With the onslaught of information about same-sex marriage in the news, not to mention pressure from those supporting it to get on board, here’s the fundamental questions we must ask ourselves when it comes to taking our stand.
1. How Did Jesus Deal With Sexual Sin?
We find one example in Jesus’ discourse with the prostitute in the book of John:
“But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
“At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
“But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
“At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’
“‘No one, sir,’ she said.
“‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin’” (John 8:1-11, NIV).
Jesus doesn’t minimize the prostitute’s sin; He challenges her to move beyond her sinful lifestyle now that a second chance is given to her. Jesus’ unconditional love didn’t give people a free pass to continue in their sin. He gave them an out for their sin.
2. In God We Trust?
We must as a nation acknowledge that our national motto, which is on every currency—“In God We Trust”—no longer represents the belief of the population or its leadership. Our beliefs are reflected in our elections, not our words. Our nation is living a lie. A nation cannot violate the values our Creator expressed in His instruction manual for living, the Bible, and expect God simply to turn His eye from evil. God said in His Word to beware of calling things that are evil good: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Is. 5:20).
God doesn’t change with the times, nor should the church or Christianity. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb. 13:8). His cultural bar does not move up or down with the moral condition of that culture.
The sad truth is that our nation has already become a secular nation. The values represented today among leadership, the media and the majority reveal that we are a nation headed the way of Europe, where God is no longer allowed in the public discourse of government. The idea that moral considerations should be part of the discussion is now taboo. As such, we can expect to see God remove His hand of protection if this trend continues. There is a remnant in the nation that still hold true to the absolutes of God’s Word, but this remnant is getting smaller in number.
3. How Does God Deal With the Sins of a Nation?
Israel’s sin was the worship of idols. God judged them by allowing their enemies to defeat them. Other times He allowed liberal and unholy leadership to rise in power. In other words, the spiritual condition of the greater majority led to them being given a leader who reflected their spiritual condition. The more ungodly the people became, the more they embraced leaders who reflected their values.
We can see this taking place today in America. We are the frog in the kettle in which the water is gradually getting hotter and hotter until it is too late.
The cultural idol of today is tolerance. Young people are reflecting more and more a belief system that is not based on any absolutes. Their god is the god of tolerance: “You do what you want as long as it doesn’t affect me.” We have made personal rights a national idol, regardless of the moral consequences. Israel made the same mistake regarding foreign idols.
Some liberals have gone so far as to state that being a Christian today is synonymous with being a bigot. Any opinion that reflects an absolute view that may not be the view of the public majority is often construed as being narrow-minded for a “progressive society.” This is especially true among the liberal media today.
4. Does a Nation Answer to God?
David Barton has written extensively on the Christian foundations of America and its accountability for its sins. He says:
“This was a question the American Founders dealt with on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. They concluded that a nation doesn’t have a spirit or a soul. Therefore when a nation dies, it is dead and won’t be resurrected later to answer for its failures, as a person will be who does have a spirit and soul. George Mason said, ‘As nations cannot be punished or rewarded in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects Providence punished national sins by national calamities.’ Providence was commonly used by the founders to refer to God.
“God’s judgment on a nation because of its ungodly leaders is evidenced many places in the Bible. A couple of them are:
“1. Because of the corruption of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, the nation went without rain for three years. The righteous had to suffer too even though they had no part in it.
“2. King David was normally a good King, but because of his disobedience to God when he numbered his army, a plague came upon the nation and wiped out 70,000 people. The Nation suffered because of the leader.”
This is now the dilemma our government faces. Will it remove any moral component to the argument? It is clear this is the direction our government has taken. Just the mention of tying morality to the argument causes an uproar in the liberal media.
It all becomes a slippery slope when you remove the moral dimension. We will end up like Canada, where it is unlawful to preach against homosexuality, which could lead to the removal of a church’s nonprofit status if a pastor teaches what the Bible says, making it a hate crime for discrimination against a group of people. Government and businesses would now have to offer the same benefits to homosexual couples as it does to heterosexual couples.
Day of Reckoning
When God spoke to Abraham in Genesis 15, He described His plan for Abraham and the nation of Israel. He told Abraham that He would bring him into the Promised Land after 400 years of slavery.
God used interesting terminology when describing one of the catalysts for this work to begin. He said “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Gen. 15:16), which would be the catalyst for the people of Israel to go into the Promised Land. The Amorites were a very ungodly people. God saw their sin as so great that He was going to use the Israelites to wipe them out. There is a place in nations where God begins to judge unrighteousness.
America is not immune to the judgment of God. We can expect God to judge the sins of our nation as our sins get greater and greater. Pray that God has mercy on our nation and that He will raise up a generation of righteous leaders and change agents who believe leadership must include morally based governance. God can shift the culture back to Himself in one day if His people get in alignment with Him and His ways. However, it always starts with us.
As Christ-followers, we are called to stand in the gap for the culture: “So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one” (Ezek. 22:30). Will we in the body of Christ be up for the task?
“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14).
Os Hillman is president of Marketplace Leaders and author of Change Agent and TGIF Today God Is First.
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