What’s Coming Down The Pike (Part II)

Of course Genesis hinted that the Gospel would be extended to the Gentiles, and if it turns out the traditionalist view of homosexuality is wrong I’m sure that our grandchildren will find lots of Biblical hints that we missed, too.

Are you arguing that homosexuality is a sexually compulsive behavior in a different sense than heterosexuality is a sexually compulsive behavior? Eating, drinking, and sleeping can all be compulsive behavior and if it’s compulsive, it’s a problem. If it causes harm to others, like Jeffrey Dahmer, it’s a problem. If it’s neither compulsive nor harmful to others, then I think you need to be sure you’re on solid ground before you condemn an entire group of people for having the same human desires for love and acceptance that you have.

First, we should note that Matt is playing with a relativistic Bible. It is not that the Biblical view of homosexuality is wrong but rather the traditionalist view. In Matt’s world the Bible has no objective meaning but rather its truth is reduced to ‘views.’

Second Matt has made the ‘no harm to others’ argument as being the foundation of why Buggery should be accepted without taking into account of how it harms people who are involved in it and without taking into consideration how the spread of it will harm others who get involved in it. Still, even were it true that mutually consenting Buggery doesn’t harm anybody Christians would still need to oppose it because God’s Word says it is sin.

Third, while people caught in Buggery do have the same human desire for love and acceptance that most people have they have twisted it and invoking the need for love and acceptance as a reason why that which is wicked should be brought into the Church is hardly convincing. Should love and acceptance from others in a twisted fashion be purchased at the cost of the hatred and rejection of God for defying His word?

I’m a fallen human with fallen human perceptions, so of course I can’t KNOW to a 100% certainty that I haven’t misinterpreted a particular text. Neither can you.

Once again Matt, you are revealing your relativistic undergarments. Since neither of us can allegedly have 100% certainty therefore we must allow for the possibility that anything could be true. The problem Matt is that you do claim 100% certainty in some areas. For example you seemingly are 100% certain that we can’t be 100% certain. How can you know with certainty that there is no certainty? I am not asking you to prove a negative. I am asking you to prove the affirmation that certainty can’t be had.

Can you give me some assurance that 22nd or 23rd Century Christians won’t be shaking their heads wondering how mainstream Christian thought in our time managed to miss the boat on homosexuality?I get your point that it seems obvious; well, so did “Ham shall be the servant of Shem forever” and Nehemiah’s ban on inter-racial marriage. And again, it wasn’t only the lunatic fringe that gave those passages a racist interpretation; 100 years ago it was mainstream.

Christians sometimes getting things wrong doesn’t prove that Christians don’t often times get things right. Following your reasoning would lead the Church to being ethically paralyzed. Maybe it really isn’t the case that pedophilia or bestiality is wrong. After all, we’ve been wrong about others things, maybe we are wrong about those things as well. Maybe we should take a wait and see attitude on moral questions such as grownups taking children into their beds. I mean, after all, those areas seem obvious also.

And you know what Matt? Your position demands that you allow for that since it is the only way that you can make wiggle room for the acceptability of Buggery. People no longer recoil at the thought of Buggery due to the success of mainstreaming that perversion but they still do recoil at the other perversions since those haven’t yet been successfully mainstreamed. The only way that people can even begin to take you half way seriously is because Buggery, due to cultural conditioning and political correctness, has eroded the Christian immune system.

Finally, this argument that we might regret not moving slower in our opposition to Buggery cuts both ways. You ask for ‘assurance’ that the Church of the future won’t be woefully regretting that the Christians of the present were so thick as to not see that we should have accepted Buggery in the Church. I could just as easily ask you for assurance that the Church of the future won’t be woefully regretting that the Christians today were so thick as to even begin to consider the legitimacy of Buggery in God’s Church. After all, Matt, there are also many cases in history also (The German Church between 1933-1945 comes to mind) where God’s people have refused to do what God clearly revealed should be done.

Maybe Matt we should ‘wait and see’ if this itching desire to embrace homosexuality in the Church isn’t more of that sort of nonsense?

Bret, you’ve just demonstrated why your side is losing this particular battle. You’re basically reduced to arguing that being gay is about nothing more than promiscuous sex and that it’s yucky, disgusting and repulsive. And that argument used to work before gay people started coming out of the closet. Now that most people actually know gay people and know that those stereotypes aren’t true, you may as well save your breath. It’s like arguments the Klan used to make about how Blacks are smelly and dirty and stupid and oversexed. Yeah, just enough Blacks fit that stereotype to keep it alive among racists, but people with Black co-workers and neighbors and Sunday school classmates stopped paying attention a long time ago.

I myself find the idea of gay sex repulsive. I also find the idea of eating sushi repulsive, but I don’t go around making doctrines about it.

No, Matt my side is losing the battle because they aren’t willing to call sin, ‘sin’ in the face of cultural pressure that opposer’s of God’s word, like you, bring. The Scriptures say do not be transformed to the World, and yet that is exactly what happens as the Church gives in to the voice of the serpent.

Let’s grant you your assumption above. Let us say, for the sake of argument that those who practice Buggery are clean, erudite, well-spoken, and a thrill to be around. That description fits some of my gay friends. Those facts don’t change anything Matt. God says all Buggery is sin, even the kind that finds lipstick on a pig. The fact that anybody would find Buggery repulsive or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is that God finds it repulsive.

Oh … and you’ll be glad to know that God hasn’t weighed in on sushi, therefore that is a red herring.

People see the blatant injustice of the regime you would impose. You yourself would never agree to live under the rules you would promulgate for gays; why should they?

I would never agree to live under the rules that God’s Word promulgate for pedophiles and pederasts either but the reason they should have to is because God’s Word says what it says. Sinners never want to live under the rules that God’s Word promulgates. That is one reason why they are called sinners. They desire there way above Gods.

Does the Bible say that all gay people go to hell 100%?

The Bible says that all who don’t trust Christ alone go to hell. The Bible also says that lifestyle Buggery is the kind of behavior that does not inherit the Kingdom of heaven. Those who struggle with the sin of buggery, like all sinners who are in Christ, must be constantly repenting of their sin.

What does it mean for a gay person to be repentant? It’s not exactly something you can turn on and off, if you follow me.

Somebody who is a kleptomaniac could make the same argument Matt. They could just as easily say, ‘stealing is not just something I can turn on and off,’ and yet we would say that the Holy Spirit of Christ can give us victory over sin. This would include the sin of kleptomania and the sin of Buggery. We would also say that there is forgiveness for where we fail in our struggle against sin.

My church has a gay couple. One of them started coming on his own after not coming to church for a while and, when we made him feel welcome instead of kicking him out, and he started to grow in the Lord. After he’d been coming for about a year he confessed that he had stolen some money from a former employer and needed to make restitution, and because of the growth he had experienced in our church, found the courage to do so. His partner got saved a while later and they started coming as a couple. His partner had a drug and alcohol problem which the Lord has delivered him from. I don’t see how anyone can claim that God isn’t working in their lives – a thief made restitution, and a drug addict is now clean and sober. And if we’d kicked them out, we would have missed the blessing of seeing it happen. If their relationship is sinful, maybe at some point God will deal with them about it. Maybe that won’t ever happen. But the fruits of new life in Christ are clearly evident. Yes, there were some righteous people in the church who were upset when they started coming. But the righteous were wrong in Jesus’ day, too.

Matt, can we come to Jesus while still embracing our sin? Does Jesus receive people who are willing to repent of some of their sins and not of other sins?

The fact that people become moral is no sure sign that God is working in their lives. Mormons, in many ways, are some of the most moral people you will ever meet but that doesn’t mean that God is working in their lives.

Matt if I had a young couple who were living together attending the Church I pastor and if one of them got saved I would tell them that they immediately need to either marry their live in or they need to quit being involved in that sinful lifestyle. I would tell them they could not serve to masters. And yet you want to suggest that because there is a little moral clean up, people knee deep in Buggery are model Christians.

Surely, we want to reach out to people struggling with the bondage of homosexuality but it is not reaching out or being kind to them by ignoring their bondage.

Besides Matt, why would you ever think that stealing and addictive habits are wrong? Maybe those are behavior patterns that we should take a ‘wait and see’ posture on. I am a little ashamed that your church might have brought pressure upon them to give up something that future generations of the Church might see as really being approved by God.

You’ve fallen into a trap often set by social conservatives that basically consists of thinking that because one standard is in error, that no standards are possible. No, being pro-gay has nothing to do with theft or substance abuse; each of those issues stands on its own merits.

It’s like the oft-repeated canard that liberals don’t believe in moral absolutes. Of course liberals believe in moral absolutes; they simply disagree with conservatives as to what they are.

And you are missing the reality that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Perhaps it is the case that you would like substance abuse and theft to still be seen as sinful and wrong. But what of the ‘Substance abusers for Jesus’ lobby? Why shouldn’t we listen to their case that since the Church has gotten things wrong in the past that we should take a ‘wait and see’ posture about the sinfulness of substance abuse?

You want moral absolutes? Fine. Now prove them from Scripture. Do so would mean beginning to attempt what you haven’t even begun to attempt.

Lying is a sin, but in a case which someone sins by lying, there was another course of action they could have taken that would not have been sinful, i.e. telling the truth. But with being gay, there is no other way for them to go…they can’t just be straight. Since one sign of repentance seems to be stopping, as much as possible, the sin in question, then homosexuals can’t be repentant unless they’re just supposed to stop acting on it and ‘live a lie’ so to speak.

Are you actually arguing that stopping ones sexual urges is not possible? Are you actually arguing that being chaste isn’t possible?

Homosexuals can be repentant by not yielding their members to sin and when they stop acting on their sinful urges, they are for the first time ‘living the truth,’ so to speak.

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him. View all posts by jetbrane