Homosexual Marriage Ruling: Response of the Remnant

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There is a great miracle that lies before us in this nation. I believe it is the greatest miracle God has performed in our history, though there have been many. The miracle is that there remains here, after over a hundred years of walking away from Him, a huge remnant. I have a friend who lives in Belgium. He made this statement to me several years ago: “We lost the Netherlands in one generation. You can put the total evangelical Christians here into one building.” When one considers the current spiritual deadness of other Western Civilization nations, once filled with Christianity, it is breath-taking that God has not done the same to us. After so many years of shaking our fist in His face, our churches, too, should be hollow shells and finding a true believer in the land a rarity. But that is not the case. Why not?

Because it is apparent that God is not finished with this nation.

And that, in my mind, is a miracle.

For despite His blessings, poured out so deeply upon us as, we now dance wickedly before Him with no shame.

And the only real response is confession and repentance. We cannot expect that from the unbeliever.

This must come from the remnant.

But to confess and repent, one must first be struck by the depth of our sin...and deeply so. This is difficult, especially in a Hollywood culture that rejects the word, fawning over each other, affirming one another, laughing even though the joke isn’t funny, gushing, smiling, singing and dancing, playing the music and ever the part, hiding a lonely, troubled soul behind make-up and giggles and social pretenses. To call something a sin is to bring the music and frolicking to an awkward stop, where the silence threatens to expose everything. That’s why the word is forbidden, because to speak it once is to speak it a thousand times, exposing not only our masks and increasing loneliness, but the nagging guilt that lies just below the surface and our desperate fight to keep it there.

But it must be spoken.

For to continue to live as if there is no sin, except the sin of saying there is, is to descend ever deeper into a selfish pit of horror from which there is no return.

Unless, however, we confess and repent.

And how are we to be moved to confession and repentance if we remain ignorant of the depth of our sin? If we continue to call evil good and good evil? If we increasingly reject a holy God and any notion of disobedience before His eyes?

Every year the President brings before us a “State of the Union”, but it isn’t the real state of our union, it is a calculated, politically posturing performance that seeks to keep the music and the dancing alive. It is both dishonest and deceiving.

I love this nation. It is filled not only with great beauty, from sea to shining sea, but with great people…good people, hard working people…people who care about right and wrong, people who strive to make a good home for their families and live in harmony with their neighbors and communities.

But the truth is, the state of our nation is not good. I have longed for a President who would stand in the House chamber and look the nation in the eye and speak the truth, though the truth is sobering. This is the state of our nation suffering the consequences of rejecting God:

• we are awash in pornography and foul language, debasing us as a people;
• we are seeped in sexual immorality and lewd imagery of all kinds;
• we create the vile in our movies and music and export it all over the world;
• our cities are filled with rape and murder and theft and we consider it normal;
• we are plagued with rampant sexual diseases with 20 million new infections every year;
• we have the largest prison population in the world, 1.6 million;
• over 30,000 active gangs roam our land, 1.4 million members, accounting for 50% to 90% of violent crimes;
• we run a lucrative import/export business of human slaves, 20,000/year;
• we are the largest marketplace for illegal drugs in the world; we buy $80 billion of them every year; the number of U.S. heroin addicts rose 150% in the last 6 years; women users have doubled; we are frying our minds and our souls;
• we are educationally sinking out of sight; of the top 35 countries in math scores, we are dead last; we are 24th in reading, we are 27th in science;
• our federal government is awash in debt so large that it is beyond comprehension, $127 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and growing larger every day…a virtual house of cards that cannot stand much longer…yet it remains insatiable in its lust for power and a blind populace chants for more, all the while getting sucked deeper beneath the wings of dependency, ever losing their incentive to bear fruit, while those who are fruitful are increasingly vilified and targeted to throw more into this black hole;
• and we haven’t yet mentioned Strike One: the ruling that declared it a moral right to dismember a baby in the womb, to sacrifice them on the altar of personal convenience; the ruling under which we now slaughter them daily and yearly…by the millions. If the blood of the one man, Abel, cried up to God from the ground, what must the cry of millions of babies sound like in His ears?

Must we go on?

Unfortunately, yes, because the current ruling is yet another slap in the face of God. Despite the attempt to make it beautiful, we have blatantly defied His Word and His design for male and female, for the marriage covenant, and have now openly and arrogantly embraced that which is vile before His eyes.

We are a nation that forbids the word or the notion of sin.

Having rejected God, it is easy to do so.

“Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that will h ealso reap.” (Gal 6:7)

If this is so, then it must also be true that whatever a nation sows, that will it also reap.

Do not be fooled, my brothers and sisters, by the seeming might and power of this nation, for she can fall in a day. Do not assess the security of America by the might of our armed forces or by the smallness or comparative lack of might in our external enemies. We are vulnerable and culpable from within and God can bring us down with one breath. It is not unrealistic or insane to think that were we able to see America through the eyes of God, we might be horrified to see that she hangs by the smallest of threads.

I have long shaken my head at the defiance of those described in Revelation 16, those upon whom the bowls of God’s wrath are poured, for, in the midst of the plagues, they still cursed God and it says of them:

“They did not repent of their sins.”

I could not imagine how a people could not be broken before Him under such horrible consequences. And, now, I see that we are not any different. For though we surely are increasingly under the plagues of our sin, we still shake our fist in His face.

And, yet, in the midst of this depravity…in the midst of a nation that mocks God…despite His deep blessings…we find He has left a huge remnant.

Why?

Now, it is entirely possible that this is not merely Strike Two. It is possible that this is actually Strike Three and we will sink so suddenly that the world will cry out much as they did for Babylon:

“Woe, woe, the great nation, America, the strong nation! For in one hour your judgment has come.”

It is possible that we may, in the near future, read Revelation 18 and see there the name of America in the place of Babylon. For certainly it is not a stretch to see how we have filled that role:

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!

She has become a dwelling place for demons,

a haunt for every unclean spirit,

a haunt for every unclean bird,

a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.

For all nations have drunk

the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality,

and the kings of the earth have committed immorality with her,

and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxurious living.”

Do not misunderstand. I don’t believe this passage was written directly about America. But the Scripture often presents to us specific instances that have multiple fulfillments. The principles and acts of God are not capricious and if He can bring judgment upon Babylon and bring her down in an hour, He can bring us down with a swiftness that will cause the world to shake its head in wonder. I know these kinds of words are foreign to us because we no longer have a healthy fear of God. We act as if there is no impunity, no accountability, no judgment. But, God will not be mocked. He may be patient for a while, and His patience may be naively taken as disinterest or unconcern…but He will not be mocked, as we are doing, without eventual consequences.

Why, I even ask myself, do you write such troubling words?

Because, my friends, I am absolutely convinced that the only response to the true state of this nation, and now this ruling, is sincere confession and deep repentance.

Ninevah was riding high and no doubt reveled in her seemingly lofty position. Assyria, at that time, was a world empire, rich and mighty. But…they were seeped in sin. And because of their wickedness, God was going to reduce them to rubble. When they were confronted with their sin, however, they confessed and repented. And the God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”, relented from that judgment and certain disaster.

So, if it now takes us looking into the mirror to behold the reality of where we are as a nation, and to speak of the judgment that is overdue us, then let us look…let the words be spoken…let Him break our heart. Stop the music and the dancing and the preening and the self-exaltation…and look at the reality around us.

There will be no confession or repentance until we do.

So, it seems to me that there are two possibilities before us, the remnant:

1. We have been given nearly a hundred years but our time is now up and it will all be taken away. And we, too, will soon barely fill one building; or
2. We have been given yet another warning to fall upon our knees in confession and repentance, in prayer and fasting, and rededicate ourselves to Him and to be the light and salt that we were made to be, to begin to impact our culture, one neighbor at a time.

My hope and my prayer is that it will be the latter. And, if so, then it is possible to think that God has kept such a large remnant here for this very hour.

When the fierce and merciless Assyrians had conquered nearly all of Israel, city after city, and now had Jerusalem surrounded, Sennacherib boldly taunted the Israelites, telling them that their situation was hopeless, to give up, that their God was clearly unable to save them. In the eyes of the world, it would have seemed hopeless. But King Hezekiah gathered the people and encouraged them. He said,

“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or dismayed before the king of Assyria and all the horde that is with him, for there are more with us than with him. With him is an arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God, to help us and to fight our battles.” (2 Chronicles 32:7-8)

And Hezekiah, in the midst of the taunting from this most powerful enemy, tore his robes, humbled himself before the Lord and cried out to Him….and God miraculously spared the city and the nation. But before He did, He sent a message through Isaiah that is an amazing picture of how God sees these powerful forces in the world, that they are nothing in His sight. And then He said these wonderfully gracious words:

“And the surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward. For out of Jerusalem shall go a remnant, and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord will do this.” (2 Kings 19:30-31)

We are eerily in the same situation. There are evil forces that have captured our cities; they have captured our media; they have captured our schools and universities; they have captured the minds of our lawmakers, our executives, and our courts; they have captured some of our pulpits; and now they stand before us and taunt us to give up, to join the dance. And I know that many of us have begun to feel as if there is no hope. For many, this current ruling appears to be the last straw…strike three.

But are we to believe that the kingdom of darkness is greater than the Kingdom of Light? Are we to ever believe that God is unable to save, even in the midst of the fiery furnace? Yes, those three men did not know if God would spare them. But they remained steadfast and resolute that they would not bow the knee to the man who now acted as if he were a god.

And now, we too, have men who act as if they were gods. We have rulers and institutions who have cast out the true God and now declare right and wrong as they see fit. They mock the notion of sin and judgment. They say “we will save you” and yet they will do nothing of the sort. For this is a path that will eventually destroy us.

They want you to bow the knee. They want you to join the dance. They want you to sing their song.

But, we will not. The remnant of God cannot. We will stand, though we may be cut down. We will speak, though we may be forcibly silenced. We will act with love and grace and kindness and gentleness, but we will not bow the knee to the gods of this world.

Do not fall into the trap of the world that will make all of this look pretty and sweet and try to get you to dance and sing with them. Instead, we will begin with the confession of our personal and national sins before God as Daniel did. We will pray for our nation and for our “opponents”,

“that God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil who has taken them captive to do his will.” (2 Tim 2:25-26)

And may our kind and gracious God hear our prayers and our weeping before Him, and may He fill us with His Spirit that we may be able to stand in the difficult days ahead. May the “surviving remnant take root downward and bear fruit upward.”

May the zeal of the Lord do this.

Soli Deo Gloria…in all things and all circumstances.