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Many of you are aware of the Canadian Bill C-4 amended to criminalize with a possible jail time up to five years so-called “conversion therapy,” which means helping anyone change back to their birth gender. This law went into effect January 8 in Canada. Then we got word a couple weeks ago that the city council in West Lafayette is trying to pass similar legislation criminalizing “conversion therapy.” Actually, twenty states already have anti-conversion therapy laws. These laws can very easily put in jeopardy evangelism and biblical counseling to help people desiring to go back to their birth gender. In view of this attack on biblical morality, John MacArthur sent out an appeal for biblical churches to make a statement today, January 16, on what the Bible teaches about sexuality and gender issues. Our church constitution has a clear statement on what the Bible teaches about these matters.
Since we teach verse by verse here at Evansville Bible Church and our next passage, James 1:17-18, talks about God’s goodness, I decided to tie the issue of biblical morality in with this wonderful passage. Every moral and sexual standard we find in the Bible comes from God’s goodness. Thus we have the sermon title, “God’s Good Gifts and Biblical Morality.” Let’s read this rich short portion of God’s Word and then we’ll look at four good things about our God.
James 1:17-18, Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. 18 In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth, so that we would be a kind of first fruits among His creatures.
GOD IS GOOD IN HIS CHARACTER
God is infinite, eternal, unchanging, omnipresent, omniscient, sovereign, just, righteous, three persons in One Divine Essence, and God is also good. All of His attributes are good, not only His grace and mercy, but also His holiness, justice, and wrath. If God did not judge sin, He would not be good. He would be an evil God.
Moses got to witness the goodness of God firsthand:
Exodus 33:18-19, Then Moses said, “I pray You, show me Your glory!” 19 And He said, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.”
All My goodness! The Psalms and Prophets repeat this wonderful theme:
Psalms 27:13, I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD In the land of the living.
Psalms 31:19, How great is Your goodness, Which You have stored up for those who fear You, Which You have wrought for those who take refuge in You, Before the sons of men!
Psalms 145:7, They shall eagerly utter the memory of Your abundant goodness And will shout joyfully of Your righteousness.
Jeremiah 31:14, “I will fill the soul of the priests with abundance, And My people will be satisfied with My goodness,” declares the LORD.
God’s goodness is great, abundant, and satisfies His people.
GOD IS GOOD IN HIS DEEDS
Every single bit of good in your life is from God. “Every good thing and every perfect gift is from above, flowing down from the Father of Lights.” All God does is good and all of His goodness is from God as the Father who is the source of pure light. There isn’t a bit of evil in God’s goodness. That’s why He never tempts us to sin. It is absolutely pure goodness, and it just keeps flowing down, like a fountain, from God’s presence. “Coming down” is in the present tense, a continual stream. He is every moment pouring out, flowing down, streaming down, sending down His goodness into this world – abundant, great, and satisfying goodness. We can’t nearly exhaust all the evidences of God’s goodness in our lives, but I want to take us back to the beginning, back to Genesis 1-2.
Creation All of creation is a display of God’s goodness. In six days God created the heavens and the earth and when He was finished each day’s work the Bible says, “God saw that it was good!” Evolution is a direct attack on God and His goodness. Every single molecule of God’s creation shouts God’s goodness. The sun, moon, stars, oceans, gravity, photosynthesis, oxygen, all the birds, fish, and animals, even stink bugs and mosquitoes, witness to God’s goodness.
When God was finished with all creation’s beauty and precision, He stood back, looked at His universe, especially the earth teeming with life, and said, “Very good.”
Genesis 1:31, God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Male and Female But what about man? Man and woman were included in that very good. After God had created everything else, He came to the pinnacle of His creation and made a man and a woman in His own image:
Genesis 1:27, God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
God designed and created your ancient ancestors, and the human race continues down to this very day. In His goodness He designed your body with all its amazing gifts of sight, smell, hearing, thinking, feeling, tasting, your amazing heart, lungs, circulatory system, your legs and feet, your hands and your fingers with those joints so you could type fifty words per minute! What an amazing gift from God flowing down when you were conceived in God’s image! I love to think of new-born babies as little “image-bearers,” which is exactly what they are. What a horrendous crime and shame to murder babies in the womb while God is preparing them for the outside world.
And notice, God made them male and female, not two males or two females, but male and female with all the beauty of gender differences: the male to be a strong provider and protector, the female able to bear children, nurturing, tender, softer. God didn’t leave our gender up to us. That’s not our choice. Birth gender is not a myth, as the world is telling us. God determined Adam and Eve’s gender and every other male or female conceived in the womb. At the moment of conception your gender was determined and no amount of science or surgery or political correctness can change it. God knit you together as either a male or female.
Psalms 139:13-15, For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. 14 I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well. 15 My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.
Marriage And then there’s the wonderful gift of marriage, one of the best good things coming down from the hand and plan of God. While all creation was very good, there was something that was not good.
Genesis 2:18, Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
Now watch our good God design an amazing relationship that Christ affirmed in Matthew 19, the history-long standard and definition of marriage. It is not a same-sex marriage. No, God designed and made Eve as a suitable helper, Hebrew “kenegdo,” Adam’s opposite and fitting counterpart. The man called her Woman, or in Hebrew “Ishah,” because she was taken from man, “Ish.”
Genesis 2:22-24, The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. 23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman (Ishah), Because she was taken out of Man (Ish).” 24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
From this point on in human history, God’s good standard for marriage has been a man and a woman. In Proverbs 18:22 God says, “He who finds a wife finds a good thing.” That means a blessing from God. One of my favorite marriage verses is Ecclesiastes 9:9, “Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun.”
Solomon is talking about a heterosexual marriage. That’s the only kind of marriage there is. Most of mankind has complied with this standard for marriage and intimate relationships. Only when men rebel against their Creator do they deny their birth gender and the very essence of marriage. Over and over God has warned us about twisting the roles of male and female. You know what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. God forbad same sex relations in the Law of Moses:
Leviticus 18:22, ‘You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.
God warns us against homosexual, same sex relationships in several places in the New Testament, and they are always a matter of God’s judgment. David Wells in Losing Our Virtue says Paul could hear the rumble of divine judgment in the culture of his day and if we listen carefully we will also hear it through ours today. God describes female or male homosexuality as “degrading” and “indecent.”
Romans 1:26-27, For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
The city of Corinth was very immoral. But God saved many Corinthians. Here’s how Paul described some of these believers in Corinth.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10 nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
Did you see, “such were some of you?” Sin has twisted our souls into perverting what God has clearly said. There has probably not been a social revolution like the sexual revolution beginning back in the 60s. Today we are witnessing a brazen and direct assault on God’s design for gender and family. The trans-gender movement is getting more and more powerful, sadly dragging young people into it.
Enormously powerful entities, including public education, entertainment, social media, and government are devoted to normalizing what God says is shameful. This gender confusion is not by accident. Cultural Marxist movements like Black Lives Matter are intent on creating gender confusion and chaos, devoted to destroying the nuclear family, and pushing the LGBTQ+ agenda. Harry Reeder, pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, wrote, “We are in the throes of a sexual revolution reflecting a tsunami-like wave of the neo-pagan world and life view of secular humanism with its insatiable sacramental pursuit of natural and unnatural sexual gratification.” We are witnessing the LGBTQ+ ideology pushing unceasingly into schools and even the doors of churches.
One school district in Colorado pays thousands to teach educators how to embed LGBTQ worldviews into curriculum. They call it “Queering the curriculum.” A Washington state law in effect January 1, 2022, allows teen gender reassignment without parents’ consent. Some evangelical leaders are promoting the idea that same-sex attraction is acceptable as long as you don’t act on those desires. As Pastor Reeder wrote, same-sex attraction is not a syndrome to be managed but “a sinful desire to be mortified.”
Rosaria Butterfield, a former lesbian who came to Christ and left the lesbian life, is another voice who is speaking biblically about the gender confusion. Abigail Shrier, not a Christian, wrote the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. She gave an excellent address at Hillsdale College recently, warning of the dangers of the trans-gender movement with its puberty blocking, giving girls testosterone, and constant affirming of young people to legitimately pursue whatever gender they choose. You can access her address here: https://youtu.be/DWbxIFC0Q2o (Science, the Transgender Phenomenon, and the Young).
[Evansville Bible Church’s Statement of Faith includes the following points regarding marriage and gender:
- The term “marriage” has only one meaning. It is a union sanctioned by God which joins one man and one woman in a single, exclusive relationship as delineated in Scripture.
- God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other.
- Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexuality conduct bestiality, incest, polygamy or any attempt to change one’s gender, or to reject one’s God-assigned, biological gender is sinful and offensive to God.
- God offers redemption and restoration to one’s created identity as male or female to all who confess and forsake their sin and seek forgiveness and mercy through Jesus Christ.
But God gives all of us sinners hope in the 1 Corinthian 6 passage. “Such were some of you.” God saved fornicators and slanderers and drunkards and homosexuals and others out of the Corinthian pagan culture, giving them new hearts and Christ’s perfect righteousness, but not without repenting of their sinful ways of living. The same is true today. And this is where the world is trying to criminalize efforts to help homosexuals or lesbians repent and change. The good news is, God forgives sinners of all kinds and by God’s grace sinners of all kinds can change and live lives pleasing to God. John MacArthur wrote in Right Thinking in a World Gone Wrong, “For a world clouded in confusion, God’s Word offers sanity, clarity, and hope.”
Providence and His Son There are many other good and perfect gifts that flow down from the Father of light; gifts that are pure and holy. His providence is good – God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God (Romans 8:28). His best gift, though, is His Son. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him might not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)
GOD’S GOODNESS NEVER CHANGES
James 1:1, With whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.
A huge part of God’s goodness for us is that He doesn’t change. Everything else in the created order moves and shifts, but God is immutable. Arthur Pink: “God has neither evolved, grown, or improved.” “For I, the Lord, do not change.” (Malachi 3:6) There is not the faintest hint of change – “no variation or shifting shadow.” That means you can trust Him and we owe Him all our worship and praise. All His other attributes are immutable. He’ll never change from pure good and everything He does in your life is good and for your good. Psalm 84:11, “No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” When He saves you, He saved you in His immutable goodness and therefore His salvation will never change!
GOD’S GOODNESS GAVE YOU NEW SPIRITUAL LIFE
James 1:18, In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth, so that we would be a kind of first fruits among His creatures.
In His goodness He chose to birth you into His family. This is regeneration. Just like you didn’t decide to be conceived in your mother’s womb, God in His goodness chose and decreed for you to be His child in eternity past, and then at some point in your life He brought you forth to be His child in His wonderful family. And we clearly declare, when God gives you His new life through the gospel, He gives you to power to change. If you had same sex attraction, God will work in you to change those desires into godly desires. He’s done if for many people.
First fruits in this passage may be speaking of those first century believing Jews, but like someone said, “While they were the first fruits of the gospel harvest, I hope we’re the last fruits. I’m ready to rocket out of here to meet Christ in the air and be with Him forever and ever!” That will be a most wonderful good gift!
GOD’S GOODNESS IS IN HIS WORD
“He brought us forth by the Word of Truth.” The most precious and powerful item we have in this world right now is the Word of God, and it is this Word that God uses to give us that new birth. Faith is a gift from God. He chose to bring you into His family. But how does He do it? Through the Word of Truth! Don’t you love that? God arranged for you to hear the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and His saving work on the cross and through that means brought you forth into His family as a child of God in His forever family!
Every good thing comes flowing down from above, from the very throne of God. You’ve got nothing good in your life that didn’t come from Him, including your own gender and all of His sustaining blessings. We thank God. Do you have a wife? She is a good gift from God. Better treat her well! God provides for us every good thing we need to live for His glory! Every one of His laws is from His goodness and for our good. And when we have sinned and rebelled against His law, He is ready to forgive. Have you been born of God through your personal faith in His Son?