Christianity: Good, True, and Beautiful?

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Rebecca McLaughlin
Good afternoon. You guys may have first seen in your program this was a session with me and Rachel, a so-called duo. But after thinking through the kinds of questions that we were going to be working through in this session, we realized that Rachel is standing up and kind of saying, “So, Rachel, what do you think about this? “I don’t know, Rebecca, what do you think about that? Probably wasn’t going to bring out the best in us, and we thought to make our combination even more dangerous, we would add in one of our favorite people. This is called an upgrade, Mary Willson, Hannah, you know, Rachel had true covered, I had good covered, so we needed beautiful, and here’s his Mary to help us. So Mary’s going to be stewarding and steering this conversation, but there are two things that I think both Rachel and I would want you to take away. If nothing else, number one, all of these questions come back to the gospel, and number two, we need to be more biblical and not less. So, if you hear us saying anything apart from that in this session, ignore it, and if you forget every other word we said in this session. Please remember those two things. This is all about the gospel, and we need to be more biblical, not less. Over to you, Mary.

Mary Hannah
Thank you. I think I join with all of you in just expressing my gratitude for the two of you. That the fact that you begin that way and tell us that’s the major takeaway that is such a joy, we know that you’re authentic in that, and that’s the drum beat of your life. We’re grateful, Rachel. I’d love to start with you. Last night, you two graciously joined a group of local church sisters of mine and shared a bit of your story and your current life with Christ, and interestingly, you told us about your teenage years and your early university years, in which you could never have guessed that 40 year old Rachel would be gladly and confidently articulating Christianity’s truth, goodness, and beauty. Explain,

Rachel Gilson
yeah, I had a very simplistic and small view of Christianity by the time I entered into college, so I often say I got tricked into moving to Yale from Southern California, where it’s cold all the time, and when I, when I showed up on campus, I had this view of Christians, well, one, I thought of them as stupid people, you know. I thought this isn’t true. This is just people believe in a made-up god, because it is a crutch that helps them get through life. That’s not what real thinkers do. That’s not what, you know, people who are pursuing true questions need. And the other thing that I thought about Christianity came from something I’d recognized about myself in high school, which was that the way that my female friends felt about other young men was actually how I felt about other young women, and so as I started to have sexual and romantic relationships with other young women, I thought, oh, this is where I feel at home, this is where I think my future is, and even though I had never been mistreated by a Christian because of my sexuality, I just sort of knew that Christians were bigots, that they were against me because of this part of my life. So, when I showed up at school, I just thought, why have no need for that at all? Christianity was offensive and ugly to me, but college was shifting for me. Going to a world-class university really shook up my understanding of myself as intelligent, knocked me down, which was very good. And then the other thing that happened was the girl I was dating at the time dumped me, and some of you have been through teenage breakups, you remember that, that’s hard. So I was looking around for something, but it wasn’t Jesus, but luckily Jesus was looking for me. So I remember being in a lecture, hearing about existence of God, being interested, Googling. I started reading different stories about Jesus, and was finding him more interesting than the caricature in my mind had been, but I was still like, oh, I’m a self-respecting atheist, I want to marry a woman someday, like I can’t be interested in Jesus. The only two people I knew at Yale’s campus who identified as Christians were these two young women who were dating each other. So, I remember going to them thinking, can you explain to me how this worked? They were like, oh yeah, the Bible’s been misinterpreted. If you interpret it correctly, you’ll see that God affirms monogamous gay relationships. They gave me this packet explaining, and I was comparing it to Bible verses I was pulling up, and I thought, I’m not a Bible scholar, but I know how to read. I don’t think this is.. I don’t think the Bible is for this. I just doesn’t make sense to me at all. A little while after that, I happened to be in the room of one of my friends. She had a bookshelf. One of my favorite hobbies is looking at people’s bookshelves and judging them, and she – it’s true – she had a copy. There was a spine on her bookshelf that said “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis, and I hadn’t been raised on Narnia, but like the title was. Appealing to me, so I was too embarrassed to ask my friend for the book, so I just stole the book, so I put it in my bag, and I was, you still

Mary Hannah
steal books?

Speaker 1
Well, not present progressive, but you know, at this, at this time, yeah, no sanctification, come on, but I was reading this book in between classes one day, and it wasn’t like a particular chapter or page or anything like that, but in the midst of reading it, I was suddenly overwhelmed that God does exist, and not like a store brand God or Zeus or something like this, but the God who made everything, the God who is perfect, and I knew I was going to have to give him an account of my life, and I, I had met me, I was arrogant and unkind and sexually immoral, and I lied for fun, and I was reading a stolen book, like I knew where all my chips were, so God really confronted me with the bad news of the gospel at first, but really quickly with that, I also understood that part of the reason Jesus had come was to place himself as a barrier between God’s wrath and me, and that the only way to be safe was to run towards Jesus, not away from Jesus, and so I remember thinking, I don’t want to become a Christian. Christians are really lame, but I was also like, I can’t pretend this isn’t real just because it’s like inconvenient for my life, like I should take the deal. So in that moment I was confronted, this is true, and I was also confronted this is clearly good for me, because I’ve just been rescued for something I could not possibly rescue myself out of. The jury at that exact moment was out whether Christianity would be beautiful, but in my 22 years of walking with the Lord, now He’s proven Himself to be beautiful over and over again. So it’s been one of the greatest joys of my life.

Mary Hannah
Thanks there. Rebecca. Your journey that God has had you on to come to the same conclusion as Rachel, that Christianity is true, good, and beautiful, including with respect to sexuality and gender. Your journey has been very different. Can you tell us a bit about your journey, and how God has brought you to this place of gladly and confidently declaring those truths.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes, so I grew up in London, quite a long way away from California, where Rachel was. It’s also geographically we’ve moved to the same place, and actually also theologically we’ve moved to the same place. I grew up in a church-going home, but it was a very kind of mixed home in terms of our the kind of church that we attended. As long as I can remember, honestly, I’ve been a follower of Jesus, and as long as I can remember having any kind of sexual or romantic feelings, they’re always directed toward other women or girls at the time. And so I grew up, you know, seriously following Jesus, wanting to tell my friends about Jesus. I was in quite kind of academic schooling environments where almost none of my friends believed in Jesus, so actually more of them were in Rachel’s camp of Christianity is stupid and foolish, and I wouldn’t even consider the claims of Jesus for all these reasons. I was very sure about who Jesus was. I was also just not really sure what to do with the feelings that were arising in me, and I think, honestly, I was mostly hoping that they would just go away. I thought, you know, this is just like a phase I’m going through, like adolescent acne or something, and I’ll grow out of this, and then, you know, going off to university, disappointed to find I hadn’t grown out of this, going to grad school hadn’t grown out of this, so I needed to believe that Jesus is true and good and beautiful, and that what the Bible says on these questions is true and good and beautiful in many ways, actually, before I really understood the gospel underpinnings of Christian sexual ethics, but I’m thankful to have grown up in a home where I did know Jesus from an early age, and thankful for His faithfulness over the years to me.

Mary Hannah
I want to shift gears now and think more narrowly. We’ve talked about sexuality and gender, and how you have seen Christianity’s truth and goodness and beauty there. I want to shift our focus more narrowly to the question relating to trans identities. I want to ask you, Rachel, in particular, what do you think you know nowadays so many of our friends and neighbors are turned off to Christianity as a result of what they see as Christians opposing people with trans identities, and they’ve come to the conclusion that Christianity is ugly, and that it’s a lie, and that it’s bad. Yeah, what do you think about our generation, the church, and our generation, our opportunity this moment? What kind of opportunities do we have in light of where we are with respect to conversations about transgender?

Speaker 1
Well, I was wondering, Dex, did you want to do the metaphor? Okay, your question wasn’t bad, but I was thinking what I have to say about trans identities is important, and it actually builds on something that Rebecca and I share a strong opinion about.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes, so let’s go

Mary Hannah
in a different order. You and then I said

Rebecca McLaughlin
I’d come to a clear understanding of how what the Bible says about gender, sexuality actually flows out of the gospel, but then I failed to explain and articulate that, so I will, I will do that real quick now. If we look at the Bible from beginning to end, we will find that it is actually not a story of hate, as many in our culture think, but it’s a story of love, but it’s just a bigger love story than many of us were ready for. So we see at the very beginning when God makes human beings male and female in His image, and he joins one man and one woman together in this sort of covenant of marriage as a very strange description that God gives in Genesis two, he says, Therefore, a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and they shall become one flesh, sort of curious description. Pop there at the end of Genesis two, and then Genesis three happens, and the first man and woman turn away from God, and all sorts of sinful behaviors flow out of that. We see that throughout the Old Testament. We’ll touch on some of those in a little while, but we see, including every example possible of sexual sin, every sort of breaking of that one flesh union of one man and one woman, and at the same time, as we read through the Old Testament carefully, we will start to hear a love song being sung, and it is the love song of God for His people. Time and again, the prophets will compare God to a loving, faithful husband, and Israel to an all too often unfaithful wife, and it’s like this, marriage is in constant crisis, because God’s people keep on cheating on him with other so-called gods, are sort of idols of the ancient world, and God keeps forgiving them and wooing them back, but it’s like this marriage is sort of in crisis, headed for a divorce, and then Jesus comes, and Jesus steps onto the stage of human history, and one of the strange things that Jesus says about himself is that he is the bridegroom. You think, well, what’s that about? I mean, Jesus never married in his life on earth, so what are we.. what are we talking about there? Well, it’s one of the ways in which Jesus is stepping into the shoes of the Creator God of the Old Testament, you know, saying, I’m the husband, I’ve come to claim God’s people for myself. And then, as we read through the New Testament, we see Paul in Ephesians five saying that Christian marriage is actually designed to echo Jesus’s love for his people, and at the end of that chapter, sort of a chapter which, when I first seriously wrestled with it as a student, I found sort of highly offensive, Paul’s first statement: Wives submit your husbands as to Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ as the head of the church. I was, I was really thrown by that as I read on, and as I explored more and listened to what Paul then says to husbands, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. And thought about, well, wait a minute, what does that look like? How did how did Christ love the church and give himself up for her naked and bleeding on a Roman cross, giving everything he had for love of us? It’s the opposite of a mandate for oppression of women, and actually, what Paul’s saying in Ephesians five, he said it’s not based on sort of gendered psychology or any kind of cultural construct, it’s based on Christ in the church. It’s Christ-centered theology, and it’s fascinating to me at the end of that extraordinary description of Christian marriage that Paul gives. He quotes back Genesis two: Therefore, a man will leave his father and his mother, be united to his wife, they should become one flesh.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And Paul says this is a profound mystery, and I’m saying that it refers to Christ in the church, so from the beginning, from creation, from when God made humans male and female in His image, from when He instituted marriages, always about Jesus and His people, and we see at the very end of the Bible and book of Revelation this great shout going out, the wedding of the Lamb has come, and Jesus has married to His church, bringing heaven and earth back together, so this is actually why marriage is male, female, and why husbands and wives are called to different roles, like Christ in the church, it’s a love built on sacrifice, like Christ in the church, it’s a love across difference, like Christ in the church, it’s a life creating, flesh, uniting, never-ending, exclusive love, so this is the the gospel foundation for what the Bible is telling us on these questions, and it’s actually about a love much greater than any human marriage is going to give to any of us. It’s about Jesus’s love for us. Now, back to the trans questions that Rachel was going to answer, what we’re trying.

Speaker 1
To say is there’s sometimes Christianity has been taught as if it’s just a chorus of no, but what we see in God’s positive sexual images, it’s a yes, it’s a very specific yes that we’re united to, and so when we come to a question like transgender identities, I mean it’s complex, it’s vulnerable, part of our affirmation is we see God at the beginning created male and female very good, but we know we live in a fallen world, we don’t always experience that as very good, and so Rebecca and I live outside of Boston, it’s a very progressive place, so many of our neighbors who do not identify as transgender think of Christianity as ugly or harmful because of our non acceptance of transgender identities and what’s interesting to me about this point of view is well progressive secularism includes right now an embrace and advocacy a celebration of transgender identities but what’s funny about progressive secularism is it’s a radical Christian heresy. You only get that form of secularism if it’s been bathing in the gospel for a long time. Progressive secularism is basically like a teenage girl who’s really mad at her mom, the gospel, but still wants to use her stuff. So a lot of the reasons that they’re mad about us regarding trans identities is because they’re taking virtues that belong to Christians and kind of weirdly judging Christianity with it, but in the wrong way. So, for example, part of the reason that our neighbors think of our view as so ugly or harmful is because they really have seen trans identifying people mistreated, they really have seen them harmed or disrespected in a variety of ways, and they understand that well, that’s wrong, people shouldn’t be mistreated because of different points of view or different ways of living. Well, they didn’t get that out of nowhere. That actually comes from that’s justice. It is God who said every single human is made in my image. Every single human being, therefore, deserves honor and dignity and respect. Period. No matter whether they agree with us or not, right? That comes from the Bible, and justice again, not made up by progressives. Justice is something God declares, like I’m going to take care of the oppressed and the forgotten and the lowly. And so, when they get mad at how even sometimes Christians have mistreated trans-identifying people, they’re expressing something that lines up with what we view, which is that no one should be harassed or mistreated for any view of difference. So, in any place we have authority to, we should repent. The proper response to that is repentance. The proper response isn’t giving up what God has said, which is that we have been made male and female. It is our responsibility to live in alignment to represent through our gender the body that God has given us, but the other thing, reason why they often think that Christianity is ugly in this place is because they think we’re betraying the good of authenticity. Sometimes you’ve heard this like expressive individualism, right, that your feelings are who you really are, and then you have to live those out. Well, this is really just a very sick version of a Christian virtue. You might even call it in Christianity integrity. It’s not the French existentialists who made up that your outside life needs to match your inner life. That’s something that I mean, Jeremiah was saying, God’s got to give you a new heart. Jesus was saying it doesn’t matter what you do on the outside, you have to be transformed from the inside. So many Christian thinkers have said, oh, we have to, we have to go inward so that we can go upward, like our whole lives have to matter, integrity. But if you rip Jesus out of that good and you just have authenticity, well then you go deep into your heart, and you see what you feel, and that’s not a safe place to go without the gospel, because you’re going to find in your heart evil things, you’re going to find in your heart broken things.

Speaker 1
When we go into our hearts with the gospel, with Jesus, I know I can be forgiven, I know I can be healed, and also anything good can be fanned into flame appropriately, but if I don’t go in with the gospel, I’ll either despair or I’ll have to pretend that that evil inside me is actually good, and so our culture has a parody of integrity, but none of us actually think that we should only do what we feel, right? The only people we know who do exactly what they feel are toddlers, and that’s not a beautiful vision of how to live a full and human life. So our neighbors are on, are on to something that integrity really matters, but it’s actually the gospel that gives them a better access to the way that our. Hearts can align with our outside living, because our hearts need to be corrected and directed by God’s word and transformed by God’s spirit. I

Mary Hannah
so appreciate the careful listening and the act of compassion that’s evidenced even in your approach to that question. You’re wanting to recognize what is that heart longing that is being perverted, but how can I honor this person and understanding where they’re coming from. Thank you for that. Is there anything you’d want to add? Yeah,

Rebecca McLaughlin
and so much of what our friends and neighbors in the Boston area believe, and the basis on which they critique Christianity, as Rachel has been saying, is a Christian foundation, and without Christianity, they have no basis for it. So, I’ll give one provocative and painful example, but about the only statement of sexual ethics that everybody in the Boston area agrees with is that rape is wrong. You know, we really believe in consent, and that’s regardless of people’s sort of religious or non-religious backgrounds. Well, they didn’t realize it’s actually Christianity that first brought the idea of sexual consent to the Western world, because in the Greco-Roman Empire, a lot of people just didn’t count, you know? You could, you could have sex with a slave or a prostitute, nobody was asking whether they consented or not. They didn’t have a sort of integrity to lose or like a sexual honor that could be compromised, and the radical message of Christianity includes the fact that all human beings are actually valuable, regardless of whether they’re male or female, rich or poor, their sort of status in the world, and it was on that basis that this idea of it’s really just not okay to force sex on somebody, that’s where it came from. And actually, if you take Christianity out, plenty of friends who would identify as secular or secular humanists or atheists, or they would say, I look to science for all my truth claims, you know, look at the look at the natural world, you’ll see plenty of things, which in human terms we would call rape. If you take Christianity out, we don’t have any basis, actually, for condemning that. So, as you, as you look at each of these kinds of questions, where our non-Christian friends or family members or colleagues might have really serious sort of moral critiques of Christianity. They’re often, as Rachel puts it, sort of using their mum’s stuff while rejecting the relationship with their mum. It’s like they’re taking Christian goods and arguing against Christianity on the basis of those things, but if you look more closely in each instance you find that Christianity actually gives you the right and good foundation. Jesus looks better the closer you look, rather than, rather than worse on these questions.

Speaker 1
And actually, this is important with transgender identities as well, because even for our neighbors who have this, the real experience of gender dysphoria, this ache that they’re not in the right embodiment. Well, there’s no amount of surgery or hormonal treatments that can actually put them in a real body, but for our siblings in Christ who walk with gender dysphoria, they have a real promise that when Christ raises them from the dead, they will finally receive a body in which they feel at home, that we’ve, we, Christianity actually has, Jesus has for them a promise that medical treatments are only a parody of, and that’s something that is really beautiful for people who are walking in a long obedience that’s very difficult,

Rebecca McLaughlin
and not, not that he will give us a body of the opposite sex. There’s actually like a continuity between our sex bodies now and what they will be in eternity, but that there is a glorious transformation healing. Yeah,

Mary Hannah
sounds like a true, good, and beautiful promise. I know two people who, in a workshop talk, but topic included sexuality, gender warfare, and judgment, just in 45 minutes, so we’ve got to now transition from having touched on the topics of the truth, goodness, and beauty of Christianity with respect to sexuality and gender to take a look at the same thing with respect to warfare and judgment. Rebecca, you mentioned moments ago that when you came to the Ephesians five passage about husbands being had over their wives, you were blown back for a bit, and it’s true that, particularly in the Old Testament, there are many passages relating to war, conquest, judgment that, especially at first glance, can throw us off, and there’s actually a process of wise interpretation that’s involved that takes time. Can you share with us a time that you misinterpreted something in the Old Testament with respect to warfare and judgment?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, so this was a couple years ago, I was doing a Bible read through in a year, you know, as we sometimes do, I. And you know, sometimes you will, you will read a passage of the scriptures, and it’s a little bit like when I was walking down the street that same week, and there was like a dead rat on the ground, and I thought, I’m going to step over that, and I’m not going to look at it, and I’m like, I just want to kind of forget, I want to blank that out of my experience, that was the nasty thing on the ground, I’m just going to keep moving, so I was reading through the book of Judges, and you know I’m well-versed enough in scripture to know that everything that the Bible describes isn’t necessarily prescribed, right? But I read through the book of Judges, and is shortly after JL has done her nifty bit of work with the tent peg and sister is head, right, so we’ve had that incident, and then Deborah, who is at that time like God’s prophet and judge to his people, so like appointed by the Lord, is sort of singing this song of praise, like celebrating the victory, and at one point she says, Have they divided the spoils, a womb or two for every man, and I thought, “Oh, I’m having like a dead rat experience here, because this isn’t just like a bad thing that happened in the Old Testament, and there are many sinful things and bad things that happen in the Old Testament. I know that in ancient warfare context, and tragically in many modern ones as well, that conquering armies will often rape the conquered women, but here we have, you know, God’s prophet talking about a womb or two for every every man, like, what is even happening here? And I spent a few hours sort of trying to pretend it wasn’t there, and then I texted Rachel, and I said, I’m having a really hard time with this little verse that I didn’t really want to look at again, and she said, Oh, Deborah is putting those words into the mouth of Sisera, the conquered general, like the enemy general’s mother, that she, Deborah, is imagining her waiting for her son to come back victorious, like, oh, you know, have they divided the spoils, a womb or two for every man, like this is normal conquest behavior, and I thought, oh, I had, like, properly failed to read that verse in context at all, and I got, I got tripped up on it, and so I’d wanted to look less, and in fact I needed to look more, because what was actually being said there was quite the opposite of what I thought was being said, so I’m just sort of telling that as a story. My guess is all of us have been there one way or another. I’ve been there quite recently, and I needed my friend who knows the Bible better than I do to like dig me out of my own foolishness.

Mary Hannah
Bottom line, we all need Rachel Gilson on speed dial, so you know, do what you can. Speaking of having you on speed dial, there is a long history.

Speaker 1
I don’t think speed dial is even a thing anymore. Mary, you

Mary Hannah
know you’re 40, I’m 44 but so don’t you make fun of me for being an old lady. That’s the one in the middle. Nice try though. Back to you, Rachel. So there’s a long history in the church, sadly, of trying to understand and reconcile some of the perceived problems of warfare in the Old Testament with the New Testament, and sometimes there have even been heresies where folks have said that there’s a so-called God of the Old Testament, pitting that so-called God against the so-called God of the New Testament. So, there’s a long history of trying to solve that problem with these difficult passages in that way. Can you share with us a bit about your experiences in that, and give us some thoughts from the Scriptures about how do we reconcile this?

Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s important, because when we encounter, you know, like the Canaanite conquest text, we were like, oh, that seems really hard, and so it could be a quick or lazy solution to be like, well, that doesn’t look like Jesus, so maybe I should just let it go, but again, like Rebecca said, we always need to read closer, read more, not pull away. It’s really important, for example, when we consider the conquest texts, that’s not God just randomly killing innocent people. He doesn’t just wake up angry and be like, “I’m just going to smite some folks. This was particularly God had patiently borne sinful behavior of a particular people, and He was judging them. He was judging evil using his people, Israel. So it was a judicial act. It was not random, arbitrary, or the killing of innocents. And it’s not like God was playing favoritism, like He uses Israel to mete out judgment, but He’s never going to judge Israel. No, Israel as well fell into centuries of disobedience, and God used another nation to come and bring justice to them. Part of what we see in this pattern is God is always caring about evil; He knows that it is unjust and needs to be punished. And so you think, well, does that theme go away when we go to the New Testament? Certainly not. And in fact, when, when any of us have experienced evil committed against us, or we see evil in the world, we know intuitively that it has to be punished, that it needs to be dealt with. When we get to the New Testament, we finally see how God deals with this, because when you recognize evil, our question stops being, why did he mete out justice in that time, or in this particular place, or there. When you see how pervasive evil is, you wonder, why isn’t he meting out justice constantly? How can any of this stand? So we see in Christ’s death on the cross God’s response to injustice, God’s response to evil, He took upon Himself and violently died and suffered to bear our sins, so that we could be forgiven, so that we could be healed, because our evil was never going to be swept under the carpet. It had to be dealt with, so God dealt with it in the cross, and Jesus warns about this constantly. The New Testament warns about this constantly. If you do not hide yourself in Jesus, who has borne your punishment for you, you will meet it when God comes again, and there is a final judgment. The God of the Old Testament was punishing evil. The God of the New Testament is judging evil, and that’s why the warnings about hell are so urgent and so important. If we do not hide ourselves in Jesus, if our neighbors don’t hide themselves in Jesus. They will face God’s wrath. God is the same. He must punish evil, but God’s grace is more, and His mercy is more. That’s why the call to come to Christ by faith alone is repeatedly held out, repeatedly offered to us and to all people, because God doesn’t want us to face him outside of Christ. We are only saved facing him in Christ,

Rebecca McLaughlin
and when we recognize that, and we read the Old Testament through that lens, a lot of things start to make sense. So one of the Old Testament books that can be really challenging in this area is Joshua, and it’s fascinating in Sunday school. Kids learn about the walls of Jericho coming tumbling down, right? We sort of sanitize it. We’re like, oh, they blew the trumpets and the walls came down, and end of story. Lovely, isn’t that great? If you read Joshua, you see, you know, God’s sending judgment on Jericho through his people, and you see a devoting to destruction of that of that city, except for Rahab, because prior to that Joshua had sent spies to Jericho, they had been, they’d gone to Rahab, who was the prostitute, a Canaanite prostitute, so like, couldn’t have been in category terms that are further from God’s people. And how does Rahab respond? She says, I recognize that you guys are serving the true God, and I want to be count, like I want to be on your side when the judgment comes. Like, please promise me that I and my family will be, will be protected, because I’ve heard about who God is, I recognize who He is, and I want to be on the Lord’s side when the judgment comes, and she and her family are saved. And then we have the contrast with Achan, who was in God’s people, he’s an Israelite, but he disobeyed God, he took some of the devoted things, hid them in his own sort of tent, and what happens to him, he and his whole family are judged. So we see even in the book of Joshua, we see like trust now in the God of all the universe, who is the true and living God, who is the one who will bring judgment, and like hide yourself in Christ, as Rachel has been pointing us to, and then when the judgment comes, you are safe. So much of the Old Testament starts to make sense through the light of the gospel. Likewise, so much of the New Testament makes sense the more you understand of the Old Testament. As we look at all of these things, if we lean into what the Scriptures are telling us, and understand more of them, and read them more in context. They start to make a deep and profound and gospel-oriented sense, which, if we increasingly shy away from them, we’re just not going to be able to see.

Mary Hannah
And when you say in context, obviously a key aspect of that is recognizing the progressive revelation of God’s salvation purposes, beginning in the garden all the way through Christ to the new heavens and earth. So, God, the God of the Old Testament, New Testament, is the same God, but He’s dealing in the Old Testament, the Old Covenant age, in a manner that is preparing God’s peace. People, for the Lord Jesus Christ, which is different than his dealings in the New Covenant Age. Let’s say that one of you has a friend that you have a relationship with, who’s not a believer. Well,

Speaker 1
that’s nice. You know, we don’t have friends, right?

Mary Hannah
Right, that’s why y’all hang out so much. Don’t have many options. So, let’s say you have a friend, just use your sanctified imagination, and she’s not a believer. And in the course of a conversation with you, she says, I don’t believe that Christianity is true, good, or beautiful, because the Bible sanctions genocide. Would you respond to her just the way you articulated now? Might there be something else you might say? How might you respond to that friend? What might your strategy be in that conversation? I

Rebecca McLaughlin
mean, one of the things I’d say, it’s actually analogous to the questions about rape. Where did my friend, who does not consider herself a Christian at all, where did she get the idea that genocide is wrong? Because, you know, go back to the Greco-Roman Empire, go back to the ancient world, and conquering your enemies and completely destroying them. That was a great day. Nobody was worrying about the women and children of your conquered foes. In fact, like, great, take them, I mean, so many, so many ways in which they could be abused and exploited, and that was all a okay, so where did we get this idea that the lives of our enemies matter? Well, we actually got it from the Bible, and this idea that all humans are made in the image of God, and that actually we were worth Jesus coming to die for, and the extraordinary teachings of this first century Jewish man who never led an army or ruled an empire or even wrote a book, who now by any measure has been the most influential thinker in all of human history, and who our least Christian friends are getting like half their ethics from. That’s why they’re concerned about genocide, seeming genocide in the old, in the Old Testament. So, so I’d probably want to kind of gently probe where they had got that right assumption from that genocide is wrong, and I would want to point them to this first century thinker who said that we should love our enemies, completely radical, extraordinary idea, and yet one that he didn’t just say but actually did in the most sacrificial, beautiful, world-changing way.

Mary Hannah
Anything you might add, Rachel, with your friend?

Speaker 1
Yeah, if I had a friend, I might.. I think what’s really important to remember, too, anytime I’ve got a friend who’s coming to me with these hard questions, Christianity is only good, true, and beautiful because Jesus is good, true, and beautiful. So, even if I have someone in my life who seems aggressively opposed to God, I’ve been told in God’s word, my enemy is not flesh and blood, my enemy is spiritual, like my neighbors who think that Christianity is hateful and ugly and broken. They are captured, they are enslaved by their sin and by false ideology, and that ideology doesn’t love them. You know what I mean? It didn’t die for them like Jesus did. So, I’m sitting across from someone who has real problems and real objections. I want to take those very seriously, and I’m always going to try to get it back to the person of Jesus, because the gospel really is the power of salvation for everyone who believes, and most, most of the best answers to the hardest questions come when you look through Him, because when you see who He is for us, not just when He lived on this earth, but who He continues to be for us, interceding for us in heaven, praying for us, promising us that he’s going to bring us all the way home, that that’s what helps us and our neighbors get through some of these hardest questions, so they shouldn’t be shied away from. We’ve got to press in through love,

Mary Hannah
and even your story proves the fact, you’re reading a stolen book and you’re reading a good argument, but it wasn’t the argument itself that converted you, it was the Holy Spirit who regenerated your heart. So, because of your belief and conviction of the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Lord Jesus, and your belief and conviction that the Spirit regenerates the heart, you’re going to give your best arguments, but it’s not up to you to convince the person, and that takes the anxiety out of it. Well, friends, thank you so much. Friends, and real friends, thank you so much for what you’ve shared with us. We’ve all benefited a lot. We’re grateful for you. Thanks. God be with you all.