(pri)DEMON(th): is upon us

 

Pride month is upon us, and it is a doctrine of demons.

Many of us will not hear anything of it from our pulpits this month. Some might get vague references curbed by the caveats that "all sins are equal" and "look at the plank in your own eye before the spec in theirs." Very few will have a Pastor willing to speak against these sins as being distinctively evil and damaging to both body and soul. 

This month I intend to be being laser-focused on the cultural sins of our age because I fall in the former camp - my pastor will not touch these things with a ten-foot pole even when he is given encouragement to do so. 

To start - let us make it abundantly clear that pride month is a doctrine of demons. Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:9 calls out both the "active" and "passive" participants in homosexual relationships, using the sexual slang of his day. A chapter earlier he tells the Corinthian congregation to "deliver over to Satan" a man in the congregation who was having sex with his stepmother. Such sexual relations were considered unnatural even by the Romans: you didn't have to be a Christian to understand this was a disordered love. And yet while it may not have been condemned by the Romans how much more disordered is homosexual love, or love between transsexuals who claim a sex God did not give them? Later in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul warns "the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons" - that is, participating in any false theology is participating in the worship of demons. If you've watched Bryan Wolfmueller's presentation on the Theology of Pronouns, you recognize that worship included transgender (male eunuchs dressed as women) temple priests. The connection between demons and the LGBTQ is made clear by Paul throughout his epistles. Paul again in 1 Timothy 4 tells Timothy "Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons" which Lenski glosses

"The great danger is that today false doctrines are not recognized as coming from demons unless they deny the faith in toto, as if the devil is not cunning enough to begin with little lies, as if only those that are as big as mountains come from him."

This too is the thrust of Romans 1, where Paul tells us (thrice) that God handed the sexually perverted over to their lusts, to their vile passions, and to their debased mind. If God is releasing them, who is snatching them up?

If Satan hates the creative work of God the Father, the redemptive work of God the Son, and the sustaining work of God the Holy Ghost, then of course he delights in men destroying each other's bodies and contracting AIDS; he relishes women seeking carnal relationships without offspring, and goads on transgenders to deface the body God crafted out of the dust and breathed into the breath of Life, and called very good. 

While we recognize that, according to Ephesians 6, we are not fighting against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers - that is, demons - we engage those demons through engaging with flesh-and-blood humans. Many of whom fully recognize their demonic depravity and go so far as to affirm and celebrate it.

As Christians, we have no choice but to confess the full counsel of God (Acts 20). We do this by speaking the truth in love (Eph 4). But this is not a limp-wristed, equivocating, sentimental kind of love. Rather, it is the love of true comprehension and understanding coupled with corresponding purpose; a love that follows Christ's command: “If a man love me, he will keep my words.”