God's View of Homosexuality, Part 1

Selected Scriptures

 

You are well aware, I know, by now that the subject for this morning is the subject of the divine perspective or the divine view of homosexuality.  We want to look at this particular issue from the eyes of God, and thus through the Word of God. 

 

I suppose there should be some justification for isolating a sin like this and preaching on it when there are so many sins which are equally heinous to God.  The answer to those who might wonder why we would isolate this one should be apparent, but just in case it isn't, this sin has taken on unique properties in our culture.  It has been declassified as a sin and turned into a sort of civil rights group.  It is at this particular point a political issue and not a moral one, an issue of freedom and not a moral one or a spiritual one.  The fact that it is being advocated not only in the private sector but in the public sector in public schools and in government, political parties and conventions and that it is being ruled on in courts and decided on in legislatures and dealt with by governors and presidents and mayors and so forth, has taken this sin and sort of extracted it out of the general plurality of sins and given an identity all its own.  And consequently, because of its prominence in our culture, it needs to be addressed.

 

I want to begin by reading a very pertinent scripture and I want you to turn to it.  First Corinthians chapter 6, 1 Corinthians chapter 6, three verses stand out with regard to this issue, verses 9, 10 and 11.  First Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 9, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the Kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers shall inherit the Kingdom of God.  And such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God."

 


 

This is one of those bad news/good news passages.  The bad news is, the unrighteous don't inherit God's Kingdom.  The unrighteous who don't inherit God's Kingdom are characterized as fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers and swindlers.  Those are the kind of people who do not go into God's Kingdom, so if you're one of those kinds of people, you don't go into God's Kingdom...that's the bad news.  But the good news is in verse 11.  Those kind of people can be washed.  Those kind of people can be sanctified.  And those kind of people can be justified.  And they have been and they are being so that he could say to the Corinthian church, "Such were some of you."  You used to be fornicators, and idolaters, and adulterers, and effeminate, and homosexuals.  You used to be thieves, and coveters, and drunkards, and revilers, and swindlers, but you aren't anymore because you've been washed from those sins and you've been sanctified and you have been justified.  That's good news. 

 

I'm here to say this morning primarily that God has good news for homosexuals.  They are redeemable.  They can be saved.  They can be delivered from that sin.  They can be washed from its stains.  They can be set on a road of godly, holy, pure living called sanctification.  And that had happened in the Corinthian church.  When Paul wrote earlier to the Corinthians in the first part of his letter, he said, "Not many of you are noble.  Not many of you are mighty.  But God has chosen the base things to confound the noble and the mighty."  You are a base, ignoble, humble people.  You want to know how base they were?  The Corinthian church was full of ex- fornicators, ex-idolaters, ex-adulterers, ex-effeminates, ex-thieves, ex-coveters, ex-drunkards, ex-slanderers, ex-extortioners, and even ex-homosexuals.  But they were washed clean and they were sanctified, that is separated from a life pattern of sin, and they were justified, that is declared righteous by God on the basis of the merits of Christ.

 

The Corinthian church was full of those kinds of people and so is Grace Community Church.  Such were some of us but we've been washed and we've been sanctified and we've been justified because God has set His saving love on sinners and forgiven them.  I have stood on many occasions in this baptistry behind me and below my feet and so have others and have baptized many who have been delivered from a life of homosexual sin, a life of sodomy.  By God's grace and through His saving love, homosexual sinners are redeemable.  They are recoverable.  They can be washed.  They can be separated from that sin and they can live a pure life.  They can be given a new heart and made fit for heaven. 

 

Some months ago I was standing in my office and I was looking at the little spindle that contains the messages that come in by phone and I noticed one that said, "A young man has called and asked that you come to the hospital to see him, he's dying."  And so I decided to go immediately and I went down to Riverside Drive to the small hospital located there and went in the door and asked the person at the desk what room he was in.  And I walked down the hall and turned into the room and took a look at this man in bed, a man I didn't know, but I could take one look at him and tell he was dying of AIDS.  He was just about skin and bones, gaunt with hallow eyes and sunken cheeks, almost lifeless.  And as I saw him, my attention moved to another man who was lying kind of casually across a small sofa that was in the hospital room, and I said to him, "My name is John MacArthur," at which point this man hastily exited the room and said, "I'll leave you alone."


 

I walked over to the bedside, knowing what I was about to hear.  I took hold of his hand and he said to me, "I'm dying, I have not long to live, I have AIDS and cancer is eating my body at rapid rate." And then he burst into tears and said, "But I'm afraid to die because I know I'm going to go to hell."  He said, "I've lived a sinful, sorted, homosexual life for I think 26 years." And then he went on to tell me, I said, "Tell me about yourself," and he told me about a Christian mother and a Christian father.  He told me about being raised in a Christian home.  He told me about attending two years of Bible college.  He told me about all the rebellion in his heart and the beginnings of that homosexual sin and how eventually it blew him right out of the Bible college into 26 years of the most gross kind of living in the mainstream of the rabid homosexual community.  He said, "Now I'm dying and I know I'm going to go to hell."

 

I said, "Tell me about homosexuality.  Tell me about it.  Tell me how you view it.  Tell me what you think of it."

 

And as he sobbed and cried he said, "It is sin, I've always known it's sin, I hate it, God hates it and it damns men."  And he said it over and over about it I suppose about a half a dozen ways, just as a cathartic to his own soul, the confession felt good.

 

And I said, "David, do you understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, the saving gospel of Jesus Christ?"  And he said yes.  I said, "Tell me the gospel."  And he reiterated to me unhesitatingly how Christ was God incarnate, born and died and rose again for our salvation and the efficacy of His death on the cross as a substitute for sinners and he knew it well and he understood that salvation was by grace through faith and only God could save out of His own mercy the one who willingly believed and was eager to turn from his sin.  I said, "Are you willing to turn from your sin to repent, cry out for God and ask Him for salvation?" 

 

He said, "Yes, yes, yes!"  So I said, "Well, salvation is a gift that only God can give, let me pray for you and ask God to give it to you."  And so I began to pour out my heart and as I was holding his hand and praying, he was squeezing my hand tightly, the emotion of his heart coming out through the hand.  And I pleaded with the Lord to be gracious and save him and to forgive him all this life of horrendous iniquity and deliver him.  And I prayed for quite a long time, after which he burst into prayer, a sobbing kind of prayer, and confessed his sin again, probably a half a dozen times to the Lord, and pleaded to the Lord to be merciful and to forgive him for the way in which he had blasphemed His name and rejected the gospel and lived in sin.

 

This man, by all intents and purposes, an absolutely inveterate homosexual who has sinned in ways that are beyond description.  And he's crying out for mercy.  After his prayer was over, there was a peace and a calm that came over his heart.  And as he opened his eyes and kind of wiped away his tears, a smile broke across his face and he was looking at the wall and he kept staring at the wall with a little smile on his face.  And I said, "What are you looking at?"  He said, "I'm looking at the calendar because I want to remember the day of my new beginning."  And then he went on to reiterate that he...that he sensed that God had saved him, that he accepted by faith the fact that if he had trusted Christ God would save him in His mercy.  And he believed in that moment that he was converted.

 


 

I think it was in a day or so from then that Lance Quinn took over a copy of The Gospel According to Jesus so that he could read it and fully understand and be sure that his faith was real. And within five days from the day that I had prayed with him, he was gone, dead.  But I said to him that day by the bed, I said, "Now that you've become a Christian, what's going to be different?"  He said, "My whole life is going to be different."  He said, "The first thing is my whole life is filled with people who live in a homosexual world.  The fellow who was in here when you came in is my lover.  My male nurse here is a homosexual and the AIDS Association has sent me an AIDS worker to be with me in these days who is also a homosexual.  Everybody in my life is a homosexual."  And he said, "Now I have the responsibility to tell them all of the sin that they're engaged in and call them all to come to Christ."  God gave him five days to do that and then he was gone.

 

Let me tell you something.  One of the supreme tragedies of our time is the declassification of homosexuality as a sin because when you declassify it as a sin, you cut them off from their salvation source.  It is a damning declassification.  You're not being nice to homosexuals to call it an optional life style, a sexual preference.  You're not nice to them to do that.  That isn't kind.  That isn't thoughtful.  That isn't loving.  That is damning.  The kindest thing you could ever say to someone engaged in homosexual sin is it is a sin that will damn you and it will exclude you from the Kingdom of God forever.  That's the kindest thing you can say.  A proper diagnosis is absolutely crucial.  This is not a preferred sexual orientation.  This is not an alternate lifestyle.  This is not a genetic thing.  This is sin and perversion that damns men's and women's souls.  The massive movement to appease the guilt and to release lust unchecked, to free up homosexuals to live any way they want and to feel good about it by defining their blasphemous sexual conduct is nothing more than an alternative lifestyle is a damning thing.  As we shall see later, those who advocate homosexual rights will have the blood of dead homosexuals on their hands.  Homosexuality is an insatiable lust.  It is a drive that goes beyond anything that heterosexual people experience.  And these people are not only trying to justify their own lust, their unchecked, unbridled, insatiable desires but they are trying to sell it to everybody else because then that becomes even a greater justification the more they can normalize it.  And so they're selling it to your children. 

 

I read this week that Star Trek II, the Second Generation, or whatever it's called, has put into the cast two homosexuals to live on the space ship because they're people too and they need proper consideration.  There are situation comedies on television where the, not the actors and actresses, they may be homosexual, I don't know, but that the parts they play are the parts of   homosexuals to normalize that.  The government is funding all kinds of homosexual advocacy groups.  The public schools of our own city are filled with advocacy for homosexuality.  The National Education Association of America is an association of homosexual advocacy endeavoring to put homosexual advocates in the public schools to assist children who have propensities that way and to make sure they are free to do that without any parental knowledge.  They want to make homosexuals out of your children. 

 


 

They want to normalize this.  They want everybody to get in on this because it makes them feel better, safer.  Politicians seek the homosexual vote by campaigning for homosexual rights.  That's an absolute inconceivable thing.  They want us to accept the notion that homosexuals constitute a legitimate minority like black people or Hispanic people, or any other race and that homosexuals have been unjustly discriminated against and because of the unjust discrimination they are now to be given reparations or they are now entitled to some kind of special treatment under the law.  A massive propaganda campaign is geared to make society and the church believe that homosexual practice is normal, moral and proper for some people, for many people, maybe for you.  Homosexuals, they say, are just another minority and they should enjoy every human right and every human freedom and they should be allowed to express their sexual acts as any minority has the right to freely express its cultural heritage.

 

Of course this is ridiculous.  They are not a race of people.  This is not a racial issue.  This is not a cultural issue.  They are deviates.  They have a perverted view of sex and they want to identify it as if it were a racial minority.  Are we to have minority rights for murderers?  What about drug dealers, they have a certain orientation?  What about child molesters, they have a sexual preference?  What about rapists, they have a sexual preference?  They have a sexual orientation, should they have civil rights?  Should they get reparations for the way we've been treating them?  Absolutely ridiculous.

 

Allowing them to express their preference in the way we have has become the cause of the most devastating public health epidemic in the history of this nation.  Allowing them to express their preference has become the cause of what will be the most devastating financial eruption the field of medical health has ever known and threatens to bankrupt the whole of America as we try to pay for the AIDS epidemic.  Allowing them to express their preference is going to lead tens of thousands, if not millions of children and young people into the pit of perversion all under the tolerance of the state and the direction of the Board of Education.  June in Los Angeles in the public schools was Gay Pride Month and it will be every June from now on.  This kind of behavior is simply the expression of sexual lust, twisted and uncontained.  And I'll say more about that tonight.  When I say it is sexual lust twisted and uncontained, I mean exactly that.  I understand that fornication is a sin and I understand that adultery is a sin in the sexual area, but there are proportions to homosexual sin that catapulted beyond what I can't understand. 

 

I could go on and on with a litany of statistics, but it's not necessary.  Just a few will suffice to give you the sense of what's the uncontained character of this lust.  The average homosexual, the average homosexual has had relationships with more than 500 different sexual partners.  In L.A., which is above the average, the average homosexual has 300 sex partners a year, almost one a day, and that's different people.  Thirty percent of them have had over one thousand sexual partners.  And many of them have had over fifteen hundred.  They stopped counting when they reached one thousand six hundred partners.  The conduct of the acts that they do has no bounds.  In the gay bath houses of San Francisco where AIDS was really born and developed and from where it spread across America, it started in a small community of people in those bath houses the statistics are quite interesting.  The homosexuals there would average three nights a week in the bath house, these are very conservative figures, I was told that yesterday by a medical doctor.  They averaged three nights in the bath house a week and each night conservatively between ten and thirty sexual encounters.  Project that over 52 weeks a year and you can see how they literally killed each other, just spreading their disease in and around.  And when they moved from there, they took it to the rest of the nation, the rest of the world.  Every conceivable, every inconceivable act is included.  You might want to know that out of the average five hundred sexual partners that a homosexual has, the vast majority of them are anonymous.  In the gay bath house that between ten and thirty you have every night are all anonymous.  You never even see the person with which you engage yourself.

 


 

It's not anything like a genius.  They say that homosexuality is a certain kind of genetic genius.  It doesn't sound like genius to me.  It's not some kind of heredity.  It is unbridled, twisted and uncontained lust.  I could give you more statistics but I think you have enough to understand.  It isn't going to help to discuss the problem anymore, we're very much aware of it.

 

  What I'm here to say is this, this vile, wretched, wicked sin like every other vile, wretched, wicked sin is forgivable by the grace of God.  That's what I want to announce.  Jesus Christ died on the cross and in His body He bore the sins of homosexuality.  He bore in His own body our sins on the cross.  I don't know if you ever thought about it like that but think of the horror that He bore.  And He did it that He might redeem homosexuals.  But to receive that forgiveness, the sinner has to see what he's doing as a sin.  And as long as we cover up the wretchedness and the sinfulness of it, we are aiding and abetting the damnation.  And that's why there is blood guiltiness.  We talked last week about the blood guiltiness that America bears for the children that is slaughtered in abortion and I believe that we bear the blood guiltiness for the execution of homosexuals that's going to come at the hands of Almighty God and is already coming through AIDS because those who have advocated that as an alternative life style or a civil right bear some of the guilt.  There's an almost tireless effort on the part of homosexuals, they're almost...they're vicious and they're violent in trying to prove that this is a normal kind of life for them because they have to deal with such unbearable guilt to try to prove it's genetic, it's hereditary.  It's somehow in the genes or the chromosomes.  Let me sum it all up by saying this.  I have read a myriad of things about this, the bottom line is this...there is absolutely no proof in any scientific realm that this is genetic.  There is no physiological difference verifiable between a homosexual and a heterosexual.  And you might also want to know that the vast majority of homosexuals also have sexual relationships with the opposite sex.  It is a choice, and we'll see that tonight.

 

There's a lot of false research being done by homosexuals, trying to make this seem genetic.  None of them have succeeded on the scientific level, nor will they because the Bible tells us it is a sin.  It is sin.  No effort at research, no research at the study of endorchronology(?), no effort at reexamination of science, no effort at rationalization is about to change what God says.  It's sin.  It's sin.  You can be sure when you hear some of this research that if it's been done by homosexuals, or even if it's done by homosexual advocates, they have falsified the data if they can prove in any way that somehow this could happen genetically.  It is sin.  It is not just some kind of hereditary orientation.

 


 

Now let's go back to 1 Corinthians 6 and look specifically at two words.  In verse 9 is the word effeminate, followed by the word homosexuals.  These are two kinds of people that do not enter the Kingdom of God.  Effeminate is malakos, the word means soft.  It came to mean feminine or effeminate, a man who acts like a woman who is soft, feminine.  It also became a technical term for the passive partner in homosexual relationships, the one who takes the female role.  Arden(??)  Gingrich(??), one of the classic lexicons says the word also included men and boys who allowed themselves to become male prostitutes for homosexuals.  You see, there are men and boys who aren't really desirous of homosexuality as much as they're desirous of money.  And so they prostitute themselves for homosexuals.  They don't maybe have that same passion, that same consuming perverted drive that the homosexuals have but they will sell themselves to them.  That word would encompass them, male prostitutes who are the passive partners to service the aggressive homosexuals, or passive partners who are homosexuals who take the female role, the effeminates. 

 

And then the word homosexual, arsenokoites, it just means that, someone who has a relationship with the same sex, namely a man who has relationships with a man.  Paul says those kinds of people don't enter the Kingdom.  And he's really covered the ground.  The active, aggressive homosexual, the passive accepting soft effeminate homosexual, the one who aggressively engages in that, the one who is the passive partner, the macho kind of homosexual, and the soft effeminate homosexual, all of them are excluded from the Kingdom.  They don't inherit it.  Why?  Because that kind of pattern of sin is exclusive of God's Kingdom.  They will never belong to God's Kingdom with all of its blessing and all of its glory.

 

The church then has to tell people that the door to the Kingdom is shut if you live like that.  If that's your choice and you're not willing to recognize it as sin and repent of it and bow the knee and accept the forgiveness of Christ, you're going to...you're going to be shut out of God's Kingdom.  The church must, as the gate keeper, announce that.  We have to say to homosexuals, if you continue that life pattern and you choose to live that way, you will have the door to the Kingdom of God shut.  If you're willing to repent, come to Christ for forgiveness and be washed and cleansed, the door to the Kingdom is open.  As the gate keepers, as the ones who hold the keys to the Kingdom, as the ones who open and close, the church and its leaders must give that message.  The sad thing is, the church in many cases is not doing it.  In fact, the church today has become a leading advocate of homosexual rights.  Even the Catholic Church has an organization inside of it called Dignity which advocates homosexual rights.  Protestant churches certainly have their advocacy groups.  The World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches which is made up of liberal churches, mainline denomination liberal churches, denies that homosexuality is a sin and thus are part of the damning conspiracy joining Satan in damning homosexuals because they refuse to recognize the sin that damns them.  Major denominations, Methodists, Episcopalian, Presbyterian ordain homosexuals, ordain lesbians and have gay advocacy groups, they call them. 

 


 

Recently when I was in Raleigh-Durham era...area of South Carolina (should be North Carolina) for some meetings, it was brought to my attention that a local Southern Baptist church had married two homosexuals to each other, had a wedding ceremony for two homosexuals and had ordained a homosexual to preach.  The church was kicked out of the Southern Baptist Association.  The homosexual Episcopalians recently had their convention in Houston.  They have a whole association which can hold its own convention.  The United Methodist pastor out in Thousand Oaks, I read in the newspaper the other day, Terry Bushard is his name said, quote, "A homosexual is welcome in this congregation and will have all rights and privileges," end quote.  The Quakers, the old legalistic pious Quakers, one of their organizations says, and I quote, "Homosexuality is no more deplorable than left-handedness."  Now I don't know what that says to those of you who are left-handed, I wouldn't think about it too long.  These advocacy groups and these organizations within the church, within quote/unquote Christianity even go further than this.  I hate to say this but I'm going to say it so you'll understand the level of this conspiracy, there is a rather strong effort on the part of some theologians to prove that the Apostle Paul was a repressed homosexual, that the Apostle Paul, they say, was struggling with his own sexual yearnings and he never resolved them so he became a self-hating, repressed homosexual.  And that's the reason he spoke against homosexuality, was a ploy to cover up what he didn't understand and that's why he was so anti-woman.  His anti-woman bias was merely an expression of his true homosexuality, but he never really understood it so he was mad at women and homosexuals.

 

There's even a denomination for Christian homosexuals, quote/unquote.  There's an organization in New York called Evangelicals Concern which is an association for Evangelical fundamental homosexuals...whatever that is.  The denomination for Christian homosexuals, quote/unquote, is called the Metropolitan Church.  There are a number of them.  Metropolitan Community Churches, Troy Perry was their founder.  I'll never forget the day I was set to debate Troy Perry, it was set up in Hollywood at the Peterson Publishers Building on Sunset Boulevard, and he was coming with Ralph Blair who was president of Evangelicals Concern and this organization in New York supposedly with many well-known homosexual evangelicals in it.  Their board of directors at the bottom had a few names and a lot of blank lines of people who hadn't yet come out of the closet, he said.  And it was to discuss homosexuality, Troy Perry being the representative of the Metropolitan Community Church.  And so we sat across the table, the moderator of the debate was Sherwood Wirt.  It was eventually published in a Christian periodical.  He at the time was the editor of Decision magazine, the Billy Graham magazine.  And we began the discussion.

 

Prior to the meeting I had been given some inside information about Troy Perry, it was very important, I wanted to hold it till the right moment.  So we got in this discussion and the first part of the discussion was that the Bible is antiquated, it's an ancient document, it was written in an unsophisticated time when people didn't really understand contemporary, sociological phenomena and weren't in to psychology and so it shows nothing but a primitive bias against homosexuality.  And that shows that it's a book that's antiquated and we need to update it.  It's true in spiritual matters, but when it comes to that issue, it demonstrates its ancient character and inability to cope with twentieth century sophistication.  That was their basic dialogue.  And what they were basically saying, bottom line, was God hasn't caught up with things yet, He's very old-fashioned and antiquated and needs to sit at the feet of some of these folks so he can learn what's come lately.  That's the bottom line.  And I discussed it on that level and said, "You're really telling me that God is out of touch with reality."  And we discussed that. 

 


 

And then we discussed the issue of even if you grant homosexuality as a God-given sort of propensity, aren't there any rules for how you conduct yourself?  You just go willy-nilly all over the place, in and out of gay bars and in and out of bath houses and in and out of relationships and back alleys, and bathrooms and anything like that, is there absolutely no...?  And then they launched into this thing, "No, it should be done, one person should take a life partner and we believe in monogamous homosexuality."  And we got into this part of the discussion and at that particular point I said, "I want to read something."  And I pulled out this paper that I had been given which chronicled the life of Troy Perry which was back alleys, bathrooms, bath houses, you name it, the whole nine yards and I just started to read it off.  And I said, "This is the record of your assistant, your associate in the church and this is what he tells me is your lifestyle.  Is this correct?"  And I started reading it at which point he came at me over the table and I had...I had someone with me, too, Mike Ryan, which is a professional football player that I brought along for the occasion.  (Laughter) And Mike just rose to his feet and Troy Perry turned and left the room.  And that was it...the end of discussion, end of debate.  It was an effort on their part to get us to believe that this is some kind of a nice thing, that they were made this way by God and it's a gift from Him.  And they live these moral lies and the truth of the matter is, that's not right, that's not how it is.  Oh there may be some who have only one partner, that's not the rule, that's far and away the minutest kind of exception.

 

This church, this Metropolitan Community Church teaches that homosexuality is a gift from God.  They teach that Jesus was never hostile to lesbians and homosexuals.  They teach that David and Jonathan were homosexuals.  Ruth and Naomi were lesbians.  And Sodom was destroyed for a lack of hospitality.  (Laughter) And I want to tell you something, folks, it's a simple spiritual principle, to the pure all things are pure and to the vile all things are vile.  They can make every pure relationship look vile, that's their agenda.  But here's the church linking with them.  There was another guy in there from the Presbyterian church who was standing alongside the Metropolitan Community Church people advocating their theology with them.  In the name of Jesus Christ, you see, these churches and these quote/unquote Christian organizations that want to affirm homosexuality are joining the damning crowd that are trying to deny the sin and the denial of the sin damns the soul.  But if we will see this as sin, then we see that it can be forgiven.  Homosexuals must have an unbearable life.  The guilt must be beyond imagination.  But there is deliverance.  They can be freed.

 

This isn't anything new, by the way.  Paul faced this stuff, it was everywhere.  When he says here, "effeminate and homosexuals don't inherit the Kingdom of God," he's not talking about something people aren't doing.  He's talking about something common.   Socrates was a homosexual, very active as were most of the Greek leaders and philosophers.  Plato penned an entire section in his symposium on homosexual love.  Historians tell us that Alexander the Great had both male and female lovers, as do most homosexuals.  And his army, the soldiers under him, were engaged also in homosexuality and the longer they were away, months and sometimes years on their campaigns, the more gross and the more widespread that homosexuality became and some historians will tell you when you read them that one of the great compelling things in those armies that caused them to fight so viciously was they were not protecting their country or their general, they were protecting their homosexual fellow soldier lovers.  And you see that happening today in the prisons of our nation, as well. 

 


 

Julius Caesar's lover was King Nicomedes.  Both Gibbon and Toynbe(?)  write that one of the major contributions to the fall of the Roman Empire was homosexuality.  Suetonius says, the historian, fourteen out of the first fifteen Caesars were homosexuals.  It was rampant in Paul's time, everywhere.  Nero who would be the current emperor when Paul wrote this had taken a boy named Sporus, had him castrated, then married him in a full wedding and lived with him as a wife.  He must have been a good wife because the Caesar who followed him picked him up as his wife.  Paul's world wasn't any different than ours.  Homosexuality was rampant and he confronted it as sin and said it's the sin just like any sin that keeps you out of the Kingdom of God.  Paul was not a homophobic over-reactor because he was a repressed homosexual, and neither am I.  He was true to what he knew the Word of God taught.  He was true to what the Holy Spirit inspired him to say, it was sin.  And until it is faced as sin, it can't be dealt with.

 

What does God say about it?  Let's go back and find out.  Deuteronomy chapter 22 is a good place to start.  Deuteronomy chapter 22, sometime in your past if you've been in a fundamental or evangelical church, you may have heard some pastor refer to this verse, probably in another context.  Verse 5 of Deuteronomy 22 says, "A woman shall not wear a man's clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman's clothing."  Now follow this, "For whoever does these things looks weird."  Is that what it says?  No.  "For whoever does these things must be on his way to a party."  No.  "For whoever does these things is...what?...an abomination to the Lord."  It abominates God, it disgusts and revolts him. 

 

Now a woman is not to wear a man's clothing.  The first time I ever heard anybody refer to this, they were preaching a sermon about why women shouldn't wear slacks or pants.  It doesn't mean that.  May I remind you of something?  In ancient times men wore skirts.  That is a ridiculous interpretation of this.  Everybody wore skirts, nobody wore pants.  That's not what it's talking about.  There was a certain style, however, to men's clothing and a certain style to women's clothing.  But the Hebrew says, "A woman shall not wear...literally...that which appertaineth to a man."  Whether it's weapons or implements, or tools, or clothes, or whatever it is that rubs out the distinctiveness of one's sex, that's an abomination to God.  Today we call people who do this transvestites, a person who exchanges his dress for that of the other sex because it induces a certain kind of sexual...perverted sexual thrill or fulfillment.  Men are to masculine and women are to be feminine and God has made them male and female, male and female created He them and that's the way He wants them to stay.  And Satan wants to obliterate and convolute and pervert and twist that.  We see that in the homosexual community today rampant.  In fact, they love to dress up in the clothing of the opposite sex.  The men put on those women's clothes and they parade themselves publicly under the title "drag queens." 

 


 

I'll never forget one time when I was riding with the infamous Hawaii Five O in Honolulu.  One of the officers was taking me around to see sorted Honolulu at night and he said, "I want to take you into an area to see something you won't believe."  And we drove into this area and here the streets were lined with dozens of...of people in bikinis and spiked high heels and done hair and thick makeup.  And as we got closer and started to mingle with them, as I walked with this officer I saw that they were all men.  They parade themselves like that down the streets in their gay-pride parades all over the country.  They dress like that.  Sometimes you see them on the street and don't even know it.  Some of them are drag queens, that is they do it in public.  Some of them are female impersonators, they do it in public.  Some of the women dress like men and you look and you wonder if they're men or women.  They do it in public.  And then there are those who do it in private.  Theirs is that seek kind of...sick kind of sortedness that men get into when they wear their wives clothes and bizarre things like that.  That kind of thing distresses God.  It is an abomination to God because it is an attempt to rub out the distinctions that God has ordained.  The ancient writer Mimonodes(?)  mentions that a man dressed in fancy women's clothes would often come and worship Venus and Ashtoreth and women dressed in men's armor would come to honor Mars.  That is so typical in ancient mystery religion because it was all a part of their pagan culture.  Satan dominates the world, he dominates pagan culture and he wants to twist and pervert sexual identity.  God says if you do that, that is an abomination to Me.

 

Look at chapter 23 verse 1.  Here you find another issue at hand.  "No one who is emasculated, or has his male organ cut off, shall enter the assembly of the Lord."  Now you'd have to ask the question...who in the world would have his male organ cut off?  Who would do this?  A homosexual.  They're called today transsexuals.  They used to be called eunuchs.  Oh it was done in a religious way, sometimes...sometimes parents in pagan societies would have their ten-year-old boys castrated so they could be devoted to the gods in the temple and they didn't have to then worry about them playing around with the priestesses who offered their services to paying customers.  Sometimes a king who had a harem would want some men in there to care for some of the needs of the harem and he would against their will castrate them so that they couldn't do anything with the women in the harem.  So eunuchs had places in harems and they had places in pagan temples, even from the time they were young.  But I think what you have here is someone who has this done to him and the implication would be not only the possibility of pagan worship here, certainly that's a possibility, but also the implication of the possibility of a homosexual perversion.  It doesn't tell us specifically.  But you have here a surgical attempt to remove maleness.  Today these transsexuals say, "Well I'm really a...I'm really a woman trapped in a man's body and so I have to get my body fixed."  In ancient times people were castrated for their religion.  They were castrated because of their duty perhaps to a king, or they were castrated by their own volition because it fit their perversion. 

 

And it says here, "One who has this done shall not enter the assembly of the Lord."  If you're a transsexual, that fits your idolatry and your sexual preference, you're not going to enter the assembly of the Lord.  Ever?  You mean, somebody who has a sex change operation can never, ever, ever enter the assembly of the Lord?  Look at Isaiah 56.  Isaiah 56, that means they can't enter the Kingdom, they can't have a relationship with God, they can't go to heaven, they can't worship the true God.  Look at Isaiah 56 verse 3, go back to verse 1, for a moment.  In the middle of the verse God says, "My salvation is about to come...My salvation is about to come, I'm going to bring salvation."  Now go down to verse 3, "So let not the foreigner who is joined himself to the Lord say the Lord shall surely separate me from His people."  You don't have to say that.  If you say I'm a pagan, I've come over here to live in Israel, I've come over here to worship at the temple, I've come over here to honor the true God, but He'll probably kick me out...don't say that, I won't do that, God says.  Verse 3, "Neither let the eunuch, the transsexual say, Behold, I'm a dry tree, there's no hope for me.  I was castrated, I'll never be able to enter the assembly of God.  I'll never be able to walk with Him."  Isaiah says, "Don't say that." 

 


 

Why?  Verse 4, "For thus says the Lord, to the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths and choose what pleases Me and holds fast My covenant, to them I'll give in My house and within My walls a memorial and a name better than that of sons and daughters," and here's a play on words, "and I'll give them an everlasting name which will not be cut off.  I'll save them if they come to Me, if they hold fast My covenant, if they choose what pleases Me."  So somebody who had his organs cut off and so defiled the image of God can be forgiven...can be forgiven if they come to the Lord. 

 

I was baptizing on a Wednesday over in the Family Center before we had this building and always I interviewed the people who came in to be baptized, but this night I had been delayed, I think, and I didn't get a chance so someone else did.  And I just came in to do the baptism.  So this rather burly lady came in and spoke her name and I think the name was Carla and the voice sounded strange and the mannerisms looked strange.  And this person said, "Well, I'm here because I want to testify to my faith in Christ and be baptized," and a very brief testimony.  And then I just baptized Carla.  But I was deeply distressed and I went out and I said to someone, I said, "Make sure that that person comes to my office immediately after getting dressed."  And this person walked in and I said, "I just want to spend a few moments, I have some questions." 

"Fine."  I said, "I'm disturbed, I want to be very up front with you.  You came in from the woman's side, you gave a feminine name but I think you're a man."  And then we launched into a discussion about the fact that he had supposedly had a recent sex change operation.  I said, "You certainly don't for a moment think that the Lord Jesus Christ is going to accept you and sanctify your lifestyle as a man living as a woman in a homosexual relationship, or relationships."

 

"Well, I was a...I've always been a woman, I just got trapped in a man's body." 

 

And I said , "No, you've always been a man and now you're a castrated man, but you're a man.  You were born a man and you will die a man and you must live as a man and you must acknowledge the sin of what you've done and if you will acknowledge the sin of what you've done and ask the Lord's forgiveness and repent and come to Him by faith, you'll be forgiven and He'll be gracious to you.  But you must live as a man.  Get rid of those clothes, get some men's clothes and prove the genuineness of your heart repentance toward God."

 

Never saw him again.  Showed up in another church down the road and I called and talked to the pastor, told the story.  And they had to deal with it.  It's real life.  There's people who do this.  The Kingdom is open to them if they acknowledge the sin of what they have done and do what pleases God.

 

Well we talked about the transsexual and the transvestite, let's go right to the issue of the homosexual.  Those are components of homosexual life.  The real issue is struck with a telling blow in Leviticus chapter 18...Leviticus chapter 18 and verse 22.  It could not be more explicit.  God is giving laws here, laws against wickedness and sin.  Verse 22, "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female.  It is an abomination.  Also, you shall not have intercourse with any animal to be defiled with it, nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it.  It is a perversion."  Again I say to you, God doesn't make commands about things that people don't do.  This kind of bestiality and this kind of homosexuality has always been a part of human life.  As we shall see tonight when we look at Genesis 19 in the story of Sodom, the whole city was given over to it.  It was the forerunner to San Francisco.  He says don't do it, it's an abomination to lie with a man as you lie with a woman.  It's an abomination to have intercourse with an animal.  It's a perversion.


 

Then follow verse 24, "Do not defile yourselves with any of these things, for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled.  For the land has become defiled, therefore I have visited its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants."  He says...Look, I brought you into this land, I'm giving you this land and I'm telling you the reason that you're able to have this land is because I have thrown the other people out and the reason I've thrown them out is because this is how they behaved.  This is brought about the destruction of the prior nation.  Look at them, they are homosexual.  They are involved in bestiality.  They are involved in...and He names other things like incest and so forth, they're involved in that, that's their life pattern and I am throwing them out.  My wrath has fallen on them and I'm telling you, if you do it, My wrath will fall on you too.  You won't escape, they didn't.  Homosexuality defiles the land and it brings God's judgment.

 

Verse 26, "But as for you, you're to keep My statutes and My judgments and shall not do any of these abominations, neither the native or the alien who sojourns among you, nobody for the men of the land who have been before you have done all these abominations and the land has become defiled, so that the land may not spew you out should you defile as it has spewed out the nation which has been before you for whoever does any of these abominations, those persons who do so shall be cut off...killed...from among their people."  You're going to die if you do this.  "Thus you are to keep My charge that you do not practice any of the abominable customs which have been practiced before you so as not to defile yourselves with them.  I am the Lord your God."  This is God talking, folks.  You do this, you'll defile your land, you defile your land, you'll die. 

 

We're watching it, aren't we?  We're seeing it..  People say, "Isn't it the judgment of God?"  Of course it's the judgment of God.  Is AIDS the judgment of God?  Of course it's the judgment of God.  All venereal disease is the judgment of God built into the fabric of human life.  You do this, you'll die.  You do this, I'll destroy your land.  This is an abomination.  This sin is intolerable to God.  He will not allow it to go on unchecked.  He will judge with death those who do it and He will destroy a nation that tolerates it.  Now you tell me where America sits in view of God's judgment.  It's not going to get better for us in this country.  The glory days are over, folks.  It looks to me like we're going downhill fast into the...into the pit of judgment.

 

Some of the homosexual rights people say, "Well, Jesus said He came to put an end to the Law.  Sure, that's the Old Testament Law but Jesus came to put an end to the Law."  No.  He didn't come to put an end to the Law, He came as the end of the Law, the fulfillment, the culmination of the Law, the one who lived the Law perfectly.  And He said, "Not a jot or a tittle shall pass away from this Law."  And He reiterates the Law, does God, in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit given to Paul to write as he writes 1 Timothy 1:10, the Law is not made for righteous men, verse 9, but for those who are lawless.  Verse 10, immoral men, and homosexuals.  The Law is still written to call homosexuals to account, is what he is saying, 1 Timothy 1:9 and 10.  Nothing has changed.  God's moral law hasn't changed because God hasn't changed.  Whatever is right has always been right and always will be right.  Whatever is wrong has always been wrong and will always be wrong.  Morality doesn't change because God doesn't change.  God said if you do this, you'll defile your land.  If you defile your land, I'll destroy your nation.  If you do this, you'll die.


 

But there's still mercy before death and mercy before judgment to those who repent.  Look at Leviticus chapter 20 and one final verse and then we'll stop for this morning.  Chapter 20 of Leviticus and verse 13, "If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, having sex with a man, a man having sex with a man, both of them have committed a detestable act, kill them." That's what it said.  Kill them.  "Their blood guiltiness is on them, they deserve to die."  The blood cries out again for death.  God's law says kill them.  God's law says if you murder somebody you should die, right?  Anybody who kills somebody, kill them.  I told you last week that in the case of abortion the blood cries out from the ground and God hears it.  The slaughter of the innocence in America as we massacre little babies, their blood cries out against their killers.  There's blood guiltiness on the ones who killed those babies, they deserve to die.  Listen to this, there's blood guiltiness on homosexuals and those who advocate homosexuality and those who seek homosexual rights, those people are...are abetting and aiding, damning sin and there is a blood guiltiness attached there on the people who do not destroy them.  This nation instead of judging, condemning, punishing homosexuality advocates it and thus has the blood of the dead homosexuals on its hands, just as it has the blood of the dead babies on its hands.  This is a blood guilty nation.  And if you think we're on the edge of some American utopia, you better guess again.  From God's standpoint, these are serious days.  How in the world we could ever get to the point with Christian beginnings where we have politicians, people running for President and congress and senate and governor and mayor and council members and all of that kind of stuff who advocate homosexual rights and those people could be elected, those people bear guilt before God because they aid and abet people going into a sin that is an abomination to God.

 

All that said, God says being a transvestite is an abomination, being a transsexual is an abomination, being a homosexual is an abomination, aiding and abetting any of that stuff is abominable to God and there's blood guiltiness associated with all of it.  And the penalty is death and God will judge the nation that tolerates it and God will destroy the people that do it.  Having said all of that, I go right back to where we started and remind you of this wonderful truth, this sin in all its categories and in all its extremes is forgivable.  Does that tell you something about God's grace?  Does that tell you how gracious our God is?  Does that tell you something about the death of Christ who in His own body bore those very sins?  God is a God of mercy and grace.  And if you will come to Him in your sin, He is willing to forgive.

 

That's the message to homosexuals, and that's the message for you to give to homosexuals.  Tonight we're going to discuss the problem some more and then I want you to look at the story of Sodom from where the term sodomy comes, and Romans chapter 1 and a very important passage tucked in the chapter of Isaiah to complete our study.


 

Father, even as we conclude this morning, we are the first to admit that this is a distasteful and repulsive kind of subject.  We don't even like to dwell on it and yet we know that we have to speak prophetically to the time in which we live.  Father, we grieve over the fact that so many are trapped in this sin and we grieve over the fact that this is being reclassified or declassified as a sin and that even churches are denying its sinfulness, and thus bear the blood of those who die as punishment for this iniquity.  Father, we just pray that You might save many who are caught in this sin, deliver them, O God, even as You have many through the years.  We know You are able to save sinners.  We feel comfortable about our own sin, but we know You hate pride and hypocrisy and a lying tongue and flattery.  We feel more comfortable about those sins.  This one we feel less comfortable about and we can become very self-righteous because we don't commit this one.  And yet, Lord, we are equally as sinful.  But, Lord, You can forgive us all.  I just pray in Your grace You might pour out Your mercy on those who are caught in the sin of homosexuality and that You might deliver many before they are destroyed forever.  I pray that we might be kind enough to speak the truth, kind enough to give the warning so that they might come to the cure who is Christ.  I pray for the leaders of our nation to take a strong stand on this.  We feel that if people who advocate this get into positions of power, it surely is a token from You that Your hand is off this nation and that You've given us over.  So, Lord, we ask that You would be gracious to us and give us leaders who see this for what it is.  Give us people who will not tolerate it and yet who will teach the saving love and mercy of Christ.  We thank You that Your Word speaks to the issues that concern us and gives us clarity.  Now make us faithful to obey.  If there are in our congregation, this morning, Lord, any who are unsaved and who are caught in this sin, save them today.  Bring them into our prayer room after the service that we might share with them and pray with them.  If there are any Christians who know You but who have been tempted by the old patterns of homosexual life before their salvation, give them strength and victory and triumph.  If there are any young people in our church that are being influenced into this, save them, deliver them before it ever happens.  And lead us all to be a people zealous of good works who live righteously and godly in this present age.  We pray in our Savior's name.  Amen.

God's View of Homosexuality, Part 2

Selected Scriptures

 

I would invite you to begin tonight to turn to Genesis chapter 1.  I just want to touch lightly on a text there that you should have in mind and then we'll move to the nineteenth chapter of Genesis.  Genesis chapter 1 and verse 27 says, "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them."

 

There you have in very simple and direct indication that the reference to God's creative purpose.  God created male, He created female.  In chapter 2 and verse 23, the man said, "Now this bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man, for this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife and they shall become one flesh."  God made male, zakar in Hebrew.  God made female, neqebah in Hebrew and they were to come together to complete each other making one flesh.  That is God's unalterable creative design.  One man for one woman for life.

 

Now there are a number of ways that such a marital relationship in God's design can be convoluted and confused and perverted.  It isn't very long actually in the book of Genesis until perversions of all kinds begin to manifest themselves.  You have a relationship that surfaces in the sixth chapter of Genesis which appears to be a relationship in which fallen angels or demons cohabitate with woman and produce some kind of strange offspring, Satan's attempt to bring about some kind of perverted sexual relationship to produce an unredeemable race.

 


 

You move ahead from the fornication of chapter 6, a bizarre kind, to chapter 19 in Genesis and you have an indication of incest.  It says in verse 36, "Both the daughters of Lot were with child by their father."  Adding to fornication and incest, if you come over to chapter 34 you find here rape.  "Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob went out to visit the daughters of the land.  And when Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land saw her, he took her and lay with her by force.  He was deeply attracted to Dinah the daughter of Jacob.  He loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her," and the story goes on.  Here is an incident of outright rape.  We won't take the time to look in detail.

 

Go to chapter 38 and in chapter 38 you have another perversion and this one is prostitution.  It mentions in verse 15, "When Judah saw her he thought she was a harlot, for she had covered her face."  Already harlotry exists, prostitution exists.  There is an occasion other than the ones that I've read you about polygamy in the book of Genesis.  So it isn't long after God has ordained one man for one woman for life that all kinds of perversions occur...fornications, adultery, incest, rape, prostitution, polygamy. 

 

And you can add to that the sin of homosexuality.  For that you go to chapter 19 of Genesis.  And I do want to spend some time in the details of this because it is our subject.  Satan obviously is trying to pervert and confuse God's order.  He has brought into human society all these other matters and now he introduces homosexuality.  Apparently it became very widespread very rapidly, as did adultery, fornication, incest, rape and prostitution.  And, of course, they're still rampant in the world today.

 

But apparently the city of Sodom was filled with all kinds of iniquity.  If you can just make a note to read Ezekiel 16, you read in Ezekiel 16 a little bit of a listing of some of the sins characteristic of Sodom.  The one sin that isn't mentioned in Ezekiel 16, but the one that is carefully detailed here and thus doesn't require a further mention is the sin of homosexuality.  There were all kinds of iniquities characteristic of this particular city, but none of them was more shocking than homosexuality.  Adultery and fornication and polygamy and incest and rape and prostitution are already present in the world by the time you get very far into human civilization and with them this sin of homosexuality, of course, rears its ugly head.

 

We have in this nineteenth chapter a fairly careful record of the kind of thing that was going on in Sodom and it gives us a good understanding.  So we want to take it rather carefully.  Look at verse 1.  "Now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening."  These were two angels who were, by the way, along with the presence of God perhaps in a preincarnate appearance of Jesus Christ had visited Abraham and Sarah.  The two angels came to Sodom in the evening.  As Lot was sitting, the brother of Abraham, sitting in the gate of Sodom.  "When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground."

 

Now we know that angels can take on human bodies and take on human form.  You will note that I just mentioned to you that two angels along with perhaps a preincarnate appearance of Christ, at least we know that God was present there in some way, had appeared to Abraham.  We know that the writer of Hebrews alludes to this when he mentions that some people have entertained angels unawares.  To entertain an angel unaware would mean that the angel had to appear in some form which was normal.  And so angels occasionally do appear in a human form.  And certainly holy angels can occasionally when it fits the purposes of God take on some kind of form which is or appears to be human.  Two angels came to Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom.  He recognized the magnificence of these beings and he bowed down with his face to the ground.


 

"And he said to them, 'Now behold my lords, please turn aside into your servant's house.'" That's my house.  "'And spend the night and wash your feet.'" That was not a derogatory statement about the condition of their feet, that was a common courtesy because everybody's feet were either dusty or muddy.  That was simply a way of saying to come in and cleanse yourselves, take care of your physical needs.  "That then you may arise early and go on your way."  What he means to say to them is you better get out of town fast and you don't want to linger in the public square or anywhere where you can be observed.  Here they were approaching the gate of the city and Lot runs, as it were, to them and says, "Hold it, you've got to come immediately to my house and you've got to be cared for there, spend the night and be fast on your way, early in the morning before anyone can notice you."

 

"They said, however, no.  We'll just spend the night in the square."  That's not a good idea.  "He urged them strongly, so they turned aside to him and entered his house and he prepared a feast for them and baked unleavened bread and they ate."  Just as Abraham had demonstrated kindness in chapter 17 to his angelic visitors, so does Lot.  He's very kind to them.  He must have known who they were.  Must have recognized the magnificence of them.

 

In verse 4 before they lay down, before these two angels could lay down, and it's interesting, isn't it, to think about the fact that these angels who take on human form have the need to sleep?  I'm not sure I can explain all of this.  I don't understand it all.  But nonetheless the plan was that they would sleep which shouldn't surprise you since they had just eaten also.  Angels apparently then did take on an actual human form which could eat and needed to sleep.  "But before they could lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old, all the people from every quarter," every section of town.  What's going on here?  Verse 5 says, "They called to Lot and said to him, 'Where are the men who came into you tonight?  Bring them out to us that we may have relations with them.'" Not very subtle, are they?

 

Here are the most magnificent objects for their perverted lust that they had ever laid eyes on.  A new flesh, as it were, to pander to their insatiable wickedness, "Where are the men who came to you tonight?  We saw them.  Bring them out that we may have relations with them."  That we may have actually intercourse with them.  That's how perverted that city was.  People came from all over town.  This isn't a little group.  This is people from all over town from every quarter, all the people both young and old.  Homosexuality had run the gamut of age throughout the whole city.  That we may have relations with them...takes a Hebrew word jada which implies sexual knowledge.  Some versions might translate it "that we may know them," but it is not just a welcome committee.  

 

"But Lot went out to them at the doorway and shut the door behind him."  He went out to speak to them and closed the door behind him because he knew of the passion, the viciousness, the insatiable lust that would drive past him and through the door if given the opportunity.  He said, "Please, my brothers, do not act wickedly." They wanted to act wickedly.  A man named Bailey has written a book in which he says, "The sin of Sodom was a lack of hospitality."  And that's why God destroyed them?  No.  It wasn't a lack of hospitality, it was the fact that they wanted to do wickedly.  They wanted to attack those angels and sodomize them. 


 

Verse 8 says, "And now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man."  Two virgin daughters.  "Please, let me bring them out to you and do to them whatever you like, only do nothing to these men inasmuch as they've come under the shelter of my roof."  This is strange, isn't it?  What is he doing here?  He is saying, "Look, rather than defile these angelic visitors, I'd rather give you my two virgin daughters."  You don't give up your two virgin daughters to people just because they lack hospitality and you're trying to appease them.  He was saying, "Can I substitute my own virgin daughters?  Would you please do to them what your lust desires rather than to these two angelic visitors?"  Frankly, I think it's a pretty stupid thing for Lot to do, or to offer to do.  But admittedly he's in a tough spot.  He certainly doesn't want to have two angelic visitors who sought shelter in his home and who are sodomized while under, as it were, his roof and protection.  The dilemma was hard but the solution was pretty dumb.  On the other hand, he may have felt safe knowing that they were all homosexuals.

 

Verse 9, they said, "Stand aside, get out of the way."  Furthermore they said, "This one came in as an alien and already he's acting like a judge.  Who is this Lot?  He comes into our town, he's an alien, he's a stranger, he doesn't even belong here and now he's sitting in judgment on our behavior?  Now we will treat you worse than them."  Which may have been a promise that they're going to rape him.  A crowd of people raping two angels and then a crowd of people raping Lot.  So they pressed hard against Lot and came near to break the door.

 

This ought to tell you something about the uncontrollable lust of homosexuals.  "But the men reached out their hands and pulled Lot into the house, the angels with them, and shut the door.  And they struck the men who were at the doorway of the house with blindness both small and great."  With divine power, they just instantly made them blind.  After rescuing Lot, amazingly they blinded these homosexuals.  But would you notice this?  "Having been blinded," it says, "they wearied themselves finding the doorway."  You would think if you had just been struck blind, you would accept your fate and get out of there and bemoan your blindness, wouldn't you?  If...I would think to myself if I got that close and I had just been made stone blind, I would be so horrified at my blindness that I would be running away in sheer terror.  But the passion and the lust was so strong and so insatiable and so unbreakable was all it did was make it harder for them to find the doorway.  Here they are blind and driven by their lust groping in their blindness to get in the door.  The lust of homosexuality is compelling, isn't it?  So wicked and so vile was this city with its homosexuals that God burned the whole place to a crisp.

 

In verse 12, "Then the men said to Lot, 'Whom else have you here?  A son-in-law and your sons and your daughters and whomever you have in the city, bring them out of the place for we're about to destroy this place because their outcry has become so great before the Lord that the Lord has set us to destroy it.'" And I remind you that homosexuality, this insatiable driving lust can take over a whole city which then is obviously a city to be destroyed by God.

 

Down in verse 24, "The Lord rained on Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven and He overthrew those cities and all the valley and all the inhabitants of the cities and what grew on the ground."  In fact, archaeologists can't even find the place.  When I say it was incinerated, that's exactly what happened.  They don't even know where it is.  God burned it to a crisp.


 

It was there that the term sodomy was originated.  There the term sodomy had its origin.  The term sodomy appears in 1 Kings 14:24, in Deuteronomy 23:17 and 18, and it means homosexuality.  It is the term for homosexuality.  Homosexual is a sodomite who gets his characterization from that city.  Clearly the term sodomy wouldn't refer to homosexuality if the sin of Sodom wasn't homosexuality.

 

To see something more of the characterization of that sin and that city, look at Jude verse 6.  And I think this is a very, very important text to sort of solidify our thinking.  In verse 6 Jude talks about angels who did not keep their own domain or habitation, but abandoned their proper abode.  I take it that that refers to Genesis 6 where you have those fallen angels who did not stay in the angelic community but abandoned their proper abode and cohabitated with human women and God has kept them in eternal chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.  They were angels who went out of their normal relationships.  And verse 7 says, "Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh."  They're exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.  The sin of Sodom was going after strange flesh.  And the rest of the cities on the plain there were drown in fire and brimstone and burned to a crisp.  A Sodomite then is a homosexual.  And frankly, that's the best term to use.  I use the term homosexual this morning and I've used it again tonight because up to this point we haven't gotten to this text.  I don't prefer the term.  Homosexual is clinical.  Homo-sexual, just identifying same sex.  The term that they like to use the term "gay" is absolutely ridiculous.  They are anything but gay.  The biblical term really is Sodomite, if you take the illustration of Genesis 19.  Although as we noted this morning, the term homosexual in the Greek is used.  I think it's a good reminder to them when you identify them to call them Sodomites because that's the best and most graphic illustration of that lust in its perversion. 

 

Before we go to the New Testament, I want you to look at Isaiah chapter 3...Isaiah chapter 3 and verse 9.  Here Isaiah is pronouncing judgment on Jerusalem and Judah.  The prophet says Jerusalem is ruined and Judah is fallen.  He says they're against the Lord and they're provoking the Lord.  In verse 9 of Isaiah 3 indicts them because they display their sin like Sodom.  Not only do they sin but they're blatant.  They do not even conceal it.  "Woe to them for they have brought evil on themselves.  Say to the righteous that it will go well with them, for they will eat the fruit of their actions.  Woe to the wicked, it will go badly with them but what he deserves will be done to him.  O, my people, their oppressors are children and women rule over them.  O, my people, those who guide you lead you astray and confuse the direction of your paths."

 

Here is an indictment between Judah and Jerusalem for parading their sin like Sodom.  This is a flagrant rebellion against God and no doubt encompass sins of homosexuality.  This shouldn't be surprising because homosexuality was rampant in the life of Assyria and Babylon and Egypt.  It took 150 years but finally these same sins that were all around Israel because a part of Israel's life and culture and led to divine judgment.  What destroyed Sodom, what would destroy eventually Greece and Rome destroyed Israel.  It is a deadly destructive sin.  And Isaiah says when the judgment of God falls, it's going to fall because you have displayed your sin like Sodom. 

 


 

As we said this morning, it is a destructive and damning and destroying sin.  It has destroyed millions throughout history.  It is still destroying millions today.  God hasn't changed His view of it at all.  It may well be the most damning sin in terms of the public acceptance in the future of our country and our world since it is being advocated in TV and books and films and papers worldwide.  And we said this morning that our society needs to see it for what it is and that is sin.  And as long as we don't, then the people who are engaged in it don't recognize their true condition.

 

What does society say about homosexuality?  Well in 1881 there was a born a man who left an immense impact on human history, his name was Sigmund Freud.  Among many human behaviors which were curiosities to him was the behavior of sodomy.  He became very interested in dealing with sodomites and in understanding them.  He determined after some supposed research that sodomy was a psychological disorder and that it was directly related to a domineering mother.  By the way, that viewpoint still hangs around today and you hear people articulate it.  He said basically, "It's just a disorder that comes because you were dominated by your mother and you grow up then hating the one who dominated you.  And since the one who dominated you was a woman, you hate women and so you attach your sexual fantasy to men."  That's been a very popular viewpoint.

 

In the 1930's there came a man by the name of Havelock Ellis.  Havelock Ellis published a manual, a sex book and in that sex book he brought sodomy into the open.  This is the 1930's.  And he pointed out, supposedly, some famous sodomites.  He concluded that there were great men among the sodomites and that they accomplished what they did because there was an unusual genius associated with sodomy. 

 

He said, "Frankly, Freud is wrong.  It is not a psychological disorder generated by a domineering mother, it is hereditary, it is genetic and it is a higher level of genius than just normal folks possess."  He wrote about Erasmus, the Dutch humanist sixteenth century, and said he was homosexual.  He said Christopher Marlowe, the English poet, was homosexual.  Michael Angelo, the Italian genius, painter, architect was a homosexual, Lord Byron, Francis Bacon, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, some of them were, by the way, history does indicate that.  I'll never forget reading the autobiography of Oscar Wilde who said at the end of his life to his horror and shame that what he was in secret all his life he had to finally shout from the housetop.  But he said, "Look at all these geniuses," and he picked the selective list of people out of the run-of-the-mill sodomites and made it appear as if it was a higher level of genius to which some people were born.

 

So since Freud and Ellis and others who have embellished both viewpoints, you can take your pick.  Did your mother do it to you because she was nasty and domineering?  Or did your mother and father do it to you genetically?  And there's still debate.  The reason there is still debate is because no one can prove it's hereditary.  Furthermore, no one can prove that homosexuals have in common a domineering mother.


 

Then along came a real fraud by the name of Albert Kinsey with a famous Kinsey Report.  In the 1940's and the 1950's he published the famous Kinsey Reports on Sexuality.  He was a sexual pervert himself and so he was trying to prove a point before he even did his research.  He wanted to justify adultery, fornication, homosexuality, and any other kind of deviant sex so he fabricated his figures, fabricated his research.  I spent this week reading a very interesting book called Kinsey Sex and Fraud.  It debunks the entire Kinsey report and shows how fraudulent the figures were.  It was he, you remember, who said that in the result of his research was that one out of ten people were sodomites.  And this normalized it.  One out of ten were sodomites.  That is not true, has never been true, may some day in the future be true if their media campaign is continuingly successful.  He tilted and twisted and fabricated the statistics to make it look like everyone was an adulterer, everyone was a fornicator, everyone was having affairs illicitly out of their marriage and one out of ten people were sodomites.

 

This was followed up by the American Psychiatric Association which declassified sodomy as a mental sickness and removed it from its lists of standard diagnostic diseases and illnesses.  And the American Psychiatric Association decided to buy into Havelock Ellis and say it was hereditary.  And once Kinsey kicked in the door with his false figures and everybody thought homosexuality was just normal and one out of ten people were homosexuals, that, by the way, is why in the L.A. public school system the homosexual awareness and the homosexual advocacy lobby is called Project Ten.  That comes from the Kinsey Report, the one out of ten and that has led to the epidemic of today.  And then you take all the talk-show hosts from Phil Donahue on through and what they do is create a platform which further normalizes this kind of deviant behavior.  There is no evidence...there is no evidence that homosexuality is a result of a domineering mother.  There is no evidence that homosexuality is a result of genetics.  There is plenty of evidence that homosexuality is a choice...a choice like all sin, it's a choice.  You may have certain susceptibility to it.  There may be some people who are more tempted in that area.  But it primarily has to do with choice. 

 

And if you read the literature of those that are trying to help people come out of homosexual sodomite sin, they will tell you that what leads people into these choices, what leads them to live like this is just a simple little list of things.  One, early homosexual experience, when they're young, somebody engages them, some other boy maybe in their youth or even late childhood, adolescence engages them in some kind of homosexual play that stimulates them.

 

Another component in the leading people into these kinds of choices is the need for intimacy and some homosexual supplies it.  Some young boy meets a man and it has been known to happen in the church with some Sunday School teachers of young boys, and it happens in the schools all the time and you read about it in the newspapers, and this teacher becomes sort of like a father figure to the boy and the boy needs intimacy and he finds warmth and he finds a listening ear and pretty soon he finds himself being stimulated in a physical way by this man and it's fun and he likes the man and that makes him feel comfortable about it and becomes a lifestyle. 

 


 

Another one of the little components that lead this way is sub-culture acceptance.  Some boys particularly, or even girls who become lesbians, can't find their way to acceptance in the normal culture and so they find a sub-culture that will accept them.  And homosexuals are always looking for new flesh.  Sometimes it happens to men because they're rejected by women and because they can't find an outlet for their physical desires among women because women won't have them, or they fell unattractive to women or they've been rebuffed, they'll slide into the circle where they can find gratification. 

 

There are factors in life that lay out the path of temptation but it's still the series of choices.  I can remember as a boy, just a young boy in my early years of junior high being approached in a restroom by a man who now I knew, and it was a few years before I understood,  that had homosexual intentions toward me.  And I didn't understand that until I looked back on that and I was so frightened, I went out of there.  And I can look back and imagine that some boy in that kind of circumstance with a man he knew and trusted would have given himself to that, found some kind of thrill in that and be on his way to a life of that.  When I went away to college in my first year at a Christian school, I had a roommate in my own room attack me in the middle of the night.  And I remember it so absolutely vividly, I was first of all shocked and all I remember was rising out of bed and throwing a punch and...(applause)...I mean, this is a fairly normal instinct for me, not to he commended, but expected...and seeing him fly across the room into a corner and then confronted, "What is going on?"  This is some years ago at a Christian school in my lifetime, it's wholesale everywhere now and the rampage is on for new flesh, and the rampage is on to elicit the involvement of young lives.  And where you have kids that are rejected by women, who are looking for a sub-culture of acceptance, who have a need for intimacy, who get lured into this kind of thing, you have some choices that lead to other choices, that lead to other choices and it becomes lust out of control. 

 

So, when we look at this situation, we have to see it for what the Bible sees it for.  It is a sin that brings about the judgment of God.  But as we saw this morning, it is a sin that is forgivable.

 

One other text and that's Romans chapter 1.  Romans chapter 1 verse 18, very familiar text which gives us a good look at the fallenness of man and God's reaction.  "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness."  In other words, God's wrath is revealed against the whole human race because they have the truth and they suppress it.  They reject it.  "That which is known about God is evident within them."  God has planted it in their hearts.  God has made it evident to them.  Verse 20, "Since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what is made so that they're without excuse."  You have the internal moral law of God, you have the external creation and evidence of God and His morality.  The evidence is there, the truth is there and men reject it.  Verse 21, "Even when they knew God innately from the internal witness and externally from the creation, they didn't honor Him as God, they didn't give thanks, they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened, professing to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.  They rejected God, thus rejecting truth.  They created their own gods like animals and men and failed to worship the true God, and that's why God's wrath is poured out upon them. 

 


 

There you have the characterization of the fallen world.  God has given the knowledge of Himself internally and externally.  Men reject it and instead of seeing God as revealed, they turn their backs on God, they invent their own gods and bring about the wrath of God upon them.

 

Now the wrath of God comes in this form, verse 24, "Therefore, God gave them over...God gave them over." What a statement.  "He gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them."  Look at verse 26, "For this reason God gave them over....there it is again...to degrading passions."  Verse 28, "And just as they didn't see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind."  Verse 24, He gave them over that their bodies would be dishonored.  Verse 26, He gave them over to degrading passions in their heart.  Verse 28, He gave them over to a depraved mind.  Body, heart, mind, all given over and what...what became of that when God took His hand off and God let man go his own way?  What came of it?  Sexual perversion.  What you see today is already the evidence of God's judgment on man as He lets him go. 

 

Verse 24, "God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them.  They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.  They worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever, amen."  Then verse 26, "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions." What kind?  "For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural."  They were given over, verse 24 says, to epithumia, uncleanness, reaching out after forbidden pleasure.  The Stoics called it grasping for pleasure which defies all reason.  Lust gone wild.  That's what verse 24 is talking about.  Desires that make people do shameless things and nameless things.  And they dishonored their bodies.

 


 

How did they dishonor their bodies?  They did what was against nature.  They did what was unnatural.  In verse 26 women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.  What you have in homosexuality then is a very clear illustration of depravity, of people given over to their lusts without any restraint on God's part.  He just let them go.  Women, we call them lesbians.  Somewhere around 20 to 25 million of them, we hear in America now.  They have chosen to live godlessly and God gives them over to the results of their choices.  Verse 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."  They burn in their lust, that phrase, "burned in their desire toward one another," literally to burn out, ekkaio, to burn out, they were consumed with lust.  It's the consuming rage of it.  As I told you this morning, the average homosexual in San Francisco, three nights in the bath house, ten to thirty different sexual encounters in one night.  Sadomasochism, flagellation, dungeons, torture, orgies, their jealousies among themselves, their neurotic acts are more perverse than heterosexual people.  When they have their Gay Parade, you can't even look at it.  You can't even watch it.  Anybody else who did anything like that would be arrested and put in jail.  Homosexuals Kerney and Hill of San Bernardino killed an estimated 40 victims.  According to the "New York Times," quote: "The man who knows more about violent death than anyone else in the country is Dr.  Milton Helpurn(?), formerly chief medical examiner of New York City."  In his biography titled Where Death Delights, Helpurn...not a Christian...wrote this, "It's not my role to condemn homosexuality as such, and I leave it to the psychiatrists and psychologists to try to figure out why people practice homosexuality."  He said, "I'm not to judge it.  But having performed sixty thousand autopsies, it is high time that those who deviate from the norms should understand the risks.  I don't know why it is so but it seems that the violent explosions of jealousy among homosexuals far exceed those of the jealousy of a man for a woman, or a woman for a man.  The pent-up charges and energy of the homosexual relationship simply cannot be contained.  When the explosive point is reached, the result is brutally violent."  Helpurn goes on, "But this is the normal pattern of these homosexual attacks, multiple stabbings, the senseless beatings that obviously must continue long after the victim dies.  When we see these brutal multiple wound cases in a single victim, we automatically assume that we are dealing with a homosexual victim and a homosexual attacker," end quote.  Why?  Because there is a burning lust that is out of control.  They burn in their desires.  He went on to say in his book that in ten seconds they can look at a dead body and tell you whether it was killed by a homosexual because of the mutilations and the multiple stabbings or multiple blows.  There is a gnawing unsatisfied gripping lust that is evidence of their depravity and evidence of the fact that God has given them over, let them go.  And they are burning in their desire, women exchanging the natural function for what is unnatural, and men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their persons the due penalty of their error.

 

How in the world can the Presbyterian General Assembly say, "The task force on homosexuality created by the General Assembly is completing its two year study and ready to finalize its recommendations to the General Assembly?"  What is there to study?  The Word of God is so clear.  Verse 28, they didn't want to acknowledge God so God just gave them over to a depraved mind to do the things which aren't proper, things which make no sense.  That's part of God's judgment.

 

Now in verse 32, after chronicling a whole list of sins that are the result of God giving people over, it says, "The people who practice these things are worthy of death and they still do them and then they give hearty approval to those who practice them."  They advocate them.  They know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death.  That's in the Bible, that's clear.  But they still do them and they give hearty approval to others who practice them.  All of life becomes totally disoriented. 

 

There's a species of ants that lives in some parts of Africa.  By the way, the ants in Africa, as I noted in my trip this summer, are astoundingly productive.  They can build massive anthills, some of them twenty feet high.  And they live in subterranean tunnels that go way down into the earth where the young are sheltered.  And down in these subterranean tunnels where the ants move, there's a special shelter for the queen.  The workers go on foraging trips to distant places, returning to the nest with food for the colony and particularly for the queen.  It is said by those who study them that if when they are away their queen is molested, the workers even far away become nervous and uncoordinated.  If she's killed, they become frantic, they rush around aimlessly and eventually die in the field without ever finding their way back.  It's thought that the worker ants in the normal situation are constantly oriented to the queen by some radar-like device.  If she is killed, all orientation ceases, frenzy ensues, a frenzy that ends in death.  What a parable of man, huh?  What a parable of man, cut off from God, he lives in a disoriented frenzy until his death, the frenzy of being disconnected from God.  Such is the condition of fallen man, of homosexual sodomites.


 

But again, we need to end where we began.  This sin is forgivable.  Such were some of you, but you are washed, you are sanctified, you are justified and all of this through the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.  It is sin, but there is forgiveness. 

 

Some Sunday nights back, a young man named Robert was baptized in the water here.  And he came into the water and he told a wonderful testimony.  He said, "I have AIDS," and he said, "I've been a homosexual for years and I said to someone I want deliverance from this life.  Where can I go?  Where can I go and find help?"  And he said, "Someone told me to go to Grace Community Church and I could find help there.  He said, "I walked into this church on a Sunday morning.  I had never been here," he sat right out over there.  And he said, "I was desperate, I wanted deliverance from my sin and its consequence, death."  And he said, "John got up, as he does every Sunday, and read a Psalm." And he said, "This is what he read."  And he recited it, Psalm 107, "They wandered in the wilderness in a desert region.  They didn't find a way to an inhabited city.  They were hungry and thirsty.  Their soul fainted within them.  Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble, He delivered them out of their distresses.  He led them also by a straight way to go to an inhabited city.  Let them give thanks to the Lord for His lovingkindness, and for His wonders to the sons of men!  For He has satisfied the thirsty soul, and the hungry soul He has filled with what is good.  There were those who dwelt in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in misery and chains, because they had rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.  Therefore He humbled their heart with labor; they stumbled and there was none to help.  Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble; He saved them out of their distresses.  He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their chains apart.  Let them give thanks to the Lord for His lovingkindness and for his wonders to the sons of men."

 

He stood in these waters and recited that verbatim.  And he said, "When I heard you read that, I knew I had come to the right place and that my chains could be broken and I could be set free."  And that morning, that first Sunday, that first time he had ever come here, he gave his life to Jesus Christ and was wonderfully saved and later entered the waters of baptism to confess that sin and that transformation to you.  And I said to him privately, "What are you going to do with the days of life that God gives you?"  Well he told me, he said, "The Gay Pride Parade is coming down the street near where I live, I've been in the mainstream of this whole thing."  And he said, "All of my former friends are going to be stopping by to greet me because they know I'm so ill and I'm going to give everyone of them the gospel of Christ."  And I know he did and he's dying and yet he's ready because he knows he's going to meet Christ.  That's the good news, isn't it? 


 

Father, we thank You for the grace that is granted to sinners of any kind and every kind.  We thank You that You forgive the deepest darkest sin, that You break the strongest chains, that You give grace to the vilest sinner for You have done it for us.  And we pray for people who are trapped in this terrible lifestyle with its inexplicable passions.  We pray, O God, that You would deliver many, be gracious to them and save them for Your glory.  What a testimony, Lord, it would be if many were saved out of that sin and gave testimony to Your grace and became rescuers of others in those chains.  Thank You for setting so many free, even here in our church.  We pray that You'll set more free, that Your grace may be displayed and Your love for sinners.  We pray also, Lord, for those who come out of that lifestyle and come to You and are still tempted, whose memories are vivid with the ugly things of the past.  We pray, Lord, that You'll wash those memories away, that You'll fix them on holy things, on right relationships.  Clean out their minds and give them pure thoughts and triumph over temptation.  Give us all, Lord, opportunity to speak to those that we might meet that are caught in that sin and to know that the most compassionate thing we can do is not accept them but warn them for if they don't understand the sin, they can't see the Savior.  And, Lord, this is but one sin among many.  We pray that You would save sinners of all kinds and make them holy, sanctified for Your glory, that many may sing Your praise in time and throughout eternity.  In our Savior's name we ask.  Amen.