One of the greatest of today’s apologists is Dr.
Voddie Baucham. I’ve always believed in
using logical response to questions by unbeliever in evangelism; and nobody
does it better than he.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother
and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And they were both
naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
It is clear here that marriage is a relationship between two
corresponding halves of humanity—men and women. And it is within the context of
families that procreate. And the phrase
“one flesh” suggests a corresponding complementary makeup of the two who are to
unite—which men and women have, physically. It is clear, biologically, how men
and women are to unite to form “one flesh.”
And how that bears favorable fruit.
All you have to do is look at them and you get a pretty good clue. Then, several months later, you get a bonus
clue that says, “Yep. That was how it
was supposed to happen.”
This argument against homosexuals from Genesis is also an argument
against those (pastors) who say that Genesis, being in the Old Testament, is
not that important. They think that origins—arguments
over whether there were six literal days of creation, or whether there was a literal
Adam and Eve, etc—are not worth getting heated up over; they say that What
Matters is Just the Cross!”
Dr. Baucham counters “Well, Who died on the Cross?” Let’s hear what Jesus says about
homosexuality. (Yes, He does speak on
this issue, despite arguments we hear otherwise. But you need a deeper knowledge of Scripture
to see that.) Matthew 19:3-6:
The
Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, “Is it lawful for a
man to divorce his wife for just any
reason?” 4 And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at
the beginning ‘made them
male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall
leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has
joined together, let not man separate.”
Thus, Jesus’ teaching on divorce is rooted on His
understanding of Genesis. He is asserting
these were real events--He believes in a literal reading of these texts.
(“Literal” reading is when the Bible reads like history, you believe it as
written—i.e., Adam was real, not a moral tale or allegory). (Thus, Jesus derives a second area of sin
from Genesis, divorce. Let nobody tell
you to ignore the Old Testament.)
Further, from Genesis we learn the three-fold purpose
of marriage: procreation, illustration, and sanctification.
Further on procreation; they are
told to “be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.” Adam can’t do that alone. Regarding
illustration: The family--father,
mother, and child--are a picture of the Triune God. (We are not suggesting the
gender of the Holy Spirit has to be feminine—the correlation is not intended to
go that far. Nor are we suggesting that
if a man and woman cannot bear a child, that they’re not a family). There is also Christ and His bride, the
church, a Groom and a Virgin Bride. Regarding
sanctification: there is a holiness in
their marriage. For example, here, they were naked but unashamed. (Paul has a
few additional things to say about marriage on the subject of avoiding
temptation for sanctification, but Dr. Baucham doesn’t cover that).
Homosexuality is a violation of the created order.
Male and female were made for each other, physically. Secondly, it denounces procreation
categorically. God designed male and
female to give birth, raise, rear, and protect children. Thirdly, it blasphemes
the illustration. Christ and His male bride? No way. Finally, on sanctification: it takes what God calls sinful and an “abomination”
(a term used for the most sinful of sins--elsewhere in Scripture you’ll find
that term) and some want to call it righteous. Homosexuality is so evil that it
is the only sin that God destroys cities with fire and brimstone in historical Scripture.
An unbiased reading of Genesis 18 and 19 cannot deny that.
Let’s talk about Education’s role. Arne Duncan is Pres. Biden’s Secretary of
Education. His resume is ‘sterling,’ as
you shall see: Right after his term as
Secretary of Education in Illinois, 83% of 8th graders couldn’t read
at grade level; 87% couldn’t do Math at grade level; 77% couldn’t write at
grade level; and 84% couldn’t do Science at grade level! He did this by
spending a ‘modest’ $10,555 per student.
The residents of Illinois paid that, including home schooling
parents. The media, and the teacher’s
unions, complain that they could do better with more money, that they’re
underpaid. He says, “No, that’s not the
reason. Home schooled students outperform both public and private students, and
their parents spend an average of $600 per year per student.”
Since Duncan clearly lacks skills for the job, why was
he Biden’s pick? Because he was also
innovative. He started Chicago’s
Annenberg Challenge, a Marxist
program. Bill Ayers (background: A co-founder of Weather Underground, a
militant activist group in the 1960s, for those who can remember those bad old
days; described as a terrorist group by the FBI; a self-described communist
revolutionary group that bombed public buildings, including police stations,
the U.S. Capitol, and the Pentagon. He
kept out of prison on a technicality)
and Barack Obama (former president, but who aroused controversy in 2008
over his connections with Ayers in those days) served together on the board of
the Annenberg Challenge in Illinois. Duncan
also endorsed establishing the Chicago social justice high schools’ Pride
campus, a gay campus that promoted and reinforced the sodomite lifestyle.
Education was also blessed with Kevin Jennings—a
founder of the Gay-Lesbian-Straight Education Network. His goal was to have Gay-Straight Alliance in
every school in America. As of right
now, virtually every school district has Gay-Straight Alliances in them. He also introduced a program called Safe
Schools (SS), which supposedly has an anti-bullying curriculum. But in reality, it is a pro-homosexual
curriculum designed to indoctrinate school children toward the homosexual
lifestyle.
It so happens that Education Secretary Duncan brought
Jennings to Washington to be the Safe Schools czar—to federalize (i.e.,
requirement for all schools) his SS, pro-homosexual curriculum.
Dr. Baucham then considers the gay argument that “this
is the way we were made; morals have nothing to do with that.” He argues that, even if that were the case. morals
would still have to be considered. If I
had a genetic predisposition for drunkenness, does that make it OK to drive
drunk? No! You may kill someone—a moral issue. A police
officer won’t let you off by playing the “genetic predisposition” card.
The gay sympathizers claim 1 in 10, or 10%, of people
are born gay. This number only has Kinsey
research to back it, but Kinsey’s research has been debunked and is known to be
unreliable. The most widely respected
survey is from the National Health and Social Life. Their numbers: 2.8% of males, and 1.4% of females, are
reported as having same-sex preference.
Pro-gay activists include gay activists, black civil
rights leaders (it’s hard to verbally accost a black person as being “you are just
a bigot, a racist bigot.”), some business and political leaders, and
unfortunately religious leaders. Their
leaders never fail to obey the saying, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” In 1989 in a book, After The Ball, outlining
their strategies, they coldly sized up the AIDS epidemic and said, “As cynical
though it seems, AIDS gives us a chance to establish ourselves as a victimized
minority, legitimately deserving America’s special protection and care.” Then they asked, “How can we maximize the
sympathy and minimize the fear?” They
called for “unabashed propaganda firmly grounded in long-established principles
of psychology and advertising.” Shamelessly, they recognize that propaganda
relies on three things: emotional manipulation;
lies; and it is subjective and one-sided.
This is what they wanted to use on the public—and they certainly have
done it, as we shall soon see. For their
media campaign, they outlined three strategies:
desensitizing, jamming, and conversion. (By the way, these are the exact
steps to brainwashing.)
For desensitizing, they would inundate us in a flood
of gay-related advertising, presenting gays in the least offensive way
possible. They also want us to hear from
outed movie and TV stars, and especially athletes. In the movies, the homosexual character is
always the best-dressed, or most intelligent, or wittiest, etc.
In jamming, they are taking two contradictory images
and jamming them together. (I.e., what
we think a gay person is like, vs. Michael Sam, healthy, rich athlete, and
happy). In doing this, they want to portray anti-gay institutions as backwards
and out-of-step with the culture and with the “findings” of modern psychology. One way gays make Christians look like bigots
is portraying, with national news, when Michael Sam, a pro basketball player,
“came out.” President Obama even congratulated him. (Ed. Note: Let’s think again about how vile
and blasphemous sodomy is—so we ask, where is our country that our president
feels he won’t endanger his credibility by congratulating a sodomite?) Another idea is, everyone hates the Nazis,
skinheads, and KKK. Racist, every one.
So what you do is, you portray people who are opposed to same-sex
marriage as being akin to Nazis, skinheads, and KKK. Their leaders say this every occasion they can. After
a while, we look bigoted and racist.
This jamming works on most of us, and we back off our opposition. Now we
are more “moderate” if we even complain.
We mutter or don’t speak about it.
If we get emotional, we “need” to apologize. This is why when a pastor deals with this
issue, he spends a good deal of time apologizing and choosing his words rather
than stating the offense against God.
Imagine this from a pastor on a Sunday morning: “Now church, we are going to address the
issue of adultery, but I don’t want you to be alarmed. I’m not here to bash adulterers; I love
adulterers, Jesus loves adulterers, I have friends who are adulterers, and I
believe that our church needs to be open and accepting towards adulterers”…You
see what I’m saying? But every time a pastor goes to speak on homosexuality, we
expect that to be upfront. Why? Because
we’ve been jammed. That’s why the most
onerous sin we can imagine has us apologizing for repeating what God said.
Homosexuals assert “That’s how people are born,
right?” Truth is, none of the studies
has proven a genetic connection to homosexuality. So how do you know a person
is homosexual—only if they tell you. There is no way to prove it otherwise. We
just assume that it is. We don’t even
question someone who says, “I just knew, even as a little boy (or girl) that I
was homosexual.” Folks, that’s not
true. When they were that young, they
weren’t even sexualized; they didn’t know any of that. Boys playing with dolls doesn’t mean they’re
homosexual. He can’t assert that.
On conversion, gays want us to change our minds: they want us to like them. They hate the idea Christians express: “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.” That’s not good enough, because you’re still
calling it sin—and they can’t abide that.
They hope the media and the schools will bring us around. But in doing so, we would be abandoning what
God has explicitly told us. One of their
expert says, “Since it’s genetic, it’s not like saying, “Tomorrow morning I’m
going to stop being gay.” That’s like saying, “Tomorrow morning I’m going to
stop being black.” So they say.
Listen to what Brian McLaren says about homosexuality
(I covered his beliefs in my “Emerging Church” blog): “Perhaps we need a 5-year moratorium on
making decrees of judgement. In the
meantime, we’ll practice prayerful Christian dialogue, listening respectfully,
disagreeing agreeably…we’ll keep our ears attuned to scholars…..etc ad
nauseum…so we can patiently wait for the wind of the Spirit to set our course;
because you know, it’s just not clear in the Bible.” Not clear?
Here is another element of their strategy; it’s called
an ad
hominem argument, that is, against the man. It’s what they do when
they’re losing the debate. They can’t make a logical argument, so they make an
argument against you. This is like how kids argue. They start losing the argument, so they go
“well….well…so you ugly.” That means I
got nothing left, OK? Listen this from Rep. Barney Frank: “I wouldn’t want the homosexual marriage
issue to go to the U.S. Supreme Court now, because that homophobe Antonin
Scalia has too many votes on this current Court.” He’s saying this about a sitting Justice! Do
you notice that it’s not your opinion that’s wrong, it’s you; you ARE
intolerant, you ARE a homophobe—it’s your character. You as a person have been judged, not your
opinion. They always use ad hominem attacks. “You as a person don’t deserve to
be in this discussion.”
They say homosexuality is as immutable as
ethnicity. That’s not true. Look at I Corinthians 6:9-11:
Do
you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not
be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals,
nor sodomites, 10 nor
thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will
inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And
such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified,
but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our
God.
That’s 2000-year old evidence that people stopped
being homosexual!
Gays argue that they are discriminated against in
marriage, in having children, etc. But
the word “discriminated” has a broader meaning, some of it good. We want our daughters to be discriminatory
when she seeks a man to date, and ultimately to marry, right? Actually, all laws are discriminatory; i.e.,
it treats everyone the same in a category that it favors, and equally to those categories
it does not favor. Remember, that’s what we want our daughters to do, right?
Take this statement from the marriage covenant, “When two people.” Start with “when.” That means we discriminate against all 13-year
olds equally. “When two.” We discriminate against polygamy and
polyamory, “When two people.” We
discriminate against bestiality and zooerasty (I’ll let you look that up). And so on.
So even the premise of their argument is out the window, since we make and
have laws that discriminate--as you can see above, for good reason.
All that works, at least, until the public, having
been sufficiently desensitized, jammed, and been—well, partially—converted,
change how we feel about homosexuals.
(Ed. note: Now I worry about
polygamy, pedophilia, or bestiality being their next goal. God help us.)
Now to the last discussion point. Apologetics.
First, we need to stop being back on our heels—we have God’s Truth on
our side. We don’t need to mutter our
objections, nor stick to “moderation.”
Remember, that’s lukewarmness—which God doesn’t speak kindly of in
Revelation 3. Oh, yes, prepare for the
ad hominem arguments. You’ll be
slandered. Expect persecution, but
endure, the only sure way to heaven.
Make your life pleasing to God, not your fellow fallen man. Truly hate the things of the world—including
those things in you. Fear,
embarrassment. And we also have logic on
our side. We need to understand that the
other side doesn’t care about truth—but that does not stop us from making our
Scriptural arguments.
They will use the genetic fallacy argument—i.e.,
rejecting logic because of where it came from—that is, from Christians. They
say, “You can’t bring the Bible to bear on this argument, because you can’t
force your religious beliefs on other people.” Thus they believe that religion
has no listenable place in our society. I reject that premise. Secondly, while you don’t want to accept
religion, you are trying to force your non-Bible religious beliefs on me, and
feel that you should be listened to, while I don’t have that privilege. I
reject that premise. Thirdly, you’re arguing that I should be loving and kind
toward you, which you get from my Bible, which you don’t acknowledge. As you
can see, that dog don’t hunt.
Last item. They
complain about how we “pick and choose” from Leviticus, especially. We often quote Lev. 18:22 to them:
You shall not lie with a male as
with a woman. It is an
abomination.
But then there are strange things in Leviticus which
we ignore, like how it’s also an abomination to eat shellfish (Ch. 11), or how
it’s unlawful to clip off the edges of your beard (Ch. 19), and not to sow
different seeds in a field (also Ch 19).
Well, let me help you. First,
Christians could argue that “also in Leviticus 18 is the proper way to treat
your neighbor, which is what you want me to do, right? So who’s “picking and choosing,” huh? You like part of Leviticus 18, but not
another part. Actually, this is just
like I am. But the difference is, I know
why I’m picking and choosing. There are
3 types of laws in the Bible. There is moral law, which is forever binding on
all people in all time. We have this
summarized in the Ten Commandments.
Secondly, there is civil law—they were for the nation of Israel, in the
ancient Near East. These laws expired
with the nation then, but they are still of general equity because they were
based on the moral law. Thirdly, we had
the ceremonial laws, which were defined to do two things: to identify Israel as God’s unique and
different people, worshipping Him uniquely in their context—and also to point
forward to the Person and work of Christ.
So when you talk about cutting the edge of the beard, that’s ceremonial
law, and intended to show that Israel was different, and not like the nations
around them. Yes, dietary and civil laws also were not like other nations. (Actually, their civil laws were far better
than most). Many of our own laws, like negligent homicide, (the ox that gores
in Leviticus) were based on Jewish laws.
(We called them Judeo-Christian laws, citing their source).
So the reason I “pick and choose” from the Old
Testament, is because New Testament writers did that, and because while Christ
has come, and we are under the New Covenant, He has fulfilled the whole law,
and He enables me to keep the moral law.
The moral law is still operable.
So if I understand how the Bible was written, and I use the Old
Testament carefully, I’m not picking and choosing what I like—which is the
opposite of you, friend. Tell me why you
get to pick and choose from the Bible, since you don’t know why, or how, you
just pick what you like. What’s better
for our society—people who just pick what law they want, and violate laws they
don’t like; or people that understand and are subject to a law that’s higher
than themselves; people that are willing to obey and submit to it. You
answer that and then we can go back to our discussion on same-sex marriage.
We haven’t covered all the Biblical points on
homosexuality, but I have given you tools to fight with. God be with you.
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