So what’s new?

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us. Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

I’ve never understood it when people say that the Bible seems irrelevant ‘because it was written so long ago’. God hasn’t changed, and neither (I am sad to say) have we.

Some people seem surprised that there’s so much heresy around these days. But don’t we know the Bible? This was prophesied by Jesus and his apostles. And don’t we know church history? It has always been the same.

Lessons from history

In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas said: ‘From the beginning, men have rationalised to find reasons why fornication and other sexual sins were not really sins, so that they might indulge their sinful desires without restraint.’ There have always been people who deny Christ’s lordship over our sexuality.

In the 16th century it was the same, even after the Reformation. One Bishop of Hereford complained of his cathedral, that it was a place where ‘idleness, contempt, and depraving of true religion, and such like occasions of the sin of sodomy do reign and rule’.

Then there was the pious evangelical head-master of Eton, The Revd Nicholas Udall (1504–1556), educated at Winchester. He was a spiritual writer, preacher, and transla-tor. But in 1541 was found to be not only an enthusiastic beater of children, but also ‘sexually involved’ with one his boys. After a spell in prison (friends in high places kept him from worse), he became a vicar in Essex and then the Isle of Wight. Jude warned us long ago that such people would ‘creep into the church’.

In the 17th century, John White, John Wesley’s great-grandfather, wrote a book about 100 of the most scandalous and malignant priests of his day. Last year I did a two-hour seminar at Union School of Theology looking at this treasure trove of the ghastly and the wicked. Number One, in John White’s book from 1643, was John Wilson, a vicar in Sussex. He was a practi-cing homosexual, who seduced young men in his parish and was very open about it. He denied Jesus’s virgin birth, the doctrine of original sin, and had a Catholic view of the sacraments and images in churches. He ‘hath openly affirmed’, said John White, ‘that bug-gery is no sinne.’ In other words, he was a liberal Anglo-Catholic, pushing a gay agenda in the church. There are 99 other stories after this, of vicars and senior clergy who followed their own ungodly passions in many and various ways – gambling, drinking, sleeping around; lost in superstition, and often out clubbing or prowling the streets. Paul said this is what it would be like ‘in the last days’.

In the 18th century, the Baptist preacher Benjamin Keach also complained: ‘Was ever sodomy so common in a Christian nation, or so notoriously and frequently committed, as by too palpable evidences it appears to be, in and about this city, notwithstanding the clear light of the gospel which shines therein, and the great pains taken to reform the abominable profaneness that abounds? Is it not a wonder the patience of God hath not consumed us in his wrath, before this time? Was ever swearing, blasphemy, whor-ing, drunkenness, gluttony, self-love, and covetousness, at such a height, as at this time here?’

Teaching today

What would he say today? People always think their day is worse than ever. But none of this is new. When Jude says certain people ‘pervert the grace of God into a licence for immorality’, we must believe him. But we must not panic when he turns out to be telling the truth, as if something strange and unusual was happening to us in our genera-tion, that has never happened before.

The present is never exactly like the past – there may be new combinations of heresy in our day, and it may be more virulent in some places – but what Jude says will be true, until Jesus comes again.

Strangely, this is comforting. It means we don’t need to panic, as if the Bible doesn’t have the wisdom we need to help us in such a time of confusion. It absolutely does.