GAY TRUTH

Every passing week makes it simply more obvious that the American culture is essentially one prolonged celebration of immorality. This is true at the popular level—gay marriage at the Grammys ? Really?—as well as at the more erudite academic level, where it is a virtue to be critically authoritative with a healthy disdain for absolute truth. Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP–used under Fair Use While once we held to a Christian veneer, now sexual sin is  pushed as progressive, abortion is funded by tax dollars, and the fear of the Lord has been replaced with the celebration of self. Where people used to blush, they now boast. Having been been “liberated” from biblical ethics , our society has instead produced a culture of death. People define virtue not on God ’s terms, but instead as doing what is right in their own eyes. Even in churches the gospel of grace is often replaced with a man-centered watered-down substitute, as if acceptability were the goal and compromise the me

Image via Wikipedia by Elodie Ballantine Emig It seems logical to move from Genesis 19 to Judges 19, because the two stories have similar elements. At the same time, because the settings and outcomes of the stories are so different, we will begin our study with a brief comparison of their historical backgrounds. Abraham probably journeyed to Canaan sometime between 2000 and 1800 B.C.  Though difficult to date exactly due to overlapping judgeships and the fact that Jephthah says that Israel had occupied the land for three hundred years (Judges 11:26), the period of the Judges is placed by most scholars between 1200 and 1020 B.C.  That is, we locate it from fifty years after the conquest of Canaan to the most probable date for the anointing of Saul as King.  If, on the basis of Judges 11:26 among other things, those who argue for a 15th century conquest of Canaan are correct, we need adjust only the earlier date, leaving 1020 B.C. as the end point of the period of the Judges. So we