Canada’s ban on biblical sexuality: How did we get here?
We’re going to take time to consider what God’s Word says about sexuality, marriage, and the nature of men and women.
The Church initiative to teach on biblical sexuality annually on the third week of January was birthed out of what happened in Canada last year when Bill C4 was brought into law on Jan. 8. It’s known as the anti-conversion therapy law.
Bill C4, I would say, is this: It’s the next in the latest slide of a long dissent our nation has been on. It’s the next step by a nation that generally rejects God and His moral law, His eternal nature, and His divine power.
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The tragic thing about Bill C4 is that it was voted into law in Canada without a single dissenting vote. The opposition and the government together unanimously voted into law Bill C4, that would say that the biblical view on human sexuality “is based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, including the myth that heterosexuality, cisgender gender identity, and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are preferred over other sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions.”
The bill goes on, if you’re to read it for yourself, to essentially criminalize the preaching, teaching, and counseling of the biblical sexual ethic that would call men and women to conform to God’s design for human sexuality.
It’s shocking when you think about it, that not a single member in the House of Commons, 338 members of Parliament, voted to defend the biblical ethic of sexuality.
Not a single MP, across all party lines, voted to defend biblical morality.
That says to us, Church, and this is very important that we understand this, that for those who would put their hope in government, or in political change, to turn a nation around, we want to declare: put your hope in God.
How did we get here? — sexual revolution
As I was considering this and praying about it, I said, “Lord, how did we get here? How did we arrive in this place as a nation? How did we slide this far?” And the Lord reminded me that this has not occurred overnight. This is just the next step in a long line of choices we have made as a nation in the rejection of God and His moral law.
Let’s go back for a moment. A well-celebrated thing in history is the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.
It was a social movement that challenged traditional values related to sexuality. It was literally a revolution. It wasn’t a revolution in the overthrowing of a nation’s government, but it was a revolution in the sense that the moral order taught by God’s Word was rejected in the sexual ethic.
The sexual revolution rejected the biblical design of heterosexual marriage. It was a revolution that increased the acceptance of homosexuality, rejected monogamy, and rejected reserving sex for the marriage bed.
Once sex could be separated from the biblical design of God-ordained marriage between a man and a woman, the next target in our nation became marriage itself.
A strategic attack — crumbling of the family order
In the last few decades, Satan has made a strategic attack on the image and the glory of God by his influence in the destruction of the marriage vow and the marriage bed; which was long protected by the laws of our nation.
It was in the 1980s that the Divorce Act was struck down. By the early 2000s, the state government had made itself the authority over the institution of marriage — that God had designed — and the state put itself in the place of God, legalizing homosexual unions. Next, the state set the terms for divorce and made itself the authority in dissolving marriage.
What we’ve watched happen in our nation is the crumbling of the family order. It’s rarer and rarer that children are raised in a family with both of their biological parents or that those parents are living together as husband and wife before God.
The family, which is the foundation of a nation — and exists from God for the health and structure of a nation — has never been in worse shape in Canada.
The state has taken it upon itself to educate children that a family is whatever hodgepodge confused mixture of human relationships that can be assembled.
The next unnatural step
When you consider all of these things together, all of a sudden it makes sense that the next unnatural step in our nation, would be to escalate the attack on the nature of male and female itself, trying to separate a man or a woman from the biology of their own physical body.
The teaching is: you don’t have to be restricted by the biology of your body, but you can assign to yourself, whatever gender and sexual identity you decide.
We know this, the public school has become the grooming ground for the new gender ideology that does not conform to obvious human biology. It’s based on fluid sentimentality, human feelings, and emotion. Seeds of confusion are being planted in the minds of our children and the young people of our nation, who are impressionable.
And there are those in sexual education working in public schools that have dropped the word pedophile from their vocabulary, speaking to our children with the acronym MAP (minor-attracted persons).
The great lie of neutrality
These actions of the state in the education system are not harmless, and they’re not neutral. They are driven by ideologies that are anti-Christ; they are anti-Jesus. The state is not impartial, supporting both sides, it has a clearly weighted moral stance in a specific direction.
The great lie is that the state, the education system, and secularism are morally neutral; they’re not. It is a religious system. They are not religiously neutral; they are religious by nature.
Jesus said this: “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matthew 12:30).
There is no soft ground in the middle. The secular state is not neutral in advancing its anti-christ agendas.
We, the Church, proclaimed the rule of Christ, the Lordship of Jesus, and the design of God’s kingdom. This is a clash of kingdoms within our own nation.
A path that leads to destruction — is there hope?
As we see the culture transforming, these things are not going to stop unless God has mercy on our nation and brings a revival. Political change is not the solution. Protests are not the solution.
As followers of Christ, we don’t put our hope in political powers or in human institutions, as much as we desire them to be reformed, to come to repentance, to be led by Godly men and women, they are not our hope. Jesus Christ is our hope.
2 Chronicles 7:14 KJV – “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
These things happening in our nation, are not the liberation of man. These are attacks on the nature of God and His Word. This is an assault on Christ in our nation. And these are attacks on God’s creational design. They’re meant to hurt God. They are meant to hurt those whom God is seeking to redeem from sin and its power.
This is a scheme of the devil to kill, steal and destroy. He’s the father of lies (John 8:44-45). Today, we are calling out these lies.
Satan is making a strategic attack on the image and the glory of God. The Word of God tells us, man is made in the image of God and the purpose of your life is to glorify God. That’s to be your identity found in Jesus.
We as people, and as a nation, need to turn to the Word of God to renew our minds, to transform and re-shape our thinking, to form a worldview that is biblical and is honoring to Christ.
The path being promoted in our nation is one that leads to destruction. But there is hope in the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The desire of my heart is to proclaim to any and all who would listen, that God has a ordain design for human sexuality and gender, and it’s laid out in His Word. My desire is to be a dissenting voice in our culture, one that points people to Christ, and be a Church that’s committed to His Word.
Men and women will never understand their value and worth, they will never understand their identity, they will never know contentment outside of God’s ordained design and a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Any message contrary to that is a lie.
We talk about these things because we want people to find the path of life and Jesus Christ. Jesus is the power by which God set the heavens and the earth in their place. Jesus is the one who brings chaos into order. Jesus has made known the path of life and in His presence there is fullness of joy, there is identity, and His Word says, there is pleasure forevermore.
Originally published at Harbingers Daily.
Matt Rowan is the Senior Pastor of Christ The King (CTK) Community Church located in Gibsons, British Columbia, Canada.
