One, we started a little late. Two, Peter's not playing golf this afternoon. So the way we're going to resolve this is allow him to go long. If you have to go someplace, we can understand that. I don't really want to give him carte blanche. We might be here until three in the afternoon. But yeah. Okay. But we'll probably go a little long in order to make up the time we lost. Well, I'll try to go to 12, and then if there are any questions, we'll, and those who need to leave can leave, and those who want to ask questions can ask questions. Go ahead, sir. Well, I'm so glad you folks have stuck around. This is such important material, it seems to me, for this day and age. And I know you're following it. I got into it, frankly, because of this what we call hermeneutic of oneism and twoism. It fits so perfectly to sexuality. Because the real options are a oneist form of sexuality, which makes no distinctions, or heterosexuality, which is based upon the distinction of male and female. So it led me naturally to seek to understand how this theological thinking could be applied in an authentic, genuine way to something so practical. But I want to talk to you now about something else very practical, but also very theoretical, and that's the notion of love. How do we defend our notion of homosexuality when the world is just dying to call us Nazis? This family in the front row just told me that they took a position in public and their son's name was on a board with swastikas surrounding it a few days later. This is the great challenge we face. And the challenge is to try to understand what the Bible means by love. And then we have to go with that, it seems to me. And we'll have to suffer any kind of persecution that will come along. So what is love? Jesus gave us the definition of it. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the most important commandment, says Jesus. The second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So we have two commandments here, a love of God and then a love of the neighbor. It's interesting that Jesus, who is the Son of the Trinity, immediately places the being of God and the love of God as the most important relationship. I was interested, as I was reading Brian McLaren's recent book, that he says that we must put the love of the neighbor first because only through loving neighbors do we prepare our hearts to love God. Would you go along with that? Or is there a genuine danger if we love the neighbor, we're going to love the world and ourselves before we've even asked, how do we love God? I think we have to go straight to the person of God, as Jesus says we need to do. But we are indeed confronted by this great complex issue of these two kinds of love. and how are they related. Ann Kennedy, a very intelligent blogger and wife and mother of six. I like wives and mothers of six, because I'm married to a woman who's a mother of seven. They're also mine, by the way. And she writes about the conflict in the Anglican church. and its title is It's About Love. We're living side by side with two incompatible worldviews and definitions of love. This is the issue, isn't it? How can an unbeliever even talk about the love of God? How can an unbeliever ever understand the love of God? But then, how many believers have really asked themselves what it means to love God? So this is the issue. One view, she says, that the only objective truth that can be known are the feelings and inclinations of the self. The other is the feelings and inclinations of God, who can be known not through the self, but through scripture. And she says at the end of this long citation that I've jumped, these two pictures of the world cannot be reconciled. They don't share anything in common. This fact is painful and difficult. So how do we love God? Well, this is going to be a lecture on theology. Who is God? And I'm going to give you some reasons why we must love God first. The first one is, we love God because He is first. He's transcendent, totally other. Before there were any neighbors to love, there was God. Before the cross, before the coming of Jesus, They say, before there were any neighbors to love, God revealed himself and reveals himself as a loving personal creator. This is what we see in the text that I cited to you, Romans 125. That we must worship and serve, thus love the creator. And this is a ground zero for Christians. This is where we begin to think about the question of love and the question really of the Christian faith and the gospel. It's God who is first as the creator, distinct from the creation that he made. So you either give loving worship to the creation or you give loving worship to the creator. So don't be surprised if you are persecuted by the world. They do not understand what you are doing. Now you have to tell them what you're doing. Will they understand it? Some perhaps will. But don't expect it as a normal repercussion of what you're doing. Secondly, we love God because He is holy. That is, He is different from us. That's what holiness means. I was delighted one day some time ago to discover that the term Tu-ism that I invented actually has in the Bible its equivalent in terms of holiness. is holiness, because holiness is actually not so much moral purity as things distinct one from the other in their rightful places, which then gives us the notion of moral purity. But holiness is ultimately a cosmological term of where things should be in their rightful places. That's why when God creates the world as the one who is distinct from the creation, and there is the first affirmation of twoism in the beginning, God created the world. God and the world being distinct. That's the first affirmation of holiness. God is holy because he is the creator in his own reality. He creates the world and gives it a place, and it's a holy place. And then he continues to go on and create things by making distinctions between things, between day and night, between dry land and sea. And then, of course, when He creates man between male and female. These are holy distinctions because they distinguish things and put them in their rightful places. So, God is the Other. And in that sense, outside of us, a personal being who is holy. And the only hope we have of salvation is from outside of ourselves. And that's what God is. God reveals himself in Exodus 3.14. I am who I am. Which means that God is self-existent dependent on no one. That can never be said of any creature. I am who I am. This is what people are saying today. The transgender people, the homosexual people. I am who I am. Isn't that interesting? Only God can say that. So this is a thoroughly unholy affirmation. A thoroughly unbelieving affirmation. that really begins our understanding of who we are as Christians. Thirdly, we love God by respecting the twoist character of his creation. I guess I jumped onto that one by making distinctions. So we love God because He is different from us. And then we love God because those distinctions, that distinction between God and us is found in what He does in creation. And really, to create is to make holy by distinguishing between things and placing them in the right places. We love God also because He is Trinity. See, there are all kinds of reasons to love God before you ever get to the neighbor. But Brian McLaren says we have to love the neighbor first. Guess what? In McLaren's book, he never gets to these issues ever. You know, the truth of the Trinity is perhaps one of the most ignored but most important truths of biblical revelation. In the Athanasian Creed, It states, whoever will be saved must hold the faith of the universal church that we worship one God in Trinity. You pastors out here, you better be preaching the Trinity. That's essential, says the Athanasian Creed. And the reason why we must love the Lord your God is because He is the very source of love. God did not create us because He needed us. Because the Trinity is a perfectly functioning, self-dependent reality. And God doesn't need you, but He created you anyway. But the love that He shows in creating us is merely a reflection of the love between the persons of the Trinity. That's where love originates. It's not with us. It's not with us loving the neighbor. It's with God loving in the persons of the Trinity. Does that make sense? I mean, it's a mysterious doctrine, the Trinity, and yet the Church is held together by it. So love is an essential element of the transcendent being of God. God distinct from us, not needing us, thus truly transcendent, independent of us, and yet expressing love. Fifth, we love God by preserving the Trinitarian image that He gives to us. I'll say that again. We love God because by preserving the Trinitarian image that He gives to us. Somebody made me Welsh tea. And I've never had Welsh tea. My grandfather was Welsh. I studied at Cardiff University in Wales, but this is the first time I've drunk Welsh tea. I don't believe a word of it, by the way. They don't grow tea in Wales. But anyway, forgive me for still drinking it. At this point, we love God because he gave us his Trinitarian image. It's something I want you to get a hold of. Genesis 126 says, then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. God is giving to us his image that we are called then to reflect among ourselves and in the world. We are, we say this many times, we are image bearers, right? We bear the image of somebody else. And we are special to God. What is man that you are mindful of him, says Psalm 8. God sees us who we made as special. And we reflect in that image God gives to us these elements of personhood, intelligence, moral sense, creativity. As we live out in this world, the image God has given to us. You see, if there's no God, there's no explanation of personhood in this world of matter. There's no explanation of morality, of creativity, of intelligence. Remember what John says in John 1, in the beginning was the Word. That is to say, the beginning was intelligence. And any intelligence we might have comes from something outside of us. It's part of the image that we have been given to live with and to realize that we are reflecting something totally outside of ourselves. But there's more to be said about the image. I become more and more convinced that the image of God, which the scripture says in verse 27 of Genesis 1, is to be found in the male and female. And in that sense, you see, we are reflecting, in some sense, the image of the Trinity. because in the Trinity there is unity and distinction, one and many, and in the relationship of male and female there is unity and distinction. So this is a fundamental function of heterosexuality, to live in this world reflecting that reality which is finally coming from somewhere else. Somebody says, God could have made 1,000 males for Adam, yet he would not have fully achieved his own image and its internal diversity. Without that full-orbed picture, his own being would have gone unknown and unknowable. Only a woman, not another man, could complete the divine design for humankind. All you women are absolutely crucial. Talk about importance. And, you know, we have in the Trinity this wonderful harmony of distinct beings. And this is the key to the cosmos, that there is distinction and unity. What I call, and have been calling before you for a few hours, twoism. And twoism, of course, is actually worked out in the Trinity, even though it's three, it's two in the sense of one and many. Twoism is the principle of unity within distinctions. And that's true for everybody. And the Bible here is not presenting to human beings some kind of small-minded, unloving moralism, but trying to give to us a sense of our glory, of our immensity in our calling to be reflections of God himself. And made in the image of God male and female, we are reflecting unity in distinction. And that is why, really, homosexuality is unnatural, as Paul says in Romans 1.26. In a way, he doesn't begin with it's immoral. He says it's unnatural. It's unnatural because it is out of order with the physical cosmos and fails to reflect even the natural world, nor does it reflect the image of God Himself. And that's why when we talk about the Trinity, we say that the persons of the Trinity may not be confused. But that's also true about human beings. The male and the female may not be confused and fused into androgyny, but must be kept separate. And if you allow that fusion of male and female, well, you know what? You get the fusion of God and the world. You get one-ism. You get a God who is indistinct from the creation because you fused him into the world. So this notion of God's image as Trinity distinct from us but being given to us is absolutely essential to maintain biblical orthodoxy in our time. These are complicated notions. I hope you can follow me somewhat. But if we're Christians, we have to begin with the being of God. And we've been given these things in scripture. And it behoves us to really think them through so that our decisions about various things are deeply grounded. We love God by loving Jesus, the final image of God. Jesus is the definitive revelation of the image of God in human form. And so we read many times, he who has seen me has seen the father. We read God shows his love for us that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. And so in loving Jesus, we're loving God. Six, we love God by honoring heterosexual marriage. I've sort of said this already, but I'm saying it again now in a different way. That heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage teach us deep things about the nature of God in his inner self, but also in his outgoing heart. First of all, the inner mystery of God. The institution of marriage in Genesis 2.24 states, therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. The therefore is referring to the creation of the two gender distinct and differing persons described in the previous verse, she shall be called woman because she was taken after the man. So that heterosexual installation of marriage is based upon the male-female distinction in Genesis 1.26 and 27, and then the mention of the woman as distinct from the man in Genesis 2.23. Clearly being different, yet one flesh, expresses something of who God is. In Deuteronomy 6.4, Scripture states that the Lord is one, but we also learn from Scripture that He is triune. Like in Hebrews 1, 2, and 3, the Son, whom He, the Father, appointed heir of all things, through whom He also created the world, He is the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of His nature. So the son is God himself, or 1 John 4, 9, and 10. And this is the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his son into the world. So the way the first human couple is two persons, yet one in deeply unified and a deeply unified entity tells us something about the being of God. One can rightly assume that the fundamental human structure is given by God, both to further his work of filling the earth, but also to reflect his own being in the created order. So I'm saying that the revelation of God as Trinity is dependent upon the heterosexual reality within creation. Now that might sound somewhat hypothetical, and not many people work this out, but I do think I have a biblical text to prove it. And that is 1 Corinthians 11.3, some of you have already thought of. In which Paul says that just as the husband is the loving head of his wife in a God honoring marriage, so in the dynamism of the distinct person of the Trinity, the head of Christ is God. So a God honoring marriage reflects in human terms the very being of God himself. Is that a fair conclusion? Here we have the relationship of a man and a woman compared to the relationship of the persons of the Trinity. So that there is some real connection between the image of God revealed in man as male and female and the Trinity. Now, I said that reveals who God is in Himself. Then I said, and His external heart. In other words, this heterosexual relationship reflects God the Redeemer. Not just God the Creator, or God in Himself, but God as He reaches out in redemption. This is deep theology, folks. I say this because the Apostle Paul, when he cites Genesis 2.24, which is the installation of marriage, you remember that, in Ephesians 5.31-2, When he's reflecting on this and actually saying that it is a form of, or a form, an expression of the love of Christ for the Church, he actually says this is a mystery. This text of Genesis 2.24 contains a mystery. I wonder what that mystery is. It contains something about the heart of God, not obvious in an initial reading of the text. Paul says, and this is his calling as an apostle, to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the, this is Ephesians 3.9, what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. So he's going back to God as the creator. And he says his role is to reveal that there's a mystery going on as God creates. And he says God creates for a deep reason, to reveal who he is. And God is revealing who he is in this account of the installation of heterosexual marriage as the lover of the creation. That's the mystery of this Old Testament text. So this really is a proto-proto-evangelium. We always know about the proto-evangelium of Genesis 3.15, but thanks to Paul, we have a picture, a flash of the gospel in God's creating the heterosexual marriage. And then, of course, Paul goes on to make that much clearer, where Christ, who is the Son in the Trinity, loves the Church. So that mystery becomes very clear in the person of the second person of the Trinity. But Paul says it's already there, you see, in Genesis 2.24. So I'm just suggesting to you that as God was doing that, He had this purpose in mind, the redemption of His people of the creation. This is the great mystery of the cosmos, you see. It's the mystery of the binary of God the Creator loving His creation as a distinct being. Luther said, the cross alone is our theology, for it is Emmanuel hanging on the cross. So this Old Testament text, instituting marriage, is a prophecy of the very point of fulfillment of the history of redemption, of God's Trinitarian love for the Church. Just as a husband must love his wife and give himself over for her, so the son gave himself over for the church. And this is how it can be said in the Old Testament. And this is an important text, Isaiah 62, 5. Just as a husband loves his wife, and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you. I think Genesis 2.24 is the reason why this is said in Isaiah 62.5. Let me read it again. You see, there is a revelatory function in God installing heterosexuality to reflect His image. Not simply in the Trinity, but in His reaching out to save the creation He makes. So I just feel that we cannot give up on this whole issue of sexuality in our time, since it is freighted with so much meaning in terms of who God is and what God does relative to the world. And of course, you could take this further. If the essence of God is to be Father, reflecting what he installs in the marriage relationship of a male and a female that become father and mother. To call God father is the most important thing or meaningful thing that we can do. And so, in order to call God Father, and that's the way he's described all over the Bible and by Jesus himself, this presupposes the heterosexual structure as intended by God as a form of revelation. Being Father without that is nonsensical, without meaning. It seems to me then that the world is not a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, whose meaning is ultimately filled by human beings. God's knowledge of himself and his revealed plan for creation are the blueprint for our lives. This is the plan of the mystery for ages revealed in God who created all things. God's perspective is not merely one perspective among many, but determines and finalizes all significance. Reality is what it is because of God's revelation and declaration of what nature is. Thus, loving God is loving what God has ordained for our good. What's being portrayed in scripture then is of absolute significance for our understanding of our role in this world as creatures of God. A man engaging in sex with another man cannot express this truth. God's love for the creation is love for the other, not a narcissistic love for the same. and not just represented by any kind of expression of human affection. Because Paul cites the case of the love for a prostitute and says, shall I take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never. And then he cites Genesis 2.24. The two will become one flesh. So this is not just any kind of sexual union. It's a sexual union of heterosexuality and monogamous marriage. I was interested to find a statement by a well-known U.S. journalist by the name of Doug Main-Waring, who was once a homosexual and promoted same-sex marriage, but became a Christian. And in 2013, he said, I am now a Christian. And even though I am same-sex attracted, or more likely because I am same-sex attracted, I marvel at the extraordinary significance of marriage in God's eternal plan. Here's an ex-gay who understands the significance of marriage in God's plan. He says, marriage is under siege because it stands at the heart of the good news of the gospel, at the heart, at its heart. This is a spiritual battle. So we're faced here with this spiritual battle that this ex-gay has clearly understood. This is the ultimate reason why we must defend God's revelation of sexuality, because of His intention to reveal something of Himself as both different from us, yet intimately related to us. This is the great cosmic task, that we image who God is and what He's doing through our sexuality. And the heterosexual mandate is not hate-filled bigotry. It's the principle of the binary and the mystery of the love of God that is at stake. Without which, by the way, there is no future human civilization. For there is neither love nor reproduction. There is indeed no gospel. This is how the cosmos works in reflecting the being of God in its binary relationships. This is how we love the neighbor. Who is my neighbor, said the Pharisee. And Jesus told him it was the one who needed this kind of love. The neighbor is not the good Samaritan, by the way. shows what love should be. It's the guy lying on the ground injured. And as my way of bringing to an end this rather analytical lecture, it seems to me that we need to remember that homosexuals are human beings. They're made in God's image. Many of them have suffered Many of them have been persecuted. Many of them have been abused by other adults. In fact, many of them become homosexuals because they've been abused by adult friends or family relationships. And I just want to encourage us to see the homosexual as our neighbor. But if we simply go towards him and say, come on, there's nothing wrong, we do not show him the real source of love, which is God, who in Jesus comes and reveals his love for sinners. Luther, in his hymn, gives a good exhortation to us in a difficult time of witness. Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. The body they may kill, God's truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever. Amen. I finished at 12, Roy. Sure. In the fourth circles, there is some kind of debate, not kind of drag-out fight, as to whether or not a self same-sex attraction is in itself sinful. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm aware of that debate. I'm kind of, well, I'd like to hear your perspective, because part of what bothers me about that assertion is, well, isn't my heterosexual attraction to people other than my wife? Yeah, I think that's true. And yet, Jesus warns us about lust. And I've always said that, yeah, I could be attracted to a beautiful woman, but if I start thinking about that and begin to imagine all kinds of things one can imagine, that's when it becomes sinful. And I have a feeling that I've met some celibate homosexuals who admit that they have never finally erased that sense of their admiration for male beauty, but don't allow themselves ever to go into that kind of thinking, which they were engaged in before they turned away from it. So it's very nuanced, I think, just the way adultery or attraction is nuanced for a heterosexual. So I just wouldn't wade into a homosexual and say, oh, you have homosexual attractions, thus you are obviously a sinner. It's much more subtle, much more complicated, I think. My wife keeps pushing me that way, and I don't want to get involved in that. I don't think you have to go there, actually. I think you can say that the Trinity is a relationship of productivity, and so the marriage is as well, and that's a good thing. that there is a baby born making it three, that just satisfies our mathematical desires, rather than some kind of deeply theological need, I think. One thing that really, the connection you helped me to make, is I preached you, let's say, the book of Ephesians before, and I think the center is clearly the third chapter where and what is the mystery of what that God was for all eternity. Planets bring into one all nations, tribes, and so forth. What I never saw until you just talked about it was in the Ephesians 5.32, this mystery. It's the same word. That's right, in 3 and 5. And so as my brain started working that way, I thought the true unity or oneness is a unity based on the Trinity and His work. That's right. In redemption. Yeah, yeah. And the substitute of that is what we see in the, as you said, of the oneism of the negatives. That's right, yeah. Thank you. So let me, because your brain worked faster than mine. You're saying that the unity that Paul sees in the church is based upon the Trinity. The completed work. Yeah, yeah. That's good. You always got to be careful when you start pastor's thinking. Sometimes you can get into real trouble. But that was an excellent insight. Yes? We have a sinful nature. So really, contrary to nature for us, is illicit. Oh, yeah. It's illegitimate. Yeah. So that's where, can you maybe explain? Well, it's kataphousin. And phousis can carry different meanings, obviously. I think in the Romans text, it's unquestionable that Paul is developing a doctrine of creation. You know, what is the sin? It's refusing God who creates all things. And there's so many references to Genesis in the creation narrative in Romans 1. So that when he finally gets to, for this reason, and shows that the reason is the rejection of God the Creator, he comes to the act of heterosexuality, which is against the nature that God has created. But I think in order to make that point strongly, you have to show that the creation narrative is presupposed. One of the ways to show that is Paul uses, in that very verse, asen and thele to refer to male and female. And it's totally unusual. And it shows up in Genesis and nowhere else. It's a reference to the creation narrative. Jesus does the same thing in Matthew 19. He uses arsene and thele, male and female, not the typical anthropos or gune that you always see for male and female, but this very specialized terminology that goes straight back to the Genesis account. Yes? By the way, when Paul was writing Romans, Nero was marrying two men. One is his wife and one is his husband. Talk about weird stuff. Something like that, yeah. Well, you know, obviously Paul's preaching included that because in 1 Corinthians 6.9, he says, such was some of you, but you have been washed. And it's a wonderful statement of the success of the gospel to reach these various expressions of perversity that he mentions there and I'm always surprised that he doesn't hold back when he's writing to Rome to say things that would obviously bother people about the practice of homosexuality where it was just open so I think the early church became known for its purity of sexuality, really. And, you know, Paul does not hesitate in... Oh, that's my pastor friend's chapter 6, where he calls for the disciplining of the man in incest, caught in incest. Is it 6? I think it is, the beginning. Or is it 5? and actually to justify this he cites a text from Leviticus 18 about incest to go ahead and discipline the man caught in incest but he doesn't have to cite Genesis 18 20 because the Christians were not practicing homosexuality or I think he would have frankly So, somehow the early church was preserved from that danger by the clear teaching of Paul in particular, I think. He says it again in Timothy as well. So, it's not just an offhanded statement. Yes. So I had your answer to that last question I asked. I find it interesting that when just thinking about what you've been saying, that we have a group of kids or anybody in general that obviously wants to point that out and wants to talk about it, but have no real clear concept of themselves. Do you think that maybe that could be because of the over-emphasis and over-focus on That couldn't happen in California, by the way. The kids would not be saying that in California. They'd be saying, go for it, man. So maybe what you're seeing is part of flyover country's still connection to some kind of biblical morality in general. Now, Paul does single out homosexuality because it is so clearly opposed to the doctrine of creation. But I don't think we should single out homosexuals as the worst sinners. He's doing that for a very specific teaching purpose, I think. And in our approach pastorally, we don't have to call homosexuals the worst of sinners. They're just sinners like we all are. So is that worse than homosexuality? It's a sin. No, I think what is dangerous about it, if we pastors don't talk about it, it won't go away. It will get worse. And our young people will never hear anything about the fundamental truths that we're trying to say through this. And they'll all be swept aside. And then we won't have the next generation of Christians to build a church on. That's the great fear I have. if pastors don't train our young people to go out into the world well-equipped. But I'm not in my church. That's true. Tomorrow evening, we'll have at Zion PCA, Reformation Day service. We'll be preaching on that. And I think we've all made arrangements with our churches to not have our own services. So we would expect to see you there and hope that you can make it. Let's pray. Our Father and our God, we thank you or the events in Peter's life that led him to study these questions, the issues that are surrounding us. It's so obvious, Father, that when we look at both cultural conflict and political conflict, that it is ultimately religious. Only by understanding the creator-creation distinctive can we be able to present the truths of the gospel. Help us to acquire those skills. There are people around us who desperately need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. And their lack of understanding that God is not part of the universe is a profound problem. Help us to glorify you. We ask this in our Savior's name. Amen. Amen. Thank you, folks, for coming, giving up. Let me just say, please sign up to get my comments on the culture before you leave. I'd love to stay in touch with you and help you to keep working on these issues.