We've posted clips of sermons delivered by John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California before, mainly because James Dobson seems to love them. And it is easy to see why, given this sermon MacArthur delivered a few weeks ago entitled "Homosexuality and the Campaign for Immorality" in which he thundered that God has abandoned America over the sin of homosexuality and that gays have "unleashed on the world the horror of AIDS" while declaring that "the Democratic Party has become the anti-God party, the sin-promoting party":
What you see in Romans chapter 1 is the sequence of what happens when God abandons a nation. First, verse 24 says, He gives them over to “the lust of their hearts to impurity,” sexual sin, the dishonoring of their bodies among them. When God abandons a society, the first thing that happens is it becomes pornographic. It becomes obsessed with sex, obsessed with fornication, adultery, every kind of sexual behavior. We have gone through that already in the sexual revolution a couple of decades ago.
The second thing that happens when God abandons a culture is found in verse 26, “God gave them over to degrading passions...their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural...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.” At the end of that verse, “Receiving in their persons the due penalty” is the diseases that come consequent to homosexual behavior. And as you know, they unleashed on the world the horror of AIDS.
But what it’s saying here is that when God abandons a nation or a culture under His wrath, there will be a sexual revolution followed by a homosexual revolution. And we are living in this very condition.
There’s a third step, verse 28, “God gave them over to a depraved mind,” that’s a mind that doesn’t function, that can’t think right. So life becomes filled with unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, envy, murder, and we talked about that last week, the massive murder of millions and millions of unborn infants in the womb that is carried on in our country and around the world.
Also characteristic of this depraved mind is they become haters of God, haters of God. We’re living in the outpouring of the wrath of God in the category of His abandoning a culture, and we’re living in the sequence that is here--a sexual revolution, a homosexual revolution, a reprobate mind that unleashes everything, including murder on a massive scale, and hate toward God.
It was shocking to me a few weeks ago, as I said last Sunday, to see that these very things that God hates and that bring down God’s judgment were affirmed as part of the Democratic Party platform. Open sex with government-provided contraception, murder of babies in wombs, God left out of the platform, and homosexual behavior even, advocating homosexual marriage--an oxymoron, since that’s impossible.
Now, all of a sudden, not only is this characteristic of our nation, but we now promote it. One of the parties, the Democratic Party, has now made Romans 1, the sins of Romans 1, their agenda. What God condemns, they affirm. What God punishes, they exalt. Shocking, really. The Democratic Party has become the anti-God party, the sin-promoting party. By the way, there are seventy-two million registered Democrats in this country who have identified themselves with that party and maybe they need to rethink that identification.
I know from last week’s message that there was some response from people who said, “Why are you getting political?”
Romans 1 is not politics. The Bible is not politics. This has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with speaking the Word of God through the culture in which we live. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s not about personalities; it’s about iniquity and judgment. And why do we say this? Because this must be recognized for what it is--sin, serious sin, damning sin, destructive sin.
You say, “Well, our society cultivates tolerance and you’re giving hate speech.” What I’m saying is not hate speech. What the Democratic Party is saying is hate speech because they must hate the homosexuals if they will allow them to go the direction they’re going, affirm that knowing that it will take them to hell. That’s hate speech. This is love speech. You either warn them or you affirm them. And Romans 1 warns them and any faithful Christian warns this is dangerous, this is deadly. It’s better to warn them than to affirm them. You might be the nice guy to affirm them, but that’s not love speech, that’s hate speech.
