Dear Andy,
I never thought I would be writing about this subject, but because you will be teaching about the subject in Sunday school, I’m putting these thoughts on paper. Thirty years ago, homosexuality was generally considered iniquity in our society. Those who practiced it were usually secretive about their conduct so that others could grow up virtually ignorant of the matter. In fact, I know some brethren who did not even know what sodomy was until they were well into middle age. I thought that was a bit odd since the Bible speaks about the matter very plainly. When I asked them how they understood the sin of Sodom, they admitted they never could figure out what was going on.
As you know, things have changed, very dramatically! At a young age, you knew the words which describe homosexuals and you understood about deviate sexual practices.
If you hadn’t learned about it from the kids in school, you certainly would have from reading the paper or magazines. On the front page of our daily paper, a major article concerned a dispute in the Episcopal church over homosexuality. The issue was the church’s blessing of homosexual couples. A homosexual priest agreed he would comply with the area bishop’s order and temporarily stop the practice.
The priest’s personal practice was not even in question. He had written a book lauding homosexual relationships and supported his thesis with details of his own experiences. He extolled his own sex acts as times when he felt a fullness of gentleness, caring, joy and love. No attempt was made by the church to remove him, criticize him or even consider his conduct as sin. That same week “People” magazine featured two men in their section on “Couples.” One was a well-known author and the other was his lover who has AIDS. Their attitude toward their sexuality is presented as “manly” and their homosexual relationship as experiencing “the simple joy of pleasure with another human being.” I
just wonder how long it will be before high schools require everybody to read some book saying deviation is normal. Living in this kind of a world, I guess we have no choice but to speak out directly on the matter.
Homosexuality is wickedness of the worst kind. God “condemned Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly.” (II Peter 2:6 NIV) What was their great sin? Sodomy! A sin so closely associated with those places that the city became a name for homosexuality.
There are not very many sins for which God will destroy a whole society in this present era. He did it for unbridled violence with the flood. (Gen. 6:13) He wiped out Edomfor wanton persecution of His people. (Obad. 10) And He puts homosexuality in that same class of sin.
The fate of Sodom and Gomorrah was deliberately designed to warn us about God’s view of this iniquity. He supplies another warning in the diseases that are transmitted by such conduct. Hear the word of Scripture: “God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.” (Rom. 1:26-27 NIV)
Note that phrase, “in themselves.” They received something internally as their “due penalty.” God was giving them and everybody else a warning. Here was wickedness so great that obvious consequences were being caused by God right now.
You may have heard that AIDS is as common among the heterosexual population as among the homosexual one. That is a gross distortion of the facts. According to a recent review in the Wall Street Journal, in North America, of the 70,000 AIDS cases there are only 900 where homosexuality is not somehow involved. True, prostitutes have AIDS, but they got it because they had bisexual customers. Drug users contracted it from contaminated needles, but the contamination has been traced to homosexuals using the needles. In this country, we are sticking our heads in the sand if we do not see the current AIDS crisis as a divine declaration of His view of deviate sex.
“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders.. .will inherit the kingdom of God. (I Cor. 6:9-10 NIV) There’s the whole scene in a nutshell. People will try to deceive us. That’s exactly what is going on in the article I cited about the Episcopalian. The priest was trying to deceive you and me and everybody else that homosexuality is alright because he enjoys it and it makes him feel close to another person. He makes it sound like an act of kindness and love. Whatever he feels, God calls it wickedness and God is our judge.
“People” magazine may present their featured couple as ordinary folks but to God they are “lawbreakers and rebels.. .perverts” right in the same category as “those who kill their fathers or mothers…slave traders and liars and perjurers.” (I Tim. 1:9-10 NIV) I can’t stress the point strongly enough — we are dealing with God in this issue; don’t be deceived by what man says.
You may wonder why God is so hard on homosexual conduct. What’s so bad about two men or two women loving each other, arousing basic pleasures in each other and enjoying responses God has built into our bodies? Whether we can see the reason or not is totally irrelevant ifwe want to please God. His word is crystal clear. But consider this: sex and all the pleasures that go with it are part of the procreative process. The result is children, the fruit of our bodies, the continuance of the race. The homosexual relationship is utterly fruitless. If all indulged in it, the race would end.
Consider, too, the physical structure of human beings. Man and woman complement each other while man and man, or woman and woman is in conflict with the very way we are physically designed.
Yes, God has built certain pleasures into our bodies but they are to be used in a prescribed manner, according to His principles. Homosexuality is a flagrant rejection of the most basic of these principles.
Hopefully, we will keep our thinking straight in the midst of a society that is quickly sinking into a morass of wickedness. Let us avoid evil and serve God acceptably in holiness and truth.
Much love,
Dad
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One