The prophet Isaiah wrote, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). “Woe” signifies a crying or groaning on God’s part because of future punishments to come on those who allow themselves to finally embrace evil over good. These are
How does such a thing happen? The German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, espoused the concept of the transvaluation of values. In essence, he believed that the toleration of sin would eventually morph into a celebration of it. Thereby good would become bad and bad would become good as a social reality. That, of course, is exactly the reality we find ourselves in today. But the “woe” that describes God’s anguish over it is directed to those who should know better right now!
In an article titled, “Immorality Embraced by So-Called Christian Love,” E. Jefferey Ludwig gets to the heart of the matter. “Immorality is being embraced by so-called Christian love. Bible-based Judeo-Christian morality is increasingly considered a non-starter. Traditional Christian doctrine is increasingly looked upon as inconsistent with nature and ‘human need.’ Sin is being sanctioned and celebrated – homosexuality, non-marital sex, aborting babies (now part of “health”), and even pedophilia – by people who should know better.” A little later, he adds, “These distortions and immoral positions are rooted in a heresy in Christian theology known as antinomianism.”
Antinomianism is easily defined. Anti means against and nomos means the law. So, antinomianism is to be against God’s law. This heresy is the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing God’s law. The fact is, however, that we are released from the penalty of the law upon repentance by God’s grace. But the antinomian view turns God’s love expressed through grace into license to sin. As Nietzsche once said, “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” Misrepresenting God’s love through a perverted grace will ultimately remove God and His authority from our minds and, in fact, evil will be called good and good evil.
False teachers, those of corrupt mind, make the slippery slope of antinomianism – the changing from right values to the wrong ones – look oh so appealing. The Apostle Peter warned of this, “For when they speak great swelling words of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through lewdness, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption; for by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning” (2 Peter 2:18-20). We dare not fall for the ever more popular heresy preached in the guise of so-called “Christian” love. God’s real love expressed through grace involves doing as well. “But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does” (James 1:25). Let us be found so doing, that is, growing in God’s grace
