Man, Woman, and Marriage

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One either believes the Bible to be God’s revelation of Himself to men, or one does not. God does not (and no man can) force anyone to accept the Bible as such. One, however, ought not to profess such belief if one is unwilling to accept what it says without seeking to alter it. Popularity, agreement with my notions, convenience, political correctness, nor any other factors affect or determine the meaning of its words to the genuine believer.

Whether or not one believes the Bible to be God’s Word, he should be honest enough to let the Bible say what it says. One forfeits any claim of integrity when he knowingly twists Biblical statements (2 Pet. 3:16) so as to make them appear to teach other than what they teach (often making the Bible thereby contradict itself). This statement applies equally to professed believers and to infidels. Countless times each day presumptuous men seek to make the Bible say what they want it to say/teach (rather than what it obviously says/teaches) in an effort to justify a position, creed, bias, or agenda.

While the foregoing premises are true of every issue upon which the Bible touches (whether in religion or morals), a case in point is marriage and those for (and between) whom God ordained it. Morally upright people find consideration of certain subjects disgusting, but the generally corrupted “culture” of modern society leaves us no choice but to discuss and cry aloud against them. While being candid, I shall strive to be tasteful in the following comments:

• The first two human beings God created were a male and a female—a man and a woman (not two men or two women) (Gen. 1:27; 2:20–23).
• God created Eve from Adam’s rib to be a “help meet [i.e., suitable]” for him (another male would have been altogether “unsuitable” [Gen. 2:18]).
• God “performed” the first “marriage ceremony” between a man and a woman (Adam and Eve), whom He charged to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). Eve’s suitability for Adam thus involved their mutual sexual compatibility. Anyone with the least knowledge of human anatomy knows that such compatibility is present only in the anatomical differences between males and females (as with lower animal forms as well).
• The sexual union of Adam and Eve enabled them to obey God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply”: “And the man knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain…” (Gen. 4:1). No aberrant, warped, abnormal “union” of two males ever produced or will ever produce a child; a “union” between two females is not even possible.
• While God does not approve of every marriage or sexual relationship between a man and a woman (Mat. 5:32; 19:9; Rom. 7:1–4; Heb. 13:4; et al.), He explicitly forbids and condemns all sexual relationships that are not between a man and a woman. He does so consistently in Old and New Testaments alike (Gen. 18:20–19:24; Lev. 18:22; Mat. 19:9; Rom. 1:24–27; 1 Cor. 6:9; 1 Tim. 1:10; Jude 7; et al.). Jesus wholly endorsed the male-female and he-she statements from Genesis 1 and 2 (Mat. 19:4–6), as did Paul (Eph. 5:31).

Until very recently, no one ever conceived of marriage in any other terms than male-female unions—and rightly so. Same-sex marriage and homosexual marriage are absurd (to say nothing of perverse) oxymorons uttered by morons concerning morality. To dignify these abominable behaviors and relationships as “marriages” only compounds the innate evils they involve.

Applying marriage to such unions does nothing to elevate them. Rather, it only serves to trivialize immeasurably the word and the institution. This brazen distortion may so pollute the beautiful and wholesome Biblical concepts of marriage, home, and family that those God-ordained institutions may never again be the societal norm. The Creator of “nature” says that homosexual “unions” are beyond unnatural—they are “against nature” (Rom. 1:26–27, emph. DM). Some do not like the fact that the Bible so teaches, but only grossly ignorant and/or dishonest persons will deny that it does so teach.

[Note: I wrote this article for and it was published in The Lighthouse, weekly bulletin of Northpoint Church of Christ, Denton, TX, May 12, 2013, of which I was editor.]

Attribution: From TheScripturecache.com, owned and administered by Dub McClish.