by ‘Plead with Him that all would not be lost’
By Jon Brown
ARLINGTON, Texas — Pastor Voddie T. Baucham warned that the pervasive sexual sins of the prevailing culture are signs of divine judgment, but that the Gospel still offers hope and that American Christians should plead with God for revival while preparing for persecution.
Baucham, who is on leave in the U.S. from his position as Dean of Theology at African Christian University in Lusaka, Zambia, preached from Romans 1 during an event last Saturday at Lamar Baptist Church outside Dallas.
Reiterating some of the points in his new book, It’s Not Like Being Black: How Sexual Activists Hijacked the Civil Rights Movement, which was released Tuesday, Baucham noted the irony that he was making his remarks on the first day of pride month, which he referred to as “pride goes before destruction month.”
Noting that the Apostle Paul ultimately spends much of the first chapter of Romans explaining how the wrath of God manifests in the world by giving mankind over to sexual depravity and “a debased mind,” Baucham also observed that Paul lays the foundation of his difficult arguments on the hope and reality of the Gospel.
Starting at Romans 1:16, Baucham read: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.'”
“That’s the foundation for all of this,” Baucham said. “That’s our foundation for thinking about all of these issues. We start there. We start with the reality of the Gospel and our need for the Gospel. We start with the reality that the righteous shall live by faith.”
“We are living in a time, in an era when there are people who are desperately wicked, and in desperate need of repentance and faith, in desperate need of the Gospel. And we’re being told that the wickedness is, in fact, the Gospel,” Baucham said.
Baucham went on to note that such a worldview is destructive because it not only calls good evil and evil good, but also “alienates people from the only hope that they have.”
“And that’s what this is about,” he continued. “At the end of the day, this is not just about laws that we don’t like, or that we disagree with, or that we want changed. […] Laws are important, but ultimately our golden rule is not just that people would be forbidden from certain things, but they will be free from them.”
Baucham went on to expound upon what he described as the “four-stage devolution” of an evil culture as described in Romans 1. He said that the destruction starts with a denial of God and His authority, as well as a desire to suppress the truth, which he noted has long been readily apparent in modern culture.
The consequence of such a worldview, Baucham said, first leads to general sexual immorality, which he explained first manifested in the Sexual Revolution and in the separation of sex from marital commitment and family.
“Here’s what’s interesting: we haven’t gotten to ‘the alphabet’ yet,” he said of such a step. “This is not about the alphabet. This is about the Sexual Revolution as a whole. Long before we got to the alphabet, we had a Sexual Revolution.”
He also said contraceptives, abortion and the crisis of fatherlessness are correlative to such an attitude.
“This thing is broken without the alphabet mafia,” he added.
Baucham then explained that “dishonorable passions” are the next stage of divine judgment against a wicked culture, and suggested that the scale at which modern society is subject to them is historically unprecedented.
“So, we’ve gone beyond natural passions gone astray, to disordered and dishonorable passions,” he said. “It’s like the law of diminishing returns, right? We always want more. We’re never satisfied. Whenever we’re pursuing one of God’s good gifts outside of the boundaries wherein God gives that gift, it never brings us the satisfaction that we crave. And on top of that, it always brings us guilt and shame.”
Despite the culture’s clarion call for people to embrace the supposed freedom of sexual liberation, he said the evidence suggests that such behavior is enslaving even children at this point.
“We go deeper and deeper and deeper into our sinfulness, and it just doesn’t satisfy,” he said. “Here’s what’s amazing: we have a generation today that has more sex and sexualized content available to them than anyone in history has ever had. Imagine!”
“When I was a kid, you had to have an uncle or somebody who had some stuff hidden in their room, you know? You’d find stuff that was hidden somewhere in an uncle’s room, or somebody would tell you, ‘Guess what I saw.'”
Lifting up his phone, Baucham added, “We’re giving them to 9- and 10-year-olds. Number one use of the internet is still pornography, and we’re giving unlimited, unfettered access to it to 9- and 10-year-olds in the palm of their hands.”
“So we’ve got a generation of people who’ve been raised with sexual material, who have been raised with libertine views towards sex, who are engaging in sex younger and younger, and we’ve got young people entering into marriage who can’t even enjoy sex anymore, because their ability to enjoy it has nearly been destroyed.”
Baucham further explained that a deeper layer of the destruction includes “willing Christians” who attempt to accommodate the idea of sexual sin as an identity by claiming the Bible failed to understand the complexity of sexual orientation, and that dishonorable passions are not actually dishonorable.
Baucham said rampant transgenderism is another consequence of such depravity and went on to warn that the push for pedophilia “is just a matter of time.” He also urged Christians to steel themselves for the last stage of a culture under judgment, which involves the wicked attempting to suppress the truth of God by approving of those who are evil while condemning and trying to silence those who resist.
“‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ There is good news,” he said. “That good news is being suppressed, but it is still good news, and it is still our only hope. And what that means is that we have to gird up our loins, deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. We have to be ready and willing to endure the suffering that will inevitably come, and it will.”
Baucham concluded his remarks by urging his listeners to pray for revival, but conceded that he cannot personally see any way out of the spiritual darkness into which the culture has plunged itself.
“We’re going to have to pray that God would send revival, because He’s already sent judgment,” Baucham concluded. “What we’ve just read is the wrath of God, and we’re seeing it everywhere. The wrath of God is here; the judgment of God is here. Plead with Him for His mercy. Plead with Him that all would not be lost.”
“If you’re anything like me, it’s hard to see a way out of this, it really is,” he added. “It’s hard to imagine how that would happen. What would that look like? I have no idea — but God. So we pray and we hope and we stand firm and we cling to the only thing that we know can stem the tide.”