A Defense Of Marriage

I'm gonna do something a little different this morning. We're just throwing all the traditions out the door here, I guess. Not doing the Heidelberg Confession in the opening. And we only did that for two years, though, so that's not really a tradition, so it's about 10 years, so.

But, no, tradition, tradition. Need to differentiate between dogma and tradition. Anyway, a little more interactive. You may actually have to talk, think, interact today. Just to warn you ahead of time, if you need to gird your loins for that kind of thing.

I realize most Reformed Baptists are much more comfortable being silent in the churches. But I wanna do something extremely practical, hopefully useful, hopefully it's always useful, but very practical and get your interaction on the subject as well.

I'm not sure how many of you saw a blog post that I put up this week. I was actually thinking about just passing my phone around so people could see it, but that really wouldn't, probably work all that well, I would imagine.

Though it's possible, if you just absolutely need to see the picture I have in mind, I can describe it fairly well, but it's, let me see how far back it is. Oh, it's got older posts, bummer. I guess we were talking, sacredness, there it is.

If you happen to have a phone and wanna look at it, the picture is in the blog entry for December 30th of last year now. Blog post title is Mr. Church, that is the sound of the barbarians at the gates.

And did any of you see the picture that I posted? Okay, I've got one person who knows what I'm referring to. Okay, let me describe it for you, unless you want to pull it up yourself, for those of you who can do such things and did not find it blasphemous to actually have your phone functioning during church.

But I was directed to a tweet by a Kevin Church, who interestingly enough, never responded to my article that I sent to him, but it is a picture. There are soldiers in full dress uniform with swords. So you can tell it's at a formal function, got their gloves on and so on and so forth.

And they're doing the arch thing, where you have the cross swords and you raise them up. And then in the center of the picture is a man in full dress military uniform. And then another man in a full tuxedo and they are kissing.

And the title of the tweet from Mr. Church is Fort Bragg has hosted its first same sex ceremony. That sound you hear is the 21st century, homophobes. And so I responded by writing an article on this particular picture and this particular commentary.

The Cultural Pressure Behind Redefining Marriage

And what I wanted to do this morning was to talk about, I had a number of people contact, it wasn't a long article, but I had a number of people comment that they sort of felt like the article was sort of like a one thing they could direct people to to explain why it is that there is a reasonable objection to what you see in that picture.

And obviously when we look at that picture, we recognize that there are many in the world who go, aw, and we go, ooh. Now we may go, ooh, for different reasons. Obviously, and I'm not even gonna get into this, not interested in getting into this, but just simple on a simple common sense basis, man, that's not good for a military.

There's all sorts of things we could talk about there, but that's not what I was looking at. What I did in the article was I laid out what I think is a very understandable and yet not overly complex argument on a theological, moral, and ethical level.

Now I realize that many people in our society do not think on theological, moral, or ethical levels, and that's why we have what's going on around us. Fact is that the, yes, sir. It was originally posted, it's on my blog, but I was, a Twitter address of at Kevin underscore church.

I don't know that there's a attribution as to where it goes from there, but I mean, I have the address if you wanna look it up. It's right here, so. You know what? I mean, yeah, I can't just beam this to everybody.

Come on, what is this? Man, this is terrible. This is definitely the first time there has been a URL on this board. There's no question. Have you ever put a URL up here, Mr.? No, no. No, the number, the letters are appropriately capitalized or not capitalized.

So this is a capital B, small, D-W, B-W -2-B-I-W. There it is, okay. There's the picture if you can stomach it. Oh, okay, I thought you were saying. I look at this picture. Basically, I've listened to and obviously participated in many public debates in this subject.

And I've listened to debates that other people have done, either in preparations of people I was debating or just simply because it's wise to learn from others and so on and so forth. And as I looked at this, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to try to explain this to people, because the majority of the people in our society derive their morals and ethics from a mishmash of sources.

Very rarely do they give consideration to the authority or validity of those sources. So you and I both know that the average American watches movies, they have particular movie stars, they invest amazing amounts of moral capital in.

And that's the rapidity of the change that has taken place in our society and moral and ethical issues. And especially in the utter redefinition of marriage has taken place because the skids were greased by Hollywood.

And as such, if Hollywood were to take up the cause of bestiality or pedophilia or whatever else it might be, and we start getting these movies and start showing these people in a positive light, and then you start getting sitcoms where a couple of these folks show up.

At first there's resistance, but then what you do is you just expose, expose. At first there's screaming, then you expose some more, a little less, a little less, a little less until you numb the natural reactions.

And pictures like this, which 20 years ago would have resulted in howls of protestation and heads rolling and everything else now are just commonplace. It's the process that has gone through. And so we know that the sources that people use to derive their morality, they're generally not thinking it through.

They're not examining the authority. They don't look at how this is related to everything else. They simply look at the narrow picture that is presented to them by their favorite Hollywood star or something like that.

And for many young people, I played on the dividing line recently, a bar mitzvah speech by a young Jewish boy in a synagogue up in the Seattle or Portland area, one of the two. And it was all about how he knows all these wonderful same-sex couples.

And he's just absolutely focused upon marriage equality. And he derives this from Jacob's marriage to Leah and how he was tricked into this and how marriage has changed over the years and all the rest of this stuff.

And it's sad to listen to it, but you understand this kid's got a, he's got a crusade. He has got something that has given him purpose. He's totally wrong about reading the Old Testament. And obviously, there haven't been any adults in his life that have come along and said, well, son, you need to understand this, this, and this.

But it's a crusade for him. It's equality. That's what it's all about. And of course, none of them actually believe in marriage equality because they aren't pushing for the ability to marry your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, your kids, or anything else.

They don't believe in marriage equality. But that is, of course, the only logical outcome of this kind of utter redefinition of what marriage is. So when you're dealing with people like this, what most of us find really frustrating is there's such a massive philosophical, moral, ethical, and epistemological knowledge chasm between us and them that you sort of go, you know, the bus is coming in five minutes.

There's, why should I bother? There's just, there's nothing I can do. I can't, I can't possibly say anything. Lunch is gonna be over in seven minutes. I, you know, I've got a wide open door here, but I just can't, I can't build a bridge over something this big that fast.

And so most of us just go, or I might say, oh, you know, just shake your head and pretend like you didn't hear the conversation, or, you know, it's just too much to get into. I found, I think, maybe a way to throw a pontoon bridge across real quick that might actually help.

And like I said, I had a number of people respond to this article and he said, wow, that really helped. That really helped. So with that picture in mind, what I did is I said, when I look at this picture, here's what I see.

Husband, Wife, and the Meaning of Marriage

The world looks at this and they see a marriage taking place. Now, on June 25th, 1982, James married Kelly, coming up on 32 years ago. Now, when I, when we make that statement, James married Kelly, we are using the word married as a verb.

Marriage, the noun, marry, the verb. Now, when I use the term marry, we have a verb. This may be where you lose people too. Unfortunately, these days, we sort of learned this when I was a kid. I'm not sure, so I'm not sure anymore, but we have a subject and a verb.

And then what is, what is, what is what? What kind of object? Direct object. Okay, thank you. I'm glad to hear there's still a few people out there that suffered through grammar in whatever grade it was.

All right. I've often said the main reason that people fail Greek is because they don't know English. Because you actually have to know your mother tongue before you start learning another one very well.

So, marry is why? There is a direct object to marry. And I submit to you that the direct object is directly relevant to the defining of the verb. This happens all through, you can think of many, many verbs in the English language where the meaning of the verb is determined by the direct object.

If I say, I hit the ball, I'm probably in some sporting context. If I hit the books, I'm probably not. Okay, so the verb changes meaning depending upon the direct object. The direct object fills out the meaning of the verb.

When James married Kelly in 1982, a relationship resulted to where James became a husband. As a result of the verb and Kelly, four years later, but in 1986, the result of this is sitting in the corner.

We have a child. And so, husband became father and wife became mother. We're all created in the imago Dei, the image of God. It is fundamental to the Christian worldview that man is created in the image of God.

That is why Neo-Darwinian micrometational evolutionary theory is absolutely destructive in its essence to Christian theology and the Christian worldview. Because if we're not made in the image of God, you have to redefine image of God to try to fit it into a system like that.

But if we're made in the image of God, and that person I'm talking to is made in the image of God, then I can communicate to them as an image bearer. Now they may be suppressing the results of that image bearing, but it's still there.

I can reach that. That's my point of contact is the image of God. It's not neutrality. It's not like there is no neutral ground of contact we can have. The point of contact with the non-believer is the fact they're made in the image of God.

And I believe that as hard as they try and as consistent as the educational system is and everything else is to try to banish this thought from the mind and to make it unnatural, we know that the terms husband and wife, father and mother are gendered terms.

We know that. We know that a husband is a man. And in fact, we hold, our society thinks it's okay to talk about deadbeat dad. Morally, we recognize that a father who does not take care of his children is not to be honored.

He needs to be tracked down and you can put his face on websites and you can make jokes about him and you can look down upon that person. It's one of the few things you can still do. And when a mother abandons her children.

Now, of course that's breaking, even that's breaking down as our society breaks down because with abortion, where is the line? You've got ethicists at Princeton saying you should be able to kill your children up to two years of age.

But we recognize that as grossly unnatural. It's grossly unnatural. And the only way to promote that and to continue that in a society is to be constantly pushing it in the educational system and amongst the pointy heads in the universities.

That for some people, some reason young people want to be like them for a while till they get out in the real world and discover that they're living in a fantasy world. But anyways, these terms are gendered terms.

Husband and wife. There is a role for a husband and we recognize when a man is not fulfilling that role. And there is a role for a wife. And certainly, certainly we recognize that there is roles of father and mother.

I mean, one of the great tragedies during World War II is, of course, when a young boy would lose a father. And the community would come together to try to help this young man who had lost a father in war because they felt that was their duty.

And they recognized that while mother, great to have mother and God has raised wonderful people who only had a mother and all the rest of those things, but the society recognized that there was a loss there, that it was not natural.

And so they would come together. And so you have father and mother. And of course, we know the vital importance of the mother as the nurturer and all these things. And so we have gendered terms. And so when I look at that picture, when I look at that picture, I say to someone who says, what's wrong with that?

How are you impacted by that? I say, well, first of all, it cannot and never will be in God's sight or in my mind, a marriage, because there is no husband and wife in this picture. It's a mirror. It's a mirror relationship.

It is at its essence narcissistic, but fundamentally there is no complementary relationship. And there can be no complementary relationship. I don't care what role one takes. There is no husband. There is no wife, because you don't have a wife.

You don't have a husband. You don't have a husband. You don't have a wife. It's just the reciprocal complementary relationship that is supposed to exist between husband and wife cannot exist in that picture.

Whatever else they're celebrating, whatever strong feelings they might celebrate, it's not marriage. And woe be to any people who becomes confused on that subject. But there is a lack of the fundamental basic elements that are absolutely required for a marriage to exist.

Now, I know immediately people start saying things like, well, better to have two men in love than an abusive husband who beats up on his wife. So better to completely redefine the relationship than to deal with sin in the relationship is the mindset of many, many people.

And you and I recognize that that kind of thinking is muddled. It's not coming from any type of reflective thought. But again, you have to be able to point out. So what you're saying is, if there is sin or there is failure in any type of relationship, you redefine the relationship.

Is that how you deal with those situations? When you have troubles with your kids, you just decide you're no longer their parents, just redefine it and they can just pass it on to somebody else. No, obviously not.

We cannot avoid the reality that what was absolutely necessary before pictures like this could appear in our society and be celebrated was a fundamental degradation of the meaning of marriage amongst non-homosexuals, amongst heterosexuals.

Obviously that's the case. When our society began engaging in marriage as little more than a social contract, then why should we be surprised when it's like, well, if it's just a social contract, why limit it to a man and woman?

Why not two men, two women, one man, three women, three men, three women, man and dog, female and puppy, whatever. It's just a social contract. That's all it is. That's how you've been treating it for all these years.

So why not just extend it to everybody? It's equality that way. But when I look at that picture, and you can use that as an illustration if you wanted to, because you know you're starting off under the suspicion of bigotry in our society.

You're starting off on, you already have a strike against you because from our society's perspective now, the accusation of being a hater, of being a bigot, it's just been repeated so many times. All you have to do is listen to MSNBC and CNN and Piers Morgan and all the rest of these people and the very idea that there is a moral and ethical foundation that should be here, that God has made us to function a certain way, you're already starting off with a strike against you.

And so what I would do in that situation is maybe even use this as an illustration, say, you know, when I look at all of the celebration that's taking place of this alleged marriage equality, which really isn't equality at all, because most of the people promoting this still say it's just between one man and one man or one woman and one woman, but they can never give me a reason why that is.

It's always purely subjective. And since it's purely subjective, once someone else comes along with an argument to change that, they have no grounds really to, there's no objective morality upon which to base any of this stuff.

And I don't know if you ever listened to someone really pushing, as happened on the Piers Morgan show, pushing somebody saying, well, why couldn't two brothers marry? Now, I know this is an ewe subject, but it's in the courts in Germany.

I mean, we can stick our head in the sand and ignore that this is happening, but then we're gonna wake up someday and wonder what in the world happens to the world around us when it invades our space, shall we say.

But there is a case in Germany right now where two brothers are suing to marry. And when someone was pressed, I was listening recently to someone was pressed to answer why is that wrong? And they were a proponent of the redefinition of marriage.

Their only response was, this was actually on a, well, interestingly enough, it was on Revelation TV, which is a television program in Europe, the UK and Europe, English channel, which is why I'm going to Spain in three weeks is I'm gonna be on that program doing a couple of debates.

And so I was listening to this as an example of the format that we're gonna be using for the debate that I'm gonna be doing, some debates I'm gonna be doing over there. And so they had a very good debate between Peter Tatchell, I think was his name.

He is a homosexual activist in the United Kingdom and a good reformed man from Scotland, as I recall. And he did an excellent job, excellent job. In fact, at one point, the host had to sort of ask him to back off a little because he kept quoting his opponent who had changed his views so many times as an example of where he was really coming from, which was perfectly appropriate, but it is Europe and you have to be really careful.

Do you think it's politically correct over here? You gotta go to the UK. It's truly an amazing thing. But anyhow, he kept pressing him on this question. Why shouldn't these two brothers in Germany be allowed to marry?

And finally, when he finally couldn't keep dodging, he said, well, the feelings that a man would have for his wife, or I might have for my partner, he's homosexual, are different than the feelings two brothers would have.

That was it. That's exactly what the response was. Says who? What if they come back and say, no, they're not. They're just exactly the same as yours. What are you gonna say? And he had no response. He had no response, which absolutely proved the point that once you open this door, there is no stop for the door.

There's no door stopping on the side that stops it. It's just gonna, it flies off the hinges and disappears into the ether because there's nothing on the other side. And the point he was making was this man in the past has spoken against the entire institution of marriage.

He thinks it needs to be done away with. All in your social contacts, it's completely wrong to have marriage. And he says, he just discovered this is the best way to accomplish this is to talk about love and equality and all the rest of that stuff.

But your ultimate goal is to destroy marriage. And you know it. And he was right. And he proved it. But I've never found anybody who could answer the question, why? And of course, once you start talking about pedophilia and thinking that, well, there are people that are hurt there.

All you gotta do is get just a few psychologists to come out with some scholarly peer-reviewed papers saying that it's good for everybody. And that's gone too. There just isn't any foundation to stop the, as I said, this isn't a slippery slope.

This is a cliff. Okay, you're not falling down a slippery slope. You just stepped off. It's the Wile E. Coyote Roadrunner thing. And we are in that brief moment where Wile E. Coyote sort of freezes before he looks down and then all of a sudden, choo, and then it's a boop down at the bottom.

We've all seen it. We all know what we're talking about. It's not a slippery slope. It is an abject cliff. And so anyways, coming back to this, I've found it to be at least a way, when you've got that five minutes, to say, well, you know what?

If you're married, you can use the term. When I married my wife, I entered into a relationship with her as a husband. And I believe that a husband has certain rights, has certain privileges, has certain duties that define that.

And it's a gendered thing. The same thing with a wife. Now I can't scream inequality because I can't have kids. The terms father, mother, husband, wife are gendered terms. And we can close our eyes and stomp our feet and say it's not fair that I can't fly like a bird.

And it's not fair that I can't run like a cheetah. And it's not fair that I can't swim to the ocean like a dolphin or whatever else. That's not fair. That has nothing to do with fair. It's the way things are.

It's the way I'm created. And so to take two men and put them in a relationship and call it marriage is simply to redefine the terms and empty them, empty the entire concept of marriage of its inherent meaning which is found in the relationship of husband and wife.

And then naturally over time in most situations, not all situations, but it used to be considered to be a sad thing that you couldn't enter into the relationship of father and mother. And that's what produces life.

To try to redefine that simply on the basis of a small minority of people who don't like the way things are is an absurdity that we simply cannot afford. But we're certainly going down that path. We're certainly going down that path.

And at that point, if I had time, I would, I mean, if it was a situation where I had time, where do you think I would go in the New Testament at that point? Not necessarily. Huh? Matthew 19. I would go straight to Matthew 19.

Say, you know what? Jesus talked about this. Because many of them have been told, Jesus never said a thing about homosexuality. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I go to Matthew 19 and I'd let Jesus speak.

I'm sorry? Oh no, I mean, there's all sorts of places we could go if there is an objection to homosexuality on a moral and ethical level. So look, the fact of the matter is today certainly the entire discussion of this is going on in our society without even the ability to identify homosexuality as immoral.

I mean, the sad thing is the New Mexico Supreme Court, the arguments before the United States Supreme Court never was the moral nature of homosexuality even allowed into the conversation. So that's where most people are.

That's where most people are. That's why it would seem to me just on a, I mean, again, you follow the spirits leading, but it would seem to me that to go to Jesus giving a positive teaching gives you the foundation then to give the negative side from Romans 1 as an easier transition for most people that you're talking to.

George, you had a question? Are you talking about people who claim to be Christians but are promoting this? Well, in my experience, the vast majority of those who take that position, vast majority, are a part of denominations and churches that already have a fundamentally compromised bibliology.

They have a fundamentally compromised view of the authority of scripture or the nature of scripture. I think one of the greatest examples of this today, there literally is online a ongoing train wreck of apostasy blog.

It is a blog of a woman who claims to be a Christian. And if you just listen to what she's saying and follow the progress, you can just, it's again, it's a, and who knows where it's gonna hit. But historically, when you look at the denominations that have done this in the past, everything happens so much faster now because of social media and because of things like that.

What used to take decades now happens in months. And this, every time I go online, Google is suggesting that I follow this particular woman whose name, her name is Rachel Held Evans. And I'm just like, stop suggesting that.

But if you just follow, you can just see a little step farther, a little step farther, a little step farther in degrading the view of the Bible and its authority and its consistency and its relevance today and all the rest of these things.

So the idea of covenant and moral law and stuff like that, that requires a pretty high view of the Bible. And so you can just put, you can just easily list the quote unquote denominations that threw this stuff out a long time ago.

So the United Methodists and the PCUSA and the ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the liberal groups, let alone the Church of, not the Old Church of Christ, but the United Church of Christ, things like that, that long ago pretty much abandoned Trinity, the deity of Christ, all that kind of stuff, as fables, myths, and all that kind of stuff.

They have no basis upon which to stand against this type of social pressure. But what we are starting to see now are more and more allegedly conservative churches that were already infected with the, we need to do whatever we need to do to bring people in to hear about Jesus' idea.

In other words, the gospel and the spirit, that's not enough. We need to do the entertainment. We need to sort of be careful about using terms like repentance and wrath and stuff like that. Those folks, a lot of those folks are basically saying, you know what, this battle's over.

This battle's over, let's not worry about it. Let's, that issue's off to the side. Let's move on. I'm not sure what they're moving on to, but Carl Truman wrote a book about a year and a half ago, The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and the thesis in his little book, I interviewed him on the Janet Mefford Show back in the end of July, about this very issue.

He said, this is gonna be the issue that demonstrates there is no such thing as evangelicalism. This is gonna be the issue that's gonna demonstrate it, because evangelicalism has eschewed any confessional standard.

And so, this is gonna be the issue where the society's gonna push so hard that you're gonna see where the schism really is between people who take seriously biblical authority and those who don't, and it's gonna be the end of the meaningful use of the term evangelical.

That's his, Carl Truman's a professor of church history at Westminster Seminary. He's an OPC guy, and tells it like it is. So, I think he's probably right on that, and we're seeing it, we're seeing it right now.

We really are. There are many, many churches that just, there's a megachurch pastor in New York that was just on, I think with Katie Kirk, or something like that. And they're finding ways of saying, without just coming straight out and saying, yeah, the Bible blesses this.

You know what, we just wanna talk about Jesus. You know, we just wanna talk, we don't wanna talk about all the rest of this stuff. The point is that the homosexuals are demanding, you gotta understand, from the perspective of many of the homosexuals who are writing today, that toleration is not enough.

Toleration is not enough. Celebration is required. Celebration is required. You can't tolerate, to say, to even call it sin, utterly beyond the pale for the vast majority of the state. Okay, you two do a thumb war as to who gets to go first.

The only thing I would say that is, while redefinition of terms is what's going on here, I think most people would look at that particular example and they'd say, well, you're changing the meaning in a much more radical way than we're suggesting.

We're suggesting expanding the application because we're not getting rid of the application that you're making. If you wanna stay married to your wife and call that marriage, that's fine. Asking for the logical reasons why the movement's doing what it's doing, it has nothing to do with, wow, we've been bigots about this all along.

In fact, there was hardly any push for this at all only a few decades ago. And the vast majority of homosexuals don't want to be trapped in that type of situation because, especially amongst men, they have anywhere from 10 to 50 partners per year anyway, so they don't want that kind of limitation.

The whole, fundamentally, the whole reason behind this is to change our culture and to change it in a radical way because marriage and the family has been what has defined Western culture and provide our law with its basis, things like that.

So if you're looking for a logical reason, there isn't one to be found there. It is truly in the destruction of marriage. But the person who now is a non-homosexual advocate for redefining marriage is the primary person I'm talking about here.

I'm not really, I'm not, I would approach a homosexual in a different way than I would a non-homosexual who is simply promoting these things, who doesn't understand what the nature of marriage is. And I've, at least I, if it doesn't help you, then leave it alone, but I think this helps.

I think recognizing that the direct object of Mary fills out the meaning of the word, and then using illustrations of that, I think is extremely helpful for most people. Real quickly, to call an Old Testament form of marriage is to ignore Jesus's own interpretation.

Basically what I would say is someone does that, I says, well, you know, it's funny, Jesus didn't interpret things the way you did because when Jesus interpreted God's creative establishment of marriage in Matthew chapter 19, he said, from the beginning, it has not been so.

It has been one man with one woman. And when you look at what happened with polygamy in the Old Testament, what was the end result every single time? Look at David and Tamar and Absalom and just concubines.

Look what happens with Sarah and Ishmael. And I mean, again, God establishes his perfect form here. Man steps down from that and falls on that. God continues to deal with men even when they're living at a lower level, but he continues to call them to a higher level.

And in the New Testament, Jesus makes it very, very plain for his kingdom and his people, there is only one standard there. And the idea of a polygamy and things like that being something that God established at the start, and that this is the goal, no, no way, shape or form.

And the Old Testament law specifically prohibits numerous forms of quote unquote marriage that were common in that day, but were identified as toibah, as abomination. You're not allowed to do those types of things for his people.

So it was a step down. God still dealt with people even when they were on a lower level, but it was never the establishment that God made for marriage. Okay, just something I thought, since some people had said, that really helps me to have something to say to someone that I'd share it with you this morning.

We'll go back to John chapter 17 next week. Okay? All right, let's close the Word of Prayer. Father, we do pray for opportunities to give testimony to your Word and to your truth. We certainly are surrounded with them.

We would pray for repentance to come to our land, but Lord, as we are in the midst of this tremendous downgrade in our society, may we truly be salt and light. We pray in Christ's name.