Most people who identify as Christians believe and teach that homosexuality is not sin and that people are born as homosexuals. They suggest that homosexuality is fine as long as it is with just one partner for life. Even many Evangelicals support gay marriage.
Yet that is a rejection of the creation mandate. God originally taught Adam and Eve that He created them as male and female and ordered them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over it (Gen 1:27-28). He told them that marriage was between a man and a woman (Gen 2:24).
Both the OT (Gen 19:1-25; Lev 18:22; 20:13) and the NT (Rom 1:26-27; 1 Cor 6:9-11; 1 Tim 1:8-10; Jude 7) teach that homosexuality is sin.i In Rom 1:26-27 Paul indicates that sex between people of the same sex is a vile passion whether between women or men.
An author in the African Journal of Religion and Human Relations in a 2016 article entitled “Gay marriage is a pervasion [sic] of natural order,” after quoting Gen 1:27-28, wrote: “From the above scriptural quotations, one can see that it is the will of God for marriage to be between man and woman. In other words, God is in support of heterosexual relationship and not same-sex relationship.”
Yet that view is not prevalent in Christianity in the United States today. In a Feb 20, 2015, article in HuffPost, Carol Kuruvilla wrote: “Rob Bell, the widely popular and controversial former megachurch pastor, is now convinced that a church [which] doesn’t support same-sex marriage will ‘continue to be even more irrelevant.’” Rob Bell is the author of Love Wins, a book promoting universalism. He was formerly the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan, a church of over 3,500.
According to a Dec 18, 2015, article by the Pew Research Center, over half of all Christians say that “homosexuality should be accepted by society.” The numbers break down as follows: 70% for Catholics, 66% for mainline Protestants, 62% for Orthodox Christians, 54% for all Christians, 51% for historically Black Protestants, and 36% for Evangelical Protestants.
Modern teaching on homosexuality, teaching that has become a tradition among most professing Christians today, directly contradicts the OT and the NT commands of God. While homosexuals can be born again just as they are (see my recent blog, here), practicing homosexuals cannot please God with their lifestyles.
God’s people should reject any tradition that contradicts God’s Word, even it that tradition is very popular in our culture and even if the rejection of that tradition will make your church “even more irrelevant.”
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i I recognize that people argue that what these verses reject is promiscuous homosexuality, not so-called monogamous homosexuality. However, the contexts of the various passages do not allow for such an interpretation.
