Unmasking the Enemy, Part 1

Author: Andrew Comiskey
May 15, 2017
How do you make sense of a breezily written Time magazine cover entitled ‘Beyond He or She,’ in which the author Katy Steinmetz champions kids from around the country who refuse any gender identification (March 27th)? Or seventy congresspersons who are seeking a nationwide ban on an individual’s right to seek therapeutic help to make peace with the gender of one’s birth, on the basis that ‘LGBTQ people were born perfect; there is nothing to treat them for’(Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif.; Washington Post, April 27th)?

Neither Steinmetz nor Lieu recognize that they are participating in the fracturing of lives; they insist that the freedom to refuse one’s male or female self is a human right, a moral good, that must be defended as squarely as recognizing the homosexual or lesbian ‘self’. Where does it end? If we agree that ‘feelings’ about oneself and the other are the foundation for human freedom, we can only observe and congratulate a generation that seeks to transcend gender altogether.

The truth: we are witnessing the enemy of humanity robbing a generation of its fruitfulness and families of their cohesiveness. In what may best be described as domestic terrorism, parents endure one bomb blast after another as sons manifest their intention to become daughters, daughters sons, or most confusing, kids who insist on being called ‘they’ in order to keep all their gender options open. It is a new and demonic twist on the teen theme of exaggerated self-investment and experimentation: every day a new mask, a new self, a new partner for the ever evolving ‘self.’

Claiming ‘freedom’ from old traditions of male or female, these ones become slaves to their own self-interest. In search of a self, they are never able to become a whole-enough self for another, for their families, for the greater community. It is impossible. How can one become outer-directed when he or she refuses to land on the most basic level of being—the truth of one’s gender? The very powers that God gives one to create life (in his or her gendered self) now threaten to destroy that life and deaden the lives around him or her.

We have a common enemy who tries to render good evil and to enslave humanity with that distortion.

Karl Barth was right. Reflecting on gender duality as the only conclusion we can draw biblically about what it means to manifest the image of God in our humanity (Gen. 1: 26, 27), he concludes that a refusal to gender identify is a descent into inhumanity and a refusal of God Himself. God created each person either male or female. There are only two natures. When we refuse that fact, we refuse Him.

Our ‘feelings’ will not save us on the last day. In light of many desires, we can look straight in the face of the powers-that-be, be they political, journalistic, pseudo-scientific, or pseudo-religious, and declare their advocacy of LGBTQ ‘rights’ as an alliance with the dark powers governing our world today.

Turning from the enemy of our souls, we turn to the One who came down from heaven in order to rent the divide between us and evil. He descends into our very depths. Upon the ground He conquered in dying for our fractured selves, He lives in order to raise us according to His will for our gendered humanity.

‘The whole life and ministry of Jesus has been a battle with demons…This battle has been with the rulers of this world, the power structures that have organized themselves and their authority so that there is no room for God in the world. Jesus, then, has not come to offer yet one more political alternative but to break the stranglehold that the powers have on the world. He offers a new world, a new world in which God is God and human beings are set free to be human beings.’ N.T. Wright

Please join us in San Diego on June 16th and 17th for the sixth annual RHN Hope 2017 Conference as hundreds gather to celebrate how Jesus has set them free from gender identity distortions. Preview with us the first full-length documentary film ever made–Tranzfomed–on how Jesus restores the transgendered. Register here today!
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