By T.C. Lo (盧天賜); March 21, 2013
• Christians must stand up and take position as light and salt of the world
If it is not a moral issue, if it is not a spiritual issue, if the Bible never say anything about it, I agree, we should stay out of this debate. But if it is a moral issue, if it is a spiritual matter, and if God has much to say about this issue, then Christians must stand up and take position. I believe church must become cultural relevant to every areas of the society in order to be the Light and Salt of the world.
Acts 20:28 talks about church leaders’ responsibility: “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.”
What an awesome responsibility of church leaders who are held accountable for the flock’s spiritual well being!
• Acceptance is today’s social mood
Political Arena
o Vermont has legalized same sex civil union in 2000.
o Only months before the 2012 re-election, President (candidate) Obama formally announced his support for homosexual marriage as acceptable and legal
o At this very moment, the U.S. Supreme Court is in the process of deciding on the legitimacy of same-sex marriages.
Social, Art, and Spiritual Arenas
o And Bride’s magazine few years ago featured its first ever article on how to plan a same sex wedding
o Music, arts, movies permeated with homosexual themes
o Episcopal Church in November, 2003 consecrated the first openly guy Bishop in the church history the Rev. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire
o Sculptures of same sex couples are beautifully displayed in the middle of Stanford University’s campus to insidiously suggest the acceptability of homosexual lifestyle.
Education Arena
o Powerfully eloquent speakers are invited to give pervasive speeches on acceptance and tolerance to students and ask them to demand hearing from their parents on sexual orientation. There are two wrong attitudes toward the devil (C.S. Lewis ):
Ignore him—we dare not ignore devil’s trickery.
Develop an unhealthy interest on him—How could that be? An eloquent speech may earn young people’s ear.
But eloquence and Truth may not go hand-in-hand. We ought to have this discernment.
• Prohibition is viewed as “intolerant”
Two friends planned to go out for lunch. John said I like Chinese food. Mary said I love Italian food. They talked for few minutes, and then John said, “OK. Let’s go for Italian food.” In this case, we say, “John is tolerant.
If you had deposited $5,000 into your saving account but later when you received your bank statement which recorded that you only put in $500. You fiercely argued with the bank manager insisting that you are right. Can I accuse you for being intolerant? Of course I can’t. Why? Because truth matters. Truth, by definition, is exclusive. If I say 2+2=4, but you say 2+2=5. I cannot agree with you. But then can you say my disagreement with you is an attitude of intolerance?
If I say “Homosexuals are wrong” and you immediately accuse me for not being tolerant to people with homosexual orientation. I have good reason to say to you that you too are intolerant because you could not tolerate me for making such statement as “Homosexuals are wrong”?
Those who think they are tolerant are of the worse kind of intolerance. See, young men, don’t be fooled!
• Bible’s view on homosexual behavior is clear
Is Bible’s position not clear? Without equivocation, there is a single monolithic position in the Bible on the issue of the homosexual behavior. Examine: Gn.19; Lev.20:13; 18:21-23; Judges 19:22-25; and 1 Cor. 6:9-10 and Rm.1.
Geneses 19:1-8
God said that the sin of Sodom was so grievous that He will go down and do something about it. And we all know what sin of the city of Sodom was. It was rampant homosexual behavior and that was so offensive to God.
• God DID come down and he wiped the whole city out of its existence.
Leviticus 20:13
If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
Do you see any ambiguity? It is very clear!
Leviticus 18:21-23
21. Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.
22. Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.
23. Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion.
Interesting observation:
• V.22 is a clear prohibition of homosexual behavior.
• Right in front of it, v.21, God puts a prohibition against child sacrifice.
• Right behind it, v.23, God put a prohibition against having sex with animal.
The way God placed this particular prohibition tells about what level God considers this behavior to be.
One may argue that this was an OT prohibition, what about NT? Jesus brought love and grace to the world, maybe the NT is different? OK, well, let’s look at the following clear statements:
1 Corinthians 6:9-10
The New Testament equivalent to the Old Testament verse, Leviticus 20:13, is First Corinthians 6:9 in terms of their directness and clarity on the prohibition of homosexual behavior.
1Co 6:9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders
1Co 6:10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
Homosexuals cannot “inherit the kingdom of God.”You see, homosexuality is not just a moral issue, it is also a spiritual issue!
Roman 1:20-28
If there is any doubt whether God’s position has changed on homosexual behavior,
Look at the adjectives that are used here, shameful, unnatural (v.26). God’s position has not changed from OT to NT.
Biblical Conclusion:
We can go on with more verses but I think the point is clear that the Bible has a consistent position about homosexual behavior, a position that is not changed from OT to NT. That is homosexual behavior, lesbian behavior, is detestable and abominable in the sight of God.
• Homosexuality is more than a personal or private business. It is an issue concerning the survival of a nation or civilization
Refer to Roman 1:20-28. This passage describes for us how human societies, the three stages by which human societies deteriorate morally and spiritually, i.e., moving away from God and moving toward the judgment of God. Each stage is notated by a phrase “任憑他們 God Gave Them Over” (Rm.1:24, 26, 28.) which God uses to mark another decline, a lower decline, in a society away from God and toward self destruction.
The first stage is humanism.
What does it mean?
• Our society replaces his God with man; and things of God with things of man.
• Our society decides they are going to displace God as the head of the society and they are going to enthrone man instead.
• Our society decides that they are going to displace the wisdom of the Bible as the guiding principle for the society and they are going to put their own wisdom in place of that.
You go to any public school in America today, you go to any public college in America today, and even though there may be wonderful followers of Christ on the staff and teaching in the classrooms in these institutions, they are forbidden by law to teach Bible in these classrooms, they are forbidden by law to mention God or biblical worldview. You go to these classrooms you hear all about man’s wisdom, man’s achievement, man’s capacity, man’s capability. For all practical purposes, American society is already well through stage one. You call this “tolerance”?
The second stage is spiritual hardness.
Secularism leads to spiritual hardness where people do not even recognize anything wrong any more—that is, Moral Relativism.
“When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes in anything.”—-G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936, English writer)
The third stage is homosexuality.
We are not talking about closet behavior of homosexuality that goes on secretly in the society. We are talking about in this stage-3 that homosexuality is being recognized and approved and normalized by a society as completely acceptable behavior.
First group mentioned (Romans 1:.27) under this stage is the women. They are the chestiest and the most virtuous element of any society. Now even the women are brazenly involved in this kind of behavior. It is worthwhile to note that right before the Fall of the Roman Empire; homosexual behaviors were rampant in their society.
Read Romans 1:29 below:
Ro 1:29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips,
Ro 1:30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;
Ro 1:31 they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
When homosexuality breaks out, hell breaks out. Every kind of wickedness breaks loose in an inextricable spiral downward. God is merciful; but His judgment can be merciless. You see, homosexuality is just a sign of what the worst to come. It points to the bigger problems of sexual promiscuity, pre-marital lust, and sex outside the parameter of marriage and many more. So we are not just talking about one issue only.
Now what about this genetic thing?
It is in my gene. I can’t really help it that God made me gay.
OK. Giving the benefit of the doubt, I agree absolutely but so is lying, cheating, stealing, murder, adultery; it is all in our genes, folks, and every bit of it. We were born with a sinful human nature that we are inherited in the genes of our parents and every one of those behavior is genetic in our genes.
But where I don’t agree with them is that we have no choice about this. Ah-ah! God says, for every sinful behavior man has ever engaged, man has a choice. The fact that they have choice brings hope. Because you have the choice not to do it by the power of the Holy Spirit, that brings hope that we proclaim.
• Homosexual behavior leads to self-destruction
A newspaper reporter in California, who did several exposé of the gay community out there, wrote an article entitled “That is nothing gay about homosexuality. Here is what he said,
“One of the biggest problems with homosexuals is their own loneliness. In homosexual’s own publications, in the writings of the psychiatrists to treat them, in the works of the ministers to try to help them, there is this constant repetition of the loneliness of the homosexual life style. This loneliness leads
• many homosexuals into drugs and alcoholism
• them to head to sadistic machismo
• them to become unkind; they are frequently vicious with their own partners and others.
Whoever decided to call homosexual gay must have a terrible sense of humor.”
• But not only there is a personal tragedy, the personal sadness of this life style is self-destructive in an incredible way. Dr. Paul Cameron did a study and published a book called “Homosexual Lifespan” and in this book, what he did is he went to look at the obituary in homosexual journals, 10 of them across the nations, A 4109 homosexuals he studied their obituaries and here is what he found:
• Homosexuals had 20 times more suicide rate of the average American.
• Homosexuals are victims of murder 83 times more often than the average American and that is not from gay bashing. In almost every case, the perpetrators of these murders are other members of the homosexual community.
• The average age of male homosexuals with Aids is 36 years old. The average age of male homosexuals without Aids is 43 years old. Folks, the average age of American is 75 years old.
And he concluded by saying, “Homosexuality plays out as THE MOST DEADLY life style. It’s far worse than smoking, or alcohol abuse, or working in an uranium mine.”
• Biblical truth should be taught — starting at the family level
What are we as Christians going to do? Let me narrowly focus on just what is immediately relevant to our church members first—especially to protect our children from being influenced by non-biblical worldviews. First, we ought to understand how we (all of us) come to embrace certain ideas. I believe there are three levels through which we are persuaded to buy-in certain ideas.
• Theoretical Level—we ought to teach our church members and their children about the biblical truth through pulpit, Sunday school, and Bible Studies. This will include the teaching of the authority of the Scripture, and why God’s Word is the absolute truth. We shall start Sunday School on January 2013, and we should design good curriculums and encourage attendance.
• Art Level-–Art, such as music, performance art, are very effective in educating God’s people. Increasingly, I come to understand why so many philosophers were also playwrights. For example, when I read about Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism, I had very difficult time to understand the essence of his thought, until one day I came across one of his play, No Exit, I began to get the hang of it. Playing games is a very effective way so I agree with George. But selecting good games is itself an art.
• Kitchen Table Level—this, perhaps, is the most important level. Christian parents should talk about subjects of this kind during the dinner time, camping event, inside the car on a long trip. When my son was very young, we both agreed to read one passage of the Bible every day before his bed time. I set the rule that we just read without discuss in order to simplify the process so the Bible reading project could sustain for long time. As we read the Bible every day, the Truth slowly instill into the young mind. So during the dinner times or vacation times, he could have something to ask about which gave me the chance to answer his question and study if I did know the answer, so the process, we both grew in the knowledge of the Word together.
People come to Jesus through one, or two, or all three levels in sequence of any permutation. As for me, I started with the Theoretical Level, and moved to the Kitchen Table Level, which was my attending of church’s fellowship groups and potluck dinners. After I was intellectually persuaded that Christianity was reasonable, it still took me a long time to come to Jesus until I was moved by the Sunday singing of hymns. I vividly remember that the hymn “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art” were so moved my heart and my soul.
Church is the hospital for sinners. Jesus is our great physician and we are the nurses. Jesus befriended with prostitutes and tax collectors, so we must love sinners but hate sins.
Ref. 1: Good portion of materials in this article was from Lon Solomon’s sermon which I heard years ago when I visited McLean Bible Church in McLean, Virginia.
Ref. 2: The three-level epistemology is extracted from many of Ravi Zacharias’ publications. Example: “Is Your Church Ready? Motivating Leaders To Live An Apologetic Life” by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler; p.33.
