Dennis Tuuri

Sermon scripture for today is Deuteronomy chapter 4, verses 5-9. Our topic is the Bible and homosexuality, part two: the state and homosexuality. So please stand for reading of God’s word. Deuteronomy 4, verses 5-9. Surely I have taught you statutes and judgments, just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should act according to them in the land which you go to possess. Therefore, be careful to observe them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” For what great nation is there that has God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us for whatever reason we may call upon him? And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all this law which I set before you this day? Only take heed to yourself and diligently keep yourself lest you forget the things your eyes have seen and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. And teach them to your children and your grandchildren.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you, Lord God. We bless your holy name for giving us a revelation of your character in the scriptures. We thank you for calling us here today to speak peace to us through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you that he is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and we acknowledge his crown rights over every aspect of the created order and certainly over every aspect of our lives.

Now, Lord God, as we turn from a consideration of homosexuality as a moral issue—whether people should do it or not and whether it’s sin or not—we pray now that as we turn to a consideration of government and the state and its relationship to these things, that you would bless us with your word. Bless us with an understanding of this word and how it applies to our time. In Jesus’ name we ask it, and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours.

Amen. Please be seated. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pivot today from the first half of this two-part series speaking about the Bible and homosexuality, looking specifically at Leviticus 18:22 and other verses about homosexuality. Hopefully we’ve laid that foundation last week. And today we’re going to turn to a consideration of what really prompted this series, which was: should the government approve or disapprove of homosexual same-sex marriage? The Supreme Court of the United States decision some months or so ago has prompted—appropriately prompted—such outrage across the nation and concerns. So that’s what we’re going to do today.

Now on your outline, the parts that have no spaces in them is what we really covered last week. Last week’s sermon is at the website, the RCC website. You know, there’s an opening slideshow that comes up, and the first slide in that slideshow is the video of last week’s sermon. So if you want to—if you missed it or want to review it or want to have people go to it that you think might benefit by it—it’s up there. And so I’ll direct you to that if you’ve already missed last week’s sermon. But most of what’s covered here was really covered last week, and it’s single-spaced. There are no spaces. So we’re not going to go back over that.

Now, we’re talking about homosexuality, but we have, as I mentioned at the beginning on your outline, the introduction: a target-rich environment. What I mean by that is you know there are many aspects of our culture and government and people’s morality that are falling apart now. That’s only to be expected in a country that moves increasingly away from the Lord Jesus Christ. Strange things happen.

There is a concept known as common grace, and there’s a theology called two-kingdom theology that says that the state is really a secular entity and it’s to operate on the basis of common grace, not special grace. But what we see going on—and I’ll talk about this more in a couple of minutes—is that as the country has moved away from the Bible and Jesus, the so-called common grace roots of civil society crumble. There is no common grace ultimately in informing our civil magistrate. It is what Peter Leithart called it: middle grace. The kind of general revelation in the world, but heavily influenced by Christian foundations for two millennia now across the world.

Hopefully we can get rid of that squeaking. I don’t know if it’s bothering you, but it’s up here. Okay, so let’s move through the outline in this. So, target-rich environment. So one of the other things of course that’s happened is the Planned Parenthood videos. We could talk about the kayakers on last a couple of days ago stopping that ship. And in a way, what we’re going to try to do here today in terms of what we’re trying to do in this series—you know, if you followed the blockage of the ship—there were, I don’t know, 13 people that had dangled themselves off the St. John’s Bridge for a couple of days. And the police strategically only had to take out, I think, two, maybe three of them. And that gave broad enough berth for the ship to move through, which makes you wonder about, you know, knowing the channel of the river there, you would have thought they would have packed themselves more tightly into the channel. But whatever.

The point is there have been some bridges removed or some obstructions—some ropes that I know that many of us would think they were the bad people in this matter—but imagine them as good people. Imagine the tanker or the icebreaking vessel rather as, you know, homosexual marriage or the butchery of babies, et cetera. There have been a few significant ropes that have been cut out of the way or pulled up out of the way by the opposition.

So what we tried to do last week is to restore one of those significant thick ropes: which is a love for the law of God and specifically revaluing the book of Leviticus. And what we’re going to try to do today is lower another big rope to stop this cultural slide. And that big rope is the relationship of the civil state to the Bible. What does the Bible tell us about civil governance and how it should happen? So that’s what we’re going to do—this target-rich environment. We’re going to try to use the word of God to approach these things and to try to help people that are stumbling toward their destruction and restore justice and righteousness, at least to particular people’s lives, and ultimately long-term to the culture.

Now, the first break on your outline that has a space after it is under the section that says “increasing degrees of sexual sin,” “uncleanness,” Leviticus 18:22 in context. So I’m going to return to that before we get to the civil government because I was asked a question about this—a couple of them. I’ve provided you a chart, two charts actually. But if you have an outline today, you could look at the chart that says “rolling back the curse,” says “answer key.” This is from our curriculum. I was amazed. I looked at our curriculum online, which you can do on our webpage. I think the Leviticus curriculum was 600 pages or something. What? Maybe I had it in big font. I don’t know. Anyway, this is a chart from the Leviticus curriculum of RCC, and you’ll see at the top of this chart—if you have it there on your outlines—it says “uncleanness: signs of the results of the fall; cleanness: removal of the signs of the results of the fall.”

So that’s a working definition that we give to kids who are taking our Leviticus Sunday school curriculum: that uncleanness are signs of the effects of the fall, okay? And what we do in this chart is to show the fall narrative on the left-hand column and then the laws in Leviticus on the right-hand column in the order in which they’re presented relative to uncleanness. And I’m not going to take the time now, but you can take this chart home and look at those and see that really all Leviticus is doing is taking the creation narrative, expanding out the results of the fall in very specific areas—work, sexuality, how you know, being kicked out of our garden home, et cetera—and it’s talking about uncleanness in to those areas and then how to roll back uncleanness, right?

Jesus came to make blessings flow as far as the curse is found, right? The great Christmas song we sing: “Joy to the World”—”far as the curse is found.” So the curse, the fall, affected everything. And Jesus now has reversed that and is cleansing everything—has definitively cleansed it through his blood.

Here’s the point. What’s the difference between the laws that say that certain kinds of sexuality are unclean and not to be engaged in and other forms that are not necessarily wrong at all? They just happen to happen. So in other words, what about eating pork? What about the special clothing that’s given to the priests? What about a woman being unclean after having a child, which is a great thing to do—have children, right?

Well, those things demonstrate ritual uncleanness. They say that it’s good to have babies, but until Jesus comes, God wants us to remember through a particular set of things. He tells us that even having children, as good and proper as that is, is still affected by the fall. So our children are born stone cold dead, right? I mean, so there’s still uncleanness. Uncleanness means effects of the fall. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done something wrong. It just means it’s unclean because every area is affected by the fall.

On the other hand, uncleanness also can refer to moral actions of men and women that are also the effects of the fall because sin is. But these things are direct moral actions, such as homosexuality, and that also produces uncleanness. So we’re adults. We can take a concept like uncleanness and say there are two areas of it, right? One that was just ritual, had nothing to do with moral sin, and others that are definitely tied to particular actions that are transgressive of God’s law.

Why was it wrong to eat shellfish? Well, it wasn’t wrong for everybody to eat shellfish. It wasn’t wrong for the gentile God-fearers at all. They could eat as much pig as they wanted. The only people that were restricted from eating pork and other things like this were the priestly nation. So God had set up a deal where there were Gentiles and Jews at this stage in history. And the Jews were to be a special priestly nation to the Gentiles. I mean, sometimes I think that he wouldn’t let them eat the best of things—bacon, for instance—because priests are supposed to sacrifice. But it’s to keep them apart until Jesus comes. And what does Jesus then do? He declares all foods clean. Because the distinction—first of all, the moral uncleanness is removed through repentance. The ritual uncleanness is removed through the shedding of his blood on the cross. And now the blessings flow as far as the curse was found, right?

And the distinction that kept the world separated—between men and women, Jew and Gentile—that’s now been overcome. That sin that creates broken relationships—and they always do—that sin has been overcome by Christ. And so now he restores relationships: men and women, Jews and Gentiles, et cetera. So there are no more laws distinguishing the priestly class from the non-priestly class.

So you know, that’s kind of an overview of this stuff. It’s quite simple. I know it’s a little more complicated when you get into the details, but there were certain kinds of uncleanness that resulted from sin. There were certain kinds of uncleanness that resulted from the sin of Adam and Eve, but no sin on the part of the people themselves. Homosexuality, of course, is in this category. And when people bring up other kinds of uncleanness that obviously have no sin attached, they’re in that category. And those are categories that, you know, people have known about for thousands of years.

So I wanted to touch on that as we go through the outline reviewing and revaluing Leviticus for us.

The second chart. So if you look on your outline, if you look under “not that big a deal”—that objection on the outline—the next place where there’s a space and it has the word “chart” there. I just wanted to give you this for your own use. The second chart is an overview of the placement in Leviticus in the canon. It talks about the first five books, shows the centrality of Leviticus, shows the centrality of chapter 19, and all that stuff. So it’s a good working structure as you read through or study through Leviticus. And I don’t want to get into it in detail, but if you look down at the actual breaking up of the divisions of the chapters of Leviticus as they relate to this chart, you’ll see the center is chapter 19, and on either side are chapters 18 and 20.

Chapter 18 has a prohibition against homosexuality. It’s an abomination. Chapter 20 says that people that engage in homosexuality—both parties, by the way, so these are both consenting adults—it’s not strange forms, but it’s consenting adult same-sex relationships. Both parties are subject to the death penalty. Why does it make the difference? Why is it an abomination over here? Or even, why are these things—don’t have any punishments—and over here they do?

Well, that’s because the structure of the book begins by citing sanctions of the covenant with God. This is how you should live. This is what’s good. This is what’s bad. And then after the center section about holiness, then it talks about sanctions to be applied to things that are bad, okay? So it adds punishments in chapter 20. So that movement—if you’re studying the issue of homosexuality from 18 to 20, from being just referred to as a bad thing to being now a capital crime—is the structure of the book of Leviticus you’re seeing, where the third section adds punishments. No, I’m sorry—adds punishments to the laws that were established earlier, okay?

So again, this is—I don’t mean to throw you off the track here—but I did want to make those points and give you a couple of resources. If the purpose of last week was to revalue Leviticus, hopefully you got that message, and hopefully charts like this and Sunday school classes and curriculum about Leviticus will be interesting to you and you’ll want to look them over and see how that works.

All right, let’s see. So one other thing I wanted to do—I keep promising this—this is one of those long introductions I guess my wife just hates—but it isn’t an introduction. It actually is going through steps of the outline that we didn’t fully point out. And I wanted to point this one out. I printed the verses out on your handouts from 1 Timothy 1:8-10. And last week, what we tried to do is make the case that the laws against homosexuality are seventh commandment violations, right?

So there’s one commandment: love God with all your heart, soul, and strength. There’s two commandments: love your neighbor as yourself. And then there are ten commandments telling us how to love God, how to love our neighbor. And one of those ten commandments is number seven, that says don’t commit adultery. And so implied in “don’t commit adultery” is all kinds of things. Implied is: build a good marriage. Implied is: don’t commit fornication. Implied is: don’t commit adultery specifically. Don’t commit other kinds of transgressive sexual sins outside of a man-woman marriage, okay? So all those things are kind of wrapped up, packed in this zip file called adultery.

Now, to show you that the New Testament kind of accepts all of this—in 1 Timothy 1:8-10—and this contains a verse that prohibits homosexuality, it’s another one of those laws. We read this: “But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous person. Are there any? Jesus says no. But for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners.”

Now listen. “For the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and mothers, for manslayers, for fornicators, for sodomites, for kidnappers, for liars, for perjurers.”

Now, what is that list doing? Do you notice anything about that? Well, if you look, you see an obvious movement—if you know your ten commandments. That’s what he’s going through: the ten commandments, right? I mean, it’s obvious. You look at so: murderers of fathers and mothers—Fifth Commandment, right? Manslayers—Sixth Commandment. Fornicators and sodomites, or homosexuals—those engaged in homosexual actions—Seventh Commandment, again, adultery. Kidnappers—Eighth Commandment, stealing. Stealing men is the ultimate theft. Liars—Ninth Commandment. And perjurers specifically—Ninth Commandment. He’s going through the commandments.

Which, by the way, in passing, let me mention—then that just before murderers, we have “unholy and profane.” And I think there’s something to maybe thinking about those terms in terms of what we’re supposed to keep holy, which is the Lord’s day, and not to profane it. I think it’s a reference to the Fourth Commandment. Don’t want to get sidetracked.

The point here is that once more, laws against homosexuality are part of the big ten. They’re part of the ten commandments and are specifically repeated in the context of the New Testament, including here in First Timothy. So there’s just not avoiding the fact that the Bible says that personally people should not be engaged in homosexual relationships.

Let’s see. “Not loving”—I think—is another section I was going to look at. And just we said this last week, but just to make sure we understand it: you know, Doug linked on the RCC page to five short videos on how to respond to the homosexual issue. They’re worth watching. I’m thinking about maybe trying to show them here in some format. They’re short, eight minutes a piece. And the man talks about this issue and he says, “Look, love is not toleration. We don’t cheapen love into just waving at somebody and say, ‘Yeah, that’s great. Hope you have a good life.’ That’s not love. Love, as defined by the character of God, is involvement in people’s lives. And love is courageous to help them see things they’re doing wrong as well as what they’re doing right.”

If you’ve got a marriage that’s simply toleration, you’re not achieving the sanctification that God has in mind for marriage. We talked about this morning in Sunday school class. So the point is: how do you define love? How do you spell love? And you know, the Fabulous Thunderbirds—M-O-N-E-Y. How do you spell love? The law, the Bible: how do you spell love? L-A-W. Law. God’s law isn’t because he’s against us; it’s because he’s for us. He wants human prospering and flourishing. And he says, “Here’s how it works. Here’s the way to get blessings.”

So whenever we take the law and try to help somebody bring their lives into conformity to it, that’s not an unloving act. That’s loving. It’s a height of unlovingness to see somebody stumbling toward death and to do nothing about it, to help them. So don’t let that love thing get in your way in these kind of conversations. The law is holy. The commandment is holy. It’s just, and it’s good, which means it’s good for us individually and it’s good for us corporately.

All right, so let’s talk now about marriage itself and the state’s involvement in marriage. I mentioned earlier that some people think that one way to build cultural government is common law, or common grace rather. Well, it’s interesting to know. Well, let me put it this way. The law—and again, this is on those videos that Doug shared—it was quite good. We’ve been saying this for 30 years. Are we trying to legislate morality? When we make a civil government, we make civil laws. Do we really want to legislate morality?

And the answer is: of course, just like everybody else. All law is enacted morality. Laws are an attempt to create a moral environment for the culture. Every law that there is is telling us: this is the right way. This is how to be moral and right and just with your neighbor. So laws are inevitably an enactment and an inducement to a morality of whatever sort. Doesn’t necessarily mean Christian morality, but it’s a morality of some sort.

The Bible says that government is to praise the righteous and to punish the ungodly. Well, to punish the godly through law is to make them think, “No, I shouldn’t really do that thing.” On the other hand, when you make a declaration—like the Supreme Court does—the law now has the effect in America of affirming a particular set of moral actions. They’re affirming a morality, the goodness of homosexual actions in marriage.

When the Supreme Court did what it did, the civil government put its affirmation—its good housekeeping stamp of approval—on something that God says is really quite bad for the people involved, okay?

Romans 1:32 says at the end of this long section that we’re familiar with, “Who knowing the righteous judgments of God that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same, but also approve of those who practice them.” So the culmination of the list of bad things in Romans 1 is the approving of other people engaged in sinful acts that have been described—and specifically, very specifically, in the list is homosexual acts.

So what that means is that people who are affirming people that sin are themselves—those people making the affirmations—are sinning. They’re sinning against that person and they’re sinning against God. When the civil government fails to do what’s right, it ends up encouraging what’s wrong, and the civil government then is in violation of God’s law. It’s that simple.

So it’s not just, you know, it’s not just the laws themselves in isolation. It’s the laws as part of an enactment of morality that the Bible talks about. And Proverbs talks about this a lot. Verse 16:12: “It is an abomination for kings to commit wickedness, for a throne is established by righteousness.” So that’s not restricted to Israel.

Paul’s comments in Romans chapter 1—you know, the flow of Romans—he begins with this list of, you know, sins of the Gentiles and the Roman Empire, et cetera. Then he says, “And now you, O man, are inescapable too.” So don’t think you’re out of this, Jew, because you’re being a hypocrite. You do these same things. We’re all sinners condemned under the law of God.

Here’s the point. When Paul makes his comments about homosexuality in chapter 1, he’s making it about people. He’s saying the law has application for people outside of the covenant community. People today get confused about this. Well, does God’s law apply just to the church? Why would it affect anybody outside?

Well, here Paul is clearly making the case that those outside of the covenant people of God are bound by God’s laws and will be judged for them by him, okay? And of course, this is affirmed over and over again in terms of Sodom and Gomorrah. Jude 7, all kinds of ways in the scriptures. But it’s one of those ropes that has been kind of dangled down from the bridge—that has been removed from the bridge rather—that let sin happen. This idea that somehow the law of God is only for us, and we just read, is for the reprobate like we all are, okay?

So Paul is, first of all, talking to Gentiles, and secondly, what is Paul doing? So as I said, there are two-kingdom people—the idea is that there’s a temporal kingdom and a spiritual kingdom. But today it’s more like there’s a kingdom of the church and then there’s the kingdom of the rest of culture. And the rest of culture is governed by Noahic covenant. And there is stuff out there. It’s not like they can do whatever they want. There’s common grace in the world. And they then form laws according to that common grace. And so we shouldn’t be telling them what to do based on a Christian set of principles, right? A Christian set of laws. We should just let them do their common grace thing.

Well, Paul is actually using that argument in Romans 1. He says nature. They’re sinning against nature. They’ve abandoned the natural use of sexuality. He says common grace. We could say, this is sort of what we could imply. He’s implying common grace even teaches you don’t do that.

Right now we’ve got a culture now where we’ve just affirmed today and we’re sending presidential envoys to states that disagree with us to spread the view that this thing—that nature itself teaches is wrong—is now right. So the point is this: to try to build a civil government upon some concept of common grace that everybody everywhere is going to agree with is folly. And the Lord God, among other things that he’s doing—he’s always doing lots of things—but one thing I think he’s doing with this Supreme Court decision is to drive the nail into the coffin of systems that say there’s some kind of common grace that’s enough to frame civil government. It’s obviously ridiculous now, right?

Well, it should be. And yet people who are affirming people that affirm these sins—who are sinning—are doing this on the basis supposedly of these two kingdoms and the common grace that’ll let that kingdom out there frame, okay, laws.

So Paul is making the case here that can be used to show that systems of governance based on some sort of common grace simply don’t work. Look, slavery was endemic in the entire world until Christianity got rid of it. Now, it hasn’t done it perfectly. As cultures move back away from Christianity to paganism, slavery goes up. Why wouldn’t you enslave somebody if you didn’t believe in the Bible? If you had the power and strength to do it?

Well, there’s this idea of their rights. Rights, as our constitution used to say, come from a Creator who has endowed us with rights. That’s a Christian concept. The whole idea of human rights—that’s now kind of gone topsy-turvy here, with the right to have sex in any way with any kind of creature you want. But the idea of rights is a Christian concept. That’s the only reason this is happening. The only reason why the problems we see are happening is because we’re post-Christian. Where, as I said earlier, what Peter calls middle grace—common grace informed deeply by Christian presuppositions and teachings. And as a result, we think common grace has the concept of human rights. It has the concept of women’s rights, and no slavery. But that is simply not true in the history of the world.

So it’s not common grace. I mean, the whole idea of common grace is it’s been there forever. That is middle grace—common grace informed by the word of God. And so in terms of the Bible and government and homosexuality, we can’t count on some kind of common grace two-kingdoms view of how to frame a government. The Bible says otherwise. And we have an obligation—again, including individually, of course—but if we have this verse in front of us: “Deliver those who are drawn toward death and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter,” that’s an obligation to us to help people.

If we see somebody taking drugs that we know is going to end up in their death, and we have care for them, we have relationship with them, if we’re really loving, we’ll be involved and courageous enough to try to help them not do that. And the same thing’s true of this. And we should want to frame laws that would not affirm drug-taking, but discourage drug-taking. I’m not saying imprisonment necessarily, but laws that would tell people, “Hey, this is bad. There’d be dragons in that particular place you’re floating off to. There’s a waterfall coming.”

So civil statutes have the obligation, I think, from a Christian perspective, of being part of this rescuing people stumbling off to their death.

Now, the text before us is very explicit in terms of this, right? Well, maybe not right, but I think it’s right. And so let’s look then at Deuteronomy 4:5-9.

Now, a little bit of context here. So Deuteronomy begins and it’s largely historical for the first three chapters, right? And we know at least in this church, we should know that by chapter 5, there’s the Ten Commandments—again, a little bit different from Exodus 20, but the Ten Commandments in 5. So this is a significant turning point in the book. These are the beginnings. After Moses has talked about the history of what God has done and reminded them of their salvation by God, he’s now begun to give them last words from a dying man. He’s already told them, “I can’t go over.” So these are Moses’s last words that provide the header for what’s going to happen in the rest of the book—Deuteronomy 5, the Ten Commandments, and then a whole bunch of sermons on the Ten Commandments. Ten sermons.

I also, as homeschoolers here, you’ll know that Deuteronomy 4 starts—before the verses we come to here—with an injunction that these words of the law be passed on to your children: “You’re rising, you’re sitting, you’re walking along the way. That you would speak of them. They’d be on the gates of your house, and you’re to pass them on to your kids.” So what he says there is that as I’m going to give you an understanding of God’s word for your walk, make sure it inhabits your work and your home, okay? You’re walking to work, you’re doing work in your home, you got your home, your children, all that. So it’s kind of make a personal application. God through Moses is telling them, “Look, a dying man is telling you: if there’s anything else you should do, make sure you teach your kids. Make sure this word is part of your life all the time, not just on Sundays.”

Then he gets to this section here in Deuteronomy 4. And this is the other—this is the twin towers, the twin pillars. First is the home. And now we’ll talk about the state. So that’s the context for Deuteronomy 4:5-9.

Okay, here it says, “Surely I have taught you statutes and judgments, just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should act according to them in the land which you go to possess.” Okay, so statutes and judgments—civil legislation, as well as just laws, personal laws. He’s taught them statutes and judgments for how to order their society in a land that they’re going to possess.

Now, when you walk out the doors of this church, you’re going into the land that you are to possess, and you take God’s word with you as a way of beautifying and making the wilderness that exists in some portions of where you walk today back into the garden or into a better garden of Eden, bringing it into relationship with Jesus, okay? So you’re going to go possess some land this week, okay?

And he tells you, as he told them, “These are important statutes and judgments for you to do as you go about doing that.”

Then he says, “Therefore, be careful to observe them, for this is your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes.” So he says, first of all, don’t just know about them and think, you know, lobby for them politically or try to write them in your city ordinances, whatever. Don’t just know; obey them. Be careful to observe them. The Bible’s the word of God. Hear it. Do it. Observe.

And what does he describe? Because he says these laws—I’m going to give you in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy. People will see those laws and say, “Wow, that is really awful. You guys are such an intolerant, lousy nation. It’s just awful the kind of civil government set up on the law of God.” That’s not what he says. What he says is that these statutes and commandments are your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations—wisdom and understanding.

I’m not sure if that’s just simple parallelism or repeating. Let me read you a couple of verses. Job chapter 28:28 says, “And to man He said, ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.’” So that may be a way to understand these two terms: fear of the Lord is wisdom, departing from evil is understanding.

Another one is verse 36 in Job: “Who has put wisdom in the mind or who has given understanding to the heart?” So mind and heart, yes, the complete man. But maybe there’s some distinctions to be made. Psalm 111:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding have all those who do his commandments. His praise endures forever.”

So maybe it’s wisdom and understanding in terms of heart and soul or mind, maybe it’s the idea of actually knowing them and doing them, or maybe it’s simply just emphasis. But the point is that the laws—the civil laws that God gave Israel—God told them: this is God’s word. Other nations would see it and say, “Boy, those are wise and understanding people. They’ve got a wise and understanding set of civil governance.” It will attract the nations.

There’s a relationship, you could say, between political action and evangelism. And you know, we look at that today and think, “Well, how could this possibly be? That’s certainly not what we see in the nations around us now.” It is what we saw before, in, I don’t know, the first century or more of this country. America was the shining city on a hill. And it’s only when we began to fall off the edge and move away from Jesus that people started despising us, okay?

So don’t think that this is just some sort of ahistorical comment that has no relevance to our particular state, our state of the nation. It has great relevance to it, and it was proved out—not that it has to be—declared true, but it was proved out in our own particular history.

He says nations will see them as wisdom and understanding. So the law of God is not intolerance; to affirm what it has to say in our particular context is indeed wisdom and understanding. And it’s wisdom and understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”

These are national laws being talked about, a great nation to have wise and understanding people. “For what great nation is there that has God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us for whatever reason we may call upon them?”

So don’t miss this. He says there are two things that are your attraction to the nations: your wise and understanding statutes and the nearness of God to you. If you take the nearness of God away, you sort of have what happened to this country? Wisdom and understanding that quickly became foolishness. Even if you could maintain wise laws, it’s lost its efficacy because people aren’t just interested in a set of laws. God has made people so that they come to desire the knowledge of God himself. So we have to be close to God and advocate for righteous judgments and a righteous ordering of the civil state. That is the attraction to the nations. That produces what we would call—what I’ve called in the past—political evangelism.

So are civil statutes important? Oh yeah, they’re exceedingly important. They’re important for our own personal well-being. They’re good for that. They’re important for our cultural well-being in a neighborhood or state or nation. They’re good for that. Holy, just, and good. And they’re good because they’re a light to the world—a light to the world that will be used by God’s spirit to draw people to himself.

Going on. “Only take heed to yourself,” verse 9. Oh, I should—before I skip over something very important. Verse 8: “And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all this law which I set before you today?”

So it says it a couple of different times here, and here it adds a word. Did you hear the word he added? Right to the—well, he gave you the word. It says they have wise statutes, understanding, but he says here they are righteous judgments, as in all this law. So now righteousness is justice, right? So they’re wise, they give us understanding, because they’re a model of social justice, okay? They’re a perfect model of social justice at a particular time and place.

Now, it was a time and place, and we know a lot of things have changed since then. The coming of Jesus being the preeminent movement of history. So we can’t just cut and paste from those laws into our statute books today. There has to be work done, okay? And understanding what the Westminster Standards call the equity—the general equity of the law of Moses—where’s the justice, the value for us? We’re not talking about cutting and pasting into our law books. We’re talking about taking the truths contained in them and bringing them over and making those the basis for our civil governance.

But the point is, at that time they were a perfect model of justice. In Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, it says that every sin got its just recompense through the law of God. It said that every, you know, statute and judgment and penalty assigned was a perfect standard in that particular time and place. And this is saying the same thing. These statutes are our wisdom and understanding. They’ll draw the nations. And that’s because they are righteous. They are just.

We’ve got so many Christian people today, you know, clamoring away for social justice. Praise God. That’s a movement of the spirit of God. So many young people that I see at conferences and stuff who want social justice. It’s wonderful. But you know, if it’s a social justice defined by the world, as opposed to God’s word, then you know, one of those ropes—the law of God being our standard of justice—is cut away. We’re not hanging on it anymore and teaching people about it. So the ship of iniquity just flies right through.

So it’s wonderful to have desire for social justice, but the key is letting justice and how to attain it be defined by the word of God. And this tells us that indeed that’s exactly what God’s law does.

So then he says, “Only take heed to yourself. Diligently keep yourself lest you forget the things your eyes have seen and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life.”

Now, that’s what’s happened to America. I mean, the prosperity of the nation, et cetera—people forgot it. Grew fat, as the prediction was of that tribe, with the prosperity. You think it’s your own hand; you develop sinful patterns. You forget; you drift away from God. And he warns us about that individually. He warns us as a church not to let that happen, and he warns a nation not to let that happen.

And then the last thing he says is, “Teach them to your children and your grandchildren.” Your children and your children’s children. We’re to teach what? These righteous, wise, understanding statutes and judgments—ways to frame a civil society. The law of God is our standard for our governmental actions, which will then not affirm wickedness but will indeed promote righteousness in the context of our nation.

Now, if you look again—we have this on the handouts—based on this text and many other like texts, Reformation Covenant Church, we’ve got our membership covenant, a statement from it as well as statements from our RCC’s confessional statement.

Oh, yeah. Here it is, okay. And it’s on your handouts. You can read along.

Number 9, from RCC’s Confessional Statement: “We believe that we are to proclaim the whole counsel of God’s Word at every opportunity, whereupon God, in His providence, may impart faith by the Word to the hearer, and that he may thereby be converted.”

So the word is central. We’re seeking conversion in people’s lives.

Number 10: “We believe that the civil precepts of the Old Testament, while given in the context of a particular time in redemptive history and cultural development, and thus are not a blueprint, are a model for perfect social justice that should inform all cultures, even in the punishment of criminals.”

But what we’re saying is: no, we’re not going to cut and paste. Those things should inform the civil governance of every nation in the world, okay? That’s what we’re supposed to pray for, and that’s what we believe is to be done.

The question of theocracy comes in. Are we working for a theocracy? Do you want to establish a theocracy in America? Well, first, people get that word confused with ecclesiocracy. Ecclesiocracy means ruled by the church. No, we don’t want that. Are we working for a theocracy? No, I’m not working for a theocracy. I’m saying it’s a fact. I’m saying that theocracy—which means God’s rule—is always true. I’m working for a day when more and more of us recognize that God is in control and we use his patterns, his teachings, his wisdom, understanding, and justice so that human flourishing can happen in this theocracy.

You see, theocracy is just the rule of God, and his law rules over all people, whether people want to admit it or not. It’s not something that you can do away with. Jesus Christ is the King of Kings. He has crown rights over everything, and he exercises them. He does them, okay? So we think the Bible is to be our standard for framing civil government.

Number 11: “We believe that obedience to God’s Law is commanded for all men.” That’s what Paul said. That’s what the Bible says. There’s any confusion you have about this and need further interaction, talk to one of the elders. God’s law is commanded for all men. Otherwise, what is he condemned by?

Number 12: “We believe that all civil magistrates are under obligation to keep God’s Law and are judged by God on how they perform this duty.”

Now, that lays out simply what we think the Bible has to say about civil governance and by application, about homosexual marriage. There it says it in brief.

And then finally, from RCC’s Membership Covenant, members of RCC—this is your obligation: “I will oppose the disgraceful and abhorrent sins of adultery, abortion, and homosexuality.”

Now, maybe it’s phrased in a way that is unnecessarily provocative, but that’s the truth of the matter. And when people in this church—we call them to be disciples of Jesus in every area. And just as in Nehemiah’s time, we look at the sins that are battering rams against a godly culture, and we say, “Boy, those things have to be avoided. We need to take a stand on those issues: abortion, fornication, homosexuality.”

Now, talking about the Supreme Court decision, Doug Wilson in his sermon quotes from Justice Scalia, who referred to the ruling as a judicial putsch. Now, a putsch is an attempted revolt or rebellion. Most people think of Hitler’s beer hall putsch in, I don’t know, ’33 or something. It was unsuccessful, but the idea is it’s a revolution. That’s what Scalia is saying. There are other justices’ dissents that Doug Wilson also quoted from. And I want to tell you that not only do we oppose what the Supreme Court did because we think civil laws should be framed according to God’s justice, wisdom, and understanding—we also oppose what the Supreme Court did because it is a revolution, an attempt to supplant the government of this country by five people on a court. And that’s what these dissenting opinions—that’s what they say across the board.

If you think it’s no big deal because it’s just an exercise of pluralistic democracy, you are absolutely wrong. Now, maybe at some point in time it would be an exercise of pluralistic democracy, but the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision threw out the votes of 36 states that had said no to gay marriage through secular democracy. And the Supreme Court said, “To heck with secular democracy. We want an autocracy, an oligarchy ruled over by us five people, who can now tell all the states, regardless of the democratic votes of the people, what to do in this matter.”

Now, that’s what happened. I’m sorry. I know we would rather not think about that much—that we’re living in a land where we’ve had a revolution—but that’s just what has happened, okay? And so this judicial putsch, that’s what it is. You should be offended not just because of the specific thing they ruled on, but you should be offended because they did this thing: overturned the state’s authority in marriage and overturned the votes of all kinds of people.

Well, you know, people really kind of approve of gay marriage. I’ve seen the polls. People say, I’ve seen the polls. Give me a plebiscite. Give me a poll vote. I’ve seen the votes in 36 states, and I don’t know what the polls are, and you don’t know who the polls are, and you don’t know who’s asking the questions. Nobody knows how many people in America really affirm gay marriage. We’ll probably find out next year in the elections. And my guess is there’s not anywhere near the amount of support that people think it supposedly has.

So don’t just give yourself an easy out on not being troubled by the decision of the Supreme Court because it’s just, you know, what everybody wanted anyway. It is not what everybody wanted anyway. And even in a secular government, Paul’s argument still holds. The laws of nature say this is a bad thing, right?

So what we have to face is that we have had a radical change in our country’s system of governance through this legal putsch—this attempt at revolution.

Doug Wilson also comments on the theories of rights that are now espoused by this Supreme Court decision that becomes authoritative across our country. And it’s kind of a complicated argument, but in essence, you know, they have changed our system of how our rights are attained. Wilson writes this:

“Our rights now come not from Almighty God—introduction to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—but from five Ivy Leaguers drunk on therapeutic feel-good gibberish. Our origami rights are to be folded for us by you five, fashioned delicately out of whatever kind of rice paper you select. In the name of God, no. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, no. In the power and authority of the Holy Spirit, who is the spirit of liberty? No.”

And now what he’s addressing is becoming, you know, true every day. Lawsuits are being filed. The fundamental right we have to religious expression is now being put off into a corner somewhere, as long as you don’t really mean it or do anything about it. And their fundamental right to homosexual marriage must be bowed to. So the whole definition of what rights are and where they’ve come from—instead of coming, as I talked about earlier, from the middle grace—now the court has cut that tether, and the rights are now strictly at the whim of five men and women in robes.

I mean, it’s that kind of a difficulty. So I could go on about this, but what do we do about it? What do we do about it? What’s next? What do we do?

And on your handout, I’ve got several things we can rattle off pretty quickly here.

First of all: rescuing the stumblers, floaters. I’ve talked about that already. We have an obligation to help people. No matter what the law says, no matter how much they’re being affirmed by the rest of culture, our obligation, if we know people and love them, is to be involved in their lives and to try to help them not to float off, off around the corner, off the river into a waterfall that’ll kill them. So we have an obligation to do that.

We have to do that by honoring God first and foremost. And how do we honor God in this matter? Rescuing the floaters, yes, but also defending our church and children from all of this.

These are the things that we mail to every church in Oregon. We—being the Oregon Family Council, of which I’m a board member. And this is an ADF—Alliance Defense Fund. I don’t know if they’ve changed their name, but this is model policies for Christian businessmen, Christian ministries, schools, and churches to put into your documents to protect you from a lawsuit. We need to do this. The elders will be looking over the model policy seen in this thing and thinking about whether we put that in the constitution, our hiring documents, whatever.

We have to think defensively because, you know, those ropes have been cut: the law of God, the middle grace, et cetera. And that ship is steaming out to do all kinds of damage to wherever it’s going. So we have to defend ourselves. We have to defend our children.

I’ve got HERK here. It’s a board, a state commission that has decided since the first of this year to allow 15-year-old kids and older to determine if they want sex changes. And they get to consult with a board, but they use state financing to give kids as young as 15 sex-change operations, chemicals, puberty suppression drugs, et cetera, without the parents even being told. Without the parents even knowing, okay? Now, that’s horrific. Now, it’s easy to stop it. It’s a commission. It’s appointed by the governor and approved by our Senate.

But if we don’t have a governor and senate different from what we have now, that HERK board’s going to keep doing its work. The point is, it’s attacking your children. Your child could be, you know, one of these people that gets deceived into going off in this way. There are all kinds of other implications for education. But you know, one of the things we have to do in response is to honor God by defending our church, defending our children.

Three: pressing the antithesis. Pressing the antithesis. We’re people of the antithesis. There’s an antithetical nature between good and evil that God establishes after the fall.

You know, that we passed out last week and again it’s this week—this Wednesday, prayer meeting of the church in Oregon City. We’re going to hand out the statement on opposing gay marriage that we have, and we’re going to ask other pastors to sign. That’s good.

Peter Leithart, I mentioned this article last week. It’s the same one in which he wrote this: “Churches need to be prepared to perceive, be poised rather, to receive the wounded. We must be more eager to welcome sexual sinners than we are to identify their sin.” Excellent comment in terms of helping people, people who are in these sin patterns. But he also in that same article wrote this:

“Most important is what happens in the churches. Even before this Supreme Court decision, some churches were making peace with same-sex marriage. Now that same-sex marriage is law, the tribe of good Christians will increase—and the division, that’s in quotes—’good Christians’ and the division in the churches over sexual morality will sharpen. Many leaders, churches, and denominations have condemned the court’s decision, and more will, but others support it, and we have not transdenominational mechanism to adjudicate between them.

“There is an opportunity here to forge or strengthen local coalitions of churches. In some cities, pastors associations have issued statements affirming biblical marriage. That’s good and needs to happen across the country. But those statements will be most effective if they have a prophetic edge. Saying what’s right is necessary, but it’s not enough. Pastors need to be willing to say that other churches are wrong and dangerously so.”

I believe he’s right. And I believe one of the biggest battles right now happens within the church. Judgment begins at the house of God. And you’re going to see lots of conversations. Don’t worry about it. Don’t think it’s bad. God’s going to be sifting his churches. And we’ve already been engaged a little bit in that here locally. But it’s a necessary component. We have to have churches warned off from being dangerously wrong on this issue and the ill effects that they bring to their parishioners.

So pressing the antithesis within the church.

D: voting Republican. Honor God by voting Republican. Why might I ever say that? Well, I’d say that in the context of a country where the Democratic Party is absolutely tied, foot and hand, to the funding of Planned Parenthood and the abominations that Planned Parenthood does. And I would say it in the context of a country in which the Democratic Party is tied, foot and hand, with homosexual marriage.

I mean, these people are absolutely dangerous. It’s not your old Democratic Party anymore.

How do we replace the HERK board? Well, it may not work to elect a majority of Republicans in our Senate, but it might. You know what? The only national leadership group that funds attempts to take over particular branches of government in states has targeted the Oregon Senate for Republican victory. So some people out there believe that the Oregon Senate could actually be overturned of Democratic control and could become Republican. That would give us a fighting chance. They wouldn’t have to confirm anybody sent up by the governor to the HERK board, for instance.

You know, people say, “Well, the Republican Party is no good. Look at what just happened. It was a Republican Supreme Court justice appointee that gave us the homosexual marriage issue, right? I mean, Kennedy was appointed by President Reagan.” Well, but remember that—if we look at the odds—four out of five Republican-appointed nominees said no to same-sex marriage. Eighty percent Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices said no to same-sex marriage, and 100% of Democratic appointees said yes to it, okay? Okay, there’s a difference between the parties, my friends.

You know, again, on these videos that Doug listed on the RCC page, he says, you know, political action isn’t everything. We don’t look to political action to save us or anything. Of course, it’s not everything. But he said, you know, it’s not nothing. It’s not nothing. It has—and particularly when you have a state. Martin Luther said, if you don’t attack at the place where the word of God is being attacked most, if you don’t respond to that, you’re not really in the game of what it is to be a disciple of Jesus.

Well, this attack on our families and churches is coming from civil government. And so we have to defend by means of going on the offensive and trying to change the composition of the Supreme Court, of our state Senate, et cetera. So it’s real important not to get discouraged about politics. Don’t do that. That’s exactly what the satanic opposition wants you to do: to drop out. Because they’re never majority. You know, they’re always minority in terms of the country, but they don’t need to be majority if we just don’t show up and we don’t encourage people to show up.

So vote Republican.

And finally: speak up. I wish I had time to go over this. Maybe we’ll do this in a whole sermon another time. Next week we’re going back to the “one anothers.” I’m committed to that. But you know, speaking up. I mentioned target-rich environment and sword drills. You know, they used to have those in Sunday schools: get to know your Bible. We’re trying to teach Bible instruction. Parents, get your kids to Sunday school. The word of God is that rope that hangs down that impedes the progress of a ship of state that’s going in the wrong direction. And when that rope is pulled up, all hell breaks loose.

Teach your children the scriptures. I know it’s hard to do in your own home setting, but we can help. Sunday school can help. Send your kids to Sunday school. They’ll learn how to use the weapon of God—the sword that comes out of Jesus’s mouth—as we go about this target-rich environment, trying to engage with significance in the culture wars, right?

But these—the last point is that our weapons are not humanistic weapons. They’re the word of God, and they’re the word of God used in a way ultimately not to chop somebody down or to cut them, but ultimately to be used as a leaf. The leaves of the trees, we’re told in the book of Revelation, are for the healing of the nations. The nations need healing. People that are engaged in transgressive sexuality need healing.

So it’s important that every one of us get prepared to speak up, but not to speak up in an offensive, jerky way. Now, people are going to be offended anyway, but I’ve attached a set of verses for you to look at on your outlines—that’s the last attachment. And what it does is it talks about the significance of closing the mouths of gainsayers and other authorities who want to say the Bible’s not relevant or we’re wrong, whatever. We got to shut their mouths, right? So you have to speak the truth, but then you also have to speak it in love.

And that set of verses—the last handout for you—read them over this week. Meditate on those sins of speech that are characterized there. Try to be people that, as we go about this issue of speaking up, entering into the fray, armed with the word of God, we use the word of God in a way that it might minister grace to the hearer.

Okay? Grace to the hearer. So that’s the concluding exhortation: know your scriptures and be able to communicate in the way that the scriptures themselves tell us to communicate, which is in a way that it might impart grace, in the providence of God, to the hearers of our words.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you again for the issues that you raise up in the context of our lives. And we thank you for this opportunity to come to repentance ourselves when necessary, to prepare ourselves for cultural engagement, to go out there more aggressively than we have in the past, speaking the truths of your word, which brings wisdom, understanding, justice, love, and encouragement to people.

Bless us, Father, in our interactions to the end that we might glorify the Lord Jesus Christ and make manifest his kingdom. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.