Homosexuality

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is a poor sermon that gives no offence; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher." —George Whitefield
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recently, I was attacked viciously by a blogger over the gay rights issue.

As carefully as I tried, I was not able to convince the gay activist that, No, I did not hate homosexuals. That, Yes, I believed gays and lesbians should have their constitutional rights along with the rest of us. And, once again, No, I was not a fascist. However, I did inform him that hermeneutically he did not have a leg to stand on if he was going to insist that both Old and New Testament scriptures did not actually forbid any type of homosexual act. Further, I pointed out that the sin of homosexuality was proscribed along with fornication, bestiality and murder, as well as a host of other sins.

Naturally, this sent him into orbit. He then proceed to tell me I was an uneducated fool, and began to shoot question at me like, “As you've apparently studied hermeneutics, what do you think of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel?” As if that had anything to do with the price of tea in China. Well, I was pretty sure it would come as a surprise to him that I had taught sociology and was familiar with the two gentlemen in question. But, I said, that has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Which was, and is, what does the Bible have to say about homosexuality?

Now, much to my discredit—since it should have dawned on me earlier—I quickly discovered that gay and lesbian activists (including those denominations that are ordaining them) have absolutely no respect for the authenticity and integrity of scripture, except to promote their agenda by twisting and contorting it to suit their purposes.

So, I was wasting my breath, and told him so.

This, however, brings me to the subject of witnessing—including, preaching and Biblical interpretation. And, immediately, my mind travels back to a convocation address given by Carl F.H. Henry at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary some 30 years ago entitled “The Barbarians Are Coming.”

Here is one short quote that I wish to leave with you from that speech, and ask you to reflect upon and pray about, in hopes that it will ignite a missionary fire and zeal in your bellies, as it has mine, to renew your resolve to witness and preach as George Whitefield (quoted above) urged us to so many years ago.

We sit glued to television sets, unmindful that ancient pagan rulers staged Coliseum circuses to switch the minds of the restless ones from the realities of a spiritually-vagrant empire to the illusion that all is basically well .... We are so steeped in the antichrist philosophy-namely, that success consists in embracing not the values of the Sermon on the Mount but an infinity of material things, of sex and status - that we little sense how much of what passes for practical Christianity is really an apostate compromise with the spirit of the age ....Our culture is lost to the truth of God, to the reality of divine revelation, to the content of God's will, to the power of his redemption, and to the authority of his Word. For this loss it is paying dearly in a swift relapse to paganism. The savages are stirring again; you can hear them rumbling and rustling in the tempo of our times. — Carl E. H. Henry, "The Barbarians Are Coming," ABE Journal 2:2 (June 1994), 3-4.

Now, that is something to think about!