Scripture routinely speaks about the value of life, protecting the innocent, human equality, the blessing of children, and so forth. Even if one can make a case for the most extreme edge cases of ending a pregnancy, there’s no way to square the “any time, any reason” stance that abortion advocates all insist on, one way or another. The more a person wants to justify killing the unborn, the more they have to distance themselves from Scripture. One way to do that is to claim the Bible is hazy on the subject.
The Bible is also clear about God’s design for sex and gender. Where the Bible is distinct on such things, it’s ignored as outdated or simply wrong. Or the fact that the words are translated is used to suggest that we can’t know what the author meant. Or the words are re-defined and twisted to imply something the original writers—and five thousand years of church history—had never intended. Those who generally accept the Bible don’t struggle to understand what it’s saying.
Debates over gender roles even reach into long-understood biblical concepts. Perhaps the most common is women and preaching. Here, God is clear, but culture has muddled the words we used. That generates most misunderstandings about those verses. We often debate what “preaching” means and how it relates to teaching and authority. What Scripture relates looks different in different cultural application. But consistent theme is that ultimate spiritual authority is reserved for males. Here, again, the most contentious voices in the discussion seem to be those who insist there is zero difference, of any kind, in God’s spiritual design of the two sexes. One can interpret some Scripture in diverse ways, but it’s very difficult to square that extreme with the Bible. Yet those who hold the non-traditional view generate most of the vitriol.
Jesus confronted His critics at one point by saying they “refused” to believe (John 5:39–40). The men he scolded were well-acquainted with Scripture, well-educated otherwise, and had first-hand eyewitness evidence of Jesus’ divinity. Judas was given in-your-face proof that Jesus was the Messiah but refused to accept truth. It could not have been clearer—but those men did not agree to come to faith. Jesus reiterated the same basic teaching in His parables (Luke 16:31). The essential flaw—human stubbornness—can carry over into believers who insist on making the Bible say what they prefer, rather than adapting their beliefs to what it says.
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