful article certainly suggests why so many Transgenders find themselves ‘eye deep’ in the New Age Movement. Once one boundary has been removed others tend to follow as you yourself have rightly inferred. Yet this begs the question ‘how such people can be reached with the gospel?’ . It would be easy to dismiss all transgenders as total reprobates who can be overlooked as far as any outreach as concerned. However, in Matthew 24:14 Jesus preached the ‘gospel of the kingdom’ would be preached in all the world to ‘all peoples’ (Ethos in Greek). Our Lord did not say ‘all peoples except transgender’ or any other undesirable group we may have in mind. Even to quietly assume that such an exclusion clause applies is to ‘take away’ from God’s Word and risk incurring the penalty mentioned in Revelation 22:19.
This is an issue my wife and I have been wrestling with because at present we’re engaged in just such an outreach to a mature M to F Transgender who had the relevant operation thirty years ago. (They never felt they could do anything else since the age of four.) Highly intelligent with a Masters in Philosophy and Psychology this personage whom I’ll call ‘Astral Alice’ has been steeped in the New Age but is now beginning to get disillusioned with it. We are now beginning to exchange articles and a wonderful witness is beginning to open. This contact was important because insights I derived from it helped me to dissuade online another (American based) m to F transgender from committing suicide because their ex-partner had disclosed personal details about them to their employer to to Southern State Based hate groups. When during my sixtieth birthday, I heard this person admit on a youtube video that a scripture passage I’d .shared with them had been instrumental in saving them. It was the best present imaginable! What I’m trying to say here is that among transgenders and others whose sexuality is too peculiar to mention is that opportunities to share an undiluted and truly biblical gospel have emerged. The last two years have seen the best period of Gospel witness in all my forty years as a regenerate believer.
Neither my wife nor I choose to go down this direction but when the Lord unmistakably said ‘go’ we went.However, it did take four months of prayer and heart searching before we reached that stage. One thing we have learned is that lamenting on the sidelines isn’t good enough – it’s necessary in these dark times to go out and use the one remaining weapon we have left, which is the Gospel, (Ephesians 6:15). As a Non-American citizen who’s never crossed ‘the pond’ I will not presume to comment on the situation in the US; but at least in Britain campaigning against this or that piece of ungodly legislation doesn’t appear to have enjoyed divine blessing. All the noisy agitation to ‘keep marriage special’ achieved nothing. Those who prayed against SSM legislation got exactly the opposite of what they fervently prayed for. This hardly suggests that the Lord was supporting their essentially political endeavors. During that fiasco I was reminded of the warning given to the twelve tribes of Israel in Deuteronomy 28:25b.
What I term ‘the multi-sexual’ revolution’ is so vast and all-encompassing in its scale that we need to accept that it’s going to have a major impact on our lives, our families and our ministries. (In my case, it’s already beginning to do so.) In this interconnected world there’s no running away from its effects. Even if, for the sake of argument, you were a rural-based pastor ministering in Tinyville, Boomsticks County in Back of Beyond State Mid-West America you won’t be able to escape its ramifications. Now I’m not just referring here to the likely possibility of persecution which you’re already very aware of; but rather to scenarios more directly related to your present pastoral ministry. What for instance would you do if a post-op Transgender person like Astral Alice comes banging on your door asking to be built-up in the Christian faith? Would it be right to turn them away and leave them in the hands of wolves who would devour them? These are issues my wife and I could face in the next year or two and I believe these are issues that could be coming your way..I’ve mentioned all this so that if (or more likely when) such an eventuality occurs you will be ready to reach in an appropriate godly manner. In your ministry, you’re a likely to be faced with cases of mind bending complexity and a strategy needs to be in place to deal with them,.So be prepared and get ready to share the gospel among those who’ve been burned by the changes you deplore in your article. In closing, please look-up Revelation 2:29.
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I found this especially helpful in understanding ding more about Gnosticism as it has effected the distinctions of creation
Twisted gender ideas actually did effect roles in my parents relationship as I examined how each functi Ned even as they were born in 1910 and 1912!
It had the effect of setting a neutralization of roles in marriage which in turn effected how iAds accommodations for my husband to leave much of his responsibility upon my shoulders while he was the. Free to “work” but turned out the freedom from his own functions in family allowed him time to cheat and create a whole “family ” by adultery with a willing woman who did not want marriage!
I appreciate Midrash ‘s comment above….may the Lord open our understanding to deal wisely in these days in which we make urgent effort to offer the bread of life to whomsoever will desire and have ears to hear!
In regard to comment above:
“What for instance would you do if a post-op Transgender person like Astral Alice comes banging on your door asking to be built-up in the Christian faith?”
Fellow, believers, we must be “wise as serpents and gentle as doves”… as the scripture states. If someone comes ‘banging on the door’ and ‘demanding’ to be “built-up” in something they are obviously not a part of, then I would say that both their actions and attitude have clearly revealed that they are not looking for what we have to offer them.
HOWEVER, if one of them were to come amongst us – ‘broken’ by GODLY SORROW, (which leads to repentance) then that would reveal to us a heart READY to consider the TRUTH of the beautiful gospel, which can set them free from their bondage and bring about “new Life in Christ” (if they so choose!)
Again, “Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves”…. the enemy IS prowling around seeking whom he may devour.”
This smorning and a lot latery, at 77 yrs old, I think of how different my life would have been and the peace and joy or a life lived in truth on the Word. as I know HE is the Word. It still is a great joy that I have learned so much for you, things so many churches leave out. in fact I have read so many scriptures that I have never heard of from you that are clearly there In HIS Word. I think people need to read it for themselves rather than believe every pulpit out there which G-d says will get double punishment , teaching wrongly. they seem to forget that taking away or adding to the Word is blasphemy , and unforgiveable. seems like money and making people happy and feeling safe is the way to fill up the church. how very sad and especially at a late times as this as we know HE IS coming very soon. taking scripture out of context is the way to receive a lie, as G-d says what He means and means what HE says. it is a feel good religion and not the truth. G-d bless you and keep you as you bless so many with your truth of the Word of G-d. I am blessed to now know and it is a joy and brings much peace.. We all need to really need to reach out and spread the truth, that is our place here on earth. it grieves me when those who do not want the truth as they are happy the way it is. so we pray and reach out .. amen
also, I never was involved is such a life like gays etc. but it grieves me still to see thousands turn to that life style/ I just don’t understand how they can do so. and I guess it is now like the days of Noah were, and what was will be as there is nothing new under the sun. it is a very sad day to see it all around the world. so we much pray and reach out.