“Same Sex Marriage”

The issue of “same-sex marriage” is one of the most emotionally charged and divisive issues facing our country and the Christian church. Too often the Christian church in America has been unloving in its words to the homosexual community. Moreover, heterosexual Christians have often been hypocritical, proclaiming the sanctity of marriage to homosexuals yet simultaneously divorcing their spouses at the same rate as non-believers. For these sins, we in the church must repent and cry out to the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, we must also affirm that it is not for any person – Christian, non-Christian, straight person, homosexual or any government official – to define what marriage is and who may marry. Since marriage is from God, He alone defines it.

The primary argument made in favor of “homosexual marriage” is that someone should be allowed to marry whomever they say they love. This view actually makes sense if marriage is about us and what we want. But while marriage is for us, it is not primarily about us or what we want. God created marriage for His purposes and throughout Scripture, He imposes boundaries on sex and marriage that run counter to the will of the prevailing culture, be it the Roman Empire of the 1st century or the U.S. in the 21st century¹. Because God is the sovereign creator of marriage, it would be the ultimate act of pride for us to redefine what He made². Therefore, we live in glad submission to what Jesus Christ himself taught about marriage: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”³ Clearly, this means that marriage is between a man and a woman in a lifelong, covenantal relationship.

As we engage with the homosexual community on the issue of marriage and other issues, we pray that our Lord will grace us with a spirit of humility as ambassadors of the Gospel through whom God is making His appeal to reconcile a broken world unto himself.

Footnotes: ¹ Matthew 19:7-9, 1 Corinthians 6:18; ² Isaiah 55:8; ³ Matthew 19:4-6

For further study, see our Position Paper on Marriage.