Sex is such a big topic because they are 18-25, most are involved in sexual relationships and they have both a body and a world that tells them the good life is found when sex with someone is working well.  The reality, though, is that it generally doesn’t work well, at least for very long, and there has been a lot of pain from abandonment, date rape, disease, abortion, and simply feeling trapped and used.  Sex and sexuality is the topic that touches the problem they think they need to solve and there is a fascination with a preacher who says this magical energy of life – sex – is in most of their cases, a sin that will hurt them.  They listen with a tenuous fascination.  The preacher is clearly outside the bounds of politically correct postmodernism, making him a little frightening.  But he is kept safe by a group-think that agrees to label him “crazy”.  And there is nowhere else most of them can go to hear someone acknowledge both God and sex as real and relevant and talk about their connection to one another.

Fortunately, Tom is one of the most gracious, engaging and respectful people I know.  His preaching really is a gift to the places he goes, because he shares God’s word and God’s truth with humility, clarity and power.  There is also humor and respect.  Unfortunately, one only has to look at campus preachers on Youtube to know these qualities are all too rare.

Even more unfortunately, these young (and old) people are lost in the labyrinth of what may be our culture’s greatest lie – that “male and female” are little more than one of the options for experiencing sex.

I must say “one of the options” because the progression described in Romans 1 is already far advanced in western culture.  When the creative role and purposes of the God of the Bible are barred from a worldview, an inevitable process begins.  Without the divine truth regarding gender identity to orient our understanding, the power of sexual drive and experience begins to be definitive over more and more of life.  This inevitably erases every competing concept, until finally sexual experience itself, in any form, becomes the measure of value.  However, since we are beings created in God’s image and sex has been designed as a very powerful aspect of our humanity meant to accomplish a purpose very different from recreation, this wayward cultural value doesn’t work.  It brings a great deal of harm, pain and inevitably the destruction of our relationships and our humanity itself.  Sex outside of God’s designed purposes becomes central and destroys our humanity.  Instead of becoming an expression of male and female it replaces what those are and then erases them.

To be continued in Image of God Part 2

Although I’m not sure Darwin would approve, many people would like to make him the patron saint of… their religion? Richard Dawkins wrote “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Which, I can see, would be quite a contribution.

There are, of course, a host of reasons to question whether Richard Dawkins really has a good claim to his fulfillment. But challenging other peoples’ intellectual foundations for their world view is hardly worth our time – and is perhaps none of our business – unless those views have profound implications that affect us all.

That is exactly the case with evolution and the atheism that rests on it.

It is interesting that these two men were born on the same day. Because their lives touched upon the same issue – in opposite ways. Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery and led a nation of people opposed to slavery into a war to stop that slavery. In the end, 620,000 Americans lost their lives, more American casualties than in all other wars combined. They went to war with a notion that all men were created equal and that no man should own another, regardless of the color of his skin. It was a notion founded upon the belief in a Creator God.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species – the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The book was such a success it sold out the first day. Within a short time the notion of “Favoured Races” and unfavored races had captured the intellectual community of Europe and America. Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man that those with dark skin were “degraded” and said that he would rather be descended from a monkey than from such a “savage”. Within a few years social Darwinism would justify deplorable working conditions for the poor, aborigines in Australia would be killed as subhuman and the leading American paleontologist would be making statements such as, “The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolian … . The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven year old of the species Homo sapiens.” Within 80 years of Darwin’s publication the greatest war on earth would be raging in an attempt to prove which European race was superior and destined to prevail.

But if Darwin had published his ideas when he first developed them rather than waiting until 1859 he might have prevented one war. It is doubtful a nation would have gone to war to prevent the slavery of “degraded” individuals belonging to an inferior race. Perhaps even Lincoln himself would have hesitated in the face of such an audacious but subtly flattering (to the white man) explanation of racial origins and racial inferiority.

“We hold these truths to be self evident – that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…” Rights and respect for our fellow man come from a Creator. Anything that founds an intellectually fulfilled atheism will not bring about a respect for the value and equality of every human life. And it will never move one man to die for the rights of another.