Bill Muehlenberg, Culture Watch, 1/4/23
Can the deception get any worse than this?
Satan is real. Sin is real. The fall is real. And deception is real. But too many folks do not believe in any of these realities. As a result, they end up fully falling victim to them. They are bound by diabolical deception, and they do not even know it is happening.
And this is not just true of Joe Pagan. It is true of those claiming to be Christians yet absolutely deny God, his truth, and what his Word clearly teaches. No wonder the Bible repeatedly warns about how easy it is to be deceived, how active the devil is, and how we must all be on guard against the lies of the enemy.
Consider the recent story of some guy who claims to be a Christian, who now claims to be a woman, and who dumped his wife and three kids in order to be ‘true to himself.’ Worse yet, he is an Anglican vicar of all things. As one write-up puts it:
The Church of England’s ‘first’ non-binary vicar said it was ‘difficult’ when they came out to their wife and three children after having a ‘moment of revelation’ while reading the story of Adam and Eve. Bingo Allison, 36, who defines as gender-queer and uses the pronouns ‘they/them’, experienced an epiphany seven years ago while reading Genesis 1-3 in the Old Testament.
The vicar, who works in Liverpool, said they came to terms with their gender identity while reading the story and realised: ‘There’s space in God’s creation for change and transformation, just because you’re created one way doesn’t mean that you can’t live another’. Bingo also said their wife found things ‘difficult’ when they first came out because ‘obviously you marry what you think it a straight guy and obviously things are more complicated than that’. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11591517/Britains-non-binary-CofE-priest-says-God-guided-truth.html
Oh dear. Which is worse: someone living in complete delusion or idiots in the media who go along with it? You will have to ignore these dingbats for using the word “they” when speaking about him. Lying to oneself is bad enough, but when others go along with this, we really are headed for civilisational collapse.
But ‘Bingo’ (which sorta tells us all we need to know about the guy) is a real piece of work here. The amount of absolute lunacy coming from his lips is quite something to behold. The article goes on to say this:
In a speech to a panel on making churches more inclusive, Bingo said Christianity had historically been guilty of prioritising the views of ‘rich, white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical men’. Explaining that they are also autistic and dyspraxic, Bingo wrote: ‘I am passionate about fully including neurodivergent people in the life and faith of the Church, particularly in our telling and retelling of stories from the Bible.
Bingo, who previously trained to become a priest in Durham, said the Church of England was ‘open to me coming out’ but added that it was ‘difficult’ for some people they had worked with ‘because for them I was the first transgender person they had worked with closely’. They have since moved to the Liverpool Diocese ‘which does so much to support and empower LGBT people’ and they have found their new congregation ‘wonderful’….
‘The history of biblical interpretation is littered with the opinions of rich, white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical men assuming that everyone in the passages that they read thought like them and perceived the world like them. The biases that this creates exclude anyone who doesn’t fit from fully engaging with the Bible, and often lead the church to miss out on vital perspective on all sorts of biblical narratives.’
Oh for heaven’s sake! Give me a break. The Bible was also not written by black, lesbian Martian dolphins, thereby obviously showing complete insensitivity to and prejudice against black, lesbian Martian dolphins. It might be time to start a new protest movement here. Enough of the biblical bigotry that does not take into account this victimised group.
But it keeps getting worse. Another online newspaper says the following about how he “saw the light” on this:
It wasn’t until seven years ago when they first came across the term gender-queer that “everything suddenly clicked”. Bingo considered putting their new-found identity on hold whilst they finished their vicar training – at this point, they were only halfway through the seven-year programme – but this proved harder than they initially expected….
It was while writing an essay on how God created the earth that Bingo had an epiphany. They said the language which the bible originally used in Genesis 1:27 spoke about “from maleness to femaleness” as opposed to men and women. They added: “I was sitting there in the middle of the night when I realised I might need to run my life upside down. It was a deepening spiritual experience, I properly felt God was guiding me into this new truth about myself. One of the things that has kept with my ministry ever since is that transition and coming out can and should be a spiritual experience, as well as an emotional and social and sometimes physical one. There is something beautiful about growing into who we were created to be and growing into our authentic selves.” www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/church-england-priest-how-god-25771430
Good grief, what utter nonsense. The verse he mentions says this:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
The obvious reason why the various English versions will have such a rendering is simply because that is the best way to translate the passage. It has absolutely nothing to do with “from maleness to femaleness”. And the rest of the Genesis creation account of man and woman is also properly translated in our English Bibles.
Genesis 2:24 for example says this: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” And when Jesus referred to that passage, the English versions are also being faithful to the original languages. As we find in Matthew 19:3-5:
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?”
So there has been no tampering with the text here. In the same way, there was no tampering with the Bible to censor out all its passages on black, lesbian Martian dolphins. Such things were not suppressed nor covered up – they simply were never in the text in the first place.
But when you want above all else to make excuses for your delusions and seek to justify your sinful and anti-biblical lifestyle, then every idiotic trick in the book will be utilised. Just make stuff up as you go along. Even claim to have an ‘epiphany’.
Guess what bud: this was NOT some divine revelation you had, but a work of satanic deception which you happily fell for, hook, line and sinker. This is always the way these things go: when you deliberately and defiantly reject God and his Word, you completely open up yourself to Satan and his wiles. You become easy pickings for the enemy of God who isthe enemy of truth.
This guy is a prime example of this. He does not need to be affirmed, celebrated, championed and promoted. He needs to repent and seek God’s forgiveness. We can pray that he will change his ways and renounce the devil and all his works. Until that happens, he is simply one blind man leading others who are also blind.
And the prayer we can pray might well echo what we find in 2 Timothy 2:25-26, that “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.”
Moreover, to the extent that he is especially trying to lead children into this diabolical error, he better be aware that millstones are the recommended response according to Jesus himself (Mark 9:42). This is very serious stuff indeed. God have mercy on the Church of England.
It appears that the Church of England needs to go back and review what heresy and apostasy are, because what they’re facing is nothing other blasphemous abominations from sources with no authority.
The word “profane” also comes to mind, not to say diabolical.