Two thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth based an argument about marriage on a simple observation about the created order: Humans are made male and female. They are gendered. When confronted with the revisionist teaching on marriage of His own day, Jesus said:
"Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate." (Matt. 19:4-6)
Jesus answered a question about divorce by going back to the beginning, to God’s original intention for marriage: one man, with one woman, becoming one flesh, for one lifetime. That was Jesus’ view.
Contrary to common assertion, then, Jesus did have something to say about homosexuality. From the beginning God had designed, intended, and endorsed marriage and sex (“one flesh”) solely for long term, monogamous, heterosexual unions. Indeed, gendered human bodies reflect that purpose: men and women designed to function together, to fit each other physically in a complementary way.
Simply put, the man was made for the woman and the woman was made for the man. Reject that function and replace it with another, and you reject God’s own good purpose for sex.
Sam Allberry, himself a Christian managing same-sex attraction, put it this way: “What was going on with Adam and Eve explains what has gone on ever since. The perfect ‘fit’ between the two of them is the foundation for every human marriage since. The account is not just about their union, but every marriage union.”
Not surprisingly, then, the six sexual activities prohibited in the Bible—adultery, fornication, rape, incest, bestiality, and homosexuality—each involve sex with someone other than one’s spouse. This point deserves repeating: All forms of sex condemned in Scripture have a common characteristic: sex other than between a husband and his wife.
Jesus spelled out the natural, normal sexual/marital relationship with crystal clarity. Inside marriage, sex is sacred; outside marriage, it is defiled. God gives sexual freedom only to husbands with wives—not to friends or co-workers, not to casual dates, not to long-term sweethearts, and not to same-sex partners in any kind of relationship—exploitive and abusive, or loving and committed.
Man was made to function sexually with a woman, and a woman with a man, to accomplish a natural purpose—“be fruitful and multiply”—that could not be fulfilled in same-sex unions.[11] This was God’s intention “from the beginning.” It was the way God wanted it. It is still the way it’s supposed to be. And this is the theme we find— explicit or implicit—with every passage condemning homosexuality: man abandoning the natural function of God’s purpose for sex.
It’s time now to look at those passages.
From the Beginning
Alan Shlemon
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Homosexuality and the Bible