Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Fourteenth Amendment requires all 50 states to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples. This should come as no surprise as the majority of those who profess to follow Christ have ceased be salt and light in this dark culture in which we find ourselves. Many examples could be given in recent news.
Tony Campolo, one of the most influential evangelicals in the US, recently came out in support of LGBTQ equality (I reported on this in Tony Campolo’s Recent Acceptance of Homosexuals in the Church. Retired Christianity Today editor, David Neff, quickly cheered Campolo on Facebook: “God bless Tony Campolo. He is acting in good faith and is, I think, on the right track.” Neff told Christianity Today:
I think the ethically responsible thing for gay and lesbian Christians to do is to form lasting, covenanted partnerships. I also believe that the church should help them in those partnerships in the same way the church should fortify traditional marriages.
Also the Emerging Church icon and U2 rockstar Bono celebrated the homosexual marriage vote and said, “Marriage is not owned by any church, but instead owned by the community who should decide who it does and does not apply to.” Bono addressed an audience while dedicating a live performance of “Pride (In the Name of Love),” to Ireland’s marriage equality ruling. Fans say Bono “changed the lyrics of the song to suit the occasion, crooning, ‘They could not take away your gay pride’ in place of ‘they could not take your pride.'”
A PRRI survey released on June 11 revealed overwhelming support for legalizing homosexual marriage, even among the religious:
Fifty-five percent of the public favors allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally, while 37% are opposed. Strong generational, religious, and partisan divisions persist on the issue.
Young adults (age 18 to 29) remain among the staunchest supporters of same-sex marriage, while most seniors (age 65 and over) are opposed. More than seven in ten (72%) young adults favor legalizing same-sex marriage, compared to 42% of seniors; a plurality (46%) of seniors oppose legalizing same-sex marriage.
The issue of same-sex marriage continues to divide religious Americans. Majorities of religiously unaffiliated Americans (79%), white mainline Protestants (60%), and Catholics (58%) favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally. Conversely, only 29% of white evangelical Protestants and 35% of non-white Protestants support making same-sex marriage legal; majorities of white evangelical Protestants (62%) and non-white Protestants (54%) oppose.
June 26, 2015 was a day of celebration for many apostate believers, but a day for real Christians to prayerfully reflect on some of the passages of our biblical heritage which tell of sexually oppressive and depraved societies such as Sodom’s homosexual depravity and subsequent destruction (Genesis 19:1-29) and similar perversion at Gibeah (Judges 19:22-30). The US supreme court cannot change the definition of marriage or the fact that homosexuality is an abomination to God (See Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Deuteronomy 23:17; Romans 1:26,27; 1 Corinthians 6:9,10; 1 Timothy 1:8-11). This Supreme Court decision has only made the impending judgment of God more official. Paul wrote:
For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them. (Romans 1:26-31)
With this historic American abomination, the US Supreme court has arrogantly redefined marriage and opposed the supreme moral authority of Jesus Christ himself. While the marriage laws of the US have changed throughout history, the Lord’s definition of marriage has stayed the same. For instance, from 1847 to 1857, in Utah, many Mormons practiced polygamy, though in defiance to the widespread view in the rest of the US. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act which outlawed federal recognition of both homosexual marriage and polygamy. In 1969, the first “no-fault” divorce law was adopted in California. Fault divorces used to be the only way to legally dissolve a marriage, and people who had differences, but did not qualify as “at fault”, only had the option to separate (and were prevented from legally remarrying).
“This ought to be a day of national mourning and a day of rededicating ourselves to live sexually holy lives,” said Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. Yesterday, Gagnon made this response:
Those who like to say that Jesus changed the Law of Moses fail to note the direction of change. The Six Antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount make clear that the change is not toward greater license but toward greater demand, making the law more internally self-consistent (Matthew 5:17-48).
When Jesus addressed the issue of marriage in more detail (Mark 10:2-12; parallel in Matthew 19:3-9), he quoted Genesis 1:27 (actually just a third of it: “male and female he [God] made them”) and 2:24 (“For this reason a man may … be joined to his woman and the two shall become one flesh”). . . .
Once the two halves of the sexual spectrum are brought together, moderating the extremes of each sex and filling in the gaps, a third party (or more) is neither necessary nor desirable. In ancient Israel women had always been bound by a strict monogamy requirement (no polyandry, i.e. multiple husbands) and did not have right to unilateral divorce. Jesus declared that the Law of Moses had accommodated to male “hardness of heart” in permitting them multiple wives. No longer, Jesus said. In effect: “I’m closing that loophole by appeal to God’s male-female prerequisite in creation.” The duality of the sexes in sexual union is the foundation or predicate for limiting the number of partners in a sexual union to two.
For those who question that this was what Jesus was doing in citing Gen 1:27c and 2:24, we have a nice history-of-religions parallel from a sectarian Jewish group known as the Essenes (the Qumran community was a monastic nucleus for “town Essenes”). In a document known as The Damascus Covenant written more than a century before Jesus’ time, the Essenes forbade polygamy (“taking two wives in their lives”) among their members because “the foundation of creation is ‘male and female he created them’” (Gen 1:27) and because “those who entered (Noah’s) ark went in two by two” (Gen 7:9; DC 4.20-5.1). In other words, they appealed to the same one-third of Gen 1:27 to which Jesus would appeal more than a century later, as a basis for revoking an allowance for polygyny (multiple wives). They correlated this verse with a reference to the Noah’s ark narrative where the precise phrase “male and female” reappears in connection with an explicit “two,” True, they didn’t go as far as Jesus’ later extension to invalid remarriage after divorce (it is easier to prohibit concurrent polygamy, polygamy proper, than to extend the principle to serial polygamy, divorce-and-remarriage for any cause). Yet they did use God’s intentional sexual design of “male and female” in Gen 1:27c as a basis for arriving at a principle of duality in number.
The Essenes called this “male and female” element of sexual ethics “the foundation of creation.” That is exactly how Jesus is viewing it. That makes Jesus’ view of a male-female prerequisite for sexual unions, extrapolated from God’s creation, an essential part of his teaching, foundational to all other principles in sexual ethics (as we would expect in dealing with creation). Homosexual practice is an obvious direct assault on that foundation because it disregards a male-female prerequisite as having any foundational significance. Indeed, it violates it. That makes homosexual practice a greater violation of God’s will at creation than polyamory, which is a violation of a principle only secondarily extrapolated from a male-female requirement.
To propose, as some revisionists now do, that “gay marriage” and the elimination of a male-female prerequisite is a new work of the Spirit overlooks the fact Jesus moved in the opposite direction by tightening the implications of a male-female requirement. It is likely, then, that those who view “gay marriage” as a new work of the Spirit have confused a work of the flesh with the work of the Spirit and disregarded the Lordship of Jesus Christ so far as the definition of marriage (and thus acceptable sexual relations) is concerned.
SEE ALSO:
Tony Campolo’s Recent Acceptance of Homosexuals in the Church