Marriage or Mirage?

I am not opposed to gay marriage.

I know that must be a stunning statement for many, coming from me, but it's true.

Recently I heard of a generally reliable Christian source publishing an opinion on what to do if a gay person is married to another gay person and he or she becomes a Christian. They should not divorce because God hates divorce. Right? How do we get here? How do we arrive at such an answer, even from a generally reliable source? The answer to that is also the answer for the question people asked me back in 2008 when the courts in California were consciously redefining "marriage."

You can see the problem, I'm sure. Scripture speaks about a spouse married to an unbeliever (1 Cor 7:12-16). "Stay with them," Paul exhorts. And when Jesus was asked on what grounds divorce was suitable, He answered, "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate" (Matt 19:6). This isn't rocket science. It's pretty clear. So the gay guy that comes to Christ should remain married to his gay partner ... right? It's biblical.

What we've done here is taken a term -- in this case "marriage" -- stripped off its original meaning (Matt 19:4-6), invested it with a completely new meaning, and then fed it back into Scripture. Now it's a scriptural issue. Because we don't know what "marriage" means anymore.

Here's the right answer to the question about a person who comes to Christ while they're in that gay mirage. (Perhaps my intentional spelling gives you a hint.) Gay marriage is not a thing. People tell me that you can't find a definition of marriage in the Bible, but no one can deny that no one in biblical times who said or wrote anything regarding marriage had any sense of the union of two people of the same gender. Never. Not once. Our current society may include that concept in their term, "marriage," but neither Jesus nor Paul nor any other writer of the new or old testaments had that concept in mind. So if we are going to properly understand what they intended, it's not fair to redefine their term to something new and then feed back to them what they never meant to say.

How, then, am I not opposed to gay marriage? On the same basis that I'm not opposed to unicorns, pixies, or zombies. They do not exist. "Marriage" is a word symbol intended to convey what the Creator meant when He expressed "A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Gen 2:24; Matt 19:4-6; Eph 5:31). It has a form and a purpose that "same-sex" doesn't fit into. So if someone who identifies as homosexual in some sense opts to leave his family and hold fast to his wife or leave her family and hold fast to her husband, that's a good thing to me and I'm in favor of it. (I'm sorry; this "non-binary gender" stuff is equally incomprehensible in a scriptural perspective. "Husband" is male and "wife" is female by definition.) Oh, and what was the question they asked me in 2008? "What difference does it make to you if they redefine marriage?" Precisely this. They've managed to twist the thinking of a generation -- even Christians -- and in so doing they've managed to twist God's Word and the whole idea of what marriage really is. And that is going to cost us (Eph 5:31-32).