Marriage and Freedom in America – Part 1
Marriage and Freedom in America – Independence Day Special (2015)
July 2, 2015
Before we get started we’ll have a few moments of
silent prayer so you can make sure you are in right relationship with the Lord.
Remember, Scripture teaches that if we trust in Christ at that instant we are
completely forgiven of all sin, past, present, and future. That has to do with
our eternal destiny and our eternal relationship with the Lord. There’s no sin
that’s not covered. When we sin, though, after salvation that breaks our
rapport with God, our on-going walk by the Spirit, and so we need to admit or
acknowledge our sins to Him. At that instant we are restored to fellowship and
we resume our walk by the Spirit. That’s why we begin every class with a few
moments of silent prayer. So after a few moments I will then open in prayer.
Let’s pray.
“Our Father, we’re thankful for all the many ways in
which You watch over us. You protect us and You’ve provided for us just a rich, tremendous heritage in
this nation that is based upon Your Word. Even though there are great assaults
against Christianity and against the truth of the Bible today, nevertheless it
was men and women committed steadfastly to the truth of Your Word who thought
deeply about what was revealed in Your Word. It permeated their souls. It
permeated their thinking and their understanding of the world around them and
of government and politics. It influenced their thinking to write such profound
documents as our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. We have a
basis for this government that is grounded in that Judeo-Christian heritage
because they took the Word of God to be literally true. They understood that
people were who the Bible said they were. They were in Your
image, created in Your image, and yet they were corrupted by sin. They gave us
a form of government that would insure liberty and attempt to protect us from
those who would seek to corrupt the power of government. Father, today there
are many who fail to understand the significance of their views. There are
others who understand the significance of their views and they hate and despise
those views and seek to destroy it. Father, we pray that You
would continue to raise up godly leaders, men and women who understand Your
Word and the truth of Your Word as it reflects reality and defines reality. We
pray You would raise up such men and women and that You would restrain and
refrain those who are operating in hostility to Your Word in such a way that
they may not achieve their ends and that in the coming years we would see a
reversal. Above all, we pray for the people in this nation that they might turn
back to You, turn to You, trust in You, go to the Scriptures for truth and that
there we would find true genuine liberty and freedom. We pray this in Christ’s
name. Amen.”
Tonight we’re going to start a mini-series that I hope
is going to be only three lessons. I don’t want to spend an enormous amount of
time on this because, frankly, this isn’t a topic that I really planned to
address. It’s not one that when it comes to dealing with topics relating to
sin, when it deals with certain kinds of things are going on culturally, they
need to be addressed from the Scripture but they are not necessarily things we
want to camp out on.
I remember in 9-11, aside from all the horrors that
took place, one of the things that I really personally resented for many years
was the fact that I was going to have to spend a lot of time studying Islam and
Islamic theology and Islamic history, which is not something I wanted to do. I
would have to spend time studying the Koran because we needed to understand our
enemy. As a pastor it’s part of my responsibility to train and equip people in
the church to think Biblically about the contemporary issues.
Over the last month as I was thinking what I might do
for an Independence Day special this year, I hadn’t really gotten around to a
real focal point on my message. Then last Thursday and Friday occurred when we
had two different opinions handed down by the Supreme Court
which really changed things. I think they made a radical shift in the
culture of our country. I knew that I needed to address this. It’s not
something I really wanted to address. I much prefer to do verse-by-verse
exposition or deal with some of the other critical topics in Scripture.
Over the last week and especially last weekend we just
heard so much that was going on. Some of it was good and some of it wasn’t
quite so good. I know like many of you I was so inundated by a lot of this that
part of me was like, “Okay, I really want to escape all of this. I really don’t
want to be thinking about it.” On the other hand, we know there are people who
need to think this through. We all need to think it through a little bit more.
Last week, as you know, in the Supreme Court decision related to Obergefell v. Hodges, they
declared that no state can prohibit the issuing of
marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Further, they determined that any
marriage performed in one state for a same-sex marriage must be recognized in
all other forty-nine states.
The reaction from most evangelicals [and I’ll talk
about a survey that came out today a little bit later] was one of dismay and
sadness. I think a lot of you and a lot of Christians were truly grieving over
the weekend. We heard a lot of different things that were said, some from
Christian politicians, and some from many other Christian leaders. Many
conservatives believe that the Supreme Court had redefined the historic
understanding of the Constitution. It’s a moving target now. We don’t really
know what the Constitution says because if you read it in terms of its original
intent or in terms of the day-to-day vocabulary, then all the sudden the
Supreme Court comes out and says, “No, it means something completely different.”
So how in the world can we be sure what our form of government is?
In effect, what happened as a result of this decision,
when they declared that there is an inherent right to same-sex marriage that is
the intent in the 14th Amendment, then they basically declared that
everyone from Bill and Hillary Clinton who have both made statements against
same-sex marriage all the way back to George Washington were actually in
violation of the Constitution when they declared that marriage was to be
between one man and one woman and homosexuality was wrong. In the case of
people like George Washington and leaders in the 19th century, they
believed that it was a criminal act.
Even Justice Roberts commented in his dissenting
opinion that in the majority opinion it now made anyone in the past wrong. It
made them bigoted. It made them into those who denigrated, disrespected, and
inflicted harm on the dignity of those who hold to same-sex marriage. Anyone
from this point back is someone who has been a homophobe. Then he went on to
describe the various problems that this will inflict on those who held to the
view that was the normative view. It was not only the normative view for the
last 200 years of the Constitution but it was the legally defined view. We went
from those who were constitutional and legal eight days ago to where now we are
those who are really the enemy. We have been declared those who have taken away
the dignity of the homosexual and we never recognized that they had this inherent
right. How bigoted of us! That’s part of the implications and the direct
statement of those who wrote the majority opinion.
I thought about this last week and was wrestling with
how I was going to approach this. I realized three things. First of all, we
rarely ever get to pick our battles. Our battles are foisted upon us by
circumstances. Many of you will now have battles and challenges and even
opportunities to present the gospel. We need to look at this from a more
positive framework. As we go through life now people are going to make a lot of
wrong assumptions, sometimes horrible assumptions
about us. We’re just a nasty,
bigoted homophobic Christian. By our lifestyle and by the way we live in
terms of grace orientation and kindness and generosity to those who are
different, those who oppose us, those who are living in what we believe to be
sinful lifestyles, we can demonstrate the life given to that belief.
We’re going to get all kinds of opportunities. We’re
going to get opportunities to answer questions and to help people think through
the issue. There’s a certain number of people who all they’re going to do is
make up their mind in hostility and negativity towards Christians. There’s
nothing anyone can say that’s going to change their
mind. That’s fine. That’s good. As Jesus said, “We don’t want to throw pearls
before swine.” There are a lot of folks who simply want to understand our
position. They want to understand what the issues may be and they might ask
you. It might come while you’re at a family barbecue this weekend and you’re
cooking. While you’re distracted, you need to understand this well enough to
right out of the blue be ready to explain why you believe this was a problem.
You can’t pick the time and you can’t pick the battle. You need to be prepared
to handle it when it comes.
Second thing, as believers we are mandated from
Scripture to give an answer for the hope that is in us. 1
Peter 3:15. Notice what it says here. We’re to sanctify the Lord God in
our hearts. That means we set apart the Lord. We focus on the fact that He is
the priority and as Paul states we are ambassadors for Christ. That’s part of
what that entails. In our sanctification, which is spiritual growth, we’re
always to be ready to give a defense. That word for defense is the Greek word
for APOLOGIA
which means to give a reasoned, thought
through answer for the hope that is within us.
Last week if you read a lot of e-mails and heard from
a lot of people, they felt pretty hopeless because their circumstances had changed
and they didn’t realize that circumstances shouldn’t affect their hope. We’re
supposed to be hopeful and our hope is built, as the Scripture says, on nothing
less than Jesus’ death and righteousness. That’s the basis for our hope. It’s
not in a republican form of government. It’s not in the Constitution of the
United States. It’s not in the Declaration of Independence. It’s not in any of
the amendments in the Bill of Rights. Our hope is based on something that has
eternal, unchangeable values.
When we have that hope and that impacts the way we act
and our thinking, then people will notice a difference and they will ask. 1
Peter 3:16 says, “Having a good conscience.” Part of
that implies we’re not responding in anger, bitterness, resentment, and irritability
when somebody asks us, “Why is it that you think this Supreme Court ruling was
such a bad idea?” We’re to have a good conscience so that “When they defame you
as evildoers.” Trust me, there are segments of our society now that are
shouting the most horrible invectives against Christians. They say that if
you’re a Christian, you’re just lower than the scum of the earth because you
are preventing, or you want to prevent, these wonderful, loving people from
fulfilling themselves in a loving committed relationship. So we are defamed as
evildoers.
We’re to have a good conscience so that those “who
revile your good conduct in Christ may be ashamed.” We need to be able to give
an answer for the hope that is within us. As this comes up, a lot of us don’t
want to engage in this battle. I don’t know about everyone here. I know some of
you have family members or friends that are in the homosexual community. I have
family members that are in the homosexual community and I have been involved
with people in the homosexual community. We have to treat them with love and
kindness personally and not with a judgmental attitude. That’s where the battle
is.
A quote I learned years ago from Martin Luther who’s
the one who originated the Protestant Reformation in 1517 said, “If we defend the
fortress at every point, except where it is being attacked, we will lose the
battle.” This is where we are being attacked at this point. Luther was thrown
in prison and he was called before the Holy Roman Emperor and he was tried. In
fact, they sentenced him to death at one point.
He stated in his trial, “Unless I am convinced by
proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and
will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to anything against
conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen!” What he meant
by not doing anything against conscience was his conscience, the norms and
standards in his soul, were based upon the Word of God. He had to stand on the
Word of God and the Word of God alone.
This became an underlying factor in the thinking in
Western civilization that the basis for freedom of religion from the tyranny of
the state was the freedom of conscience. That this isn’t just some trivial
thing like, “Well, that violates my conscience so I’m not going to do that
today.” This was based upon something that was well thought out and was a
person’s sincerely and deeply held convictions and beliefs.
Another thing we need to realize as we talk about hope
is a promise that’s dear to most of us. Going back to Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived
at a time when he warned the southern kingdom of Judah that the Babylonians
were going to come because they had violated God’s Word, they had violated the
Law, and they had succumbed to all manner of abominations, as the word is used
many times in Jeremiah, through idolatry and all manner of different things.
The word basically refers to anything that violates the Law of God. As a result
of that, God brought judgment upon the southern kingdom and destroyed it and
Jerusalem.
In Lamentations 3:20–23 he says, “My soul still
remembers [the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian
destruction when the Babylonians came in and completely destroyed Jerusalem,
destroyed the Temple, and killed hundreds to thousands in Jerusalem and buried
them in the Valley of Gihon]. He lived through that and when he remembered that
the horrors of his nation completely falling, he said, “My soul still remembers
and sinks within me.” He had sadness and sorrow. There’s nothing illegitimate
about that. The solution is then stated in verse 21, “This I recall to mind.
Therefore I have hope.” Even though the circumstances were as dark and
depressing as we can imagine, nevertheless he had hope, he had confidence.
“Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail
not. They are new every morning. Great is Your
faithfulness.”
What I want to do in these lessons is accomplish two
or three things. First of all, I want to shed light on what the Bible teaches.
There are a lot of believers today who are uncertain. Questions are being
raised in conversations and they are uncertain. They may understand in some
sense that the Bible clearly teaches that homosexuality is wrong but they’re
hearing all these comments from other people and they don’t really know how to
respond to that. We need to clarify what the Bible teaches. There are some
people, unfortunately, within the Christian community who misrepresent
homosexuality. They treat it as a sin that can cause you to lose your
salvation. They treat it as an unforgiveable sin. They treat it as a sin that
is categorically different from any other kind of sin. They’ve elevated it all
out of proportion of what the Scripture says. We need to understand what the
Scripture really says.
We need to avoid heat and we need to shed some light
on what the Bible actually teaches. And there’s some hate out there, even
within the Christian community. There are people who have expressed some very
awful things about homosexuals. They would never say those same things about
their friends who are adulterers or their friends who are liars or their
friends who are cheats or the fact that they cheat, maybe, on their income tax.
All of these kinds of sins are lumped together in the Bible in the same list
that include homosexuality. They’ve singled this out
and there have also been some Christian groups, so-called Christian groups,
where they have used this as an excuse to carry out violence against
homosexuals. This is just dead wrong and is not acceptable and you can’t
conform this to Christianity.
The same kind of thing happened with people who didn’t
understand the Bible and called themselves Christians and conducted
anti-Semitic attacks and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews down through
the centuries. It’s an ignorance of the Scriptures and a failure to carry out
the virtues that are emphasized for every Christian. So we want to shed light
on what the Bible teaches and not heat and not hate but to have a clear
understanding of what the text says.
Second, we want to understand what the Founding
Fathers meant in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and how this truly
impacts the legal aspect. This goes to the issue of authority because you and I
as Christians look to the Word of God as the absolute and final authority.
That’s where we need to stake our ground. We, as Christians, believe in the
Word of God and as Luther said, “Here I stand. God help me. Amen.” This is our
position.
When we’re talking to the unsaved community and when
we’re talking to people for whom the Bible is not an authority and we’re not
talking about apologetics at this point. We’re talking about conversations with
a neighbor, with a friend, with a business worker, or whoever might ask you,
the appeal is not to the Word of God because that has no authority to them. The
appeal is to the law, the Constitution, and history. This is a different issue
from the way I would teach apologetics in terms of teaching Biblical truth
related to the Person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ or the authority of
Scripture. It’s much the same thing I taught when the question comes up of what
gives Israel legitimacy to the land. Granted, the Bible clearly teaches that
God has given the land to Israel but we know that Israel is not going to
completely fulfill that until we get into the end times and into the
establishment of the kingdom. If you’re talking to an unbeliever it’s important
to go to the law and go to what happened at San Remo and an understanding of
the Balfour Declaration. It’s important to go to those areas to demonstrate
from history and from law that Israel has a right to the land, historically and
legally. And the same thing is true for this issue, to understand what the
historical and legal aspects are in terms of this particular discussion.
We have to understand first and foremost what God says
about marriage and sexuality and only then can we know the truth. As Jesus said
in His argument in John 10 with the Pharisees, “When you know the truth, the
truth will set you free.” That’s been misquoted and misused to I don’t know how
many people. But when Jesus uses it, He’s referring to the truth of the Old
Testament. Deal with Jesus in context. It’s not talking about whatever you think
is true but when you understand God’s revelation, which is absolute truth, that
is the truth that will set you free. It will give you true freedom. So the only
way we can have genuine liberty and genuine freedom is to understand the Word
of God. True freedom brings proper spiritual freedom and it’s always grounded
upon the truth of God’s Word. But for some Christians and all non-Christians
any appeal to the Bible appears to be a conflict with the so-called separation
of church and state issue. We need to think that through.
As I pointed out last Sunday the problem is that
ultimately when you think about this issue and defining marriage it always
comes down to a religious assumption, a religious presupposition. We have to
stop and help think about these issues of authority and truth and knowledge. We
also want to address two fundamental issues that are raised in this debate. One
is the preservation of the 1st Amendment which
says we are guaranteed the free exercise of religion and how that is going to
take shape under the new law. Another fundamental issue that has to be
discussed is the issue of marriage. At the very core here is an assault on
marriage which includes issues related to gender and sexuality and these are
things that have eroded within evangelicalism as the ideas and the teaching of
the Church have been infiltrated over the last 50 years.
Finally we need to think through how we are going to
“speak the truth in love”. How are we going to interact with those who disagree
with us? And those who are saying vile things about
Christians. How are we going to present Christ and our views in a
hostile environment? Now I’m really addressing what I’m saying in these lessons
to those who have a genuine desire to understand truth. They really want to
know, saying “I want to know the right thing.” They
may be confused already. They may be going down the wrong path already but
they’re not so far down that they’re locked into a hostile attitude. They’re
willing to talk and understand. We need to know how to address this in the
light of so many hateful things that are said about Christians and distortions
that are said over and over again about the Bible from people who truly do not
understand the Bible.
We live in a world now where we as Christians who have
believed the same thing about marriage, sex, and freedom for the last four
hundred years in this country are now considered the enemy. We believe as
Christians the same things about marriage and sex for two thousand years since
the birth of Christianity since the birth of Jesus Christ and His death on the
cross. Views that were held for the previous two thousand
years during the age of Israel going back to the call of Abraham. Before
Abraham these things were true going back to creation. Now we’re basically declared
to be criminal and to have hate speech and to be hostile to those who disagree
with us. We see this is a critical topic.
What I want to do since this is Independence Day I
want to remind us in this series of what the framers of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution said. What did they say in regard to
religion? Where did they get their ideas? How did that impact what they said?
If we’re going to properly understand and interpret the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence we need to understand where they’re coming from,
and how they used words and vocabulary. If we don’t understand what they mean
by the words they used, if we assign, in some cases, modern meanings to the
words that they used at that time, then we’re going to completely misunderstand
and distort what it was that they intended, so we need to understand where they
got their ideas.
Primarily it was from the Word of God. Computer
studies and computer analysis of the speeches and letters and the writings of
the Founding Fathers indicate they got the vast amount of their ideas from
sermons and from the Bible. That’s the language that they used. That was their
source of their information. The sad thing we have today is that for so many
evangelicals they are working overtime to try to prove that the Bible really
doesn’t say anything negatively about homosexuality. They are just flipping the
Bible over on its ear. We need to understand some of that that’s going on.
So first of all what I want to do is just run you through
some statements from our Founding Fathers. I’m going to do this at the
beginning of each time so that we see their framework. They’re the ultimate
authority in terms of the Constitution. They’re not the ultimate authority for
us as believers but what we see is they derived their ideas, their thoughts,
that which formed and shaped our government. It wasn’t a perfect government but
there were flaws but yet they built a system that was self-correcting.
Sometimes it was a harsh self-correction as in the War
Between the States dealing with the problem of slavery but it was a
self-correcting document. We look at John Jay who was a president of the
Continental Congress. He was also the first Chief Justice and a contributor to
the Federalist Papers. He stated, “Providence” – that’s a reference to
God [in that generation they referred to God as the Almighty, as Providence,
and in these more formal terms: The Supreme Being, the Creator. These are some
of the ways they described God. That’s how their generation approached and
wrote at that time]. He said, “Providence has given to our people the choice of
their elders, and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our
Christian nation…” Notice, here’s the first Supreme Court Justice identifying
the United States as a Christian nation. He’s not identifying it with a
particular sect of Christian beliefs but as Christian. Not that everyone in it
is a born again believer. Not because in it has their theology correct but
because the ideas that shaped the nation had their source in the
Judeo-Christian heritage, which came from the Bible. So he continues, “The
interest of our Christian nation, to select and prefer Christians for their
rulers.”
Now we’re going to skip up to a modern quote. This is
from Justice Clarence Thomas a few years ago. He was speaking in New York at
the Wriston Lecture at the Manhattan Institute. He said, “Let me put it this
way: there are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution [this is one
of my favorite quotes], try to discern as best we can what the framers intended
or make it up.” Those are really the only two options. You either do your
historical research. Read the writings of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution and come to understand what they meant and
interpret the document in terms of the original intent of the writers or, you
just make it up.
That is what we’ve been seeing for the last fifty
years under activist judges as they think that the Constitution is a living
document. No, it’s articulating universal absolutes. The more we’ve gotten away
from that idea, the more we’re going to see the Constitution morph into things
we can’t really imagine. So how can we guarantee freedom for the future if the
document that guarantees that freedom isn’t always interpreted the same way? He
goes on to say, “No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless
interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the framers, they
have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores.”
“To be sure even the most conscientious effort to
adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as
all methodologies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the
advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, in 1892 ruled, “There is no
dissonance in these declarations. There is a universal language pervading them
all, having one meaning; they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation,
this is a Christian nation.” That’s the Supreme Court. How far we have fallen.
Here we have Daniel Webster who is the author of the
American Dictionary of the English Language who wrote quite a bit about the
Constitution in the early 1800s. He is also the author of one of the spelling
books that was a standard tool in the early 1800s in American schools. He
wrote, “In my view the Christian religion is the most important and one of the
first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be
instructed… No truth is more evident to my mind that that the Christian
religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and
privileges of a free people.” This is in the Preface to the American Spelling
Book.
He also said in 1828 in the dictionary defining
marriage. He writes as the definition of marriage, “the legal union of a man
and woman for life”… which served the purposes of “preventing the promiscuous
intercourse of the sexes,… promoting domestic
felicity, and… securing the maintenance and education of children.” This is how
they thought in the early 1800s.
He also said, “Our citizens should early understand
that the genuine source of correct republican principles… [not
in contrast to democrat, they didn’t have a Republican party when he wrote
this. That is talking about our government as a republic]. Our citizens should
early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is
the Bible particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.”
We also know that the Bible was printed by
authorization of Congress. Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Congress wrote
or signed the resolution passed by Congress, “that the United States in
Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable understanding of Mr.
Aiken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as influence of the
progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied from the above report of
his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition
of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States and hereby authorize him
to publish this recommendation in the manner he should think proper.”
Congress appropriated the funds for the publication of
the Bible so if this is what they believed they were doing then they had no
sense of creating this kind of wall of separation between religion and
government. In fact, that term is not found anywhere in the founding documents.
Charles Carroll who was a signer of the Declaration of
Independence wrote in a letter to James McHenry on November 4, 1800, “Without
morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time.” Notice the emphasis which we’ll see in the next couple of quotes of the
importance of morals and virtue as foundational to government. Without morals
and virtue and a government that is promoting the instruction of morals and
virtue to the children of the country, then there’s no guarantee that the next
generation can survive. He says, “Without morals a republic cannot subsist any
length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, [that
applies to a lot of people today].” What he really means by this is not
Christianity per se but the Judeo-Christian heritage, the Judeo-Christian
framework. He says, “Whose morality is so sublime and pure… are undermining the
solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free
governments.”
John Adams says in a speech to the military in 1798
when he was vice president, he warned his fellow countrymen stating, “We have
no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions
unbridled by morality and religion.” They understood that every human being is
corrupt by human nature and that the corrupt human nature enticed every human
being to various passions and lusts. In order to be a good citizen, they had to
be taught how to bridle, how to control those passions and lusts
and that could only be done by teaching morality and religion. He said,
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other.”
Now at the beginning of the Declaration of
Independence in the preamble Thomas Jefferson and his companions on the
committee who wrote the Declaration of Independence stated, “We hold these
truths to be self-evident.” Self-evident means everyone recognizes this without
giving it any analytical thought. “That all men are created equal.” He doesn’t
mean all males; he means all human beings. And they’re created. They didn’t
happen by chance. It isn’t the result of an accidental lightning strike on some
mass of protoplasm that caused all of a sudden inorganic matter to become
organic matter. He says, “They are endowed by their Creator.” These rights
don’t come from government. They don’t come from the Supreme Court. They don’t
come from the legislature or the president. That these rights
are inherent in each human being because they are created in the image and
likeness of God. That phrase isn’t used here but that’s the implication.
Whether they were Christians or whether they believed everything in the Bible
or not, this was an era when people were controlled by a theistic worldview and
whether they were Christian or non-Christian, whether they were Deists or
atheists and few were atheists, if any, or Unitarians, they all thought within
this Biblical view.
Just like today most Christians, most evangelicals,
even though who were well taught and are growing in Christ, are still
influenced and think in terms of relativism because that’s the dominant
worldview today. Just as Christians today often think in terms of a
non-Christian worldview, non-Christians at that time thought within a Biblical
worldview because that was what surrounded them. The Declaration goes on to
say, “That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
All I want to do is comment on happiness. Happiness
today means the pursuit of personal pleasure and joy. That’s how most of us
read it. In the original document it was to pursue life, liberty, and the
pursuit of property.” James Madison wrote that the greatest property that we
have is our conscience. That’s our greatest property. To be able to follow our
conscience and do what each of us believes to be right or wrong. That is the
foundation for the 1st Amendment.
George Washington said, “There is no truth more
thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of
nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.” For them happiness
isn’t the pursuit of personal pleasure. Happiness is the pursuit of virtue and
the control of passions. That’s how they understood happiness.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Without virtue, happiness
cannot be.” What they meant by happiness isn’t what most Americans think of.
(Slide 21) Just a couple more quotes. The New York Supreme Court once stated,
“The morality of the country is deeply engraved upon Christianity. The people
whose manners and morals have been elevated and inspired by means of the Christian
religion.”
The Florida Supreme Court stated, “The Christian
concept of right and wrong, or right and justice, motivates every rule of
equity. It is the guide by which we dissolve domestic frictions and the rule by
which all legal controversies are settled.” The Christian
concept of right and wrong. These were state Supreme Court rulings and
federal Supreme Court rulings. The reason I’m emphasizing this is that when we
look at the reasoning, the rationale used in the majority opinion in this
statement they don’t cite legal precedent because they can’t.
When you read Justice Robert’s dissenting opinion he
is citing the writings of the original writers of the Constitution. He is
referring to legal precedent in numerous laws that again and again and again for
the last two hundred years the law of this land, property rights, inheritance
rights, and numerous other decisions have been predicated upon a specific legal
definition of marriage. You change that definition of marriage. It throws a
monkey wrench into all of these legal precedents. It’s a tidal wave. It’s a
tsunami that is going to wreak havoc in the legal system. There will be
innumerable court cases trying to untangle the knots that have come from this.
Now, what do we need to do when we talk to folks? This
is a problem. It’s not always easy. A lot of times we get in situations where
you may be going out and walking with a neighbor or a friend or you may be just
with family at the 4th of July and someone may just casually say,
“What do you think about this?” They may just be making conversation or maybe
they’re really interested and you have to respond. How are you going to
respond? That is something each of us needs to think through. What is the
strategy going to be for how we’re going to express why we believe what we
believe?
Here’s what happens. We’ve got an iceberg here in the
picture. I’m using that as a background to understand that the iceberg
represents the various issues that are going on in life. At the very top we
just see that about one tenth of the iceberg appears. When we have
disagreements with people and we have conflicts with people and we have
arguments with people, such as political arguments, social arguments, and
cultural arguments, it always takes place in terms of those above-the-water
line surface issues, the most obvious things. There’s more to it than that.
That only represents about 10% of the issue.
What we’re doing here is that on the left side is the
statement: Logical sequence. There’s a logical sequence to the way we think. So
the Logical sequence looks like this. We have a Foundation of all thought. In
philosophical terminology it’s called metaphysics. It has to do with ultimate
reality. What do you believe is ultimate in the universe? Is it an infinite,
personal God? Is it matter in strict evolutionary or Darwinian terms, then what
you have is matter. Is it energy? Is it just nothing? Do you have a religious
belief like Buddhism or Hinduism where ultimately there’s just nothing and when
it’s all over with we’re just going to go to nothingness? And there will be no
identity.
What is your ultimate reality? If your ultimate
reality is a personal, infinite Creator God, to whom you are answerable, then
everything else will flow from that. If your answer is that ultimately there’s
just impersonal matter and there’s really nothing to distinguish us, which in
fact is what modern science believes, that our thoughts, our feelings are just
biochemical. There’s no volition. We are simply a result of different chemical
reactions that take place in the brain. In that case no one can be held
responsible for anything because there’s no volition, no free will, and no
immaterial soul. These are vastly different approaches.
What you start with in metaphysics is going to impact
the next important area which is called epistemology.
That’s a big word. A lot of people have never heard that before. It refers to
the study of knowledge, essentially the authority in knowledge. How do you know
truth? You say this is the way things are. How do you know that? Someone else
says they’re another way. How do they know that? It’s more than just personal
opinion. These things are just well thought through and we have to determine
how we know truth. How we know right from wrong. We make these various claims.
How do we know just or unjust? Someone says, “Well, that’s wrong.” Well, on
what basis?
That gets us into the next area. That is Ethics. The
question of what is right. What is wrong? What is good or bad? Value judgments.
These relate to issues today that we hear a lot about—everything from
family values to civil rights. How do we determine what is the ultimate source
of information. That takes us down to the source of knowledge. Where do you get
truth? Then built upon those three levels, those three stories of knowledge and
information we have political/ national or individual decisions.
In your life and my life the political decisions and
the national decisions, the everyday decisions, policy decisions, parenting
decisions, and the decisions you make about how you’re going to be entertained,
all of those decisions presuppose that you’ve already answered the ethical
questions. Those ethical questions presuppose a particular kind of epistemology which is logically an outgrowth of what you
think is ultimate in the universe. If you’re a Christian you believe that
ultimately we are ruled by a personal infinite God who is
going to hold us accountable. He has revealed to us knowledge and truth
on which we can build our lives. On the basis of that knowledge and truth He
has revealed to us we can make ethical decisions. We can determine what is
right and what is wrong and what is good or bad. It’s not dependent on any
individual feelings or perceptions. It’s based on a standard that is outside of
us. Then when we begin to deal with political, national or individual
decisions, it’s pretty much set.
So today we’re talking about the issue of same-sex
marriage. That’s a political/judicial decision and people just want to argue
about it just in terms of “well, don’t homosexual couples have the right to
love each other and have the right to dignity?” But those questions presuppose
a whole host of other issues and that’s where the conversation needs to go. If
we don’t get below the surface and talk about those issues, all we’re going to
do is throw bricks back at each other. All we’re going to do is insult each
other. All we’re going to do is get mad and angry because we’re not talking
about the real issue. We’re just talking about the surface issue.
So this is the area we talk and argue about up here
but as I pointed out it’s these three areas: ethics, epistemology, and
metaphysics, where the conversation needs to take place. But these three areas
are usually ignored. Now let me make another point. One of the reasons I’m
doing this is because all of us need to be challenged and need to improve our
critical thinking skills. You’ve got children, grandchildren, people who are
listening online and live streaming, people all over the world, and people who
will access this because they’re going to be searching on same-sex marriage and
this is going to come up in a Google hit or some other search engine which is
going to find it. They’re going to be asking these kinds of questions. So we
need to understand how to think this through and we need to develop our
critical thinking skills.
In a couple of weeks I’m going to be going to
Gulfport, Mississippi. I’ve been asked to come out there and speak at a Bible
Conference on a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. There were some former students
of mine at the black pastor’s conference that I used to spend a lot of time
with, WHW, and one of these guys found out I was going to be there. He said some
of the pastors would like to come and have me talk to them. The other day I
e-mailed him and asked, “What’s the plan? What do you want me to do? What’s the
schedule?” He said, “We would really like you to come and talk to us about what
these issues are in same-sex marriage, how it’s going to impact the church, how
we should respond to this and what we should do.” So this is just some of the
kind of things going on. We have to develop our critical thinking skills, and
sadly in our culture we have so dumbed down education that many segments of our
society no longer have the critical thinking skills to think through these
issues.
When you say this is a whole lot more than just two
people who say they love each other and want to live together legally, it has
all kind of implications. Others just look at you with a glazed look because
they’ve never heard that before. We need to be able to think about those things
and to talk about those things. What happens when the pressures of life come,
such as decisions like this, then we have to drive down from the top? We have
to say, “Well, these kind of political decisions are based on a certain kind of
ethic. Where did those ideas of right or wrong come from?” Well, it come from a certain kind of authority, a certain view of
God. It gives us an opportunity if someone will listen to ultimately take this
to a place where we can talk about the gospel.
In the past we’ve talked about the fact that when God
created man in the Garden of Eden he instituted three things: individual
responsibility, marriage, and family. This was all done before their sin. After
the flood, there are two more divine institutions: Government and nations. So
it’s these first three that come before the fall. They’re designed to promote
productivity and to advance civilization. Therefore these are for every member
of the human race whether they’re a believer in God or not. Government is
established after the Fall as well as national
diversity and these are designed to restrain evil.
Now I want you to open your Bibles to Genesis 1. Turn
to Genesis 1:26 and we will at least begin to look at what the Scripture says
as we go forward.
Today there was a study that came out from the Barna
Group. Some of you may be familiar with the Barna Group. Every now and then I
mention this. I posted the link to this on the Dean Bible Ministries Facebook
page today. It’s a new survey they conducted just after the Supreme Court
ruling came out last Friday. It’s a highly respected religious polling firm.
They’ve been in business since at least the mid-80s and in my opinion, they
have the best and most clear definition of who is and is not an evangelical.
For example, there was an article that I believe was
on the front page of the New York Times earlier this week and the headline had something to do
with “Evangelicals Rethinking Their Stance on Same-Sex Marriage”. The problem
is that in most of the alphabetical soup of media people and your more liberal
newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post and LA Times that they have
a loose view of an evangelical. Their view of an evangelical is that if you
think you are one then you are. It doesn’t matter what you believe. They don’t
have an objective standard. If you just think you’re am evangelical then you
are. Barna comes along and has 9 points of what makes an evangelical. They
believe in the Trinity. They believe in the inerrancy, infallibility of
Scripture. They believe Jesus was the God-man. They believe in the virgin birth
and several other things. They have a pretty decent understanding of what an
evangelical is. They realize that you can’t just throw the word around. It has
a clear, objective meaning. The people who are filling this out are people who
believe in those things.
If they’re filling out the research form or survey
form and they don’t believe in all nine of those things, then they’re not
counted as an evangelical. They may be counted as something but what they came
out with as a result of their survey last week was that unlike the article in
the New York
Times which made it appear as if evangelicals and pastors were really
rethinking this whole thing and they were going to come around after all and
they were going to eventually approve of same sex marriage the Barna poll found
that only 2% of evangelicals support the Supreme Court decision. 94% of
evangelicals in this country are completely, strongly against the Supreme Court
decision and that would leave about 4% that are undecided. So you have 94%
against, 2% in favor and 4% undecided. He also found that 66% of practicing
Christians, meaning they may not be evangelical in all their beliefs but
they’re committed, practicing Christians, who make up 42% of the population and
66% of them disagree with the ruling. That is a huge
number.
Okay let’s look at the foundation for marriage.
Genesis 1:26–28, “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according
to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the
birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every
creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ ” So initially God is saying He’s
going to create everyone in His image. That’s what gives dignity to man. A
large part of the argument in the majority opinion was
that we need to give dignity to homosexuals. Dignity
comes from the fact that they are human beings and they’re created in the image
and likeness of God. It’s not a utilitarian or pragmatic concept.
Based on an evolutionary presupposition
which governs the thinking of those five justices, they don’t even have
a right to think about dignity because rocks and trees and protoplasm do not
have dignity. If they believe man is the accidental product of an electrical
discharge that somehow made inorganic life organic then they have no basis in
thought to assign dignity to man. It’s just a pragmatic or utilitarian concept.
So that’s illogical, irrational, and not consistent with their foundation.
As Christians we believe that everyone, whether they
agree or disagree, whether they are Muslim, terrorist, criminal, or homosexual,
whether they’re a liar, whether they’re a liberal, whether they’re
conservative, and yes, whether they’re a Democrat or a Republican, they all
have equal dignity because they’re created in the image and likeness of God.
Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He
created him; male and female He created them.” So God created male and female.
This applies not only to their physiological makeup
but also to their soul makeup. They were complementary. We’ll get into that in
Genesis 2. They were designed to complement each other, not to be
interchangeable parts. That’s an important statement because going back to the
early 60s, the thinking that came out of the feminist revolution that was very
much a part of the sexual revolution in gender identity issues starting in the
late 60s and into the 70s is that men and women are identical in everything
except a few incidental physiological parts and so they are completely
interchangeable. There’s no real substantive difference between men and women.
Christianity says yes, they are both in the image of God,
they are equally in the image of God but God made men as men and women as
women. What has happened is we have lost that distinction.
The command in Genesis 1:28 is that they are to be fruitful
and multiply. This is an argument against homosexual marriage because
homosexuals cannot be fruitful and multiply. You have to have a man and woman
to fulfill God’s intended design for human beings, which is to be fruitful and
multiply. This is not just something restricted to a pre-fall command. Think
about this. In Genesis 8:17 God speaks to Noah and tells him to bring out all
the different living beings. They’re going to come out on the earth so they may
abound and be fruitful and multiply on the earth. Now that’s applying to the
animals. But then He applies that same phrase, the same phrase He used back in
Genesis, chapter 1. In Genesis 9:1, “So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said
to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.’ ” Then in Genesis 9:7
“And as for you, be fruitful and multiply; Bring forth
abundantly in the earth and multiply in it.” So God states the command twice,
to be fruitful and multiply, in a post-fall, post-flood fallen corrupt world,
God is sticking with His original blueprint of one man and one woman making a
marriage. It was together as complementary people that they would fulfill God’s
plan and purpose.
Genesis 2:18 “And the Lord God said [to Adam, on the
sixth day of creation] ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ ” He’s
talking about the male here. He says it is not good for the male to be alone.
He is saying He didn’t design the human race for loners. There
needs to be a partner, so God said, “I will make a partner.” The word there is EZER and that refers to the woman. What
happens from feminist politics that comes out in the 60s is that this
denigrates women. This is just patriarchialism. You have to understand the
Scripture. This is a high compliment, a high position, because the only other
person who is said to be an EZER in the Old Testament is God, Himself. He is our helper. This elevates
the woman to an extremely high position. This is not treating her as some
domestic slave or household servant. She has a very high position.
So she is created to complement the man and to help
him achieve God’s original design to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds
of the air, and the beasts of the field as he is going to be God’s
representative. He’s not doing it alone. He needs a partner to help him fulfill
that. Genesis 2:18 sets that up showing that the roles of male and female are
complementary. Then we have the creation of the woman in Genesis 2:21–24,
“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He
took one of his ribs, closed up the flesh in its place.”
God doesn’t create the woman individually. She’s not
the product of some separate evolutionary process. This is one of the problems
you have with evolution. If, according to evolution you have this by chance
evolution and then by chance, you have first a male, then how are they going to
replicate the species without a female? If the female came along, she would be
the product of a different evolutionary chain and they’re going to have to find
each other somewhere in the world so that they can then replicate.
This shows that they, at the very least, would have a
distinct line. They’re not of the same species. Biblical creation teaches us
that they are from the same source. They’re identical and have the same DNA.
Adam says in Genesis 2:23, “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore a man
shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall
become one flesh.” Not joined to another person of the same sex.
This is referred to by Jesus in Matthew chapter 19. He completely affirms the original creation
design of God as male and female and there’s to be a heterosexual union. The
Pharisees came to Him and questioned him about divorce, saying: “Is it lawful
for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?” Jesus answered and said to
them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning made them male
and female?” See we just read that in Genesis 1:26–27. Then Jesus said,
“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his
wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” That is Genesis 2. So Jesus quotes
from Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 showing that Jesus did not view these as distinct
or contradictory accounts of creation but He gives equal authority to both of
them and he said, “So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore
what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
What we see here is the foundation of marriage. It is
the foundation for true freedom in the human race. Why? Because Jesus said you
shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. So you have your
greatest liberty when you are operating in reality and on the basis of what God
has revealed.
Now what I want to do is come back on Sunday and we’re
going to talk about the attacks on marriage. If God instituted something and it
is established, then when sin enters into creation, there are going to be
attacks on marriage. We have to understand what takes place and that will give
us an opportunity to go through the Scripture and see why Scripture emphasizes
the exclusivity of a one man-one woman union in marriage. We’ll see this in
Genesis before the Mosaic Law and then we’ll see it after the Mosaic Law. One
of the things I read as I read these blogs and the hateful things said about
Christians is that they talk about all these contradictory things said in
Scripture and that we cherry-pick what we want to apply and not apply out of
the Mosaic Law. It’s a failure to understand, either willingly or unwillingly,
that in Christianity we believe the Mosaic Law was only given to the Jewish
people as a nation for their law. The Mosaic Law did not make these things in
and of themselves criminal. Murder was criminal from
Genesis 4 on. Adultery was criminal and sin from Genesis 4 on. All of these
things are sin. They’re instantiated in a law code for Israel in order to
preserve and protect the nation. That’s the function of the divine
institutions, to preserve and protect and provide stability for the human race.
Without those the result is social chaos. We’ll come back and look at this and
develop it some more on Sunday morning.
“Father we thank You for this opportunity to look at
Your Word and to be reminded that we live in a great nation. It is wobbly.
There are serious cracks that have appeared in the walls of our structure and
they may cause the walls and roofs to fall down. But we still live here. We
still have freedom. We still have the freedom to teach Your Word. We will
always, no matter what happens, have the opportunity to express Your grace and love to unbelievers. We need to be
strengthened in our own spiritual life, not to ever even in our own thinking,
think hate toward homosexuals or towards anyone who is wrapped up in any kinds
of sin. We are not here to judge other people. We are here to offer them the
gospel and to explain God’s wonderful love to every single human being and that
Jesus Christ has paid the penalty for sin and that all sin was paid for at the
cross and that there’s a free offer of forgiveness of sin to one and all simply
by accepting the gift of salvation, trusting in Him as the one who died for our
sins. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”