Transgender Issues and The Bible, Part 2

Scripture prohibits cross-sex behavior. And so, if you look at in Deuteronomy 22:5, “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does those things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” Now, again, we talked about the complexities of dipping back into the Old Testament Law. But what are those principles are one just ceremony to Israel, what are those principles that are teaching us moral standards that still apply?

And in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul, when he references this same thing about what women wear, it’s referencing those same principles. It’s not just the garment itself. In fact, in the Hebrew, the word there is “men’s things,” or, “women’s things.” And so, it’s this prohibition of aligning your life to live, or to adorn, or to present yourself as the opposite sex of what you are.

You see as well in 1 Corinthians 6, “Do you not know the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers,” and I use the NET translation, because they spell it out, there’s actually two different terms when he talks about homosexuality.

One are the passive homosexual partners, the malak, and one are the practicing homosexuals. And this one in particular, this passive homosexual partner, it was a common thing and it was men that took on the role of women, especially in a gay relationship.

And so he talks about both the dominant and the passive. There’s no place in Scripture that ever condones or endorses cross-sex presentation or behavior. And the places that we do have in Scripture that speak about it, condemn.

Continue on as well. The incarnation of Christ affirms the goodness of our sexed embodiment. The fact that Jesus came and He didn’t come as a sexless being. He came as a man, He lived as a man, He experienced it. And as Colossians tells us, for in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

Now, here’s the amazing part. Jesus is still a man. Jesus still has a body. When He was incarnate, He became a body for all time. And so, as we look at that, you go, “Man, if our God and our Savior embraced that, the importance and the importance for us.” Sex differences probably remain after the resurrection.

Now, you’ve got the one verse and we looked at it last week that you’re not given in marriage when we are resurrected. So, from everything we can tell, it doesn’t look like you have the act of sex post-resurrection, but it doesn’t mean that we stop being male and female. In fact, if you look at it, Paul tells us the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you. He will give life to your mortal bodies. It’s this body that counts. And it’s going to get new life and it’s going to be redeemed into that.

And so, when we are God’s children now, we – it’s not yet appeared what we are going to be like, but we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is. So, in other words, in the same way Jesus had a resurrected body, we will have a resurrected body. And notice in this, He makes a really strong declaration. “We shall see Him as He is,” because He is male.

A few more passages with this. Jesus acceptance of the eunuch is not a pattern for understanding gender identity. So, Jesus talked about eunuchs in their time. He said, “There are eunuchs who have been so from birth, there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, there are eunuchs that have been made, who have made themselves eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive this.”

Eunuchs in that time period were either people that were asexual, they had no sex drive whatsoever. Many times they were men that were castrated. And they would serve in the court, they would watch over the king’s harem. And so, there was one way that he made sure that the guy watching over the harem wasn’t messing with the harem. Or a lot of times they were generals, because they wanted a guy who is focused on war and not women.

Here’s the one part, though, that it’s not speaking about at all. In fact, there’s no eunuch that ever presented themselves as a woman. They were still men. The only thing this passage would speak to in this - one, it speaks to Jesus’ affirmation of singleness. Two, it speaks to Jesus’ affirmation that some have chosen life without sex for the sake of the kingdom like the apostle Paul.

And he goes, “Man, that is a life to be praised, not diminished.” But nothing about this verse speaks to gender identity or transgender. One other verse, Paul’s reference to neither male or female does not overturn sex differences. The verse where he says, “They are neither Jew nor Greek, there’s neither slave nor free; there’s no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Some have used this verse to go, “See, he is showing a spectrum. It’s not binary anymore.” It’s not speaking to their sexed bodies. It’s not speaking to the differences not existing anymore. There are still Jews and there are still Greeks. There are still slaves and there are still free. But in Christ, now, we have been united as one. And these barriers are not in place. But this doesn’t speak to gender identity.

These are verses that people debate, and so you need them at least to understand with that. But I would encourage you, if this is an issue you’re struggling with, go back through the verses. I would want you to understand them, I would want you to wrestle with them, because here's the reality: God’s truth is the truth we align to, not my opinions.

And so, I may say certain things that you look at and you go, “Well, I don’t know on that.” Go back to the Bible. I encourage you to do that. Let me give you a few summary points out of this. One, biological sex and gender are linked together and important to God’s design. There’s no way around that as you go through the Bible, God links the two together and they are both important in His design.

Second thing, instead of transitioning, we should help people accept their bodies as part of their God-given identity. Man, it may be hard to hear this, but I think this is the hard truth that Scripture leads us to, that we should not encourage transitioning, but encourage a discipleship. And part of that discipleship journey is learning to accept your body and learning to see God’s good design even in your desperate struggle.

We need to recognize the unique struggle for Christians who suffer and I use the word “suffer” with gender dysphoria. If you start reading some of the firsthand accounts, unbelievable levels of suffering. And I have got to confess, I don’t know what that would feel like that every day some of them describe as almost like electricity through your body and just every day you feel wrong. Every day there’s just this tremendous battle in it.

If you’re so far removed from this, you may look at those expressions and you see the drag queen hour and you see the different really radical expressions of it and part of you just reacts in disgust. Or part of you reacts with a, “Well, they just need to stop it.”

Hear me, there are Christians who love the Lord, they are praying every day, and they are struggling with this in an internal way. And so just dismissing it is not going to help them. Now, embracing the ideology doesn’t help them either. It actually is killing them. And so, as Christians we have to be people of truth but extend the grace.

And recognize, when I say suffering, the level of suicide, for those who have attempted suicide, for people who struggle with gender dysphoria, it’s one of the highest of all groups. In fact, it’s one of the things, though, that drives the ideology, because here’s the thinking here. “Well, it’s so, yeah, I mean, they’re going to try to commit suicide and so even if they are a little kid or even if they are expressing it at any point, man, it would be better to go ahead and change their gender so that they don’t commit suicide.

Here’s the problem. They don’t take in account any of the other coexisting conditions, like depression, like anxiety levels, and OCD, and bipolar. A lot of which exist in this. Here's the other thing they don’t take into account. The suicide rates don’t go down for people who transition; in some cases, they go up. That’s a reality that needs to be said, because so many people are held hostage by a high suicide rate that they go, “Oh, we have to do this.” No, that’s not what it shows.

In fact, the only longitudinal study, it was a thirty-year study of those who transitioned, they actually saw a spike in suicide at the ten-year mark. That it didn’t solve what they thought it was going to solve. We need to recognize this struggle and we need to speak into it and we need to come alongside and, because here’s what I would say. I don’t care what the rates are – one suicide is too many.

And so, could I caution you that maybe you see something and you want to go express your disgust. There may be somebody around you, you know what they hear in it? They hear, “I’m not lovable. And maybe I’m disgusting.”

Now, I know as I say that, some of you will go, “Yeah, but Tim, don’t we have to…” Of course we stand for truth. But we serve a Savior who stood against lies while He still chased after people who were the one sheep that went astray.

And to that end, here’s what I say, as a church, we’ve got to create a safe place where people can find and follow Jesus. Jesus is the key. We need to be creating relationships with people outside of this church across all spectrums. That’s part of our evangelism. We need to welcome people. But hear me. We don’t fix people. I can’t fix me! But I introduce people to Jesus and He’s fixing me. And He changes everything. And it’s got to be the heartbeat of our church as we do that.

We need to avoid defining genders according to stereotypes and embrace the diversity of expression in God’s design. See, there’s a stereotype that sometimes we have contributed to that to be a man you’ve got to be a big, burly man. And you have to love sports and you have to do these kind of activities and that’s what makes you a man and you’re really strong and you’ve got a lot of hair and that’s manly!

And the same thing with girls. Man, if you’re a girl, you don’t really like sports and you’re really refined and you’re sweet. And, I mean, all these things in that that may be true. Nothing wrong in that, but the reality and this is where the culture is using these stereotypes, because you take a teenager, you take somebody going through puberty, you take a time period and hear me, young people, all of us were confused at that stage in life.

And the culture takes your confusion and they take your doubts and they go, “Well, maybe you’re not really a manly man. Or maybe you’re not really a girl.” And you know what their answer, to put you in another gender stereotypical box and make you transition.

Here’s what I love about the Bible. God loves the diversity of all of us; He actually created it. God looks at you and says you are fearfully and wonderfully made. You are exactly like I wanted you. And if you start reading through the stories of the Bible, read it sometime, you want to take a manly man, there’s nobody manlier than king David. He killed a giant. But he also was a guy who liked to hang out and play his harp and he was a poet. And his best friend was a dude named Jonathan and when he died he told everybody, “I loved him more than any woman.”

Now, in our culture we go, “Oh, was he gay?” No. No. But the diversity of what it means to be a man. Look at Jacob and Esau. Esau was the manly man. Had hair on his arms; he’s a great hunter. Jacob was real smooth skinned and he liked to cook. [laughter] I look at a woman like Deborah who led the army into battle. Or Jael who, in the tent, she put a tent peg through a general’s head. You look at it, some of the greatest entrepreneurs, in the Bible, are women. Lydia was one of the major supporters of the Church.

Guys, here’s why I say this. If we would actually read our Bibles, we would recognize God loves the diversity of that expression, but it doesn’t change their gender. That’s what the culture is doing to you.

And if you’re a young person today and you keep hearing these things and you keep feeling a little confused or you are struggling with your own identity, hear me. The answer is not radical surgery and radical hormones that are actually destroying bodies and they are destroying fertility. It's madness at a certain degree that we are so quick to prescribe this.

And by the way, if you think I’m just saying this as the ranting pastor, Sixty Minutes just had a few months ago a whole segment on twenty-year-olds who transitioned and all of them said, “Why did we do that? And why did they rush us into this?”

We don’t do this anywhere else. You would never look at somebody that has a mole on their skin and go, “Oh, you need radiation and chemotherapy today.” They’d go, “What?” “Well, that could be cancerous.” But that’s what we are doing in this area. Don’t believe the lie. As we do this, we’ve got to confront the lies of the current ideology, because it, guys, it is destroying life.

And even me speaking, anybody that speaks out on this these days, you get canceled. And anytime I see that, I look at it and I got, “Whoa, what is going on there?” Why the vitriol? Why can we not talk about it?

And anytime I see something this embedded or they lie and kill and destroy, just hear me, there’s part of the movement, I’m not talking about the people, I’m talking about the movement, there’s part of the movement, it’s demonic. And even at the risk of being cancelled and rejected by culture, we are going to live truth even at a cost.

Never lose sight of the individual that Christ loves, no matter how their lives have been impacted by sin. We stand against an ideology; we chase after individuals.  And so, I think we need to be a church that is willing to speak truth. But we also need to be a church that lives truth and extends grace.