On June 26, 2015, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court of the United States redefined marriage.  We are living amidst the shockwaves of that decision, even in 2020. The impact is evident in public education curriculum, corporate kowtowing, frivolous lawsuits, media censorship and, perhaps most disturbingly, amidst evangelical Christianity, caving to the cultural whims of the moment.  All the while, our brothers and sisters in Christ in the developing world look on, aghast, with mouths open and heads spinning.

Kevin DeYoung writes in The Good News We Almost Forgot,

“We know from Romans 1; Leviticus 18 and 20; 1 Timothy 1; the book of Jude-and the passage from 1 Corinthians 6—that same-sex intercourse is a perversion of the created order and offensive to God. And yet, many churches and denominations (to say nothing of state courthouses) are wrestling with the legitimacy of homosexual behavior…How can Christians talk about sexual immorality in a way that is both true and gracious? First, we need courage. We need courage to say that unchecked, unrepentant sexual immorality cannot be tolerated in the church. We need courage in our churches and denominations to affirm clearly, not just on paper, but in our preaching and actions, that unchecked, unrepentant sexual immorality is to be lovingly rebuked, not celebrated. Young people especially need courage to stick out like sore thumbs in their schools and teams and winsomely defend the belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman for a lifetime.”

Conservative Christians, holding to orthodox beliefs, rightly want to defend marriage for a variety of reasons, among them:

-Emotionally – the nurturing of future generations
-Physically – the continuity of our species through reproduction
-Societally – the stability for civilization.

 

 

As John MacArthur notes, “the family is the divinely created institution for the formation of restrained sinners who by generations of morality, discipline, love, virtue, and obedience, become a benefit to society, enjoy God’s gifts, and are grateful.”

While all of the above are valid motivations for defending the biblical definition of marriage, we must not forget the overarching theological rationale:

Marriage, between a man and a woman, is one of the primary means by which the Creator of the universe has chosen to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The story of God’s love is a story about marriage, and His inspired, all-sufficient, inerrant Word begins and ends with a wedding:

“In Genesis, we see Adam and Eve established as husband and wife. Then in the history of Israel, we hear God describe his relationship with the nation of Israel as a marriage covenant. The same terms are used for Christ and the church: Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church. Heaven itself is described as a wedding feast. Before we even get to our systematic application, here is a major point of contemporary significance. Marriage, a picture of love between one man and one woman, is at the heart of the biblical story of God’s love. Therefore, marriage matters for a whole host of reasons. It matters because God created it, not society, and therefore God and God alone defines it. It matters because it’s a picture of God’s gospel love, hard-wired into creation. Change or redefine marriage, and you’ve gone a long way toward defacing and obscuring one of the most significant common-grace pointers to the love of God in Christ.”
(Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church, Michael Lawrence)

Our world today is filled with highly charged individuals mobilized for their particular cause, many of whom cannot adequately articulate the beliefs motivating their behavior.

As Christ followers, we can and should do better. We have God’s unchanging standard for marriage, as provided in Scripture.

Our Genesis Family Ministry reflects our conviction that God ordained the family as the basic building block of human society.

Alternatively, Satan hates the family. His initial attack on God’s supreme creation in Genesis 3 corrupted the family, but it also initiated a chain reaction of the following sins below, each of which is an assault on the sanctity and harmony of marriage and the family.

The book of Genesis catalogs:

• Fratricide (4:8)
  “Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.”
• Polygamy (4:19, 23)
  “And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah…”
• Evil sexual thoughts and words (9:22)
  “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside.”
• Adultery (16:1–4)
  “So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife.” 
• Homosexuality (19:4–11)
  “And they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.’”
• Fornication and Rape (34:1–2)
  “Now Dinah the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob, went out to see the women of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land, saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her.”
• Incest (38:13–18)
  “When Judah saw [Tamar], he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. He turned to her at the roadside and said, ‘Come, let me come in to you,’ for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law.”
• Prostitution (38:24)
  “[Tamar] said, ‘What will you give me, that you may come in to me?’ He answered, ‘I will send you a young goat from the flock.’ And she said, ‘If you give me a pledge, until you send it.’ He said, ‘What pledge shall I give you?’ She replied, ‘Your signet and your cord and your staff that is in your hand.’ So he gave them to her and went in to her, and she conceived by him.”
• Seduction (39:7–12)
  “Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, ‘Lie with me.’”

Your financial support of the Genesis Family Life Program combats Satan and honors the Lord, by nurturing His divinely ordained institution of marriage and family.

I’m an unapologetic child of the 80’s. Somewhere in my parent’s home is a HYPERCOLOR sweatshirt to prove it.

Search “High School Stereotypes of the 1980s,” and you come up with terms like:

-Preppies
-Jocks
-Valley Girls
-Skaters
-Headbangers
-Goths
-New Wavers
-Overachievers

…the list goes on.

And if you’re like me, you recall, from your teen years, individuals who changed to fit into a particular group. They wanted so badly to be accepted that they were willing to endure wholesale change of their identity to achieve it.

That is what is sadly occurring within the evangelic church today: churches so desperately in need of feeling embraced by secular society that they are rushing to be seen as the most tolerant, loving, open-minded and sympathetic.

But as John MacArthur notes below, chasing cultural acceptance is neither the Church’s mandates, nor ultimately feasible.

If there is any doubt about this, it is worth asking why popular evangelicalism’s greatest fear is being out of sync with the culture. Pastors and leaders are chasing the culture, so that its trends show up in their churches. They treat this pursuit as a necessary evangelistic strategy. But the only way to be in sync with the culture is to diminish the presence of the Word of God, because unregenerate culture will always be fundamentally and irreconcilably incompatible with the truth of God. By catering to the unchurched or to the unconverted in the church, evangelicalism has been hijacked by legions of carnal spin doctors seeking to convince the world that Christians can be just as inclusive, pluralistic, and open-minded as any postmodern, politically correct worldling. 

However, true biblical Christianity requires a denial of every worldly value and behavior, and Christians must be willing to make a commitment to the Word of God, with a full understanding of the implications of doing so. Jesus plainly tells the disciples in John 15: 19 that the world will hate them because they are not of this world. God has chosen believers out of the world, and the world hates them. In Luke 6: 26, Jesus says, “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.” 

Why is the world so fixed in its animosity toward the truth of God? Jesus says in John 7: 7, “The world . . . hates Me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil.” Contempt for Scripture is not intellectual; it’s moral. As the Lord explained to Nicodemus, “Men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil” (John 3: 19). How tragic for the church to seek to accommodate that worldly affection, since it is impossible by any human method to overcome the sinner’s resistance to the truth and the gospel (2 Cor. 3: 14). The only time the church has made any spiritual impact on the world is when the people of God have stood firm and have refused to compromise, boldly proclaiming the truth in the face of the world’s hostility. In the end, seeking cultural relevance will only result in obsolescence, since tomorrow’s generation will inevitably renounce today’s fads and philosophies.

 In the face of ever-changing cultural trends, the church needs to boldly proclaim the eternal relevance and evergreen applicability of the Word of God. In particular, Christians must embrace and exalt six truths about the Scripture: its objectivity, rationality, veracity, authority, incompatibility, and integrity.