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Homosexuality
Does
God consider the sin of homosexuality to be worse than other sins
No,
and I will tell you why.
Because
when you have any listing of sins in the Scripture, for example, in
1
Cor. 6:9-10 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither
fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of
themselves with mankind, Nor thieves,
nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
Categorically,
you have got everything in the same list.
But
when you look at a list like that you see that they are all outside the
kingdom.
So
categorically they are all in the same situation--they
are defined by their sin.
Verse 11, then says,
And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye
are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the
Spirit of our God.
The
point being, that those are all sins that are characteristic of people
outside the kingdom, but they are all forgivable--right?--because, "such were some of you."
He's
saying to the Corinthian church, "you know, that
list is a list of what you used to be and some of you were here, and some of
you were here, and some of you were here, and so forth."
So,
if it is true that Homosexuality along with many others defines life outside
the kingdom, but that that sin is forgivable, then in that sense it is no worse a sin than any other.
Having
said that, I would say, however, that when you look at Romans 1:18, and you have to look at it to
understand this:
When
Romans 1:18 For
the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
The "wrath of God" follows a
sequence.
In
Romans 1, you look first of all at verse 24, and here is the defining of
God's wrath--let me kind of sum this up for you.
You
read Romans 1:18 about "the wrath of
God" and we say, "Ok, 'the wrath of God,' what are you
talking about?
Well,
there are five kinds of wrath:
1. There is Eternal Wrath - That's Hell.
2. There is, Eschatological Wrath, or the
wrath of the last days. The wrath described in Revelation 6-19,
all the Seal Judgments, Trumpet Judgments, Bowl Judgments--the final wrath.
3. There is Cataclysmic Wrath: the
flood; the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; the destruction of the cities of
the plain; the destruction of Capernaum; the judgment of God on Korazin,
Bethsaida--and in history God has judged whole civilizations through cataclysms
that took unbelieving people and catapulted them into eternity, such as Pompeii,
which was a city literally notorious for its vice.
4. Then you have, Natural Wrath. That
is the wrath of God that comes in a sowing and reaping fashion. If
you are a drunkard all your life, you may die of cirrhosis of the liver; if you
live in sexual sin all your life you may shorten your life and die of some
venereal disease including AIDS. So there are certain things built-in,
"Whatever a man sows he reaps,"
But
the wrath being spoken of in Romans 1 is the 5th kind.
5. It is the Wrath of Abandonment. It is that judicial act of God whereby
He lets the sinner go. In other words, He stops convicting, He
stops calling, it's Genesis 6:3, where God says, Genesis 6:3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with
man, ...
There comes a point
when God says, "That's it--I'm
letting you go." And when God lets a society go, verse
24 says, "He gives them over to
uncleanness"--that's sexual sin. Then verses 26-27, For this cause God
gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural
use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the
natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men
working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of
their error which was meet.
So you have lesbianism
and homosexuality. When God gives a society up they plunge
into sexual sin and then they sink deeper into homosexual sin.
So while homosexuality is a forgivable sin, and categorically
no worse than others, when it happens on a societal level, when a society affirms it, when it
becomes normal in a society, that is evidence that God has turned that society
over.
If
you look at America
you can look back to the sexual revolution of the 60's, which has now become a
homosexual revolution today in which the homosexuals have redefined themselves
as a minority, like a racial group of people demanding rights.
So
I think as far as individual sin goes it is no more damning than the other sin
and as forgivable as any other sin.
When
it becomes the pattern of a society it is evidence that God has turned that
society over to that sin….we may be at that point
We
hate the sin of homosexuality because of its baseness and because of its
perverseness, but at the same time we need to understand that it is a sin like
any other sin and we have to call that sinner to repentance and offer that
individual sinner the grace and the forgiveness of God.
We
can't play God and while God may be turning America
over--God may be no longer striving with America as a society;
He
may have abandoned us already, still He is saving individuals who respond to the gospel.
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