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July 13 - August 21, 2020
Homosexual behavior is a sin, not according to who practices it or by what motivation they seek it, but because that act itself, as a truth-suppressing exchange, is contrary to God’s good design.
Homosexual practice is sinful because it violates the divine design in creation. According to Paul’s logic, men and women who engage in same-sex sexual behavior—even if they are being true to their own feelings and desires—have suppressed God’s truth in unrighteousness. They have exchanged the fittedness of male-female relations for those that are contrary to nature.
And yet the fact that Paul singles out homosexual relations as a conspicuous example of the human heart suppressing the truth and turning from God suggests that we must not soft-pedal as no big deal what the Bible underlines as particularly egregious rebellion.
You don’t have to be an expert in Greek to see how Paul got the word arsenokoitai from Leviticus. Here’s what the relevant texts look like in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament used by Jews in the first century): Leviticus 18:22 meta arsenos ou koimēthēsē koitēn gynaikos (“you shall not lie with a male as with a woman”) Leviticus 20:13 hos an koimēthē meta arsenos koitēn gynaikos (“whoever shall lie with a male as with a woman”) You can see from the second text in particular how Paul’s use of arsenokoitai is almost certainly taken from the Holiness Code of Leviticus.
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if Paul wanted his readers to know he was referring only to exploitative forms of homosexuality, he wouldn’t have coined a term from a portion of the Mosaic law where all sex involving a man with a man is forbidden.
Are we really to suppose that Paul—just after urging excommunication for sexual sin (5:4–5, 13), and just as he references the Mosaic law (6:9), and just before he anchors his sexual ethic in the Genesis creation story (6:16)—meant to say, “Obviously, I’m not talking about two adult men in a long-term relationship”?
The best translations communicate the notion of activity; arsenokoitai refers to men engaged in homosexual behavior. It’s the shameless act Paul describes in Romans 1:27 as being committed arsenes en arsesin (“men in men”).1 This is why early translations of the New Testament translate arsenokoitai as “men lying together with males” (Latin), “those who lie with men” (Syriac), and “lying with males” (Coptic).
Paul is saying what we find hard to hear but what the rest of the Bible supports and most of church history has assumed: homosexual activity is not a blessing to be celebrated and solemnized but a sin to be repented of, forsaken, and forgiven.
There is no evidence that ancient Judaism or early Christianity tolerated any expression of homosexual activity.
The prophets didn’t rail against homosexual practice because as a particularly obvious and egregious sin it was less frequently committed in the covenant community.
Counting up the number of verses on any particular topic is not the best way to determine the seriousness of the sin involved.
It’s explicitly condemned in the Mosaic law (Leviticus) and used as a vivid example of human rebellion in Paul’s most important letter (Romans).
There are at least eight vice lists in the New Testament (Mark 7:21–22; Rom. 1:24–31; 13:13; 1 Cor. 6:9–10; Gal. 5:19–21; Col. 3:5–9; 1 Tim. 1:9–10; Rev. 21:8), and sexual immorality is included in every one of these.
Not only did he explicitly reaffirm the creation account of marriage as the one-flesh union of a man and a woman (Matt. 19:4–6; Mark 10:6–9); he condemned the sin of porneia (Mark 7:21), a broad word encompassing every kind of sexual sin.
Jesus didn’t have to give a special sermon on homosexuality because all of his listeners understood that same-sex behavior was prohibited in the Pentateuch and reckoned as one of the many expressions of sexual sin (porneia) off limits for the Jews.
No one would think of proposing a third way if the sin were racism or human trafficking.
When we tolerate the doctrine which affirms homosexual behavior, we are tolerating a doctrine which leads people further from God.
The biblical teaching is consistent and unambiguous: homosexual activity is not God’s will for his people. Silence in the face of such clarity is not prudence, and hesitation in light of such frequency is not patience. The Bible says more than enough about homosexual practice for us to say something too.
Let me be blunt: the Bible says nothing good about homosexual practice.
There is simply no positive case to be made from the Bible for homosexual behavior.
Why does the Bible talk about men lying with men and the exchange of what is natural for unnatural if it wasn’t thinking about the created order and only had in mind predatory sex and promiscuous liaisons?
Paul could have believed that tribades [the active female partners in a female homosexual bond], the ancient kinaidoi [the passive male partners in a male homosexual bond] and other sexually unorthodox persons were born that way and yet still condemn them as unnatural and shameful. . . . I believe that Paul used the word “exchanged” to indicate that people knew the natural sexual order of the universe and left it behind. . . . I see Paul as condemning all forms of homoeroticism as the unnatural acts of people who had turned away from God.8
Crompton, a gay man and pioneer in queer studies, in his massive book Homosexuality and Civilization: Some interpreters, seeking to mitigate Paul’s harshness, have read the passage [in Romans 1] as condemning not homosexuals generally but only heterosexual men and women who experimented with homosexuality. According to this interpretation, Paul’s words were not directed at “bona fide” homosexuals in committed relationships. But such a reading, however well-intentioned, seems strained and unhistorical. Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of
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There is no positive case for homosexual practice in the Bible and no historical background that will allow us to set aside what has been the plain reading of Scripture for twenty centuries. The only way to think the Bible is talking about every other kind of homosexuality except the kind we want to affirm is to be less than honest with the texts or less than honest with ourselves.
But—and here’s the rub—the communicant membership of the church, like the membership of heaven, is made up of born again, repentant sinners. If we preach a “gospel” with no call to repentance, we are preaching something other than the apostolic gospel.
If we think people can find a Savior without forsaking their sin, we do not know what sort of Savior Jesus Christ is.
If those with same-sex attraction are being singled out for repentance, the solution is not to remove forsaking of sin from the gospel equation, but to labor for a church community where lifelong repentance is the normal experience of Christian discipleship.
If we are to be faithful to Scripture, we must not provide assurance of salvation to those who are habitually, freely, and impenitently engaged in sinful activity.
The Bible’s teaching on this matter is as clear as it is unpopular: persistent unrepentant sexual sin leads people to hell (Matt. 5:27–32; Rom. 1:18–2:11; 1 Cor. 6:9–10; Gal. 5:19–21; 1 Thess. 4:3–8; cf. 1 John 3:4–10).
The phrase seeks to win an argument by not having one. It says, “Your ideas are so laughably backward, they don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
American Psychological Association has concluded: “Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors.”
No matter how we think we might have been born one way, Christ insists that we must be born again a different way (John 3:3–7; Eph. 2:1–10).
heterosexual marriage is the only proper context for sexual intimacy, no matter how strongly or how persistently or how achingly we may wrestle with unfulfilled sexual desires.7
Intense longing does not turn sinful wrongs into civil rights.
We can’t help but pay attention to our pain, but we should not think that God always says what we want him to say in the midst of our pain.
As Jackie Hill-Perry puts it in her “Love Letter to a Lesbian”: You see what God has to say about homosexuality, but your heart doesn’t utter the same sentiments. God’s word says it’s sinful; your heart says it feels right. God’s word says it’s abominable; your heart says it’s delightful. God’s word says it’s unnatural; your heart says it’s totally normal. Do you see that there is a clear divide between what God’s word says and how your heart feels?10
we must base our ethical decision on something more than our subjective sense of what feels right.
The “good fruit” Jesus talks about in Matthew 7:15–20 is not a reference to my sense of satisfaction or my perceived ministry effectiveness.
Bearing fruit means doing the will of our Father who is in heaven (v. 21). Jesus is looking for followers who will hear his words and put them into practice (vv. 24–27).
there are no genuinely healthy trees apart from obedience to Christ and the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:16–24).
The grace which leads us to say yes to our great God and Savior Jesus Christ also demands that we say no to ungodliness and worldly passions (Titus 2:11–14).
Grief and groaning, longing and lament, sorrowful yet always rejoicing—it’s the life we live between two worlds.
If everything in Christian community revolves around being married with children, we should not be surprised when singleness sounds like a death sentence.
Nothing in the Bible encourages us to give sex the exalted status it has in our culture, as if finding our purpose, our identity, and our fulfillment all rest on what we can or cannot do with our private parts.
But if the summum bonum of human existence is defined by something other than sex, the hard things the Bible has to say to those with same-sex desires is not materially different from the hard things it has to say to everyone else.
Once we’ve accepted the logic that for love to be validated it must be expressed sexually and that those engaged in consensual sexual activity cannot be denied the “right” to marry, we have opened a Pandora’s box of marital permutations that cannot be shut.
The path which leads to the affirmation of homosexual behavior is a journey which inevitably leaves behind a clear, inerrant Bible, and picks up from liberalism a number of assumptions about the importance of individual authority and cultural credibility.
