What does the Bible (God, Jesus) say about same sex gay (arsenokoites) relationships / marriage?
by an unknown author from TruthorTradition.com
Homosexual, lesbian (gay) behavior (same sex relationships, marriage...) is sin, and is forbidden in the Bible. The graphic word arsenokoites (from arsen, “male,” and koite, bed) describes a man who “beds” another man. Although arsenokoites is sometimes used in a wide sense referring to all homosexuality, it also had a narrower sense, referring to the one who took the active or “male” role in the homosexual relation. The one who took the passive or “female” role was called the malachos. The word malachos literally means “soft” or “soft to the touch.” Although it had other uses such as “soft clothing,” it was the standard word in the Greek language for the “passive” one in the homosexual relation.
With these terms in mind, as well as others we have encountered above, we see that the vocabulary in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 10 is very specific: “Neither the sexually immoral (pornos) nor idolaters nor adulterers (moichos) nor male prostitutes (malachos) nor homosexual offenders (arsenokoites) nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” Homosexual behavior is also addressed by descriptive phrases, idioms, and euphemisms rather than just through the words that refer directly to it. For example, Romans 1 contains some very descriptive language.
Romans 1:24-27
(24) Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
(25) They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
(26) Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.
(27) In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
It is hard to read these verses and conclude anything other than that homosexual and lesbian relationships are wrong in God’s sight. The “natural relation” is a man and a woman. Homosexuality is also mentioned idiomatically in Jude 7: “…Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example, in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire” (NASB). “Gross immorality” is a good translation of the verb, ekporneuo, which is simply porneuo, the verb meaning, “to commit sexual immorality,” with the prefix ek, which intensifies the verb. Thus, the NASB translation of “gross immorality” is a very good one. Later in the verse, the phrase, “to go after strange flesh” is defined by Louw and Nida in their lexicon as “an idiom, literally ‘to go after strange flesh,’ to engage in unnatural sexual intercourse—‘to have homosexual intercourse.’” [1] In the Old Testament, the Law forbids homosexuality just as it forbids adultery and bestiality. “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable” (Lev. 18:22). “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable” (Lev. 20:13).
Lesbianism is not specifically mentioned by name in the Bible for a good reason: the name is a late invention. Both the terms “homosexual” and “lesbian” were coined in the 19th century by theorists who were describing people’s emotional and sexual interest for others of the same sex. “Lesbian” was chosen because of Sappho, perhaps the greatest female Greek lyric poet (c. 630-570 BC) who was interested in other women and lived on the island of Lesbos, and from the island of Lesbos itself, because it was known as a center of Greek culture, pleasure and licentiousness. As we saw in the verses just quoted above in Romans, however, the sexual attraction of a woman for another woman instead of a man is not natural and not godly.
Reference: TruthorTradition.com
Thinking Biblically About Homosexuality
by John MacArthur
"But if we will see this as sin, then we see that it can be forgiven. Homosexuals must have an unbearable life. The guilt must be beyond imagination. But there is deliverance. They can be freed. "
I want to begin by reading a very pertinent Scripture and I want you to turn to it. First Corinthians chapter 6, 1 Corinthians chapter 6, three verses stand out with regard to this issue, verses 9, 10 and 11. First Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 9, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers shall inherit the Kingdom of God. And such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God."
This is one of those bad news/good news passages. The bad news is, the unrighteous don't inherit God's Kingdom. The unrighteous who don't inherit God's Kingdom are characterized as fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers and swindlers. Those are the kind of people who do not go into God's Kingdom, so if you're one of those kinds of people, you don't go into God's Kingdom...that's the bad news. But the good news is in verse 11. Those kind of people can be washed. Those kind of people can be sanctified. And those kind of people can be justified. And they have been and they are being so that he could say to the Corinthian church, "Such were some of you." You used to be fornicators, and idolaters, and adulterers, and effeminate, and homosexuals. You used to be thieves, and coveters, and drunkards, and revilers, and swindlers, but you aren't anymore because you've been washed from those sins and you've been sanctified and you have been justified. That's good news.
A Conversation with a Young Homosexual Man
Some months ago I was standing in my office and I was looking at the little spindle that contains the messages that come in by phone and I noticed one that said, "A young man has called and asked that you come to the hospital to see him, he's dying." And so I decided to go immediately and I went down to Riverside Drive to the small hospital located there and went in the door and asked the person at the desk what room he was in. And I walked down the hall and turned into the room and took a look at this man in bed, a man I didn't know, but I could take one look at him and tell he was dying of AIDS. He was just about skin and bones, gaunt with hallow eyes and sunken cheeks, almost lifeless. And as I saw him, my attention moved to another man who was lying kind of casually across a small sofa that was in the hospital room, and I said to him, "My name is John MacArthur," at which point this man hastily exited the room and said, "I'll leave you alone."
I walked over to the bedside, knowing what I was about to hear. I took hold of his hand and he said to me, "I'm dying, I have not long to live, I have AIDS and cancer is eating my body at rapid rate." And then he burst into tears and said, "But I'm afraid to die because I know I'm going to go to hell." He said, "I've lived a sinful, sorted, homosexual life for I think 26 years." And then he went on to tell me, I said, "Tell me about yourself," and he told me about a Christian mother and a Christian father. He told me about being raised in a Christian home. He told me about attending two years of Bible college. He told me about all the rebellion in his heart and the beginnings of that homosexual sin and how eventually it blew him right out of the Bible college into 26 years of the most gross kind of living in the mainstream of the rabid homosexual community. He said, "Now I'm dying and I know I'm going to go to hell."
I said, "Tell me about homosexuality. Tell me about it. Tell me how you view it. Tell me what you think of it."
And as he sobbed and cried he said, "It is sin, I've always known it's sin, I hate it, God hates it and it damns men." And he said it over and over about it I suppose about a half a dozen ways, just as a cathartic to his own soul, the confession felt good.
And I said, "David, do you understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, the saving gospel of Jesus Christ?" And he said yes. I said, "Tell me the gospel." And he reiterated to me unhesitatingly how Christ was God incarnate, born and died and rose again for our salvation and the efficacy of His death on the cross as a substitute for sinners and he knew it well and he understood that salvation was by grace through faith and only God could save out of His own mercy the one who willingly believed and was eager to turn from his sin. I said, "Are you willing to turn from your sin to repent, cry out for God and ask Him for salvation?"
He said, "Yes, yes, yes!" So I said, "Well, salvation is a gift that only God can give, let me pray for you and ask God to give it to you." And so I began to pour out my heart and as I was holding his hand and praying, he was squeezing my hand tightly, the emotion of his heart coming out through the hand. And I pleaded with the Lord to be gracious and save him and to forgive him all this life of horrendous iniquity and deliver him. And I prayed for quite a long time, after which he burst into prayer, a sobbing kind of prayer, and confessed his sin again, probably a half a dozen times to the Lord, and pleaded to the Lord to be merciful and to forgive him for the way in which he had blasphemed His name and rejected the gospel and lived in sin.
This man, by all intents and purposes, an absolutely inveterate homosexual who has sinned in ways that are beyond description. And he's crying out for mercy. After his prayer was over, there was a peace and a calm that came over his heart. And as he opened his eyes and kind of wiped away his tears, a smile broke across his face and he was looking at the wall and he kept staring at the wall with a little smile on his face. And I said, "What are you looking at?" He said, "I'm looking at the calendar because I want to remember the day of my new beginning." And then he went on to reiterate that he...that he sensed that God had saved him, that he accepted by faith the fact that if he had trusted Christ God would save him in His mercy. And he believed in that moment that he was converted.
I think it was in a day or so from then that Lance Quinn took over a copy of The Gospel According to Jesus so that he could read it and fully understand and be sure that his faith was real. And within five days from the day that I had prayed with him, he was gone, dead. But I said to him that day by the bed, I said, "Now that you've become a Christian, what's going to be different?" He said, "My whole life is going to be different." He said, "The first thing is my whole life is filled with people who live in a homosexual world. The fellow who was in here when you came in is my lover. My male nurse here is a homosexual and the AIDS Association has sent me an AIDS worker to be with me in these days who is also a homosexual. Everybody in my life is a homosexual." And he said, "Now I have the responsibility to tell them all of the sin that they're engaged in and call them all to come to Christ." God gave him five days to do that and then he was gone.
Let me tell you something. One of the supreme tragedies of our time is the declassification of homosexuality as a sin because when you declassify it as a sin, you cut them off from their salvation source. It is a damning declassification. You're not being nice to homosexuals to call it an optional life style, a sexual preference. You're not nice to them to do that. That isn't kind. That isn't thoughtful. That isn't loving. That is damning. The kindest thing you could ever say to someone engaged in homosexual sin is it is a sin that will damn you and it will exclude you from the Kingdom of God forever. That's the kindest thing you can say. A proper diagnosis is absolutely crucial. This is not a preferred sexual orientation. This is not an alternate lifestyle. This is not a genetic thing. This is sin and perversion that damns men's and women's souls. The massive movement to appease the guilt and to release lust unchecked, to free up homosexuals to live any way they want and to feel good about it by defining their blasphemous sexual conduct is nothing more than an alternative lifestyle is a damning thing. As we shall see later, those who advocate homosexual rights will have the blood of dead homosexuals on their hands. Homosexuality is an insatiable lust. It is a drive that goes beyond anything that heterosexual people experience. And these people are not only trying to justify their own lust, their unchecked, unbridled, insatiable desires but they are trying to sell it to everybody else because then that becomes even a greater justification the more they can normalize it. And so they're selling it to your children.
Cultural Acceptance & Sexual Preference
I read this week that Star Trek II, the Second Generation, or whatever it's called, has put into the cast two homosexuals to live on the space ship because they're people too and they need proper consideration. There are situation comedies on television where the, not the actors and actresses, they may be homosexual, I don't know, but that the parts they play are the parts of homosexuals to normalize that. The government is funding all kinds of homosexual advocacy groups. The public schools of our own city are filled with advocacy for homosexuality. The National Education Association of America is an association of homosexual advocacy endeavoring to put homosexual advocates in the public schools to assist children who have propensities that way and to make sure they are free to do that without any parental knowledge. They want to make homosexuals out of your children.
They want to normalize this. They want everybody to get in on this because it makes them feel better, safer. Politicians seek the homosexual vote by campaigning for homosexual rights. That's an absolute inconceivable thing. They want us to accept the notion that homosexuals constitute a legitimate minority like black people or Hispanic people, or any other race and that homosexuals have been unjustly discriminated against and because of the unjust discrimination they are now to be given reparations or they are now entitled to some kind of special treatment under the law. A massive propaganda campaign is geared to make society and the church believe that homosexual practice is normal, moral and proper for some people, for many people, maybe for you. Homosexuals, they say, are just another minority and they should enjoy every human right and every human freedom and they should be allowed to express their sexual acts as any minority has the right to freely express its cultural heritage.
Of course this is ridiculous. They are not a race of people. This is not a racial issue. This is not a cultural issue. They are deviates. They have a perverted view of sex and they want to identify it as if it were a racial minority. Are we to have minority rights for murderers? What about drug dealers, they have a certain orientation? What about child molesters, they have a sexual preference? What about rapists, they have a sexual preference? They have a sexual orientation, should they have civil rights? Should they get reparations for the way we've been treating them? Absolutely ridiculous.
Allowing them to express their preference in the way we have has become the cause of the most devastating public health epidemic in the history of this nation. Allowing them to express their preference has become the cause of what will be the most devastating financial eruption the field of medical health has ever known and threatens to bankrupt the whole of America as we try to pay for the AIDS epidemic. Allowing them to express their preference is going to lead tens of thousands, if not millions of children and young people into the pit of perversion all under the tolerance of the state and the direction of the Board of Education. June in Los Angeles in the public schools was Gay Pride Month and it will be every June from now on. This kind of behavior is simply the expression of sexual lust, twisted and uncontained. And I'll say more about that tonight. When I say it is sexual lust twisted and uncontained, I mean exactly that. I understand that fornication is a sin and I understand that adultery is a sin in the sexual area, but there are proportions to homosexual sin that catapulted beyond what I can't understand.
What I'm here to say is this, this vile, wretched, wicked sin like every other vile, wretched, wicked sin is forgivable by the grace of God. That's what I want to announce. Jesus Christ died on the cross and in His body He bore the sins of homosexuality. He bore in His own body our sins on the cross. I don't know if you ever thought about it like that but think of the horror that He bore. And He did it that He might redeem homosexuals. But to receive that forgiveness, the sinner has to see what he's doing as a sin. And as long as we cover up the wretchedness and the sinfulness of it, we are aiding and abetting the damnation. And that's why there is blood guiltiness. We talked last week about the blood guiltiness that America bears for the children that is slaughtered in abortion and I believe that we bear the blood guiltiness for the execution of homosexuals that's going to come at the hands of Almighty God and is already coming through AIDS because those who have advocated that as an alternative life style or a civil right bear some of the guilt. There's an almost tireless effort on the part of homosexuals, they're almost...they're vicious and they're violent in trying to prove that this is a normal kind of life for them because they have to deal with such unbearable guilt to try to prove it's genetic, it's hereditary. It's somehow in the genes or the chromosomes. Let me sum it all up by saying this. I have read a myriad of things about this, the bottom line is this...there is absolutely no proof in any scientific realm that this is genetic. There is no physiological difference verifiable between a homosexual and a heterosexual. And you might also want to know that the vast majority of homosexuals also have sexual relationships with the opposite sex. It is a choice.
There's a lot of false research being done by homosexuals, trying to make this seem genetic. None of them have succeeded on the scientific level, nor will they because the Bible tells us it is a sin. It is sin. No effort at research, no research at the study of endocrinology, no effort at reexamination of science, no effort at rationalization is about to change what God says. It's sin. It's sin. You can be sure when you hear some of this research that if it's been done by homosexuals, or even if it's done by homosexual advocates, they have falsified the data if they can prove in any way that somehow this could happen genetically. It is sin. It is not just some kind of hereditary orientation.
In the Bible and History
Now let's go back to 1 Corinthians 6 and look specifically at two words. In verse 9 is the word effeminate, followed by the word homosexuals. These are two kinds of people that do not enter the Kingdom of God. Effeminate is malakos, the word means soft. It came to mean feminine or effeminate, a man who acts like a woman who is soft, feminine. It also became a technical term for the passive partner in homosexual relationships, the one who takes the female role. Arden(??) Gingrich(??), one of the classic lexicons says the word also included men and boys who allowed themselves to become male prostitutes for homosexuals. You see, there are men and boys who aren't really desirous of homosexuality as much as they're desirous of money. And so they prostitute themselves for homosexuals. They don't maybe have that same passion, that same consuming perverted drive that the homosexuals have but they will sell themselves to them. That word would encompass them, male prostitutes who are the passive partners to service the aggressive homosexuals, or passive partners who are homosexuals who take the female role, the effeminates.
And then the word homosexual, arsenokoites, it just means that, someone who has a relationship with the same sex, namely a man who has relationships with a man. Paul says those kinds of people don't enter the Kingdom. And he's really covered the ground. The active, aggressive homosexual, the passive accepting soft effeminate homosexual, the one who aggressively engages in that, the one who is the passive partner, the macho kind of homosexual, and the soft effeminate homosexual, all of them are excluded from the Kingdom. They don't inherit it. Why? Because that kind of pattern of sin is exclusive of God's Kingdom. They will never belong to God's Kingdom with all of its blessing and all of its glory.
The church then has to tell people that the door to the Kingdom is shut if you live like that. If that's your choice and you're not willing to recognize it as sin and repent of it and bow the knee and accept the forgiveness of Christ, you're going to...you're going to be shut out of God's Kingdom. The church must, as the gate keeper, announce that. We have to say to homosexuals, if you continue that life pattern and you choose to live that way, you will have the door to the Kingdom of God shut. If you're willing to repent, come to Christ for forgiveness and be washed and cleansed, the door to the Kingdom is open. As the gate keepers, as the ones who hold the keys to the Kingdom, as the ones who open and close, the church and its leaders must give that message. The sad thing is, the church in many cases is not doing it. In fact, the church today has become a leading advocate of homosexual rights. Even the Catholic Church has an organization inside of it called Dignity which advocates homosexual rights. Protestant churches certainly have their advocacy groups. The World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches which is made up of liberal churches, mainline denomination liberal churches, denies that homosexuality is a sin and thus are part of the damning conspiracy joining Satan in damning homosexuals because they refuse to recognize the sin that damns them. Major denominations, Methodists, Episcopalian, Presbyterian ordain homosexuals, ordain lesbians and have gay advocacy groups, they call them.
Julius Caesar's lover was King Nicomedes. Both Gibbon and Toynbe(?) write that one of the major contributions to the fall of the Roman Empire was homosexuality. Suetonius says, the historian, fourteen out of the first fifteen Caesars were homosexuals. It was rampant in Paul's time, everywhere. Nero who would be the current emperor when Paul wrote this had taken a boy named Sporus, had him castrated, then married him in a full wedding and lived with him as a wife. He must have been a good wife because the Caesar who followed him picked him up as his wife. Paul's world wasn't any different than ours. Homosexuality was rampant and he confronted it as sin and said it's the sin just like any sin that keeps you out of the Kingdom of God. Paul was not a homophobic over-reactor because he was a repressed homosexual, and neither am I. He was true to what he knew the Word of God taught. He was true to what the Holy Spirit inspired him to say, it was sin. And until it is faced as sin, it can't be dealt with.
What does God say about it? Let's go back and find out. Deuteronomy chapter 22 is a good place to start. Deuteronomy chapter 22, sometime in your past if you've been in a fundamental or evangelical church, you may have heard some pastor refer to this verse, probably in another context. Verse 5 of Deuteronomy 22 says, "A woman shall not wear a man's clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman's clothing." Now follow this, "For whoever does these things looks weird." Is that what it says? No. "For whoever does these things must be on his way to a party." No. "For whoever does these things is...what?...an abomination to the Lord." It abominates God, it disgusts and revolts him.
Now a woman is not to wear a man's clothing. The first time I ever heard anybody refer to this, they were preaching a sermon about why women shouldn't wear slacks or pants. It doesn't mean that. May I remind you of something? In ancient times men wore skirts. That is a ridiculous interpretation of this. Everybody wore skirts, nobody wore pants. That's not what it's talking about. There was a certain style, however, to men's clothing and a certain style to women's clothing. But the Hebrew says, "A woman shall not wear...literally...that which appertaineth to a man." Whether it's weapons or implements, or tools, or clothes, or whatever it is that rubs out the distinctiveness of one's sex, that's an abomination to God. Today we call people who do this transvestites, a person who exchanges his dress for that of the other sex because it induces a certain kind of sexual...perverted sexual thrill or fulfillment. Men are to be masculine and women are to be feminine and God has made them male and female, male and female created He them and that's the way He wants them to stay. And Satan wants to obliterate and convolute and pervert and twist that. We see that in the homosexual community today rampant. In fact, they love to dress up in the clothing of the opposite sex. The men put on those women's clothes and they parade themselves publicly under the title "drag queens."
Genesis
Genesis chapter 1 and verse 27 says, "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them."
There you have in very simple and direct indication that the reference to God's creative purpose. God created male, He created female. In chapter 2 and verse 23, the man said, "Now this bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man, for this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife and they shall become one flesh." God made male, zakar in Hebrew. God made female, neqebah in Hebrew and they were to come together to complete each other making one flesh. That is God's unalterable creative design. One man for one woman for life.
Now there are a number of ways that such a marital relationship in God's design can be convoluted and confused and perverted. It isn't very long actually in the book of Genesis until perversions of all kinds begin to manifest themselves. You have a relationship that surfaces in the sixth chapter of Genesis which appears to be a relationship in which fallen angels or demons cohabitate with woman and produce some kind of strange offspring, Satan's attempt to bring about some kind of perverted sexual relationship to produce an unredeemable race.
You move ahead from the fornication of chapter 6, a bizarre kind, to chapter 19 in Genesis and you have an indication of incest. It says in verse 36, "Both the daughters of Lot were with child by their father." Adding to fornication and incest, if you come over to chapter 34 you find here rape. "Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob went out to visit the daughters of the land. And when Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land saw her, he took her and lay with her by force. He was deeply attracted to Dinah the daughter of Jacob. He loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her," and the story goes on. Here is an incident of outright rape. We won't take the time to look in detail.
Go to chapter 38 and in chapter 38 you have another perversion and this one is prostitution. It mentions in verse 15, "When Judah saw her he thought she was a harlot, for she had covered her face." Already harlotry exists, prostitution exists. There is an occasion other than the ones that I've read you about polygamy in the book of Genesis. So it isn't long after God has ordained one man for one woman for life that all kinds of perversions occur...fornications, adultery, incest, rape, prostitution, polygamy.
And you can add to that the sin of homosexuality. For that you go to chapter 19 of Genesis. And I do want to spend some time in the details of this because it is our subject. Satan obviously is trying to pervert and confuse God's order. He has brought into human society all these other matters and now he introduces homosexuality. Apparently it became very widespread very rapidly, as did adultery, fornication, incest, rape and prostitution. And, of course, they're still rampant in the world today.
Cultural Acceptance Part 2
What does society say about homosexuality? Well in 1881 there was a born a man who left an immense impact on human history, his name was Sigmund Freud. Among many human behaviors which were curiosities to him was the behavior of sodomy. He became very interested in dealing with sodomites and in understanding them. He determined after some supposed research that sodomy was a psychological disorder and that it was directly related to a domineering mother. By the way, that viewpoint still hangs around today and you hear people articulate it. He said basically, "It's just a disorder that comes because you were dominated by your mother and you grow up then hating the one who dominated you. And since the one who dominated you was a woman, you hate women and so you attach your sexual fantasy to men." That's been a very popular viewpoint.
In the 1930's there came a man by the name of Havelock Ellis. Havelock Ellis published a manual, a sex book and in that sex book he brought sodomy into the open. This is the 1930's. And he pointed out, supposedly, some famous sodomites. He concluded that there were great men among the sodomites and that they accomplished what they did because there was an unusual genius associated with sodomy.
He said, "Frankly, Freud is wrong. It is not a psychological disorder generated by a domineering mother, it is hereditary, it is genetic and it is a higher level of genius than just normal folks possess." He wrote about Erasmus, the Dutch humanist sixteenth century, and said he was homosexual. He said Christopher Marlowe, the English poet, was homosexual. Michael Angelo, the Italian genius, painter, architect was a homosexual, Lord Byron, Francis Bacon, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, some of them were, by the way, history does indicate that. I'll never forget reading the autobiography of Oscar Wilde who said at the end of his life to his horror and shame that what he was in secret all his life he had to finally shout from the housetop. But he said, "Look at all these geniuses," and he picked the selective list of people out of the run-of-the-mill sodomites and made it appear as if it was a higher level of genius to which some people were born.
So since Freud and Ellis and others who have embellished both viewpoints, you can take your pick. Did your mother do it to you because she was nasty and domineering? Or did your mother and father do it to you genetically? And there's still debate. The reason there is still debate is because no one can prove it's hereditary. Furthermore, no one can prove that homosexuals have in common a domineering mother.
Then along came a real fraud by the name of Albert Kinsey with a famous Kinsey Report. In the 1940's and the 1950's he published the famous Kinsey Reports on Sexuality. He was a sexual pervert himself and so he was trying to prove a point before he even did his research. He wanted to justify adultery, fornication, homosexuality, and any other kind of deviant sex so he fabricated his figures, fabricated his research. I spent this week reading a very interesting book called Kinsey Sex and Fraud. It debunks the entire Kinsey report and shows how fraudulent the figures were. It was he, you remember, who said that in the result of his research was that one out of ten people were sodomites. And this normalized it. One out of ten were sodomites. That is not true, has never been true, may some day in the future be true if their media campaign is continuingly successful. He tilted and twisted and fabricated the statistics to make it look like everyone was an adulterer, everyone was a fornicator, everyone was having affairs illicitly out of their marriage and one out of ten people were sodomites.
This was followed up by the American Psychiatric Association which declassified sodomy as a mental sickness and removed it from its lists of standard diagnostic diseases and illnesses. And the American Psychiatric Association decided to buy into Havelock Ellis and say it was hereditary. And once Kinsey kicked in the door with his false figures and everybody thought homosexuality was just normal and one out of ten people were homosexuals, that, by the way, is why in the L.A. public school system the homosexual awareness and the homosexual advocacy lobby is called Project Ten. That comes from the Kinsey Report, the one out of ten and that has led to the epidemic of today. And then you take all the talk-show hosts from Phil Donahue on through and what they do is create a platform which further normalizes this kind of deviant behavior. There is no evidence...there is no evidence that homosexuality is a result of a domineering mother. There is no evidence that homosexuality is a result of genetics. There is plenty of evidence that homosexuality is a choice...a choice like all sin, it's a choice. You may have certain susceptibility to it. There may be some people who are more tempted in that area. But it primarily has to do with choice.
And if you read the literature of those that are trying to help people come out of homosexual sodomite sin, they will tell you that what leads people into these choices, what leads them to live like this is just a simple little list of things. One, early homosexual experience, when they're young, somebody engages them, some other boy maybe in their youth or even late childhood, adolescence engages them in some kind of homosexual play that stimulates them.
Another component in the leading people into these kinds of choices is the need for intimacy and some homosexual supplies it. Some young boy meets a man and it has been known to happen in the church with some Sunday School teachers of young boys, and it happens in the schools all the time and you read about it in the newspapers, and this teacher becomes sort of like a father figure to the boy and the boy needs intimacy and he finds warmth and he finds a listening ear and pretty soon he finds himself being stimulated in a physical way by this man and it's fun and he likes the man and that makes him feel comfortable about it and becomes a lifestyle.
Another one of the little components that lead this way is sub-culture acceptance. Some boys particularly, or even girls who become lesbians, can't find their way to acceptance in the normal culture and so they find a sub-culture that will accept them. And homosexuals are always looking for new flesh. Sometimes it happens to men because they're rejected by women and because they can't find an outlet for their physical desires among women because women won't have them, or they fell unattractive to women or they've been rebuffed, they'll slide into the circle where they can find gratification.
There are factors in life that lay out the path of temptation but it's still the series of choices. I can remember as a boy, just a young boy in my early years of junior high being approached in a restroom by a man who now I knew, and it was a few years before I understood, that had homosexual intentions toward me. And I didn't understand that until I looked back on that and I was so frightened, I went out of there. And I can look back and imagine that some boy in that kind of circumstance with a man he knew and trusted would have given himself to that, found some kind of thrill in that and be on his way to a life of that. When I went away to college in my first year at a Christian school, I had a roommate in my own room attack me in the middle of the night. And I remember it so absolutely vividly, I was first of all shocked and all I remember was rising out of bed and throwing a punch and...(applause)...I mean, this is a fairly normal instinct for me, not to he commended, but expected...and seeing him fly across the room into a corner and then confronted, "What is going on?" This is some years ago at a Christian school in my lifetime, it's wholesale everywhere now and the rampage is on for new flesh, and the rampage is on to elicit the involvement of young lives. And where you have kids that are rejected by women, who are looking for a sub-culture of acceptance, who have a need for intimacy, who get lured into this kind of thing, you have some choices that lead to other choices, that lead to other choices and it becomes lust out of control.
So, when we look at this situation, we have to see it for what the Bible sees it for. It is a sin that brings about the judgment of God. But as we saw this morning, it is a sin that is forgivable.
One other text and that's Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1 verse 18, very familiar text which gives us a good look at the fallenness of man and God's reaction. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." In other words, God's wrath is revealed against the whole human race because they have the truth and they suppress it. They reject it. "That which is known about God is evident within them." God has planted it in their hearts. God has made it evident to them. Verse 20, "Since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what is made so that they're without excuse." You have the internal moral law of God, you have the external creation and evidence of God and His morality. The evidence is there, the truth is there and men reject it. Verse 21, "Even when they knew God innately from the internal witness and externally from the creation, they didn't honor Him as God, they didn't give thanks, they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened, professing to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. They rejected God, thus rejecting truth. They created their own gods like animals and men and failed to worship the true God, and that's why God's wrath is poured out upon them.
There you have the characterization of the fallen world. God has given the knowledge of Himself internally and externally. Men reject it and instead of seeing God as revealed, they turn their backs on God, they invent their own gods and bring about the wrath of God upon them.
Now the wrath of God comes in this form, verse 24, "Therefore, God gave them over...God gave them over." What a statement. "He gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them." Look at verse 26, "For this reason God gave them over....there it is again...to degrading passions." Verse 28, "And just as they didn't see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind." Verse 24, He gave them over that their bodies would be dishonored. Verse 26, He gave them over to degrading passions in their heart. Verse 28, He gave them over to a depraved mind. Body, heart, mind, all given over and what...what became of that when God took His hand off and God let man go his own way? What came of it? Sexual perversion. What you see today is already the evidence of God's judgment on man as He lets him go.
Verse 24, "God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. They worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever, amen." Then verse 26, "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions." What kind? "For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural." They were given over, verse 24 says, to epithumia, uncleanness, reaching out after forbidden pleasure. The Stoics called it grasping for pleasure which defies all reason. Lust gone wild. That's what verse 24 is talking about. Desires that make people do shameless things and nameless things. And they dishonored their bodies.
How did they dishonor their bodies? They did what was against nature. They did what was unnatural. In verse 26 women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. What you have in homosexuality then is a very clear illustration of depravity, of people given over to their lusts without any restraint on God's part. He just let them go. Women, we call them lesbians. Somewhere around 20 to 25 million of them, we hear in America now. They have chosen to live godlessly and God gives them over to the results of their choices. Verse 27, "And in the same way also, the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error." They burn in their lust, that phrase, "burned in their desire toward one another," literally to burn out, ekkaio, to burn out, they were consumed with lust. It's the consuming rage of it.
The Response
Some of the homosexual rights people say, "Well, Jesus said He came to put an end to the Law. Sure, that's the Old Testament Law but Jesus came to put an end to the Law." No. He didn't come to put an end to the Law, He came as the end of the Law, the fulfillment, the culmination of the Law, the one who lived the Law perfectly. And He said, "Not a jot or a tittle shall pass away from this Law." And He reiterates the Law, does God, in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit given to Paul to write as he writes 1 Timothy 1:10, the Law is not made for righteous men, verse 9, but for those who are lawless. Verse 10, immoral men, and homosexuals. The Law is still written to call homosexuals to account, is what he is saying, 1 Timothy 1:9 and 10. Nothing has changed. God's moral law hasn't changed because God hasn't changed. Whatever is right has always been right and always will be right. Whatever is wrong has always been wrong and will always be wrong. Morality doesn't change because God doesn't change. God said if you do this, you'll defile your land. If you defile your land, I'll destroy your nation. If you do this, you'll die.
But there's still mercy before death and mercy before judgment to those who repent. Look at Leviticus chapter 20 and one final verse and then we'll stop for this morning. Chapter 20 of Leviticus and verse 13, "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, having sex with a man, a man having sex with a man, both of them have committed a detestable act, kill them." That's what it said. Kill them. "Their blood guiltiness is on them, they deserve to die." The blood cries out again for death. God's law says kill them. God's law says if you murder somebody you should die, right? Anybody who kills somebody, kill them. I told you last week that in the case of abortion the blood cries out from the ground and God hears it. The slaughter of the innocence in America as we massacre little babies, their blood cries out against their killers. There's blood guiltiness on the ones who killed those babies, they deserve to die. Listen to this, there's blood guiltiness on homosexuals and those who advocate homosexuality and those who seek homosexual rights, those people are...are abetting and aiding, damning sin and there is a blood guiltiness attached there on the people who do not destroy them. This nation instead of judging, condemning, punishing homosexuality advocates it and thus has the blood of the dead homosexuals on its hands, just as it has the blood of the dead babies on its hands. This is a blood guilty nation. And if you think we're on the edge of some American utopia, you better guess again. From God's standpoint, these are serious days. How in the world we could ever get to the point with Christian beginnings where we have politicians, people running for President and congress and senate and governor and mayor and council members and all of that kind of stuff who advocate homosexual rights and those people could be elected, those people bear guilt before God because they aid and abet people going into a sin that is an abomination to God.
All that said, God says being a transvestite is an abomination, being a transsexual is an abomination, being a homosexual is an abomination, aiding and abetting any of that stuff is abominable to God and there's blood guiltiness associated with all of it. And the penalty is death and God will judge the nation that tolerates it and God will destroy the people that do it. Having said all of that, I go right back to where we started and remind you of this wonderful truth, this sin in all its categories and in all its extremes is forgivable. Does that tell you something about God's grace? Does that tell you how gracious our God is? Does that tell you something about the death of Christ who in His own body bore those very sins? God is a God of mercy and grace. And if you will come to Him in your sin, He is willing to forgive.
Reference: gty.org; God's View of Homosexuality, Part 1, God's View of Homosexuality, Part 2
by an unknown author from TruthorTradition.com
Homosexual, lesbian (gay) behavior (same sex relationships, marriage...) is sin, and is forbidden in the Bible. The graphic word arsenokoites (from arsen, “male,” and koite, bed) describes a man who “beds” another man. Although arsenokoites is sometimes used in a wide sense referring to all homosexuality, it also had a narrower sense, referring to the one who took the active or “male” role in the homosexual relation. The one who took the passive or “female” role was called the malachos. The word malachos literally means “soft” or “soft to the touch.” Although it had other uses such as “soft clothing,” it was the standard word in the Greek language for the “passive” one in the homosexual relation.
With these terms in mind, as well as others we have encountered above, we see that the vocabulary in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 10 is very specific: “Neither the sexually immoral (pornos) nor idolaters nor adulterers (moichos) nor male prostitutes (malachos) nor homosexual offenders (arsenokoites) nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” Homosexual behavior is also addressed by descriptive phrases, idioms, and euphemisms rather than just through the words that refer directly to it. For example, Romans 1 contains some very descriptive language.
Romans 1:24-27
(24) Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
(25) They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
(26) Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.
(27) In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
It is hard to read these verses and conclude anything other than that homosexual and lesbian relationships are wrong in God’s sight. The “natural relation” is a man and a woman. Homosexuality is also mentioned idiomatically in Jude 7: “…Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example, in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire” (NASB). “Gross immorality” is a good translation of the verb, ekporneuo, which is simply porneuo, the verb meaning, “to commit sexual immorality,” with the prefix ek, which intensifies the verb. Thus, the NASB translation of “gross immorality” is a very good one. Later in the verse, the phrase, “to go after strange flesh” is defined by Louw and Nida in their lexicon as “an idiom, literally ‘to go after strange flesh,’ to engage in unnatural sexual intercourse—‘to have homosexual intercourse.’” [1] In the Old Testament, the Law forbids homosexuality just as it forbids adultery and bestiality. “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable” (Lev. 18:22). “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable” (Lev. 20:13).
Lesbianism is not specifically mentioned by name in the Bible for a good reason: the name is a late invention. Both the terms “homosexual” and “lesbian” were coined in the 19th century by theorists who were describing people’s emotional and sexual interest for others of the same sex. “Lesbian” was chosen because of Sappho, perhaps the greatest female Greek lyric poet (c. 630-570 BC) who was interested in other women and lived on the island of Lesbos, and from the island of Lesbos itself, because it was known as a center of Greek culture, pleasure and licentiousness. As we saw in the verses just quoted above in Romans, however, the sexual attraction of a woman for another woman instead of a man is not natural and not godly.
Reference: TruthorTradition.com
Thinking Biblically About Homosexuality
by John MacArthur
"But if we will see this as sin, then we see that it can be forgiven. Homosexuals must have an unbearable life. The guilt must be beyond imagination. But there is deliverance. They can be freed. "
I want to begin by reading a very pertinent Scripture and I want you to turn to it. First Corinthians chapter 6, 1 Corinthians chapter 6, three verses stand out with regard to this issue, verses 9, 10 and 11. First Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 9, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers shall inherit the Kingdom of God. And such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God."
This is one of those bad news/good news passages. The bad news is, the unrighteous don't inherit God's Kingdom. The unrighteous who don't inherit God's Kingdom are characterized as fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers and swindlers. Those are the kind of people who do not go into God's Kingdom, so if you're one of those kinds of people, you don't go into God's Kingdom...that's the bad news. But the good news is in verse 11. Those kind of people can be washed. Those kind of people can be sanctified. And those kind of people can be justified. And they have been and they are being so that he could say to the Corinthian church, "Such were some of you." You used to be fornicators, and idolaters, and adulterers, and effeminate, and homosexuals. You used to be thieves, and coveters, and drunkards, and revilers, and swindlers, but you aren't anymore because you've been washed from those sins and you've been sanctified and you have been justified. That's good news.
A Conversation with a Young Homosexual Man
Some months ago I was standing in my office and I was looking at the little spindle that contains the messages that come in by phone and I noticed one that said, "A young man has called and asked that you come to the hospital to see him, he's dying." And so I decided to go immediately and I went down to Riverside Drive to the small hospital located there and went in the door and asked the person at the desk what room he was in. And I walked down the hall and turned into the room and took a look at this man in bed, a man I didn't know, but I could take one look at him and tell he was dying of AIDS. He was just about skin and bones, gaunt with hallow eyes and sunken cheeks, almost lifeless. And as I saw him, my attention moved to another man who was lying kind of casually across a small sofa that was in the hospital room, and I said to him, "My name is John MacArthur," at which point this man hastily exited the room and said, "I'll leave you alone."
I walked over to the bedside, knowing what I was about to hear. I took hold of his hand and he said to me, "I'm dying, I have not long to live, I have AIDS and cancer is eating my body at rapid rate." And then he burst into tears and said, "But I'm afraid to die because I know I'm going to go to hell." He said, "I've lived a sinful, sorted, homosexual life for I think 26 years." And then he went on to tell me, I said, "Tell me about yourself," and he told me about a Christian mother and a Christian father. He told me about being raised in a Christian home. He told me about attending two years of Bible college. He told me about all the rebellion in his heart and the beginnings of that homosexual sin and how eventually it blew him right out of the Bible college into 26 years of the most gross kind of living in the mainstream of the rabid homosexual community. He said, "Now I'm dying and I know I'm going to go to hell."
I said, "Tell me about homosexuality. Tell me about it. Tell me how you view it. Tell me what you think of it."
And as he sobbed and cried he said, "It is sin, I've always known it's sin, I hate it, God hates it and it damns men." And he said it over and over about it I suppose about a half a dozen ways, just as a cathartic to his own soul, the confession felt good.
And I said, "David, do you understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, the saving gospel of Jesus Christ?" And he said yes. I said, "Tell me the gospel." And he reiterated to me unhesitatingly how Christ was God incarnate, born and died and rose again for our salvation and the efficacy of His death on the cross as a substitute for sinners and he knew it well and he understood that salvation was by grace through faith and only God could save out of His own mercy the one who willingly believed and was eager to turn from his sin. I said, "Are you willing to turn from your sin to repent, cry out for God and ask Him for salvation?"
He said, "Yes, yes, yes!" So I said, "Well, salvation is a gift that only God can give, let me pray for you and ask God to give it to you." And so I began to pour out my heart and as I was holding his hand and praying, he was squeezing my hand tightly, the emotion of his heart coming out through the hand. And I pleaded with the Lord to be gracious and save him and to forgive him all this life of horrendous iniquity and deliver him. And I prayed for quite a long time, after which he burst into prayer, a sobbing kind of prayer, and confessed his sin again, probably a half a dozen times to the Lord, and pleaded to the Lord to be merciful and to forgive him for the way in which he had blasphemed His name and rejected the gospel and lived in sin.
This man, by all intents and purposes, an absolutely inveterate homosexual who has sinned in ways that are beyond description. And he's crying out for mercy. After his prayer was over, there was a peace and a calm that came over his heart. And as he opened his eyes and kind of wiped away his tears, a smile broke across his face and he was looking at the wall and he kept staring at the wall with a little smile on his face. And I said, "What are you looking at?" He said, "I'm looking at the calendar because I want to remember the day of my new beginning." And then he went on to reiterate that he...that he sensed that God had saved him, that he accepted by faith the fact that if he had trusted Christ God would save him in His mercy. And he believed in that moment that he was converted.
I think it was in a day or so from then that Lance Quinn took over a copy of The Gospel According to Jesus so that he could read it and fully understand and be sure that his faith was real. And within five days from the day that I had prayed with him, he was gone, dead. But I said to him that day by the bed, I said, "Now that you've become a Christian, what's going to be different?" He said, "My whole life is going to be different." He said, "The first thing is my whole life is filled with people who live in a homosexual world. The fellow who was in here when you came in is my lover. My male nurse here is a homosexual and the AIDS Association has sent me an AIDS worker to be with me in these days who is also a homosexual. Everybody in my life is a homosexual." And he said, "Now I have the responsibility to tell them all of the sin that they're engaged in and call them all to come to Christ." God gave him five days to do that and then he was gone.
Let me tell you something. One of the supreme tragedies of our time is the declassification of homosexuality as a sin because when you declassify it as a sin, you cut them off from their salvation source. It is a damning declassification. You're not being nice to homosexuals to call it an optional life style, a sexual preference. You're not nice to them to do that. That isn't kind. That isn't thoughtful. That isn't loving. That is damning. The kindest thing you could ever say to someone engaged in homosexual sin is it is a sin that will damn you and it will exclude you from the Kingdom of God forever. That's the kindest thing you can say. A proper diagnosis is absolutely crucial. This is not a preferred sexual orientation. This is not an alternate lifestyle. This is not a genetic thing. This is sin and perversion that damns men's and women's souls. The massive movement to appease the guilt and to release lust unchecked, to free up homosexuals to live any way they want and to feel good about it by defining their blasphemous sexual conduct is nothing more than an alternative lifestyle is a damning thing. As we shall see later, those who advocate homosexual rights will have the blood of dead homosexuals on their hands. Homosexuality is an insatiable lust. It is a drive that goes beyond anything that heterosexual people experience. And these people are not only trying to justify their own lust, their unchecked, unbridled, insatiable desires but they are trying to sell it to everybody else because then that becomes even a greater justification the more they can normalize it. And so they're selling it to your children.
Cultural Acceptance & Sexual Preference
I read this week that Star Trek II, the Second Generation, or whatever it's called, has put into the cast two homosexuals to live on the space ship because they're people too and they need proper consideration. There are situation comedies on television where the, not the actors and actresses, they may be homosexual, I don't know, but that the parts they play are the parts of homosexuals to normalize that. The government is funding all kinds of homosexual advocacy groups. The public schools of our own city are filled with advocacy for homosexuality. The National Education Association of America is an association of homosexual advocacy endeavoring to put homosexual advocates in the public schools to assist children who have propensities that way and to make sure they are free to do that without any parental knowledge. They want to make homosexuals out of your children.
They want to normalize this. They want everybody to get in on this because it makes them feel better, safer. Politicians seek the homosexual vote by campaigning for homosexual rights. That's an absolute inconceivable thing. They want us to accept the notion that homosexuals constitute a legitimate minority like black people or Hispanic people, or any other race and that homosexuals have been unjustly discriminated against and because of the unjust discrimination they are now to be given reparations or they are now entitled to some kind of special treatment under the law. A massive propaganda campaign is geared to make society and the church believe that homosexual practice is normal, moral and proper for some people, for many people, maybe for you. Homosexuals, they say, are just another minority and they should enjoy every human right and every human freedom and they should be allowed to express their sexual acts as any minority has the right to freely express its cultural heritage.
Of course this is ridiculous. They are not a race of people. This is not a racial issue. This is not a cultural issue. They are deviates. They have a perverted view of sex and they want to identify it as if it were a racial minority. Are we to have minority rights for murderers? What about drug dealers, they have a certain orientation? What about child molesters, they have a sexual preference? What about rapists, they have a sexual preference? They have a sexual orientation, should they have civil rights? Should they get reparations for the way we've been treating them? Absolutely ridiculous.
Allowing them to express their preference in the way we have has become the cause of the most devastating public health epidemic in the history of this nation. Allowing them to express their preference has become the cause of what will be the most devastating financial eruption the field of medical health has ever known and threatens to bankrupt the whole of America as we try to pay for the AIDS epidemic. Allowing them to express their preference is going to lead tens of thousands, if not millions of children and young people into the pit of perversion all under the tolerance of the state and the direction of the Board of Education. June in Los Angeles in the public schools was Gay Pride Month and it will be every June from now on. This kind of behavior is simply the expression of sexual lust, twisted and uncontained. And I'll say more about that tonight. When I say it is sexual lust twisted and uncontained, I mean exactly that. I understand that fornication is a sin and I understand that adultery is a sin in the sexual area, but there are proportions to homosexual sin that catapulted beyond what I can't understand.
What I'm here to say is this, this vile, wretched, wicked sin like every other vile, wretched, wicked sin is forgivable by the grace of God. That's what I want to announce. Jesus Christ died on the cross and in His body He bore the sins of homosexuality. He bore in His own body our sins on the cross. I don't know if you ever thought about it like that but think of the horror that He bore. And He did it that He might redeem homosexuals. But to receive that forgiveness, the sinner has to see what he's doing as a sin. And as long as we cover up the wretchedness and the sinfulness of it, we are aiding and abetting the damnation. And that's why there is blood guiltiness. We talked last week about the blood guiltiness that America bears for the children that is slaughtered in abortion and I believe that we bear the blood guiltiness for the execution of homosexuals that's going to come at the hands of Almighty God and is already coming through AIDS because those who have advocated that as an alternative life style or a civil right bear some of the guilt. There's an almost tireless effort on the part of homosexuals, they're almost...they're vicious and they're violent in trying to prove that this is a normal kind of life for them because they have to deal with such unbearable guilt to try to prove it's genetic, it's hereditary. It's somehow in the genes or the chromosomes. Let me sum it all up by saying this. I have read a myriad of things about this, the bottom line is this...there is absolutely no proof in any scientific realm that this is genetic. There is no physiological difference verifiable between a homosexual and a heterosexual. And you might also want to know that the vast majority of homosexuals also have sexual relationships with the opposite sex. It is a choice.
There's a lot of false research being done by homosexuals, trying to make this seem genetic. None of them have succeeded on the scientific level, nor will they because the Bible tells us it is a sin. It is sin. No effort at research, no research at the study of endocrinology, no effort at reexamination of science, no effort at rationalization is about to change what God says. It's sin. It's sin. You can be sure when you hear some of this research that if it's been done by homosexuals, or even if it's done by homosexual advocates, they have falsified the data if they can prove in any way that somehow this could happen genetically. It is sin. It is not just some kind of hereditary orientation.
In the Bible and History
Now let's go back to 1 Corinthians 6 and look specifically at two words. In verse 9 is the word effeminate, followed by the word homosexuals. These are two kinds of people that do not enter the Kingdom of God. Effeminate is malakos, the word means soft. It came to mean feminine or effeminate, a man who acts like a woman who is soft, feminine. It also became a technical term for the passive partner in homosexual relationships, the one who takes the female role. Arden(??) Gingrich(??), one of the classic lexicons says the word also included men and boys who allowed themselves to become male prostitutes for homosexuals. You see, there are men and boys who aren't really desirous of homosexuality as much as they're desirous of money. And so they prostitute themselves for homosexuals. They don't maybe have that same passion, that same consuming perverted drive that the homosexuals have but they will sell themselves to them. That word would encompass them, male prostitutes who are the passive partners to service the aggressive homosexuals, or passive partners who are homosexuals who take the female role, the effeminates.
And then the word homosexual, arsenokoites, it just means that, someone who has a relationship with the same sex, namely a man who has relationships with a man. Paul says those kinds of people don't enter the Kingdom. And he's really covered the ground. The active, aggressive homosexual, the passive accepting soft effeminate homosexual, the one who aggressively engages in that, the one who is the passive partner, the macho kind of homosexual, and the soft effeminate homosexual, all of them are excluded from the Kingdom. They don't inherit it. Why? Because that kind of pattern of sin is exclusive of God's Kingdom. They will never belong to God's Kingdom with all of its blessing and all of its glory.
The church then has to tell people that the door to the Kingdom is shut if you live like that. If that's your choice and you're not willing to recognize it as sin and repent of it and bow the knee and accept the forgiveness of Christ, you're going to...you're going to be shut out of God's Kingdom. The church must, as the gate keeper, announce that. We have to say to homosexuals, if you continue that life pattern and you choose to live that way, you will have the door to the Kingdom of God shut. If you're willing to repent, come to Christ for forgiveness and be washed and cleansed, the door to the Kingdom is open. As the gate keepers, as the ones who hold the keys to the Kingdom, as the ones who open and close, the church and its leaders must give that message. The sad thing is, the church in many cases is not doing it. In fact, the church today has become a leading advocate of homosexual rights. Even the Catholic Church has an organization inside of it called Dignity which advocates homosexual rights. Protestant churches certainly have their advocacy groups. The World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches which is made up of liberal churches, mainline denomination liberal churches, denies that homosexuality is a sin and thus are part of the damning conspiracy joining Satan in damning homosexuals because they refuse to recognize the sin that damns them. Major denominations, Methodists, Episcopalian, Presbyterian ordain homosexuals, ordain lesbians and have gay advocacy groups, they call them.
Julius Caesar's lover was King Nicomedes. Both Gibbon and Toynbe(?) write that one of the major contributions to the fall of the Roman Empire was homosexuality. Suetonius says, the historian, fourteen out of the first fifteen Caesars were homosexuals. It was rampant in Paul's time, everywhere. Nero who would be the current emperor when Paul wrote this had taken a boy named Sporus, had him castrated, then married him in a full wedding and lived with him as a wife. He must have been a good wife because the Caesar who followed him picked him up as his wife. Paul's world wasn't any different than ours. Homosexuality was rampant and he confronted it as sin and said it's the sin just like any sin that keeps you out of the Kingdom of God. Paul was not a homophobic over-reactor because he was a repressed homosexual, and neither am I. He was true to what he knew the Word of God taught. He was true to what the Holy Spirit inspired him to say, it was sin. And until it is faced as sin, it can't be dealt with.
What does God say about it? Let's go back and find out. Deuteronomy chapter 22 is a good place to start. Deuteronomy chapter 22, sometime in your past if you've been in a fundamental or evangelical church, you may have heard some pastor refer to this verse, probably in another context. Verse 5 of Deuteronomy 22 says, "A woman shall not wear a man's clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman's clothing." Now follow this, "For whoever does these things looks weird." Is that what it says? No. "For whoever does these things must be on his way to a party." No. "For whoever does these things is...what?...an abomination to the Lord." It abominates God, it disgusts and revolts him.
Now a woman is not to wear a man's clothing. The first time I ever heard anybody refer to this, they were preaching a sermon about why women shouldn't wear slacks or pants. It doesn't mean that. May I remind you of something? In ancient times men wore skirts. That is a ridiculous interpretation of this. Everybody wore skirts, nobody wore pants. That's not what it's talking about. There was a certain style, however, to men's clothing and a certain style to women's clothing. But the Hebrew says, "A woman shall not wear...literally...that which appertaineth to a man." Whether it's weapons or implements, or tools, or clothes, or whatever it is that rubs out the distinctiveness of one's sex, that's an abomination to God. Today we call people who do this transvestites, a person who exchanges his dress for that of the other sex because it induces a certain kind of sexual...perverted sexual thrill or fulfillment. Men are to be masculine and women are to be feminine and God has made them male and female, male and female created He them and that's the way He wants them to stay. And Satan wants to obliterate and convolute and pervert and twist that. We see that in the homosexual community today rampant. In fact, they love to dress up in the clothing of the opposite sex. The men put on those women's clothes and they parade themselves publicly under the title "drag queens."
Genesis
Genesis chapter 1 and verse 27 says, "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them."
There you have in very simple and direct indication that the reference to God's creative purpose. God created male, He created female. In chapter 2 and verse 23, the man said, "Now this bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man, for this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife and they shall become one flesh." God made male, zakar in Hebrew. God made female, neqebah in Hebrew and they were to come together to complete each other making one flesh. That is God's unalterable creative design. One man for one woman for life.
Now there are a number of ways that such a marital relationship in God's design can be convoluted and confused and perverted. It isn't very long actually in the book of Genesis until perversions of all kinds begin to manifest themselves. You have a relationship that surfaces in the sixth chapter of Genesis which appears to be a relationship in which fallen angels or demons cohabitate with woman and produce some kind of strange offspring, Satan's attempt to bring about some kind of perverted sexual relationship to produce an unredeemable race.
You move ahead from the fornication of chapter 6, a bizarre kind, to chapter 19 in Genesis and you have an indication of incest. It says in verse 36, "Both the daughters of Lot were with child by their father." Adding to fornication and incest, if you come over to chapter 34 you find here rape. "Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob went out to visit the daughters of the land. And when Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land saw her, he took her and lay with her by force. He was deeply attracted to Dinah the daughter of Jacob. He loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her," and the story goes on. Here is an incident of outright rape. We won't take the time to look in detail.
Go to chapter 38 and in chapter 38 you have another perversion and this one is prostitution. It mentions in verse 15, "When Judah saw her he thought she was a harlot, for she had covered her face." Already harlotry exists, prostitution exists. There is an occasion other than the ones that I've read you about polygamy in the book of Genesis. So it isn't long after God has ordained one man for one woman for life that all kinds of perversions occur...fornications, adultery, incest, rape, prostitution, polygamy.
And you can add to that the sin of homosexuality. For that you go to chapter 19 of Genesis. And I do want to spend some time in the details of this because it is our subject. Satan obviously is trying to pervert and confuse God's order. He has brought into human society all these other matters and now he introduces homosexuality. Apparently it became very widespread very rapidly, as did adultery, fornication, incest, rape and prostitution. And, of course, they're still rampant in the world today.
Cultural Acceptance Part 2
What does society say about homosexuality? Well in 1881 there was a born a man who left an immense impact on human history, his name was Sigmund Freud. Among many human behaviors which were curiosities to him was the behavior of sodomy. He became very interested in dealing with sodomites and in understanding them. He determined after some supposed research that sodomy was a psychological disorder and that it was directly related to a domineering mother. By the way, that viewpoint still hangs around today and you hear people articulate it. He said basically, "It's just a disorder that comes because you were dominated by your mother and you grow up then hating the one who dominated you. And since the one who dominated you was a woman, you hate women and so you attach your sexual fantasy to men." That's been a very popular viewpoint.
In the 1930's there came a man by the name of Havelock Ellis. Havelock Ellis published a manual, a sex book and in that sex book he brought sodomy into the open. This is the 1930's. And he pointed out, supposedly, some famous sodomites. He concluded that there were great men among the sodomites and that they accomplished what they did because there was an unusual genius associated with sodomy.
He said, "Frankly, Freud is wrong. It is not a psychological disorder generated by a domineering mother, it is hereditary, it is genetic and it is a higher level of genius than just normal folks possess." He wrote about Erasmus, the Dutch humanist sixteenth century, and said he was homosexual. He said Christopher Marlowe, the English poet, was homosexual. Michael Angelo, the Italian genius, painter, architect was a homosexual, Lord Byron, Francis Bacon, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, some of them were, by the way, history does indicate that. I'll never forget reading the autobiography of Oscar Wilde who said at the end of his life to his horror and shame that what he was in secret all his life he had to finally shout from the housetop. But he said, "Look at all these geniuses," and he picked the selective list of people out of the run-of-the-mill sodomites and made it appear as if it was a higher level of genius to which some people were born.
So since Freud and Ellis and others who have embellished both viewpoints, you can take your pick. Did your mother do it to you because she was nasty and domineering? Or did your mother and father do it to you genetically? And there's still debate. The reason there is still debate is because no one can prove it's hereditary. Furthermore, no one can prove that homosexuals have in common a domineering mother.
Then along came a real fraud by the name of Albert Kinsey with a famous Kinsey Report. In the 1940's and the 1950's he published the famous Kinsey Reports on Sexuality. He was a sexual pervert himself and so he was trying to prove a point before he even did his research. He wanted to justify adultery, fornication, homosexuality, and any other kind of deviant sex so he fabricated his figures, fabricated his research. I spent this week reading a very interesting book called Kinsey Sex and Fraud. It debunks the entire Kinsey report and shows how fraudulent the figures were. It was he, you remember, who said that in the result of his research was that one out of ten people were sodomites. And this normalized it. One out of ten were sodomites. That is not true, has never been true, may some day in the future be true if their media campaign is continuingly successful. He tilted and twisted and fabricated the statistics to make it look like everyone was an adulterer, everyone was a fornicator, everyone was having affairs illicitly out of their marriage and one out of ten people were sodomites.
This was followed up by the American Psychiatric Association which declassified sodomy as a mental sickness and removed it from its lists of standard diagnostic diseases and illnesses. And the American Psychiatric Association decided to buy into Havelock Ellis and say it was hereditary. And once Kinsey kicked in the door with his false figures and everybody thought homosexuality was just normal and one out of ten people were homosexuals, that, by the way, is why in the L.A. public school system the homosexual awareness and the homosexual advocacy lobby is called Project Ten. That comes from the Kinsey Report, the one out of ten and that has led to the epidemic of today. And then you take all the talk-show hosts from Phil Donahue on through and what they do is create a platform which further normalizes this kind of deviant behavior. There is no evidence...there is no evidence that homosexuality is a result of a domineering mother. There is no evidence that homosexuality is a result of genetics. There is plenty of evidence that homosexuality is a choice...a choice like all sin, it's a choice. You may have certain susceptibility to it. There may be some people who are more tempted in that area. But it primarily has to do with choice.
And if you read the literature of those that are trying to help people come out of homosexual sodomite sin, they will tell you that what leads people into these choices, what leads them to live like this is just a simple little list of things. One, early homosexual experience, when they're young, somebody engages them, some other boy maybe in their youth or even late childhood, adolescence engages them in some kind of homosexual play that stimulates them.
Another component in the leading people into these kinds of choices is the need for intimacy and some homosexual supplies it. Some young boy meets a man and it has been known to happen in the church with some Sunday School teachers of young boys, and it happens in the schools all the time and you read about it in the newspapers, and this teacher becomes sort of like a father figure to the boy and the boy needs intimacy and he finds warmth and he finds a listening ear and pretty soon he finds himself being stimulated in a physical way by this man and it's fun and he likes the man and that makes him feel comfortable about it and becomes a lifestyle.
Another one of the little components that lead this way is sub-culture acceptance. Some boys particularly, or even girls who become lesbians, can't find their way to acceptance in the normal culture and so they find a sub-culture that will accept them. And homosexuals are always looking for new flesh. Sometimes it happens to men because they're rejected by women and because they can't find an outlet for their physical desires among women because women won't have them, or they fell unattractive to women or they've been rebuffed, they'll slide into the circle where they can find gratification.
There are factors in life that lay out the path of temptation but it's still the series of choices. I can remember as a boy, just a young boy in my early years of junior high being approached in a restroom by a man who now I knew, and it was a few years before I understood, that had homosexual intentions toward me. And I didn't understand that until I looked back on that and I was so frightened, I went out of there. And I can look back and imagine that some boy in that kind of circumstance with a man he knew and trusted would have given himself to that, found some kind of thrill in that and be on his way to a life of that. When I went away to college in my first year at a Christian school, I had a roommate in my own room attack me in the middle of the night. And I remember it so absolutely vividly, I was first of all shocked and all I remember was rising out of bed and throwing a punch and...(applause)...I mean, this is a fairly normal instinct for me, not to he commended, but expected...and seeing him fly across the room into a corner and then confronted, "What is going on?" This is some years ago at a Christian school in my lifetime, it's wholesale everywhere now and the rampage is on for new flesh, and the rampage is on to elicit the involvement of young lives. And where you have kids that are rejected by women, who are looking for a sub-culture of acceptance, who have a need for intimacy, who get lured into this kind of thing, you have some choices that lead to other choices, that lead to other choices and it becomes lust out of control.
So, when we look at this situation, we have to see it for what the Bible sees it for. It is a sin that brings about the judgment of God. But as we saw this morning, it is a sin that is forgivable.
One other text and that's Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1 verse 18, very familiar text which gives us a good look at the fallenness of man and God's reaction. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." In other words, God's wrath is revealed against the whole human race because they have the truth and they suppress it. They reject it. "That which is known about God is evident within them." God has planted it in their hearts. God has made it evident to them. Verse 20, "Since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what is made so that they're without excuse." You have the internal moral law of God, you have the external creation and evidence of God and His morality. The evidence is there, the truth is there and men reject it. Verse 21, "Even when they knew God innately from the internal witness and externally from the creation, they didn't honor Him as God, they didn't give thanks, they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened, professing to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. They rejected God, thus rejecting truth. They created their own gods like animals and men and failed to worship the true God, and that's why God's wrath is poured out upon them.
There you have the characterization of the fallen world. God has given the knowledge of Himself internally and externally. Men reject it and instead of seeing God as revealed, they turn their backs on God, they invent their own gods and bring about the wrath of God upon them.
Now the wrath of God comes in this form, verse 24, "Therefore, God gave them over...God gave them over." What a statement. "He gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them." Look at verse 26, "For this reason God gave them over....there it is again...to degrading passions." Verse 28, "And just as they didn't see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind." Verse 24, He gave them over that their bodies would be dishonored. Verse 26, He gave them over to degrading passions in their heart. Verse 28, He gave them over to a depraved mind. Body, heart, mind, all given over and what...what became of that when God took His hand off and God let man go his own way? What came of it? Sexual perversion. What you see today is already the evidence of God's judgment on man as He lets him go.
Verse 24, "God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie. They worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever, amen." Then verse 26, "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions." What kind? "For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural." They were given over, verse 24 says, to epithumia, uncleanness, reaching out after forbidden pleasure. The Stoics called it grasping for pleasure which defies all reason. Lust gone wild. That's what verse 24 is talking about. Desires that make people do shameless things and nameless things. And they dishonored their bodies.
How did they dishonor their bodies? They did what was against nature. They did what was unnatural. In verse 26 women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. What you have in homosexuality then is a very clear illustration of depravity, of people given over to their lusts without any restraint on God's part. He just let them go. Women, we call them lesbians. Somewhere around 20 to 25 million of them, we hear in America now. They have chosen to live godlessly and God gives them over to the results of their choices. Verse 27, "And in the same way also, the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error." They burn in their lust, that phrase, "burned in their desire toward one another," literally to burn out, ekkaio, to burn out, they were consumed with lust. It's the consuming rage of it.
The Response
Some of the homosexual rights people say, "Well, Jesus said He came to put an end to the Law. Sure, that's the Old Testament Law but Jesus came to put an end to the Law." No. He didn't come to put an end to the Law, He came as the end of the Law, the fulfillment, the culmination of the Law, the one who lived the Law perfectly. And He said, "Not a jot or a tittle shall pass away from this Law." And He reiterates the Law, does God, in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit given to Paul to write as he writes 1 Timothy 1:10, the Law is not made for righteous men, verse 9, but for those who are lawless. Verse 10, immoral men, and homosexuals. The Law is still written to call homosexuals to account, is what he is saying, 1 Timothy 1:9 and 10. Nothing has changed. God's moral law hasn't changed because God hasn't changed. Whatever is right has always been right and always will be right. Whatever is wrong has always been wrong and will always be wrong. Morality doesn't change because God doesn't change. God said if you do this, you'll defile your land. If you defile your land, I'll destroy your nation. If you do this, you'll die.
But there's still mercy before death and mercy before judgment to those who repent. Look at Leviticus chapter 20 and one final verse and then we'll stop for this morning. Chapter 20 of Leviticus and verse 13, "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, having sex with a man, a man having sex with a man, both of them have committed a detestable act, kill them." That's what it said. Kill them. "Their blood guiltiness is on them, they deserve to die." The blood cries out again for death. God's law says kill them. God's law says if you murder somebody you should die, right? Anybody who kills somebody, kill them. I told you last week that in the case of abortion the blood cries out from the ground and God hears it. The slaughter of the innocence in America as we massacre little babies, their blood cries out against their killers. There's blood guiltiness on the ones who killed those babies, they deserve to die. Listen to this, there's blood guiltiness on homosexuals and those who advocate homosexuality and those who seek homosexual rights, those people are...are abetting and aiding, damning sin and there is a blood guiltiness attached there on the people who do not destroy them. This nation instead of judging, condemning, punishing homosexuality advocates it and thus has the blood of the dead homosexuals on its hands, just as it has the blood of the dead babies on its hands. This is a blood guilty nation. And if you think we're on the edge of some American utopia, you better guess again. From God's standpoint, these are serious days. How in the world we could ever get to the point with Christian beginnings where we have politicians, people running for President and congress and senate and governor and mayor and council members and all of that kind of stuff who advocate homosexual rights and those people could be elected, those people bear guilt before God because they aid and abet people going into a sin that is an abomination to God.
All that said, God says being a transvestite is an abomination, being a transsexual is an abomination, being a homosexual is an abomination, aiding and abetting any of that stuff is abominable to God and there's blood guiltiness associated with all of it. And the penalty is death and God will judge the nation that tolerates it and God will destroy the people that do it. Having said all of that, I go right back to where we started and remind you of this wonderful truth, this sin in all its categories and in all its extremes is forgivable. Does that tell you something about God's grace? Does that tell you how gracious our God is? Does that tell you something about the death of Christ who in His own body bore those very sins? God is a God of mercy and grace. And if you will come to Him in your sin, He is willing to forgive.
Reference: gty.org; God's View of Homosexuality, Part 1, God's View of Homosexuality, Part 2
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