Dear church,

When God created the heavens and the earth, he did so in an orderly way. Go back and read Genesis 1 again. God created things, and he separated things from one another. There were different kinds of things. He brought order out of chaos. Everything lived as it was designed to live. 

God’s people are to remember that. The false religions and ideologies of the world want to return the chaos. For instance, the great lie of the transgender movement is that God wasn’t all that orderly – that there’s not just male and female. There’s mixing and matching and different shades of gray. 

Holiness, however, has always been about purity and the maintaining of the order God gave us. We don’t mar his created order by creating our own different kind of order. That would be to set ourselves up as little gods. 

And so to be holy, we stay away from false religion and ideologies that try to put God’s order back into chaos. 

We understand the boundaries that God gave us. We understand the difference between love and lust. We understand how God created things, and we keep that in view. And we repent from our efforts to set up our own order for creation. 

As such, we don’t curse our parents, because in the order God gave us, parents are to be honored. We don’t commit adultery because marriage was designed to be a commitment for life, and chaos ensues when adultery is committed. We don’t commit incest, homosexual acts, or bestiality, because these things introduce confusion into God’s order. There are lines that ought not to be crossed. 

These infractions are made worse when committed as part of pagan religious practices. We stay away from these things. 

Perhaps the most important thing that this chapter teaches is that God has established how we are to live, and there will be forces in the world that will try to add chaos back into God’s good creation. 

We need to stay clear-eyed and focused on how God wants his people to live, even in the face of the temptation to join into the chaos that defines sinful humanity.

Chris