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Friends in Christ Jesus, as a J.D. and PhD in Christian History, Ohio State University, I would like to my thoughts on the latest Gay apologist craze.
Many proponents of the gaysexual lifestyle choice are also Christian. They learn in church as children that gaysexuals are eternally separated from God. Then they grow up and they meet one of these gaysexuals on the street, in a school, or perhaps in their own family. The gaysexual is disarming enough, and the Christian naturally feels a conflict between being drawn to the gaysexual as a person and knowing what God as to say on the subject.
This creates what we call a cognitive dissonance, or a conflict between what we rationally can see with our eyes and ears (that God is with us always) and what we are being led to believe by community leaders and gaysexual activists (that gay is OK). Some Christians try to quiet this dissonance with the following: Jesus never condemned any homosexuals or mentioned gaysexuality or gaysexual acts at any time. Therefore, if Jesus couldn’t be bothered to comment on the topic, then, the argument goes, either it is a minor sin or, even more, not a sin at all.
This argument is often presented with a pithy graphic or meme in which the “Christian” in question says, “Here! Look at what Jesus says about gays!” And with that we are presented with a blank sheet of paper, or a Bible-shaped book with nothing on the page. All this is very cute, to be sure. But did Jesus really say nothing about gaysexuals?
Gay apologists read the Gospels and find nothing in the quotes of Jesus there. BUT JESUS’S WORDS ARE NOT LIMITED TO QUOTES IN THE FOUR GOSPELS.
Quite the opposite. THE BIBLE SAYS PLENTY ABOUT GAYSEXUALISM. By incorporating by reference the rules of the Old Testament, and by empowering Paul of Tarsus with the authority to speak in His name, VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING THE BIBLE SAYS AGAINST GAYSEXUALISM IS SANCTIONED BY JESUS HIMSELF.
JESUS INCORPORATES IN HIS WORDS THE RULES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
First, some “Christian” defenders of the gaysexual lifestyle try to say that Jesus is not the same as the old, rather vengeful God of the Old Testament. This is, of course, absurd. Jesus and God are the same thing. “I and my father are one,” says Jesus in John 10:30. The Bible is crystal clear that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which make the trinity, are of the same substance. 1 John 5:8 sets this out in plain English: “And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.” In other words, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the same, and EVERY BIBLE SAYS THIS (even the ones that the gay apologists use).
This means that whatever God said in the Old Testament should also be considered the words of Jesus. Jesus Himself says so in Matthew 5:17: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”
The law on gaysexualism is spelled out in Leviticus. Leviticus 18:22 sets it right out: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Of course, then there is Leviticus 20:13: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
This means that Jesus came to fulfill the law, that is, to make sure that homogays and similar sinners do not get into heaven. Did he actually say that? YES, through His appointed messenger, Paul.
APOSTLE PAUL SPEAKS FOR JESUS/JESUS SPEAKS THROUGH PAUL
Chapter 9 of the Book of Acts tells of the dramatic conversion of Paul after seeing Jesus while on the road to Damascus. In verse 8, the Lord says of Paul, he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel. Ananias, to whom the Lord was speaking, went to Paul, telling him that “the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.” In Chapter 22, it is announced that Paul shall “be his witness unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard.” From then on, Paul preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God (Acts 9:20).
With this, we can expand the words of Jesus beyond the Gospels themselves and into any and all of the epistles of Paul. This is perfectly logical. God sent Jesus to earth to deliver God’s message to the world. In order to make the message credible, it was necessary for God to cause his son to be killed in a particularly brutal way. It is intuitive why this was necessary, specifically, that without torture and murder the message would have been lost.
Thus, Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice, which is death. And this continued for a good 48 hours. Then Jesus was alive again and perfectly fine, but now that he had been killed already, he was free to go to heaven. So he did, and then that left no one on earth to carry the message. So God appointed Paul in his stead. When ghost Jesus passed the torch on the road to Damascus, he passed God’s authority from himself to Paul. Thus Paul speaks for Jesus, and anything Paul says is as good as Jesus himself speaking.
Jesus said, "when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13). Accordingly, Jesus himself tells us that He is speaking through Paul.
Now that we can read Jesus’s words in the rest of the New Testament, here is what Jesus (through Paul) has to say. In 1 Corinthians 6:9, Paul tells us: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate (i.e. gaysexuals), nor abusers of themselves (masturbators) with mankind.”
In 1 Timothy 1:10, Paul goes on to tell us that God’s grace is especially designed “for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers (gaysexuals), for liars… etc.”
Interestingly, those of us who have studied the Bible in its original text know that Paul used the same word for menstealer (πούστης) as was used in Leviticus in clear reference to homosexuals (הוֹמוֹסֶקסוּאָל). (I am fluent in Biblical Greek and Hebrew and have a good copy of the original, authentic text of the gospels, the original Torah, and the original copies of the epistles of Paul.)
In the Book of Romans, chapter 1, Paul speaks (in Jesus’s name) of lesbians, in addition to homers:
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:
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.
Again, Jesus is speaking THROUGH PAUL in this matter, since Romans 1:1 clearly states that Paul is an apostle of Jesus and is speaking His messages as His servant.
JESUS NEVER APPROVED OF SIN
Can anyone seriously think that Jesus, as the son of God, the same God of Abraham and Isaac and Moses, really came back to earth in a posture that was OK with gaysexualism? There is the famous story of the prostitute, where Jesus says “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” This story has been so misinterpreted that it is makes me (and Jesus) want to cry. This story in in John 8. The adultress/whore women as been caught fornicating, and Jesus is saying “Wait, there are not three witnesses here (as John 8 points out, you needed three witnesses to condemn a whore.) What Jesus is saying there is, “Hey, how would you like it if we stoned YOU without due process of law”? When they finally let the woman go for lack of evidence, Jesus tells her “Go, and sin no more.”
Jesus is NOT approving of sin here. He is telling her: “Go, and stop sinning.” And there is a subtext here that if she repeats her behavior, and there are three witnesses, then she will get a rock through her eye socket and Jesus will not stop it. After all, he has come to fulfill the law, and that is what the law says. In other words, she escaped by the skin of her teeth.
CONCLUSION
Jesus came to earth in order to preach a message and to drive that message home with his temporary death. This message was that God is coming back to reclaim his kingdom and humans better get right with that. There is nothing Jesus ever said or did that would suggest he was OK with gay. Nothing at all. And no one can seriously take the view that if He ran across a homosexual, then He would have been OK with it. Christ repeatedly condemned sin. And through his prior words as God of the Old Testament, and his post-sacrifice words through his messenger, Paul, he could not be more clear about it.
JESUS HATED GAYSEXUALITY, AND HE HAD NO INTENTION OF LETTING GAYSEXUALS INTO HEAVEN AND INTO COMMUNION WITH GOD.
He says so in his own words.
Many proponents of the gaysexual lifestyle choice are also Christian. They learn in church as children that gaysexuals are eternally separated from God. Then they grow up and they meet one of these gaysexuals on the street, in a school, or perhaps in their own family. The gaysexual is disarming enough, and the Christian naturally feels a conflict between being drawn to the gaysexual as a person and knowing what God as to say on the subject.
This creates what we call a cognitive dissonance, or a conflict between what we rationally can see with our eyes and ears (that God is with us always) and what we are being led to believe by community leaders and gaysexual activists (that gay is OK). Some Christians try to quiet this dissonance with the following: Jesus never condemned any homosexuals or mentioned gaysexuality or gaysexual acts at any time. Therefore, if Jesus couldn’t be bothered to comment on the topic, then, the argument goes, either it is a minor sin or, even more, not a sin at all.
This argument is often presented with a pithy graphic or meme in which the “Christian” in question says, “Here! Look at what Jesus says about gays!” And with that we are presented with a blank sheet of paper, or a Bible-shaped book with nothing on the page. All this is very cute, to be sure. But did Jesus really say nothing about gaysexuals?
Gay apologists read the Gospels and find nothing in the quotes of Jesus there. BUT JESUS’S WORDS ARE NOT LIMITED TO QUOTES IN THE FOUR GOSPELS.
Quite the opposite. THE BIBLE SAYS PLENTY ABOUT GAYSEXUALISM. By incorporating by reference the rules of the Old Testament, and by empowering Paul of Tarsus with the authority to speak in His name, VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING THE BIBLE SAYS AGAINST GAYSEXUALISM IS SANCTIONED BY JESUS HIMSELF.
JESUS INCORPORATES IN HIS WORDS THE RULES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
First, some “Christian” defenders of the gaysexual lifestyle try to say that Jesus is not the same as the old, rather vengeful God of the Old Testament. This is, of course, absurd. Jesus and God are the same thing. “I and my father are one,” says Jesus in John 10:30. The Bible is crystal clear that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, which make the trinity, are of the same substance. 1 John 5:8 sets this out in plain English: “And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.” In other words, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the same, and EVERY BIBLE SAYS THIS (even the ones that the gay apologists use).
This means that whatever God said in the Old Testament should also be considered the words of Jesus. Jesus Himself says so in Matthew 5:17: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”
The law on gaysexualism is spelled out in Leviticus. Leviticus 18:22 sets it right out: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Of course, then there is Leviticus 20:13: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
This means that Jesus came to fulfill the law, that is, to make sure that homogays and similar sinners do not get into heaven. Did he actually say that? YES, through His appointed messenger, Paul.
APOSTLE PAUL SPEAKS FOR JESUS/JESUS SPEAKS THROUGH PAUL
Chapter 9 of the Book of Acts tells of the dramatic conversion of Paul after seeing Jesus while on the road to Damascus. In verse 8, the Lord says of Paul, he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel. Ananias, to whom the Lord was speaking, went to Paul, telling him that “the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.” In Chapter 22, it is announced that Paul shall “be his witness unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard.” From then on, Paul preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God (Acts 9:20).
With this, we can expand the words of Jesus beyond the Gospels themselves and into any and all of the epistles of Paul. This is perfectly logical. God sent Jesus to earth to deliver God’s message to the world. In order to make the message credible, it was necessary for God to cause his son to be killed in a particularly brutal way. It is intuitive why this was necessary, specifically, that without torture and murder the message would have been lost.
Thus, Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice, which is death. And this continued for a good 48 hours. Then Jesus was alive again and perfectly fine, but now that he had been killed already, he was free to go to heaven. So he did, and then that left no one on earth to carry the message. So God appointed Paul in his stead. When ghost Jesus passed the torch on the road to Damascus, he passed God’s authority from himself to Paul. Thus Paul speaks for Jesus, and anything Paul says is as good as Jesus himself speaking.
Jesus said, "when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13). Accordingly, Jesus himself tells us that He is speaking through Paul.
Now that we can read Jesus’s words in the rest of the New Testament, here is what Jesus (through Paul) has to say. In 1 Corinthians 6:9, Paul tells us: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate (i.e. gaysexuals), nor abusers of themselves (masturbators) with mankind.”
In 1 Timothy 1:10, Paul goes on to tell us that God’s grace is especially designed “for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers (gaysexuals), for liars… etc.”
Interestingly, those of us who have studied the Bible in its original text know that Paul used the same word for menstealer (πούστης) as was used in Leviticus in clear reference to homosexuals (הוֹמוֹסֶקסוּאָל). (I am fluent in Biblical Greek and Hebrew and have a good copy of the original, authentic text of the gospels, the original Torah, and the original copies of the epistles of Paul.)
In the Book of Romans, chapter 1, Paul speaks (in Jesus’s name) of lesbians, in addition to homers:
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:
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.
Again, Jesus is speaking THROUGH PAUL in this matter, since Romans 1:1 clearly states that Paul is an apostle of Jesus and is speaking His messages as His servant.
JESUS NEVER APPROVED OF SIN
Can anyone seriously think that Jesus, as the son of God, the same God of Abraham and Isaac and Moses, really came back to earth in a posture that was OK with gaysexualism? There is the famous story of the prostitute, where Jesus says “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” This story has been so misinterpreted that it is makes me (and Jesus) want to cry. This story in in John 8. The adultress/whore women as been caught fornicating, and Jesus is saying “Wait, there are not three witnesses here (as John 8 points out, you needed three witnesses to condemn a whore.) What Jesus is saying there is, “Hey, how would you like it if we stoned YOU without due process of law”? When they finally let the woman go for lack of evidence, Jesus tells her “Go, and sin no more.”
Jesus is NOT approving of sin here. He is telling her: “Go, and stop sinning.” And there is a subtext here that if she repeats her behavior, and there are three witnesses, then she will get a rock through her eye socket and Jesus will not stop it. After all, he has come to fulfill the law, and that is what the law says. In other words, she escaped by the skin of her teeth.
CONCLUSION
Jesus came to earth in order to preach a message and to drive that message home with his temporary death. This message was that God is coming back to reclaim his kingdom and humans better get right with that. There is nothing Jesus ever said or did that would suggest he was OK with gay. Nothing at all. And no one can seriously take the view that if He ran across a homosexual, then He would have been OK with it. Christ repeatedly condemned sin. And through his prior words as God of the Old Testament, and his post-sacrifice words through his messenger, Paul, he could not be more clear about it.
JESUS HATED GAYSEXUALITY, AND HE HAD NO INTENTION OF LETTING GAYSEXUALS INTO HEAVEN AND INTO COMMUNION WITH GOD.
He says so in his own words.
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