There’s an old movie that came out in 1966, when I was nine years old. I didn’t see it until a few years later, when it was shown on TV for the first time. The name of the movie was The Bible: In the beginning. . . One scene from the movie popped into my mind recently when I was thinking about how children and students in our public schools are now being taught that homosexual behavior is “normal” and that the students have a right to change their gender any time they want to, as long as they have a desire to do so. This teaching is supported by our mainstream media, evil politicians, corrupt executives that run our global corporations, prominent celebrities, and “influencers” on social media.

The scene in the movie that popped into my mind was based on Genesis 11:1-9, which tells the story of the Tower of Babel. Most Christians are aware of the Tower of Babel, which was built shortly after the great flood, when the entire world spoke the same language.

The way the story was told in the movie was that the Tower of Babel was built during the reign of King Nimrod. King Nimrod ordered his subjects to build the tower because he wanted a structure that was tall enough to reach Heaven. The movie portrayed King Nimrod as a man who was viewed by his subjects as a god, and who considered himself to be an equal to Almighty God.

At one point, King Nimrod climbs to the top of the Tower of Babel with his bow and arrow. In an act of defiance against Almighty God, he shoots the arrow into the sky. After the arrow disappears into the clouds, a severe windstorm reigns down on Earth and destroys part of the tower.

After the storm, King Nimrod approaches some men who helped to build the tower. When he attempts to order them around, they respond by speaking a different language. The men do not understand what he is saying, and he does not understand what they are saying. When the thousands of people in the city where the tower is located realize that they cannot understand each other, chaos ensues and they fight among each other. The scene ends by showing the people fleeing from the city through the countryside.

Here’s what the Bible said about what happened:

And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:7-9.

Last week, when I went on the internet to search for the movie, I did not remember that it recounted the first 22 chapters of the Book of Genesis, with an emphasis on the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark, and the story of Abraham. The only thing I remembered about the movie was the story about the Tower of Babel and King Nimrod defying God by shooting his arrow into the sky. While the length of the movie was two hours and 54 minutes, the length of the scene that I remembered was less than seven minutes.

As time goes by, we tend to only remember the things that had an unusual or significant impact on us. As a young boy, the defiance against God that was carried out by King Nimrod apparently had a significant impact on me because that is the only thing I remembered about the movie.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a gesture that was used by teenagers and college-age individuals that was considered to be an act of defiance against one or more other people. The use of the gesture was called “giving someone the finger” or “flipping someone off,” and is described by Wikipedia.com as “an obscene gesture [that] communicates moderate to extreme contempt.”

The gesture is performed by showing the back of your hand to one or more people while your middle finger is extended upwards. It is usually accompanied by the person yelling out one or more expletives. There is a literal meaning that has been assigned to the gesture that I won’t describe here. Suffice it to say that it refers to a crude act that has no place in a civil society.

Flipping someone off was fairly common during the ‘60s and ‘70s. On the rare occasion that I see it happen today, it’s usually done by someone who is in their 60s or 70s, which makes sense because the person became familiar with and used the gesture during their youth.

Today, the common way that younger people show their anger and defiance toward others is to get in their face and yell the F-word at them multiple times, while attempting to shame or bully them into submission. But these modern-day radicals are not satisfied by only doing that. Unlike the old days when someone would give you the finger, yell some expletives, and then walk away, in today’s world, after the initial confrontation, the person who is angry with you may jump on Facebook, Twitter, or another social media platform and launch a personal attack against you for everyone else to see.

The person then sometimes escalates their rage by getting others to join them in attacking you on various social media platforms. In extreme cases, an effort is made to destroy your reputation and livelihood by threatening you and your family, contacting your employer to get you fired from your job, and by ostracizing you from society. This behavior has become so widespread that there’s a name for it: “Cancel Culture.”

What brought to mind the act of defiance portrayed in the movie about the Tower of Babel, as well as the middle finger gesture and the modern-day social media attacks against people, was the behavior that is currently being encouraged, endorsed, and glorified by our educational institutions, celebrities, and media to promote the acceptance of and experimentation with homosexuality and the changing of one’s gender.

Since the dawn of Christianity, the promotion and acceptance of homosexual behavior and an openness to the youth of a society to seriously consider changing their gender from male to female or vice versa has been considered an outright act of defiance against Almighty God.

For those of us who believe in God, we know that every individual is created in His image and likeness, and the gender that is assigned to each person at conception was planned by God for all eternity. Any action that is taken by a person to change his or her gender is the equivalent of shooting an arrow toward Heaven to show God that He had no part in the person’s creation or destiny. That action is also no different from the person thrusting his or her middle finger toward Heaven while shouting expletives at God.

The very act of teaching children, teenagers, and young adults that they have a right to change their gender is an unspoken declaration to God that He does not exist, or that He does not have the right or authority to choose the gender of a person He creates.

While less than four percent of our population has a desire to engage in homosexual behavior or change genders, there is a diabolical plan that has been put into place to dramatically increase that percentage by teaching, promoting, and encouraging as many of our youth as possible that they have the right to change the gender God intended for them, and they should strongly consider doing so for their own personal satisfaction and pleasure, and to prove to the world that no one can tell them what to do.

It is my belief that because of our fallen human nature, there are some people who have a tendency toward and are drawn to homosexual behavior and/or the desire to change genders. Those people are no different from you and me in the sense that each of us has a tendency toward and are drawn to sinful behavior that is associated with the sin of pride and one or more of the other seven capital sins, which are anger, lust, sloth, envy, gluttony, and greed.

The fact that we have a tendency toward and are drawn to certain types of sinful behavior doesn’t give us the “right” to defy God and follow our sinful passions to whatever extreme they take us.

The road to personal and societal destruction is paved with people who choose to succumb to and pursue their sinful tendencies and passions, rather than work to prayerfully and diligently overcome those tendencies and passions, so they can learn to obey the laws of the God who created them in His image and likeness.

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