The LGBTQ Agenda Has Won the Culture War: Why Is It Not Satisfied?
The gay movement has made huge social gains over the past 60 years. In the late 1960’s it was illegal in most countries to participate in homosexual acts. Today, being of the LGBTQ bent would go unnoticed, if it wasn’t for them still proudly declaring their sexuality.
The LGBTQ folks are still of the impression that they have several steps to go before they achieve equality with straights. In reality, every major barrier has been removed. They can dress up in clothes previously restricted to the oppose sex, they can serve openly in the military, and they now enjoy the same marital rights as heterosexuals.
The lack of any real grievance is the reason why some sexually confused people decided they wanted the right to use the restroom of their choice. A couple of years ago, the LGBTQ lobby was calling for a boycott of states with laws that required people to use restrooms that corresponded to their sex at birth. The whole issue lost momentum and faded when everyone collectively realized the silliness of the whole matter.
Another phony battle that the gay community has been waging is the one with Chick-Fil-A. The fast food company does not have any active opposition to homosexuality. Chick-Fil-A has long backed away from supporting any organization that is remotely anti-gay. The hatred festers because the queer community wants Chick-Fil-A to bend its knee to the gay lifestyle.
San Jose city council members voted unanimously to hang rainbow flags and pink and blue pro-transgender rights flags outside the Chick-fil-A that’s scheduled to open inside the San Jose International Airport in May. There have been campaigns around the country, including San Antonio, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, to try to prevent new Chick-fil-A locations from opening in their communities.
Jack Phillips, owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, was sued when he refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds. The U.S. Supreme Court gave him a partial victory by saying that Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission violated Phillips rights under the First Amendment. Because the court did not rule on the larger issue of whether businesses can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gays and lesbians, it allowed for someone else to sue him over a refusal to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition.
It should be clear to anyone with the rational mind, that you don’t ask your enemy to bake you a cake. It is just pure vindictiveness to try to compel this man to violate this faith.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has formally launched a bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Buttigieg, who has enjoyed a surge in opinion polls and fundraising in recent weeks as his contrived feud with the vice president has drawn a great deal of media attention.
Buttigieg claims that a 2015 Indiana law signed by Pence allowed businesses to use religious liberty as a defense for hate. He argued the law would allow businesses to discriminate against the LGBTQ community.
“The vice president is entitled to his religious beliefs,” Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., said on CNN’s “New Day.” “My problem is when those religious beliefs are used as an excuse to harm other people,” he said.
Buttigieg didn’t have any beef with Pence when he was Governor of Indiana. Now that he is running to be the first gay president, Pence and Chick-Fil-A are the enemies of gay rights. Because homosexuality is based on a belief that is contrary to human nature, Buttigieg can’t tolerate Christians that hold to biblical truth. The only way to have sexual freedom in America is to silence the voices of all believers who dare to stand against the LGBTQ agenda. The day will soon come when they will get their wish, but instead of paradise, the world will suffer the fate of Sodom.
“It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed” (Luke 17:28-30).
–Todd
The Departure
Author’s note: This article has appeared in this and other forums previously. The heads-up it represents to the Christian who should be looking for the Blessed Hope (Titus 2:13) has never been more relevant than now. Because the spiritual falling away is so pronounced, the literal (spatial) “Departure”–the Rapture of the Church–has never been more in immediate prospect!
The Scripture is haunting. It echoes and reverberates throughout the spiritual hallways of the Church with each passing hour.
Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils. (1 Timothy 4:1).
This forewarning fits into the last-days pattern, also given by the Apostle Paul, in the familiar prophetic passage:
Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of Perdition. (2 Thessalonians 2:3)
The “falling away,” apostasia in Greek, means a “departure from.” Paul prophesied in the 2 Timothy 4:1 passage that there will come a time at the end of the Church Age when people will depart from the “faith.” He foretells in 2 Thessalonians that this will be a general “falling away,” the apostasy of the end time. What is this “faith” from which people will fall away, and who are the “people” who will fall away? Another crucial question is: Can the departure that God forewarned be recognized when it occurs?
“Faith,” as here defined, must by context be the faith in the One who is at the heart of the Gospel–faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God, chosen from the foundation of the world to be the propitiation for the sin that separates fallen man from God. It is the faith you and I must have in order to confess with our mouths that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, and to believe in the deepest part of our spirits that God raised Him from the dead.
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. (Romans 10:9)
A person can’t fall from a position (doctrinally speaking in this case) he never has attained. The “people,” then, whom Paul the apostle is writing about in his prophecies of 1 Timothy 4:1 and 2 Thessalonians 2:3 are those who have believed in Jesus Christ for salvation of their souls.
This brings us to the question: Can the departure God, through Paul, foretold be recognized when it occurs? To recognize that “falling away”–that apostasia, or apostasy—when it begins to happen will almost certainly give the Christian attuned to God’s will a heads-up on the nearness of the Tribulation era, thus to the nearness of the Rapture of the Church.
We have looked at the “faith” as faith in Jesus for salvation and at the “people”who will “depart” from the faith as being the Church–that is, the true Christians who are alive at the time of the end, when the apostasy takes place.
Although there are those who think this departure includes the possibility of one losing one’s salvation, the “falling away” of 2 Thessalonians 2:3 cannot include that meaning. A quick look at Romans 8:38 and 39, to name just one security-of-the-believer passage, shows that God’s Word teaches that the believer can’t depart from the Heavenly Father to the point of losing his or her family status. Jesus, in John chapter 17, makes that absolutely clear. I suggest that if you have questions about this, read the Scriptures I just mentioned.
What, then, is meant by “departing from the “faith”? Glad you asked. The “faith” mentioned in 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy 2:3 is a collection of faith principles wrapped up in the Lord Jesus Christ. These principles are doctrines put forth by the Word of God. The Word of God is none other than the Lord Jesus:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
“People” at the time of the “falling away” will “depart” from the “faith”–the doctrines put forth by the Word of God, who is Jesus Christ. This departure will mark the generation of Christians at the very end of the Church Age.
The question that applies most relevantly to us today is: Are we seeing signals of the departure about which Paul forewarned?
We have analyzed, dissected, examined, and inspected every end-time signal found in God’s Word many times in these commentaries: Israel again in the land of promise; the EU looking to be the reviving Roman Empire; Russia, Persia (modern Iran) and other nations looking to be a nucleus that will one day form the Gog-Magog force of Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39. These, plus, all of the other end-time characteristics of this generation.
However, I believe the most insidious of all the things taking place under the clever, devious hand of the devil–Satan—is the falling away, the departure from the faith being currently orchestrated by Lucifer, the fallen one.
This departure is evident to the spiritually discerning when looking at the church growth movement. This “seeker friendly” approach to both the saved and the lost (all who don’t know Christ) through New Age, corporation-type seminar seductiveness and brainwashing techniques that water down or completely eliminate true Bible doctrine is leading in a profound departure from the “faith once delivered” (see Jude 1: 3).
The new paradigm instituted by the champions of the church growth movement is the shift from New Testament Christianity to “New Spirituality-Driven Christianity.” Like in the modern corporate organization, invented in large part by German economic guru Peter Drucker, who mentored some of the leading designers of the church growth movement, the system is more an organism than an organization–adopting Drucker’s model based upon Freudian psychology and Darwinian evolutionary principles. The individual is assigned a value, and must fit in or be removed from the system. To put it as I heard one person of the movement say: “Pillars just hold things up. So, they need to be moved out of the way.” So, those who hold to doctrine must get out of the way so no one
will have their feelings hurt by talk of sin, blood atonement, and eternal punishment in the place called Hell, if repentance is not forthcoming.
Again, the Apostle Paul wrote God’s view of this watering down of doctrine:
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. (Galatians 1:8)
Are we at the point of departure from the faith that is prophesied for the very end of the Church Age? Maybe we can get a better sense by looking at one more area of Scripture pertaining to the matter:
I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. (2 Timothy 4:1-4)
There is another prophetically scheduled departure to consider. It’s the one we should be looking forward to. It is a God-ordained onethat will remove every child of God of the Church Age–living and dead—from Planet Earth in one millisecond:
Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ. (Titus 2:13)
–Terry