These questions were asked during last Sunday’s service (10/18). Please join us this Sunday (10/25) as we look at part 2 of this topic, continuing our series in 2 Peter called Life in the Last Days.
1. How do we treat gay-affirming false teachers vs. non-Christians differently?
James 3:1 says that teachers will be judged with stricter judgment. Those who teach falsely in the name of Christ are committing a worse evil than those who merely oppose Christ. This is especially true when the false teaching is effective at leading Christians away from God to the point of denying their Master. The ‘blood’ of the apostate is on the false teachers’ heads.
Therefore, we should oppose false teachers. Not violently, but nonetheless, oppose them and call out their erroneous teaching. Non-Christians, on the other hand, should be treated with welcome and hospitality rather than opposition. We should be inviting them to the life that is found only in God. To be sure, this, by its nature, will oppose their pride, but it is done with gentleness, respect, and kindness.
2. I hear this teaching and agree/accept God’s sexual ethic. What my heart grieves is how truly cruel so called Christians are towards those who are sexually lost. I feel stuck. While I don’t side with gay-affirming teachings, I also can’t stomach to side with the cruelty people can use in the name of “the Bible says” that I see in the news or online or in mean confrontations. Do you have any wisdom? Is there a third option?
One of our values as a church is ‘Grace-Centered Truth’. We deliberately worded it this way because we believe both are vital. Pastor Barney said to me this week: "Truth without grace crushes. Grace without truth rots." Truth is gracious in light of the gospel of Jesus, but it must be communicated with love as the motive and the means or else its beauty will be obscured if not missed altogether. Jesus responded to sin with truth and grace.
There are many Christians who in the name of ‘truth’ ignore the great commandment for us to love—as you say, they speak with cruelty. At the same time, we must acknowledge that what the world defines as love is not the same as God defines it. The world defines love as something similar to ‘nice,’ if not ‘affirming’. But God’s word says the greatest manifestation of love—Christ on the cross—is also our greatest incrimination (1 John 4:9-10; Romans 5:8). This means that love is defined as sacrificially giving oneself for the greatest good of another, but it also means that God’s greatest loving act is offensive to our sinfulness.
The third option is to see ourselves inside the problem of sin rather than above it. If we are inviting people to the same grace we ourselves need, then we will remain in the balance of ‘grace-centered truth’. Still, we must prepare ourselves for the reality that many people will still reject this truth as ‘cruel’ because it offends their autonomy and pride, which in the case of homosexual behavior, would otherwise be celebrated by the world.
3. Why was Lot heralded as a pillar of righteousness? If he was so upset by the behavior of his neighbors why not move away, why put his daughters and wife at risk? Where is it evidenced that he was bothered by what was going on around him? I've read that passage in Genesis a few times and while Lot seems to be worried for the angels that visit him, I've always wondered why he was counted righteous when he always kind of read like a coward to me. If Lot was still considered righteous having seemingly taken no action to go counter culture to the people around him, is that the example for behaving in and not of the world we are to follow?
This is a great question. It’s something I chose not to get into during the sermon for the sake of time, but it’s definitely a difficulty with this passage. I do not have a perfect understanding of it, even after reading multiple commentaries. But my best attempt at synthesizing what I know from the Bible’s big picture is as follows.
It’s important to note that there are two types of righteousness in scripture—positional and personal. The Old Testament tends to emphasize personal whereas the New Testament has a mix of both.
Lot was ‘righteous’ in the same way that Abraham was righteous—by faith.
Lot was a poor example of what it means to have faith in God. Many of the examples we have of people of faith are less than ideal (for example, even Abraham did some really horrible things, including towards his own family members). You are right to call Lot a coward and he failed miserably when offering his daughters to the mob.
Still, the hospitality and protection Lot showed to the angels would have been considered to be a very righteous act. And more than that, it appears as though he and his household were the only ones in the whole city who never took part in the sensual contact of the wicked—a testament to their faithfulness to the Lord.
We do not have any biblical record of Lot having been tormented by what he saw around him. Perhaps this was something the Holy Spirit revealed to Peter as he wrote this.
Regardless, I do think it’s significant that in Genesis 18, Abraham prayed that God would save Sodom for the sake of ‘righteous people’ living there, and in response, God evacuated Lot and his family before raining fire. To me, that says that God determined Lot fit the description of ‘righteous’.
4. I am comfortable in LGBT spaces, or around non believing people who like to party and have no qualms about their sobriety, or work and school friends who rejected religion or walked away from the church. I've never called a person out on their behavior outside the church bc it just doesn't seem right to hold someone to a standard they don't even care about. Inside is a different story, which I suppose is what this message was about (false teachers within the church), but will there be a lesson about how to engage with those outside the church who live according to the current culture of the world?
You are right that this was a sermon about how to engage inside the community of Christ. There is a different standard and different approach inside versus outside. While inside is the emphasis of 2 Peter, the emphasis you ask about (how to engage with the world outside) was the emphasis of 1 Peter (especially chapters 2-4). I recommend going back and checking that series out again.
5. Say someone was being unbiblical sexually (they're lgbt, porn addicted, an adulterer, or love fornication) but was regularly engaging with the word, praying, and seeking after the Lord yet hadn't gotten around to or never got called out to repent of that sin in their lives and they die without having a chance to repent of that, do you believe that God's grace covers them still or that they missed the mark and being out of a state of grace perish forever?***
This is another great question. The Bible never answers this question directly. What that tells me is that God wants us to trust him to decide who gets eternal life, but also he wants us to choose him above all else rather than trying to ‘keep tabs’ on whether we’ve done ‘enough’ to be deemed worthy to enter eternal life with him.
That being said, there are some repeated, clear things said in scripture that we can wrestle with.
The sexually immoral will not enter the kingdom of God (Rev 22:15, 1 Cor 6:9, Gal 5:19-21). That is a hard teaching. It does say ‘those who practice such things’, which I take to mean that those who are unrepentant of these sins will not inherit the kingdom.
Jesus will judge people’s faith by their works (Job 34:11; Jeremiah 17:10; Matthew 16:27; Rom. 2:5-11; Rev. 20:12). In other words, faith in Jesus saves you, but that faith is not abstract—it is evaluated by works.
If someone knows what they should do and deliberately chooses not to do it, they run the risk of showing on the last day that they did not have saving faith to begin with. The language used in Romans 1 is that we are 'without excuse' because we have access to God and His word.
On the last day true believers will be glorified with Him (Rom 8:30; 2 Tim 4:8; Rev. 20:4). Those who place their faith in Jesus Christ can have confidence that God knows who belongs to him (Numbers 16:5; Nahum 1:7; John 10:14; 2 Thess. 2:13) and he will complete the work he has begun in them (Phil 1:6).
6. Regarding the sermon today, while I value the need to be clear that homosexuality is sin, at moments the message felt heavily focused on correcting Seattleites as opposed to what is God’s heart for sexuality. Heterosexual marriage is the right context and I agree that sin must be called out but married heterosexuals still often miss the mark. I am burdened by my own tendency towards sin and pride and missing the mark in this area and felt sad by how people cheered about judgment on homosexuality versus the invitation to soberly self examine our own propensity for distortion and longing for our (lgbtq) neighbors to have hope with a very very painful topic. Why was the emphasis on repent if you’re gay or watching porn and not on examining our hearts to see if we view sex as a means to an end where we are the master of our choices versus focused on submitting every area of sexuality to Jesus as master even in the context of marriage?
I didn’t hear people cheering for anyone to be judged. If you are right about that, I am sorry for our church’s actions and very concerned along with you. Christians must never be happy to see someone experience condemnation. We must share God’s heart that ‘all would be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Timothy 2:4).
It is good that you are personally convicted about your own sexual sin and not merely pointing the finger at those who it may be otherwise easy to. The focus of the sermon’s text (2 Peter 2:1-10a) was not on those in monogamous, heterosexual marriages who have heart issues (such as you mentioned, seeing their spouse as a means to an end). Those are important problems you bring up, but not the same ones as those in our text. I am not aware, for example, of false teachers in the church promoting mere heart issues as though it is approved of by God. At the same time, the sermon was also not about those living in sin outside the church. The emphasis is on false teachers who corrupt the word of God and lead people into destruction from within the church. One example of that today is the ‘gay-affirming ‘Christian’ movement.
I was intentional to point out the equality of heterosexual sins to those of homosexual sins and our collective need to surrender our sexual desires and activity to the Lordship of Jesus. I hope that was heard and received by all.
May the Lord continue to tenderize your heart for his design for marriage, sexuality, and loving our (LGBTQ) neighbors!
7. What should our response for loving and ministering to people in the church (TWS and the broader church) who have accepted false teaching? Is there a reference to guidance in this? Would be good to have that referenced in the sermon.
In its simplest form, false teaching is sin. Therefore, when you have a personal relationship with someone who believes it or who is teaching it, the best thing to do is to confront it like you would any other sin. There were some great instructions Jesus gave us for how to do that in Matthew 18. My sermon on that passage can be found here.
For those in the broader church, there may not be much that you can do. When you see a false teaching infect a lot of people, it is probably worth gaining an understanding of it as well as understanding why it is biblically false so that you have the ability to spot it and refute it, should it come into our church.
8. The reference to angels being cast down occurs in 2 Peter 2:4. I assume this refers to a certain set of fallen angels, since we know Jesus cast out demons. What fallen angels might the text be referring to?
Though Jesus cast out demons, these are merely examples of how the spirit world crosses over into the material world all the time. So there are not different ‘categories’ of fallen angels that the text refers to, but rather all angels who have fallen and are currently under chains of bondage in darkness.
Probably the easiest way to understand this is to relate it to how we understand the curse in Genesis 3:14-19. In the same way that God cursed human beings when we sinned, he cursed all the angels who sinned. Just as we are still living in this world despite the curse, so are fallen angels (demons) permitted to engage in the world until the final judgment.
9. Joel, when you repeatedly emphasize Jesus’ poverty and seem to associate material poverty with spiritual virtue, are you suggesting that being poor is somehow more Christlike than being financially stable or prosperous? Do you believe Jesus could have grown up in a respectable, hardworking, financially secure, blue-collar family without that diminishing His humility or His identification with the poor? Or does your theology require Jesus to have been materially poor in order to make Him the example you want Christians to follow?
There is no command in scripture for Christians to be poor. I am not associating being poor with being virtuous. The reason I highlight the fact that Jesus was poor is not because we must be poor (other than poor in spirit, aka humble and helpless before God, cf. Matthew 5:3). I highlight his poverty because it is a sign of his humility and a particular dimension of the gospel. People tend to look down upon those who are poor, but God dignifies the poor by becoming one of them (cf. Luke 1:51-53; 2 Corinthians 8:9).
Got more questions about this text or some other hard passage? Share it with me
In the Love of Christ,
Pastor Joel
***Another, similar question was asked: When a person is in the hospital and is anointed with oil, does that cleanse them from all sins? If a dying person tells someone that he or she will find playboy magazines and the person hearing that doesn't pray with them to repent, are they going to be judged and not forgiven by the Lord?
