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 endocrinology, 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