Tag Archives: homosexuality

John Piper and Russell Moore on Recent Supreme Court Ruling

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Also yesterday, John Piper posted this very pastoral and biblical response.

Jesus died so that heterosexual and homosexual sinners might be saved. Jesus created sexuality, and has a clear will for how it is to be experienced in holiness and joy.

His will is that a man might leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and that the two become one flesh (Mark 10:6–9). In this union, sexuality finds its God-appointed meaning, whether in personal-physical unification, symbolic representation, sensual jubilation, or fruitful procreation.

For those who have forsaken God’s path of sexual fulfillment, and walked into homosexual intercourse or heterosexual extramarital fornication or adultery, Jesus offers astonishing mercy.

Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)

But today this salvation from sinful sexual acts was not embraced. Instead there was massive institutionalization of sin.

In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States of America has ruled that states cannot ban same-sex marriage.

The Bible is not silent about such decisions. Alongside its clearest explanation of the sin of homosexual intercourse (Romans 1:24–27) stands the indictment of the approval and institutionalization of it. Though people know intuitively that homosexual acts (along with gossip, slander, insolence, haughtiness, boasting, faithlessness, heartlessness, ruthlessness) are sin, “they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:29–32). “I tell you even with tears, that many glory in their shame” (Philippians 3:18–19).

This is what the highest court in our land did today — knowing these deeds are wrong, “yet approving those who practice them.”

My sense is that we do not realize what a calamity is happening around us. The new thing — new for America, and new for history — is not homosexuality. That brokenness has been here since we were all broken in the fall of man. (And there is a great distinction between the orientation and the act — just like there is a great difference between my orientation to pride and the act of boasting.)

What’s new is not even the celebration and approval of homosexual sin. Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia. What’s new is normalization and institutionalization. This is the new calamity.

My main reason for writing is not to mount a political counter-assault. I don’t think that is the calling of the church as such. My reason for writing is to help the church feel the sorrow of these days. And the magnitude of the assault on God and his image in man.

Christians, more clearly than others, can see the tidal wave of pain that is on the way. Sin carries in it its own misery: “Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:27).

And on top of sin’s self-destructive power comes, eventually, the final wrath of God: “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming” (Colossians 3:5–6).

Christians know what is coming, not only because we see it in the Bible, but because we have tasted the sorrowful fruit of our own sins. We do not escape the truth that we reap what we sow. Our marriages, our children, our churches, our institutions — they are all troubled because of our sins.

The difference is: We weep over our sins. We don’t celebrate them. We don’t institutionalize them. We turn to Jesus for forgiveness and help. We cry to Jesus, “who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10).

And in our best moments, we weep for the world, and for our own nation. In the days of Ezekiel, God put a mark of hope “on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in Jerusalem” (Ezekiel 9:4).

This is what I am writing for. Not political action, but love for the name of God and compassion for the city of destruction.

“My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law.” (Psalm 119:136)

Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything

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That’s the title to Robert R. Reilly’s new book which I just received from amazon, put out by Ignatius Press. I won’t list Reilly’s credentials – they are off-the-chart impressive! But whenever you use the phrase, “everyone should read this,” you better mean it because if you use it too much it won’t come with the earnestness you intended. So with great reservation, I am saying, “everyone should read this”  – and I do mean everyone. Here is the inside jacket write-up:

“Why are Americans being forced to consider homosexual acts as morally acceptable? Why has the US Supreme Court accepted the validity of same-sex “marriage”, which until a decade ago, was unheard of in the history of Western or any other civilization? Where has the “gay rights” movement come from, and how has it so easily conquered America?

The answers are in the dynamics of the rationalization of sexual misbehavior. The power of rationalization – the means by which one mentally transforms wrong into right – drives the gay rights movement, gives it its revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest because the security of its rationalization requires universal acceptance. In other words, we all must say that the bad is good.

At stake in the rationalization of homosexual behavior is the notion that human beings are ordered to a purpose that is given by their Nature. The understanding that things have an in-built purpose is being replaced by the idea that everything is subject to man’s will and power, which is considered to be without limits. This is what the debate over homosexuality is really about – the Nature of reality itself.

The outcome of this dispute will have consequences that reach far beyond the issue at hand. Already America’s major institutions have been transformed – its courts, its schools, its military, its civic institutions, and even its diplomacy. The further institutionalization of homosexuality will mean the triumph of force over reason, thus undermining the very foundations of the American Republic.”

And as an example of what you will read, consider chapter six, “Inventing Morality,” on page 79 where Reilly is talking about court cases and comes to the case, Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. This case was challenging a Pennsylvania law that said a woman wanting an abortion had to notify (not gain consent, just notify) the father. The Court struck the law down as a violation of the woman’s right. This is an example of the domino effect of cultural “force over reason,” and the change of reality itself from “good to bad.”  Reilly then says:

“In other words, a father might act to save the life of his child, which would be an infringement on the mother’s right to kill the child. This decision represents a reversal of the wisdom of Solomon’s famous judgment in the Old Testament, in which he discovered that the real parent was the one who was willing to forsake her child in order to save his life. For the Supreme Court, the real parent is no longer the one who wishes to preserve the life of the child, but the one who is willing to take it.”

This is what this unprecedented debate is all about – it is about changing the very meanings of good and bad, right and wrong, for all of us. But know this: if you are intolerant of the gay rights agenda in any way, you are bad and you will not be tolerated – you will be silenced and punished . . . and the day is coming . . . Marshall Law and imprisonment . . . the end of a free society . . . the end.

Read the book.