The devil is resourceful, hard working. There is no temptation he will not use, no stratagem too tiny to try us with. He does, however, have a few areas he specializes in. He is called Satan because he is an expert at making accusations. He delights to accuse us when we are innocent, and when we are guilty. He is also a murderer and has been from the beginning. Those who hate Him, we are told, love death (Proverbs 8:36). He is also not just a liar, but the father of lies (John 8:44). When we hear a lie we ought to smell sulfur. Every lie has his hoof prints on it. Of late the broader culture has been rather frantic in telling and believing lies with respect to boys and girls, and we Christians too often face the temptation to believe them. Here are ten we must never give in to:
10. Boys can become girls. Girls can become boys. No. Chemicals, surgery or clothes do not change boys into girls or girls into boys.
9. Gender is a social construct that can be chosen at will. No. From the beginning He has made us man and woman.
8. If our feelings don’t match reality, reality will have to change. I don’t dispute that the gender dysphoric feel like what they are not. But what needs to change is the wish to be other, not the immutable reality the dysphoric find themselves in.
7. Having our desires “met” will make us happy. No, repenting and believing on the Lord Jesus Christ will make us joyful. The One who designed us gives us His law not to make us miserable, but to show us the way of life. His law is always and everywhere an invitation to joy, not a burden to be carried. If it feels like a burden to us, we must change, not it.
6. Failing to celebrate the mutilation of bodies, and failure to affirm the lie that boys can become girls and girls boys is mean-spirited, narrow and cruel. No, sin is never something to be celebrated, and to be against something is no more narrow-minded than to be for something.
5. Determining to live trans is no one’s business but his or her own. No, public decisions have public consequences. It’s true enough that we have plenty of our own sins to worry about. It’s true enough that Christians have no need to hunt down hidden sexual perversion to shout it down. I am honestly not interested in what people wear in the privacy of their own homes. But living trans is a decidedly public decision when we are expected to call he’s her and she’s he.
4. Non-Christians are bad people who do this kind of thing and Christians are good people. No, apart from the grace of God in our own lives we’d find ourselves in the same mess or worse as anyone else. Even with his grace we yet struggle against and fall into sin.
3. Homosexuality is the same as any other sin. No, not all sins are the same. All sins are rebellion against the living God and are due His eternal wrath. But that doesn’t make them all equally rebellious or equally evil.
2. Homosexuals just want to be left alone to do their own thing in private. No, homosexuals insist that the rest of the world approve of their sin. And many are more than willing to use the force of the state to make it happen, whether through indoctrination at the government’s schools, or intimidation through its courts.
1. God will be mocked. No, God will not be mocked. The unsurpassed swift embrace of sexual perversion in the broader culture isn’t a surprise to Jesus. Rather, even as He ordained the rise of Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar for our good and His glory, so He has ordained even this. He will use it for His purposes.
We must guard our minds against the devil’s lies. And we must not lose heart. Jesus always wins.