Not long ago, I spoke at Sydney University on the issue of sexuality, and the convenor of the group drew up a list of questions which often get asked on the issue of homosexuality. I will attempt to answer them as thoroughly and faithfully as possible. Many questions of the questions revolved around the nature of God’s love, and how God can love people and yet judge them and tell them what to do at the same time. I will attempt, below, to give a clear picture of what God’s love is and what it means in relation to sexual expression.
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Foreward note
Before these questions are answered, which will be done at a later stage, many of them revolve around the questions of, “If God is all love, then isn’t love God? If that is true, then why should God judge the way I live my life? If His love is unconditional and accepts me the way I am, then He should accept the way I choose to live my life. If God is love, then how can He make me gay and then tell me not to live like that?”
There are many things to say about this, but I want to spell out what God’s love looks like in the Bible in simple terms before I answer the rest of the questions. It is always important to couch discussions of topics like these in the Bible’s frame of reference, because if we do not then we are wading through the issue with no clear sense of guidance but just vague, ill-defined notions of what individuals think love ought to be like. Conducting a discussion on love with no clear understanding of what God’s love is like is like talking about bridge building with no idea what a bridge is.
In Christ, God IS Love
God, in Christ, is certainly love and loving, but that love has an objective truth element to it that cannot be changed. There are subjective dimensions to experiencing God’s love on behalf of those who are genuine Christians, but that love is defined by and limited to what God reveals of His character. Love is a feeling for God as much as it is an action: it is deliberate. Jesus Christ personified this by saying in John 10, where He reveals Himself as the Good Shepherd, (verses 17-18a) “Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. Noone takes it from me, but I lay it down of Myself”. Love is found in self-sacrifice with no expectation of return. Jesus, God’s Son, is loved by God. Why? Because, as He goes onto say in verses 17-18a, He gives it voluntarily, not because He is obligated to. On the night when Jesus was betrayed, He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane to His Father and prayed, “Please take this cup of suffering away from Me. But let not My will be done, but Yours”. Love is all about giving to others, not because they have to but because they choose to and do it that others may life and not see the horrible decay of death.
The love of God in Christ is absolutely unconditional in the sense that those who receive it do absolutely nothing to merit it. Their good works, pedigree, prowess, morality, personality, position, ethnicity, and other factors contribute nothing to their salvation: the course of church history has proven this to be the case with a murderer (Saul/Paul) being saved and a sexually loose man in St. Augustine. Paul, on the one hand, was a religious moralist; while Augustine, on the other, was a pagan. In other words, God saves the religious and the irreligious. In fact, often the people who are steeped in sin the greatest are the ones who are most receptive to receiving God’s grace. As the Catholic philosopher G.K. Chesterton once surmised: “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God” – on other words, those who turn away from God to fill their hearts up with self-confected love are the most lost and yet, without even realising it, they are looking for the One True Source of love. As Paul understood very well, “Rarely would one die for a righteous man; though for a good man one might dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love towards us, in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-8).
God’s love has boundaries
However, God’s love has boundaries, just as our love has boundaries. This is best explained with an example. I have a hypothetical friend named George, who knows that I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t smoke. I also have children and wife, and out of caring respect for them, I prefer not to have any pets in the household. George knows all of this as we have discussed it countless times before. Yet, when George comes over to our annual Christmas dinner with our friends, he brings his pet rottweiler, chain smokes so much that the carpet is stained with ash, and brings a keg of beer. And to top it off, he muddies the kitchen tiles with the muddy boots that he wore at from bushwalking. Wouldn’t I have a right to be just a little angry with this person? His excuse is, “Oh sorry, I forgot you didn’t like these things”, but it’s a poor one. He has not forgotten the information: he has forgotten to care about me and my family. I have revealed something of myself and my personal character, but this person has disregarded that. It is enough to bring about a break-down in our friendship and I have good cause to wonder if ever really was a friend in the first place. This love is best defined in 1 John 4:10-11 – “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (NKJV).
God’s love has boundaries too. One of those boundaries is to be internally consistent by abhorring evil and loving righteousness (Romans 12:9); it involves abstaining from evil and exposing it (Ephesians 5:11) and walking in holiness because God Himself is holy (1 Peter 1:13-16). It involves not tolerating everything and being ‘open-minded’ because it leads to confusion and disaster: as G.K. Chesterton was once quoted saying, “An open mind is like an open mouth: its purpose is to bite on something nourishing. Otherwise, it becomes like a sewer, accepting everything, rejecting nothing”. (A terrific, albeit tragic, example of this in the Bible is the Old Testament Book of Judges. It demonstrates what happens when people put too much trust in their own understanding, foresake the fear of God- which is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 3:5-6), and itch whatever scratch they have.)
In John 8, a woman is caught in adultery and she is about to be put to death under provisions of the Jewish law (although for sexist reasons, the man who did it with her was not brought under the same judgement). Jesus interrogates those with the stones, seeing in their hearts their hypocricy. “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first”, He said. Eventually, the stone-throwers disperse and Jesus is left with the woman. John reports: Jesus asked, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” God’s love is to show mercy and kindness to people, but it is added with the exhortation not to sin any longer. God hates sin, because it disrupts our relationship with Him, just as the beahviour of my former friend George disrupts our relationship. Until we are truly sorry for our sin and confess our sinful desires to God, asking for His forgiveness and power of regeneration to live His way (1 John 1:8-9). Noone can play victim with God and make demands on His love: we must understand love on God’s terms, or else we cannot meet Him in fellowship.
‘What’s love got to do with it?’
Many people blindly assume that all which matters in a relationship is ‘love’, no matter what its object. This, however, is profoundly misleading. Former gay Christian Joe Dallas writes:
“It is hard these days to say that love is not the final standard for right and wrong. Love is nice, after all; in our culture, it’s been nearly defined as something so intense and beautiful, it justifies almost anything done in its name. And with all the hatred and violence in the world, why [criticise] a loving relationship between any two people? … An essay on homosexuality and ethics puts it well: ‘One of the most popular errors in the realm of Christian ethics has been the effort to make love and omnipotent spiritual quality which has the power to sanctify anything that is done in its name’*. Love can, according to Jesus, interfere with God’s plan for an individual (Matt. 10:37) … Solomon loved his foreign wives [and] they turned his heart away from God (1 Kings 11:3-4) …
Two men, or women, may be in love. Their love may run very deeply, and they may pledge fidelity to each other and live as happily as any married heterosexual couple. But again, that will not, in itself, justify a homosexual relationship. Scripture places boundaries on human relationships, offering no compromise, even if love is present. If a form of sexual relating is wrong, it remains wrong, no matter what degree of love goes along with it. Or as a brassy lady [Tina Turner] once put it, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’”
(A Strong Delusion: Confronting the ‘Gay Christian’ Movement (1996), pp. 162-163). * Quoting Roger Biery, ‘Understanding Homosexuality: The Pride and the Prejudice’.
Love is not justifiable regardless of its object, simply by virtue of love being present. Any unhealthy kind of ‘love’ can be justified using that perspective, including that of paedophilia, which is a current trend noted in Dallas’ book (pp. 38-44). To understand love, it must be understood on God’s terms.
(All quotes from Scripture are from the New King James Version, except where otherwise indicated)