Matthew Vines - Filtered Through Man in New York City

Straw man arguments are the bulk of the book. Filter those out and what’s left is pretty much what nobody disagrees with. But if you take the hater’s abuse of Scripture and pretend that’s all there is, it’s an easy target… Meanwhile, ignoring what Scripture actually directs and forbids.

And don’t know his full story, but the most alarming thing from his testimony is not the homosexuality, but this…

“I got so angry with God for not keeping up his end of the bargain. But after some time, I finally realized why he wouldn’t change me. He never felt like he needed to.”

Does he feel that he is perfect in all ways? Even aside from the homosexuality, is there nothing of which he needs to repent? I truly wonder if he has ever understood the gospel at all, or if he has ever heard it in its totality.

I’m truly saddened that this man has completely missed or rejected Biblical truth for a lie.

But where did the idea of the lie come from? Sadly, we live in a day that one kind find any type of church that will teach anything he/she wants to hear or believe. This is, by far and away is the greatest threat to Biblical Christianity, not the gay movement or gay agenda.

This humans article showed up on my facebook page early this morning, so imagine my surprise to find it in a Sharper Iron article! One of my former students from when I taught at Cornerstone U. is the co-pastor of the church that this gay man attends in NYC. My former student (now the pastor of the gay-affirming church) is a Rob Bell copycat; his mannerisms, his preaching, his quirkiness and his theology. Of course this is not surprising since he used to be on staff at Mars Hill Bible Church in the GR area right after he graduated from Cornerstone. When I had him as a student he was already on the trajectory towards being a progressive/liberal Christian. He grew up in a liberal Lutheran church (although he had come to faith in Christ through a more evangelical church) and had gravitated towards the emergent church movement through the writings of Brian McLaren and attending Rob Bell’s church while at college. In his view, affirming gay Christians is the social justice issue of our day and he doesn’t want to be on the “wrong side of history.” The fallacy of chronological snobbery at its worst……….

While certainly one must deal with Vines’ work, it also strikes me that there are a lot of other things that have got to go for a church to affirm homosexuality. Here’s an example from the “Metropolitan Community Church” where they theoretically affirm the creeds—I’d assume primarily Apostle’s and Nicene—but what is left unsaid, as far as I can tell, is any grounding in the Word of God.

In other words, it isn’t about just six verses at all, but rather is about sixty-six books that get consistently problematic for anyone who wants to normalize sexual sin, be it heterosexual, homosexual, or whatever. And as we grasp all the places where Scripture simply doesn’t jibe with sexual sin, I think we’re going to be able to deal better with those who want to pretend that they’re OK if they simply expunge six verses from Scripture.

Side note; if you deal with the problem of sexual sin by sidelining the Scriptures, church has got to get depressing. I grew up in a (Methodist) church where they tended to preach from the newspaper, more or less, and for all our faults as fundagelicals, it was quite frankly depressing to go back to that church and hear the lack of sermon. I can only imagine that it’s far worse in the MCC.