Last year, Target came up with the bright idea of allowing men to have permission to use a woman's restroom if the man feels like he is a woman and prefers to use the woman's room. This allowance could lead to a lot of different problematic situations that I will not go into at this time. After that incident took place, I made a personal decision to not use Target anymore unless someone either gave me a gift certificate or if someone was registered there for their wedding or baby shower.
What is wrong with Target allowing men to use women's restrooms and vice-versa? Well, starting with the Bible, the whole way of thinking that homosexuality is right and normal is covered. The Bible has a whole lot to say about how we are to use our bodies, and there are boundaries in what we can do with our bodies, or what we can do to other people's bodies.
A note about the Target issue: Although we don't agree with Target's policies, and we know the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong and will be punished, in no way do we reject people who are homosexuals or transgenders. They are people who are created in God's image, and, like all of us, are slaves to their sins. They need the Gospel message, just as we do, for the sins we have committed. We are all subject to the temptations and trappings of sin, and we all need a Savior from sin.
The Bible is very clear that marriage is made up of one man and one woman. God designed men and women to marry and have sexual relations. That is a good thing. It is a beautiful thing when used correctly. But when it is used in any other form, it is wrong. It will be punished by God.
The problems we have today in our society stem from wrong thinking, and a philosophy that tells us that whatever is truth to us, that is our truth. In other words, truth is subjective. So, if the Bible says that being immoral is wrong and God will judge immoral people, if I believe that it is ok for me to be immoral, than I have a 'right' to immorality. Somehow, God's standard gets left out or is subject to our standard.
So, if I have a standard that wants to protect my privacy in a restroom, that standard actually becomes subject to a greater stander, that of one which says that a man can come into the restroom I am using because his feelings of desiring to be a woman and use a woman's restroom to express his feelings, I must be subject to that.
If I put a post out about this on Facebook, people will call me a bigot. They did today. How does one live in their boundaries when someone else's newly created boundaries cross over theirs?
One of the comments expressly said that I didn't know the Bible because it is a book of God's love. So, that brings up the question which is the title of this article. Does having standards imply that a person is a bigot if they have standards? A more intense question is, is God a bully because He has standards? Do His standards violate His characteristic of love?
The person who wrote the comment on God's love was correct. The part that is hard for us to understand is that although God is love, and God loved us so much that He sent His Son to die for us, in our place, is that God has standards. If God didn't have standards, then He wouldn't have had to send His Son to die in our place. We could never measure up to God's standards, but Jesus did. That is why He was the only one qualified to die in our place, to take our sins away.
I think this post-modern thinking has messed people up so much. The second commandment says that we cannot make for us a graven image of God. We cannot make a god to suit ourselves. That is why it is so hard for a post-modern person to understand the message of the Gospel. They don't understand that God has standards, and if they do understand that God has standards, they call Him a bully.
They want to take the shortcut to escape hell. They want to believe that God is all-loving and all-forgiving, and that all they have to do is mentally accept the facts that are true, and they are good to go. They don't want to understand that God does love us, and that His love is so great that it provided a way for Him to make for us so that we could be redeemed from our sins. When it involves a personal response from the person in order for salvation to take affect in the person's life, they say, 'forget it'.
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