What is the Biblical View of Homosexuality?

 

By Rev. D. Earl Cripe, Ph.D.

 

The Old Testament View

In the Book of Leviticus 18:22, God said:  "Thou shalt not lie with a mankind as with a womankind:  it is an abomination."  He adds to that in chapter 20 and verse 13 by saying:  "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."  Here God says that they are responsible for their own deaths.  The vile and abominable thing they have done is what has brought this execution upon them.  The idea of a victimless crime was ludicrous to God, and to the ancients of Israel.  This corrupt behavior threatened the decency, the domesticities and the health of everyone in Israel.

 

In Deuteronomy 23:17, God further clarified this by saying:  "there shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel."   In I Kings 14:21-24, we are told that Rehoboam, Solomon's son, ruled in Judah.  He was not a good king.  Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord during his reign, provoking God to anger with their abominations.  In verse 24 it says:  "And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel."  In chapter 15, Asa (one of the few good and Godly kings that Israel ever had) came to power.  Verses 11 and 12 say:  "And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the Lord, as did David his father.  And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made."

 

The Biblical View of Tolerant Societies and Leaders

In Leviticus 22, the virtues of Jehoshaphat are being extolled.  He was a mighty king, righteous and totally intolerant of evil in the land.  In verse 46 we read:  "And the remnant of sodomites, which remained in the days of his father Asa, he took out of the land."   The attitude of God, and of righteous and decent people, was unarguably clear on this matter.  Homosexuality was a vile abomination that brought the anger and the judgment of God.  To fail to rid the country of these sodomites was a great sin.  Completely eliminating them from the land was the only way to restore health, moral and ethical sanity, and the blessing of God.

 

The New Testament View

The Biblical philosophy with respect to this matter (if you want to call it that), is explained for us in Romans 1.  In verse 18, St. Paul says that God’s wrath falls from heaven upon the evil behavior of men who have a contemptuous attitude toward God’s law, and righteous behavior as described by that law.

 

Why do these people claim that the truth is actually unrighteous?   The reason, according to verses 21 and 22, is that they are resentful of God, they are filled with self-pride, they are haughty and they want to take the credit for having created the universe.  These theories are the works of men who have lost all light in their minds concerning truth and reality.  This happened to them because they did not want the knowledge of God in their minds.  As a result, God withdrew Himself from their minds.

 

Can Normal People Be Homosexuals?

Many sins, such as belief in evolution, and the rejection of the authority of husbands, fathers and even God Himself are discussed.  Verse 24 tells us this:  "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lust of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves."

 

The unskillful person might wonder how and why the subject of "their own bodies" got involved in this all of a sudden, and whether or not it really belongs here.   The answer is that it does, and I want to explain to you how and why.

 

What Causes Homosexuality?

One of the ways in which one might identify what we have just described from the Romans passage is this:   It is showing how man lapsed into a kind of spiritual and ethical homosexuality.   That is to say that in the original creation, man was heterosexual in all respects, and could only survive so long as he remained that way.  It was only in his interacting with God that he could sustain and propagate life.  Man was in the image of God (though he was not God), just as woman is in the image of man (though she is not man, she is woman).  Every nature was commanded to take after its own kind.   If man had not been God's own kind, he could not have intercoursed with God.  But that did not mean that since man was in the image of God, he could forget God and intercourse with himself just as well on a spiritual and intellectual level.  But in fact, this was the choice that Adam and Eve made in the Garden.  They decided they could go it on their own, without intercourse with God.  The decision to go it alone, to follow the leading of their own finite minds, to not only leave God out of it, but to defy God (since they though that they would have a better life and find more meaningful things without Him) brought death and the loss of purpose and fulfillment.  In their place came pain, sorrow, weariness, fear and eventually death.

 

Spiritual Homosexuality Precedes the Physical

In this sense, the human race becomes spiritually and ethically homosexual.  They are intercoursing with themselves, not with God.  But man, being tri-partite - that is to say, in three parts, which are body, soul and spirit - cannot separate his spiritual life from his social and physical life in terms of philosophy and principle.  It is at this point that man’s moral and domestic values begin to go, and with it, his chance for a happy home and a fulfilled life.  He now becomes permissive, adulterous and dishonest.  It is only reverence for God and His laws that cause him to be a pure person, a faithful husband or wife, and a considerate neighbor.  When he loses that reverence and fear, his life begins to fall apart.  Now the decent into the depths of the homosexual mentality has begun.  Man does not think that his rebellion will affect his heterosexuality.  He thinks he will stop with rebelling against the truth concerning God, and with slipping around with another woman.  But once God gives him up, there is no good force in his life to stop him.  The philosophy that we can live and reproduce ourselves without a wholesome intercourse with God, impacts the whole of our being.  In this fallen condition, we have no control over the evil forces that drag us down.

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Sadly, the descent into the immoral and blasphemous abyss doesn't stop with infidelity.  For those who have deliberately changed the truth into a lie, and worshipped evolution, or other forms of spiritual homosexuality (creation by the creature rather than the Creator Rom 1:25), we see how this spiritual homosexuality develops physically in the human race:  "For this cause God gave them over to vile affections:  for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:  and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet." (Rom 1:26-27)  So we see that the finished product of rebellion against God, which is all one in the same with spiritual homosexuality, is physical homosexuality.  This is the hallmark of a society that has reached the depths of depravity.  This is also the inevitable end of the philosophy of human autonomy - that man is a sovereign being who answers to no one, not even to God, and that it is right for him to do whatever he wants to do without respect to any absolute laws concerning right or wrong.

 

At first it only affected our attitudes towards church and governmental leaders.  Soon it began to influence our heterosexual moral values.  Now, finally and inevitably, it has led to physical homosexuality as the ultimate expression of rebellion against God.  And this is in fact - make no mistake about it - what homosexuality is: the ultimate rejection of God and His laws, and the goodness, sanity and decency that goes with them; even down to the rejection of and refusal to conform to the most basic concepts of what life is, and was intended to be.  It is a rebellion against our very nature.  “They rejected the natural use,” St. Paul says in verse 26, and began to do those things which are contrary to nature. 

 

Physical homosexuality is the wickedest of all of man's sins.  Bestiality (which usually follows homosexuality in a society and is beginning now to make its appearance in television advertising) is more insane, and is a further-out way of expressing rebellion and non-conformity.  But it is not as fundamentally wicked as sodomy and lesbianism.

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Can Our Civilization Survive This Moral Malaise?

These trends in society tell us that our civilization is on an irreversible skid into oblivion.  No civilization in the history of the world has ever survived the three symptoms that now characterize ours:  Anarchy, blasphemy and homosexuality. 

 

But God created us.  He has control over us in the ultimate sense, why does He let this happen?  The answer is found in verse 28, which says:  "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not convenient."

 

The Insanity, Abnormality and Deviation of Homosexuality

You can't be a homosexual or a lesbian and be normal.  Your mind has to go haywire.  You have to be subnormal - mentally deranged.  You can't think like a human being, or even like a normal animal, you have to think like the devil.  You have to sink to the depths of the pit, morally, spiritually and intellectually.  And so God took His hand off of them, because that is what they wanted, and gave them over to a reprobate mind.  Reprobate means devoid of reason and judgment.  It means abnormal and subnormal.  It means depraved.

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So now you have a Biblical picture of what sodomy is, and why God, in order to preserve the race long enough to save it, went to destroy the city of Sodom.

 

It is Inevitable That Offenses Must Come, But Woe Unto Those by Whose Hand They Come  

The so-called gay (a hideous corruption of a once happy word) and lesbian community, which by their own admission includes the woman's liberation movement, is not a legitimate minority or a legitimate anything else.  They are a bunch of disease-ridden rats that should have been exterminated from society long ago.  When those who bear the sword, given to them by God for the express purpose of the punishment of evil doers (i.e. the rightful governmental authorities), fail to carry out their divine appointment (Rom 13:1-5), because they can not, will not, or are not allowed to by legislators who are failing their mission, or by judges who pervert justice and make a mockery of their profession, all of society suffers.

 

God’s Point of View ©2010