Gay Christianity Refuted Part 2

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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And good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line, a mega -edition of the program. Today, two hours,

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I want to get as far as I possibly can in concluding our review of Matthew Vine's presentation on the subject of homosexuality and his defense of the concept of a gay

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Christian. We have gotten a tremendous number of contacts about this particular subject.

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There is a real need for continued dialogue on this subject, not dialogue in the sense of, well, we need to understand the other side better, or well, there needs to be a compromise, anything like that.

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No, what we need to continue to do is to dialogue with people who are confused or deceived or are involved in deceiving others into believing that the

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Bible is unclear on this and that homosexuality is just simply one aspect of the way that God made things.

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And that simply is not the case. It is a perversion of God's intention, and it is a destructive behavior.

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And while we still have the freedom to do so, because for some reason, homosexuals do not want us to have that freedom to say what we are saying.

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They try to shout you down or legislate you down, and that is happening all around us. Anyone who denies that's happening is just simply denying there's a sun in the sky or that it's blue or whatever else.

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And so we will dive right back in. For those of you who have the presentation, we are 35 minutes and 18 seconds into the presentation.

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It's only a little over an hour long, so I unfortunately doubt we are going to get all the way through it as much as I would like to attempt to do so.

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We'll give it a shot here. So let us press on. For unnatural ones.

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In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.

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Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

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Well, now it seems the case is finally closed. Even though the verses in Leviticus don't apply to Christians, here we have

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Paul in the New Testament explicitly teaching the unacceptability, the sinfulness of same -sex relationships.

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Now, I just pause for a moment. We've already seen that Mr. Fiennes is, of course, in error concerning the application of the

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Levitical passages. We saw why. And if you're just now tuning in, haven't heard that before, please look in the archives.

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I think what we will be doing is taking all of these programs, putting them into one single whole and making that available from the front page of the website for people to be able to access that so that you can go through it point by point.

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But certainly, the same apostle who has said we do not do away with the law, we establish the law by faith, etc.,

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etc., this same apostle is drawing from that very same Levitical law in his understanding of God's revelation of what is and what is not appropriate human sexual behavior as well.

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That needs to, again, be emphasized even though the normal homosexual attempt to deal with these texts atomizes it.

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It disconnects them. You're not going to ever hear, well, I hesitate to use the term ever, but you almost never hear a homosexual apologist dealing with these texts as a whole unless they take the position that the

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Bible's witness should just be rejected in toto, which I would think would be about the only consistent position that a homosexual could ever take on this particular subject.

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And even though he only speaks of lustful behavior and not of loving relationships. And notice, reading into the text, a category that Paul does not acknowledge.

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As we saw when we looked at this before, this is talking about, it is an illustration of idolatry.

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That is an abandonment of the truth that has been revealed by God and a twisting of the creator -creation relationship.

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And that's exactly what you have going on here in that these individuals are those who

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God has given them over to dishonorable passions. Now, the homosexual will say, well, since God made me this way, and since I am not an idolater, the

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Christian, the quote -unquote Christian homosexual, which again is an oxymoron, but that's the terminology they use.

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They want to hold on to a form of religiosity. The quote -unquote

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Christian homosexual will say, I am not engaged in idolatry.

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I haven't done all these things. I haven't suppressed the knowledge of God. And therefore, I can't be described in these ways.

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The problem is that the apostle identifies this kind of sexual behavior as an illustration of the very twistedness of what idolatry brings.

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And so you can go at this backwards and establish your own position and then try to cram it into the text.

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Or you can actually listen to the text and see how it consistently flows from the

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Old Testament text that we've already seen. Mr. Vines has inappropriately and improperly attempted to get around, primarily utilizing the argumentation of countrymen and Scroggs and Schenzoni and Mullincott and especially

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Boswell, some of whom are homosexual, some of whom are not, but all of whom have a particular agenda they are seeking to attempt to promote.

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He labels same -sex unions unnatural. They are outside of God's natural design, which was set forth in Genesis 1 and 2 and is exclusively heterosexual.

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So even if a same -sex relationship is loving and committed, it is still sinful.

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Now, I just want to emphasize something in regards to the actual language that Paul uses in verses 26 and 27.

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When we talk about the natural function or the natural relations, notice that it says,

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For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. And then the parallel in verse 27 is,

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And the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman. So when we're talking here about nature, when we're talking about the natural function, we're clearly talking about the sexual function, we're talking about the complementary nature of the female body and the male body, that which produces life, etc.,

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etc. That is clearly what is in view in what the Apostle is saying in these texts.

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It's not just simply what's natural for them, as in these are heterosexuals engaging in homosexual activity.

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That is reading a category into it that is not being derived from the text, it's being enforced upon the text.

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That is the normal attempt of most gay Christians to get over this particular problem.

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That is the traditional interpretation of Romans 1, 26 -27.

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How solid of an interpretation is that? Does this passage require us to reject the possibility of loving relationships for gay people?

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We have already, of course, addressed the issue of what love is, how the Bible defines love, and that true

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Christian love is defined on biblical parameters, that it is defined on the basis of complementary relationship, and all the things that have already become a part of at least three hours,

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I think, we've done so far. Yeah, I think three hours we've done so far, just in response to the first half hour of this presentation.

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And if so, how does that make sense, given the problems that I outlined earlier with that position? Was that Paul's intent here?

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To teach that God desires gay people to be alone. And notice the completely eisegetical decontextualization of the text.

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I mean, this is completely loading the conclusion. This is not exegesis.

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This is not going to the text. This is not honestly dealing with the text. This man has an agenda.

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He has a position that he is seeking to force into the text. Well, the man has perverted his own life, and now he's seeking to pervert the scriptures as well.

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It is an unfortunate thing to observe. It's a sad thing to see. But that's exactly what is going on.

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To even ask such a question of the context of the text is just completely inappropriate on any meaningful basis, for a

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Christian, a person who claims to be a Christian at the very least, and shows a tremendous bias on his part.

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For their entire lives, because their sexual orientation is broken, and is outside of his created, natural design.

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Their sexual orientation is rebellious, not just broken. It is a rejection of God's intention, and it is an acceptance of desires, so much so, and so much of an abandonment of the fight against what would be considered the appropriate mechanism of resisting temptation.

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That it becomes definitional of the person, and very much a part of the entire worldview that is created around it, and then brought to the text, resulting in the kind of reading that we're seeing right now.

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How we understand this passage hinges in large part on how we understand the meaning of the terms natural and unnatural.

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It's commonly assumed by those who hold to the traditional interpretation that these terms refer back to Genesis 1 and 2, and are intended to define heterosexuality as God's natural design, and homosexuality as an unnatural distortion of that design.

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Now, one of the problems with this is that the term natural that is found in this text, for example, in verse 26,

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Fusakane Kresen, that is the natural use.

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The term natural here is used in a phrase, and on a lexical basis you need to allow a phrase to be defined by its context.

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You can't just take one element of that, run off to some other text, like, oh, let me just guess, 1

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Corinthians 11, 14, and take that particular reading and bring it back into this text.

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And so you have a natural use that is being exchanged for that which is para -fusen, against nature.

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And then, as I pointed out, it's important to see, verse 27, Hamoyos, likewise, also the men, abandoning the natural usage, again, in parallel, of the female, then burned in their lust one for another.

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And so clearly, this is any and all, this is any homosexual activity.

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Lesbianism, male homosexuality, this is what's being described here by the

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Apostle. This is in perfect harmony with how the Apostle interpreted God's law, the

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Levitical law, how Jesus interpreted the creation of man and woman,

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Matthew 19, all of these things that we have already seen, we see a perfectly harmonious testimony so far in all of these texts.

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But, of course, we're being told that, well, I can't mean that because that means that I'd have to be alone.

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Well, if you choose in your rebellion against God to violate his ways, then, yeah, you will be alone in your violation.

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But that's not an argument against this interpretation of Scripture and the consistency of this interpretation of Scripture.

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But once again, closer examination does not support that interpretation.

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In order to understand what Paul meant by the use of these terms, we have to consider two things.

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First, we have to look at the broader context of the passage in order to see how the concept of nature functions within it.

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And secondly, we need to see how Paul himself uses these terms in his other letters and how they were commonly and widely applied to sexual behavior, in particular, in the ancient world.

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First, the passage's context. In chapter 1, verses 18 -32, Paul is making a larger argument about idolatry.

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And that argument has a very precise logic to it. The reason, he says in verses 18 -20, that the idolaters' actions are blameworthy is because they knew

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God. They started with the knowledge of God, but they chose to reject

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Him. Paul writes, What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

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For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

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The idolaters are without excuse because they knew the truth. They started with the truth, but they rejected it.

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Paul's subsequent statements about sexual behavior follow this same pattern. The women, he says, exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.

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Now, immediately, once again, Matthew has demonstrated a real inability to engage in meaningful exegesis.

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Because in verse 24, you have already had the summary statement made by the

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Apostle Paul that they knew God. They did not honor

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His God or give thanks to Him, but became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. So, he's just jumped over, skipped, a transitionary section that begins to deal with the results of idolatry.

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And the result of idolatry is a futility of thinking, a darkening of the heart, a becoming foolish, even though they claim to be wise, an exchanging of the glory of the immortal

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God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. In other words, there is an impact, there is a fundamental perversion of the created order that follows from the existence of idolatry, from the existence of the suppression of the knowledge of God.

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Katakonto, they are holding down the knowledge of God and when the creature suppresses the knowledge of the

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Creator, the result is a deformation of the created order.

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And part of that involves the mind, the thinking. Claiming to be wise, they become fools.

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The exchange, there is an exchange going on. Now, in verse 23, the term that is found there, alasso, is the same term that's going to be found in verse 25.

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They exchanged the truth of God and then in verse 26, where likewise you have the same term, it's meta there, but it's the same root, the exchanging of natural relations.

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And so if you're going to follow this, if you're going to at all claim that you are even pretending to honestly deal with this text, then you must note the context appropriately.

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And so after the assertion of the exchanging of the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things, in other words, man's mind and his worship is turned away from its proper object to that which is inappropriate.

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Then you have, verse 24 starts off, Diaparetokon autous hatheos, therefore

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God gave them over in the loss of their hearts to impurity.

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And so whatever he's describing is impurity. It involves the dishonoring of their bodies amongst themselves.

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But it is a part of God's giving them over. They want to suppress the knowledge of God.

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They want to pervert the relationship of the creator and the creation. All right, here comes the result.

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God gives them over in the loss of their heart to impurity because they exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

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So what is Paul stating? Paul is stating that there is an absolutely necessary result of the perversion of the created order on the part of the created order.

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God gives them over to degrading passions. He gives them up in the loss of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies amongst themselves.

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You can't skip that and pretend that you're dealing with verses 26 and 27.

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I mean, it might work, sadly, in a Methodist church where very few of the people sitting in front of you anymore even bother to read a

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Bible, but it's not going to work if you're actually claiming to be dealing with the text itself.

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Remember, and people say, oh, you're just so mean to Seth. Hey, remember, I'm the one that sat in the debate with Barry Lynn.

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Yes, Barry Lynn, who is on Fox News all the time and CNN all the time. Barry Lynn used to be head of the

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American Zionist Separation Church State. I'm not sure if he still is, but I think he might be.

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I don't know. I haven't checked for a long time. Barry Lynn, who does not like me, let me assure you.

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And we were in a debate on this very subject, and I was asking about this very text, and I had to let him borrow my

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Bible to read the text because he came to a debate where he was one of the debaters on the subject, is homosexuality consistent with biblical

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Christianity, and he didn't bring a Bible. And so when I say something about people not reading, not really looking at the text, not really driving their beliefs from the text,

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I think I've got a basis for actually saying that that's been my experience because you know what?

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It has been. And the men abandoned relations with women and committed shameful acts with other men.

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Both the men and the women started with heterosexuality. Really? What do you mean they started with heterosexuality?

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Are you trying to... These folks need to figure out whether they are going to assert that the

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Bible knows nothing about, quote -unquote, sexual orientation, or whether it does know about it.

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If you can say it doesn't, then you can't be talking now about, well, these are heterosexuals, they're acting like homosexuals because now you're assuming that it knows something about it.

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Make up your mind. Which one is it? The whole idea, actually, is a reading in of something that's not only not necessary, but it misses the whole point, but which one is it going to be?

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They were naturally disposed to it, just as they were naturally disposed to the knowledge of God.

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Just as they were naturally disposed to the knowledge of God. No. Paul's point is that all of the created order testifies the existence of God, and that all men, and all women, until they bow the knee to Jesus Christ, are involved in the suppression of that knowledge of God.

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Not that it's, quote -unquote, natural. It is a part of the witness of all of the created order.

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But by skipping verses 24 and 25, he's now able to provide a completely different context, and therefore not even follow the thought of the text, and explain why.

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Why is there a diatouta? Verse 26. Diatouta paretokon.

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Now, he had already used paradidomi in verse 24. Therefore, God gave them over in verse 24.

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It was already there. But then he repeats it, but he uses diatouta in verse 26.

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For this reason, God gave them over to dishonorable passions.

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So, are we being told here that the reason that these are dishonorable passions is simply because these are heterosexuals pretending to be homosexuals?

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You really think that's Paul's point? You really think, in establishing this grand theme of idolatry and the perversion of the created order, that Paul's point is to refer to, that Paul actually knows that there are people who are by nature homosexual.

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And he's excluding them. No, they're fine. They can go do what they want to do. That's fine. But if you're actually a heterosexual, but you engage in homosexual behavior,

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I'm going to use you as an example. But they rejected their original, natural inclinations for those that were unnatural.

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For them, same -sex behavior. Paul's argument about idolatry requires that there be an exchange.

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The reason he says that the idolaters are at fault is because they first knew God, but then turned away from him, exchanged him for idols.

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Paul's reference to same -sex behavior is intended to illustrate this larger sin of idolatry.

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But in order for this analogy to have any force, in order for it to make sense within this argument, the people he is describing must naturally begin with heterosexual relations and then abandon them.

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No, that does not follow in any way, shape, or form. Because of the verses that Matthew, either in self -deception or deception led by others, skipped over.

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Therefore, God gave them over. God gave them up. Those who suppress the knowledge of God, and that's everybody,

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God gives them over. Now, in grace,

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God, thankfully, does not do this to everyone, in the sense of giving them over to the same kinds of sinful behaviors.

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But notice that this whole text is going to continue on, and it's going to, after talking about homosexuality, it's going to continue to say, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge

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God, God gave them to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. And they were filled with all manner of, and then you have a couple found in Paul's writings, of the viceless, the sinless, all manner of unrighteousness.

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So, all manner of unrighteousness. Evil, covetousness, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

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They are gossips, slanders, haters of God, which might be translated, actually, hated by God. Insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents.

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Now, disobedient to parents is in the middle of this. It's identifying the source of all human sinfulness, in the refusal to have the right relationship with God Himself.

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It starts with God. Human sin cannot be defined separately from the fact that we are creatures, and that therefore there is a law that we must be held accountable to, in regards to our

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Creator. And so, to try to say, well, this means that they were heterosexuals, or the analogy doesn't hold.

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Misses the fact that this is something God gave them over to, and it results in the perversion of the natural order.

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The natural order is that men and women, together, engage in sexual behavior, producing life.

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But a man, to have sex with a man, does not produce life. A woman with a woman does not produce life.

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There is no complementary element. And by nature, the bodily functions do not fit.

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And so, to go against nature is to see, as man sees in the universe around him,

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I see the evidence of God, but I am going to go against that. We see the natural relationship of man and woman.

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I'm going to go against that, and I'm going to lust after men. And notice something.

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The text specifically says, in verse 27, it doesn't say this about the women, but I think the homoios would allow this.

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Homoios means, in the same way. Likewise, the men gave up natural relations with women, and were consumed with passion for one another.

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How much more obvious does it have to get? The description is of a man who lusts after men.

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Is that not homosexuality? Is that not the very description and definition of it?

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Seems to be. We might put it another way. We might ask Matthew another way.

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How could, would it be possible for the apostle to have actually described homosexual behavior as that desired by Matthew Vines in this text?

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And if so, how? What words could it be used? That's what

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I'd like to know. Because I'm starting to wonder that no matter, is there any way scripture could describe homosexuality that a homosexual could not find a way around it?

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Could not find some mechanism to say that it really doesn't refer to me? And that is exactly how he describes it.

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But that is not what we are talking about. Gay people have a natural, permanent orientation for those of the same sex.

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It's not something that they choose. And it's not something that they can change. What has been my statement from the beginning?

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That is his assertion. That is his position. And he will do whatever he needs to do with the biblical text to maintain that.

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He's not deriving this from the text. He's derived this from, this is his conclusion. His conclusion is, this is how

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I have been made, and it's good. And that's it.

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That's how it's supposed to be. That's the end of the discussion. They aren't abandoning or rejecting heterosexuality.

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That's never an option for them to begin with. No. Once again, it is an option.

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It has become an option for many who were consumed by homosexual lust. But they are able, by the grace of God, because they are human beings who can be influenced by the spirit of God and changed by the spirit of God, to not only resist those things, but to change those things as well.

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And if applied to gay people, Paul's argument here should actually work in the other direction. If the point of this passage is to rebuke those who have spurned their true nature, be it religious, when it comes to idolatry, or sexual, then just as those who are naturally heterosexual should not be with those of the same sex, so too those who have a natural orientation toward the same sex should not be with those of the opposite sex.

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Well, there you go, folks. If you can take a text like this and actually turn it into its opposite, then you have demonstrated that you are doing the exact thing that Paul described.

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You are twisting the creator -creation relationship, and you are twisting the very words of Scripture themselves.

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It's right there in front of you, and it is amazing. For them, that would be exchanging the natural for the unnatural in just the same way.

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We have different natures. There is absolutely no evidence. I mean, if he's actually saying this, then what he's saying here is that Paul did understand.

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Most of these writers will say, oh, this was beyond Paul's understanding, but now it sounds like he's saying

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Paul did understand the concept of sexual orientation and that he would have had a positive view of it as a

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Jewish man, and I would challenge him or anyone else to prove that from history.

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Show me anybody in the Jewish milieu of Tanniatic Judaism, Second Temple Judaism, that was promoting what this man is promoting.

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I mean, that's the big thing today, isn't it? The big thing today, you want to be on the cutting edge. Let's talk about Second Temple Judaism, and let's talk about Paul as a

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Jew from the Second Temple period, and okay, let's do that. Show me a context that would substantiate this.

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I've never seen anyone even try. Never seen anyone even try, because it just doesn't exist.

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It just wasn't there. When it comes to sexual orientation, but is this just a clever argument?

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Yes. It has no grounding in the historical context of Paul's world. Yes. And therefore yields an interpretation that could not be what he originally intended.

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Yes. After all, the concept of sexual orientation is very recent. Uh -huh. It was only developed in the past century.

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Except he just used it and asserted that Paul would have understood it, didn't he? And it's only come to be widely understood within the past few decades.

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So how can we take our modern categories and understandings and use them to interpret a text that is so far removed from them?

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But that level of removal is precisely the point. In the ancient world, homosexuality was widely considered not to be a different sexual orientation or something inherent in a small minority of people, but to be an excess of lust or passion.

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Some people did have that view. Not Jewish people.

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Not in the context from which Paul would be speaking. But watch the mixture of stuff here.

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When it's convenient to try to interpret Paul as a

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Second Temple Jew, they'll do that. When it's then convenient to completely ignore that and say, well, we need to look at how the

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Greeks viewed it or how Philo viewed it or how the Romans viewed it or whatever, then they'll do that. Don't even bother trying to find consistency in pro -homosexual readings of Scripture because the only thing you're going to find consistent in that is inconsistency.

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That anyone could be prone to if they let themselves go too much. Just a couple of quotes to illustrate this.

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A well -known first century Greek philosopher named Dio Chrysostom wrote the following. The man whose appetite is insatiate in such things, referring to heterosexual relations, will have contempt for the easy conquest and scorn for a woman's love.

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As a thing too readily given and will turn his assault against the male quarters, believing that in them he will find a kind of pleasure difficult and hard to procure.

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A fourth century Christian writer said of same -sex behavior, you will see that all such desire stems from a greed which will not remain within its usual bounds.

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The abandonment of heterosexual relations. I'd be really interested in knowing why he didn't identify that particular person so we could look at the context.

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For same -sex lust was frequently compared to gluttony in eating or drinking. Sexuality was seen as a spectrum, with opposite sex relations being the product of a moderate level of desire and same -sex relations the product of an excessive amount of desire.

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Now that is incredibly simplistic. Incredibly simplistic. And none of this has anything to do with the

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Jewish perspective, which again would be what he would have to establish to come up with any meaningful foundation for interpreting the apostle

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Paul within this context. Personal orientation had nothing to do with it.

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But within this framework, as I said, same -sex relations were associated with the height of excess and lust.

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And that is why Paul invokes them in Romans 1. His purpose is to show that the idolaters were given over to unbridled passion.

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That would not be a part of his argument at all. It wasn't a matter of excess.

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He wasn't saying, well there are some idolaters that are less idolatrous than other idolaters. And being a really big idolater is a really big bad idea.

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It wasn't his point. His point was the exchange. It was the twisting of the creator -creation relationship.

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And the result that God gives them over to dishonor themselves. You see, it is something that is honorable for the creature to recognize and honor the creator.

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If you choose to suppress the knowledge of the creator, thereby seeking to dishonor him, the creator will actually bring about your own dishonor.

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And that this dishonoring takes place in the mind, their foolish hearts are darkened, and also in the body.

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In that they engage in behaviors that bring about the destruction of their own flesh.

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And that has been going on for a long, long time. And to depict a scene of sexual chaos and excess that illustrates that.

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And that is completely consistent with how same -sex relations were most commonly described at the time.

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But the only reason that a reference to same -sex behavior helps Paul illustrate general sexual chaos is because the people he is describing first began with opposite sex relations.

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And then in a burst of lust, abandoned them, exchanged them for something else. None of which you find anywhere in Romans 1.

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We have not found any foundation to accept what Matthew has said to this point.

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This is a gross twisting of the scripture rather than an exegesis of the scripture.

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And surely it is significant that Paul here speaks only of lustful, casual behavior.

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He says nothing about the people in question falling in love, making a lifelong commitment to one another.

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Which again, falling in love and making a lifelong commitment to one another. Yeah, there's nothing about love here.

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Because from Paul's perspective, there can't be in this context. Because love involves that complementary aspect which can't be there.

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And what's this momentary thing? Where's this lifelong thing? Yeah, there was no one promoting the concept of homosexual marriage or anything of the kind in this day in Paul's context.

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And so he doesn't say anything about it because it wouldn't even cross his mind. That's true, because it's to take a perversion and pervert it even more.

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It's one thing. You know, I can understand the homosexuals that I mentioned last time in the study from Macquarie State University.

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50 plus year old male homosexuals. Where 50 percent, if I recall correctly,

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I'm going off the top of my head here. If I recall this, 80 percent had had 11 or more sexual partners in their life.

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50 percent had 100 or more. And 25 percent had 500 and more in their life.

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That I can understand from a human perspective.

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The vast majority of homosexuals do not want what Matthew is describing here.

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And in nations where homosexual marriage has been made legal, 90 plus percent of homosexuals do not get married.

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They're not interested. And those that do have divorce rates significantly higher than the heterosexual population.

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Might want to mention that in passing. But the point is that to address this as he is addressing it is to take a tiny minority.

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And the President of the United States did the exact same thing. A large portion of the apologists for the homosexual perspective will do the same thing.

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They'll talk about committed monogamous relationships. Why? Because they know that if they were to represent homosexuality as it actually exists.

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And as people know it exists. No one would ever accept it. They would never even begin to give consideration to it.

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Within the context of a moral discussion. But you're talking about maybe, maybe the 1 % in that ironic.

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You're talking about the 99 % versus the 1 % here. So you're judging a movement of the 99 % on an argument for the 1%.

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Think about that. And so to say, well Paul doesn't mention this.

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Nobody was promoting this in that age. It was not an issue.

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You cannot even begin to establish that there was anybody in his context that would even begin to make this argument.

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So the honest way of dealing with Paul is to say, well Paul you're just ignorant. And just abandon the scriptures.

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That's the only honest way to try to make this kind of argumentation. Don't twist them. You don't like what they have to say.

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Okay. We understand that. We understand why. Because you're in rebellion against them. That's all there is to it.

41:19

Starting a family together. We would never dream of reading a passage in scripture about heterosexual lust and promiscuity.

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And then from that condemning all of the marriage relationships of straight Christians. Especially because we have all these wonderful, positive, direct teaching passages that talk about marriage as a symbol of Christ and the church and the intention of God.

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Where is that for homosexuality? Where is that?

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We noted the glaring absence in Matthew's presentation of any discussion of Matthew chapter 19.

41:58

And Jesus' own teaching. Why is there a glaring absence of that? Because it just can't be twisted far enough.

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Well I guess anything can be twisted. But you can't do it with a straight face. There is an enormous difference between lust and love when it comes to our sexuality.

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Between casual and committed relationships. Between promiscuity and monogamy.

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That difference has always been held to be central to Christian teaching on sexual ethics for straight

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Christians. Why should that difference not be held to be as central for gay

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Christians? How can we take a passage about same -sex lust and promiscuity and then condemn any loving relationships that gay people might come to form?

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Notice again, we don't have to define loving relationships from the Bible.

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We define quote -unquote loving relationships based upon some external thing.

42:56

And then read that back into the Bible somehow. And say, well, we know these exist because we are here.

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And we experience these things. And therefore the Bible can't be condemning these things. It is a completely anachronistic backwards twisting of the scriptures.

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You take a passage specifically talking about the homosexual activity of males.

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And turn it into a positive statement. Defending what can at best be a 1 % activity.

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A 1%, maybe at best, of homosexuals would ever experience a quote -unquote monogamous relationship.

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It just doesn't happen. It's so rare. And I really wonder, if these guys are really out there making these arguments, why don't we see them protesting at the gay pride parades?

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You'd say, why would they be doing that? Because if you've ever been to one, I haven't. But I have seen the videos.

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And what's going on the side streets is the exact, it's exactly what we just read in Romans 1, okay?

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It's disgusting. In public. Why aren't these guys out there protesting that?

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Saying, you people are giving us all a bad name. You're giving us the majority of us a bad name. Because they know they're not the majority.

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They know they are the tiny minority. They know that. And so, it sounds like what he just said, it sounded to me like a denunciation of at least 90 % of the quote -unquote gay community.

44:48

I would think that the gay community would be a little upset about that. That is a very different standard than the one that we apply to straight people.

44:58

And again, the primary argument that is advanced in support of this kind of a different standard is that Paul doesn't merely condemn same -sex lust.

45:05

He also calls same -sex desires shameful and labels same -sex unions unnatural. I've already explained why

45:13

Paul's use of the term unnatural requires the idolaters' willful spurning of their natural heterosexual desires.

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Actually, the willful spurning of God's creative action of them as male and female.

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Which is exactly what Matthew Vines is doing. It's right there. And that's how this term functions within the passage as a whole.

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Mirroring the idolaters' exchange of God for idols. But before we leave this passage, we also need to consider how

45:45

Paul himself uses these terms in his other letters. Now this is something you need to tune into if your mind has wandered and you're going, okay, okay, okay.

45:53

You need to tune in here because it is very, very common. This is another conversation stopper. You need to be aware of the fact, and this is why

46:02

I mentioned this before. But what homosexual apologists will do is they will run over to passages like 1

46:09

Corinthians 11 -14. And they will take the term nature. And they will say, see, over here it has a limited meaning or a cultural meaning or it can mean something else.

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And therefore, we really can't know what Paul means in Romans 1.

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So a real common argument is because Paul says does not even nature tell you that it is wrong for man to have long hair.

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See, nature means cultural norm. Therefore, cultural norm in Romans 1.

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And that's how you get around it. All right? So that's why I emphasized what I emphasized earlier.

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I emphasized earlier that it talked about not just nature. It doesn't just say parafusus, which is against nature.

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But it used a specific term. It used fusikein kreisen, the natural use of the woman, natural use of the man.

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So you can't just take a phrase that has a specific meaning in one context. And because one of the words is used differently someplace else, overthrow what it means.

47:26

And that's exactly what you have here. And again, if you just want to see what happens when you get these apologists into a debate rather than a talk show, where the hosts are all on the liberal side anyways, but into a debate where they actually have to answer questions, just listen to the debate that I had with Barry Lynn on this very subject.

47:54

And listen to the cross -examination. That must have seemed like the longest cross -examination he had ever experienced in his life.

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And he's an attorney. He was so angry after that. And it wasn't because I was playing games.

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I just held his feet to the fire and held him to the text. It happens very rarely.

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And how the terms natural and unnatural were commonly applied to sexual behavior in his day.

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One of Paul's most significant references to nature outside of Romans 1 comes in 1 Corinthians 11.

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There in verses 13 through 15, he writes, Judge for yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?

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Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory?

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This is actually the most similar passage in the New Testament to Romans 1, 26 through 27. No, not even close.

48:55

Not even close. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever parallel to the use that is found in Romans 1, 26 of It's not there.

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It's not there. It is untrue to make the statement that he has made. Now, I don't know if he knows it's untrue, or if he's just following the deceivers who have deceived him.

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Whatever it is. But that is not a true statement. Because not only does

49:32

Paul refer to nature here, he also speaks of the concept of disgrace, which is the same term that is translated as shameful in Romans 1.

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But the way that we interpret these terms in 1 Corinthians 11 is very different than how the traditional interpretation wants to read them in Romans 1.

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One of the most common meanings of the Greek word for nature is custom. And that is how

49:56

Christians widely interpret this passage in 1 Corinthians today. And the reference to what is a disgrace or shame is taken as specifically being shameful given particular customs.

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So how we read Paul here in 1 Corinthians is basically this. Do not the customs of our society dictate that it's considered shameful for a man to have long hair, but honorable for a woman.

50:21

This reading aligns with ancient Mediterranean attitudes about gender and hair length. And it makes much more sense than the idea that natural biological processes would lead men to have short hair.

50:33

By nature, it would grow long. But again, this passage about hair length in 1

50:39

Corinthians is the most similar one in Paul's writings to the passage about sexual behavior in Romans 1.

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It is not. So if we understand Paul's references to nature and a disgrace in 1

50:51

Corinthians as being about custom, why do we not do the same in Romans 1?

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Because that would require you to abandon sound exegesis and all principles of meaningful interpretation because the term nature is used in a phrase that is defined by the context.

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I mean, this is really one of the most pitiful arguments that is put forward.

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And anyone needs to be prepared to take this apart because it is just so badly formed and is just so obviously in error that it can only work with people who do not have the text in front of them and do not do serious reading of it on a regular basis.

51:36

And in fact, unlike the traditional interpretation, that approach would be consistent with how the terms natural and unnatural were actually used in regard to sexual behavior by the ancient

51:46

Greeks and Romans. Notice, ancient Greeks and Romans. Remember, how about by the Jews?

51:52

We didn't hear anything about that, did we? No, we decided to go to a different background for Paul than that from which he actually spoke.

52:03

In those patriarchal societies in which women were viewed as inferior to men, the main distinction that they made when discussing sexual behavior was not orientation but rather active versus passive roles.

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The Greeks and Romans, along with other societies of biblical times, believed that a man's natural, customary role was to be active in sexual relations, whereas a woman's was to be passive.

52:29

When either of those roles were inverted, when a man was passive or a woman was active, they labeled that behavior shameful and unnatural in a sense of violating customary gender roles.

52:40

So, we now go to Greek and Roman, some Greek and Roman sources, and read them back into Paul, having ignored the use of phrases and things like that, as if somehow we're actually exegeting the text of scripture.

52:54

And I think even most of the folks in the audience could tell by now, we're not exegeting the text of scripture anymore, we're finding a way around it.

53:02

That is why they commonly called same -sex unions unnatural. But just like Greek and Roman attitudes about appropriate hair length, their views about gender roles are specific to those patriarchal cultures.

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In both of these cases, Paul is merely using terms that have already gained a wide currency to describe things in the societies that he's addressing.

53:24

And he uses the term nature in Romans 1, just as he does in 1 Corinthians 11. So if we're going to be consistent, as well as historically accurate in our biblical interpretation, then we need to acknowledge for Romans 1 what we already do for 1

53:39

Corinthians 11. The term nature here refers to social custom, not to the biological order.

53:47

Okay. Now, what you need to understand is, this is another common pro -homosexual means of introducing confusion.

54:02

That's not what he said earlier. What he said earlier was these are heterosexuals who engage in homosexual behavior.

54:10

Now, we have the idea of custom, that this is against cultural custom.

54:18

Well, which one is it? Many times I have found that homosexual apologists will throw out contradictory arguments without even sensing the contradiction.

54:31

The only thing that binds the arguments together is that it gives me excuse for my lusts and my activities.

54:38

But it doesn't matter if my arguments actually contradict the other arguments I've already put forward.

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As long as it produces some sense of confusion in the minds of people, then there you go.

54:52

That's just how it is. And that is exactly what we're hearing right now.

54:57

And it is a culturally specific term. Our two remaining passages are less involved than the others, so I'll spend somewhat less time on them.

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They are 1 Corinthians 6, 9 and 1 Timothy 1, 10. And the debate here centers around the translation of two

55:15

Greek terms. In 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 10, Paul warns against those who will not inherit the kingdom of God.

55:24

And then he lists ten different types of people who will not inherit the kingdom. Because the dispute here is about translation,

55:32

I'll start with the King James version of this passage, which was published more than 400 years ago and so predates this modern controversy.

55:40

It reads, Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

55:47

Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor violers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God.

56:04

You know, I wonder if he's going to be consistent here and also argue about the drunkards.

56:13

I mean, aren't there people who are disposed to a weakness to alcohol? I wonder if he's going to be consistent here.

56:21

Ah, never mind. Our key words for the discussion here are the words translated as effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind.

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These somewhat ambiguous translations in the King James are consistent with how these words were actually translated into English for hundreds of years.

56:40

Some kind of immorality or abuse, but specifically what kind was never stated. This changed halfway through the last century, when some

56:49

Bible translators began connecting these terms directly to homosexuality. The first occurrence of this shift came in 1946, when a translation of the

56:58

Bible was published that simply stated that, quote, homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God.

57:04

By the way, if his argument here is that no one before 1946 had understood arsonic at First Corinthians 6 .9

57:14

as referring to homosexuals, that is just absurd. This text has been understood to refer to homosexuality for a very, very, very long time, not just since 1946, but there are many people who, again, 1946 sounds so long ago that it might as well be ancient church history.

57:36

And so, I'm afraid we're going to have to pick up with the discussion of arsenikoitai, arsenikoitais, and the meaning of the term, which we've already addressed, the next time.

57:48

And maybe, since we're 50 minutes in, there's only 15 minutes left, I think we might actually make it through on the next one.

57:55

But we'll probably take another hour. That's going to be five hours of response. Well, we're going to do it next time, but we're going to be back after this break.

58:03

Keep listening. Last time we were together, we were continuing our response to Matthew Vines, and we need to try to conclude that someday.

58:19

But I did not actually really feel like we've completed and finished some of the comments that we needed to make on the subject of Romans 1.

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Now, you may want to go to Sermon Audio and listen to the two -part Bible study series that I'm doing on Romans 1, relevant to this, for some of those comments.

58:42

But before we continue on with Mr. Vines' attempt to get around the meanings of, especially the term arsenikoitais, 1

58:50

Corinthians 6 -9, I wanted to address part of the issue that is raised by his comments on Romans 1.

58:59

If you recall, the primary essence of his argumentation was that Romans 1 is about individuals who are not, by nature, homosexuals acting in a homosexual way.

59:15

Now, this went against the actual text itself, which talks about adult males burning with desire for one another.

59:25

That's a clear description of male homosexual behavior and orientation.

59:35

But he then went on to try to say that nature is only just a customary thing. So he used two different contradictory definitions.

59:42

First, he said that there are those people who are, by nature, homosexuals, and that Romans 1 is only talking about people who, by nature, are not.

59:50

But he then turned around and attached a completely different meaning of the term nature, contradicting himself.

01:00:00

Now, there are numerous other ways that pro -homosexual activists today are attempting to get around the clarity of Romans 1.

01:00:11

I wanted to read a section. This is from the enrichmentjournal .ag .org.

01:00:18

Robert Gagnon has written a great deal on this particular subject.

01:00:24

I've been listening to a number of his lectures as well. Unlike Matthew Vines, who clearly has basically read

01:00:35

Boswell, but not read any of the responses to Boswell, I have not simply read Gagnon, and I'm just simply going with what

01:00:42

Gagnon says. When I give you these citations, especially from other authors, thanks to the kindness of God's people and certain people out there who keep an eye on the ministry resource list, these books that I'm going to be quoting from are sitting on the desk next to me.

01:00:58

They're marked, and I've checked the context and done due diligence at that point.

01:01:06

Some of these books are not exactly the type of books you necessarily want to have in your library, but my library has a lot of odd stuff in it as it is.

01:01:14

My section on homosexuality has grown a good bit over the past two weeks or so.

01:01:20

With the discussions that we've been having. I just wanted to read this because it completely and thoroughly refutes the assertion that Mr.

01:01:33

Vines has made. Look, no one back then knew anything about committed homosexual relationships.

01:01:41

We didn't know anything about orientation. Those people back there just didn't know. And as Robert Gagnon has said many, many times, if you hear anyone saying that, the person you're listening to clearly has no idea what they're talking about.

01:01:55

None at all. I'm going to read the fifth point of a particular article online from Robert Gagnon.

01:02:03

Fifth, contrary to false claims that people in the Greco -Roman world had no concept of committed homosexual unions, there is plenty of evidence for the conception and existence of loving homosexual relationships, including semi -official marriages between men and between women.

01:02:16

Moreover, we know some Greco -Roman moralists who acknowledge the existence of loving homosexual relationships while rejecting even these as unnatural.

01:02:25

In Plato's Symposium, circa 380 BC, the comic Aristophanes is said to remark about male -male relationships.

01:02:33

They, i .e. the two men, continue with one another throughout life, desiring to join together and to be fused into a single entity and to become one person from two.

01:02:42

His remarks play off of the positive view of same -sex eroticism expressed by Phaedrus and Pausanias at the banquet.

01:02:49

Neither Phaedrus, the beloved of Eryximachus, also at the banquet, nor Pausanias, who was a lover of the tragic poet and host

01:02:58

Agathon, a relationship that began when Agathon, now 31, was 18 years old, advocate for same -sex hedonism.

01:03:05

On the contrary, they stress an attraction for the soul or mind more than the body, and the relationship's inducement to moral excellence.

01:03:12

Pausanias, in particular, emphasizes that, quote, love is neither right nor wrong in itself, end quote, but only right when it is, quote, done rightly, end quote, and, quote, for the right reasons, end quote, that lovers who love rightly, quote, are prepared to love in the expectation that they will be with them all their life and will share their lives in common, as if having been fused into a single entity with, end quote, the soul of the beloved.

01:03:35

It is thus evident that Aristophanes reflects Pausanias' view of himself when the former states that men who love males, quote, are not inclined by nature, fusae, the same term we find in Romans chapter 1, by the way, toward marriage and the procreation of children, yet are compelled to do so by the law or custom, namas, with the result that the two joined males, quote, live their lives out with one another unmarried, end quote.

01:04:00

In Plutarch's dialogue on love, late 1st, 2nd century A .D.,

01:04:06

Protogenes argues that man -male love is superior, not because it is more hedonistic, but because instead of having as a net result the reaping of the fruits of pleasure, it comes through friendship to the end and goal of virtue.

01:04:21

Daphnaeus, defending the superiority of male -female love, concedes that homosexual relationships are not necessarily exploitative for sexual intercourse that is contrary to nature with males does not do away with nor damage a lover's kindness or amorous goodwill.

01:04:35

Yet he declares that even the intercourse that comes about from joining males is done willingly, it remains shameful since males are with softness, that's malachia, and that's a term that we're going to encounter in 1

01:04:48

Corinthians 6 again, and effeminacy, surrendering themselves, according to Plato, to be mounted in the custom of forfeited animals and to be sowed as if to produce children, contrary to nature.

01:05:00

In Rome, the epigrammatist Marshal and the satirist Juvenal, early 2nd century

01:05:05

A .D., refer jeeringly to effeminate men who willingly commit themselves as brides to other men.

01:05:11

For example, Gracchus, a man renowned for his family background and his wealth, became the bride to a common cornet player and signed semi -official documents.

01:05:20

Lucian of Samasota tells of two rich women who regard themselves as married, the masculine Megia of Lesbos, from which lesbianism comes from, and her wife,

01:05:30

Damanassa, the Corinthian. Remember, Corinth had lots of problems, and there you have an example of it.

01:05:37

The astrologer Ptolemy of Alexandria writes of manly women born under a certain constellation who are lustful for sexual relations contrary to nature and take the active sexual role with women whom they sometimes call their lawful wives.

01:05:50

Clement of Alexandria mentions in disgust women contrary to nature marrying women. Obviously, marriage implies commitment, yet commitment does not change the unnatural and sinful character of the relationship.

01:06:01

Some Greek and Roman moralists condemned all homosexual acts on the ground of a nature argument. Literature of the 1st century

01:06:07

C .E. bears witness to an increasing polarization of attitudes toward homosexual activity, ranging from frank acknowledgment and public display of sexual indulgence on the part of leading

01:06:15

Roman citizens to severe moral condemnation of all homosexual acts. If even some sectors of the pagan world were beginning to develop absolute opposition to all forms of homosexual practice, what is the likelihood that Paul would have made exceptions for committed homosexual unions?

01:06:32

Paul operated out of Jewish scriptures and a Jewish milieu that were unequivocally opposed to homosexual practice, even of a committed sort.

01:06:39

For example, 1st century Jewish historian Josephus stated the obvious to his Roman readers.

01:06:45

The law of Moses recognizes only sexual intercourse that is according to nature, that which is with a woman. But it abhors the intercourse of males with males.

01:06:54

Several rabbinic texts forbid marriage of a man to a man. One referring to Egyptian practices even forbids marriage of a woman to a woman,

01:07:02

Sifra on Leviticus 18 .3. It is hardly surprising then that even Lewis Crompton, a homosexual scholar, acknowledges this point in his massive work,

01:07:11

Homosexuality and Civilization. However well -intentioned, the interpretation that Paul's words were not directed at bona fide homosexuals in committed relationships seems strained and unhistorical.

01:07:23

I stop for a moment just to point out, that's exactly, that is exactly what pro -homosexual apologists like Matthew Vines and like another man we're going to listen to briefly today, that's exactly what they're saying.

01:07:36

But here is a homosexual scholar saying, this seems strained and unhistorical.

01:07:43

Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same -sex relations under any circumstance.

01:07:53

The idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any other

01:08:00

Jew or early Christian. Do you hear that? I think it's very important that you hear that.

01:08:06

There is no evidence, none whatsoever in history, that there was any positive promotion of homosexual or lesbian behavior amongst the

01:08:19

Jews the time of Christ or Paul. So you would have to pull both the

01:08:25

Lord Jesus and Paul completely out of their milieu and completely out of their context to say, oh well, but they wouldn't have had any problem with this.

01:08:35

Nobody in their context was promoting such things. It is a complete abuse of history.

01:08:41

To even begin to make that kind of statement. I go back to Gagnon, two more short paragraphs.

01:08:48

Also worth noting is the falsity of claims that the ancient world knew nothing akin to our understanding of a homosexual orientation or of congenital influences on at least some homosexual development.

01:08:58

Do you catch that? You will hear every pro -gay apologist saying, they didn't know about what we know about today.

01:09:05

That is false. Now don't expect anybody on CNN or MSNBC or even

01:09:10

Fox News for that matter to challenge that. It's just taken as a given anymore. But it's not true.

01:09:18

As classicist Thomas K. Hubbard notes, Homosexuality in this era, that is the early imperial age of Rome, may have ceased to be merely another practice of personal pleasure and began to be viewed as an essential and central category of personal identity exclusive of and antithetical to heterosexual orientation.

01:09:41

End quote. And finally, Bernadette Bruton, a lesbian New Testament scholar.

01:09:48

If that doesn't tell you immediately that when you hear someone talking about a New Testament scholar, you need to ask a little bit further as to the commitments of said person.

01:10:02

Bernadette Bruton, a lesbian New Testament scholar, who has written the most important book about lesbianism in antiquity, also acknowledges this point.

01:10:11

She states that, quote, Paul could have believed, Paul could not have believed.

01:10:16

In fact, what I'm going to do, never mind. I think there's a typo in this, so I'm going to open the book, which is in my hand.

01:10:25

And I'm going to get my reading glasses out because it is a small print book. This is page 244, chapter 9.

01:10:33

I'm just going to read you the entire quote here, which is longer than what Gagnon produced.

01:10:39

Further, even if Paul condemned only homosexual acts committed by heterosexual persons, many lesbians in the church who feel that they have chosen to love women, as well as all bisexuals, would fall under that condemnation or thereby not helped by this interpretation.

01:10:53

In sum, the category of the innate homosexual who is thereby free of shame and whose sexuality counts as natural does not fit the

01:11:02

Roman world and does not address the self -understanding of many contemporary lesbian, bisexual, and gay

01:11:08

Christians. I believe that Paul used the word exchange to indicate that people knew the natural sexual order of the universe and left it behind.

01:11:17

Paul uses the plural throughout Romans 1, 18 -32, showing the communal aspect of the behavior. As a people, they suppress the truth about God, and as a people, they change their form of sexual behaviors.

01:11:28

In other words, I see Paul as condemning all forms of homoeroticism as the unnatural acts of people who had turned away from God.

01:11:41

Bernadette Bruton, page 244 of her book, Love Between Women, Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism.

01:11:49

So, what is her conclusion? What does she say should be the result of all this?

01:11:57

We need to reject Paul. There you go. At least she's honest.

01:12:03

We need to reject Paul. His viewpoints are culturally mandated and culturally oriented and created by cultural categories, and so we just need to reject him.

01:12:19

So there you go. That's where it comes from.

01:12:24

So, I want to add that information, because I think it's important that you recognize that there is factual, historical evidence behind what we're saying, and when they make these claims, nobody knew anything about them.

01:12:38

That's a lie. That's a lie. It is untrue, and if Matthew Vines has been spending two years studying this issue, why hasn't he found this information?

01:12:52

Two years! Now, one other thing. I was listening to a debate, and I'm 99 % certain this was a debate between Harry Knox, Director of Religion and Faith Program, at the

01:13:08

Human Rights Campaign. The Human Rights Campaign is a pro -homosexual organization. It just angers me to no end that they use human rights as a pro -homosexual thing.

01:13:16

But my good brother Michael Brown debated Harry Knox in 2008, and I had actually grabbed a bunch of Michael's material on Isaiah 53 to listen to.

01:13:36

In the middle of it, I just accidentally grabbed this too. So I ended up listening to it on a ride yesterday.

01:13:44

And I had heard it before, but listened to it again. And I was struck by listening to Harry Knox's opening statement.

01:13:53

And I want to just play a portion of this, then we're going to get back to Matthew Vines. Some of you are going, you are never going to finish this.

01:14:00

But I think you'll see why this is relevant, and how it's relevant, and how this is illustrative of the fact that you might think that you have come up with answers to the pro -homosexual apologists, if you're listening to just Matthew Vines.

01:14:17

And then you go listen to Harry Knox, and all of a sudden he's got a completely different view that contradicts Matthew Vines. But you're not ever going to find them debating their positions, because they don't mind.

01:14:26

They don't care that they're contradicting each other, as long as all of their arguments are against Christian Orthodoxy.

01:14:34

As long as all of their arguments are contrary to, contradictory to,

01:14:40

Christian Orthodoxy. Then they don't care if they are contradicting each other.

01:14:47

It's the gather all of the arguments you can together, even if they're self -contradictory, and throw it like you're throwing everything in the kitchen sink.

01:14:58

And just hope that if you can then connect that with enough emotion, that you'll convince your audience.

01:15:05

And guess what folks, it's working. It is working. Just look around, and you will see that it is working.

01:15:16

Now, let's listen to Harry Knox's comments on Romans 1.

01:15:24

Alright, and what we're going to do, we're going to listen to his comments, and then I'm going to stop it.

01:15:30

And then I'm going to play the first section of his rebuttal. What happened in between, was that Michael Brown got up and obliterated these comments.

01:15:44

He did so kindly, Michael Brown is a much nicer man than I am. He did so generously, but he obliterated his comments with facts, with language, with linguistics, with lexical sources.

01:15:59

Totally destroyed it. And then listen, listen to what happens. Robert Gagnon has said that this happens in all of his debates, it's happened in my debates, it happens in Michael Brown's debates.

01:16:10

When you finally expose the biblical bankruptcy of the argumentation, then you always get the same argument back.

01:16:20

So, let's listen to what Harry Knox said in this debate on the subject of Romans 1.

01:16:32

I went to the wrong one, that's the beginning of the second one, I thought it was queued up. Let's go to the right one here, and go.

01:16:52

The lives, the feelings and well -being of individual children were sacrificed for what was perceived to be the common good.

01:17:01

And in the process, it became a commonplace of the priestly life to take part in orgies that, if they were not good for the children, were pleasurable for the adults.

01:17:12

To leave that part of the story out of your study of Romans 1 is intellectually lazy for you, and spiritually life -threatening to your lesbian and gay neighbors.

01:17:24

But explanation of Paul's writings in that context, though scary and provocative, offers you the chance to speak words of real hope and reconciliation to a nation obsessed with sex, and talking about sex in every venue except church.

01:17:43

And please don't forget to go on to study Romans 2, where Paul begins to admonish us not to judge our neighbors.

01:17:55

How badly America needs to hear the message of hope through Christ expressed in 1 Corinthians 6.

01:18:01

So, there he goes on from there. So, what is the argument? The argument that he just made was, this is all about pederasty.

01:18:09

It's all about pederasty. Now that is not what Matthew Vines said. Matthew Vines' interpretation is completely different than Harry Knox's interpretation.

01:18:19

It's all about adults using children. Even though Romans 1 actually says men lusting after other men with one another, the mutuality, it's right there.

01:18:31

There's nothing in the text supportive of this, but that's what he says. And Michael Brown gets up, points that out, demonstrates that.

01:18:40

And so, what does Harry Knox do when he gets up for his rebuttal?

01:18:46

Well, here we go. Whether the person with whom I'm talking values the

01:18:52

I don't know why this is starting just slightly after what I'm telling it to, so I'm going to back it up again here.

01:18:58

But we cannot and dare not to our own detriment change what God's words say.

01:19:04

Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Very good. Harry. In every conversation that I ever have about this hard topic, it becomes pretty quickly clear whether the person with whom

01:19:21

I'm talking values the experience of the Holy Spirit in my life and whether they're going to be presumptuous enough to deny that the experience that I have had exists.

01:19:35

And not just me. My lesbian and gay Christian and sisters and brothers of many other faiths, too, so fully embody the beauty of those faiths all over this world that we stand in stark contrast to any rhetorical argument on this.

01:19:59

The love of Christ, I pray, is simply available to you through my life and apparent to you through my life.

01:20:06

I work very hard to make it be so every day. And I know that that is something that the church over time has valued as highly as it has the

01:20:17

Bible. What it has sought not to do when it has been wisest is to make an idol of the

01:20:24

Bible. So, what do you do? You become completely subjective.

01:20:30

You say, you are questioning the Holy Spirit in me. The Holy Spirit's in me.

01:20:37

You're making an idol of the Bible. No rebuttal. Now, in the first part, he had actually said, well, the

01:20:44

Bible means this. Then it's shown that he's wrong. That's not what the

01:20:51

Bible means. And so what's the response? Well, how dare you turn the

01:20:57

Bible into an idol, and how dare you question that I have the Holy Ghost within me. And I'm just reminded as I listen to this exactly what happened to me when

01:21:07

I debated Barry Lynn on this. Because remember, this man is a member of the same church as Barry Lynn, the

01:21:14

United Church of Christ. And what did Barry Lynn claim? That he receives the same kind of inspiration and revelation as Paul did.

01:21:23

The Holy Spirit in me, he says. And yeah, the Holy Spirit contradicts what he says in the

01:21:28

Bible. But that's no big deal. Absolutely amazing.

01:21:38

Absolutely amazing. So, there you go. You need to recognize all these different kinds of arguments are out there.

01:21:48

And we have responses. They're factual. They're true. They're consistent.

01:21:54

They're defensible. They're documentable. But the time that we will have to be able to say those things in the public square is vanishing quickly unless God is merciful.

01:22:11

And there are certain people out there that aren't helping with that. Dr. Al Mohler tweeted a reference to a video of a

01:22:21

North Carolina fundamentalist pastor who in his quote -unquote sermon,

01:22:27

I hesitate to call it a sermon, Pastor Charles Worley of the

01:22:35

Providence Road Baptist Church. I wonder if someone in channel, I was going to do this and I forgot to do this,

01:22:41

I wonder if someone in channel can look up Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina and see if there's something about the

01:22:50

King James Version on the website someplace. Because I just got the feeling listening to the man that this just might well be.

01:22:59

It's definitely a good old fundamentalist church. And if you listen to Charles Worley, he says, and stuff like that.

01:23:12

What the man did is he, in the middle of the sermon, demonstrated exactly what attitude we cannot have, we dare not have, that is utterly and completely opposed to the attitude any believing

01:23:29

Christian should ever have on this subject. But the problem is the world thinks that's how we all are.

01:23:38

And we all suffer when people like this. There are people who oppose homosexuality simply because they are bigots.

01:23:45

There are homophobes. There are homophobes out there, there's no question about it. There are people who have an irrational fear.

01:23:53

They've never thought through Romans 1. They've never thought through 1

01:24:02

Corinthians 6. They might quote Leviticus 18 or 20, but they've never invested 10 minutes in thinking about the holiness code.

01:24:14

They've never even bothered to try to understand Jesus' teaching in Matthew chapter 19, the positive aspect.

01:24:23

No, it's just, well the Bible says it's wrong, so it's wrong. It's a surface level mechanism for feeding bigotry and hatred.

01:24:39

And it's real easy for them to do that because we see the bigotry and hatred on the other side. So it's like, well, there you go.

01:24:48

But he said in this video, which has gone viral, and folks, if you've got a camera on you and there's a microphone on your lapel, realize something.

01:24:59

You're speaking to the whole world. Think about it.

01:25:08

Build a great big large fence, 50 or 100 miles long, and put all the lesbians in there,

01:25:14

Worley went on to say in his 13th May sermon at his maiden

01:25:20

North Carolina church. Guess I could have given you the location there, sorry about that. Fly over and drop some food.

01:25:27

Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified so they can't get out.

01:25:33

And I'm not even doing a thick enough accent there. Feed them, and you know in a few years they'll die out.

01:25:39

You know why? They can't reproduce. Well, thank you, Pastor Worley.

01:25:46

Thank you very much for assisting the world in recognizing that there are people who call themselves funnymentalists who will use the

01:25:59

Bible as an excuse for not thinking things through and for being ignorant.

01:26:05

Thank you very much, sir. We needed that assistance and that help. What an amazing thing.

01:26:15

What an amazing thing. So, it's all on us, folks.

01:26:23

It's all on us to not compromise, to speak the truth, but to speak it in love and to be ready to give an answer, not like that man did, but like we are trying to do here, like Michael Brown's trying to do, like Al Mohler's trying to do, like so many others are attempting to do in that way.

01:26:49

Am I seeing that their website has disappeared or something like that? Because I saw something about it. I don't know.

01:26:54

But we need to get back to Matthew Vines or we're never, ever, ever going to finish this.

01:27:00

So, we've just gotten to the point where we're transitioning out of the Romans 1 material into the 1

01:27:05

Corinthians 6, verse 9 material. Our two remaining passages are less involved than the others, so I'll spend somewhat less time on them.

01:27:19

Hello? Our two remaining passages are less involved than the others, so I'll spend somewhat less time on them.

01:27:25

Okay. I have no idea why it's doing that. Let's see if we can fast forward past it. Let's start with the King James Version of this passage, which was published more than 400 years ago and so predates this modern controversy.

01:27:37

It reads, Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?

01:27:44

Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor violers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

01:28:03

Our keywords for the discussion here are the words translated as effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind.

01:28:11

These somewhat ambiguous translations in the King James are consistent with how these words were actually translated into English for hundreds of years.

01:28:19

Some kind of immorality or abuse, but specifically what kind was never stated. This changed halfway through the last century when some

01:28:28

Bible translators began connecting these terms directly to homosexuality. The first occurrence of this shift came in 1946 when a translation of the

01:28:38

Bible was published that simply stated that Homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God.

01:28:45

Several decades later, after the distinction between sexual orientation and sexual behavior came to be more widely understood, this was changed to say that only practicing homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom.

01:28:56

But these terms and concepts regarding sexual orientation are completely alien to the biblical world.

01:29:05

Neither Greek, the language of the New Testament, nor Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, nor Latin, the language of early

01:29:12

Christian translations of the Bible, had a word that means or corresponds to the English word for gay.

01:29:20

The concept of sexual orientation, and of same -sex orientation in particular, didn't exist in the ancient world.

01:29:28

Now, I just stopped long enough. Did you catch all the quotes that I gave you just a few minutes ago, which demonstrate that this is pure mythology?

01:29:39

I mean, it's just sad. I've actually had people contact me who said they had relatives who attended this talk and who were convinced by it.

01:29:48

Well, if you can be convinced by this kind of thing and you don't check it out, then you can be convinced by anything. You're obviously convinced by the sincerity of the person, or at least the perceived sincerity, and things like that.

01:29:59

You're not convinced by facts. You don't check things out for yourself, because this is just absurd.

01:30:04

But anyway. The English term homosexual was not even coined until the end of the 19th century. And so translations of these words that suggest that Paul was using these distinctly modern concepts and categories are highly suspect.

01:30:19

But today there are many translations of the Bible, but certainly not all of them, that link these terms in some way to homosexuality, rendering them variously as males who practice homosexuality, men who have sex with men, or male prostitutes.

01:30:37

What is the basis for this shift in translation? The word translated as abusers of themselves of mankind in the

01:30:44

King James is a compound word. In the Greek, it is arsenikoitis.

01:30:51

Arsen meaning male and koitis meaning bed, generally with a sexual connotation.

01:30:57

And so the argument is that we can determine the meaning of this term from its etymology. Male plus bed in the plural form must then refer to men who sleep with other men.

01:31:07

Now, we have already given the foundation here. We've already given the background.

01:31:14

We've talked about this before, but obviously it's important to point it out again, because when we went through these texts,

01:31:24

I pointed out the fact that, for example, in Leviticus 2013.

01:31:31

Now, what's the term? Arsenikoitis. Let me read Leviticus 2013 in the

01:31:37

Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek translation that the Apostle Paul utilized and would have been utilizing.

01:31:42

In fact, the early church to whom he was writing, this is their version of the

01:31:48

Bible. Now, you have koimei the, and then you have meta arsenos, with a man, koitis.

01:32:08

Arsenos and koitis are right next to each other in the text. And I pointed out, when we went through this before, that it seems that the earliest appearance of this term either is from Paul himself, and hence it's probably a term he has made up to describe this sin straight out of Leviticus, which, remember,

01:32:37

Matthew Vines did not attempt to explain to us that Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 are not condemning homosexuality.

01:32:46

All he said was, it doesn't matter anymore because we don't believe any of these laws are binding on Christians. But he didn't even bother to try to argue that that's not what he was talking about because it plainly is.

01:32:59

So if the Apostle, writing to the church, which is using the Greek Septuagint, uses the very language of the

01:33:08

Greek Septuagint in describing this activity, how can you come up with anything other than homosexuality?

01:33:19

Men lying with men in bed. Men doing with men what you normally do with a woman in bed.

01:33:27

That's exactly what both texts are saying. And as Jeff Neal said, this is one of those, you know, it's funny, as certain people look for ways of inflating their number of debates that they've done, who remain nameless.

01:33:49

But one of the debates that I've done, which has never been heard by anybody but those who were listening that day, sort of like the debate

01:33:57

I did with the Imam a few weeks ago that only people who ever heard it were the people who were listening live.

01:34:03

But Jeff Neal and I were on the radio station here in Phoenix KPXQ. And we debated two homosexuals.

01:34:13

And they didn't record it. Or they lost the tape or whatever, I forget what it was. Yeah, they didn't record it.

01:34:20

And so no one ever got to listen to it again. But one of the things I remember very clearly Jeff saying in that debate, in talking about arsenokoites, was arsenokoites means what men do with other men in bed, and that ain't eating crackers.

01:34:37

That was how Jeff put it. That was a wipeout debate.

01:34:43

It was not even close. It was just a massive destruction of the homosexual side.

01:34:50

But no one's ever heard of that again, because unfortunately that's what happened. So this is the information.

01:34:59

It's right there. It's right in front of our eyes.

01:35:05

It's the source from which Paul is driving this. If you allow for any intertextuality in the

01:35:12

Bible, if you allow for the relationship of Old and New Testament in the Bible, it's right there.

01:35:20

It's clear. If you want to know what the Bible's actually saying, you can know. If you don't want to know, well, you can always just twist it.

01:35:30

But there are several problems with this approach. First, simply looking at a word's component parts doesn't necessarily tell us what it means.

01:35:39

Unless, of course, they're found right next to each other in the very scriptural source that Paul would be driving them from.

01:35:48

There are many English words where this approach would fail. For example, the words understand, butterfly, honeymoon.

01:35:57

And television, which doesn't mean far -seeing, none of which is relevant to arsenokoites.

01:36:05

Why? Because it does not have an established lexical meaning prior to Paul's usage of it.

01:36:11

Therefore, you must look at the sources from which Paul derived his technical vocabulary. And remember, kaihas an koimethe meta arsenos koitein gunaikas.

01:36:26

Leviticus 20 .13 in the Greek Septuagint. The component parts here, honey and moon, really don't tell us anything about what that word actually means.

01:36:39

In order to understand what a word means, you have to consider how it's used in context. Oh yes, that's true.

01:36:45

The problem with the word abusers of themselves with mankind, arsenokoites, is that it was used extremely rarely in ancient

01:36:53

Greek. Uh -huh. In fact, Paul's use of it in 1 Corinthians is considered to be its first recorded use anywhere.

01:36:59

Now it's interesting because there is possibly one previous use.

01:37:06

I read you already the footnote on that subject from the same -sex controversy, from my study of the term using thesaurus lingua grecae cd -rom many, many, many moons ago.

01:37:20

And after Paul, the few places that it appears tend to be in lists of general vices, which are not the most helpful of contexts.

01:37:28

Fortunately, however, many of these lists are grouped by category. And this Greek word consistently appears among sins that are of a primarily economic nature, rather than those that are primarily sexual.

01:37:41

This and some other contextual data indicate that this term referred to some kind of economic exploitation.

01:37:47

Some kind of economic exploitation. Okay, so you've got

01:37:52

Paul. You've got him using the Septuagint. There is no question in scholarship of the absolutely intimate relationship that exists between the

01:38:05

Apostle Paul and the text of the Greek Old Testament called the Septuagint.

01:38:10

None whatsoever. And you have malakoi and arsenokoitai right next to each other.

01:38:22

And yet this somehow is some kind of an economic thing.

01:38:29

It really, all those people that are translating this as homosexual, they've just got an agenda.

01:38:36

They're just missing it. Likely through sexual means. This may have involved forms of same -sex behavior, but coercive and exploitative forms.

01:38:46

There's no contextual support for linking this term to loving, faithful relationships.

01:38:54

Again, eisegesis. Taking a concept that would not have existed for the Apostle Paul. That is the idea of loving, faithful, homosexual relationships.

01:39:02

Utterly rejected by all. There is not a single Jewish source contemporary with Paul.

01:39:08

A hundred years, any direction. Two hundred years, any direction. That could begin to substantiate this. Just read it in and turn the text on its head.

01:39:17

That's how you do it. The other debated word in this passage, translated as effeminate in the

01:39:24

King James, is malakos in the Greek. This was a very common word in ancient

01:39:31

Greek, and it literally means soft. It was used as an insult in a wide array of contexts to refer to those who were considered weak -willed, cowardly, or lazy.

01:39:43

And all of those failings were particularly associated with women in ancient times.

01:39:48

Hence the rendering effeminate. In a specifically sexual context, the word was used to describe general licentiousness and debauchery.

01:39:58

But this wasn't limited to any particular kind of relationship. Men who took the passive role in sexual relations were sometimes labeled this term, which is the basis on which some modern translators connect it to homosexuality.

01:40:12

But so many people were labeled this term for so many different things. Most of them not even sexual in nature.

01:40:20

Now notice how he's doing this. This takes some effort to take something so plain, so clear, so obvious, so contextually compelling, and to sow confusion.

01:40:34

You have to cut the text into little parts. Don't allow malakoi to be right next to arsenokoitai.

01:40:43

Why? Because if you allow the text to stand as it is, the two terms contextually influence your translation of both of them.

01:40:55

And see, it's not because we just have a bunch of mean, nasty, fundamentalist Bible translators that are just picking on us, loving, monogamous homosexuals, about which 99 % of us aren't.

01:41:09

That's not why it is. You see, translators, honest translators, recognize these two words are right next to each other, and therefore contextually they mean something together, don't they?

01:41:22

And we know what arsenokoitai means. We see the connection to Leviticus 18 and 20.

01:41:28

And so malakoi, what's talking about here, are both aspects of the homosexual sexual encounter.

01:41:37

There is the aggressive male, and there is the passive effeminate.

01:41:47

And it's interesting what he didn't read. Did you notice what he read? He read verses 9 and 10.

01:41:52

He did not read verse 11. He didn't read verse 11. Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the

01:42:10

Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. You see, that text is the great offer of hope to the person who has become trapped in the soul and body -destroying lifestyle of homosexuality.

01:42:31

And because it is, those who refuse to repent find it tremendously offensive.

01:42:40

Because you see, it closes the door on quote -unquote gay Christianity.

01:42:45

It says, such were some of you, not such are some of you.

01:42:55

It specifically uses a form that cannot possibly allow. It's the imperfect of I mean, eta.

01:43:07

And so, some of you in the past, and it doesn't use an error, it uses the imperfect, so it was an ongoing action in the past.

01:43:18

Some of you in the past, this is how you acted. That was your lifestyle, but it isn't any longer.

01:43:28

There has been a change. There has been a break. You were washed.

01:43:33

That means you have to be washed of this. It is a dishonoring thing.

01:43:39

It is sinful. It's a rejection of God's purposes. It defiles. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of our

01:43:51

Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. But you see, it says you were, not you are.

01:44:04

And the man we're listening to has to change the Bible to justify his continued rebellion against God's will.

01:44:16

And most of the sexual ones about men in relationships with women, that there's no valid basis for picking out one possible reason out of dozens and saying that that must have been what

01:44:26

Paul had in mind. See, lexical agnosticism. We don't know what it means.

01:44:33

You know, this context thing, we just can't put too much emphasis on that context thing, you know.

01:44:41

It would be more faithful to the text to return to the ambiguity that prevailed for more than 1900 years of translation.

01:44:49

The notion that Paul is singling out gay people here and saying that they will not inherit the kingdom of God simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

01:44:57

Well, as we have seen, Matthew Vine's argumentation does not hold up under scrutiny.

01:45:05

In the final passage, 1 Timothy 1, verse 10, the first word, abusers of themselves with mankind, reappears in a list of people

01:45:14

Paul says the law was written against. Here the translation is them that defile themselves with mankind.

01:45:23

The translation issues and debates here are the same as those from 1 Corinthians. In other words, it's arsenicoites again, except here it's arsenicoites because it's in the plural.

01:45:40

Plural dative, I mean. So they're not exactly a compelling argument there either, but he's just going back to what he's already said and we've already demonstrated is untrue about arsenicoites and its use here right after the term pornoise.

01:46:12

Pornoise, arsenicoites. So, you know, I think it's important for us to remember but it doesn't have anything to do with that homosexuality thing and what men do with men in bed.

01:46:21

No, that's not that. The six verses in the Bible that refer in some way to same -sex behavior and indeed, they're all negative.

01:46:32

But that isn't a conclusive argument. The majority of references to sexual behavior in general and to heterosexual behavior in the

01:46:40

Bible are negative. It's not because sexuality is a bad thing. Because most of the references to it in Scripture are to lust, to excess, to infidelity, promiscuity, rape, or violence.

01:46:55

And yes, the Bible also contains positive affirmations of opposite -sex relationships in addition to hundreds of negative verses about forms of them.

01:47:04

And it does not contain explicit positive statements about same -sex relationships. It certainly does not.

01:47:11

But it also hardly ever discusses same -sex behavior of any kind. And the very few references to it are in completely different contexts than loving relationships.

01:47:22

There are no loving relationships. Because there can be none, because you have not even seemingly given consideration to the concept of mutuality, the concept of the fact that loving relationship is biblically defined on the basis of God's creative decree of man and woman, male and female.

01:47:46

You cannot biblically love a mirror. Sexual narcissism is not the biblical concept of love.

01:47:59

In Genesis 19, there's a reference to threatened gang rape. In 1

01:48:05

Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1, there's a reference to what appears to be sexual exploitation.

01:48:12

In Romans 1, Paul refers to lustful same -sex behavior as part of an illustration of general sexual chaos and excess.

01:48:22

And though he labels this behavior unnatural, he's using this term in the sense of uncustomary gender roles.

01:48:30

See, now what happens is you've had this argumentation presented that has never taken into account the inconsistency of it, the arguments against it, and now these are being presented as facts, as if it's already been established, which of course they have not.

01:48:48

And unfortunately, many, many people simply do not follow arguments carefully enough.

01:48:56

They have not been taught to think critically. And so what's going to happen here in the last eight minutes, approximately, maybe a little less than that, is you take these false assertions that you've made, you weave them together, and then this is how you make this effective in our culture today.

01:49:25

You now cement it with emotion, and that's how you make it work.

01:49:32

Just as he's referring to social custom when he labels long hair in men unnatural, the only place in Scripture where male same -sex relations are actually prohibited in Leviticus comes in the context of an

01:49:47

Old Testament law code that has never applied to Christians. The Bible never directly addresses, and it certainly does not condemn, loving, committed same -sex relationships.

01:50:02

There's no biblical teaching about sexual orientation, nor is there any call to lifelong celibacy for gay people, but the

01:50:13

Bible does explicitly reject forced loneliness as God's will for human beings.

01:50:19

Not just in the Old Testament, when God says that it is not good for the man to be alone, but in the

01:50:25

New Testament as well. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul writes about marriage and celibacy.

01:50:33

He was celibate himself, and he says that he wishes that everyone else could be celibate as well. But, he says, each person has their own gift.

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For Paul, celibacy is a spiritual gift, and one that he realizes that many Christians don't have.

01:50:49

However, because many of them lack the gift of celibacy, Paul observes that sexual immorality is rampant, and so he prescribes marriage as a kind of remedy or protection against sexual sin for Christians who lack the gift of celibacy.

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It is better to marry than to burn with passion, he says. And today, the vast majority of Christians do not sense either the gift of celibacy or the call to it.

01:51:19

This is true for both straight and gay Christians. And so if the remedy against sexual sin for straight

01:51:27

Christians is marriage, why should the remedy for gay Christians not be the same?

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It is. You can marry any woman you want. The problem, of course, is you want to redefine, out of the biblical categories, what marriage is.

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I hope you can see this, how clear this is. Because if you can, many in our society cannot.

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But you may be one of the few people that can explain it to them, that can try to get them to see it. But there does seem to be a veil of blindness, certainly upon those who have deceived themselves into thinking that marrying another man is actually a marriage, or a woman marrying another woman is actually a marriage, but certainly amongst many others as well.

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And I think we know exactly where that's coming from when we go back to Romans 1. The arguments and debates that we have, both in the church and in civil society, about gay marriage tend to get lost in abstractions.

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Is it right for a man to marry another man, or for a woman to marry another woman?

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Well, it doesn't seem right. But isn't how God designed us?

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He made men for women and women for men. That is His design, His definition of marriage.

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And it's not for us to tamper with or change. But these arguments are always made by people who are themselves heterosexual.

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You mean the way that God made us? People who always fit in, who haven't endured years of internal torment and agony.

01:53:15

Now see, here comes the transition. Now what you do is you create a victim mentality.

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And you start talking about how you've been hurt. And you see, people naturally are afraid to say anything negative towards someone who claims victim status.

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We see this in the law courts all the time. I'm the victim here! And that's why we have laws.

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And that's why judges are supposed to judge on the basis of law and not on the basis of emotion. And so now you start talking about the suffering that has been theirs.

01:53:55

Well, sin brings suffering. And all of us experience suffering in our lives.

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Some of it from sin. Some of it because we live in a fallen world. You lose a loved one, you experience suffering.

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Because of abiding sin, there's relationships that are broken, we experience suffering. But you don't start redefining reality itself based upon your suffering.

01:54:25

It is such a massively self -centered, narcissistic thing to demand that all of society adopt and adapt and change just for you, just because of your desires and your perspectives.

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And yet that's exactly what we have going on here. Because they have a different sexual orientation than their friends, than their parents, than seemingly everyone else in the world.

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But those people, gay people, are just as much children of God and just as much a part of his creation as everyone else.

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And there's something terribly unseemly about straight Christians insisting that gay

01:55:18

Christians are somehow inferior to them. Now again, we simply reject at its foundation the very concept of a gay

01:55:27

Christian. That has no more meaning than an incestuous Christian or a

01:55:34

Christian who engages in sexual activity with animals. And there are actually a whole number of other realms of behavior that Dr.

01:55:44

Brown's brought up that I can't mention on this program.

01:55:50

I just can't. I mean, there are things that arouse sexual desire in people that just...

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I mean, we know what necrophilia is, but there's even more beyond that that makes necrophilia look tame.

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Are we going to allow... Because, as everyone will point out, even the most perverse behaviors, even the most perverse behaviors have some kind of biological foundation to them.

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So are we going to... If we're going to go this direction, do we just simply allow for any biological...

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Any behavior, because it has a biological basis, that's anarchy. That's the end of all ethics and morality.

01:56:39

And this closing statement that Matthew Vines makes could be made by a person promoting intergenerational love.

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Just change the words. And the arguments are absolutely identical.

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Absolutely identical. How dare you straight Christians deny that God has made me this way and deny to me happiness and deny to me fulfillment.

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You are forcing me to be alone because you won't let me have sex with eight -year -olds.

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How dare you do that? And you think, oh, no, no, no.

01:57:20

It's happening, folks. It's already happening. At the speed it's going, who knows what's going to be next.

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Or broken. Or that gay people only exist because of the fall. And that God really intended to make everyone straight like them.

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But, you know, I am a part of creation, too. Including my sexual orientation.

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I'm a part of God's design. See? Put these words in the mouth of anyone.

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A polygamist, a person promoting incest, a person promoting pedophilia, bestiality.

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Let them stand up there and make the exact same arguments. Because my sexual orientation comes from God.

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I'm a child of God. I'm a part of his creation. How dare you do these things to me?

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And the sad thing is you'll have a bunch of people sitting at United Methodist Church going, oh, I never thought about that.

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Because they have abandoned any meaningful biblical foundation.

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That's the first thing that I learned growing up in Sunday school. That God created me.

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That God loves me. That I'm a beloved child of God. You know, if you were taught that in Sunday school, you were lied to.

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Because unless you've repented and put your faith in Jesus Christ, you aren't any of those things.

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Theology matters. No more and no less valuable than anyone else. I love

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God. And I love Jesus. I really do.

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But that doesn't mean that I need to hate myself. Or somehow wallow in self -pity. I love

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God and I love Jesus, but I hate my sin. And it is not a Christian response to say,

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I love God, I love Jesus, but even though Jesus died on the cross for my sin, I'm going to redefine my sin so I don't have to repent of it.

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Misery and loathing for the rest of my life. That's not what God created me to do. Our discussion of this issue, of the gay issue, can't take place in the realm of abstractions.

01:59:44

Of musings about ideal design and ideal gender roles. As though gay people don't even exist.

01:59:51

Jesus placed a particular focus on those others overlooked. On those who were outcast.

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On mistreated and marginalized minorities. And if we are working to emulate the life of Christ, then that's where our focus needs to be too.

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So now what you do is you associate your sinful behavior with marginalized and outcast minorities.

02:00:16

Once again, playing yourself as the victim and trying to draw to yourself the sympathy that is rightly due to the widow and the orphan, but now being attached to sexual perversion.

02:00:30

Which, in and of itself, is a perverse action. And is very offensive.

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And should be offensive to anybody who for a moment honors what Jesus actually taught and what its actual application should be.

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Romans 12 tells us to honor one another above yourselves. Rejoice with those who rejoice.

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And mourn with those who mourn. Hebrews 13 .3 says,

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Remember those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

02:01:08

Wow, that one is incredibly offensive to me since the context is talking about Christians remembering fellow

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Christians who were in chains and enslaved and persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ.

02:01:21

Not about sexual perversion. And not about perverting the message of Christianity as Matthew Vines has done in this.

02:01:28

Talk about something that is truly reason to be offended. There's a reason to be offended.

02:01:37

How fully have you absorbed not just the existence of gay and lesbian

02:01:43

Christians? We reject the existence of gay and lesbian Christians.

02:01:48

In the sense that you have defined it. There are Christians who struggle with same -sex attractions.

02:01:55

But they do not allow those same -sex attractions to define the

02:02:02

Christian faith. They repent of them. They seek

02:02:07

God's grace to quell them. But the depth of the pain and the hurt that their own brothers and sisters have inflicted on them.

02:02:20

Their own brothers and sisters have inflicted this upon them. Here comes the absolute guilt trip. That if you do not accept the twisting of Scripture that we have just endured for...

02:02:33

We're just past five hours now in this response. If you do not accept these things, all of the falsehoods, all the bad arguments, the contradictory arguments, the fallacious arguments that we've documented, then you are inflicting pain on others.

02:02:49

How dare you do that? This is clear evidence that the twistedness that Matthew Vines experiences in his sexual orientation is not limited just to his body, but to his mind and his spirit as well.

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Because if you can take God's truth and twist it like this, to where you're projecting your own rebellion upon others and accusing them of causing hurt, when it's you who are bringing about this hurt to yourself by your refusal to repent, an amazing thing to see.

02:03:30

Does that pain grieve you as though it were your own? And how aware are you of the ways in which you may be contributing to suffering and hurt in gay people's lives?

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It's still commonplace for straight Christians to say, yes, I believe that homosexuality is a sin, but don't blame me.

02:03:50

I'm just reading the Bible. That's just what it says. Well, first of all, no.

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You are not just reading the Bible. You are taking a few verses out of context and extracting from them an absolute condemnation that was never intended.

02:04:09

Notice that the arguments which have not been compelling at all, which we have refuted thoroughly and completely,

02:04:16

I think any rational person would be able to see that, now they're absolutes.

02:04:23

It's no longer just, well, you know, it could be seen this way or it could be seen that way. Now they're absolutes, and you're guilty if you believe those absolutes.

02:04:35

But you are also striking to the very core of another human being and gutting them of their sense of dignity and of self -worth.

02:04:45

So if you talk about incest, if you talk about bestiality, intergenerational love, you are gutting that person.

02:04:52

So, in other words, there can be no ethical or moral discussion whatsoever, anything goes, if you're going to be truly loving.

02:05:02

You are reinforcing the message that gay people have heard for centuries. You will always be alone.

02:05:15

You come from a family, but you'll never form one of your own. You can't form one of your own.

02:05:25

You cannot produce life with another male. That is the facts of reality.

02:05:33

It is a fantasy world for you to think otherwise. You are uniquely unworthy of loving and being loved by another person.

02:05:43

And all because you're different. Because you're gay. Being gay, being different, is no crime.

02:05:54

Being gay is not a sin. And for a gay person to desire and pursue love and marriage and family is no more selfish or sinful than when a straight person desires and pursues the very same things.

02:06:11

The Song of Songs tells us that King Solomon's wedding day was the day his heart rejoiced.

02:06:21

To deny to a small minority of people, not just a wedding day, but a lifetime of love and commitment and family is to inflict on them a devastating level of hurt and anguish.

02:06:39

And by redefining reality itself, by refusing the categories that God has forced upon you,

02:06:49

Mr. Vines, by creation itself, you are the one who is inflicting this pain upon yourself.

02:06:58

You want to have family. Well, family is defined by God's creative act.

02:07:07

You want to have children. Children are wonderful. Children are fantastic.

02:07:15

I will never forget the birth of my children. And I love them to this day.

02:07:22

And I'm really looking forward to loving my grandchild that I'm going to have by the end of the year,

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Lord willing. Yeah, I'm going to become a grandpa soon. And I'm going to hold that little child.

02:07:35

And I'm going to marvel that my youngest child has now got a child, too.

02:07:42

And I'm probably going to start singing Sunrise, Sunset, or something along those lines. As I experience that grandpa thing.

02:07:51

But you know what? The reason I'm experiencing those things is because I didn't rebel against the way that God created me.

02:08:00

I have a wife. I have a wife, and therefore we had children.

02:08:14

And Matthew, I'm sorry that you have given up the battle against unnatural sexual desires.

02:08:22

And you've allowed that to define who you are. But I am not inflicting anything upon you that you have not inflicted upon yourself.

02:08:38

To tell you the truth is not to inflict anything upon you. I've listened to you.

02:08:45

I'm not like that guy in North Carolina. And by the way, someone did mention to me it is a King James only church, which makes perfect sense.

02:08:53

It's King James only, fundamentals, Baptist church. I'm not like him.

02:08:59

I've listened to you. I've checked out your facts and found you're wrong.

02:09:06

But I know what arsenikoites means. I know what malakoi means. I've looked at the original languages.

02:09:13

I've looked at the historical sources. Far more deeply than you have. And I'm telling you, your emotions have become your ultimate authority.

02:09:31

And you are abusing not only yourself by giving in to your sexual desires, but you are abusing the word of God.

02:09:43

You are abusing the Bible. And I have the honesty to tell you that.

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And you say, but that hurts me. When the doctor tells you you have cancer, that might hurt you, but you need to hear that.

02:10:02

You need to know that so that you can take steps to do something about it. It is not love for someone to lie to them about their real situation, their real state.

02:10:15

There is nothing in the Bible that indicates that Christians are called to perpetuate that kind of pain in other people's lives, rather than work to alleviate it, especially when the problem is so easy to fix.

02:10:29

All it takes is acceptance. The Bible is not opposed to the acceptance of gay

02:10:37

Christians or to the possibility of loving relationships for them. And if you are uncomfortable with the idea of two men or two women in love, if you are dead set against that idea, then

02:10:55

I'm asking you to try to see things differently for my sake, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

02:11:04

I'm asking you to ask yourself this. How deeply do you care about your family?

02:11:13

How deeply do you love your spouse? And how tenaciously would you fight for them if they were ever in danger or in harm's way?

02:11:25

That is how deeply you should care. And that is how tenaciously you should fight for the very same things for my life, because they matter just as much to me.

02:11:40

Gay people should be a treasured part of our families and our communities. And the truly

02:11:47

Christian response to them is acceptance, support, and love.

02:11:55

Thank you, and thank you to everyone for coming tonight. The question that was not asked is how much do you love

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God, how much do you love His truth, and how much will you allow Him to define

02:12:10

His own creation? Because what Matthew Vines has done is, in his rebellion against God, he has chosen to rebel against God's creative order and then to blame everybody else for the resultant pain and suffering that his own capitulation to his sexual desires has brought into his life.

02:12:31

Acceptance, indeed, of what, Mr. Vines? Of a completely different moral and ethical system that would allow you to salve your conscience, but in the process to destroy yourself and anyone else that you would bring into that rebellious relationship.

02:13:00

We have now spent at least five -and -a -half hours,

02:13:06

I think that's correct, responding to an hour -and -five -minute video. And I know there are some of you that would rather I talked about Dave Hunt's new book or something else.

02:13:21

But this is the issue of our day. It's not because this is the most important issue in the

02:13:28

Bible. It is because this issue is defining the cultural rejection of any kind of moral or ethical sanity.