Vanity Fair, Bunyan's or otherwise

Bruce Jenner is on the cover of Vanity Fair, in case you’ve been living in a cave.

One can only feel sad, especially if you have seen the Diane Sawyer interview. Was the former Olympic gold medalist sincere? No one is that good an actor. Was he in his right mind? No man thinking he’s a woman is speaking with the mind of Christ. Satan has made haggis of his faculties and we should pray for this person made in God’s image, even as he surgically changes his own image.

But there is something else. The Bible calls us to be men who understand our times (1 Chronicles 12:32). And here is something we would do well to understand, lest we be fooled as we were with the homosexual movement in its early stages. Back then they told us, hat in hand, on many a Terry Gross Fresh Air program, that they were hard-wired by nature, lonely, and harassed. They wanted only sympathy and to be left alone.

Fast-forward 30 years, and the movement, having gained the upper hand, cares little whether you think they are hard-wired by nature. And as to wanting simply to be left alone, the gay lobby is now on the attack and threatening to overrun all our freedoms and institutions.

Do not imagine that the next 30 years of transgenderism will not evolve into the same kind of designer gender choices and off-the-rack casual experimentation that homosexuality did in its endless permutations from a supposed hard-wired psychological condition or identity crisis to a moral free-for-all.

If you feel yourself getting weak in the knees, ask yourself what Jonathan Edwards would have said to an instance of transgenderism in his church. Better yet, remember the Apostle Paul, and consider his tone:

“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. … [D]eliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh …” (1 Corinthians 5:1-5, ESV).

In imitation of Paul, we should sympathize (“ought you not rather to mourn?”) and recognize that our churches should not bless sexual immorality within them (“deliver this man to Satan”). In this way, hatred of sin does not become hatred of a person, and just as importantly, holiness is not swallowed up by sympathy.