Transcript

Have you ever heard people claim, Jesus never said anything about homosexuality?

This is supposed to shut down Christians and make them think they shouldn't care about sexual morality because Jesus allegedly never cared enough to say anything about it.

But in today's episode, I'm gonna show everything that's wrong with this argument and how you should respond to it.

So my immediate response is just ask the question, Why does that matter?

I then point out the assumption the person is making.

If Jesus didn't condemn something, that means Jesus condoned it, but that's obviously false.

Jesus didn't say anything about incest, bestiality, or child sacrifice, but that doesn't make those behaviors moral.

Even the Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson, who's in a legal marriage with another man, admits that when it comes to Jesus' silence on homosexuality, quote, One cannot extrapolate affirmation of such relationships from that silence.

Robinson instead claims that all, quote, We can safely and responsibly conclude from Jesus' silence is that he was silent on the issue.

Once again, does that mean all we can safely and responsibly conclude about Jesus' silence on incest, bestiality, or child sacrifice is that Jesus was silent on those issues?

No!

Because you can know what someone thinks about a particular issue if you know enough about that person's foundational views.

And when it comes to Jesus' foundational views on sexuality, we know that he was the furthest right arch conservative of his day.

Jesus literally made the Pharisees look like a bunch of liberals.

First, Jesus rooted himself in the morality of the Old Testament, and we know the Old Testament's prohibitions of homosexual behavior are part of the perpetually binding moral law rather than a temporary ritual law.

Leviticus 18:22 that condemns homosexual acts is placed between moral laws, not ceremonial ones.

Verse 20 condemns adultery, verse 21 condemns child sacrifice, and verse 23 condemns bestiality.

Leviticus also prescribes capital punishment for this crime, which it doesn't do for mere violations of the ritual law.

Finally, Leviticus makes it clear that actions like adultery, bestiality, and same-sex relations were part of the moral law that also applied to non-Jews.

Only Jews were expected to follow things like the dietary laws.

God had even judged the other pagan nations for engaging in these defilements and expelled them from the land for doing so, as is seen in Leviticus 18:24-25.

But Jesus didn't just uphold these moral laws, he strengthened them.

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets.

I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus taught that loving your neighbor refers to everyone, not just fellow Israelites.

Jesus commanded the love of enemies, condemned lust as a type of adultery, and condemned anger as a type of murder.

And Christ did the same thing with sexual ethics.

He called the people of God to an even higher standard than what they were held to before.

Although it is amazing to me the lengths that liberal theologians will go to to try and turn Jesus into a ventriloquist dummy for their own agenda.

In his book, Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology, Patrick Cheng claims, Radical love is ultimately about love.

Which, as St. Paul teaches us, is 'patient and kind' and 'not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude.' As such, radical love is premised upon safe, sane, and consensual behavior.

But the real Jesus condemned at least one sexual behavior that modern people usually consider to be safe, sane, and consensual: remarriage after divorce.

And because Jesus did that, we know what principles grounded his sexual ethics, and through those principles, we can safely conclude what Jesus believed about the morality of homosexual behavior.

In the first century, there was a debate among the Jews over when divorce was permissible.

Deuteronomy 24:1 allowed a husband to divorce his wife if, quote, She finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her.

The two most important figures in this debate were the rabbis Hillel and Shammai, who founded two opposing schools of thought among the Pharisees.

The followers of Hillel believed divorce could be justified for almost any reason or indecency, including a wife accidentally ruining her husband's dinner.

The followers of Shammai, on the other hand, said divorce was only permissible in the case of adultery.

The Pharisees brought this debate to Jesus by asking him this question, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?

Instead of siding with one group of the Pharisees over another, Jesus answered them by going back to a more fundamental law.

He said, Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one'?

So they are no longer two, but one.

What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

In this answer, Jesus presented an interpretation of the moral law that was stricter than the strictest of the Pharisees.

No sin could dissolve the marriage bond God created.

In response, the Pharisees brought up Deuteronomy's provision for divorce, to which Jesus replied, For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery, and he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

The unchastity, or sometimes labeled adultery exception, is controversial, and many people rush to a false conclusion regarding it.

This can't refer simply to adultery because the Greek word for adultery, moicheia, is not used in this verse.

Instead, Matthew describes Jesus using the Greek word for general sexual immorality, porneia.

Some scholars think Jesus was referring to an invalid marriage between relatives that could be dissolved because of its intrinsically sinful nature.Or Jesus might have meant that a man can remarry if he divorced his wife during the period between the initial marriage ceremony and the marriage's consummation, which could be as long as a year in the ancient world, because of the reason of adultery.

This would make sense for this variant of the verse to appear in Matthew's Gospel, because Joseph considered doing just that in the beginning of Matthew's work, until an angel assured Joseph to take Mary as his wife into his home.

Whatever the exception means, the parallel passage in the Gospel of Mark leaves no doubt as to Jesus' teaching about remarriage after divorce.

Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

Some people try to diffuse the force of Jesus' teaching by saying He's only being ironic, because wives were never allowed to divorce their husbands in the ancient world.

But although wife-initiated divorce was rare in the ancient Near East, it wasn't unheard of.

Exodus 21:10-11 describes how a slave married to her master can leave her master without paying any sort of penalty if he fails to provide for her needs, including marital rights.

A second-century divorce certificate, in Hebrew called a get, addressed to a husband from his wife was discovered in the Judaean Desert in 1951.

The text said the following.

I, Shelomziin, daughter of Joseph Kebshun of Ein Gedi, with you, Eleazar son of Hananiah, who had been the husband before this time, that this is from me to you a bill of divorce and release.

According to David Instone-Brewer in his study on divorce and remarriage in the Bible, quote, Normally women would not write a divorce certificate such as this one, but they would ask a court to persuade their husbands to write one.

Perhaps this non-rabbinic practice was influenced by the Greco-Roman world where women could initiate divorce, as wealthy Jewish women in the first century are known to have done.

Jesus did not care if second marriages were, as Chang puts it, Safe, sane and consensual.

Jesus also didn't quibble with his opponents about possible exceptions in the Deuteronomic Code.

Jesus instead went all the way back to creation itself and rooted the morality of sex in the permanent life-giving nature of marital love that God designed in our own bodies.

If Jesus condemned what critics would today call harmless thoughts, lust, or what they would call finding your soulmate, which is really adulterous remarriage, because if Jesus condemned these because they violated that permanent design found in the one flesh union that only exists between a man and a woman, then there is absolutely no way Jesus would have affirmed the use of our sexual organs outside of that marital context within same-sex relationships.

Finally, we don't know if Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, because Jesus said many things that are not recorded in scripture.

John 21:25 says, But there are also many other things which Jesus did.

Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

When St. Paul was in Ephesus, he spoke to the elders of the churches there, exhorting them to provide for the needs of the church in Jerusalem.

He then said to them, In all things I have shown you that by so toiling one must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.' Acts 20:35.

Even though Paul relates this saying of Jesus in a way that suggests it was well known, that saying is not recorded in the Gospels.

This is one indication of how some of Jesus' teachings were not written in the accounts of his life, but were passed down through other means, including unwritten ones that we call sacred tradition.

Granted, there's no sacred tradition that describes specific words of Jesus that are not also recorded in scripture.

But what matters is what Jesus taught about homosexuality, not the specific words he may have said on the matter.

And since there is an unbroken tradition of Christians condemning same-sex behavior from the very beginning of the church's history, we can safely conclude this tradition comes from Jesus himself.

And check out the link in the description below where I engage those who claim the tradition is not unbroken and that the medieval church sanctioned same-sex weddings.

It would be bizarre if Jesus approved of homosexual behavior only to have all of his followers teach the opposite, including St. Paul, whom Jesus personally chose as an apostle and inspired author of Scripture, but who clearly condemns homosexual behavior in Romans Chapter 1 and First Corinthians Chapter 6. Finally, many people call Christians who hold to the natural view of sexuality hateful or judgmental.

But in Jesus' time, the hateful attitude was to leave the lost alone and let them suffer their fate.

The Pharisees condemned Jesus because he dined with tax collectors and prostitutes and he called them to repentance when the Pharisees would have preferred just ignoring them.

But Jesus reminded them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.

I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.

New Testament professor Robert Gagnon puts it well in his book about the Bible and homosexuality.

What was distinctive about Jesus' ministry was not that he refused to make judgments about the conduct of others, or even that he lowered his moral standards.

On the contrary, in many areas he elevated those standards.

What was distinctive was his incredibly generous spirit, even toward those who had lived in gross disobedience to God for years.

He expended enormous effort and exhibited great compassion in the search for the lost.

Jesus did not wait for the lost to come to him.

He went looking for them.

I hope this episode was helpful for you.

If you'd like to learn more about this topic, check out Robert Gagnon's book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, or my book, Counterfeit Christs: Finding the Real Jesus Among the Impostors.

Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.