Christian, there are many ways by which the evil one and the kingdom of darkness seek to influence you. Fortunately, the Father has broken your relationship with both of those, having rescued you “from the dominion of darkness and brought you into the kingdom of the Son he loves” (Colossians 1:13-14). However, the attempt at influencing and confusing you with lies goes on. Your weapon against it is the Truth and the words that go with it.
Here’s the truth against one of those lies.
You’re likely familiar with the comparatively recent attempt to promulgate and support gender confusion in every arena. We know this does not come from God, who created us in His own image, “male and female” (Genesis 1:27). There is much more to say about the darkness of this deception (including the essence of procreation itself), but I hope to alert you to a tool being used to sell this lie, one you’ll want to be prepared for.
It’s a single word: “Empathy.” It’s being used as a hammer to get you to go along with people’s feelings, even while those feelings, real or imagined, are wrecking people’s lives. “Empathy” has taken the place of “compassion,” and we need to be clear as to why.
Empathy is imagined and postured, while compassion is real and felt. The word, “empathy,” has only been around for a hundred years or so, while “compassion” is an ancient word. In the last decade or so, “empathy” has been used and demanded increasingly as a way of leveraging societal change. A person can virtue signal by imagining another’s stress and then going along with their course of alleviating it. That’s empathy. Someone who is genuinely compassionate can feel that stress without agreeing with their course of alleviation.
Someone might say, for example: “I have the DNA and body of a man, but I feel like I’m a woman and want to go into women’s locker rooms and bathrooms, and play on women’s sports teams. Have you no empathy for me? I should be allowed to do what I want.” Compassion is free to respond, “I have compassion for your confusion and don’t want you to suffer, but I have a different course for your health because I cannot enter into your delusion.”
Compassion actually cares, and has a course for health that’s based upon the truth—Biblical, god-given truth—while empathy has no foundation. It’s made up, on-the-fly, we might say. It’s man-centered, exalts feelings over truth, and results in lunacy and harm; lots and lots of harm. That’s why people who are disregarding Biblical truth try to leverage you into agreement or silence (at least) by using the word, “empathy.” But you have a foundation for caring that insists upon the truth—God’s truth—which results in health, spiritually and physically.
Of course, we know that walking in the truth is a challenge, especially in a world of suffering and darkness. But the One who is the way, the truth and the life, has given us the Holy Spirit, who leads us in truth and freedom. After all, God is “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). And that’s why we care the way we do. And we do.
See you later.
Genesis 1:27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Hebrews 2:14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
Colossians 1:13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
2 Corinthians 1:3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
Hebrews 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin.