Introduction
There is no doubt that LGBTQIA+ issues in today’s world are hotly debated, and the issues are no less a hot button issue within the church. People go back and forth with traditionalists claiming it’s a perversion and liberals claiming God loves everyone no matter what their orientation or identification sexually. So what is really said in Scripture about these issues, especially those of homosexual and trans issues? Is the Bible really silent on it as many today claim? Does it openly affirm and embrace it as many atheists within the movement are now trying to claim? In fact, the Bible has quite a lot to say about the issue, but only if the approach to the topic is on the basis of theological fundamentals and principles rather than attempts to cherry pick verses, which is why many on both sides of the argument fail to make a compelling Biblical case on the issue at hand.
What are the Biblical Fundamentals?
In a discussion of theology, it is important to first lay out the framework or worldview from which we will examine the issue. Since the goal is to examine this from a Biblical theological perspective, we have to start there. What theological matters are at hand when dealing with LGBTQIA+ issues? There are three core issues at hand that need to be discussed in order to have a firm foundation to grasp how we should approach these issues if we care about reasoning from a Biblical theology.
First, there is the matter of God’s nature; this is where every theological discussion inevitably starts because what God does or does not affirm is unfailingly bound up in who He is. Second, there is the matter of God’s definition of sex, marriage, and identity. Third, there are the fundamental claims about sex, marriage, and identity that are at the heart of the LGBTQIA+ community. On those three rests the whole of the argument, and from those three, we find our answer in Scriptural principles.
God’s Nature in Relation to the Matter
We begin first with an examination of God’s nature. When asking if God would or would not affirm a movement or belief of any sort, His nature should be where we begin, not just the direct commands. Obviously, if there is a direct command against or for something, we have a clear answer, but when we do not, we have to ask ourselves about what the Bible tells us about God and what He might say about the topic more broadly. This is why I said earlier that His nature as well as His definitions of the three claims at the core of the LGBTQIA+ community matter to this discussion, again, assuming we care at all what God has to say, which as Christians we claim we do.
Holiness and Justice
What aspects of God’s nature are relevant in this case? First, there is His holiness and His justice. This is relevant because He is unable to abide any blot or stain of sin and must, to fulfill His nature as a just God, punish it if the person is not under redeeming grace. While it is true that God is a loving God, it is also true that He says in Scripture that He will not abide evil.
All we need do to know that God is also a God of justice and wrath against sin is look at what He did to Israel to bring about repentance in His own people or how He handled wicked cities like Nineveh or Sodom and Gomorrah. Yes, He gave some of these a chance to repent, but when they insisted on their sin, He punished and judged. In some cases, He wipes out entire nations for their rebellion.
That is not a God who sits up in the clouds like a loving old grandpa and smiles at the sinner and says, “Oh, I love everyone, so it’s okay.” He takes sin seriously. So seriously, in fact, that He sent His own Son to die for His people because if He hadn’t, He could never have let their sins go. There had to be atonement.
In the Biblical worldview, a holy God and the existence of the sin nature that makes us all abhorrent and deserving of wrath in His sight is the whole reason we needed a Savior to begin with. If God were not holy or just, He would not be God, and Christ never would have needed to die at all because He could have shrugged at our sins and let us into paradise anyway.
If God were not holy and set apart, He would be human. His holiness and justice are part of the essence that makes Him God instead of man. We are neither perfectly holy or perfectly just, and therein lies the reason why we needed a Savior to begin with.
Relevancy to the LGBTQIA+ Issue?
This matters, of course, because if the LGBTQIA+ agenda and claims are in fact against God’s word in command or principle, they would be an affront to a holy and just God, which would make them sin. This says nothing, yet, of how He might handle such an issue, but at the very beginning, it is crucial to grasp that if it is sin, God cannot look upon it without judgment forever if there is no repentance for it any more than He could look on the sins of the aforementioned cities and peoples forever without judgement precisely because of His nature as a just and holy God.
He may love His people, but loving His people, as the Israelites and later the New Testament church discovered, doesn’t mean there won’t be punishment and chastisement for evil doing among them. It just means the punishment or chastisement serves a different purpose—that of bringing about reconciliation and repentance—than the judgment of the wicked who are not under His grace.
Inerrancy and Omniscience
The second pair of aspects to God’s nature that are crucial to understand are His inerrancy and His omniscience. God, according to the Biblical worldview, is God because He knows all and never makes any mistake or error in anything. If there were anything He didn’t know or anything that He messed up or sinned in, He would not be God. He cannot run counter to His nature in any aspect, so it is impossible for Him to do that which would violate His essence in any way.
Relevancy to LGBTQIA+ Issue?
This is relevant because if the LGBTQIA+ agenda and claims require things that would run counter to God’s nature should He affirm them, then He cannot affirm them without being no longer God. Since we know from Scripture that He is unchanging from the dawn of time through eternity, we know it is impossible that He would affirm anything that would run counter to the principles or commands He has established.
Objection: The Old Testament Isn’t Relevant
Some would object that I have pulled from the Old Testament mainly so far and that God does change because He shows grace and love in the New Testament and wrath and judgment in the Old, which, such people usually say, we can safely ignore because it isn’t relevant. However, if we believe what the Bible teaches—that God is unchanging—that would mean that the precepts and guidelines and information about His nature that are laid out in the Old Testament should guide us just as much as the New.
There is more that could be said on this, but the article is already quite long enough, and it is enough to remind the believer that if he says he believes the Bible, the Bible teaches in New Testament alone that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Therefore, if God was the same in the days of the Old Testament as He was in the days of the New and today, the same truths of His nature and what He deems wicked are also unchanged. We can, therefore, be certain that if the claims the movement and those within it bank upon to convince us we should agree with them run counter to God’s nature as revealed in Scripture, Old or New alike, it is not something He would ever condone and is therefore not something a Christian should either.
God’s Definitions of the Core Aspects Under Question
Second, we must examine God’s definitions of the core aspects called into question by the LGBTQIA+ movement and the core of the debate going on within the church. This will be a lengthier section because it will deal with more Scripture than it does the theology aspect. The pieces will be put together when we get to the conclusion of the matter, but a thorough examination of the Scripture itself on the three fundamental definitions under fire in this debate should be made by anyone claiming to care about the theology of the matter, so that is what I will do here.
Marriage in the Bible
The first question to ask is what God’s definition of marriage is. In Genesis, we have the very first mention of both marriage and the role that sex (as well as sex in the sense of gender) is meant to play in it. This comes in the form of the well-known story of Eve’s creation:
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
(KJV, Genesis 2:18-25)
Here, we have the very first man and wife every created and the first precedent, set into place by God Himself for how a marriage works. He says that the reason for marriage is because it is not good for man to be alone. He creates Eve to offer Adam a help meet. So right of the bat, we have some principles we can draw out here about how God defines marriage and how He views it as well as sex within it.
Adam’s Understanding of His Own Gender and of the Lack of a Corresponding Opposite
Of course, from Adam’s perspective, it is equally important to note here that he was looking around at male and female pairings in nature around him and realizing first that he was himself a male and second that he did not have a female as the others did. This further reinforces the concept that God’s institution of marriage—which came long before He ever instituted a human government that would, in our present day, decide to redefine God’s institution—was intended to include only one male and one female. Adam observed this rule of unions first in nature, though we know that today even nature has been changed by the effects of the curse of sin and imperfectly reflects God’s natural order. It was later reaffirmed by God in a passage in Genesis 3, where the famous first glimpse at marriage comes as He inspired Moses to write of marriage that it was the reason for which a man should leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife, the two becoming one flesh.
However, while there is much we can learn about marriage and gender from examining Adam’s understanding of it, which God saw fit to tell us for a reason, (one of the lessons being that Adam understood he was a male and that gender was instituted from the very beginning in the very first of humankind as well as in the animals around that first man), there is more we can learn if we examine why God Himself saw fit to institute marriage and, with it, the family and the authority structure within the home, which He defines clearly after the Fall later in Genesis.
Companionship
First, God instituted it to give man companionship. He determined that it wasn’t good for man to be alone, and while one reason for this was Adam’s biological imperative to continue multiplying the human race—a biological imperative God had given to all creation and had not, yet, given Adam a way to fulfill—the other was the idea of family and companionship, the second of which even animals can be seen to seek out on instinct. He viewed it as essential to give man a helper to come alongside him, just as the animals had one male and one female to work together, keep each other company, and to continue to multiply their species. God’s response to this problem was to give Adam the same sort of companionship He’d given to the rest of creation—a woman. So right at the beginning, God’s definition of marriage is one man, one woman. That already begins to clarify the question of how we ought to view some issues withing the LGBTQIA+ agenda, but we will continue to make it totally clear what Scripture says.
A New Family Unit
Second, we have the understanding that a new family unit must be formed when a marriage happens. Here notice that the passage says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (KJV, Genesis 2:24). Earlier in the passage, Adam also notes that Eve is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (KJV, Genesis 2:23) and that she would be called “Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (KJV, Genesis 2:23). Once again, nowhere in here is it implied that it is possible for anyone other than a man and a woman to be married, and directly after Adam points all of this out, we have the comment regarding why this matters. We’re told that because of this—a woman being bone of a man’s bone and flesh of his flesh—a man should leave his parents and unite himself with his wife and, just as importantly, that they will be one flesh. Obviously, after Adam and Eve, there is no woman who is literally taken from a man’s flesh and bone in the way that Eve was from Adam’s, so we know that God didn’t mean one flesh in that sense. The common understanding of this passage—especially as it is in the context of marriage, which has other passages that support this understanding—is that one flesh refers to uniting as husband and wife through sex.
Marriage Instituted by God before Human Government was Instituted and Could Rule on LGBTQIA+ Issues
This is not the only depiction of marriage or sex, though it alone is fairly clear on God’s definition of marriage and sex as it relates to marriage. It is also a very clear and intentional statement that God was instituting it back then, before he instituted the second sphere of authority in human life—human government. Given this, we can understand from this passage alone that it was God’s institution, one He takes very seriously and discusses all throughout Scripture. It is not, and never will be, an institution which human government may supersede with any authority except that of illegitimate force to give those following God’s order (whether intentionally or through subconscious dictate) no choice but to obey. This makes it plain that human government’s edicts that marriage must now include things God never intended to include are illegitimate and should not be acknowledged or followed by the Christian, even if it means accepting punishment for breaking the law should he find himself under tyranny where he has no legal recourse.
God’s View of Sexual Relationships
However, God does not leave us alone with only this short verse to tell us that He has instituted marriage as His institution or that He has defined it as between one man and one woman. The Bible contains an entire book regarding sexuality and relationships between individuals involving it.
Song of Solomon doesn’t get much screen time when people talk about the Bible, but it literally offers us a glimpse into the romantic and then sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Once again, nowhere in the book does it ever indicate God views this sort of relationship as appropriate between anybody but one man and one woman, but it does have quite a lot to share about sex within a marital context.
Paul also shares quite a bit about sex and marriage, noting in I Corinthians 7 that marriage is important if two individuals are unable to refrain from sexual relations with one another. He says, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (KJV, 1 Corinthians 7:1-2). Once again, man and woman. No other unions are considered acceptable, and here Paul tells us that the purpose of marriage is to allow for relations between a man and a woman that are not sin (fornication and adultery are both regarded as sins that God commanded the Israelites to put people to death for). He notes that it is his own observation that it is better to remain unmarried and that it is not a sin to be married.
The Authority Structure of Marriage: The Final Piece of the Definition and a Picture of Christ
Later in I Corinthians, Paul reaffirms the concepts from Genesis and elaborates upon them further, stating that “that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God,” (KJV, 1 Corinthians 11:3) and adding that “For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (KJV, I Corinthians 11:7-9). Here, we see further evidence that marriage as God defines it is intended to be between a man and a woman with a physical as well as emotional relationship and further support for God defining gender as male and female, setting them apart as different, and defining how they operate in marriage, this time with the authority structure in the home.
Paul’s explanation of marriage indicates that God views it as being related to authority and the hierarchy of it He established. He points out that men are different from women in how they should approach their roles and behaviors in church because men are meant to be answerable directly to God as they are the image and glory of God while women are intended to be submitted to the head of their home (husbands in the context Paul has been discussing) as they would submit unto the Lord, which Paul also notes when he says that wives should “submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord” (KJV, Ephesians 5:22) because the husband “is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church…therefore, as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be subject to their own husbands in every thing” (KJV, Ephesians 5:23-24).
This leads us to the final major aspect of marriage in God’s definition of it. So far, we have seen that God defines marriage as between a man and a woman for the purpose of creating a new family unit, a goal in which sex plays a part that God upholds as beautiful, and as a picture of Christ and the church. The final aspect is that of authority within a marriage. Marriage is between a man and a woman for the purpose of creating a new family unit with the man as the head and the wife his partner and help meet who submits to him with love and respect as the church submits to Christ in all things.
That is God’s definition. It doesn’t include anything outside of that definition. Anything inside of it may take many different shapes; not every woman or man are the same, and how they choose to go about handling the submitting of the woman to the man often looks very different, but so long as there is one man and one woman who have become one through sexual union that is kept within the marriage bed to create a new family unit with the man as the head, you have a marriage in God’s eyes. Without that, you do not.
Sex in the Bible
As noted above, sex is hardly a subject God stays silent on in Scripture! We’ve already discussed what He has to say about sex within marriage, which is the only place where He has intended for it to be. He makes it clear in numerous places throughout Scripture that we are not to fornicate (Ephesians 5:3; 1 Corinthians 5; 1 Corinthians 6:18; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; Colossians 3:5; Revelation 2:20; Jude 1:7; Acts 15:20) or to commit adultery (Matthew 5:32; 19:9; James 2:11; Luke 16:18; Leviticus 20:10; Exodus 20:14; Deuteronomy 5:18; Proverbs 6:32; Mark 10:11-12; Galatians 5:19; Revelation 2:22). We are to be faithful to our spouses in the one man and one woman context. Anything else is condemned by nature of the Biblical definition of marriage. It is considered adultery and fornication, for which God often punished His own people.
God’s Ruling on LGBTQIA+ Relationships that Include Homosexuality
What other precedent is there surrounding sex outside of marriage? There are, of course, the complex laws in Leviticus surrounding cases of assault as well as adultery and fornication, but to the point of this article, what does the Bible have to say about sex between men or women rather than a man and a woman?
Sodom and Gomorrah–An Old Testament Example and Jude’s Warning in the New Testament
In Jude, we learn that the reason God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament was because they and the cities around them “in like manner” (Jude 1:7) were “giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh” (Jude 1:7) for which they were punished by “the vengeance of eternal fire” (Jude 1:7).
Notice that this reinforces the earlier point that God is unchanging and that both Old and New Testament are essential to our understanding of Him; Jude, under God’s inspiration, sees fit to explain to his reader that God punished Sodom and Gomorrah for sexual perversions, reminding his reader of what happens when God decides He is done forbearing and begins judgment. So much, then, for the argument that we can have one but throw away the other when it displeases us or seems “outdated” or fails to fit our notion of who God should be.
Note that here, when Jude discusses strange flesh, it encompasses relationships that went beyond adultery or fornication—both of which only applied in the Bible to a woman or man sleeping with an individual of the opposite gender who was not their spouse.
From the story about Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah, we also know that this referred to homosexuality specifically (the original term “sodomy” or “sodomite” came from Sodom because it was known for this in particular) because when the men of the city came after the angels who had come to visit Lot, they wanted him to give them the men who entered the city so that they may know them, a term that is used specifically in the KJV to refer to having sexual relations with another person.
Lot recognizes that this is the intent they held when he goes to them and says “I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof” (KJV, Genesis 19:8). Again, Sodom was well-known for sodomy/homosexuality as well as adultery and fornication. God burned them to the ground for it, and Jude later warns in the New Testament that this was the response to it and that it should not be taken lightly.
Paul’s Warning that Homosexuality is a Judgment on Wicked Peoples and Nations
Lest the Old Testament examples were not enough, God inspires Paul to discuss this particular sin in his sweeping explanation of why no man is without sin and every man is without excuse before God in the book of Romans. In this case, God uses it as punishment and judgment on peoples and nations who refused to acknowledge God or His laws repeatedly and openly rebelled against Him. Paul says:
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. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.
(KJV, Romans 1:26-28)
Once again, not a single thing God had to say about these sorts of relationships is complimentary.
There are more passages that could be discussed, but these are the plainest examples and passages we could possibly examine, and it should be pretty clear already that things do not match up between God’s view of sex and that of the LGBTQIA+ community. The standard that sex is pleasurable but only able to also be beautiful and good when it is reserved for marriage alone—which is between one man and one woman for the purpose of creating a new family unit and a picture of the union between Christ and the church—is diametrically opposed to the view that sex is for pleasure predominantly and holds no inherent value beyond it with no morality to it at all (excepting in cases of rape or incest, for example).
The second is the only viewpoint that would allow one to come to the conclusion that sex can be had without any moral wrongdoing between any person of any gender at any time they so please. If you hold the first according to the Bible, as everyone who professes to be a Christian should since the Bible is their sole authority, you cannot agree with the second or anything that is born of it.
The Definitions of the LGBTQIA+ Community
Here, we’ll begin with a brief explanation of the philosophical premise the whole reasoning train begins from in this community’s worldview, and that is with sex. Most of us are surrounded by a culture, even ignoring the LGBTQIA+ community specifically, that views both marriage and sex as solely to do with the pleasure of the individuals involved and not inherently moral or immoral so long as consent is given.
Redefining Sex and Marriage to Be Rooted in Pleasure and Gratification is Essential to Normalizing LGBTQIA+ Relations
The definitions and train of logic that lead to “homosexuality and LGBTQIA+ relations are praiseworthy” do not begin with marriage, as they do in Scripture, because in this community (as well as many others who reject a Judeo-Christian worldview), marriage is something you do when you decide you like a person enough to want to live with them and have sex with them exclusively, at least for as long as you both feel like you love one another. In this community, the view of sex is that it is for pleasure predominantly and that so long as both people involved are enjoying what is happening, nothing is immoral about it.
One can quickly grasp how such a view, if accepted, would make the step to “homosexuality is moral and should be accepted” an easy one. If all sex is about is the enjoyment of both parties and, perhaps, whether or not they have feelings of love for one another, then why shouldn’t a man and a man or a woman and a woman engage in such a thing if it makes them happy or brings them pleasure?
This is the whole premise upon which everything else rests! You would not attempt to redefine marriage from centuries of human definition as one man and one woman (a definition which held true even in pagan or non-Christian cultures with no concern for Biblical precepts like that of Rome where many older men and young men frequently engaged in homosexuality openly and with no censure from the culture) unless you believed that marriage was solely about your own pleasure just as sex is.
At the core of the redefinition lies a shift in viewpoint on purpose, which itself requires the redefinition in order to avoid the moral implications behind the original definition and the purpose that required that definition. Pleasure rather than the goal to reflect Christ’s relationship with the church or the goal to create a new family unit to carry on one’s legacy is the modern reason for both sex and marriage, and as a result, anything goes so long as it is pleasurable.
Can LGBTQIA+ Beliefs Co-Exist with Those Presented in Scripture?
Such a principle is obviously in direct defiance against God’s definitions of both, and I would remind the reader here that we have already established earlier that those following the God of the Bible must accept that God alone can define these things because He was the one to institute it long before He ever instituted a human government that could do as ours has and try to redefine His system.
In God’s system, sex is pleasurable, but its purpose is to bring together a man and a woman as husband and wife, not only to carry on the next generation but to bring them together more closely in becoming one unit working in common purpose with love and respect. Sex is intended to achieve those things as one part of the marriage. In any other context, God condemns it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a man and a woman or a woman and a woman/a man and a man. He condemns it all. He burned several cities to the ground for it and inflicted it on others as a judgment for their sin by removing His influence to allow them to run after it with no prick of the conscience to stop them, two things which are mentioned and discussed in both New and Old Testaments.
It is clear the two definitions cannot co-exist, and as Christians, this alone ought to prove to us that if we truly are God’s people, we cannot agree with anyone who seeks to redefine marriage or sex to be solely about pleasure with no concern for God’s ordained order or purposes for each.
How Should Christians Deal with LGBTQIA+ Issues?
The obvious part of the answer is that we do not condone or accept any attempt to redefine marriage or sex to something that is outside of God’s order because we know and understand that it is God’s institution, not man’s, and therefore, where He has called abhorrent the thing another seeks to add to the definition, we must not waver in refusing to allow it.
Homosexuality versus the Bible–You Have to Choose
This gives a clear answer on where we fall about homosexuality, which is mostly why I covered the definitions of marriage and sex in the Bible so closely. At this point, it should be abundantly clear that those two things in a Biblical worldview are contradictory with the same two things from the viewpoint of a society aiming to uphold LGBTQIA+ agendas. You must choose one or the other. You cannot have the Bible and “homosexuality is acceptable in God’s eyes”. It is literally impossible on a fundamental level, as we have shown.
Can the Rest of the LGBTQIA+ Community Be Condoned and Applauded by the Christian who Believes the Bible?
What about the rest of the LGBTQIA+ community though? How do we handle the issue of transgenderism and gender identity in a Biblical way—if that is indeed our concern? Let’s go back to the definitions of God’s nature we discussed and then take a look at Adam and Eve further to bring us full circle.
Transgenderism
The Bible doesn’t have any overt passages that discuss people who think they should’ve been born a boy instead of a girl, so we can’t go to a chapter and verse like we can on homosexuality. The New Testament in particular deals with Christians, and such defiance against God’s order was not one that would ever have been imagined in their day, let alone among God’s own people. It certainly wasn’t an issue known among God’s people in the Old Testament, and we have reason to believe that it was not present among His people in the New either, thereby explaining why we have no explicit instruction on what to do with the matter.
Even the Corinthians, who allowed a man doing horrible sexually perverted deeds, never allowed homosexuality or the ideology of trans/queer society to be present in their church as we do today in modern day America. That alone ought to terrify us considering that the Corinthian church was pretty messed up and gained a very stern, harsh rebuke from Paul on their goings on. Imagine how much greater our rebuke would be!
But does the lack of specific Scripture and open, specific rebuke of such things mean we’re left without any guidance on what our theology should contain regarding this issue and therefore free to decide, as some churches have, that it is acceptable with no further examination or concern for the matter? Absolutely not! As I pointed out in the beginning, an appropriate examination of any issue on a theological level examines God’s nature and the implications that nature has on the matter when there is no precept or principle to guide us.
Return to God’s Nature
So, as I said, let’s go back to the aspects of God’s nature I pointed out in the beginning. In this case, it is God’s inerrancy that we are concerned with. Remember that we said that God cannot be God if He is not both omniscient and incapable of error. Humans are neither, and so if He were neither, He too would be like us and would have no call for claiming a right to set any moral principles to guide us at all.
If God is unable to err, however, and we know from the Bible that He shapes us and ordains our purpose even when we are still in the womb (Galatians 1:15; Psalms 113:9; Psalms 22:10; Psalms 71:6; Psalms 139: 13), then we should also understand that it would be impossible for the claim made by those wishing to be a boy when born a girl to be true. The whole heart of their claim is that they should never have been born a girl because they should have been born a boy. In other words, there was a mistake.
Now, if we believed in random chance as an evolutionary concept or that God set things into motion and has no concern for our goings on now (or at least none with the gender of a baby because we believe that is left up to the laws of nature He set into motion), we could easily agree with this because when random chance is the name of the game, mistakes of such magnitude certainly could happen and should be expected to happen. It would be nothing to bat an eye at.
However, if we claim we believe the Bible and are therefore Christians, then we do not believe in random chance. We believe in a God who creates us and forms us in our mothers’ wombs and ordains our purposes from that point (a claim which He makes through the writers in both Old and New Testament), and we believe in a God who cannot make any mistakes. If that is so, then not only is it impossible that He could make such a mistake as to create a woman who should’ve been a man, but it is in fact blasphemous irrationality to claim such. If God could make such a mistake, He would no longer be God.
Non-Binary?
It is further important to address the issue of those who claim to be non-binary (of both genders or of no gender at all). Here is where we must return to the point I made in brief about Adam’s perspective of the matter of a companion. While God had many purposes for marriage and instituting it, Adam was not thinking of companionship or marriage when he saw the pairings of animals. He could not be thinking of the second, certainly, because it had not yet been instituted, and he walked with God, so he did not lack for companionship either.
He was looking at the animals and seeing that there were pairs of one male and one female. He recognized instinctually that he was male. He was not non-binary. He didn’t need someone to explain the gender “construct” to him in order to know he was supposed to be male. It was built into him that he could look at the differences physically between the two genders God had created and at himself and understand, even from observing animals, that he was a male and that he did not have a female counterpart like the rest of God’s creation did.
His desire for that was not driven by need for companionship either, as he had God to speak with and walk with and didn’t know anything different. It was driven by the understanding first of the command to multiply according to kind and second by the understanding that he did not have what he needed to fulfill that command like the rest of nature did. So, he recognized his gender instinctually, recognized the gender of the rest of creation—male or female—and knew he was missing a female of his kind.
Such a passage, along with the reaffirmation of male and female—a binary system of gender—all throughout Scripture within God’s definition of one of society’s most fundamental units—a marriage—makes it plain that in God’s defining of gender, there is no room for being something other than male or female, being both, or being no gender at all.
By virtue of the fact that God created humans and set that defining characteristic into place biologically, Christians cannot claim it is possible to be that which God has not allowed within His creation. If one is living and breathing, then one can only be either he or she, not both and not neither. It is an inescapable fact, no matter what those confused or reality-defying individuals within the LGBTQIA+ community may claim.
Christians may not waver from the order and definition of gender that God has instituted and imprinted onto the very subconscious minds of humankind. Only a conscious, intentional decision to try to defy reality leads to this claim, and Christians must recognize it as the lie that it is.
Speaking the Truth but with Love
So how do we respond to people within the community? What is the appropriate way to handle this as Christians? First of all, as I said, we do not affirm the immoral or reality-denying viewpoint. We must remain firm on the truth regardless of how much someone may hate us for it. Doing otherwise sacrifices both truth and reason, and then we have no basis at all upon which we can judge anything right or wrong. We never agree with that which is rebellion and sin against God.
However, it would also not be right for us to respond to those in this community with hatred, vitriol, and unkindness! They are as much sinners as we are. The only reason we are not under equal condemnation as Christians is because of the grace and mercy God has shown us, a grace and mercy He will willingly show them as well if they repent.
Whether we are dealing with the one who has embraced all manner of sexual immorality or with the one who believes an outright lie because their fallen nature has manifested in a way that has left them confused and their view of reality destroyed, we must not treat them unkindly or rudely.
We should embrace them with Christ’s love, but we have to remember that Christ’s was not a love that refused to call sin sin. He spoke to the woman who had committed adultery gently, but He still told her to go and sin no more. In cases such as those with the unrepentant Pharisees, He is quite sharp in His condemnations, calling them a brood of vipers and whitewashed sepulchers. So we are not called to dance around the fact that what they are doing and believing in is sinful and immoral.
However, at the same time, we should remember that we are called to behave in a manner that draws people to Christ, and angry, rude, irrational people do not do that! If we are to be successful in being a witness to these individuals as sinners, just as we are called to do with the rest of the world, our approach needs to be one that is firm on truth and reality but also gentle and kind.
Every situation will be a little different in what that means and how we deal with it, but if we offer nothing but condemnation, then we are not offering them the Bible; we are no better than the Pharisees looking down on the adulterous woman while they themselves had their own plethora of sins to address.
So as we use discernment in determining how best to balance telling the truth and loving the lost, we should remember that even as we are called to uphold truth, we are also called to reach the lost, which requires us to know what we believe and why in a way which we can explain rationally and without being combative, rude, or un-Christlike in our approach.
In some cases, there may be no way to uphold the truth and keep the peace; many will not allow it because if we will not applaud their agenda and their beliefs, we are the enemy. However, in many cases, if we will behave in a way that is above reproach as we uphold the truth, living peaceably with all men, as Paul discusses in Romans 12:18 is entirely possible. In so much as it depends on us, we ought to aim for interacting with those from this community in a manner that is peaceable and displays God’s character both in His holiness and in His love.
