Gay Christianity Refuted Part 1

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. And welcome to The Dividing Line, a mega edition of The Dividing Line.

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Today, two hours, the first hour we will be providing a response to a video that I viewed just this, well,

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I didn't view it, I listened to it just this morning. It was directed to me,

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I was directed to it, I guess, by a gentleman here in the local Phoenix area who said he did not want a hat tip, so you don't get a hat tip, fine.

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Anyway, that's normally how I encounter such materials, is someone drops me a line or an email or a tweet or something in channel and so on and so forth.

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As I listened this morning to this presentation, I decided that while we had planned a regular

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Dividing Line, that I would add an hour because, and we won't finish this today,

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I honestly think it would almost be oppressive to try to address this subject for two full hours, it would be hard.

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But what we're going to do is for the first hour, respond to a gay Christian presentation.

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Because last time we talked about Dan Savage, who doesn't claim to be a Christian at all and just simply says the

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Bible is filled with bull on this subject. That's one perspective, that's one direction that people go.

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And then you have this perspective, and I think most Christians struggle much more than I do to respond to this perspective, and certainly it is this presentation that has been extremely effective in totally neutralizing liberal

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Protestantism in regards to homosexuality. You know that you're

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ELCA, PCUSA, United Methodist, Episcopalians, etc.,

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etc. Your liberals are, as a whole, have completely collapsed, and I think you will hear in this presentation exactly why.

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As I listened, I was struck by the erudite speech of this young man.

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Having written a book on the subject of homosexuality, I sort of felt like standing back and saying, sir, did it really take you two years to read

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John Boswell's book? Because I know the sources from which he's drawing his exegesis, which is in fact an eisegesis of the text, but most people listening to this, and I know

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I posted it on the blog so people could watch it and could listen to it. I think most people who've listened to it have listened to it within a context of not so much listening to hear what other people would hear, and I think

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I should have put that into the blog article. Try to put yourself in the position of someone sitting in that audience and try to understand why it is that on the basis of numbers we're losing this war.

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The next generation is buying both Dan Savage and this fellow.

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Even though they're giving completely different argumentation, they're buying them both.

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What does that tell you? It tells you that most of our fellow citizens are not convinced by rational argumentation.

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It is appearance. It is emotion. It's not a matter of truth.

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It's not a matter of consistency, and that's what's going on around us.

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We want to launch into this particular section, and then we'll take a break at the top of the hour, and then the second hour will be a little bit more normal, and I'll be able to mention a certain birthday girl out there, but I don't want to do that in this hour because it just wouldn't seem appropriate to attach these things to this particular subject.

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We're going to launch right into it like we always do. Listen, respond, interact, educate, hopefully prepare you because this is the kind of presentation that I think we need to be very quick to give a clear, compelling, biblically -based, non -harsh, non -hateful response to.

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Let's start listening. ...graciously agreeing to host the event. My name is

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Matthew Vines. I'm 21 years old, and I'm currently a student in college, although I've been on leave for most of the last two years in order to study the material that I'll be presenting tonight.

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I was born and raised here in Wichita in a loving Christian home and in a church community that holds to the traditional interpretation of Scripture on this subject.

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Just to offer a brief outline for this presentation, I'll start by considering... Now, by the way, I think that Matt's church is not the church he's speaking at.

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In other words, the one he grew up in is not the same one he's speaking at now. I think it was a different church that would not exactly allow him to stand up front and explain why they're all wrong.

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...some of the broader issues and divisions that are behind this debate. And then I'll move to a closer examination of the main biblical texts that are involved in it.

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And then I'll offer some concluding remarks. The issue of homosexuality, of the ordination of gay clergy, and of the blessing of same -sex unions has caused tremendous divisions in the church in recent decades, and the church remains substantially divided over the issue today.

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On the one hand, the most common themes voiced by those who support changing traditional church teaching on homosexuality are those of acceptance, inclusion, and love, while on the other hand, those who oppose these changes express concerns about sexual purity, holiness, and most fundamentally, the place of scripture in our communities.

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Now, one of the things that was at least somewhat to be appreciated in this presentation...

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It's not a fair presentation, an unbiased presentation, obviously. But it is...

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Well, let's just compare it to Dan Savage, and it'll look like it's the model of fairness and balance.

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But one of the issues that we will be addressing repeatedly in this conversation is, what is love?

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What is love? What is Christian love? Is love defined biblically the same thing as love defined by our society?

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And most assuredly, we recognize that it is not. But notice the contrast that was just made, one side being concerned about love, the other side concerned about purity.

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I am just as concerned about love. In fact, one of my greatest criticisms of Matt's position is that he never defines what love is, and he insists, and will within the next few minutes, insist that the love that exists between two homosexuals is identical to the love that exists in a married relationship between a man and a woman.

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And I remember exactly where I was on North New River Road this morning, in the middle of a 70 -mile bike ride, when he said that.

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And thankfully, there's nothing out there but coyotes and lizards that heard me yelling, and no, it isn't, in between breaths as I was climbing a hill at that particular point in time.

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So this will be central to the discussion. Are we continuing to uphold the

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Bible as authoritative, and are we taking biblical teachings seriously, even if they make us uncomfortable?

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I want to begin tonight by considering the traditional interpretation of Scripture on this subject, in part because its conclusions have a much longer history within the

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Church, and also because I think that many who adhere to that position feel that those who are arguing for a new position haven't yet put forth theological arguments that are as well -grounded in Scripture as their own.

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Well, as an individual who has written on this subject, and who has, unfortunately, an entire section of pro -homosexual books in his library, however,

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I will admit, let's see, the same -sex controversy here is

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Copyright 2002. It's ten years old. And if I had had to keep up with what has been published in the past decade, it would be three times, four times the size that it is.

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I was amazed, even during the writing of the same -sex controversy, how many books came out even during that time. And I'll be honest with you,

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I haven't kept up with a lot of this stuff, because as I listen to people like Matt today, they've not come up with anything new.

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There isn't anything new here. And, well, as we'll see, it's the other side that very rarely takes seriously the refutations that have been written of material, starting with John Boswell and others that have come since then.

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John Boswell's book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, is probably the main source for most of Matt's presentation, and certainly the books that have been spawned by it all look back to Boswell as the scholarly rock upon which they stand.

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And refute Boswell, and you've refuted most of what they have to say, and we'll see that as we go along.

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In which case, the most biblically sound position should prevail. The traditional interpretation, in summary form, is this.

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There are six passages in the Bible that refer in some way to same -sex behavior, and they are all negative.

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Three of them are direct and clear. In the Old Testament, in Leviticus, male same -sex relations are prohibited and labeled an abomination.

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And in the New Testament, in Romans, Paul speaks of women, quote, exchanging natural relations for unnatural ones, and of men abandoning natural relations with women and committing shameful acts with other men.

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And so, according to the traditional interpretation, both the Old and the

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New Testament are consistent in their rejection of same -sex relationships. Now, I would want to add, as we did in our book, the fact that if you think that the issue of the

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Bible's teaching on homosexuality is solely or even primarily based upon the negative texts,

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Genesis 18 and 19, Leviticus 18 and 20, and then

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Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1, those six texts.

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There are others, some of the male temple prostitutes in the Old Testament, things like that, but those are the primary texts.

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If you think that the biblical argument relating to homosexuality is even primarily based upon those, you've missed the boat.

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Because the primary biblical argument is found in Matthew 19 in Jesus' own teaching drawn from Genesis, as to the nature of God's creative decree, the role of men and women.

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And you must understand that those who, like Matt, consider themselves to be gay

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Christians, do so, they take their position fundamentally through an overthrow of scriptural authority.

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Now, he's not going to specifically get into those issues, but I've never seen a metropolitan church of Christ that in the slightest bit demonstrates an understanding of the consistency of biblical teaching, especially in regards to the positive biblical teaching in regards to marriage.

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I've just never seen it. But it's not just those three verses, as well as three others that I'll come to later.

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It's true that six verses isn't all that many out of Scripture's 31 ,000. But not only are they all negative, from the traditional viewpoint, they gain broader meaning and coherence from the opening chapters of Genesis, in which

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God creates Adam and Eve, male and female. That was the original creation, before the

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Fall, before sin entered the world. That was the way that things were supposed to be.

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And so according to this view, if someone is gay, then their sexual orientation is a sign of the

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Fall, a sign of human fallenness and brokenness. That was not the way that things were supposed to be.

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And while having a same -sex orientation is not in and of itself a sin, according to the traditional interpretation, acting upon it is, because the

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Bible is clear both in what it negatively prohibits and in what it positively approves.

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Christians who are gay, those who are only attracted to members of the same sex, are thus called to refrain from acting on those attractions, to deny themselves, to take up their crosses, and to follow

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Christ. And though it may not seem fair to us, God's ways are higher than our own, and it's not our role to question, but to obey.

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Now, I'm not sure I would have put it quite that way, but I think it is absolutely fair, it is absolutely appropriate, throughout the course of this examination, to replace same -sex attraction with other sinful attitudes and actions that the

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Scriptures represent to us, and see if the argumentation that Matt presents is not perfectly designed to overthrow the entirety of biblical morality.

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People shut you down when you immediately make connections and they've been taught to do this by example, not because they've thought through why there's actually no connection, but the reality is that today, if you're familiar with the historical development of the arguments for homosexuality over the past 50 years, then you know that those who are promoting intergenerational love are using the exact same arguments that were being used by homosexuals 50 years ago.

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If you don't know what intergenerational love is, intergenerational love is pedophilia.

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Adults engaging in sexual behavior, which of course they will say is loving sexual behavior, with minor children.

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That's intergenerational love. And we already have those within the psychology, psychiatry community who are drawing the parallels, making the arguments that this needs to be removed from the

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DSM and needs to be seen as the way these people were born.

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These are natural proclivities. The same thing with polygamy. The same thing with bestiality.

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All of these things, we just need to grow past and recognize that these things are acceptable.

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Everybody gets to define their own moral plane, except that maybe stealing or something, because I don't want you to take my

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Mac from me, or something along those lines. It is absolutely fair to point out that especially toward the end of this presentation, as Matthew Vines is berating

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Christians for adding suffering to the life of gay

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Christians, that that kind of argumentation is already being used for almost every kind of moral overthrow of God's commandments.

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And that needs to be kept in mind, and then you need to examine, is there a foundation for differentiating the homosexual argument from these others who are using the same argument?

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And if so, what is it? Because I've heard homosexuals say, I'm offended when you do that.

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Well, I imagine you are. But what's the basis for your offense? Can you provide, well, but they're not young enough to make that kind of decision, or they're not old enough to make that kind of decision.

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That sounds like a rather arbitrary thing. And so keep that in mind as you listen to this, as it develops, and we'll see that.

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Within this framework, gay people have a problem. And that is that they want to have sex with the wrong people.

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They tend to be viewed as essentially lustful sexual beings. So while straight people...

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Now, let me just mention, again, one of the reasons we need to hear this is that Matthew Vines is presenting the monogamous, long -term, committed concept of homosexuality, which is almost never experienced by a homosexual.

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While, sadly, long -term monogamous marriages are now in the minority, we all know those glorious cases, those glorious couples we see, who've been married 50 and 60 and 70 years.

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But the vast majority of homosexual expression in our society, and historically, and this will even be substantiated by some of the arguments he himself makes later on, but the vast majority of homosexual experience is not monogamous.

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It's not based upon long -term commitments or anything of the kind. And unfortunately, once again, all one has to do is do just a little bit of digging on the

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Internet to see the real public face of homosexuality, which is not the face that Matthew Vines is putting on here, which means it is a multifaceted movement.

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And he may well say, I'm not talking about that kind of homosexuality. But if he's going to say that, then he needs,

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I think, to come out and condemn that kind of homosexual behavior.

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But the problem is, on what basis are you going to condemn it? Because once you start making those kinds of judgments, what's the foundation upon which you're standing, etc.,

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etc.? Fall in love, get married, and start families.

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Gay people just have sex. But everyone has a sexual orientation.

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And it isn't just about sex. Straight people are never really forced to think about their sexual orientation as a distinctive characteristic.

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That's because there is a natural sexual orientation and there is an unnatural one.

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And oh, he's going to go through Paul and does not even nature tell you long hair and try to get away from the fact that the

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Bible can actually talk about the fact that because God has created in a particular fashion that there is a necessary natural function of the male and the female.

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He's going to use that way to get around that, as if, well, if the Bible ever once uses the term nature in some other way, then there cannot be any transcendent use.

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There cannot be anything that flows from the fact that one of the biggest themes in all of Scripture is the reality that God's the creator of all things and therefore he determines what is natural and right for all things through his creative decree.

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But that really, really, really needs to be kept in mind. But it's still a part of them.

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And it affects an enormous amount of their lives. By the way, I forgot what I was going to comment about there. Over and over again in this presentation,

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Matthew Vines is going to talk about his desire to start a family. Again, it's easy to say, well, you could do that if you wanted to.

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But you see, due to the nature of the created order, there's only one way to do that.

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Two men cannot start a family. I mean, would there be any meaningful argumentation to someone who is complaining and saying,

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God isn't treating me correctly and I'm not able to truly fulfill my true desires because I want to be married to my

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German shepherd and I want to start a family with my German shepherd, but I can't.

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Well, why can't you? Well, because God didn't create it to work that way. That's why.

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And two men together cannot create life. Two women together cannot create life.

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That awesome and wonderful thing that results in the creation of life requires a male and a female.

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Not two men, not two women. To complain about that is to complain about the sun in the sky or the moon at night.

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That's just the way it is. Now he's going to say, well, but there's an overarching biblical teaching that it's not good for man to be alone.

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That biblical teaching has found the context of God specifically meeting the need for that man by creating what, another man?

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No, by creating a woman. And that woman, who is different than him, is his helpmate.

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If God had created another man, then God might have just done as well to create a mirror.

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And as I said, one of the key issues is, what is the nature of love? The love that exists between a man and a woman is not a mirror image love.

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It is the love of one who is different than I am. Homosexuality does not offer that kind of relationship.

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What sexual orientation is for straight people is their capacity for romantic love and self -giving.

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It's not just about sexual attraction and behavior. It's because we have a sexual orientation that we're able to fall in love with someone, to build a long -term, committed relationship with them, and to form a family.

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Family is not about sex. But for so many of us, it still depends upon having a companion, a spouse.

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It's not about sex, but it's not separated from it either. If you're going to talk about family, then you have to bring that in.

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It is essentially self -centered. It is essentially focused upon me, and my desires, and my wants.

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That's what homosexuality is. When you marry another who is different than you, not the same as you, different than you, that begins the process of quite literally ripping the selfishness right out of you.

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And the more you're willing to give of yourself to that other person, the more that's going to be your experience.

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And then, when the little ones arrive, every little one comes into this world absolutely self -centered.

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Me, myself, and I. My needs, my wants. And talk about the most effective way of removing self -centeredness from an individual.

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And then they start going through that process where the desire of the family is to remove self -centeredness from them.

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And to make us look to others, and to serve others. That's what I think the great tragedy of homosexuals adopting children is all about.

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Because the only love that that homosexual couple can demonstrate is mirror image love.

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There are no male and female, Oh, I know somebody. Well, we all can tell. Those lesbians, which one's the man?

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I know, I know. But that's not the same thing. When two women adopt a child, that child does not have a father.

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When two men adopt a child, that child does not have a mother. That's the reality of the situation.

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And that's true for gay people, as well as for straight people. That is what sexual orientation means for them, too.

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Gay people have the very same capacity for romantic love and self -giving that straight people do.

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The emotional bond that gay couples share, the quality of love, is identical to that of straight couples.

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There. That's what I was mentioning before. That's where I have to say,

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No. That is not true. You can talk all you wish,

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Matthew, about the depth of feeling that one has, but it is not, and since you call yourself a

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Christian, it is not Christian love. Because it's not defined within biblical parameters, within the parameters that the

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Creator Himself designed. You may not like those parameters. You may have given yourself, you say you didn't choose this, but you have chosen to let it define who you are.

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And so when you say that it's identical, I say to you, you are wrong. It is not.

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It cannot be. It cannot be. It's impossible. Gay people, like almost all of us, come from families, and they, too, long to build one of their own.

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But the consequence of the traditional interpretation of the Bible is that while straight people are told to avoid lust, casual relationships, and promiscuity, gay people are told to avoid romantic relationships entirely.

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That is not the result of the traditional interpretation of the Bible. That is the result of the way that God created men and women.

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And even though He only dealt with it as it's found in Genesis, He didn't mention, and I could be wrong about this,

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I'll stand corrected if I am, but I don't think that He made mention of Jesus' reaffirmation of the specific teaching of Genesis in Matthew chapter 19.

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And that says a lot to me. It is unfair to say, well, this is due to the traditional interpretation of the

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Bible. No, it is due to the way that God created men and women. Would it be fair for those who promote intergenerational love to say that it's due to the, well, of course, the

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Bible doesn't even mention that. That's an abomination beyond even the imagination of the scriptural writers.

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But would it be fair for them to blame the Bible and the traditional interpretation of the

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Bible for their inability to publicly celebrate their intergenerational love?

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If you think it's too wild and crazy to imagine a push someday by intergenerational lovists for public recognition of their relationships in a marriage context, then you haven't been paying attention to what's going on in our world.

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Straight people's sexuality is seen as a fundamentally good thing. It is. As a gift. It is.

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It can be used in sinful or irresponsible ways. Correct. But it can also be harnessed and oriented toward a loving marriage relationship.

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Yep. It's called discipline. It's called controlling the urges that are ours and limiting yourself to monogamy for the glory of God and the love of the person to whom you're committed.

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Yes, quite right. That will be blessed and celebrated by their community. Yes, it is. That should be. But gay people, though they are capable of and desire loving relationships that are just as important to them, are told that for them, even lifelong committed relationships would be sinful.

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They would be. Because it would involve a fundamental denial of the created order, a fundamental turning inward of oneself rather than outward toward that which is other, and it would be a fundamental giving into the desires that are specifically defined as being in opposition to God's truth.

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And so, again, there are so many sins that we could plug in here and put into Matthew's argumentation and then fault the

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Christian community for being so narrow -minded as to not see the pain that we're causing to these individuals because we will not celebrate their consummation of their sinful desires.

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It is an amazing thing to listen to. Because their sexual orientation is completely broken.

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It's not an issue of lust versus love. Now, by the way, he will say that sexual orientation is really something that's a trans -biblical category.

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It is something we've only come to understand in the past about 50 years. So they couldn't have understood it back in the days of the

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Bible, of course. Which fundamentally says what about the

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Bible and its origination? Because if gender and sexual orientation and all this stuff that has come into vogue, if that's true, if it really does represent something about humanity, then didn't

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God know about it even back when he inspired the Bible? Remember, we're talking to someone who claims to be a gay

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Christian, which means I would think that Scripture is normative and that Scripture is inspired.

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But what does that inspiration mean? Well, we'll see a little bit more as we continue on.

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I've only gotten through, how far have I gotten so far? Six minutes and 52 seconds. Yeah, at this rate. Or of casual versus committed relationships.

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Because same -sex relationships are intrinsically sinful, no matter the quality and no matter the context.

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Quality and context. Quality? What does that mean?

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Are there high -quality thievery versus low -quality thievery?

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Is there high -quality anger versus low -quality anger? High -quality adultery versus low -quality adultery?

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Is high -quality adultery less sinful than low -quality adultery? How about high -quality bestiality versus low -quality bestiality?

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How is that relevant to its violation of God's standards?

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Gay people's sexual orientation is so broken, so messed up, that nothing good can come from it.

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No morally good, godly relationship could ever come from it.

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I agree. I agree completely. And so they are told that they will never have a romantic bond that will be celebrated by their community.

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They will never have a romantic bond that is defined by their perversion of the sexual decrees of God, the created order.

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It sounds like these terrible, horrible people are denying to them something.

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No one's denying them. If they will but repent of their sin, recognize the sinfulness of it, confess it, and turn from it, and seek restoration and healing, which of course is the very thing that most of the folks in the homosexual movement, if you want to see a homosexual get angry, tell them it's possible to be an ex -homosexual.

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The results will be absolutely amazing to you, but if they will turn from those things, they can experience those relationships.

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But the point is, by definition, those relationships are defined by the creative decree of God.

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And that's the whole issue. They are told that they will never have a family.

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Philippians 2, verse 4 tells us to look not only to our own interests, but also to the interests of others.

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And in Matthew 5, Jesus instructs that if someone makes you go one mile, go with them two miles.

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And so I'm going to ask you, would you step into my shoes for a moment and walk with me just one mile?

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I really don't think either text actually had anything to do with exhorting us to try to understand what it is like to be a sinner who is so defined by one's sin that you will actually define the entirety of your life thereby.

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I don't think either one of those texts really can be stretched that far. Even if it makes you a bit uncomfortable,

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I am gay. I didn't choose to be gay.

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It's not something that I would have chosen, not because it's necessarily a bad thing to be, but because it's extremely inconvenient.

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Now, it's interesting. Bigelow and Channel, I guess, has found a transcript to this entire talk, and he's posting it in Channel as either that or he made it.

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I doubt that. But I guess there is a transcript online someplace. I'll have to get the URL and attach that to the blog article.

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But I didn't choose to be gay. How do you respond to that?

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I suppose it could be said that there are people who did not choose to experience particular sexual desires.

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I did not choose to be impatient. I mean,

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I look at myself, and there are some people who think I'm very patient, but no, not always.

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No, no. Ask my kids. There have been times I've not been a patient man. I'm not overly patient with people in traffic, for example.

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One of my favorite lines in the car is, it's the long one next to the brake. That's a little bit of a sarcastic type thing, but it's the long one next to the brake.

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Yeah, Bigelow just said the transcript. I guess he's got a matthewvines .tumblr

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.com address, so you can find it there. I didn't choose to be impatient.

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I didn't choose to be angry. I didn't choose to be lustful.

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I didn't choose to list any of the sins that we might experience, and certainly we recognize that there are certain sins that we, as individuals, recognize are our besetting sins.

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I mean, people who have been given great physical talent as athletes, it's very easy for them to look down upon other people, to experience arrogance, pride, until that torn

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ACL brings you back down to earth. But none of us chose those things.

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But does that make you gay? If a person has a tendency toward anger, does that mean they were born a murderer?

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And I'm not talking about Jesus saying, if you hate your brother, you've killed him already in his heart. There are a lot of us who have experienced anger on a level like that that never killed anybody.

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But are you born a murderer because of that? Are you born a fornicator?

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I've had guys who've said, I can't help it. I've just got to have sex with every woman

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I see. And what do we say to someone like that?

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You're a human being, for crying out loud. You're a man.

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Keep it zipped. Show some discipline. Demonstrate that you have a mind.

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You have something between your ears that can control the urges of your body. That's what being a human being is about.

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The Bible says, don't be angry. Therefore, control your anger. It's a part of being a human being.

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In the same way, if you have lustful desires for the same sex, you repent of them and you don't act upon them.

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You recognize that they do not come from God, just as I recognize that any of the temptations and desires and lusts of the flesh that trip me up are not an excuse for indulging in that activity, let alone defining the entirety of my life.

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So much so that I can then go around blaming others for denying to me the ability to have a family.

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Because I won't, well, I won't tell Linus what a family is. I demand everyone change the definition of family so I can have one.

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That is petulant childishness. So when someone says, well,

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God just made me this way. Well, I do not deny the existence of the desires.

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What I deny is that as human beings, we must be mastered by them.

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There is a giving in. There is a point in time when you stop the struggle, and that's when someone, quote, unquote, becomes gay.

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It's stressful, it's difficult, and it can often be isolating and lonely to be different, to feel not understood, to feel not accepted.

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I grew up in as loving and stable of a family and home as I can imagine. I love my parents, and I have strong relationships with them both.

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No one ever molested or abused me growing up, and I couldn't have asked for a more supportive and nurturing childhood than the one that I had.

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I've never been in a relationship, and I've always believed in abstinence until marriage. But I also have a deeply rooted desire to one day be married, to share my life with someone, and to build a family of my own.

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Again, do you hear the emotion? Do you understand why this kind of presentation has far more impact in a society such as ours today than anything

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I will say in response? Now, if we're pragmatists, that's why we'd give up on this.

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One of the reasons I chose to take this hour was because of my viewing of that Andy Stanley clip that Al Mohler mentioned yesterday or the day before, where Andy Stanley, in a sermon, talks about a situation in their church where there is a man, there are actually two men, who are married to women.

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One left his wife, they were in the church, and entered into a relationship with the other man.

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They left that campus of Stanley's church, went to another campus of Stanley's church, and became leaders in it.

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Stanley found out from the former wife that they were now at the other campus, but that the other man was still married.

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The divorce wasn't final yet. And the amazing thing is, the church said to them, you can't be in leadership because he's still married, not because of the homosexual relationship.

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And by the end of this story, up on the screen, they don't have pulpits and things like that, but up on the screen, you've got two guys, then a little girl, then a woman, and then a man, and then a little girl, and that's the new family.

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Because the divorced woman then married another guy, and he already was divorced and had a daughter.

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And nowhere was there the slightest discussion of the fact that this is all, every single bit of it, an utter rejection of God's revealed will, and a complete dishonoring of His teaching about marriage.

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Just, just, and never anything about homosexuality. Nothing about it at all.

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It was amazing to me. That was one of the things that actually prompted me to go ahead and listen to this when the link was sent to me, because I'm like, well, this is what's happening even in quote -unquote evangelical megachurches.

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Amazing stuff. But according to the traditional interpretation of Scripture, as a

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Christian, I am uniquely excluded from that possibility for love. Please hear how this presentation assumes its own conclusion.

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I am uniquely excluded from this kind of love. Again, intergenerational love.

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Those people promoting pedophilia make the exact same argument. By your tradition, you are excluding me from experiencing what

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God has made me to experience as love. There are just so many, it's just wrong on so many levels.

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It's a complaint against the created order. I don't want to do it your way,

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God. I don't want to follow the natural order here, and I'm going to complain because you're telling me

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I should. And there are people who actually listen to you, and I'm going to be angry with them because of their listening to you.

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For companionship and for family. But unlike someone who senses a calling from God to celibacy, or unlike a straight person who just can't find the right partner,

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I don't sense a special calling to celibacy. And I may well find someone I grow to love and would like to spend the rest of my life with.

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But if that were to happen, following the traditional interpretation, if I were to fall in love with someone, and if those feelings were reciprocated...

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Now remember, the someone here has to be gay. Not the someone in the biblical context.

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Not the someone of the biblical definition of a man leaving his father and mother, being joined to his wife, and the two becoming one flesh.

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No, not that. This is specifically already assuming the reality of appropriate loving homosexual relationships, which is the whole point.

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My only choice would be to walk away. To break my heart and retreat into isolation, alone.

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And this wouldn't be just a one -time heartbreak. It would continue throughout my entire life.

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Whenever I came to know someone whose company I really enjoyed, I would always fear that I might come to like them too much.

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That I might come to love them. And within the traditional interpretation of Scripture, falling in love is one of the worst things that could happen.

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Or what Matthew Vines... I wish someone had explained, maybe interacted with him.

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He needs to understand what love really is, and that he's not showing love for another man to engage in that type of relationship.

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You've already allowed the twistedness of the desires to be victorious.

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You haven't repented of them. You've embraced them, decided that they are self -definitional.

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But you need to recognize you are not loving that other person when you are encouraging them in their rebellion.

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And leading them into a relationship that can never produce life. It's not life -affirming in the lives of the people who are engaged in it.

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It is self -destructive. But it also cannot produce life. It cannot create a family.

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That's what needs to be understood. To a gay person. Because you will necessarily be heartbroken.

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You will have to run away. And that will happen every single time.

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How about being heartbroken over the fact that you have allowed your lusts and desires to determine your humanity?

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Rather than allowing your humanity, by the grace of God, to defeat your lusts and desires.

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How about being heartbroken over that? You come to care about someone else too much.

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So while you watch your friends fall in love, get married, and start families, you will always be left out.

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You will never share in those joys yourself, of a spouse, and of children of your own.

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You must understand, you will not engage, you will not experience that.

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As long as you buy the line, and you've evidently bought it completely, that you cannot experience the

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God -ordained desire for another person who is a woman, who is complementary to you, and with whom you can create life.

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That's your decision. But it's not grounds for complaint against God, or against anyone who then points out the fundamental truths regarding that.

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You will always be alone. Well, that's certainly sad, some might say, and I'm sorry for that.

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But you cannot elevate your experience over the authority of Scripture in order to be happy.

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Christianity isn't about you being happy. It's not about your personal fulfillment.

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Sacrifice and suffering were integral to the life of Christ. How about obedience, repentance, and confession?

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You know what confession is? To say the same thing. There is, in a part of confession, an admission that God was right and I was wrong.

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And the fundamental element of homosexuality and the gay Christian movement is a refusal to confess that God is right, and they are wrong, when it comes to this issue of human sexuality and God's right to determine what is right and wrong in it.

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And as Christians, we're called to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow

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Him. This is true. But it assumes that there's no doubt about the correctness of the traditional interpretation of Scripture on this subject, which

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I'm about to explore. And already two major problems have presented themselves with that interpretation.

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Now here's where it starts getting, at least biblically, interested. The first problem is this.

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In Matthew 7, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns against false teachers, and He offers a principle that can be used to test good teaching from bad teaching.

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By their fruit you will recognize them, He says. Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

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A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

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Good teachings, according to Jesus, have good consequences. That doesn't mean that following Christian teaching will or should be easy.

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And in fact, many of Jesus' commands are not easy at all. Turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, laying down your life for your friends.

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But those are all profound acts of love, that both reflect God's love for us, and that powerfully affirm the dignity and worth of human life and of human beings.

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Good teachings, even when they are very difficult, are not destructive to human dignity.

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Which is interesting to note that Paul identifies as shameful acts, those engaged, those acts that homosexuals engage in, in Romans chapter 1.

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And he's going to have a way around that. It's going to be the, well, these are heterosexuals who actually aren't homosexuals, but they're engaging in homosexual activity, and that's why it's an abomination, and so on and so forth.

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He's got a way around that, we'll deal with it. There wasn't anything in his presentation that had not been thoroughly refuted in the same -sex controversy a decade ago, when he was written when he was what, 11?

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Yeah, when he was 11. I'm not going to hold my breath to see if the book ends up in the bibliography.

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But we'll just listen to a little bit more before we take our top -of -the -hour break. They don't lead to emotional and spiritual devastation, and to the loss of self -esteem and self -worth.

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So, if biblical teaching results in someone feeling devastated, then that means it's not a biblical teaching.

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I'm pretty certain that thieves convicted on the basis of God's law of thievery lose a lot of self -esteem because of that.

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I don't like being called a thief. I don't like being called an adulterer. I don't like being called an idolater.

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Well, it must mean all those teachings, we shouldn't embrace those teachings, because they have bad fruit.

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Is that really what Jesus was talking about when he talked about a good tree bringing forth good fruit, a bad tree, bad fruit?

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Or was he talking about the, well, the hypocrisy of the Jews and the

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Pharisees? Well, the Pharisees were Jews, obviously. Maybe that's what he was talking about.

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Yeah, I think that's probably the case. But those have been the consequences for gay people of the traditional teaching on homosexuality.

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It has not borne good fruit in their lives. Actually, in the lives of those who have heard it, accepted it, repented, turned, and been changed by the grace of God, it has.

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It has. This argument fundamentally is, unrepentant people, who are hurt by their unrepentance, should be able to say that the biblical teaching that calls them to repentance is bad and produces bad fruit, and therefore we should reject it.

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Well, there you go. We'll look at the second argument when we pick up the next time in our response.

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We've only gotten 13 minutes in, but that was a whole hour that already went past.

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So we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. And welcome to The Dividing Line.

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We continue in the first hour of the program today. The response we began last week, which evidently has gained a great deal of listenership.

01:00:06

It is somewhat ironic that we do this on the same day that at least one state in the

01:00:11

Union is voting on, well, just maintaining a logical, rational, historical, moral, ethical definition of marriage rather than allowing for the complete redefinition of marriage in such a way as to make marriage nothing more than a relationship between two living creatures.

01:00:35

That's not what marriage has ever been. That's not what marriage will ever be. But that is what is going on in our society.

01:00:43

We began a response to a man who describes himself as a gay Christian on The Dividing Line of last week.

01:00:52

We will spend the first hour of the program continuing to respond to his presentation made, as I recall, in Wichita, Kansas.

01:01:00

So I'm just going to dive right back into where we were in the presentation.

01:01:05

For those of you who have downloaded the presentation from YouTube, maybe have the MP3 or something like that, we are 13 minutes and 22 seconds into the opening, well, just into the statement itself and the presentation.

01:01:22

We'll pick up right there. And it's caused them incalculable pain and suffering.

01:01:28

If we're taking Jesus seriously, that bad fruit cannot come from a good tree, then that should cause us to question whether the traditional teaching is correct.

01:01:41

Now, we already addressed this, but if you might just be joining us for the first time, Mr. Vines is presenting biblical arguments against what he calls the traditional interpretation of the

01:01:54

Bible on the matter of homosexuality and gay marriage, which I insist is an oxymoron and is not a meaningful phrase because it fundamentally alters the very meaning of the term marriage.

01:02:07

It's like a married bachelor. These are not terms that can be put together in a logical or rational fashion.

01:02:15

But be that as it may, he is trying to argue that there are overarching principles in Scripture that the traditional interpretation overthrows.

01:02:25

And that in this instance, you have bad fruit.

01:02:31

The bad fruit is the suffering of homosexuals. And of course, as I pointed out last time, this makes as much sense as a thief who is punished for his thievery blaming the law for his punishment.

01:02:49

What's wrong is he broke the law, and the law brings punishment upon those who break it.

01:02:57

And so to blame the law for the results of that is, again, just assuming what you have yet to prove.

01:03:09

And Mr. Vines wants to lay out certain definitions without defending them and then insist that we all must follow them.

01:03:16

It is easy to see the irrationality of this simply by substituting other deviations of behavior from God's law and see what happens.

01:03:30

And so God's law prohibits bestiality. It prohibits sexual relations with animals.

01:03:36

Well, there are people who claim, and there are people who claim, it's documented fact that God made them that way, that that's what they want to do.

01:03:47

And so they suffer because society says that's the wrong thing to do.

01:03:53

They suffer because they cannot openly celebrate what they think God has made them to be.

01:04:00

Does that mean that the law against bestiality comes from a bad tree, that it's not good fruit?

01:04:07

Well, of course not. And any immoral act, a person who commits it can blame the tree for their suffering.

01:04:19

But that's what people who break the law always do, isn't it? You always blame the law.

01:04:25

You don't blame yourself. That's just how it works. The second problem that has already presented itself with the traditional interpretation comes from the opening chapters of Genesis.

01:04:38

From the account of the creation of Adam and Eve. This story is often cited to argue against the blessing of same -sex unions.

01:04:47

In the beginning, God created a man and a woman. And two men or two women would be a deviation from that design.

01:04:55

But this biblical story deserves closer attention. In the first two chapters of Genesis, God creates the heavens and the earth, plants, animals, man, and everything in the earth.

01:05:08

And he declares everything in creation to be either good or very good, except for one thing.

01:05:16

In Genesis 2, verse 18, God says, It is not good for the man to be alone.

01:05:25

I will make a helper suitable for him. Now let me stop right here, because I think this is going to be an excellent example of the kind of handling of the scripture that is absolutely necessary for those who would turn the moral system of the scripture upon its head.

01:05:46

And that's exactly what someone who calls himself a gay Christian, that's exactly what they're doing. That's like calling yourself an adulterous

01:05:53

Christian. Or a murderous Christian. Or an angry Christian. Or a thieving

01:05:59

Christian. Or a gluttonous Christian. Or any other violation of God's law attached to Christian, insisting, well,

01:06:06

God made me like this. This is the fact that you must accept, is that God just made me in this fashion.

01:06:12

I have no control over it. I, as a human being, cannot control my desires. It is mechanically determined for me that this is what

01:06:20

I must do. What you're going to hear is how to turn a text on its head.

01:06:28

Because when we look at Genesis chapter 2, when we look at the creation story, what has happened and what takes place here is a recognition that while the animals had mates, and that means a male and a female, the man did not.

01:06:51

And so when it says, then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him.

01:06:59

That's an etzer, a helper. And the term that is translated as fit for him, it speaks of correspondence to.

01:07:18

And in the context, it's clearly a correspondence that is parallel to that which has been found in the created order amongst the animals.

01:07:26

The animals came in pairs, male and female, but there was no female for Adam.

01:07:33

And so what is missing and what needs to be a part of the positive presentation that Christians make in our society as we seek to be salt and light and to oppose the degradation of marriage, the degradation of society, the redefinition of these things, the overthrow of God's law, is we need to positively state that there is something that is absolutely definitional to the term marriage that refers to the male -female relationship and that the woman is a helpmate to the male, not a mirror image to the male.

01:08:18

None of the animals that have been brought before Adam had been a male -male or female -female pair.

01:08:25

And the correspondence that is referred to here is a correspondence that is not a mirror image correspondence, but a fulfillment completion correspondence, which no two men and no two women can ever fulfill.

01:08:46

There is no way you can even seriously suggest that the author of Genesis had that in mind.

01:08:53

It is not possible. You are abusing the text. You are twisting the text. It is much more honest to just reject the authority of the text than it is to twist the meaning of the text.

01:09:08

But what's interesting is Mr. Vines likewise will not make any mention.

01:09:16

I could be wrong about this. I'll be corrected here in a second when I play this, but as I was riding along listening to this last week,

01:09:22

I caught this. There is a rather full interpretation of this concept provided to us in the

01:09:32

New Testament, and it is on the lips of none other than Jesus Christ himself.

01:09:39

Because in Matthew 19, beginning at verse 3, some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him and asking,

01:09:46

Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? And notice what

01:09:52

Jesus' answer is. Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

01:10:00

Stop right there. Immediately you have in Jesus' own interpretation of the creation story a creation mandate, a creation decree.

01:10:11

The concept of maleness and femaleness is a part of God's creative action.

01:10:19

And said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, not his father and his father or his mother and his mother, and be joined to his wife.

01:10:30

There's only one meaning for that. It's not male who acts like a female.

01:10:36

It's not female who acts like a male. Leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

01:10:48

Now not to put too fine a point on it, but a male and a male and a female and a female cannot become one flesh.

01:10:57

That is not physically possible. The design does not point to that.

01:11:05

So they are no longer two but one flesh, but therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

01:11:11

What needs to be said clearly and forcefully is that the Christian teaching on marriage found in the

01:11:18

Christian scriptures, in the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, is one man and one woman together becoming one flesh.

01:11:28

And that is the only relationship that God has ordained, and it's the only relationship that God will bless.

01:11:38

You may complain about that. You may wish to change God's views. Don't call that Christianity.

01:11:46

Call it whatever you want to call it, just don't call it reflective of Jesus' teaching because it isn't.

01:11:56

And so Jesus interprets those words as a blessing solely upon what we would call, sadly have to call today because of the perversions of these things, heterosexual marriage of one man and one woman.

01:12:17

That's how he interpreted it. That's how he applied it. Now listen to what happens when your intention is not actually to deal with what the text says.

01:12:32

You have an external authority. In this case, for Matthew Vines, it is his own personal experience, his own personal desires, his lusts, his desires becomes the matrix through which the text of Scripture must be interpreted.

01:12:50

And the result is the complete and utter overthrow of the actual meaning of the text.

01:12:57

And yes, the suitable helper or partner that God makes for Adam is Eve, a woman.

01:13:04

And a woman is a suitable partner for the vast majority of men, for straight men.

01:13:11

But for gay men, that isn't the case. Now see, there you have, as we pointed out, the utter capitulation to the lust that then defines the person and it becomes the fundamental epistemological assertion.

01:13:29

I am a gay man. I have been made this way. I cannot control it. I did not choose it.

01:13:34

God made me this way and therefore I must place that priority upon anything else.

01:13:45

And if you say to me that I am twisting the Scripture, well, so be it.

01:13:51

It does not matter. There are gay men, there are lesbian women, and even though none of that is found in the text, and even though it would overthrow

01:14:00

Jesus' use of the text in Matthew 19, that doesn't matter.

01:14:07

For them, a woman is not a suitable partner. And in all the ways that a woman is a suitable partner for straight men, for gay men, it's another gay man who is a suitable partner.

01:14:17

That's not true. That is not correspondence. That's a mirror image. It cannot be the correspondence of Scripture.

01:14:26

Fact. That's it. That is the end of attempting to come up with a gay

01:14:32

Christian defense because if that's not the case, if you cannot demonstrate, if Mr.

01:14:38

Vines cannot demonstrate that the correspondence here is, in fact, that which could allow for a mirror image, that's not the case.

01:14:49

That's not what was in Genesis 2. That's not what's in Matthew 19. That's not what any of the authors believed.

01:14:56

It is a perversion and twisting of the intention of the text to interpret it in this way.

01:15:04

And the same is true for lesbian women. For them, it is another lesbian woman who is a suitable partner.

01:15:11

But the necessary consequence of the traditional teaching on homosexuality, the necessary consequence of the teaching of the

01:15:20

Scriptures as they were written, the intention of the authors, the language, the context, not just the traditional interpretation, but the actual meaning of the text of Scripture, even as interpreted by Jesus Christ himself, would be the accurate way of saying it, is that even though gay people have suitable partners, they must reject them.

01:15:43

And they must live alone for their whole lives, without a spouse or family of their own.

01:15:50

Now, you can see just the massive loading of emotion based upon really, really bad logical argumentation.

01:15:59

So, you reject God's purpose for yourself, you adopt the opposite of God's purpose for yourself, and then you blame the traditional interpretation for your not getting to have a family, which, of course, a family is a man and a woman having children, which you cannot have with another man, which a woman cannot have with another woman.

01:16:21

And yet, somehow, that's due to the traditional interpretation? No, it's due to your rejection of the decree of God and the created order itself.

01:16:34

We are now declaring good, the very first thing in Scripture, that God declared not good.

01:16:40

Now, catch that. God said it was not good that man be alone. So you have a man who becomes embroiled in his lust for other men, and therefore cannot have a family, because two men together can't have a family, but now that means that we are somehow saying something that was bad, that he's alone, is a good thing.

01:17:02

If you can even follow this, you're starting to understand, as Paul will say in Romans 1, and he's going to try to get around Romans 1, we're going to deal with it, we're going to get there, none of this is new, this has been around for a long time, but we all need to understand how these folks are reasoning, but there is a fundamental twistedness in homosexuality that impacts all of a person's thoughts, and here you're seeing it.

01:17:35

This is obviously an intelligent young man, this is a young man who is well -spoken, and yet he can take a text and turn it on its head and actually blame the original meaning of the text for his own inability to satisfy his lusts and desires, when it's nature itself that precludes him from having a family or having children.

01:18:04

It doesn't work. We weren't designed that way. Two men having sex does not result in children.

01:18:14

That's the way it is, that's creation. If you're an atheist, that's just the way it is.

01:18:19

You can look at it from the atheist viewpoint, that does not produce life.

01:18:26

In fact, it produces death. And so to blame the reality of the created order on some traditional interpretation, that's what you have here.

01:18:45

And given that the majority of people in our society do not think logically, they do not think based upon factuality, they do not think on a historical basis, when it comes to ethics and morality anymore, it's all just whatever feels good, you can see why the emotional aspect here is so very, very important.

01:19:08

For the man to be forced to be alone, and the fruit that this teaching has borne has been deeply wounding and destructive.

01:19:18

This is a major problem. By holding to the traditional interpretation, we are now contradicting the

01:19:25

Bible's own teachings. Now, there you have it. By holding to what the

01:19:31

Bible teaches, you're contradicting the Bible. That's really what's being said. We have not seen any overthrow of what these texts actually say in their original context.

01:19:41

Instead, you have an external idea being brought in, being made the standard, and say, well, if the application of God's teaching results in my unhappiness and my being alone, and again, we can point to so many intergenerational love advocates who will say the exact same thing, those promoting bestiality will say the exact same thing.

01:20:04

How is it different? It's not different. They will make the exact same form of argumentation.

01:20:12

The Bible teaches that it is not good for the man to be forced to be alone. It doesn't say forced to be alone.

01:20:18

It says it's not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him, and that is a woman.

01:20:25

Period. No one is keeping Matthew Vines from marrying. It is his lusts that keep him from obeying

01:20:35

God's commands. And it all goes back to his acceptance of his assertion that this is how

01:20:41

God has made me, I have these lusts, I have these desires, I cannot help it,

01:20:47

I will not fight it, and therefore, I am going to overthrow the entirety of the testimony, the positive testimony of Scripture regarding men and women as interpreted by Jesus himself.

01:21:03

Matthew 19, 6, So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Who? Male and female.

01:21:09

That's Jesus' teaching. If you don't like Jesus' teaching, then

01:21:15

I suggest to you, you stop trying to twist it to fit your desires. A person who follows

01:21:23

Christ, follows his Lordship. The very concept of following Christ involves confession and repentance.

01:21:30

What's confession? Homologueo. To say the same thing. You are confessing that what Jesus says about truth and error, sin and righteousness is true, even in your own life.

01:21:41

You do not change Jesus' demands to meet your own. That's not following Christ.

01:21:47

That's denying Christ. And yet now we are teaching that it is. Scripture says that good teachings will bear good fruit.

01:21:56

But now the reverse is occurring, and we say it's not a problem. Something here is off.

01:22:04

Something is out of place. Yep, something is off and something is out of place, but that which is off and out of place is found in the interpreter, not in the text.

01:22:14

And that's frighteningly clear, at least to those who recognize the authority of Scripture.

01:22:20

It is not frighteningly clear to a large portion of those in our society whose moral compass and moral grounding has been thoroughly eroded by secularism and other forces.

01:22:38

And it's because of these problems and these contradictions that more and more Christians have been going back to Scripture and reexamining the six verses that have formed the basis for an absolute condemnation of same -sex relationships.

01:22:52

Can we go back? Can we take a closer look at these verses and see what we can learn from further study of them?

01:23:02

What are these six verses? There are three in the Old Testament and three in the

01:23:07

New Testament. Now, let me just remind you once again, even though I made this statement in the first hour of my review, that while these are the key texts that will be examined on a negative side, it is the positive teaching we have just already seen, the positive teaching of Matthew 19, the positive teaching of the relationship of male and female that is the foundation of these texts.

01:23:32

And it is inappropriate for people to communicate to others the idea that, well, this isn't a major issue for the

01:23:39

Scriptures, because by separating out the positive commands regarding the nature of human sexuality, gender, maleness, femaleness, etc.,

01:23:50

etc., by separating these out, it makes it look like, well, there's just these six texts. I mean, there's all these verses in the

01:23:56

Bible. It's got to be a minor issue. That is not how you faithfully or accurately handle the

01:24:05

Word of God. So I'll go in order of their appearance in Scripture. In the Old Testament, we have the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, as well as two prohibitions in Leviticus 18 and 20.

01:24:17

And in the New Testament, we have a passage by Paul in Romans chapter 1, as well as two Greek terms in 1

01:24:22

Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1. To begin, let's look at Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

01:24:31

In Genesis 18, God and two angels come in the form of men to visit

01:24:37

Abraham and Sarah at their tent alongside the Dead Sea. Abraham and Sarah do not yet realize who they are, but they show them lavish hospitality nonetheless.

01:24:47

Halfway through the chapter, God, now beginning to be recognized by Abraham, tells him,

01:24:53

The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me.

01:25:06

Abraham's nephew, Lot, and Lot's family live in Sodom. And so Abraham bargains with God and gets him to agree not to destroy the city if he finds even ten righteous people there.

01:25:17

At the start of the next chapter, in Genesis 19, the two angels arrive in Sodom, still in the form of men.

01:25:25

Lot invites them to spend the night in his home, and he prepares a meal for them. But beginning in verse 4, we read the following.

01:25:32

Before they had gone to bed... Now, let me just stop for just a moment. I, not very long ago, preached a sermon on Genesis chapter 19 at the

01:25:45

Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. You can find that sermon at sermonaudio .com. If you want to have a fuller discussion, then

01:25:52

I'll be able to provide here. And, of course, the specific chapter on Genesis 18 and 19,

01:26:00

I wrote in The Same -Sex Controversy as well. The book that we have published on that subject has been out for a decade now.

01:26:08

But let me just mention that, though I'm sure he had to pick and choose how much detail he was going to provide, that before we get to verses 3 and 4, the reality is that it says,

01:26:26

The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth and said,

01:26:35

My lords, please turn aside your servants' house and spend the night and wash your feet, that you may rise up early and go on your way.

01:26:43

They said, No, we will spend the night in the town square. But he pressed them strongly, so they turned aside to him and entered his house, and he made them a feast and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.

01:26:53

So notice that even before we get to the text where he begins in verse 4, there is clear evidence of the fact that Lot is well aware of the nature of the city.

01:27:06

And he is well aware of the fact that it would be unsafe for men to stay in the city square.

01:27:16

And he is likewise seeking to bring them to his home unnoticed.

01:27:23

And he wants them to leave early. Evidently, those in Sodom did not get up early in the morning.

01:27:33

And so there is a background there. And once again, what should be our concern?

01:27:38

Our concern, first and foremost, should be what did the author of this text want to communicate?

01:27:46

What did it mean in the original language, in the original context? And then we make application from that point to the modern situation.

01:27:58

So we pick up with it from that particular point. All the men from every part of the city of Sodom, both young and old, surrounded the house.

01:28:08

They called to Lot, where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.

01:28:14

Now, that's actually a rather bold translation. The ESV says that we may know them.

01:28:22

The term Yedah certainly does refer to sexual relations. And that is clearly what they desire to do.

01:28:29

They desire to involve these men in sexual relations. Now, what

01:28:36

Mr. Vines is going to assume is that since there are all these men, that this is going to be an instance of gang rape.

01:28:47

And that that's all that is wrong here. It's not that these are men seeking to have sex with men, but that there are too many of them.

01:28:58

Evidently, if there had just been two, it would have been okay. If there were only two people that came to Lot's house and said, we'd like to have sex with your guests, would they like to do that?

01:29:11

Then that would have been fine, evidently. But it is the large number that suggests to him the concept of gang rape.

01:29:22

And once again, I just point out for those of you who have read The Same -Sex Controversy, these are issues that we have addressed over and over and over again.

01:29:33

In fact, I just happened to open the book, page 50. Objection stated, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is irrelevant to homosexuality because it does not address loving monogamous relationships.

01:29:45

It is only decrying gang rape and violence, nothing else. Response, surely there is everything wrong with violence, whether sexual or not.

01:29:52

There is everything wrong with gang rape as well. But to note that these things are wrong does not explain many of the issues in the narrative of Genesis 19, as well as the rest of the

01:29:59

Bible's references to Sodom and Gomorrah. There was no violence on the part of the crowd until Lot identified their desires as wicked.

01:30:05

Was Lot wrong to identify homosexual desires for these men as wicked? And was Peter wrong to interpret the story from Genesis as involving daily ungodliness on the part of the

01:30:12

Sodomites? Are we to assume the Sodomites engaged in daily gang rapes? Or is it apparent that it was their lifestyle that tormented his soul?

01:30:20

The insertion of the concept of monogamous loving homosexual relationships into the biblical discussion begs a number of issues.

01:30:27

First, very few homosexual relationships are in fact monogamous. Second, to call a relationship loving in a biblical sense means it is in accordance with God's will and is fulfilling

01:30:35

His purpose, resulting in His glory. And finally, it assumes that a homosexual relationship thusly described is part of the biblical concept to begin with, and such is an unfounded assertion refuted by the fair and careful examination of Scripture.

01:30:46

Indeed, it is directly contrary to God's law and to that truth we now turn. And then we went into the book of Leviticus.

01:30:52

So this is, again, nothing new here. These things have been responded to over and over and over again, but it is good to hear them and to respond again because, well, it seems our culture has a very short memory.

01:31:12

Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him and said, No, my friends, don't do this wicked thing.

01:31:17

Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don't do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.

01:31:28

But the men keep threatening, so the angels strike them with blindness. Now, it is interesting to me that Mr.

01:31:36

Vines does not continue reading the text because the text actually says,

01:31:42

But they said, Stand back. And they said, This fellow came to sojourn, and he has become the judge.

01:31:50

Now we will deal worse with you than with them. Then they pressed hard against the man,

01:31:56

Lot, and drew near to break the door down. But the men reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door.

01:32:03

Evidently, the section about judgment, the section about moral judgment, and the fact that these men are rejecting the moral judgment that Lot has pronounced upon their desire to engage in sexual relations with these men, that doesn't really quite fit the paradigm, and so it didn't get included in the reading.

01:32:30

Lot and his family then flee from the city, and God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone.

01:32:36

The destruction of Sodom and... Now, we've also skipped some more very, very important element of the text here, and that is, the men reached out their hands and brought

01:32:48

Lot into the house with them and shut the door. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great, so that they wore themselves out, groping for the door.

01:33:01

Now, here's one of the problems with Mr. Vine's attempted interpretation of this text.

01:33:07

He's going to limit this to gang rape. Have you thought, in light of the verse he skipped, how absurd that is?

01:33:18

How could blind guys engage in gang rape? But they didn't stop trying to get to the door, even when they were blinded.

01:33:33

They were so filled with lust and desire, that even when blinded, they didn't repent.

01:33:46

They didn't stop. They didn't give consideration to Lot's words. How long did it take them before they figured out everybody else had been blinded?

01:33:54

I mean, if all of a sudden the lights went out to you, the first thought across your mind is going to be, this has happened to me,

01:34:01

I can't see. But the first thought across your mind is not going to be, all of us can't see.

01:34:10

But it's not going to be too long until you figure that out. You're going to hear other people crying, I can't see! I can't see!

01:34:16

And then it's going to strike you, we've all lost our sight. Now, what is the immediate reaction of a rationally thinking person at this point?

01:34:31

You are going to be reeling with fear. You're going to be reeling with the recognition that something extremely unusual has just happened.

01:34:42

And you're going to stop what you're doing. They don't stop.

01:34:49

They don't stop. They weary themselves. They wore themselves out, groping for the door.

01:35:01

Now, if you can't see anybody else, how can you engage in gang rape? But you can still engage in sexual activity.

01:35:12

Why? I can't even begin to imagine, but very clearly, this was a group of people who were far beyond rationality at this point.

01:35:26

This morning, I was in California. And I flew home.

01:35:33

I hadn't even been home yet. I just came here straight from the airport to do the program. And for some reason,

01:35:40

I forget exactly how it was, I was following my RSS feeds at the airport gate.

01:35:49

I flew through security this morning, that was really nice. And I happened to run across the story of what had taken place at a

01:35:59

Baptist church in San Francisco a number of years ago. When a speaker on this subject, they had not advertised it publicly, they knew they couldn't, but it had still gotten out.

01:36:11

And the 75 to 100 homosexuals that attacked this church, what they did to people, what they did to the property, what they did to the people who tried to get into the church for the services, breaking down doors, and nobody was ever arrested.

01:36:28

Nobody was ever arrested. Because as the cops said, well, you've got to understand, this is San Francisco. The behavior of these people, their abuse of older people, their abuse of children, the abject hatred that these people were enveloped in,

01:36:46

I could not help but think of this biblical story, narrating events from thousands of years ago.

01:36:57

There is something about homosexuality and the twistedness, the fact that you are twisting the creator -creation relationship and fundamentally denying

01:37:09

God's right to define you at your most basic level, that produces a kind of irrationality on the part of its adherents, especially when the sinfulness of your behavior is brought to your attention.

01:37:30

That's what these people in San Francisco could not stand, was that someone might, in a context they don't have to go and listen, they don't have to hear it, but the very fact that they know what's going to be said drove them to extremes of behavior that are absolutely amazing.

01:37:53

Just amazing. And here we see it as well. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the entrance of the house, both small and great, so that they wore themselves out, groping for the door.

01:38:06

I think that's one of the most amazing statements of the inveterate sinfulness of man.

01:38:17

Even in the presence of God's direct judgment that I've ever read.

01:38:24

And Matthew Vines doesn't even tell his audience about it. I mean, Gamora was not originally thought to have anything to do with sexuality at all, even if there is a sexual component to the passage we just read.

01:38:35

Now, what we're going to hear here is clear evidence of one of two things.

01:38:41

Either Matthew Vines is a very dishonest man, or Matthew Vines is a young man who has been thoroughly deceived by only reading

01:38:50

John Boswell and books like that. Because, you see, when reading pro -homosexual works in preparation for the

01:39:05

Writing of the Same -Sex Controversy, I came across a Roman Catholic priest who was promoting homosexuality.

01:39:16

And he was the first one I'd ever encountered who used, well, the argument you're about to hear from Matthew Vines.

01:39:25

And so as soon as I heard him saying this, I just shook my head. Here it comes.

01:39:31

I want you to hear this, because you need to be ready to respond to this kind of thing.

01:39:37

Listen. But starting in the Middle Ages, it began to be widely believed that the sin of Sodom, the reason that Sodom was destroyed, was homosexuality in particular.

01:39:47

Now, by the way, we provide, in the Same -Sex Controversy, an entire chapter.

01:39:55

Actually, it's Appendix B, I apologize. It's Appendix B. Jeff Neal provided this.

01:40:00

John Chrysostom, on Romans, Chapter 1. John Chrysostom is before the medieval period. He is one of the patristic writers.

01:40:07

And we give his interpretation of Romans 1. And, of course, he makes direct reference to homosexuality as being a part of, and even in interpreting

01:40:18

Genesis and Sodom and Gomorrah, as homosexuality as being part of this. So here you've got Matthew Vines saying, uh -uh, this is a medieval thing.

01:40:27

We provide in our book, evidently he doesn't read Christian books on the subject, just non -Christian books on the subject, or liberal

01:40:33

Christian books, which aren't really Christian. It's just untrue. John Chrysostom, entire chapter, demonstrating that statement, that this was not interpreted in the early church as having anything to do with sex, is a falsehood.

01:40:45

It's wrong. It's been documented to be wrong, but it'll be repeated over and over again.

01:40:52

And, by the way, it just so happens that in my writing right now, I'm writing a section in the upcoming book, looking at parallels, parallel references in the

01:41:06

Qur 'an, and how these parallel references phrase things differently, and how this causes questions in regards to the

01:41:13

Orthodox Islamic understanding and the interpretation of the Qur 'an and how the Qur 'an was given. But one thing's clear.

01:41:20

All you have to do is look at Surah 7, and Surah 26, and Surah 29, and you will discover,

01:41:28

Surah 11, you'll discover that the Qur 'an likewise interprets the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as having to do with homosexuality.

01:41:37

And the Qur 'an is 632, as far as, at least from the Islamic perspective, its earliest possible genesis, at the death of Muhammad.

01:41:47

And so, even in Saudi Arabia, it was interpreted that way. So, the statement just simply isn't true, and yet, again,

01:41:57

I wonder how many people in this, I believe it was United Methodist Church, would ever even check the accuracy of these statements.

01:42:06

This later interpretation held sway for centuries, giving rise to the English term sodomy, which technically refers to any form of non -procreative sexual behavior, but at various points in history has referred primarily to male same -sex relations.

01:42:20

But this is no longer the prevailing interpretation of this passage, and simply because later societies associated it with homosexuality.

01:42:26

Prevailing amongst whom, is the question. Homosexuality doesn't mean that that's what the

01:42:32

Bible itself teaches. In the passage, the men of Sodom threatened to gang -rape

01:42:37

Lot's angel visitors. That's reading into it, and reading against the very text that he skipped.

01:42:43

Who've come in the form of men, and so this behavior would at least ostensibly be same -sex. But that is the only connection that can be drawn between this passage, and homosexuality in general.

01:42:55

The only connection? That's it? Really? He's actually going to provide a refutation of himself, here in just a moment.

01:43:04

And there is a world of difference between violent and coercive practices like gang -rape, and consensual, monogamous, and loving relationships.

01:43:12

No one in the church, or anywhere else, is arguing for the acceptance of gang -rape. That is vastly different from what we're talking about.

01:43:21

But the men of Sodom wanted to rape other men, so that must mean that they were gay, some will argue.

01:43:27

And it was their same -sex desires, and not just their threatened rape, that God was punishing. But gang -rape of men, by men, was used as a common tactic of humiliation and aggression, in warfare and other hostile contexts in ancient times.

01:43:41

It had nothing to do with sexual orientation, or attraction. The point was to shame, and to conquer.

01:43:48

That is the appropriate background for reading this passage in Genesis 19. Now, I don't know where he gets that.

01:43:54

Two men? This has something to do with shaming and conquering? Where'd that come from? Completely foreign to the text whatsoever.

01:44:02

And the ironic thing is, you'll find so many different ways of getting around this story, and they're all contradictory to one another.

01:44:14

I mean, there are homosexuals that say there's no sexuality involved at all. They'll say this is just simply about not extending hospitality.

01:44:25

I mean, there's so many, and they're all contradictory to one another. But we haven't gotten to the key thing yet.

01:44:33

Which notably is contrasted with two accounts of generous welcome and hospitality. That of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18, and Lot's own display of hospitality in Genesis 19.

01:44:44

The actions of the men of Sodom are intended to underscore their cruel treatment of outsiders, not to somehow tell us that they were gay.

01:44:53

And indeed, Sodom and Gomorrah are referred to 20 times throughout the subsequent books of the Bible, sometimes with detailed commentary on what their sins were.

01:45:01

But homosexuality is never mentioned or connected to them. Watch this. In Ezekiel 16, verse 49, the prophet quotes

01:45:08

God as saying, Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.

01:45:16

They did not help the poor and needy. So God himself in Ezekiel declares the sin of Sodom to be arrogance.

01:45:25

Okay. There you go. Sounds good, doesn't it?

01:45:30

That is what Ezekiel 16, 49 says. It says, Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.

01:45:41

That's exactly what it reads. And the very next verse says,

01:45:49

They were haughty and did an abomination, toevah, before me, so I removed them when

01:45:57

I saw it. Toevah! The very same term used in the holiness code of homosexuality and homosexual relationships.

01:46:11

Daniel Halminiak was the Roman Catholic priest that I was referring to, and that's exactly what he did. All he did was quote

01:46:17

Ezekiel 16, 49. Never quoted Ezekiel 16, 50.

01:46:23

What must you assume about your audience when the refutation of your point is in the very next sentence of a text and you don't bother to quote it?

01:46:37

Does Matthew Vines know that Ezekiel 16, 50 is there? I don't know. I don't know.

01:46:45

Did Daniel Halminiak know that? I think he probably did. Is Matthew Vines just following Halminiak and others that have made the same error, just repeating secondhand these texts?

01:46:54

See, 16, 49 says this, and they've never been forced to look at 16, 50? I don't know.

01:47:01

I don't know. Sin is almost never alone. No one has ever said that the only sin of Sodom, other than being gay, they were just the most righteous people on the planet.

01:47:15

No one's ever made that argument, obviously. But it's right there.

01:47:23

Talk about twisting Scripture. When you stop, and remember, verse divisions, they come much later in time.

01:47:32

When you stop right before that kind of language, they were haughty and did an abomination before me.

01:47:44

And I'm looking at the Hebrew right there. Toeva, you know, there's the text right there.

01:47:53

Abomination, very same word used in the Holiness Code, which he's about to define as, well, he's about to define it away.

01:48:04

So I removed them when I saw it. When I saw what? Their Toeva.

01:48:12

That's what it says when you actually read the entire thing.

01:48:18

Does he know that? I don't know. But I hope now he'll, at least, maybe not tell people what he just told people, because it's untrue.

01:48:29

...and apathy toward the poor. In Matthew 10 and Luke 10, Jesus associates the sin of Sodom with inhospitable treatment of his disciples.

01:48:39

Of all the 20 references to Sodom and Gomorrah... Now, is that really what

01:48:46

Jesus was doing? Or was Jesus pointing out that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah brought judgment, and yet they had so little light in comparison to the gospel message that Jesus and his disciples were bringing to the very

01:49:05

Jewish people who possessed the Scriptures. You cannot make the argument that the only sin of Sodom...

01:49:14

And by the way, have you caught something here? The only sin of Sodom was inhospitability? Is that the same thing as gang rape?

01:49:22

I don't think so. So which one is it? Well, it's both. You see, as long as it's an excuse, it's okay.

01:49:33

As long as it's an excuse, that's alright. We can pile on the excuses, even if they're not consistent with one another, because it makes it sound better.

01:49:44

That's what you have to do when you're perverting the Scriptures. When you're twisting their meaning and you're trying to turn them into the exact opposite of what their authors intend, that's what you've got to do.

01:49:55

And that's what we are hearing. Throughout the rest of Scripture, only one connects their sins to sexual transgressions in general.

01:50:05

The New Testament book of Jude, verse 7, states that Sodom and Gomorrah, quote, gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.

01:50:13

But there are many forms of sexual immorality and perversion. And even if Jude 7 is taken as specifically referring to the threatened gang rape from Genesis 19, 5, that still has nothing to do with the kinds of relationships that we're talking about.

01:50:29

That's really, again, it's really, really, it's almost painful to listen to someone trying to get around what

01:50:39

Jude and 2 Peter say at this point. It really, really is. Because it's just so plain that they are talking about defiling of the flesh, they're talking about going after strange flesh.

01:50:57

It is utterly unfair to even begin to try to deal with the text.

01:51:04

It really shows, in essence, that there isn't really any desire here to really hear what is being said.

01:51:14

Because when you look at the parallels, you have to ask the question, well, where do you think

01:51:19

Jude got his interpretation? Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh.

01:51:34

Now, what does strange flesh mean? Sarcas heteros.

01:51:44

They are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. Where did

01:51:52

Jude get this? Did this just pop up someplace as far as an interpretation goes?

01:51:58

Was Jude written during the medieval period? So Jude interprets

01:52:03

Sodom and Gomorrah in the way that he had earlier claimed no one had interpreted until the medieval period, which we already saw

01:52:10

John Chrysostom did, and even the Koran did. And so you really start wondering about his facts after a while.

01:52:16

Maybe there's an agenda here. Yeah, there really is an agenda here.

01:52:24

And it's a clear agenda, a very obvious agenda. And we're demonstrating that.

01:52:32

It's now widely conceded by scholars on both sides of this debate that Sodom and Gomorrah do not offer biblical evidence to support the belief that homosexuality is a sin.

01:52:41

I think we've demonstrated that anybody who would say that obviously doesn't have any concern about actually interpreting what the text itself says.

01:52:51

But our next two verses from Leviticus... And now we're going to leave. I think we can honestly say, verse number one examined,

01:53:01

Matthew Vines fails completely to deal with it contextually, biblically, canonically, honestly, etc.,

01:53:10

etc. Do not lie with a man as one does with a woman. It is an abomination. Continue to be commonly cited to uphold that belief.

01:53:18

And they certainly can be claimed to be of greater relevance to this issue than the matter of gang rape. So they deserve our careful study and attention.

01:53:27

To back out for a moment and provide some context, Leviticus is the third book of the Bible. We have

01:53:33

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Beginning in Exodus and continuing through Deuteronomy, God delivers the law to the

01:53:43

Israelites, which contains 613 rules in total. The book of Leviticus deals primarily with ceremonial issues related to appropriate worship practices at the tabernacle, the various offerings and how to make them, clean versus unclean foods, diseases and bodily discharges.

01:54:02

Partially true, but only partially true. In my response video that I posted just a while back, not to Matthew Vines, but to Dan Savage, I pointed out that there is so much more in Leviticus than pro -homosexual advocates want to admit is actually there.

01:54:29

In fact, Jesus quoted from Leviticus, I think, I could be wrong about this, I haven't checked it in a while,

01:54:35

I think he quoted from Leviticus more than any place else because he kept saying, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, and that comes directly from this very section of Leviticus.

01:54:46

But the other things that are also found, I went through 12 things in my video, just 12 things I just grabbed really quickly, that were found in that video.

01:54:54

Prohibitions against bestiality, child sacrifice, adultery, thievery, the abuse of the poor, unjust scales, commandments to honor your father and your mother, commandments to honor the elderly in a society, all these incredibly positive things are part of the warp and woof of the fabric of the

01:55:17

Mosaic law found in the book of Leviticus. And so to, in essence, identify

01:55:25

Leviticus as something that is really just not relevant today, that's going to be his argument, is that no

01:55:33

Christians believe these things are relevant to us today, is to grossly misrepresent the reality of Leviticus.

01:55:44

As I've said many, many times before, the Holiness Code, Leviticus 18, 19, 20, we have to examine it carefully, we have to examine it contextually, we have to examine it in the context in which it was written, the context of the entire

01:56:00

Bible. There are things in there that were specifically for the people of Israel. There are things in there we think we know what they apply to today, but don't necessarily.

01:56:11

And then there are things that are really, really clear. And Leviticus 18, 22 is one of those very, very clear things.

01:56:23

And I think what I need to do is, we're going to take our top of the hour break.

01:56:30

I was going to switch over. I think I need to press on. I need to press on because we're sort of right in the middle of this.

01:56:39

And as hard as it is to do it, as difficult as it is to deal with the subject for that long,

01:56:46

I would beg your indulgence, and let's press on. Our culture needs to hear these things, and you need to be prepared.

01:56:55

So let's press on after this break. Christ is the end of the world.

01:57:21

Whoops, I wasn't supposed to do that. Sorry about that. I'm not even sure that I was at the right point there.

01:57:26

I may have clicked on it. Let me double -check that I'm at the right place here. Hmm. Well, we're going to continue on, and I'm going to hit play.

01:57:36

And if it sounds like it's the wrong spot, I'm going to have to look around for it because it may have – I was closing the other files and just opening this one up, and I don't want to skip anything.

01:57:45

This says we're at 24 minutes in. That sounds about right. So we will continue on.

01:57:51

We are responding to Matthew Vine's presentation. We're now going to Leviticus, and I'm actually going to back it up just a little bit because the statement he just made

01:58:00

I think is somewhat important, so we'll probably re -hear something. Describes himself as the fulfillment of the law.

01:58:06

Yeah, I haven't heard that, so let's back it up there. Quote, forgave us all our sins. Yeah, I skipped ahead.

01:58:13

I apologize. Now we're going to have to – This is live radio, folks. This is how it works. We're going to have to find where we were here.

01:58:20

Much of the New Testament deals with the issue of the place of the old law. Boy, I've really skipped ahead.

01:58:27

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom. Ah, that's close. We heard that one. That's the Ezekiel 16.

01:58:33

One, connects their sins to sexual transgressions in general. Yeah, we're getting close. We're getting close. Sorry about that, folks, but sometimes you just click in the wrong place.

01:58:41

It's now widely conceded by scholars on both sides of this debate that Sodom and Gomorrah do not offer biblical evidence to support the belief that homosexuality is a sin.

01:58:50

But our next two verses from Leviticus do not lie with a man as one does with a woman.

01:58:56

It is an abomination. Continue to be commonly cited to uphold that belief. And they certainly can be claimed to be of greater relevance to this issue than the matter of gang rape.

01:59:06

So they deserve our careful study and attention. To back out for a moment and provide some context,

01:59:13

Leviticus is the third book of the Bible. We have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

01:59:21

Beginning in Exodus and continuing through Deuteronomy, God delivers the law to the Israelites, which contains 613 rules in total.

01:59:30

The book of Leviticus deals primarily with ceremonial issues related to appropriate worship practices at the tabernacle, the various offerings and how to make them, clean versus unclean foods, diseases and bodily discharges, sexual taboos, and rules for the priests.

01:59:48

Chapter 18 of Leviticus contains a list of sexual prohibitions, and chapter 20 follows this up with a list of punishments.

01:59:55

In these chapters, male same -sex intercourse is prohibited, and the punishment for violators is death.

02:00:02

These specific verses are Leviticus 18, 22, and 20, 13. They read,

02:00:08

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. Now, I want to stop right there, because I want to give you some background information that will be important not only as we interpret this text, but will be especially important as we interpret the texts in Corinthians and in the pastoral epistles in 1

02:00:32

Timothy. That means it's going to be a little bit down the road, so you might want to take note of this or something like that, but it is important.

02:00:40

Leviticus 18, 22, in the Greek Septuagint, the

02:00:47

Greek translation of the Old Testament, and most scholars will admit that, especially in the

02:00:53

Pentateuch, the Greek Septuagint is an excellent translation. The Septuagint, there really isn't a single

02:00:59

Septuagint. I mean, we have Ralphs, and we have the Goettingen version and stuff like that today, but that's really a compilation over time.

02:01:11

The Pentateuch, obviously, was done by very, very skilled translators first.

02:01:18

Most probably, anyways. And then some of the rest of the Old Testament is done very well.

02:01:24

Some of it isn't. And that's something to keep in mind.

02:01:31

Secondly, remember that the Bible of the New Testament Church is the Greek Septuagint. Very few of the converts of Paul in Ephesus or any place else would have direct access to what we would call today the

02:01:47

Masoretic Hebrew text. That's obviously somewhat, even at that point, anachronistic because the

02:01:52

Masoretes didn't flourish until the 9th century, but to the stream of textual tradition that underlies the

02:02:00

Masoretic text, to put it that way. They weren't reading Hebrew. Or Aramaic, for that matter. The Targums or whatever else it might be.

02:02:08

They were using the Greek Septuagint. And the Greek Septuagint says, Kymata arsenos, write that down,

02:02:16

A -R -S -E -N -O -S OO, OO is the negative, you shall not.

02:02:25

Koimei theisei koitain gunaikos Delogma, bedelogma, gar esten

02:02:34

It is an abomination. Now, arsenos, koimei theisei refers to the bed, in essence.

02:02:52

To sleep. But then, koitain is the very

02:03:00

Greek word that I believe is mediated to us through Latin. But it's basically a transliteration of coitus.

02:03:10

Coitus, sexual relationship. The marital relationship, intercourse. So you have in Leviticus 18 .22

02:03:22

the word for man is not anthropos here. It is arsenos, because arsenos refers more forcefully and directly to male than anthropos, which is more general.

02:03:38

Now, why do I emphasize this? Because when we get to the

02:03:43

New Testament, one of the words that we need to deal with is arsenokoites. Arsenokoites.

02:03:51

And modern writers will seek to find ways of redefining this term.

02:04:01

I found it fascinating that Matthew Vines, and we're going to get to it later on, but I'm just giving you a heads up so you can make the connection when we get there.

02:04:09

I'll repeat this when we get there. We certainly aren't going to get there today. At least I doubt we will, even though we've still got an hour to go. I sort of doubt we'll get there.

02:04:15

We might. I don't know. I don't know. This is live webcasting. This is how it's done. This is just the way that we do it.

02:04:24

But when we get to the use of arsenokoites in the New Testament, Matthew Vines fascinatingly is going to admit that the first use of arsenokoites is found in Paul.

02:04:38

Now, I provide a discussion in the same -sex controversy of another patristic reference.

02:04:44

You know, I'm often attacked by people who can't deal with my arguments because I went to Columbia Evangelical Seminary for my

02:04:54

PhD work. One of the things I did when I went to Columbia is

02:04:59

I obtained the Thesaurus Lingua Grecae CD -ROM, which is no longer available, unfortunately.

02:05:05

Now you have to subscribe to an online service and all the rest of that stuff. And I can't even find the original disc anymore.

02:05:10

The poor thing. But anyway. And you had to subscribe to this. You had to buy it. If I recall correctly, it was $500 for three years at first.

02:05:19

Then it went down to $300, etc., etc. When it was originally made available to higher institutions, it was like $60 ,000 to have it available in your library.

02:05:33

I obtained the TLG for my doctoral work. It was not available anywhere around here in any of the quote -unquote accredited schools.

02:05:42

But I used it for my doctoral work. And so one of the things that I did in writing

02:05:48

The Same -Sex Controversy, this is something that scholars do when they do scholarship, is

02:05:55

I asked myself the question, what is the history of the usage of this term?

02:06:03

And I found one possible historical source that precedes

02:06:10

Paul's. But the dating on that particular source is very uncertain.

02:06:18

And it may be post -Pauline. But I discussed it. And if I recall correctly, a fairly lengthy footnote

02:06:29

I'm looking, just happened to pop this open here.

02:06:36

Yeah, there it is. Now this is interesting.

02:06:41

I'm just going to read this for the fun of it. This is just the kind of notes that we included in our book. This is the note that I was referring to.

02:06:50

It's note number one on page 159. A scan of the relevant material found in the Thyros Lingogreki CD -ROM reveals a single use of the term prior to Paul, the infinitival use in the

02:07:00

Sibylline Oracles at 2 .73. This work is dated by the TLG canon data as early as the 2nd century

02:07:07

B .C. However, the more common dating is A .D. 1st century. If the material is contemporaneous with Paul, the origin of the term could have come from Abinic sources from which

02:07:18

Paul could have derived the word as well. And if the material is post -Pauline, its use could have come from Paul or from a common

02:07:24

Jewish source. Now, he doesn't mention the Sibylline Oracles or anything like that.

02:07:33

And it's interesting. I then had this note. This is note number three, which I'll just throw in here just because I know there are people taking notes on this because, let's face it, not too many people are talking about this kind of stuff in our society today.

02:07:47

And while we've got the opportunity to do so, we better do it. So, in other words, may I suggest maybe grabbing the recordings of these programs and keeping them for yourself?

02:07:58

You know, that might be a good idea. Footnote number three, page 159.

02:08:04

Some scholarly sources limit the meaning in just this way. Speaking of arsonic coites, the impact of political pressures appear even in the realm of Christian scholarship and publishing.

02:08:13

For example, the second edition of a Greek -English lexicon in the New Testament and other early Christian literature by Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, and Donker, University of Chicago, 1979, for those of you as old as I am, that was the big green monster.

02:08:25

That was what I used when I learned Greek. Defines arsonic coites as a male who practices homosexuality, pederast, sodomite, page 109.

02:08:34

The listed sources were fairly small at this point, but included Bailey's work. With the advent of the third edition, now known as BDAG, in 2000, the entry more than tripled in size, with the main definition dropping the term homosexual.

02:08:52

The definition given is a male who engages in sexual activity with a person of his own sex, pederast.

02:08:59

The first part of the definition, however, defines a homosexual, not a pederast. The largest portion of added sources are revisionist in nature and have already been addressed, that is, in our book.

02:09:12

However, BDAG does note the formation of the word based upon the septuagint usage at Leviticus 2013, even though this very fact militates strongly against the dropping of the term homosexual from the definition, while retaining the description of homosexuality.

02:09:28

I think if you've not gotten it before, if it's not something you've wanted to think about before, you might want to pick up the same -sex controversy.

02:09:36

One thing I've said to a lot of folks, whenever you're reading any of my books, don't skip the endnotes.

02:09:44

Don't skip the endnotes. I put a lot of the most important material in the endnotes.

02:09:50

I expect them to be read. But anyways, the whole reason I stop there is to give you this information, that the term in the

02:10:00

New Testament, arsenokoites, is in all probability derived by Paul from the conjunction of the terms arsenos and koitain in Leviticus 18 .22.

02:10:15

This is vitally important to understand, because it bridges, it demonstrates the

02:10:23

New Testament. Authors did not think that what was found in the Holiness Code in Leviticus was irrelevant to them.

02:10:31

It bridges the gap between the two, and it explains to us exactly what Paul has in mind when he says, you were homosexuals, but you are no longer.

02:10:44

And it is fatal to the case of the person who wants to create the oxymoron of gay

02:10:52

Christian. And 2013 goes on to say, If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.

02:11:03

They shall surely be put to death. Their blood is upon them. Well, there we have it.

02:11:11

For many, the biblical debate is now over. It's surprising that so many people continue to believe that these verses in Leviticus somehow form the heart of the theological debate about homosexuality.

02:11:24

They are, in fact, of secondary significance to the later passage by Paul in Romans 1. Now, that right there shows a fundamentally flawed understanding of the

02:11:34

Apostle Paul and of the Apostle Paul's relationship in his theology, in his teaching, to the

02:11:41

Old Testament law. Fundamentally flawed. The Apostle Paul was the one who even in asserting that it was never the law's intention or purpose to bring about justification said that by faith in Jesus Christ we establish the law.

02:11:59

Because we are saying the law was right to bring condemnation of our sin. That the law is our schoolmaster to bring us unto

02:12:05

Christ. We establish the law.

02:12:11

We just recognize its purpose is to expose sin, not to bring about justification.

02:12:19

Keep that in mind. And the reason for that isn't that their meaning is unclear, but that their context within the

02:12:24

Old Testament law makes them inapplicable to Christians. Much of the

02:12:29

New Testament deals with the issue of the place of the old law in the emerging Christian church. As Gentiles were being included for the very first time in what was formerly an exclusively

02:12:38

Jewish faith, there arose ferocious debates and divisions among the early Jewish Christians about whether Gentile converts should have to follow the law with its more than 600 rules.

02:12:50

And in Acts chapter 15... And notice he's not making the proper differentiations in regards to ceremonial law, the law fulfilled in Christ, the fact that Jesus himself talked about making all meats clean.

02:13:04

None of that. Those distinctions which are absolutely necessary for any meaningful discussion of law just are not going to be part of his understanding.

02:13:14

We read how this debate was resolved. In the year 49 A .D., early church leaders gathered at what came to be called the

02:13:21

Council of Jerusalem, and they decided that the old law would not be binding on Gentile believers.

02:13:28

The most culturally distinctive aspects of the old law were the Israelites' complex system,

02:13:34

Israelites' complex dietary code for keeping kosher, and the practice of male circumcision. But after the

02:13:40

Council of Jerusalem's ruling, even those central parts of Israelite identity and culture no longer applied to Christians.

02:13:48

Although it's a common argument today, there's no reason to think that these two verses from the old law in Leviticus would somehow have remained applicable to Christians.

02:13:57

There's no reason to believe that. Despite the fact that this same section says you should love your neighbors as yourself,

02:14:03

Jesus repeated that over and over again. This is the same section talking about bestiality and adultery and theft and honoring father and mother and taking care of the poor.

02:14:11

Just no reason! Really? If you actually allow these texts to stand and then read the

02:14:20

New Testament in light of them and don't engage in revisionism to try to change the meanings of the terms in Romans 1 and 1

02:14:26

Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1, then there's lots of reason. But you see, what you have to do is you have to atomize.

02:14:33

You have to break up the text, look at each one, try to provide a hopefully plausible excuse for each one, and that way you can make your argument.

02:14:45

If you allow them to stand together, well, you will not succeed. Even when other much more central parts of the law did not.

02:14:54

In Galatians 6, Paul goes so far as to say that in Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything.

02:15:03

He speaks of the old law as, quote, a yoke of slavery that he warns Christians not to be burdened by.

02:15:09

In Colossians 2, Paul writes that through Christ, God, quote, forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code with its regulations.

02:15:19

It was against us and that stood opposed to us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross.

02:15:26

In the Gospels, Jesus describes himself as the fulfillment of the law. And in Romans 10, verse 4,

02:15:32

Paul writes, Christ is the end of the law. Hebrews 8, verse 13, states that the old covenant is now, quote, obsolete because Christ is the basis of the new covenant, freeing

02:15:45

Christians from the system of the old law, most of which was specific to the ancient Israelites, to their community and their unique worship practices.

02:15:55

Christians have always regarded the book of Leviticus, in particular, as being inapplicable to them in light of Christ's fulfillment of the law.

02:16:01

That's just not true. That is just simply not true. That is a simplistic statement that is utterly erroneous.

02:16:10

No one has ever interpreted Christ's fulfillment of the law as meaning we should not love neighbor's self.

02:16:17

No Christian has ever interpreted the fulfillment of the law in Jesus Christ as to mean that we are no longer to honor father and mother, that we are no longer to take care of the poor, that we are no longer to use just scales.

02:16:32

None of that. That's just simply, utterly untrue. Now, issues about shaving your beard, different issue.

02:16:47

You know, we've gone through this. In fact, just last week, we replayed the program where I went through the objections to the holiness code.

02:17:01

We talked about the things you need to do to examine the holiness code and to do so in a meaningful fashion.

02:17:09

But that's just being all washed away. It's just like, ah, doesn't matter. No Christians actually believe this is applicable to us.

02:17:16

That is just not even close to being an accurate statement. So while it is true that Leviticus prohibits male same -sex relations, it also prohibits a vast array of other behaviors, activities, and foods that Christians have never regarded as being prohibited for them.

02:17:34

That's exactly right, and it's exactly irrelevant. For example, chapter 11 of Leviticus forbids the eating of pork, shrimp, and lobster, which the

02:17:45

Church does not consider to be a sin. Chapter 19 forbids planting two kinds of seed in the same field, wearing clothing woven of two types of material.

02:17:54

Now, again, Ben here done this, got the T -shirt, but what you need to be prepared to do is to have counterexamples.

02:18:08

Say, you know, sounds like you're sort of going off a script there. Have you actually read

02:18:13

Leviticus 18, 19, and 20? And the vast majority of them will have to say, uh, no.

02:18:22

And you say, those are also the same chapters that say you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There shall be no child sacrifice.

02:18:29

There shall be no bestiality. That you shall honor your father and mother. You shall have equal scales.

02:18:34

You shall not unjustly treat the sojourner amongst you, the alien amongst you.

02:18:41

These are all in the same section. Did you know that? Well, no.

02:18:47

Are these still valid moral principles today? And since they're mixed in with laws about not trimming the corners of your beard and about not doing things out of fear, either honor of or fear of the dead, which would have something to do with prohibiting religious practices that either honor the dead or fear the curses of the dead.

02:19:18

I mean, that's just common pagan religion. Isn't it obvious, just given

02:19:25

Jesus' use of these texts, that we need to have some mechanism whereby we recognize what is valid and what is not.

02:19:40

And what is applicable and what is not. And what's that based on? Well, it has to be based upon God as our creator.

02:19:48

And that's when we go back to the positive statements of Scripture. Male and female. That's what marriage is.

02:19:55

This is what sexuality is about. It's a gift from God, but it's to be used in this way.

02:20:00

I mean, and this is, again, absolutely fatal to the attempt of individuals to twist the meaning of the text so that you can have such a thing as a gay

02:20:11

Christian or gay marriage or anything like it. And that's why they don't go there.

02:20:18

They have to do these simplistic type of argumentation. They have to atomize the text, isolate things.

02:20:23

You can't look at the text as a whole. And people, I think, like Dan Savage, know that. That's why they just say the whole thing is a bunch of bulk.

02:20:31

I think that's a little more of an honest approach, to be perfectly honest with you, than this kind of desperate attempt to maintain some type of religiosity while rejecting the very essence of the commandments of Scripture.

02:20:48

And cutting the hair at the sides of one's head. Christians have never regarded any of these things to be sinful behaviors because Christ's death on the cross liberated

02:20:58

Christians from what Paul called the yoke of slavery. That is not what the yoke of slavery was.

02:21:07

That it is a gross misrepresentation of Paul's understanding of the law to read it in that way.

02:21:16

The law is good and holy and just. But the law was never intended to be the mechanism that makes us right before God.

02:21:26

We cannot fulfill it in the perfection that it demands. And what the death of Christ frees those who believe in Him and repent and turn from their sin, not those who redefine their sin so they can continue to practice it.

02:21:42

No. Those who repent and turn from their sin and trust in Christ find that that condemnation, that just and righteous condemnation of the law against their sin has fallen upon the sin bearer in their place.

02:22:00

It is a perversion of the scriptures to look to the cross of Christ and to say the cross of Christ changes

02:22:09

God's moral law. The cross of Christ demonstrates how seriously

02:22:14

God takes His moral law. That's what the cross of Christ demonstrates.

02:22:22

We are not subject to the old law. But the old law does contain some rules that Christians have continued to observe.

02:22:31

The Ten Commandments, for example. And so some argue that Leviticus 18 .22 and 20 .13,

02:22:38

the prohibitions of male same -sex relations, should be an exception to the rule. No, no, not an exception to the rule.

02:22:45

Unless you can present a meaningful argument from the text that they do not represent

02:22:54

God's moral law, then they are to be taken as normative. Not an exception.

02:23:00

You've already had to turn Genesis 2 on its head. Ignored the interpretation of that by Jesus in Matthew chapter 19.

02:23:09

So you've already had to reject the very matrix that makes these passages understandable and gives us the guidance to understand what is still binding, what is not, on its head.

02:23:21

That's the problem. And that they should continue to have force for Christians today. There are three main arguments that are made for this position.

02:23:28

The first is the verse's immediate context. Leviticus 18 and 20 also prohibit adultery, incest, and bestiality, all of which continue to be regarded as sinful.

02:23:40

And so homosexuality should be as well. But just three verses away from the prohibition of male same -sex relations, in chapter 18, verse 19, sexual relations during a woman's menstrual period are also prohibited.

02:23:53

And this, too, is called an abomination at the chapter's close. But this is not regarded as sinful behavior by Christians.

02:24:00

So what is considered sinful behavior quote -unquote by Christians, which

02:24:07

Christians were not told, somehow becomes the standard, the matrix by which we are to examine what the

02:24:14

Holiness Code is actually talking about. So we've already thrown out the shellfish and the shaving of the beard, and now menstruation.

02:24:27

And, well, it's just a few verses away. Well, look, the Holiness Code is not organized like a printer manual.

02:24:33

And there are things in close proximity that some of which will be directly and only relevant to the people of Israel because it specifically talks about maybe the nations around them or the religious practices of the peoples around them that may or may not have a continued application today.

02:24:53

I mean, the specific prohibition of offering your children in sacrifice to Moloch is probably not relevant to too many people today.

02:25:04

I've run into a lot of odd religious people, but I have not run into any worshipers of Moloch recently.

02:25:13

There was a guy outside the grocery store once I was a little concerned about. But other than that, just haven't run into him.

02:25:21

But, as we've pointed out many times before, even those laws can continue to have a principal application.

02:25:33

And I already gave the example. I'll expand upon it here. You have the Old Testament law that tells us that you are to have the guardrails, the barriers around the roof because people were up on their roof.

02:25:47

And that was where you'd be in the cool of the day. And so God commands his people to put railings on their roofs.

02:25:57

Why? To save life. Now, almost none of us go up on our roofs anymore.

02:26:04

Given here in Arizona, that would fry you badly. And there is no cool of the day in Phoenix.

02:26:13

What's that? In August, the cool of the day is when it finally dips below 100 at about 3 o 'clock in the morning.

02:26:19

That's the cool of the day. And it's even worse on your roof because it's still radiating all that heat from the attic.

02:26:26

And so it's always hotter up there than it is someplace else. So we're not up there. So I confess,

02:26:32

I do not have a railing on my roof. Now, there are some people who say, See? You don't really believe that homosexuality is wrong.

02:26:40

Talk about a leap, isn't it? But believe me, there are people who do it. But, but,

02:26:48

I do think it's perfectly appropriate to have a fence around a pool.

02:26:54

Why? Because the element of the commandment is saving life.

02:27:01

Protecting human life. So it's a principle. You apply the principle.

02:27:09

You have those sections that talk about cutting yourself for the dead.

02:27:18

Well, there aren't too many of us that are engaged in religions anymore that worry about dead relatives.

02:27:27

There are! Down in South Sea Islands, ancestor worship, the Hawaiian Islands, stuff like that.

02:27:33

These would be directly relevant statements. But the principle is do not follow after the religious teachings and practices of the people around you, especially as they relate to doing things out of either fear of the curses of the dead or to honor the dead.

02:27:55

So, again, it takes some thought. It takes some contemplation.

02:28:01

It takes the light of the New Testament. But we can make application.

02:28:08

They are relevant. Rather, it's seen as a limited matter of ceremonial cleanliness for the ancient

02:28:14

Israelites. And all of the other categories of prohibitions in these chapters on adultery, incest, and bestiality are repeated multiple times throughout the rest of the

02:28:25

Old Testament. Really? The commandment against bestiality is repeated more often than the commandment against homosexuality?

02:28:33

Seriously? Where? I'd be interested in knowing that. Both within the law and outside of it.

02:28:39

In Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Ezekiel. But the prohibitions on male same -sex relations only appear in Leviticus, among many dozens of other prohibitions that Christians have never viewed as being applicable to them.

02:28:52

So since it's among those, and some Christians, maybe some who hadn't thought through the principial application or things like that, whatever, since it's among those, then even though it goes directly against the positive teaching of Matthew chapter 19, and even though it goes directly against the teaching of Romans 1, and 1

02:29:14

Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1, and if we looked at all things together and didn't cut them apart like he's doing, it would make perfect sense, well, then we can go ahead and dismiss these things.

02:29:27

Well, Leviticus calls it an abomination. And if it was an abomination then, then it certainly can't be a good thing now.

02:29:35

The term abomination is applied to a very broad range of things in the old law. And it is. It is.

02:29:41

In fact, Toei Vah is applied specifically to things that are related to violating one's

02:29:50

Jewish identity, to things that we would not consider today to be moral evils.

02:29:57

He is exactly right. But what he's exactly wrong about was already illustrated.

02:30:04

Remember his citation of Ezekiel 1649, skipping Ezekiel 1650?

02:30:13

And what God saw was their commission of a Toei Vah, and he took them away?

02:30:21

What was the Toei Vah? What was the abomination? It certainly wasn't something relevant to the identification of the people of Israel.

02:30:31

It wasn't a covenant sign. It was their sexual perversion.

02:30:40

And so, once again, you need to be quick to catch when someone makes a half -argument and then provides a whole conclusion.

02:30:59

This will not only ruin a lot of sermons that otherwise sound good, but really haven't been thought through, but I don't know how anybody survives in listening to modern political speech when they don't even bother with half -arguments.

02:31:15

They give you one -tenth arguments and then full conclusions based upon the one -tenth. But that's what you're getting here.

02:31:22

Eating shellfish in Leviticus 11, eating rabbit or pork in Deuteronomy 14, these are all called abominations.

02:31:30

As I just said, sex during a woman's menstrual period is also called an abomination. The term abomination is primarily used in the

02:31:37

Old Testament. But notice, he won't take the time to look at other uses of toiva about things that continue to be abiding moral principles.

02:31:48

Why not? Because you're only getting half the story instead of the whole story. To distinguish practices that are common to foreign nations from those that are distinctly

02:31:57

Israelite. This is why Genesis 43, 32 says that for the Egyptians to eat with the

02:32:03

Hebrews would be an abomination to the Egyptians. And why Exodus 8, 26 says that for the

02:32:10

Israelites to make sacrifices near the Pharaoh's palace would be an abomination to the Egyptians.

02:32:15

And by the way, that was due to religious considerations on the part of the

02:32:21

Egyptians. There's nothing wrong with the Israelites' sacrifices, of course. The problem with both of these things is that they would blur the lines between practices that are specifically

02:32:31

Israelite and those that are foreign. The nature of the term abomination in the

02:32:36

Old Testament is intentionally culturally specific. It defines religious and cultural boundaries between Israel and other nations.

02:32:44

Now, he's just made it only culturally specific. It can never be anything else. Again, get half the story, half the argument, you know.

02:32:55

Stop your citation of Ezekiel 16 at the convenient point, and that's what happens.

02:33:03

But it's not a statement about what is intrinsically good or bad, right or wrong. And that's why numerous things that it's applied to in the

02:33:10

Old Testament have long been accepted parts of Christian life and practice. Okay, but the penalty is death.

02:33:20

Certainly, that indicates that the behavior in question is particularly bad, and we should still regard it as sinful.

02:33:27

But this overlooks the severity of all of the other punishments in the Old Law. Given the threats posed to the

02:33:33

Israelites... Let me just stop just for a moment. Leviticus 18 .26

02:33:42

But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you.

02:33:50

For the people of the land who were before you did all of these abominations so that the land became unclean.

02:33:59

Hmm, seems like it's something more than just simply the difference between the Israelites and the other people.

02:34:05

It's something about uncleanness. For everyone who does any of these abominations, the person to do them shall be cut off from among their people.

02:34:13

There are abominable customs that were practiced before you, but they make people unclean.

02:34:20

So keep my charge ever to practice any of these abominable customs. Leviticus 18 .30 So abomination has something to do with uncleanness, and sometimes that just has to do with, again,

02:34:33

Israelite, non -Israelite, but a lot of them have to do with, well, morality and what is truly moral.

02:34:42

And in Deuteronomy chapter 12, well, Deuteronomy chapter 7,

02:34:49

The carved images of their gods you shall burn with fire. You shall not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, or take it for yourselves, lest you be ensnared by it, for it is an abomination to the

02:34:58

Lord your God. Is that just a cultural thing, or are we now getting to worship? In fact, idols themselves are called

02:35:07

Toeva. They themselves are an abomination because they involve a person in idolatry.

02:35:16

And the Lord hates every abominable thing. Deuteronomy 12 .31

02:35:21

You shall not eat any abomination.

02:35:27

Deuteronomy 14 .3 There is one that specifically is dietary in context.

02:35:33

There are so many of these. You shall not wear a man's garment.

02:35:39

A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the

02:35:45

Lord your God. Cross -dressing has something to do with sexuality. It has something to do with changing, well, it's just custom.

02:35:57

That's all it is. Just changing custom. And yet, Deuteronomy 20 .18

02:36:07

What they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the

02:36:14

Lord God. There is something about idolatry and changing the natural order of things.

02:36:24

Cursed be the man who makes a carved or cast metal image, an abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.

02:36:33

And all the people shall answer and say, Amen. There's a lot about abomination in the

02:36:40

Old Testament, and a lot of it is directly related to idolatry, which, interestingly enough, is the primary thrust of Romans 1, and the excellent example of the result of idolatry and the twistedness of the creator -created relationship is homosexuality and lesbianism.

02:36:58

It is exactly how Paul puts it. By starvation, disease, internal discord, and attacks from other tribes, maintaining order and cohesiveness was of paramount importance for them.

02:37:10

And so almost all of the punishments in the Old Testament will strike us as being quite harsh. A couple that has sex during a woman's menstrual period is to be permanently exiled from the community.

02:37:20

If a priest's daughter falls into prostitution, she is to be burned at the stake. Anyone who uses the

02:37:27

Lord's name in vain is not only to be reprimanded, but to be stoned. And anyone who disobeys their parent...

02:37:33

And by the way, it is perfectly appropriate to point out that most of us probably have been misled as to the actual application of taking the

02:37:44

Lord's name in vain. Its primary application was to swear by the name of Yahweh and thus overthrow the justice system.

02:37:54

Now, I don't think there's any excuse for coarse jesting and coarse language and profanity and all the rest of that stuff, but its first and foremost application clearly was to overthrow justice by swearing by the name of Yahweh that something was true when it was not.

02:38:11

Not fulfilling one's vows that one makes would fall into the same category. ...is to be stoned as well.

02:38:19

Even some things that we don't see as moral issues at all received the death penalty in the Old Testament. According to Exodus 35, verse 2, working on the

02:38:27

Sabbath was a capital offense. Why wasn't that a moral issue? Maybe not in the churches he was raised in.

02:38:35

I don't know. But why would it not be a moral issue? I mean, the man who was stoned for gathering sticks was specifically rebelling against Moses' authority and God's authority in the establishment of the law.

02:38:46

So why would that not be a moral issue is what I wonder. And in Ezekiel 18, the death penalty is applied to anyone who charges interest on a loan.

02:38:55

And this, too, is called an abomination at the chapter's close. Simply because something received the death penalty in the

02:39:02

Old Testament doesn't mean that Christians should view it as sinful. Now notice the argument. He's really responding to an argument that isn't an argument, and that is that, well, because it had a death penalty, then it needs to be valid today.

02:39:14

What it meant initially was the gravity of it. And the question is, is that concept continued on into the

02:39:25

New Testament? And very clearly, it is. It is. But notice the atomization approach.

02:39:34

Cut all these texts apart. Don't let them stand side by side. Don't let them stand in one canon.

02:39:40

Don't let there be a continuous theme. Knock each one down. I'm reminded, very honestly,

02:39:46

I mean, for those of you who are apologetically minded, what this reminds me of is the way that Mormons get around all the evidence against the first vision of Joseph Smith.

02:39:58

You come up with a plausible excuse for this, a plausible excuse for that, but you can never answer the tsunami of facts that demonstrate the first vision, as taught by Mormonism, that it did not happen.

02:40:13

But by taking each single fact separately, separating it out, then you can try to come up with a plausibility argument.

02:40:21

That's what's being done here, is you isolate each one of these texts, treat it separately, try to come up with a plausible argument, but you never allow them to stand together, because that would overthrow your entire position.

02:40:34

There's too much variance for that to be a consistent and effective approach. The default Christian approach for nearly two millennia now has been to view the particular hundreds of rules and prohibitions in the old law as having been fulfilled by Christ's death.

02:40:47

Simplicity alert! Simplicity alert! Wrong! Wrong! And there is no good reason why

02:40:52

Leviticus 18 .22 and 20 .13 should be exceptions to that rule.

02:40:59

Because they're not exceptions, because that's not a rule. And we've already seen that Arson Acoites shows us that in Paul's mind, the

02:41:06

Apostle Paul, author of 13 letters of the New Testament, the very prohibition of Leviticus 18 .22

02:41:13

is smack dab in the middle of what he says some of you were, but you're not anymore, because you're a

02:41:21

Christian. So if our three Old Testament passages do not, upon closer examination, furnish persuasive arguments against loving relationships...

02:41:33

That wasn't closer examination. That was fallacious examination. We've actually found all of them to stand the test quite well.

02:41:41

And Mr. Vine's review to be inappropriate. For gay

02:41:46

Christians. Then what about our three New Testament passages? And indeed, for those who spent some time studying this theological debate, they will know that the most significant of the six passages is not in the

02:41:58

Old Testament. Instead, it appears in the opening chapter of Paul's letter to the church in Rome.

02:42:04

Specifically, Romans chapter 1, verses 26 and 27. This passage is the most significant for three reasons.

02:42:13

First, it's in the New Testament, and so it doesn't encounter the same problems of context and applicability that Leviticus does.

02:42:20

Secondly, unlike Leviticus, it speaks of both men and women. And thirdly, even though it's not very long, at two consecutive verses, it's still the longest discussion of any form of same -sex behavior anywhere in Scripture.

02:42:35

Now, that is an argument unto itself, one we've already exposed. It doesn't have to be long, but again, that's isolating the negative from the positive teaching.

02:42:45

And this also is going to involve him in isolating these particular texts from the flow of Romans chapter 1, which is, of course, where the primary element of the truth will be discovered.

02:42:58

And because these two verses are embedded within a broader theological argument about idolatry that's somewhat complex,

02:43:04

I want to spend more time on this passage than any other. Paul begins his letter in Romans chapters 1 through 3 by describing the unrighteousness of all humanity,

02:43:15

Jew and Gentile alike, and the universal need for a savior. Romans chapter 3 nears its close with the famous verse,

02:43:24

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. In Romans 3 .10, Paul says,

02:43:30

There is no one righteous, not even one. To build his case to that effect,

02:43:36

Paul argues in chapter 2 that even though the Jews have the law, they still don't follow it well enough to earn their salvation on their own.

02:43:44

But he starts in chapter 1 by describing the unrighteousness of humanity more broadly. And in Romans chapter 1, verses 18 through 32,

02:43:53

Paul writes of the descent of Gentiles into idolatry and the consequences for them of their rejection of God.

02:44:00

He says that they knew the truth of God, but they rejected it. They exchanged the truth for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the

02:44:12

Creator. Birds, animals, reptiles. And so because they had given up God...

02:44:20

Let me just stop just for a moment because I don't have anything to disagree with the summary statement being given.

02:44:28

But I did want to interact with you with a tweet. Someone tweeted to me,

02:44:37

Listen to your program. Think you've missed something. Abortion is modern incarnation of offering children to Mulloch.

02:44:42

Where did I say anything other than that? I was rather obvious in what I said. I said that there aren't any people running around worshipping

02:44:49

Mulloch today, but there is a principle of saving life that is relevant, and that of course would be relevant to abortion.

02:44:55

So my whole point was that just because you don't have Mullochites running around, there are principles, that was the whole point, principal applications to be made.

02:45:08

And yes, I would say that the murder of unborn children partakes of the exact same disregard for human life that is prohibited in that kind of thing.

02:45:22

Of course there was a religious aspect to it, but there's a religious aspect to abortion today as well.

02:45:27

Secularism is just as religious as anything else in the sense that it is an ultimate value generator.

02:45:34

And so I just wanted to point out, yeah, I know, that's the whole point of what I was making there, and so since somebody didn't get it, maybe other people didn't either, so I needed to make the application.

02:45:44

God in turn let them go. He let them live without Him. And He gave them over, it says, to a wide array of vices and passions.

02:45:54

Included among these passions were some forms of lustful same -sex behavior. In verses 26 and 27, we read the following.

02:46:03

Because of this, referring to their idol worship, God gave them over to shameful lusts.

02:46:10

Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. Now, again, he jumped in too early here, or too late,

02:46:21

I guess, because if we'll listen to what is actually said, the apostle is talking about the twisting of the creator -creation relationship.

02:46:34

And he's saying that since the creation of the world, God's invisible attributes, His eternal power, divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that those who refuse to honor and worship

02:46:46

God as God are unapologia, they do not have an excuse. They do not have an apologetic.

02:46:53

For even though they knew God, there is a knowledge of God that has been mediated by the created order.

02:46:59

It is internal and external. It's all around us and it's within us. Even though they knew God, they did not honor

02:47:04

Him as God or give thanks. That's the extent of what General Revelation holds us accountable to doing. The Gospel is not part of General Revelation.

02:47:12

The Trinity is not a part of General Revelation. But the General Revelation tells us that there is a God, that we should honor

02:47:17

Him as God and give Him thanks. But, instead of doing what they were supposed to do, they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened.

02:47:28

And so there is a darkening of the human heart and a futility that's introduced into the very thinking process of mankind.

02:47:36

They profess themselves to be wise, but in reality they have become foolish. Foolish, the term that is used there, verse 22, is moronos, foolishness.

02:47:52

Elsewhere the term is frequently used as lacking in understanding. But there is a foolishness that comes to those who profess themselves to be wise, but are rejecting the knowledge of God.

02:48:05

And they exchange, very important, they exchange the glory of the incorruptible

02:48:11

God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four -footed animals and crawling creatures.

02:48:18

They engage in idolatry. They exchange that which was in their possession for a lie.

02:48:29

In fact, that is the very terminology he's going to use. Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.

02:48:38

And so this spiritual and mental rebellion results in a fundamental moral degradation of those who engage in it.

02:48:51

Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.

02:49:00

So it impacts all of man, his mind, his spirit, and his body.

02:49:07

For they exchanged, the same term, verse 23, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the

02:49:18

Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. So, the Apostle is talking about the nature of idolatry as an exchanging, a perversion, of the

02:49:29

Creator -created relationship. Okay? So that's the context.

02:49:37

There is a rejection of God as Creator and an exchange of that truth for a lie.

02:49:46

That, then, becomes the context for Romans 1, 26 and 27.

02:49:54

And the sin that is described here is then descriptive of the result of twisting the

02:50:04

Creator -creation relationship. If anything should be clear to Mr.

02:50:09

Vines, it's that when you are reconciled to God, when your sins are forgiven, when you're made a new creature in Christ, when you submit to the

02:50:20

Lordship of Christ, that that rebellion and that twisting of the

02:50:25

Creator -creation relationship should end. It doesn't get a blessing.

02:50:32

It doesn't continue. And so, the prime illustration provided by the

02:50:40

Apostle of how fully this twistedness impacts man is found in the discussion which he admits is about homosexuality.

02:50:50

For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.

02:50:56

In the same way, also, men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

02:51:07

This is an illustration of the twistedness of rebellion against God.

02:51:13

These people are suppressing the knowledge of God. Now, we're about out of time, but let me just summarize for you, because we'll pick this up.

02:51:20

The next time we do this, we're over halfway through now. We're 35 minutes in, and it's only one hour and seven minutes long.

02:51:31

So, we're over halfway. We made good progress today. At this rate, it'll take us about four and a half hours of air time, a little bit more, five hours.

02:51:42

It'll take a little over five hours to cover all this, but we try to be thorough. The argument that you can think about between now and the next time we're together, and I'm not going to be able to do this on the next program because I'm going to be doing the next program via Skype, and I don't think the sound quality would be good enough over Skype because we don't want to be able to put these together probably in one response.

02:52:05

So, next week when we continue with this, the argument, and you can think about between now and then, the argument is going to be very simple.

02:52:16

The argument is that this is about heterosexuals who engage in homosexual behavior, but it's not about people who by nature are homosexuals.

02:52:32

See? See how easy it is? I mean, just because you're introducing an entire category that is nowhere found in Romans 1, doesn't mean anything.

02:52:44

This is, and again, this is one of many, many, I mean, I forget in Romans 1, how many objections, because what we did is after we gave the exegesis, here on page 123, a note concerning the plethora of objections.

02:53:04

The number of objections and attempts to redefine the words of the Apostle in Romans 1 is large indeed. A few comments are necessary before examining these attempts.

02:53:12

First, many books utilize the PhD method of obfuscation at this point, piled higher and deeper. Seemingly, the authors of such revisions believe it is best to multiply possible scenarios as to Paul's meaning in this passage, perhaps hopeful of presenting the idea that there are many possible ways to answer the traditional objections to homosexuality.

02:53:30

Many of the less scholarly revisionist works, those that do not present a single focused attempt to redefine

02:53:35

Paul's meaning, will multiply possible understandings, seemingly in the hope of so muddling the thinking of the readers that they will throw up their hands in despair and assume that no one can really know what

02:53:43

Paul was talking about, since so many scholars are confused as to the real meaning of the passage. At times, the views cited within a single work can seem to be self -contradictory, but this passes without even a notation.

02:53:56

This only adds to confusion. At other times, when a scholar presents a specific interpretation, that view may well be directly contradictory to the conclusions of another pro -homosexual author or scholar.

02:54:06

The pro -homosexual revisionist literature hardly presents a single coherent whole when it comes to its methods of exegesis and the conclusions it comes to.

02:54:14

And there is one consistency in all the revisionist literature and absolute refusal to allow for the possibility that the historical

02:54:20

Christian viewpoint on the matter is correct. No matter what other conclusions are reached, the one that cannot be true is the one

02:54:27

Christians have proclaimed from the beginning. This consideration alone is very telling. And then

02:54:32

I started into the objections. And I forget how many there were, but we've covered a bunch of them.

02:54:38

And, again, if you can't wait till next week, you can always order The Same -Sex Controversy and get into that material as well.

02:54:46

Available in the bookstore at aleman .org. So, Thursday, we're going to get back together again, and we're going to be doing this via Skype, but we'll do it on a different topic at that time.

02:54:58

In fact, probably take your phone calls and things like that, because that's easier to do when I'm on Skype. So we'll see you then.