It’s Pride Month! This is when Big Corporations spend an entire month celebrating the LGBT community, and pressuring everyone else to celebrate behaviors and lifestyles that are at odds with the teachings of Jesus. So, since the LGBT activists are about to get 30 days of celebration, I thought I would celebrate what Jesus taught about marriage on my little blog.
Here’s what Jesus says about marriage.
1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.
2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”
4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,
5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?
6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”
8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”
10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”
11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.
To be a Christian, minimally, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That means that we accept what Jesus teaches, on whatever he teaches about. We don’t overturn the teachings of Jesus in order to make people who are rebelling against God feel better about their rebellion. It is central to the Christian worldview that Christians care more about what God thinks of them than what non-Christians think of them. In fact, Christians are supposed to be willing to endure suffering rather than side with non-Christians against God’s authority.
Matt Walsh had a fine article about this issue.
He said:
As Christians, our goal is not to avoid being like the big bad “other Christians,” but to strive to be like Christ Himself. This is one of the advantages to having an Incarnate God. He went around acting and speaking and teaching and generally functioning in our realm, thereby giving us a model to follow. This is the model of a loving and merciful man, and also a man of perfect virtue who fought against the forces of evil, condemned sin, defended his Father in Heaven with sometimes violent force, spoke truth, and eventually laid down His life for those He loved (which would be all of us).
[…]This is what it means to believe in Christ. Not just to believe that He existed, but to believe that Christ is Truth itself, and that everything He said and did was totally and absolutely and irreversibly true forever and always. Many Christians today — not only the ones in the video, but millions alongside them — seem to think we can rightly claim to have “faith” in Jesus or a “relationship” with Him while still categorically denying much of His Word. This is a ridiculous proposition. We can’t declare, in one breath, that Christ is Lord, and in the next suggest that maybe God got it wrong on this or that point. Well, we can make that declaration, but we expose our belief as fraudulent and self-serving. We worship a God we either invented in our heads, which is a false idol, or a God who is fallible, which is a false idol.
If you really accept Jesus as God, then you can’t think he is wrong when he explains what marriage is. Period. End of issue.
Real Christians don’t make excuses for sin. Real Christians present the gospel. The gospel is that all men have rebelled against God and fallen short of perfect submission to and obedience of him. For this, they deserve to be separated from God eternally. Jesus paid the price for this rebellion on the cross, and anyone who accepts him as Savior and Lord will be with God eternally after they die. There is no salvation apart from Jesus. That’s what Christians say. And they say it regardless of how weird they look, and how many non-Christians don’t like them for saying it.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Can you imagine a pastor in this day and age preaching on these two verses??? Why, a church of any size would empty out! How much more if they preached on sodomy or abortion.
“And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” ” – Jesus (Mark 10:11-12)
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Thank you for posting about biblical standards!
I think Robert A. J. Gagnon has excellent resources and observation around these passages, for instance,
He notes that it is male and female,
The sexually differentiated words,
And marriage always involves sexual complements.
Speaking of corporations: I was idly wondering, don’t some corporations match any charitable contributions as long as it is a legitimate 501c3? (e.g., https://doublethedonation.com/ )
Some seminarians used to talk about ‘plundering the Egyptians’ (i.e., Exodus 12:35-36) — maybe summarized as “getting money / treasures / resources from others and applying them to godly causes.”
So for instance, let’s say (hypothetically) some non-Christian parent bequeathed you some nice sum of money as an estate — we should apply that to godly causes.
Or even asking employers to see if they’d match gifts made to Christian organizations (Reasonable Faith? Cru? etc.)
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Some may claim that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality. To that I say “Ni!”
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Ni!
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We demand a burning shrubbery.
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Very nice write up!
I would add the following two arguments:
1. Jesus is God.
2. All of the Bible is God’s Word.
3. Therefore, all of the Bible is Jesus’ Word.
Thus, we can conclude that everywhere that the Bible speaks against homosexuality, OT and NT, that is indeed Jesus speaking against it.
Finally, I would add that when the Pre-Incarnate Christ was pulverizing the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah into sands of glass, He was using His Judicial Actions to “speak” very strongly against homosexuality. Those actions of His should “speak” volumes of fear into not only perverts of every variety, but also those who support them, or minimize that sin. Which means a pretty high percentage of those in American churches, and arguably the overwhelming majority of pastors, who will spend this month being silent on abominations so wicked that God’s Holy Wrath hangs just inches over the inhabitants of most Western nations.
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Regarding your first point, I addressed this in the comments where I said:
I could have made it even more biblical and to the point by saying that Jesus is God (the 2nd person of the Trinity), God inspired Scripture, and Scripture contains statements against homosexuality. Therefore, Jesus did indeed “speak” to the issue. I went a more modest route, because most people who accept homosexuality (actually all, in my experience) do not have a high view of Scripture or the deity of Jesus. I do not really expect an article like this to persuade them, because their theology is not captive to Scripture. I simply wrote this as a return volley to those who play the game of appealing to Scripture when it seems friendly to their cause.
Regarding your second, gay affirming “theologians” try to spin the S&G story as being about something different, like “inhospitality.” Pretty ridiculous, though, to suggest that this sin, of all the others being committed in the ANE, was of such magnitude that these people deserved to be nuked.
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Exactly!
My apologies that I missed that you had made the same first argument that I had. Regardless, once they step into the Christian worldview, we’re allowed to use our full arsenal, even if they reject the worldview in its entirety. They’re already stealing objective moral values and duties from God, and many pro-sodomites claim to “profess Christ” too, so showing how their logic fails in THEIR professed worldview is of value.
Yeah, secular scientists say that the sands are glass around the historical locations of those cities, indicative of a meteor strike. Regardless, if God starts throwing rocks from outer space, it’s way more serious than “inhospitality.”
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Exactly, back at you :)
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