Statement on Homosexuality Voted at Annual Meeting of Adventist Governing Body
Updated, November 3, 2015: Two papers centered on the topic of homosexuality were discussed at the annual meeting of the North American Division (NAD) of the Adventist denomination. Dr. Jiří Moskala, dean of the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University, summarized a paper submitted by the seminary faculty entitled “An Understanding of the Biblical View on Homosexual Practice and Pastoral Care” [BVHPPC].
Following that, the committee began discussion of a proposed “Statement on Human Sexuality” [NADSHS]. This paper echoes the themes and recommendations of the seminary study. The NAD paper was drafted by Pastor Kyoshin Ahn, Dr. Larry Blackmer, Pastor Claudio Consuegra, Pastor Marcus Harris, Dr. Heather Knight, Grace Mackintosh, Pastor Alan Parker, Katia Reinert and Dr. Gerald Winslow. On Tuesday, November 3, after some changes had been made and considerable discussion, the statement was voted.
Both papers condemn homosexual activity and endorse sexual relationships only in the context of marriage. However, for a church that has long struggled about how to deal with homosexual people, the insights and recommendations are significant.
First, both make a clear distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual practice. “Given the complexities of the fallen human condition, we recognize that individuals may experience same-sex orientation through no choice of their own.” The documents avoid the question of why people are homosexual—we do “not presume to have settled the scientific and social questions regarding the cause of non-heterosexual orientation” [NADSHS].
Second, both clearly affirm a place in the church for people of homosexual orientation. “Those with same-sex orientation who conform to biblical teachings about sexual behavior may fully participate in the life of the Adventist Church” [NADSHS].
Third, both counsel churches and pastors that they must provide a church home and pastoral care for people who are homosexuals. “All persons, including practicing homosexuals, should be made to feel welcome to attend our churches while non-practicing gay persons should be welcomed into membership and church office. All should receive spiritual care from the Church (Gal. 6:1)” [BVHPPC]. “The church must provide freedom and protection from social marginalization” [NADSHS].
The titles of the two papers were somewhat out of sync with their contents. The seminary paper’s [BVHPPC] title says it addresses homosexual practice; however, it covers a much broader discussion of sexual sins, including heterosexual ones. Conversely, the “Statement on Human Sexuality” focuses almost exclusively on homosexuality, referencing other sexual sins only in passing.
Click the titles below to access each of the documents referenced in this article:
Were there any psychiatrists, psychologists, or other mental health therapists there who have had experience with homosexuals? Not recognizing all the names, what were their particular experience in addressing these topics? Theory only goes so far, while practical experience is much more valuable. Also, did any of the members of this committee have a child or close relative who is gay?
So many unanswered questions. It’s a committee of very straight religious fundamentalists discussing a subject that is very poorly understood, yet making important decisions about it.
It’s a committee of very straight religious fundamentalists discussing a subject that is very poorly understood, yet making important decisions about it.
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Let’s hope not Elaine. That’s the standard approach in the past but let’s hope not.
I think the church will change, but again, not on its own.
I think the pressures of secular culture and education will finally crack the grip of prejudice in the church.
Only then will the church be able to figure out how to minister practically and exactly what the church’s stance on sexuality costs LGBT people and how much of that cost the church is willing to bear alongside them (that “bear one another’s burdens” thing).
Sexual orientation my be impacted by the hormonal content of the prenatal fluid, i.e. the estrogen/testosterone, i.e. prior to birth.
Wes Blevins
ATT, it seems that in matters controversial our Church has never or hardly ever taken the lead to be an example of hope or change! Look at the racial segregation issue back in the 60s, our Church, instead of taking the lead was forced by the government to accept black students, but there was still and STILL is segregation in our churches in the Southern states of the USA! Also it was after our schools began accepting government grants for research that, again the government had to force then to accept black professors. It would have been such a great witness had our Church lead the world every time, but sad to say here we are again! And it’s true that unless the people on this committee are personally familiar because of a child or other family member in or used to be in the lifestyle in question, they will not be fit to be on such a committee!!!
Hi Elaine, there is no such thing as a gay child. Surely such a label threatens to damage our children.
Donovan,
But should there be happy children? Who has labeled a child before puberty as gay? A few children at an early age have said that they feel like the other sex. Who is to doubt another’s personal experience and deny it?
Yes, many have denied it; even homosexuals have tried to deny and live a lie. But the costs are enormous. Those who have finally confessed that they have always been a homosexual yet married, had children, all the while living devoid of personal integrity. When they finally admit to themselves and the world, there is a tremendous relief. But think of all the troubles left behind in trying to behave as the church wanted!
Unless you are also gay, you cannot fully understand the meaning of “outcast” in one’s own church (they are often “cast out”).
Elaine,
What of the cost if the bible is true and it is unrighteous for a man to lay with a man as with a woman?
The Cost is enormous indeed if is true that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.
In this life we have struggles, should we not hold fast and trust the word of God?
Yes, true empathy can only be achieved when one has experienced what the other is going through. No one can judge unless you have walked in their shoes.
Of course there are both gay and straight children.
Any teenage boy or girl would tell you that.
Children have no sexuality? Did your sexuality only awaken after you were married?
I am not defined by my sexuality. Nor do I believe that we should label children according to sexual urges. Children especially can be confused about their sexual urges as they develop. Why label children as gay?
Is it not a choice for a man to lay with a man as with a woman?
Donovan,
If you do not want others to define you by your sexuality, then the Golden Rule (remember, it’s in both testaments) should be followed that you also not define others by their sexuality.
Hopefully, it is your choice to lay with a woman (assuming you are a male). It is always a choice, excepting rape, that there is mutual consent prior to sexual activity with anyone, including your mate.
If you have teenaged sons they’d be highly offended if you told them they’re not straight and that it’s too soon to know if they really like girls or not.
By the way, I think it’s good advice to tell LGBT kids not to feel forced to identify with any description if they don’t want to.
I am not in agreement with the idea that calling kids gay makes them choose to be gay (not that you’re saying this).
Of course there are no gay children: just children whose innocence has been ripped from them by evil adults: permissive parents and perverted others and vice versa. This is where the church loses its hold on God, refuses to accept the straight “Thus saith the Lord”, forgets Jesus’ dire warnings concerning the hurting of children, where its leaders assume an attitude of self-righteousness and for their own gain, mislead the church of God.
Then they make God out to be a liar and a dissembler. But be warned: God is not mocked and you will sow what you reap. The seriousness of waylaying the gospel of Christ and making him out to be one who favours sin will come back to seriously haunt this church. I will not make this a Bible study, for those who are leading others astray are doing it in the full knowledge that they are doing the devil’s work.
What damages gay kids is trying to tell them they aren’t gay, or that they can be cured with orientation change therapy. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I can clearly look backwards over my life and see that I was gay at an early age.
Elaine,
This is a thorny topic because of the polarization of viewpoints. On the one hand you have the LGBT community’s vigorous social and legal defense of their “lifestyle choices.” On the other hand you have the religious fundamentalists who condemn from a behavior-focused view of sin. The arguments between these two groups dominate public discourse on the topic.
Then you have a small group hiding in one corner who have discovered the redeeming power of God, but whose attempts to be heard and show people the power of God at work in their lives and changing them. Right now this group is the object of great scorn from both of the other groups because their experience illustrates the falsehoods held by the others as orthodoxy. I have three friends whom God has redeemed from homosexuality and whose testimony is helping others be redeemed. But they must minister discretely because of how venemously and even violently they will be attacked by both of the other groups if they were to be identified publicly. I find that very revealing about the nature of the dominant viewpoints.
God’s power is not a secret.
William,
You have just given the reason that many LBGT folk do not attend the church:
“because of how venemously and even violently they will be attacked by both of the other groups if they were to be identified publicly.”
Why would anyone put himself in that position, begging for welcome or acceptance? Why pretend to “minister” to them when the church has many members who need pastoral concern and counseling for broken marriages–a much more common problem? Both these need to be referred to expert counseling by psychologial practitioners or marriage counselors. According to the Seminary professors, they are totally unprepared for this, so why should their graduates have training in this area?
Both the church and those who are LBGT are merely tilting at windmills if they believe there is a “cure.” Maybe there will be when the many more members are “cured” of their heterosexual nature (or is it their choice?).
For those who are straight and they fool around with gays or become gay because of a gay experience, then for them I have reservations. But if a person was born gay and never had straight tendencies, then if they were born this way, and there is no cure, what does God do with them? How fair would it be for them to be condemned by God who created them to be this way? The absurdity of it all!
I can’t see how God can condemn these; moreover, how will God justify his condemnation to the saints? Isn’t the thousand years with Christ a time where the saints review the books on how God was just and fair in his decisions for who stays and who goes?
Well, said William.
William Noel,
As to your three friends who have been “redeemed” from their homosexuality:
Are you proclaiming that they are celibate,
or are you stating they have become heterosexual?
If the latter, are they entirely free of same sex attraction?
Do they get spontaneous erections when they see an attractive sexy woman?
This is the ultimate test. The penis does not lie!
The plethora of advertisements for viagra and cialis indicates widespread waning sexual
desire/performance in middle aged men.
Indeed from our thirties onwards, testosterone serum levels diminish
So many of these “redeemed” homosexuals, sow their “wild oats” for decades
and then proclaim “redemption” when sexual potency and desire decline.
They then pretentiously pontificate their views to teenage gays
who are at the height of their sexual desire.
Only a SADISTIC god would make teenage boys gay, bestow the same
hormonal levels on them as their straight brothers and cousins, then demand celibacy.
The life long LONEINESS demanded of gays/lesbians is presumptuous and cruel.
It is like placing them in a desert and denying them water!
Only judge someone when “you have walked a mile in their moccasins”.
Robin,
You spoke of so many things that I’m not sure how to respond. Please, do not take anything I have said as expressing judgement because I recognize my status as a sinner who needs God’s continual redemptive work to insure my own salvation. If anything, I am expressing sympathy for those who recognize the realities of their struggle with sin and the difficulty some find in letting God cleanse and transform them according to His promises.
I choose to respect the privacy of my friends and will reveal no further details about them so they will not be made the objects of the venemous attacks that are so typical when someone no longer matches the expectations of others.
Redemption is real, even for homosexuals. How God chooses to do it is up to Him.
It’s entirely possible that gay men can have happy marriages with women and vice versa.
This is not the same as being heterosexual though.
So in that vein your questions expose William’s blind spot. The Christian world has been down that road already. It’s littered with church jargon: “delivered”, “redeemed” etc.
At the end of the day we know the caveats to this fancy language:
Sexual attraction to men still remains. The person just chooses to switch labels and cease behaviours.
None of that is heterosexuality of course.
By the way I will reiterate that is very possible for gay people to live heterosexually–and very good lives, but certainly not in a toxic environment of denial and doublespeak.
att its a thing you may have heard of “situational heterosexuallity” they have the same libido as before, but try and fit the heterosexual mold,
Your test system is flawed. Contrary to your system all males do not get spontaneous erection when they see an attractive woman.
Your claim that it is sadistic for the all wise God not to expect teenage “gay” boys who is at the height of their sexual desire to be celibate is very arrogant to my mind. To begin with, God did not create any teenage boy gay, additionally, I believe that God who is not sadistic knows better than any human why a man should not lie with a man as with a woman. Furthermore, As you may be aware the SDA church does not encourage any teenager male or female to have sex outside of marriage to a husband or wife of the opposite sex even if they are at the height of their sexual desire. We definitely do not encourage teenage boys to marry each other.
By your own admission male testosterone serum levels diminish from thirties onwards thus less desire for sex.
As to LONELINESS God said it is not good for man to be alone, then God created from the rib of man a woman and brought her unto the man. Further on God said that a man should not lie with a man as with a woman it is an abomination. One year the theme of our single ministries department was single but not alone.
Your claim that sex for a “gay” is a life and death scenario like being in the desert and not being able to drink water is one reason why I believe it is especially dangerous to label children as gay. It is in Christ that we find life and in rejecting Christ death not in sex /…
Yes, Elaine. I’m trying to not be cynical and to not view the discussion of pastoral concern as a sop to church members who aren’t “very straight religious fundamentalists.” But based on this report, I am not there yet.
Yes Michael, I noted the sop in the words “and pastoral care.” It’s like the difference between “Obey the Decalogue to be saved” or “Lovingly obey the Decalogue to be saved.”
This paper is a great victory and advance for the gay agenda because it affirms the right of practicing homosexuals to worship with SDA congregations. Withholding church office and/or membership is nonsensical. Gays are free to attend church and could easily commandeer a Sabbath class, if they are clever enough and have a sympathetic audience.
Some gays are essentially conservative SDAs [except in the bedroom]. They pay tithe, believe in the 2300 days and investigative judgment; EGW is respected except “Solitary Vice,” although the new breed of SDA gay remains virgin until same sex marriage and eschews solitary vice.
They uphold the pillars of the church and are probably more SDA than either Elaine Nelson or Erv Taylor, or a host of others.
Is there a “heterosexual lifestyle”? Are all heterosexual married couples labeled by their sexual life? Why is “sex” the elephant in the room when this is discussed, as though homosexuals is all about their sexual life? Does the church see heterosexuals as only about whether they are sexually active or celibate? Why is that the one main theme when this is discussed?
Humans need love and companionship. God said “it is not good for man to live alone.” Men, especially need someone close in their life. Note how soon a widower is married while women often prefer widowhood that remarriage. Companionship and mutual interests are what people want; sex will wane but if their is love and respect it will weather sickness, even death.
How many men (and women) here are widowed or have not married? Yet most would deny the desire for the same love and companionship except of the same sex? Why should not monogamous marriage (now that it’s legal) be accepted by the church when they accept adulterous fornicators?
I disagree, Hansen. I suspect in many cases pastoral concern is already the practice.To me, as reported, the paper failed argue in favor of integrating homosexual believers into the life of the church.
Well the church has to do something or the other.
This is the time FIRST to begin educating members by PROFESSIONALS, not Bible Quoters.
What is wrong with quoting the word of our creator? Jesus did it all the time. It is written a man shall not lie with a man as with a woman it is an abomination.
Some would prefer we don’t study the word of God, so that they can decieve us with words of PROFESSIONALS heresy.
Have you not also read, You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. 8″You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. 9″You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.…
Tis is so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take him at hiw word, just to rest upon His promise just to know Thus says the Lord.
Big mistake allowing practicing homosexuals to fellowship with SDA congregations. People who practice homosexuality should be avoided in the context of worship. SDA churches practice open communion; therefore, openly gay and proud individuals will be allowed to sup at the Lord’s table. Travesty; simply should not be allowed. SDA fence straddling is what causes problems. If you are gay, you are out, that’s all. Not complicated at all. Go to a SDA Kinship meeting.
For many years on the other website you’ve had extreme views on LGBT people.
Sad to know you haven’t changed.
That’s the reason some do not want to associate with a church that is so exclusive that it will only welcome those who bona fides they can inspect. Young people today are far better educated on this subject and have friends who are homosexual and accept them for who they are. The young people will not long stay in a church that discriminates against women and gays.
Like Jeb Bush some have said “I’ve got better things to do than being here.”
Elaine, Do you not belief that the bible is the word of God?, why maliciously and dispargingly lable as discriminators, those that seek to trust the word of God that says a man should not lay with a man as with a woman. Are we not free to trust and live according to the revelation of our creator?
I am a young person and I recognise that the church value system is different from the value system of the world. The Church doctrines is guided by the wonderful and righteous word of God. I chose to trust the testimony of God on the issue or rightness of a man laying with a man as with a woman.
We seek to repent from sin, we do not accept and teach that the strong should murder the weak, nor do we teach that we should abondon our spouse and leave them affectionless for someone else(adultery)even if we feel like it. Nor do we tell our young people to have a sexual relations with other partners before marriage(fornication)the risk of sexual transmitted disease, unplanned preganancy as well other emotianl damage would hurt our young people tremendously we exclude people who teach these things as righteous.
Is not a man laying with a man as with a woman a choice?
Reading your comments on homosexuality remind me of the parable Jesus told in Luke 18:10-14. If you’re going to exclude homosexuals from the church, why not also those who are proud they aren’t homosexual and who have an “I must be holy because I’m not them” attitude?
I think you need to have an encounter with the holiness of God and the true nature of the sins that are in you so that you can have sympathy for others who are seeking the redemption God offers.
Hi William I don’t think anyone has called me a Pharisee before. To be clear my opinion is that we are all sinners. I am a sinner Born in sin shaped or socialized in iniquity the only sure foundation I have is the word of God. I am not saying I am better than a homosexual? Far from it.
Is it pride to say adultery is sin? Is it pride to say murdering is sin? Is it pride to say fornication is lawlessness? Why is it that homosexuality that is described as an abomination is out of bounds? I have become a Pharisee if I question homosexuality.
Should I not question the logic that would seek to normalize a person as gay? My contention is, having homosexual urges does not make you gay. You are not defined by your sexuality. If you are struggling with any sin come to Christ.
Due to the popularity and the push of persons with gay agendas persons with same sex attraction are being targeted and labeled now more than ever. I think it is not right especially to label children as gay. You are not your temptations.
A gay person is someone who is more or less exclusively sexually attracted to the same sex.
That’s the definition.
You can’t run around saying:
“I’m sexually attracted to men but I’m not gay!”
You’d be laughed to scorn… And rightly so
If someone was ill, why would you not want them to receive medical attention to help them recover? In the same way, why should people struggling with one particular sin be excluded from a group of people who also are learning to let the power of God help them overcome? It isn’t like homosexuals have some extremely communicable disease that will infect others just by being close to them.
The first thing Jesus does in redeeming us is forgive us for what we’ve done wrong. By doing that He removes the guilt that separates us from Him so we can be in fellowship with Him. When are you going to learn to forgive others and trust that the power of God is so great that you are in no danger by being close to other sinners, including homosexuals? It is possible that your redemption experience will be what they need to hear so they can learn to trust God and grow in His redemptive power. Since homosexuality is just one of many ways the sin that is in our world is displayed in our behaviors that we call sins, why do you want to draw a line excluding one particular sin. Is it because you doubt the power of God in your own life?
I think you may be misunderstanding what I am saying. God has always been gracious, forgiving and good, I believe this is the everlasting gospel, that does not change the fact that sin results in death. How am I excluding Homosexuals who are learning to let the power of God help them overcome? I am 100% for that. I am challenging those that is saying their is no overcoming homosexuality.
Should we exclude an adulterer who is struggling to remain faithful to their spouse. We don’t tell them that is okay to be an adulterer. Or should we tell them that it is okay to be an adulterer because God forgive them? would that make it right? Are you saying we should encourage homosexuals to be married and hold offices in the church and that this would not be contrary to scripture?
why attack the church for holding the biblical position on sexuality. Love the sinner but not the sin or sins.
Donovan,
Thank you for clarifying. It appears you and I agree that God offers the same hope of redemption and promise of victory over sin to homosexuals as He does for all other sinners and that there is no hope for those who deny God’s power to fulfil His promises.
I think what we’re wrestling with here is the question of defining at what point a person’s sin become so great that the church cannot afford to continue them to fellowship with the body of believers. Clearly, a person who claims God is powerless to transform them is not a believer and such a person should not be allowed to serve in a leadership position. It is when we start trying to measure a person’s struggle, their weaknesses and failings that things get messy. That is also where I think many take the wrong approach by drawing lines and creating artificial boundaries because such actions are devised with the intent of promoting and exposing failure instead of celebrating the victories God gives and encouraging people to hold onto His promises.
Focusing on finding failure will always find success because it focuses our attention on sinning instead of embracing the victory over sin that God promises us. That is why I feel the emphasis on measuring sinful behavior is misguided.
Adultery is an ACT. Heterosexuality and homosexuality describes one’s gender, not an act. Does the church ask heterosexuals to live a life of celibacy? No, it only forbids sex OUTSIDE of marriage, giving their sexual activities a blessing, hoping for progeny.
We should not expect a homosexual to live a life of celibacy; it hasn’t worked too well see the Catholic priesthood. But now that marriage for same sex couples is legal, the church should welcome them as members, trusting they will be true to their vows just as all the the other heterosexual couples. They many even have children who should be welcomed, also. Surely, no Christian church would turn away such a couple with children.
27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent ACTS and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their ERROR. Rom 1:27 (NT).
You shall not lie with a man as with a woman it is an abomination Lev: 18:22 (OT)
According to the New Testament and Old Testament laying with man as with a woman is an ACT.
Elaine you may be confused, there is no such thing as homosexual gender.
Trust God.
You said: “that does not change the fact that sin results in death”.
But what death are you talking about? The first or the second? If we go right back to the beginning, Adam and Eve were told they would die because they changed the course through their sin, but God was not talking about the eternal or second death, just the earthly or first death. Their sin resulted in the first death, not the second death.
That said, all of us are sinners and we all must die because of our sins, but does that result in the second death? Jesus enters and prevents the second death for he said those who believe in him will be saved (from the second death). So if we are sinners and we believe in Christ –being sinners right up to our last breath, are we saved from the second death because we believed in Christ?
I am speaking especially of the second death, the first death is a sleep. The second death I believe is as a result of rejecting God. Sin is not a mistake, it is not an accident, it is not DNA, the essence of sin is Lawlessness, rebellion against God. We move to repent from sin, God grace will take care of the rest.
By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected By this we know that we are in Him: (1john2:4-5), we also know that His commandments are not grievous. Once we come with a contrite and humble heart God will heal us.
Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and the one who is holy, still keep himself holy.” 12″Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done. He that is righteous not he that is sinful, but he that is righteous.
It is not sinful to say that it is an abomination for a man to lie with a man as with a woman. He who have ear to hear will hear.
Practising homosexuality is a sin that ought to be repented of like every other sin. We definitely do not affirm sin. Yes we are sinful but we look to Christ, we repent and God grace will do the rest. Trust…
Is a non-practising homosexual person like a non-practising Catholic? I prefer the term ex-gay because it implies they have left it behind. Non-practising implies they might want to practise again one day.
“Ex-gay”?
It pains me to see Adventists saunter down the path from which other Christians have beaten a hasty retreat after years of embarrassment.
Leo,
I have three friends whom God has redeemed from homosexuality. They describe themselves in different ways because of their particular histories, yet they all describe themselves as “redeemed by th power of God.” They do not measure themselves by what they no longer do, but by the closeness of their relationship with God. One plainly says that he still struggles with temptation, but sees himself in the story Paul tells in 2 Corinthians, chapter 12. Instead of complaining that he still battles with that sin, he praises God that He has turned temptation into a “thorn in his flesh” (verses 7-9) that keeps him at the foot of the cross seeking God’s power each day instead of pursuing temptation. So he counts his weakness as a blessing and praises God for it.
Do they call themselves straight? Or heterosexual?
This road has been traveled before by many. The church-speak/code-speak all comes to naught when scandal breaks out.
This is not to say that gay people cannot marry heterosexually; but that doesn’t make them straight or “formerly gay”.
Indeed, “gay” isn’t a behavior or “lifestyle”.
They call themselves sinners whom God is redeeming through His amazing power. What they will tell you is that God’s redemptive power changes their inmost desires, even their sexual orientation.
I choose not to get lost in debating descriptives because they are used with such flexibility and variation. The ultimate descriptive is that God is powerful enough to transform all who come to Him in faith. So I do not ask my friends to describe themselves in the common way, but focus on measuring how God is working in them.
It is a shame that these redeemed people can’t get their grace filled message out due to the dire polarization of two sides that can’t accept that grace centered experience.
“Is a non-practicing homosexual person like a non-practicing Catholic?”
It’s the same as a non-practicing heterosexual. Both homo and hetero can be non-practicing. The differences: we do not question whether heterosexuals are “practicing”. Their private life is out-of bounds unlike homosexuals. Such a lack of decency and respect is given homosexuals!
“Is a non-practicing homosexual person like a non-practicing Catholic.
No. What is a non-practicing heterosexual person called? Is it not supposed that both may be non-practicing? Who is checking? Who would think of asking heterosexuals whether they are active sexually? Why the total disrespect for another human who is homosexual? To paraphrase the questioner of Joe Mccarthy: “Sir, have you no decency”?
Physicians practice medicine. Lawyers practice law. If gays have to practice, doesn’t that imply that it’s a learned behavior? How about they practice not being gay.
It is not a “behavior”. It is an orientation just like heterosexuality. This is why the non fundamentalist world doesn’t use the term ” practicing homosexual”.
Apparently you view sin as simply a set of wrong behavior when the sins we commit when the problem isn’t our behaviors, the sins we commit, but the SIN that is in us. Our misbehaviors are merely the symptoms of the root problem of SIN. I praise God that His focus is not on our misbehaviors but on building a relationship with us so that His power can reside in us and change our nature so we will no longer behave in wrong ways. The person who focuses on the misbehaviors they see in others and demanding they change their ways has not experienced the redemptive power of God and is not a child of God, but someone just as lost in sin as the person they condemn.
Correction
(Edits didn’t get captured before submitting.) My first sentence should have read:
“Apparently you view sin as simply a set of wrong behaviors when the problem isn’t our behaviors, the sins we commit, but the SIN that is in us.”
I’m thoroughly Maxwellian on that point.
But I also understand that sexual orientation is morally neutral–and so does the church.
I like these things:
1. We’re finally looking at pastoral care. The debate has largely passed us by, however.
I think society will determine how we treat LGBT people (much like society determined our attitudes towards racial prejudice) going forward.
This is a good thing, but I’m glad there are no official theological objections in the way now.
In other words, I think the idea that gay people are people just like you and I will be forced upon the church by force of culture and media and that that is a good thing.
We are not equipped to minister in our current state of prejudice and wilful blindness in many cases.
When prejudice against gay people becomes as socially unacceptable as racism, then the church will be ready to minister. Not a moment before.
2. I like the explicit mention of sexual orientation, something that maybe the majority of SDAs in the wild do not know exists.
I don’t like the use of the term “homosexual” as a noun or the term “practising homosexual”.
Both are reductive and unfair and not to mention outdated. The term LGBT is very standard.
I also wonder if they addressed the issue of “change ministries”. I fear that the spectacular collapse of that charade in the West may have no effect on a church as distracted as ours.
Christ said you are the light of the world. The secular world is the secular world and the church is the church called out of the world. We are not of the world (in values).
We are peculiar and if the world accept homosexuality as right we don’t need to follow, the world don’t accept the word of God in fact a lot dont believe that there is a God.
I accept ones freedom to lay with whoever they want to lay with once it is between consenting adults. That is because I don’t believe you can legislate righteousness. That does not mean lying with the same sex is right. Do not conflate Freedom with righteousness.
You shall not lay with a man as with a woman it is an abomination. L 18:22
It is always wrong when a man lie with a man as with a woman. We are neglecting our responsibility by not warning or teaching the world of the loving and righteous revelation of the word of God.
Having a form of Godliness but denying the power thereof from such stay away.
The secular world taught us that segregation was wrong. We certainly didn’t come up with that on our own! Segregation was church policy even at the GC level!
Also you don’t have to repeat (yet again) what the Bible says about the proper use of sexuality.
Not only do I fully agree with the traditional interpretation (need no convincing), but traditionalists always seem to think that their views are unknown and this must be restated over and over.
Christians were involved in ending segregation laws, racial discrimination and segregation still happens you cannot legislate love. Martin Luther King Jr. Was a Christian. Is the segregation of an entire race of poeople the same as saying homosexuality a sin?
I am not suggesting that the church is perfect, I don’t think it is, but does that mean homosexuality is right? I for one respect the right of consenting adult being free to make their choice of sexual partner that is an Issue of Freedom. Our doors are open to such a person attending church and I believe that they should be treated with Love.
You say you agree with the traditional interpretation of homosexuality being an abombination, yet you think the term ex-gay is an embarrasment, why label someone as gay permanetly? they are children of God and God can provide them with the power to be born again (re:orientation), why is that an embarrassment?
I repeat what the bible says about sexuality to be clear on my meaning. Homosexeual orientation like the inclination to cheat on ones spouse should be resited like all other temptations. Your flesh should not have dominon over you, we ought to bring our body under subjection to the power of God this is my opinion.
When I hear you label or name someone gay, what I hear is that they have no more choice/ power. They are ruled by their flesh I believe that is a lie. Why deny the power of God?
This may offend some people but “gay” is no different to “visually impaired” in the church’s book.
Therefore it doesn’t need to be repented of.
Some people are just sexually attracted to the same sex. This is not an “urge”, it is morally neutral.
Does it present challenges? Yes it can. Just like heterosexuality.
Arguably its challenges can be greater.
What I think it’s unhelpful is attaching undue moral burdens to sexual attractions (i.e. calling them “temptations” etc)
Similarly you don’t tell disabled people that they lack faith if they call themselves disabled.
Jesus already foresaw this (gay people) in Matthew 19.
Some men are eunuchs from birth (and no he wasn’t talking about hermaphrodites).
And the word “ex-gay” has embarrassed itself. It has publicly self immolated in the West. That’s a bag of stories.
How comforting to know that there are still some who live by all the Levitical laws. Judaism was very restrictive and there are still a few who live by ALL those laws in the Torah.
The two papers submitted are reported:
Both papers condemn homosexual activity and endorse sexual relationships only in the context of marriage.”
Nothing has changed for the Bible Thumpers. All the psychological studies notwithstanding, it’s the same position the church has always had. What a waste of time and tithe to be repetitious.
Elaine the church can set its own standards. The thing is it has never understood what the true cost of those standards are and it has not committed itself to supporting those affected.
Why are you debating with Elaine? she left Adventism years ago and disparages Adventism frequently.
I know this, but she’s often very insightful.
It’s not called the Sinners Denied Access church for no reason.
If *anyone* is engaging in overt sin it is a reasonable basis to deny him membership in the SDA church. Someone will push back with statements like what about pride? Tell me how you can determine a person is guilty of pride.
You can tell if someone is guilty of GLUTTONY, if they are so pot bellied
they appear eighteen months pregnant!
Some commentators on this thread are so unnaturally
obsessed and pre-occupied with homosexuality
that they overlook out of wedlock pregnancy, co-habitation among our
teenagers and twenty somethings, divorce etc!
Gluttony and pride are equal sins.
We make such a “golden calf” of our health message,
our obese pastors/administrators,
should be placed on administrative leave and sent fo dietary rehab,
until they achieve a presentable image for their constituencies/congregations!
How can you determine one is homosexual? Maybe it’s easy if you’re a peeping Tom. Few, if any have attended church and told everyone they were homosexual, so how could anyone know unless he was a good friend? Good friends neither approve or condemn but accept them as they are.
It is God’s place to help all sinners, and not for us to judge or condemn. The wheat and tares should be left until the final harvest, and we have not been called to judge, condemn, or label anyone as a tare or wheat. Isn’t God sufficient to judge the heart? Has he asked for our help since He’s so busy?
i submit the most intense urge in the human family is desire for sex(that is in the majority). The homosexual desire for sex is as intense (driven)as
is the hetero. The differential is that the desire for homo, or hetero, or asexual sex, is determined by the DNA of each person. There are a few immorals, who by choice, practice all types of sex for the thrill. The act of sexual relations whether hetero, homo, amoral, or asexual, covers the complete gamut from A to Z, on the sexual scale. All dependent on the Genetic makeup of each human creature. A hetero would find it just as difficult to give up sex as does the homo. A asexual would rather die than have sex. So homosexuality is sinful, as is adultery, lying, cheating, covetousness, gluttony, stealing, murder, lack of love, defaming GOD.
What is your sin?? God says “ALL FLESH” is sinful, and will be until the day you die. Also, all sin demands the death penalty. Your sin demands the Death Penalty. But Jesus Christ has paid the penalty for “ALL SIN”. Yours, and the homosexual. So “WHY DO YOU HATE THE HOMO”. You say you have no love for them?? God have mercy for the mercy-less. Be ashamed for your own sins, don’t suggest others sins are worst than your own!!!!.
Since all flesh is sinful if I am a robber should I continue stealing, cheating, coveting, murdering did Jesus come to save us in our sin or from our sin. should we repent at all? What did Jesus mean when He says go and sin no more?
My friend, there is no homosexual DNA. Does DNA make it right for a man to lie with a man as with a woman? If I tell you that man to woman and father and mother in marriage is right, this is not hate speech, this is not only natural this is what the word of God our creator teaches why take the word of man above that of God?
Abraham trusted God and it was accounted unto him has righteousness.
Sin resides in the heart and mind not in your skin or hair or bone or Dna (flesh) these may have been deformed as a result of sin but they are not sin. (Autism for eg is not sin) Sin is a heart and mind matter a spiritual matter. Sin is lawlessness.
Temptation is not sin, So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. (Gal 5:25) We do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Trust God.
Donavan,
You done well.
Don’t tell anyone it’s sin, that wouldn’t be politically correct.
God made the human body and it’s not sinful in itself. Yes, it’s that which is in the heart [soul] that defiles a man.
Donovan,
My apologies: spelt your name wrong.
Donovan,
It is easy to tell a person to walk by the spirit but quite another to show someone how to do it. The biggest problem I see in this discussion is we have a lot of people who are quick to condemn others and tell them to obey when they have a powerless form of godliness that gives no example of how to do it. We have many who reflexively strut their self-concept of holiness but who have no testimony about what it means to confront their own sinfulness and struggle with God to find victory over it.
William
I fully resonate with your comments here. Too much “holier than thou” head religion and no expreiencial confession of personal struggle, an admittance in their head religion state that produces too much mental dissodence for them to do so.
The problem is ancient. Sodom is witness. The idea is new. Homosexuality is now an identity. In 1890 when the term ‘homosexual’ was coined it was thought to be a mental illness.
The Greeks were big into young man/boy sexual liaisons. Most had a go at it. But to seek that as an identity was not an option. It wasn’t tolerated. It would be demeaning to oneself. It would be like never growing up. The Greek grew up, took a wife, raised a family, sought honor for himself and his family.
Elaine wants to keep the Docs in charge. The mind Docs; the psychologists, the psychiatrists, the mental health therapists. But is this the best way forward? Why not look to the past? This is sexual behavior. It isn’t a disease or a gender identity. We need to simply call the behavior what it has always been; unnatural and immoral. For Jews, Christians and Muslims it is forbidden behavior, sinful behavior.
The men of Sodom will always object. We just have to bear their wrath. They aren’t going to get a pass. The land will vomit them out, like always.
Because in my retirement, I am very itinerant, I attend many different churches, both Adventist and main stream Protestant.
I am always saddened when I see the lovely young children going up front for the story hour, knowing that indisputably, demographically, one in 20/25 will grow up to be gay and lesbian.
When I attend a “reconciling” United Methodist church, which boldly publishes in every weekly worship bulletin, that AlL
are welcome, regardless of race, class, gender or sexual orientation, I have no concern for those minority children
knowing that this particular congregation will nurture, love, and be compassionate of them.
When I read many of the condemnatory condescending and ignorant comments on this thread,
I intuitively know that our gay/lesbian offspring would have more self esteem, self worth,
wholesomeness and childhood happiness, if they had been born into affirming, loving, supportive, accepting Atheist homes, than into rejecting disparaging demeaning Adventist homes. Particularly those who are told they have deliberately “chosen” to be gay.
The way our churches/families/schools have treated our gay/lesbian offspring is offensive, unchristian and cruel. Read Doctor Reneé Drumm’s doctoral dissertation for confirmation of this.
No wonder the suicide rate for gay teens whose families are rejecting of them is EIGHT times that of their straight cousins and siblings!
The reward centers of the brain are run by chemistry, not by the cerebral cortex.
Humans are frightfully complex creatures and the process of becoming who we are is fraught with unimaginable variances.
Check out this “fascinating case study of a man who failed a paternity test because part of his genome actually belongs to his unborn twin. This means that the genetic father of the child is actually the man in question’s brother, who never made it past a few cells in the womb.” http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/man-failed-paternity-test-because-he-chimera-his-unborn-twin
The NAD is standing on firm ground to support ministry to all of humanity within each congregation. We are all God’s creation and God is benevolent. From Genesis to Revelation, this is the theme.
Odd, we always thought it was addiction to the endorphin’s of the cause and rebellion. Much like the party that blocked the Interstate in Texas; celebrating the execution of police officer who sacrificed his life to save many.
2 Peter 2 (read the whole chapter):
1 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.
CHRIST bought and paid for you; not the other way around. What would you contend that have to offer HIM?
HE spared not the angels that sinned, the world that was evil nor Sodom and Gomorrah. Didn’t turn out well for Lots wife for even looking back. Great Words; for it is Written. We know what has, is and will be.
HE Sacrificed HIS SON; what more do you want? If that is not enough and you want to continue sinning or leading others astray, HE will take care of that for you. HE stated Vengeance is MINE and HE makes that a class of it’s own. HE can do it much better than any or all of us combined and says HE will. But HE is always there to help too; just ask.
14 Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children:
15 Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness;
Romans 1:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
27 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 recompence of their error which was meet.
28 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;
29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
Self explanatory.
Should you hate and or condemn your homosexual brother or sister, you will be condemned yourself for lack of Godly love. Are you sure you desire to accept God’s condemnation for your “holier than thou label”. The penalty is deadly.
Like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; 16 because it is written, “YOU SHALL BE HOLY, FOR I AM HOLY.” (1 Peter 1:16)
Homosexual is not the identity of our brothers and sisters I believe that is a lie. They are sons and daughters of God, God has blessed them with the power to overcome and not to follow the world.
The suggestion that if Christians trust the Word of God as it pertains to the rightness or lawfulness of a man laying with a man as with a woman is condemnatory is emotional black mail and untrue. Furthermore sin pays its own wages and the wages of sin is death.
It is not that some are right and some are wrong, it is that we are all different and our differences is what makes us the same in that we do not account for our differences any more than the Grace of God does.
We are created as we are, (Genesis 3) and we are invited to worship our creator just as we are (Revelation 14) … the bible references I share are not meant to be a hammer but an inspiration as is all of scripture.
Seeking certainty is the end of innocence (Genesis 3), while in the now-Jesus world Paul makes obvious that knowledge, spiritual practice and prophesy are the certain path to disappointment, while faith, hope and charity endure (1 Corinthians 13) which Revelation (14) defines as resulting in patience.
The good thing to keep in mind is that Jesus came not to condemn but to save (John 3) … or he could save no one. And if He saves the world, does he not save everyone in the world? Answering that question with either a No or a Yes is to seek certainty. Answering with I hope so is a confession of faith.
We need to distinguish between emotionalism with Love.
Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth (1 Cor 13:6).
Neither do I condemn you go and sin no more. Love the sinner not the sin.
Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.
Through the law is the knowledge of sin, and the word of God is clear you shall not lie with a man as with a woman.
We are sinners the word of God is light unto our path and a lamp unto our feet.
Be not deceived we are not all telling the truth, Some is right and some is wrong by Gods grace we can trust the evidence provided in scripture.
We miserably fail our children. We fail to teach them within Titus 2 and fail to admonish them in the Lord; resulting in blaspheme. This is real child abuse.
We fail to provide the conviction in Testimonies to our young adults. To show them the right path of Love.
We fail to rebuke and admonish breaches of Sound Doctrine as commanded in the Scripture. This is a true failure in Love.
We changed the Truth of GOD into a lie. We are the reason they turn to vile affections (Romans 1:25). We dig our own hole, but do not want to take responsibility for it; lets blame someone else, it’s much easier that way.
If this life is just a quick training course and final exam into Heaven; then it must be viewed as such. There is no bell curve; HE Sacrificed HIS SON. If that is not enough, and we know it will not be for many; there is no make up exam. This is as real as it gets.
We need to teach and stop condemning others to the fire; this is True Love, HIS Love. If they are HIS they no longer meet your classifications or terms; nor do they want to be labeled such. Do we want to be called a continuing sinner? Further more,do we want HIM calling us a sinner; especially at last day (then)? We need to take the world out of our views and self convictions; HE either replaced them or not. We either serve HIM; or not.
Charity,
What testimony can you share with us to show that you know how to translate that into practical application? That you are doing as you say and able to teach others by example?
Open your eyes, look at the world around you; pretty good testimony of our failures. Read your BIBLE.
By any chance are you a member of Westboro Baptist Church? You know, those folks who go around the country protesting at the funerals for soldiers killed in combat and carrying signs with hateful messages. Like you, they know all about the condemnations of sin in the Bible but nothing about the amazing love of God that the Bible tells us about or how God works in us to save us. When are you going to let God’s love soften your heart so you can begin ministering His redeeming power to others instead of just condemning them?
What does the bible say on this subject? Do you follow the path of evil doers and let them in your church. If that is their decisions on living their lives in sin then you are condoning satan’s ways and allowing that into your church?
If you allow it in your church you might as well let satan worship with you all. What would be the difference? If the Homosexuals want to attend your church they must submit themselves to God and HIS will and in due time they should be on a daily basis asking forgiveness of their sins including that of homosexuality. I myself am disgusted with what some people think on letting them in their churches especially the fact of my reasoning is you are judging others as to what their intent is in your church? Doesn’t God, Christ, Jesus, Your Higher Power, your LORD have comments in the BIBLE on this matter of JUDGING OTHERS?
Angela,
Please read your Bible. The command of God to obey his commandments if we love him isn’t in Exodus 20. You will find Jesus making five such statements in the Gospel of John in His discourse in the Upper Room, all of them emphasizing his desire that they continue the ministry of miracles that He had given them to do. Not once did Jesus say anything about the Ten Commandments in those statements.
I share your concern with the judging attitude expressed by several who are commenting on this topic. If we exclude people from the fellowship of the church just because they have a particular sin but include everyone else with other sins, how can we claim to be ministering God’s redeeming and transforming love to them? God wants us working in his incredible power to minister to all who sin, which means everyone. We have no basis for excluding homosexuals, or not loving them.
I think the greater sinner is not the homosexual who knows the evil nature of their ways and is seeking God, but the person who condemns them for their sin. That person is proud so they are blind to the reality of their evil nature and the severity of their own need to experience the redemption they are attempting to deny to others.
Exodus 20
If you love me(GOD)keep my commandments.
Verse 12 Honor thy father and mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your GOD is giving you. Read this again “is giving you” is this past or present or future?
We all have questions on the bibles meanings so maybe the homosexuals didn’t read the part on what HE(GOD) will do to them if they would like to have long lives on this earth. AND for the heavenly ways well GOD will bring his wrath down upon us and the book of life they will find out if they are allowed into GOD’s heaven.
Angela,
The part about obeying God’s commandments if we love Him is found in John, not Exodus 20. Plus, applying the 5th Commandment to homosexuality is an application far outside the issue it addresses.
We both know that no one is saved by keeping God’s law, yet you keep pointing to God’s law, apparently to justify condemning homosexuals, when we really should be talking about how a homosexual can be changed by God. The Law only makes us aware of our need for God’s power to work in us so we will be changed, so the issue we need to be focused on is not how we are condemned, but how God works in us to redeem us. It starts with accepting that God loves you and then works by allowing God to work in you. So long as you keep pointing to the condemnation the Law brings it is difficult, if not impossible, to see God’s incredible love that reaches to the uttermost to save ALL who come to Him by faith.
Will you allow God to reveal His love to you and work in you so you can be empowered to minister that life-changing love to others? Perhaps even to witnessing the redemption of homosexuals?
The report on the papers is puzzling to me on two accounts.
1. What exactly is NEW in the position presented? The papers spell out and confirm what has been the official position of the church for quite some time (even if many may not be aware). Thus I can’t see an “progress”.
2. The focus on homosexuality and pastoral care is puzzling in comparison to other issues that are far more pressing (at least in terms of numbers), yet don’t get any attention. As counselor I am asking: what exactly are we avoiding by these discussions…
Andreas,
Good questions! Perhaps the “new” is that we’re actually starting to discuss the topic and recognize that there is need for ministry to address it. My feeling is that we’re starting to move in the right direction but are still some distance from actually doing anything realistic or effective.
It appears that Westboro “is” represented here voicing their total input of negativity, as per William’s Suggestion. Should no positive response be
forthcoming from them, would recommend the monitors seriously curtail their continuing presence here at Atoday.
You can neither buy nor sell unless you have the mark of the beast. This is coercion.
Your attempt to coerce with threats of censorship /curtail views that clearly challenges your own is quite telling.
I am of the opinion that persons such as your self will ultimately advocate that persons with bible believing opinions on homosexuality go to prison freedom be censored.
First you will demonize them with names such as homophobia and Westboro then more redicule (no biblical evidence) then turn to the state for help to persecute your own brothers and sisters.
Like Cain who refuse to slay the lamb but eventually murder his brother you and others like you who fight against the commands of God will eventually seek the life and freedom of others all while claiming you are loving.
May I sguggest that you test your arguments against scripture and not only in local cultural context but rather in the larger context of the great controversy over the character and government of God.
I occasionally read an article in AT. I then scroll down to see who comments. Guess what? Same names. People, get a life.
As a Christian, I have struggled with the issue of homosexuality ever since I met my gay best friend when I was twenty. In the beginning, I spent many hours with Jon as he researched the history and culture at the times the very few mentions of homosexuality were written into Scripture, desperately trying to find a way to reconcile his sexuality with his love for God. Having been raised in a small community and baptized into a conservative Dutch Reformed church, and having attended services, Sunday school and weekly Bible studies religiously, and having come from a prominent and respected family, news that Jon was gay spread like an aggressive cancer after a church member spied him kissing another young man. Upon this revelation, the church leaders told a teenaged Jon that as a homosexual, he was no longer welcome to fellowship with them. His parents, however (even though they loved and supported Jon), remained members of the congregation. I could see the pain and betrayal Jon felt over how his church “family” had treated him, and their collective reaction only further distressed him and caused him to endlessly question whether he was worthy of God’s love and Christ’s offer of redemption and salvation. It was only after Jon hung himself from the rafters of a dairy barn that the church considered its part in the tragedy and how it could learn to love, rather than reject and condemn, homosexual members or visitors.
After seventeen years of friendship with Jon,
I can attest that he was the sweetest, kindest, most generous, loving and genuine people I have ever known. HOW, I questioned, could a loving God who hard-wired into most of us the need for a mate, tell someone so wonderful but who had the misfortune to be BORN gay, that he could not have the very thing most of us crave above all things: a parter, a lover, a soulmate, an “other” with whom to spend our lifetime? How is a man who forms a monogamous lifetime bond with another man “damned” when he is observing the very sanctity of marriage that a heterosexual Christian couple observes? How can God, Who created in Adam the need to love and be loved by another, condemn that very same need in a homosexual? Surely He understands that instinctive, visceral need and that sin is at fault for monkeying with sexual orientation, not the gay individual! Certainly God finds it “okay” for the homosexuals to commit him- or herself to a monogamous lifelong relationship with a partner of the same sex! And for almost two decades, that was my position on homosexuality: it’s acceptable to God if “practiced” monogamously with a lifetime partner because God understands their need for togetherness.
But here’s the crux of it: God DOES understand that need – after all, He engineered it! But just because He understands it doesn’t mean He condones it, just as He understands all sin yet condemns it. The problem, as I see it, is that we get our human emotions all mixed up in the matter
of homosexuality – derision, fear, empathy, love and hatred. We humanize the issue (it’s only natural to do!), but we need to step back and truly seek out God’s will in the matter.
When faced with such a challenging issue as homosexuality, I always ponder and pray over the two things I understand the most about God: God is love, and God doesn’t change. This leads me, then, to two conclusions: God loves every homosexual just as much as He loves me, and that God’s original design for human sexuality HAS NOT CHANGED and therefore the sexual expression of love for another is reserved exclusively for the lifetime-committed heterosexual couple. We can take any “twist” on human sexuality and substitute it for homosexuality – pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality: God understands that sin has perverted human sexual appetites (even heterosexual ones! Consider threesomes, “swinging” and sex addicts), but that God understands it doesn’t equate to His condonation of it.
So where does that leave the homosexual who wants to obey God? In a truly challenging and unenviable position, because he or she must fight their human nature and their inborn craving to physically love and be loved by another. It would be impossible if not for the gift of the Spirit, because only a spiritual mind can overcome a carnal craving. The sex drive is the most powerful there is, and many a heterosexual has succumbed to it in a sinful manner. Consider only the account of King David and Bathsheba –
not only did David knowingly and willfully commit adultery, but he knowingly and willfully had Bathsheba’s husband murdered when it came to light that his mistress was pregnant! How much less “abominable” is it to commit adultery and to murder than for a man to have sex with another man? Not less, I think, but more! David broke four commandments in his lustful pursuit of Bathsheba: he coveted the wife of one of his soldiers, he stole her from him, he committed adultery with the man’s wife, and then he had him murdered! Pretty damning sinfulness, there. And yet, the Bible tells us that David was a man “after God’s own heart”. Despite his sinful nature, and despite having given into his sinful nature (and his transgressions with Bathsheba aren’t the extent of it), David still LOVED GOD and tried his best to follow God’s will.
My ultimate point: God loves every sinner. Christ would have died for a solitary homosexual, just as He would have died for a solitary adulterer, or liar, or thief. Who is any one among us, no matter how righteous, in any position to judge another sinner? Judgement is not our job – it is Christ’s. Condemnation is not our punishment to mete out – it is God’s. We have been commanded by our Savior to LOVE one another and to gently correct one another when we stumble over the rock that is our human nature. And even if one among us stumbles and stays down – an alcoholic, a thief, a lover of money, a Sabbath breaker, a homosexual – we are STILL
commanded to love one another! We need to pray ceaselessly that God empowers us to overcome our carnal minds with our spiritual minds, and enables us to look with spiritual eyes upon each other so that we may see what Jesus sees: a sinner in need of love and grace. And then we need to extend to one another the same.
Let’s try to see each other as Christ sees us. It’s a humbling and sometimes embarrassing exercise, because each of us hides something we don’t want the world to see. But God sees it and He loves us anyway, in whatever condition He finds us.
My apologies to the “owner” of this blog for the length of this post – it is an issue I feel very, very strongly about and with which I have wrestled as a Christian with a gay best friend. We need to learn to be at the very least more empathetic toward the homosexual struggling to align his or her life with the will of God, or we’ll be just another bunch of “Christians” who push more gays to the point of suicide through our intolerance, hatred and condemnation of something we straights are ill equipped to truly understand. It is possible to love our gay brothers and sisters without condoning an actively homosexual lifestyle. Christ regularly supped and rubbed elbows with the pariahs of His day (tax collectors, prostitutes, adulterers) without condoning their actions and behaviors. As His modern-day disciples, we should strive to follow His example of unconditional love.
I am glad that this is NAD and it does not speak for the rest of us. For its fruits show it to be the most fallen division in the Adventist world. It has all the trappings of the silly whore of Ezekiel 16. I firmly believe what Sis. White said about whole conferences falling, for this division exemplifies it. The shaking is on.
I confess that I find great interest in reading the comments in this forum, and sometimes make a few contributions myself; but I confess that I am amazed by the quality of mentality which I find in this maze of ideas. Sometimes I suspect that some commentators either do not get a clear understanding of some of the terms used, or they are so programmed about some SDA beliefs that they seem to be oblivious to any other way of seeing, or sensing things. If a person is born with what we call homosexual tendencies(or attractions), the person is created like that; or as we say, God made him so; how can we treat him,or her, as a wilful sinner who must seek forgiveness, and turn away from that error in order to find acceptance into the SDA fold? And if the condition is an affliction,or an aberration that the person is not responsible for bringing upon himself(herself), how can christians treat that one as an outcast and a wretch. I associate and fellowship with Adventists all my life, over 80 years now. I attend church almost every sabbath, and I know well that we consider ourselves special ,elect, called and separate from the world; and we are careful about remaining unspotted and untarnished; but we often forget that we are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, to minister to the needs of the least of the brethren. In my church you do not have to be found out to be a homosexual; Just wear some jewelry,or stop paying the tithe and you are at once a paria.
Hi, Nathaniel.
I think the argument that God “makes” someone a homosexual, and therefore it’s OK for someone to have sex with another of the same gender, is an interesting one, and one I agonized over for the better part of two decades as I tried to decide how God wanted me to “deal with” my best friend: a gay man. I was raised Christian Reformed and had been taught by my church and my dad that being gay was sinful. When I met Jon, that was what I believed. But as I came to know him and to love him, I came to believe that is was patently unfair that God would “make” somebody gay and then say, “And if that’s not hard enough, here’s the grand prize – you must be celibate your whole life if you wish to please Me!” In fact, by that time I thought God was a madman for a whole lot of reasons, tops being that He claimed to love me so much that He knew the numbers of hairs on my head and yet was ready to roast me in hellfire for all eternity if I stepped out of line. But I had had an encounter with Jesus when I was very young and I had FELT His love for me at that moment, and I wasn’t ready to give up on that love just yet. So I issued God a challenge: explain a few things to me so that they make sense, or I’m calling it quits. God issued me a challenge in return: find out what I have to say about things – not your pastor, not your church, not your dad, but Me – and I’ll explain things to you.” And He did. He still does. The more I seek to know Him,
the more He reveals to me.
To my question “Why do You create gay people?” God answered, “I don’t.” Now before you call me crazy, listen: God directly created only TWO humans, Adam and Eve. He created them without any flaws – no nearsightedness, no mental illness, no bone or blood diseases, no expiration date. Adam and Eve lived in a perfect paradise, where no animal hunted and killed another, where there were no airborne pathogens, where God could live in perfect unity with every living thing and protect them from so much as a stubbed toe. But in His intelligent creatures He also gave the gift of free will – to love and obey Him if they so chose, and to be allowed to choose to NOT love and obey Him if they so chose, because perfect love does not demand – it asks. One of these intelligent creatures, of course, is Satan, and he deceived the woman (Scripture tells us) and she chose to disobey God.
Thus, sin entered the scene, and it destroyed everything. God had told the first couple that death would be the consequence of their disobedience, and so it was: to clothe their “nakedness” (their shameful fallen status), God killed a goat – the first life lost on account of sin. And from that first death, all kinds of badness was introduced – pain during childbirth, hard manual labor, and physical and psychological maladies from the very first of Adam and Eve’s offspring: blisters, broken bones, envy, murderousness; increasingly shortened lifespans, mental illnesses,
and yes, even homosexuality. And the farther we get from Eden, the more and more sin subjects and subverts God’s original designs.
God did not create homosexuality any more than He created death – such things are the consequences of compounding generations of human disobedience as plant, insect, animal and human DNA is further bastardized by sin. God’s original design was flawless. If not for Satan’s rebellion and Eve’s choice to disobey God by listening to his scabrous suggestions, such heartaches would not have been introduced into the human experience; it was not God’s will that these things came to be, but rather Eve’s willful disobedience. Anything that deviates from God’s original design is NOT HIS DESIGN. It’s the design of another, and unless we are vigilant, we’ll listen to and believe his lies just as Eve did.
Heather’s experience and testimony above is interesting, instructive and food for thought. She has full trust in God’s power and willingness to pardon all people and all sins, and that is how many of us see God. We depend on the bible for the assurance we hold of God’s love and foregiveness; but it is the same bible which the fanatics use to scare the hope out of some of us, and make us feel that there is very little hope of salvation for us. Perhaps if we must understand the bible as it should be, we will all have to study it in Hebrew and Greek. If we can’t, then we will have to rely on the honesty and competence of those who can undersrand the bible in the original languages in which it was written.
God is love; but He ordered the wholesale extermination of whole canaanite nations. He is fair and impartial; but he allowed Moses to kill thousands of Israelites who worshipped the golden calf set up by Aaron, while Aaron himself was let off with his life. He forbids the making of graven images, or the likeness of anything that is in the heaven in the earth or in the sea; but He orders moses to make and set up a golden snake, and to craft an ark with angels of metal mounted on. Very often I wish our theologians would tell us the truth about these discrepancies in scripture which portray God as a blood thirsty despot rather than a loving God. I am afraid that many of us reflect this kind of image in our treatment of, and regard for others.
2 Corinthians 11:
1 Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and indeed bear with me.
2 For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.
3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
4 For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.
Are we not warned? Does the simplicity of CHRIST beguile?
Matthew 7:21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
Do we preach another Jesus?
We are to be focused on two main Commandments from which all the Law and Profits hang. Love GOD and Love your neighbor. Does this ideology not fail both?
Ecclesiastes 7:
16 Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?
17 Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?
You can individually choose to serve HIM; or not. Serving HIM does not include searching for what you want to hear; that would be serving yourself. These are our individual requirements and warnings.
The requirements of the Body are very different.
Ezekiel 16:9 Then washed I thee with water; yea, I throughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil.
In HIS covenant HE anointed us and turned us into something beautiful; but we “playedst the harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on every one that passed by”
2 Corinthians 6:
14 Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?
15 And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?
16 And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
17 Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you,
HIS oil changes us. Shake up water and oil, the oil will rise; except that which is held back by the world. Shake again and some are released but others held to the world. We have no part or control of any of it. The only way to rise out of the world is by HIM changing us with HIS anointing oil.
We are commanded to separate from evil; for our own protection and from our own arrogance. We should also Love others enough to warn them; and definitely not be addicted to the world or any cause.
Through the years individuals of an apparent conservative complexion have often asked me, “Ed, do you love the world? If you love the world, you must repent and withdraw from the world in significant areas of your life.”
My response has been, “Well, God so loved the world that he gave (immersed in worldly corruption; sacrificed) his only begotten Son. If God loves the world, then so must I; it goes with the territory.”
Never do we read in the Bible of Jesus moving out of population centers to avoid worldly associations, or of shunning people with dread life patterns or disease. I pity those with pathological fear of contamination who cannot enjoy fully the joy of ministering to any and all in society. What a terrible handicap; surely perfect love can and will cast out this fear, by God’s grace.
There are dozens of scripture telling us to have no attachments to the world. Here’s just a few:
Jn 15:19 If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are NOT of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
Jn 17:16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
Love not the world or the things of the world.
Rm 12:2 And be NOT conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
1Jn 2:15 Love NOT the world, neither the things that are in the world. If ANY man love the world, the love of the Father is NOT in him.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
There are no discrepancies Nathaniel. God did command Moses to make the snake and He also commanded Solomon to make the images in the temple, but never forget that these were God ordered, and only God ordered. You recall, that snake had to be destroyed by Hezekiah years later for what the Israelite’s were doing with it. A testament indeed of what making images can do, which is why God had Moses and Joshua destroy all the images, idols, groves and anything else that resembled idolatry in the heathen nations they conquered. As for the images in the holy and most holy place, they were not for public viewing –only the High Priest (and God) saw them. No one was even allowed to come near to the doors. If you recall, when the Babylonians took Jerusalem, they placed their own image (the abomination of desolation) on the alter of God, and because that desecrated the temple, God had it destroyed.
It took hundreds of years for the Jews to finally learn their lesson about making images; however, the heathens/gentiles (now Christians) never did learn the same lesson.
It took 500 years after Christ to bring images in the church and it never became officially accepted (or indoctrinated) until 787AD. Google “The Seventh General Council, The Second Council of Nicaea 787AD” and just read the first 5 pages of the historical information to get insights on how this commandment was viewed back then and compare it to how it is viewed today. Obviously, something has gone terribly…
….wrong.
Heather,
I am a pragmatist; and I do not believe in too much theorising. After reading the first three chapters of Genesis for literally hundreds of times, there is no way I can accept those stories as literal- literal days, literal fruits, literal snake, literal conversation between snake and woman. Not even literal Cain in chapter 4. In my childhood, I accepted all these stories, as I was taught by my parents and other seniors, in perfect innocence.
If in my workshop I build a boat which turns out to be unstable and dangerous, I discard it and replace it with a safe and stable one. I do not carry it to sea and use it to put innocent lives at stake. Some of our brilliant theologians and seers tell us that if God chose to replace the fallen couple, He would have violated their power of choice; or that if He had destroyed the guy who introduced sin(or evil)into the earth, people would be serving God from fear. Or something to the effect that God has to vindicate His love to the host of unfallen worlds… So He has this Plan in which His Son will come to die; but before he dies priests and others will have killed millions of innocent animals in sacrifice, and many more millions of people would be born with all kinds of mysterious defects and diseases, and suffer all kinds of pains and hurts and disasters. His death is supposed to bring hope; but while we hope many millions more are born in misery, and the pains and torments continue unabated. We do not see things as God…
but the car manufacturers or appliance providers would almost instantly recall the defective items and replace them with workable ones. The truth is that we do not know God’s plan and we crowd people’s mind with all types of speculation and theories,that we make God into an entity who seem not know what He is about. Truth is that the Bible does not and cannat tell us everything about all the unknowns about us, but at least, let us permit God enough wisdom to guide things along in the interest and well being of His whole creation.
So Heather, if you believe that the communication link between God and you is clear, and you have the conviction that it is his voice you are hearing, follow on without doubt; but with a clear conscience, and without guilt. God is the only one who judges correctly and righteously. The others are trying to impress that they are righteous by making helpless and weak people feel guilty. Often they succeed and drive many to suicide or insanity. Godly people assist the weak and helpless to heal their lives as they find help in God.
Matthew 4:17 From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 5:
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
CHRIST taught to repent and keep the commandments; remember this is only a test drive.
2 Corinthians 11:
2 For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.
3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
4 For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.
The Holy Spirit places Heather in remembrance; yes she can trust and enjoy that great gift of the Comforter from HIM.
John 14:
15 If ye love me, keep my commandments.
16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;
Yes Ekimi, ” It took hundreds of years for the jews to finally learn the lesson about making images, however, the heathens/gentiles never did learn the same lesson”
Have we,gentiles/SDAs learnt the lessons? One fellow takes a chisel and hammer to create an image from a log of wood or a block of stone; another takes a brush and creates an image on a canvas, and suggests to people that it is an image of God. What is the difference? Perhaps we do not bow down, but we make, and when we do make we violate as well; do we?
Yes, but we can take a chisel and hammer to turn the BIBLE into what we want it to be.
Once again; we only have two Great Commandments from which all of the Law and Profits hang. Love GOD and Love our neighbor. Maybe GOD is jealous?
Exodus 20:
4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.
6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
More results of idols and graven images are in Isaiah 44:
24 Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself;
25 That frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad; that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish;
Do we not seem to have a lot of this now also now? Maybe we didn’t learn the lesson?
I applaud the church on developing these position statements. It’s definitely a step in the right direction. Now we must move forward to develop our own therapeutic resources to help those whose desires are in conflict with their convictions and who are struggling with all sorts of sexual addictions and emotional brokenness . . . instead of just saying “I’ll pray for you” or “You need Jesus!” Prayer, in and of itself in situations like this, is NOT the solution alone, but a path that leads us to resources that provide effective solutions. Our church needs REAL empowering resources in this area, not just nicely crafted statements and compassion–though, again, this is a good start!
Nathaniel: I suppose, then, that you have come to a different conclusion than to which God has brought me. I am certainly no dummy, and yet I believe fully that Scripture is true. Where you see a “graven image” in the serpent God commanded Moses so make, I see the unique way in which God was already foretelling the Cure for the serpent’s (Satan’s) bite. He was teaching the Israelites not about graven images, but about having FAITH in Him, and that if they believed Him and looked at the serpent as per His instruction they would not perish, even though they had been bitten by the deadly fiery serpents. Even today this lesson smacks with truth and promise, and assures us that when we look with FAITH to the Cure for the destruction sin assures, like the Israelites of old we will not die. Where you see “wholesale extermination” in Scripture of peoples and nations, I again see lessons taught. If we give ourselves over to the desires of our own hearts and become irreversibly wicked, we will be subject to God’s judgement and justice and we will be destroyed. Every one of us is given a chance – every one of us has our name written in the Book of Life. It is by a series of our own choices and an ultimate hardening of our hearts against Him that God will blot our names from the Book. It is not His choice or His will – it is our own! So if whole ancient nations were “blotted out” by God’s righteous judgement, we can rest assured that God was just in His actions and that those…
He destroyed were evil. Again, consider the nature of God: does He act without first warning us and giving us an opportunity to repent? Does He bear with us patiently and give us every opportunity to choose Him, or does He just outright smite us when we are disobedient? Does He act in such a final way without thought or reason? I have my answers to these questions, because I know I would be a pile of ashes thousands of times over if God was an unthinking hothead. And let us consider Aaron and the golden calf. Moses is up on the mountain for days, and the people are scared because they think the only man who could speak directly to this “new” God and hear His instructions – the very man who led them from their familiar Egypt into the unfamiliar wilderness – is dead. Imagine their panic! Now if you know anything about Egyptian religion, you know that have a pantheon of gods, and for 430 years the Israelites were a part of that culture. This God of Israel is as yet unfamiliar to them, so they do what they know: they fall back upon their familiar and therefore comforting idolatry. Also remember that for Aaron, Moses’ second-in-command, that this is a confusing time of upheaval and change, and he too is displaced. So when the people appeal to him, he gives in. But the story hints that later, Aaron casts his die in on the side of God, which is why he is spared, and that some of the Israelites vote against God, which is why they were not:
“Moses standeth in the gate of the camp and sayith, ‘Who is for Jehovah? – unto me!” and all the sons of Levi are gathered unto him; and he saith to them, ‘Thus said Jehovah, God of Israel, Put each his sword by his thigh, pass over and turn back from gate to gate through the camp, and slay each his brother, and each his friend, and each his relation.’ And the sons of Levi do according to the word of Moses, and there fall of the people on that day about three thousand men, and Moses saith, ‘Consecrate your hand to-day to Jehovah, for a man is against his son, and against his brother, so as to bring on you to-day a blessing.'” Ex. 32:26-29. Once again, it comes down to faith and choice: have faith, choose God and choose for yourself life; choose anything else – wife, money, science, alcohol, government, job – and choose for yourself death. Later in the story we see God’s affirmation of such: “And Jehovah saith unto Moses, ‘Whoso hath sinned against Me – I blot him out of My book; and now, go, lead the people whithersoever I have spoken to thee of; lo, My messenger goeth before thee, and in the day of my charging – then I have charged upon them their sin.'” vs. 33-34 And yet, as angry as God is at the betrayal of His people, He reserves His final judgement of them until “the day of [His] charging”, and we see in Scripture that He continues to bear with them and beseech them to abandon their wicked ways and turn to Him (though ultimately, we know that they do…
not). When I read Scripture, it is with the mindset that I am ready to learn and to understand God, to the degree that my human mind can. It’s OK that I occasionally run into something that I question, but without fail, further study and prayer resolves those things for me. Even still, there are things that I won’t know until I can ask Christ Himself (dinosaurs are one of those things. I know that Satan can use and alter the things God made so as to confuse the human mind. Right or wrong, my personal opinion about dinosaurs is that they are tricks – things Satan threw in there to make science and mankind believe a story other than that of Genesis). And that’s OK, too – my faith sustains me when it comes to the things that, for now, I just can’t know. I know what matters, and I know what is true: Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and He died for my sins so that I might be reconciled to God the Father through Him. This does not mean that I am not, like you, a pragmatist. But being pragmatic is an approach that I find best reserved for tangible, worldly human things. When it comes to my faith – to my choice to spend eternity with my God and Savior, and to intangible otherworldly things that are too important to risk leaving up to my imperfect human understanding – I put my pragmatism aside and instead let the Spirit lead the way. God has not failed me yet, and I don’t expect that He will.
Every day we trust in things we cannot see, in systems we do not understand and in people we do not know. I trust that when the light turns green on my side, it turns red on the other guy’s side; that the jar of store-bought spaghetti sauce I’m feeding my family isn’t poisoned; that the engineers who designed my car engineered it for the maximum safety of me and my son; that the software and hardware that flies hundredes of jets in U.S. airspace will prevent any one of them from crashing down upon me (just as the people flying on them trust in the pilots’ abilities to correctly use those systems and to land them safely); that my son’s educators know the best way to instruct him, and that when I drop him off at school he is in a place where he is safe and protected; that the medications I take are what was prescribed by my doctor, and that they were made to specifications by the pharmaceutical company that manufactured them, and that an employee of the company didn’t lace them with arsenic; that when I give PayPal my bank card number for my Bath and Body Works order, that my financial information is secure, and that the BBW employees will receive my order and send me the right stuff; that I’m pumping unleaded gasoline into my car as indicated and not diesel; that my Taco Bell food hasn’t been spit in or otherwise defiled; that my doctor knows how to diagnose and treat my specific ailments, because I certainly didn’t go to medical school and know what he knows!
Every day we trust our very lives without a thought to someone or something. We don’t question the knowledge and understanding of our doctors, lawyers, government or scientists. We haven’t been trained in medicine, law, civics or chemistry, so we trust in those who have been. And yet, we question the One Who understands all those things – and moreso! – because HE created those things in the first place! We can understand the physical and chemical properties of the known elements and organize them by atomic weight on the periodic table, but HE created the elements! We can understand the mechanics of flight and put airplanes in the sky, but HE created the very properties that make it possible (lift, drag, air currents, etc.)! We trust in so many things, including our own understanding, and yet we question the Creator, the Senior Designer, the Lead Engineer, the Master Artist! Why? He gives us all the answers we need in His Book – in the Word made Flesh – and yet we just can’t accept when He says something we don’t agree with! “A man shall not lie with a man as with a woman…” and we all engage in debates and arguments and rely on our experiences and emotions to decide the issues for us! We trust psychologists and geneticists when they “explain” homosexuality, but we don’t trust the Author of Life when He says, “This is wrong. This is not per my design.” Why – WHY? – do we find it so EASY to trust in almost anything and anybody than our God? Any ideas, anybody?
Heather,
You have asked a fundamental question and illustrated it clearly. There are many reasons why people do not trust God. First, they don’t see Him, so they don’t feel like it is possible to know Him. Second, they’ve heard all sorts of bad things about him. (Why should they want to trust someone who is going to torture the wicked through eternity with fire?) Yet I think the biggest reason people don’t trust God is because they see so few people who actually do trust Him so they don’t see much benefit in it. What is more, the people they meet who claim to love Him don’t act like it and the benefits they claim come from such a relationship are not apparent, questionable or unappealing.
In other words, they have a form of godliness but none of the power. What we need is people to actually dare to get to know God.
The NAD leadership will have to be answerable to God for the folly of her ways and for leading God’s people astray.
Nations who trample on God’s law and openly defy God will reap what they sow – and receive the curse of God. The Bible testifies of this.
One doesn’t have to be a prophet to have predicted the advent of the homosexual agenda now closely trailing behind the militant (anti-patriarchal) feminist assault which the church has been bombarded with since the NAD’s renegade Mohaven chapter – which then, and now, is the direct result of the dominant culture leading the pack.
The NAD (yet again) in fulfilling both the role of opinion leader and change agent by voting in this way on this matter, once again falls prey to the dictates of the dominant culture as they further lose their grips on the Bible being the basis for our faith. The Church should not be a puppet of a secular ungodly government.
The term sexual orientation, isn’t a biblical teaching and is of a sinful human construct coined to normalise sexual immorality. A person sexually attracted to children or other preferred sexually immoral behaviour may argue that they are orientated this way – or ‘born’ like this. Does that make it an acceptable Christian virtue? If you’ve answered no, then full marks for you.
Surprisingly though, so-called progressives vying for gay rights in the Church, turn a blind eye to the fact that there is no conclusive scientific evidence that proves that sexual orientation in the context of ‘what floats your boat’ is in fact a true component of human sexuality. All the markers still point to the biblical teaching of what is the norm – and of course what is a perversion of that norm. Let’s not kid ourselves…
Heather, you will agree with me that this world is a wonderful place, and that the creator is a wonderful God. From your lenghty exposition and testimony,it is clear to me that you trust men(with all their weakness and their ungodly ways),and that you love and trust God. You have confidence in the physician, so you take the medication he prescribes; you have faith in the engineers and the pilots, so you drive the cars and fly in the aeroplanes;you trust the cooks, so you eat in the restaurants…etc,etc….You fear that some of us trust men more than we trust God. But it is not that we do not trust God. Man is the problem. Most men trust God,sometimes without even thinking about trust. Let us not deny sincerity to the host of people who trust God and their fellowmen every moment. Thatis why most of us take the doctor’s medicine, and eat in restaurants, drink bottled water, drive in cars, fly in planes undergo surgeries, etc, etc.
God has made his world and put in place all the principles which govern growth and development,movement and balsnce, etc. Man has discovered how some of these principles operate in our space, and has harnessed them to promote and enhance our level of existence and development. Some of these scientists, engineers,,technicians and other workers are also atheists, skeptics and gays – most of them very reliable people, and we will have to trust their integrity. Unfortunately a few of them are unreliable and so we have the problem where we have to…
recall millions of VW cars, or to collect our loved ones in body bags after a pilot crashes a plane on to a mountainside. And here lies our problem. Though most men are honest, we have to cater for the odd deviant.
God is revealing Himself to us all the time; but not all men are honest about the revelation. Did God tell the Hebrews to slaughter all those canaanite nations? Or is it that the Hebrews thought so, mistakenly or deliberately, following the practice of the nations of those times? The two stories of creation in Genesis -are they both from the pen of Moses,or are they two different stories from two different writers? At one time Jesus is quoted as saying, “I and my Father are One”; at the other time he is telling his hearers,”My Father is greater than I”. Is there the hand of an editor here, or is there inaccurate reporting? We trust God to be accurate and consistent, but do we trust our fellowman to remember what he sees and hears,or to relate the story or impression accurately, or to be careful or fair not to mix two or more stories and treat them as one?
Under the jewish national and ceremonial law, the men who were found having sex relations as man with woman,were to be killed, how do you translate that into church law today? In Paul’s time, pehaps he could not invoke any state law to sanction the deviant, so he could only keep them out of the “kingdom”.
Hi, Nathaniel. To be clear, those were two separate posts, the one being my response to you, the other just a general observation regarding the things in which we unquestioningly trust – the point being that they ARE manmade and ARE prone to failure (and sometimes catastrophically so), while we question and find fault with God at almost every turn. I have done it myself, and sometimes still do – think that I am a better manager of my life than God and, in a fit of distrust, wrestle control from Him and do things my own way (which unfailingly leads to me crying out to Him to rescue me from the prideful mess I have made of things!). The “point” of the second post was to make us think, and to consider why we put more trust in prone-to-failure manmade things than in our infallible God. It is a curse we have lived under since Eve chose to listen to Satan in Eden: we tend to listen to and believe in things other than God. I was curious why others would say we do this. My own conclusion is that nothing has changed since that fateful day in Eden – that there is still an Enemy whispering in our ear and making us question God’s instructions to us. “Is He a megalomaniacal despot?” I have wondered, listening to Satan’s suggestion that it is so, and following in the footsteps of my first female ancestor who wondered, “Is He keeping some great secret from us?” before she bit into the fruit. I see so much TRUTH in the account of creation and its fall that I am unable
to dismiss it as merely “a story”. And to this very day, humanity on the whole trusts in all things “of the world” without sparing a passing thought for how dangerous this learned, conditioned response can be.
Hi again, Nathaniel. I have to disagree with you that “most men are honest”. Indeed, I believe the very opposite, and that it is only with and through God’s divine guidance that we are able to rise above our humanity. “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.” Jer. 17:9-10 Are we honest creatures? How can we be, when our hearts are “deceitful and desperately sick”? Even so, I believe that God is able to identify men (and women!) who listen above all else to His voice, and who faithfully record His words and follow His commands.
Now, knowing this, we can listen to our deceitful hearts… or listen for God’s wise instruction. Does it MATTER whether Genesis was penned by two writers or one? By one, the writer is consistent with his accounts, albeit going into more detail in his first penning than in his second. By two, each writer tells the same story, one writer adding more detail than the next. Why get hung up on a point that matters not? Whether penned by one man or by two, the stories echo one another without causing conflict in the creation account.
I want to tell you about me and my husband. He goes his way in the morning, I go mine. He perform his responsibilities, I perform mine. He drives the Ford, I drive the Mercury. He makes money during the course of his day,
I don’t (just the opposite, in fact!) And yet, we are “one flesh” according to God’s design and the vow we made before Him. How can this be? If we were truly “one flesh”, we would be indivisible: we would both go the same way, do the same things, in the same car, and make the same money. But the “oneness” of marriage isn’t physical – it’s spiritual and practical. My husband’s “goal” as he leaves for the day is to provide for his family; my goal for the day is the same. He makes the money it takes to raise a family, I make the doctor appointments, take care of business matters, pay the bills, manage the details. My husband’s “goal” is to live in a nice home, in a safe neighborhood; mine is the same. His goal is to center his family in God; mine is the same. “Oneness” doesn’t necessarily equate to “sameness”, and this is true even of the Godhead.
God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit all have different “jobs” – God is commanding and judging, Christ is interceding and working on our behalves, the Spirit is communicating God’s will to our hearts and convicting our hearts concerning that which is right and that which is wrong. IS the Father “greater than” the Son? In that he is “above” the Son and is issuing the marching orders, yes, He IS greater than the Son. ARE the Father and Son ONE? Yes, in that the united “goal” of the Father, the Son and the Spirit is to reconcile a fallen humanity to God and to thereby bring us home to God’s…
kingdom, They are One. For me, there is no discrepancy or contradiction in this matter.
Regarding the stoning of homosexuals and other such directives, we need to understand that the laws that governed the Nation of Israel – that is, the body of Old Testament people who were God’s chosen people – applied to ONLY THOSE PEOPLE. Once the physical Nation of Israel ceased to be, so did the social laws that governed them. At that point, God made a NEW covenant with a new people, that “people” being anyone who chose to love Him and follow His commands. We learn in New Testament Scripture that the new covenant didn’t make the Law obsolete (that is, the Ten Commandments still stand. And so do the laws that predate the Exodus, such as the Sabbath, the food laws that Noah observed while on the ark, having packed into it seven of each clean animal in contrast to only one male and female of each unclean animal, which tells us that the clean animals served as a food source for Noah and his family).
Questions are good. Questions asked help us to grow in our faith walk, providing we don’t allow them to stall us and point accusatory fingers at God outright. As was the choice given to Adam and Eve, so the choice remains for us today: to have faith in Him, or to not.
Why does a person’s religion or orientation bring into question his professional integrity? Do you inquire about either of your physician, pharmacist, and only trust what an Adventist suggests for you and your body?
Do you believe that Christians should live by the Jewish law that stoned homosexual or adulterers? You should begin gathering your rock pile as you will be kept busy. Or move to Afghanistan where stoning is a common practice for those sins.
You would find Jenkins’ church to your taste. He preaches death to all homosexuals. Is that following Christ’s example who refused to stone the adulterous woman?
What could Christ have meant when He said “There are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men; and there are eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to accept this, let him accept it” (Matt.l9:12).
Elaine, I find you to be reactive, prickly and itching for a fight against the Adventist church and those who identify as “Adventist”, so ordinarily I would ignore your slings and barbs and deny you the satisfaction of a response. But in this case I find you to be way, way overboard, reading things into Nathaniel’s response that he clearly didn’t say and I don’t believe he so much as implied. He is positing his own thoughts and engaging in a polite, respectful intelligent exchange of ideas. This is how we learn from each other and grow. Suggesting that another contributor gather a rock pile or move to Afghanistan is a childish and immature way to goad an honest seeker into a silly argument, or to shut him up entirely so that only your position remains. Attacks are counterproductive and scare more timid people out of leaving responses for fear of being bullied. If all you are looking for is a petty fight, go start an “Antiventist” site – your time would be better spent there, identifying the planks in everyone else’s eyes whilst looking past the one in your own.
my my, be the hero, Heather. Nathaniel is eloquent and can converse his position with out rancor. Elaine, is more than twice your age, an intellectual observant of history being made, being born before the creature comforts, which are taken for granted, by folks today. When autos were not available to 90% of the population. Airplanes were few (mostly military) and non=pressurized, flying under ten thousand feet, at the great speed of 150kph. Doctors were body mechanics, operating with meager knowledge, lack of adequate meds, and equipment. Ether the best anesthetic. People dying from common infections, appendicitis, colds, strep throat, etc, because of no antibiotics, having been discovered. Experienced WWII, the worst war of mankind, in terms of 50-100 million casualties. Elaine has experienced the greatest slice of human history, as knowledge has increased more in the past 100 years, than all time before. She is not alone in her religious thinking. Many have the same questioning of which Bible messages are inspired by GOD, and which are allegorical, metaphoric, and which are of the writers own adlibbing anecdotal thoughts of the times in which they lived. Also recognizing that for thousands of years the history was from mouth to ear, from generation to generation, before written. As to trusting professionals,
who put on their clothes just as you and i do, knowing from whence we come,
trust must be earned. Whereby faith is an exceptional blind trust in our ALMIGHTY GOD.
all Christians, borne again, again, and again in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, know and understand the Ten Commandments given to Israel. But as the laws were pure and Holy, it was impossible for sinful flesh, then and now, to
keep the laws. The people were condemned to death. God gave His only Son, the Christ, in the person of Jesus of Nazereth, to live and express the Love of the Almighty. Jesus is and was of the Father, immortal. Recreated on Earth, in the flesh of man. Being sustained by the Spirit of God, He sinned not. He exhibited perfectly the Love of the Ancient of Days. When He died as man on the cross, He died as the Son of God. The Ten Commandments that condemned all mankind, although Truth, and we know it, but it’s penalty was removed by the shed blood of God, the Son of God. And by giving His Life in the perfection of His Love, He gave a new Covenant which mankind is to honor, “LOVE AND HONOR ME, GOD YOUR CREATOR, AND LOVE YOUR NEIGHBORS WITH ALL YOUR SOUL’S POWER”. “THIS IS THE GREAT COMMANDANT OF YOUR LOVING GOD”.
It is sad to see someone, anyone, who is so jaded on life to believe that most people are dishonest. One sees what he is looking for. I see more honest, kind-hearted and compassionate people on a daily basis, perhaps it it the city I live in? They are kind and helpful and often go out of their way to help the unfortunate who perhaps are somewhat slow or using a cane, which I occasionally use. Strangers will offer to help me cross a wet street; hand me their empty shopping cart, pick up things I may drop and often reach for something too high to pick up in the store.
Honesty? I trust, but I verify and am not gullible and naive or could have been scammed long ago as some have. I live independently at 91 years and counting, and have so many things to be thankful for: love, friendships, and most of all family. What more could anyone want? Love begets love; honesty begets honesty; respect for others gains self respect for both. Christians should first and foremost demonstrate love; otherwise, nothing said is worth hearing.
My sisters,Elaine and Heather, and brother,Earl,
I am enjoying this discussion, especially realising that we can read the same material and understand it so differently. Let me hasten to say that I am impressed by Elaine’s clarity of presentation and lucidity of thought, considering her age. At ninety-one lots of people resign themselves to the rocker or sofa, and withdraw from active communication with the rest of the world. She is also not afraid to give her frank opinion on these religious and church matters, much of which have become so contentious in SDA circles.
In this dialogue, I do not think her objections were in reply to the observations I made. We both agreed that most people are “good” or honest,and that we demonstrate our trust of one another by taking the medicine prescribed by our doctors,driving the cars, flying in the planes, etc… She confessed she is assisted every day by kind and thoughtful people as she makes her daily rounds. She took some time off to admonish us a bit, but all that is in keeping with the spirit of helping one another.
Let me spend a moment to comment on a point made by Earl.
Heather, I agree with you that the serpent of brass, the ark, and the story behind them were object lessons to teach valuable principles of godliness and salvation to the Israelites. Perhaps it does not matter whether the creation stories were written by one person or by more than one. The problem, to me,about the two creation stories is that they contradict each other in some respects. One story says that man was created on the sixth day after the animals and other creeping things; the other story tells that Adam was created before the animals. It would seem to me that the difference is important for the SDA believers, because we believe in a literal creation of literal days,or we will have a problem with the sabbath, exceept we treat the sabbath also as an object lesson.
To me, it is not convincing how we try to explain that three persons can be one God. The I AM is too emphatic in my bible for me to take that trinity talk. It sounds much like a concoction in view of what I read in the bible.
Hi, Nathaniel. Again, I see cohesive creation accounts where you see “discrepancies”. God created creeping things AND Adam on the same day, the sixth day. One account mentions the creeping things first, the other mentions man first. Does it matter whether God first created Adam and then created creeping things, or vice-versa? That He made creatures in the morning, and man in the afternoon, or vice-versa? They were both made on the SAME day. Where’s the stumbling block? It’s llike a friend asking what I did that Friday and I tell her, “I picked up my son from school and did some shopping”, both of which I did do. Later, I’m recounting to my husband the events of my day, “Well, I worked a little on my book, and then I rested my back for a bit. I got going around two and went shopping for things for Sabbath potluck, and then I picked Caleb up from school and came home.” In this account, I told my husband about my day IN ORDER of the things I did. Are either of the accounts false? No. It’s simply that when speaking to my husband, I give all the details of my day in order, because he’ll want to know. But when speaking to my friend, I tell her the highlights, or the things I know she’ll be interested in, but the order in which I did those things doesn’t take away or add to the accounting of my day. In both accounts I picked up my son from school and shopped. As a writer, I can attest that we writers have different styles. Some, like me, pack a simple story full
of sights, sounds, smells and adjectives. We are known as “storytellers” because of the rich detail of the things we write. Some writers forego such wordiness and don’t “dress things up”. They tell the “bare bones” of a story. Both styles are valid and can be powerful in their own right. To my eye, there are two writers who contributed to the creation account. One, like me, adds all the details – the order of things, the words of the Creator, the types of creatures. The other just records “the meat” of things – the main points – without dressing things up with a lot of language. Both accounts are in agreement and both are equally valid, although recounted in a different manner per the individual style of each contributor.
Conclusion: We can either keep a wary, suspicious eye out for seeming “discrepancies” (as I once did) and things that make us doubt the truth and power of Scripture, or we can prayerfully trust the Lord to guide us safely past them. When something seems not to “click” in Scripture, I ask Him to help it make sense. Sometimes it takes a simple cross-study, sometimes it takes an exhaustive search of Scripture using a concordance, sometimes it takes looking at the Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic. But unfailingly, God has proved His Word time and again to me, and I have learned to trust Him to explain it, rather than question His ability to protect His Word from human editing and interference.
Heather,
Read the creation story in Genesis 2. Adam was God’s first created act and not until everything was completed, he took Adam to see all the animals in order to name them. THEN, he caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam and took from him a rib and fashioned women and gave to Adam.
There are two distinctively different creation stories and the compilers of the Bible included both but combining them into a coherent single story is impossible.
Genesis 2 begins thus: “Thus the heavens and the earth WERE COMPLETED in all their vast array. By the SEVENTH day God HAD FINISHED the work he HAD been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating THAT HE HAD DONE.” Gen.2:1-3 Elaine, you can’t just ignore something because it doesn’t fit what you want to believe. At the opening of Gen. 2, God has ALREADY created everything, including Adam, and has rested on and blessed the seventh day. From there we have “mini glimpses”, synapses if you will, of God’s previous actions. Vs. 4-7 describe how God HAD created man (He isn’t creating, as in Genesis 1; rather, He HAS CREATED); vs. 8-14 describe the garden of Eden that God HAD ALREADY planted; vs.15-17 tell us that God placed Adam in the garden to tend it and told him not to eat fruit from a certain tree; vs.18-20 tell us the order in which God HAD CREATED things the sixth day – that God created Adam earlier in the day and then later created the animals, and allowed Adam to name them; vs. 21-25 describe how God HAD CREATED Eve on the sixth day, and we see more of the order of His sixth day creation – man, animals, woman.
They are NOT different stories. One is more detailed than the other, one provides insight into the order of God’s sixth day creating. The first three verses of Gen. 2 tell you how it is POSSIBLE to understand them as one. But will you?
Now, Brother Earl, you said,referrring to the ten commandments “But the laws were pure and holy,it was impossible for sinful flesh, both then and now, to keep the laws”
Is that intended to be a faith-shaking thought? God made man; He made man, and gave them his laws and asked them to keep those laws. What kind of god are you presenting here, giving laws that are impossible for sinful flesh to keep? Is He guessing his way,or is he experimenting with the sinner’s mind? My view is that God means what He says, and if he knew that man could not keep the law He would not ask man to keep it/.
I agree with Earl, that “sinful flesh” is unable to keep the laws. IF we believe Scripture, we know that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. If the Nation of Israel had been able to keep God’s commandments, why was it necessary for sin offerings and the day of atonement? If God’s “new people” could “live up to” His commands, why did Christ need to die on the cross? We are certainly not supposed to disobey God’s rules, but we do. “I do the things I do not want to do!” lamented Paul. But “the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak.” Having not been raised Adventist, I didn’t grow up with the food laws. Even so, the Spirit convicted my heart that the food laws are still in effect. For THREE YEARS I stopped eating unclean foods…until McDonalds recently came out with the “All-Day Egg McMuffin”. And even though I KNEW I was doing the wrong thing – not according to the church but according to my convicted heart – I ate one. And that Canadian bacon was so, so good! That night, I confessed my sin to God. But two days later, I ate another. And later numbers three, and four! I was willfully and knowingly disobedient, and that’s the worst kind of wrong I can commit! But thankfully, for sinners such as myself – for those of us who WANT to obey but follow the desires of our human flesh – there is Jesus. God didn’t set us up to fail. He set us up to be victorious, through Christ. Left to our own devices, we’d fail miserably.
“There is nothing new under the sun…” observed the wisest man to ever have lived. 91 or 43, Elaine and I have seen the SAME THINGS in our lifetimes, albeit in different forms. She lived when cars were being created – I live with staggering almost daily advances in technology wherein Air Force personnel can “fly” an unmanned drone and target a single individual hundreds of miles away from his own position. She sometimes walks with a cane because of her advanced years, I often walk with a walker due to multiple spinal fusion surgeries and I can’t feel my right foot most days. I did not just come to this forum – I’ve lurked for years and occasionally commented, and I have seen with my own eyes how critical and antagonistic she can be towards others. I often wonder why she’s “here” with her open contempt of the church. Mind you, you will never catch me defending the church as an organization, but the truth is that attacks on people who care about or even love the church are counterproductive. And intellectual? I’ll never forget the day she attacked me for believing in the Old Testament, saying that there is “no mention” of Christ in the Old Testament. Umm…what? He’s in the very first chapter of Genesis and throughout. He didn’t just “appear” in the New Testament. And still she goads, calling me “jaded” because I believe what Scripture says and trust HIM above my own experiences, unlike her according to her own testimony. And here, now, I brush away the dust.
My intention here is not to try to convince people against their will,or to convert others to my point of view. When we get other people’s point of view, it can help us to modify or refine our own. People must be prepared to live responsibly, and be prepared to face the consequences of their actions. To live recklessly and carelessly without consideration for consequences is presumptious; so when we talk about the blood of Christ covering our sins we must bear this principle in mind. This principle applies to the homosexual, the arrogant, the self-righteous or the lustful.
Scripture says that we must resist the devil,if we want him to flee from us. Even so we have to fight against evil tendencies in our lives; and some of us can fight harder and smarter than others. A friend of mine was an inveterate smoker. One night he went to bed without his usual smoke. He got up during the night to get a smoke,but could not find a cigarette around; and was in torment-he could not sleep. He jumped out of bed early the next morning and hustled to the village shopkeeper, and called him up, asking for cigarettes. The shopkeeper was angry,and asked him, “You really really called me out of bed to sell you cigarettes”? My friend told me that he turned away in embarassment, and never bought or smoked another cigarette from that morning. Think of it. There are thousands of smokers who are fighting the smoking habit for months and years, and cannot get the victory! Some people have stronger…
“…so when we talk about the blood of Christ covering our sins we must bear this principle in mind. This principle applies to the homosexual, the arrogant, the self-righteous or the lustful.” Right on! But there are three other powerful factors involved, and they are choice, confession and repentance. If I am a homosexual who chooses to disregard what the Bible says and doesn’t try to overcome my sinful behavior, I am NOT covered by the blood of Christ. I have decided that there is nothing wrong with my sexual orientation and denied my need of a Savior. I am well within my rights to make this decision. Or maybe instead I’m a homosexual who believes what the Bible says, and I realize that I am powerless on my own to affect the desires of my flesh. I acknowledge my need for a Savior, I confess my sinful urges and I repent of any actions I have taken to fulfill those urges. Now, I’m not a homosexual, but I used to have VERY “sticky fingers”. I was SO good at stealing that I stole a cockatiel from one pet shop and an iguana from another (in addition to many other things over the course of ten or so years)! Even with $50 in my pocket I’d steal a $2 lipstick. Eventually, though, I returned to my faith and confessed my thieving to God, asked him to help me overcome my very powerful urges to steal and repented of my old ways. Prior, I was NOT covered by Christ’s blood. Only through confessing my need of Someone greater than myself to save me from myself, was I protected
by Christ’s blood. It’s like a young child hiding under a blanket. Covered, they cannot be seen by their parent. But upon venturing out from beneath that blanket, the parent notices the child. Similarly, when we are “hidden in Christ”, our confessed sins are not counted against us by God the Father because when He looks at us, He sees the precious blood of His son. When we venture away from Christ and do not confess or seek forgiveness for our sins, our sinfulness is “noticed” by God because when He looks upon us, He no longer sees the Perfection that is Christ – He sees the unrepentant sinner. As Christians, we can literally COST SOMEONE THEIR ETERNAL LIFE if we tell them the Bible is false, or outdated, or patriarchal or a human machination, and that it’s ok to act on homosexual urges, or to be an adulterer or a thief! Yes, we ARE to love one another, even a gay man or an adulterous woman or a practiced thief. But to excuse behaviors in others that God has identified as sinful, because we think it’s unfair or it’s uncomfortable to speak the Truth, puts another at risk of destruction. I found my friend Jon’s struggle with homosexuality heartbreaking, and to my human emotions it was an unfair predicament. Yet in the final analysis and speaking as a Christian, I told him I believed the Bible, BECAUSE I loved him! I wanted him to be saved! If we truly want to love a fellow sinner, we speak the truth, and we pray for them. We do not give them a “pass” into damnation.
Some people have stronger wills than others, as some have stronger faith than others; and it is possible that God can do a better job with those of stronger will and stronger faith. But these are my words and my opinions and I stand to be corrected.
So sister Heather, if you believe like my brother Earl,that we sinners cannot keep God’s laws, you are entitled to your opinion; but take note of the many times when God asked the children of Israel to “keep my statutes”,”obey my voice”,”keep my commandments”. Was He giving them the order, knowing well that they could not comply; and still punisned them when they failed? If a human brother does this, he will be called a hypocrite,or at least a hard taskmaster,and I cannot regard God as being less sincere or less conscientious than fair minded humans.
Nathaniel, of COURSE God wants us to keep His statutes and obey His voice, because what happened when the Israelites ultimately DIDN’T? They forfeited the covenant they had made with God and were destroyed (as a nation). He didn’t want that, and so he admonished them always to obey Him. Similarly, He doesn’t want to lose even one of us! Do I not remind my son time and again not to run into the road? Do I not remind him, regularly, to beware of strangers acting strangely? Am I not saying, essentially, “obey me”? What kind of parent would I be if I didn’t warn him about acting in a dangerous, life-threatening manner?
But there is an Enemy to whom we sometimes choose to listen, the one to whom this fallen world belongs, and therefore God knows we WILL fail to obey Him from time to time, like with me and my Egg McMuffins, or like my son when he crossed the road the other day even though I told him not to. And so God sent a Guarantee, through Whom we are saved through His grace alone when we have faith in Him. He also sent us the Spirit, to help us stay on course. If we were able to simply obey the law, we could earn our ways into heaven, right? All alone, on our own. And if that were the case, then Christ died for nothing! I am strong-willed and stubborn, and I can be a real bulldog when it comes to things I feel strongly about. And yet I am too weak and imperfect to earn salvation – there is no way I could pull it off. And thank God, literally, that I don’t have to!
Nathaniel, Earl, Elaine, all: To clarify, my use of capitalization in my posts is to add emphasis, because there is no way to put something in italicized or bold print. I am not “yelling”, as some believe the use of caps implies. I haven’t once felt angry during the conversations above, and in fact have enjoyed the exchange of ideas and opinions. For me, these conversations have reaffirmed my own beliefs, because I am confident that God has revealed to me the truth in these matters.
Homosexuality, on any day, is a challenging topic for fair-minded Christians, particularly those of us who know or have loved a gay person (as I deeply loved my best friend, Jon). I tried for YEARS to find a way around the few verses in Scripture that address homosexuality, but in the end, I came to believe that being gay is fine, but engaging in homosexual sex is a violation of God’s laws. Yet not one of us can say we haven’t violated God’s laws, so no sinner is above or beneath another; rather, we are all in the same place: standing in need of a Savior and the power of God to help us be strong where we are weak. God’s rules don’t always make sense to our human minds and sometimes the truth can seem unfair or make us feel uncomfortable. But if we love God, the Bible tells us, then we will love truth also and will follow the rules as best we can. It’s not always an easy thing to do, but if we rely on Him through Whom all things are possible, then the promise is ours to inherit.
Being heterosexual is also fine. Just that you can’t expect to marry. Try that one on for size.
Being heterosexual is also fine. Just don’t expect to marry; remain celibate. We ask of others what we would never do. Following the Golden Rule.
I have nothing but love for homosexuals. Unlike many Christians, I would never oppose their right to get married. I staunchly believe that my rights end where the next guy’s begin, and that I can’t force my personal beliefs regarding such matters onto another. But we can’t confuse the issue as Christians, IF we believe the Bible and IF we want to obey God. I would no more encourage an adulterer to continue behaviors that could potentially cost them their eternal life than I would tell a gay person to do so. Sex isn’t everything, and one need not be married to find companionship. My own brother is proof of that to me. He is 50 years old and has NEVER had a girlfriend. Never dates. Nada. I suspect he may be gay, but he hasn’t confirmed it and I’m not going to outright ask him. But he has a good career and enjoys various activities with friends (male and female), owns a very nice condo and has a cat and keeps up on world events and politics. He’s also a Christian, so I highly doubt he’s out there sleeping around. Plus, he’s very fastidious and it wouldn’t be his style. For whatever reason or reasons, he has remained single and likely pretty celibate. It IS possible to live such a life. Paul of Scripture was unmarried and (as a Christian) celibate. Whole groups of monks are, too! A disciplined heart and mind can achieve amazing things, particularly with the assistance of the Almighty.
Elaine – one last thought. You say that “We ask others what we would never do”. I’m not asking gays to obstain from having sex with each other. Neither is the church. Or anyone who is a bigot against them. Are you?
Whether you choose to accept it or not, or to believe it or not, it is what GOD COMMANDS, regardless of what mankind thinks or feels about His rightness or fairness. Like it or not, God is Supreme and Almighty. He knows what we cannot know, and understands what we cannot so much as begin to grasp. He Alone made the laws that govern His creation. What He says IS. You are 91 years of age. Instead of fighting against Him and what He commands, I admonish you to make peace with Him as YOUR Amighty God and Savior. What goes on between another sinner and God is ultimately between them once the sinner has heard the Truth. I speak the Truth to you now, Elaine, as an apostle of the Living God. Accept that He Alone is Sovereign. Should you value eternal life in the Kingdom as a co-heir with Christ, you will make your election without delay. His Kingdom IS at hand, and even now He is stretching forth His hand to knock upon the door of your heart. His desire for you is that you heed his knock. But the choice, of course, is yours.
Jesus said do you not know God made them male and female, so the two can marry and be one. This is pretty clear proof that
God didn’t design men to marry men, or women to marry women.
To say someone is born gay means you believe in predestination, that God made some to be lost and some to be saved regardless of what they do or how they live their lives, no one has any say. After all what you really believe is they weren’t born that way, God created them that way.