Jeremiah Knight, June 2, 2026
We keep saying judgment is coming, but Scripture shows something more frightening. Sometimes judgment is not God striking a culture down. Sometimes it is God handing that culture over to the darkness it demanded, until rebellion calls itself progress and confusion becomes normal.
The account of Genesis 19 is not an allegory. It is not a moral fable invented by the ancient Hebrews to teach a lesson about hospitality or kindness to strangers. It is history, recorded by Moses under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, describing what actually happened to two cities whose corruption reached such a level that the God who made the world judged them with fire from heaven and left their smoking ruins as a permanent witness to every generation that would come after. The contemporary attempts to soften this account, to reinterpret it as a story about social ethics rather than sexual sin, to extract its moral message while denying its historical claim, are all attempts to escape what the text actually says. And what the text actually says has not changed because we have decided we no longer like what it says.
The sin of Sodom is named explicitly by multiple New Testament writers. Jude 7 says the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah “since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.” Strange flesh. The Greek phrase carries the specific meaning of unnatural sexual desire, and Jude places this sin alongside the sin of angels who left their proper domain as a parallel example of created beings rebelling against the order God established. This is not a vague reference to general wickedness. It is a specific identification of what the men of Sodom were pursuing when they surrounded the house of Lot demanding access to the visitors. Genesis 19:5. The text could not be plainer. Their sin was sexual perversion that violated the natural order God Himself had created, and the judgment that fell on them was the response of a holy God to a culture that had crossed every boundary He had set.
Ezekiel 16:49 and 50 expands the description. “Behold this was the guilt of your sister Sodom; she and her daughters had arrogance abundant food and careless ease but she did not help the poor and needy. Thus they were haughty and committed abominations before Me.” The pride was real. The neglect of the poor was real. But the climax of the description is the abominations they committed, and the word abominations in the Old Testament consistently includes sexual perversion alongside idolatry as a category of sin that defiles a culture in ways that cannot be overlooked. The pride that produced their disregard for the poor was the same pride that produced their sexual rebellion, because pride is the root from which all such sins grow. The man who refuses to accept that God defines what is good will eventually refuse every boundary God has set, and the refusal will work itself out across every category of life including the sexual one.
We are now living through the resurrection of Sodom under different language. The contemporary culture has taken what God once destroyed by fire and turned it into a celebration. What Scripture calls abomination is now described as identity. What previous generations of Christians universally condemned is now demanded as a virtue. Flags representing the pride that Scripture identifies as the root of every rebellion are flown over courthouses, schools, corporate headquarters, sporting events, and tragically over many of the institutions that still call themselves churches. The cultural pressure to bow to this revolution is intense, sustained, and increasing, and the church that has built its life around being acceptable to the surrounding culture is bowing in numbers that should alarm anyone paying attention.
But the Word of God will not bow regardless of what the culture demands. Romans 1 is not the opinion of an ancient apostle that we are now free to update for our more enlightened times. It is the inspired indictment of God against the very pattern we are watching unfold in real time. Paul writes that humanity exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped the creation rather than the Creator, “and for this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error” Romans 1:26 and 27. The natural function. The unnatural function. The exchange. The handing over by God Himself as a judgment on a culture that had rejected Him. Every element of what Paul describes is happening before our eyes in the contemporary West, and the fact that the culture refuses to recognise the description does not change what the text says about what is occurring.
This pattern is not new. It is ancient. The temple culture of Canaan that surrounded Israel in the Old Testament was saturated with sexual perversion as a form of worship. The cult of Baal and Ashtoreth involved sexual rituals that included what would now be called LGBTQ practices, and every time Israel was drawn into idolatry the sexual chaos followed. The pattern Paul describes in Romans 1 was the consistent pattern of every pagan culture that surrounded the people of God. Reject the Creator. Worship the creation. Then receive the sexual confusion that the rejection produces. The contemporary movement is not a step forward into enlightenment. It is a step backward into the very paganism the church has spent two thousand years standing against, dressed in modern language and protected by modern legal frameworks but identical in substance to what God destroyed Sodom for and what He judged Canaan for and what He gave the Roman world over to in Paul’s day.
The contemporary church has tried to make peace with this rebellion by softening the language and removing the specific applications, but the softening does not change what Scripture says. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 10. “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor effeminate nor homosexuals nor thieves nor the covetous nor drunkards nor revilers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” The list is explicit. The categories are clear. The conclusion is unambiguous. Those who practice these things will not inherit the kingdom of God. And the contemporary attempts to argue that Paul did not mean what every Greek scholar for two thousand years has agreed he meant are not honest engagements with the text. They are attempts to escape what the text says because the text says something the contemporary culture refuses to accept.
But the gospel does not end there, and this is the part that the contemporary church most often gets wrong in the opposite direction. The very next verse in 1 Corinthians 6 contains the hope. “Such were some of you; but you were washed but you were sanctified but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” 1 Corinthians 6:11. Such were some of you. The Corinthian church included former practitioners of every sin Paul had just listed, including the sexual sins. These people had come out of the very lifestyles the contemporary culture is now demanding be celebrated, and they had come out because the gospel had reached them and the Spirit had changed them and they had been washed and sanctified and justified by the work of Christ applied to their lives.
This is the message the church must hold without flinching in either direction. The sin is real. The judgment is real. And the gospel is real, and the same Christ who calls sin what it is also offers cleansing to anyone who repents and believes. We do not soften what Scripture calls sin to make people feel better about themselves. We also do not deny that the gospel can reach the people Scripture identifies as sinners. Both errors damage souls. The first damages by leaving people in their sin while pretending the sin is acceptable to God. The second damages by suggesting that the people in this particular sin are beyond the reach of the grace that has reached every other category of sinner across history. Christ saves sinners. He saves liars and thieves and adulterers and idolaters and yes, He saves those who have been enslaved to sexual sin of every kind including homosexual lust. But He saves them by calling them out of their sin into newness of life, not by joining them in their celebration of what He came to deliver them from.
You cannot keep your sin and claim Christ at the same time. The contemporary attempt to combine the affirmation of biblical Christianity with the affirmation of unrepentant LGBTQ identity is a contradiction that Scripture itself does not permit. “What partnership have righteousness and lawlessness or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?” 2 Corinthians 6:14 and 15. The mixing is not possible. The person who wants both must choose, because the two cannot coexist in the same heart. The cross that Christ offers does not come without the death of the self that the cross requires, and the self that includes unrepentant sin must die for the new life of Christ to take root in the place where the old life used to be.
The rainbow that the contemporary movement has appropriated as its symbol is itself an irony that the church should not let pass without comment. The rainbow belongs to God. It was His own sign placed in the sky after the flood as a covenant promise that He would never again destroy the earth by water, Genesis 9:13 to 15, and the same God who hung that rainbow in the sky also wrote what He requires of His creatures and what the consequences of refusing those requirements would be. The appropriation of His own symbol by a movement that defines itself by the rejection of His revealed will is a particular kind of mockery that the God of Scripture does not overlook. “Do not be deceived God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows this he will also reap” Galatians 6:7. The reaping is coming. It has already begun in many forms. And the church that warned faithfully will stand in a different place at the end than the church that capitulated quietly when its voice was needed most.
This is not about politics. It is not about hate. It is about truth, the kind of truth that actually sets people free because it first tells them they are enslaved. The contemporary culture has dressed up rebellion as freedom, but the rebellion is the slavery and the truth Christ offers is the freedom. “If therefore the Son makes you free you will be free indeed” John 8:36. The freedom is in Him, not in the assertion of our own autonomy against Him. And the church that loves people enough to tell them this is the church that is actually loving them, while the church that affirms them in their bondage is functioning as the agent of their continued slavery regardless of how kind the affirmation feels in the moment.
So let the church speak clearly when the surrounding culture is shouting confusion. Let us not whisper when God has thundered. Let us not cower when souls are at stake. Let us love enough to be misunderstood, hated, opposed, and accused of every form of bigotry that the contemporary vocabulary can produce, because the souls in front of us are eternal and the truth that saves them is the same truth that the culture is determined to silence. Silence is not compassion. Silence in the face of soul destroying lies is complicity in the destruction of the souls being lied to, and the God who will judge every word we have spoken will also judge every word we should have spoken and did not.
Sodom burned. The smoke of its judgment was not the end of the story. 2 Peter 2:6 says God reduced the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes “having made them an example to those who would live ungodly lives thereafter.” An example. A warning. A permanent testimony that the holiness of God is not a metaphor and the judgment of God is not negotiable. We have been warned. The warning is in the text. The pattern that produced the judgment is unfolding around us. And the mercy of God that still calls sinners to repentance is still extended, but the extension has an end, and no generation has the guarantee that the end will not be theirs. May we hear the warning, may we speak it faithfully to a generation that needs to hear it, and may we trust the God who has not stopped saving sinners to reach souls through the proclamation of the same gospel that has reached every other generation before us.
He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.