The promotion and normalization of homosexuality (I’m including the entire LGBTQ+ sexual alphabet movement under this term) has become almost ubiquitous in our culture. Some churches and Christians are capitulating to cultural pressure to affirm, accommodate, or simply stay quiet about homosexuality.
The church or Christian who bows to this pressure is doing more than getting one issue or a few texts wrong. The biblical case for the sinfulness of all homosexual acts, summarized by Paul in Romans 1, is rooted in creation and the flow of the biblical storyline. Males and females have unique, non-interchangeable glories as God’s image bearers.
In Romans 1, the apostle Paul explains that there are no atheists, just professing ones “who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Rom 1:18). God has revealed himself in an undeniable way in the created order. Paul explains all “are without excuse” because “his invisible attributes … have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world” (Rom 1:20).
This suppression of the truth of the creator God inevitably leads to idolatry because there are no non-worshippers in the world (Rom 1:21-23). Man’s rebellion expressed in suppression of the truth of God is described as futile, foolish, dark, and leading to death (Rom 1:21-22, 32). The problem of denying the reality of God is not an intellectual one but a moral one (Ps 14:1). Paul describes the inevitable idolatry in creation language, creating “images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Rom 1:23, see also Gen 1:20-28), or perhaps in what we could call de-creation language. Any attempt to make a god image out of a thing God created is a reversal of creation.
Also, Paul immediately links God’s judgment to their idolatrous attempt at de-creation as giving them over to the “sinful desires of their hearts” toward sexual impurity (Rom 1:24). In other words, idolatry inexorably leads to immorality. A suppression of God as the creator of the cosmos naturally leads to a suppression of God’s design related to the apex of the created order, man and woman, God’s image bearers (Gen 1:26-28).
Paul’s argument that what is seen in the created order, the natural world, clearly demands a creator also extends to what is clearly seen in God’s natural design for man and woman. The obvious physical complementary between man and woman is something that can be seen. Man and woman were sexually made for one another by their creator God, who says that he designed their sexual complementarity to be expressed exclusively in a covenantal marriage commitment.
Thus, Paul treats all expressions of homosexual relations to be emblematic of idolatrous rebellion against the creator God and suppression of the truth of God in unrighteousness. It constitutes a rejection of God’s visible creative design, which is why Paul refers to it as unnatural and degrading:
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Rom 1:26–27)
Those who suggest Paul only condemns certain types of idol-related homosexuality and nonconsensual homosexual acts or that the unnatural relations language only forbids homosexual acts that violate a person’s self-identified orientation simply ignore Paul’s logic. Paul appeals to a universal truth about sexual relations rooted in God’s created order (see also, Matt 19:4-9), which cannot be regulated to a limited number of homosexual acts or as a notion that could become culturally outdated.
Homosexual practice represents a key emblematic marker in a fallen world of what it means to suppress knowledge of the creator God and his creative design in the world. It is an expression of the loss of human dignity and is rightly described as being both anti-God and anti-human. Homosexuality must not be a subject about which the church or the Christian sounds an unsure note. As J. Gresham Machen wrote, “The type of religion which … shrinks from “controversial” matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life…. the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”[1] Human sexuality, lived to God’s glory, is one of the important things in God’s world.
Of course, the sinfulness and rebellion of homosexual behavior must never be the last word for any church or Christian. Getting homosexually biblically right means calling it what it is—sin and anti-God rebellion but getting it right also means recognizing the power of the gospel to save unrighteous sinners. In 1 Corinthians, Paul asserts twice in three verses that those who practice unrighteousness, including homosexuality, “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 6:9, 11), but he adds, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” (1 Cor 6:11).
A biblical approach to homosexuality will unapologetically say what God has said about sin and will unapologetically say what God has said about the gospel and its power to save. Embracing this approach will mean that we think about people in bondage to homosexuality not first and exclusively as opponents in a culture war but as lost sinners in need of the Savior.
[1] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, New Edition (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 1–2.
