The divine paradigm for happiness and everlasting joy God has revealed in the scriptures tells us that anything less than that paradigm is incapable of bringing his children to their full potential. As a case in point, newly spawning alternatives to male–female identities and relationships are in reality as old as humanity. Making a mock of God—of a divine Father and Mother—they have brought down entire civilizations. They exemplify a de-created state that characterizes descent on Isaiah’s spiritual ladder instead of a re-created state closer to God’s image and likeness.
Says Isaiah of God’s end-time people, “Their tongue [lashon, also “language”] and their actions are contrary to Jehovah, an affront to his glory before his very eyes. The look on their faces betrays them: they flaunt their sin like Sodom; they cannot hide it. Woe to their souls; they have brought disaster upon themselves!” (Isaiah 3:8–9). Says the Lord, “Hear the word of Jehovah, O leaders of Sodom; give heed to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” (Isaiah 1:10). The Sodom and Gomorrah identity implies that a similar judgment as that of old awaits his people.
Yet there exist those who “have imagined up unto yourselves a god who doth vary, and in whom there is shadow of changing” (Mormon 9:10)—who applaud the accommodation of persons who practice abominations instead of affirming God’s condemnation: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination. . . . For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people” (Leviticus 18:22, 29). “Turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness,” they deny God (Jude 1:4).
As an elect category on Isaiah’s spiritual ladder, those whom God names his “sons” and “daughters” are persons who have ascended from a saved or sinless state to a sanctified one. Upon proving faithful through a descent phase as their loyalties to him are tested, God re-creates them closer to his (and her) image and likeness and delivers them from end-time calamities in a new exodus: “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth—all who are called by my name, whom I have formed, molded and wrought nor my own glory” (Isaiah 43:6–7).
Delivering them are the spiritual kings and queens of the Gentiles whom God re-creates to a translated state: “They will bring your sons in their bosoms and carry your daughters on their shoulders. Kings shall be your foster fathers, queens your nursing mothers” (Isaiah 49:22–23). All such higher spiritual levels are espoused: “I rejoice exceedingly in Jehovah; my soul delights in my God. For he clothes me in garments of salvation, he arrays me in a robe of righteousness—like a bridegroom dressed in priestly attire, or a bride adorned with her jewels” (Isaiah 61:10).
Profuse marriage imagery permeates all re-created categories on Isaiah’s spiritual ladder. We find there no hybrid or in-between versions or persons possessed by spirits of the opposite sex, which is not of God. Rather, a divine kind of “joy” and “delight” that is unattainable outside of God’s male–female paradigm accompanies those whom God has joined together: “You shall be known as her in whom I delight. . . . As a young man weds a virgin, so shall your sons wed you; as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:5).
He who has “paid the price of our peace,” by whose “wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5)—who holds out his hands to those “who walk in ways that are not good, who follow their own imagination” (Isaiah 65:2)—embeds a formula for their healing in the very act of condemning their practices: “Go on hearing, but not understanding; Go on seeing, but not perceiving. Make the heart of these people grow fat; dull their ears and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears, understand in their heart, and repent, and be healed” (Isaiah 6:9–10).
