Asking All the Wrong Questions about Homosexuality

The wrong question “Who made me homosexual: God or me?” is a sincere question and we want answers!   It is often asked because IF God made a person homosexual and IF God doesn’t make mistakes THEN homosexuality is fine with God.

IF…THEN.  Accept the IF, you must accept the THEN.

IF, for the person experiencing homosexual inclinations, the answer is the person in the mirror and not God, THEN the new questions arise.  Ought it be overcome (for those with internal conflict and confusion)? Should it be argued as not problematic at all?  After all, they simply cannot help it.  It’s how they are and always will be.

The questions are personal and the answers are painful.  But in the midst of pain, the Gospel ministers a response in the form of Truth and Love.

As a woman in ministry, I face a similar conflict because being female and called to ministry is not “traditional.”  I understand.  That’s why I say that the right question is, “What will be my response?”

Let me offer an analogy I’ve grown fond of using.

I am older than the tone and tenor of my writing sometimes suggests.  I’m in my 50s and my hair—once brown like chocolate—gradually has grayed.  I don’t like that so I color my hair.  (Vanity, I’m still working on that one.)

Is my hair gray because God made me with gray hair, or is it because I made myself have gray hair?

While it’s possible to say that children give us gray hair, it’s not true even if it is humorous.  The question above is a wrong question.

When God created me, my DNA says that my hair is brown.  I didn’t do anything to make my hair gray.  My hair does that all by itself and if I didn’t color my hair, who knows how much gray I’d have.  Maybe I’d look like a midsummer dandelion.  Ugh.

The truth is my body resides in a broken world.  The cells responsible for producing pigment don’t work like they did when I was born.  So instead of the brown hair I was given at birth, my hair (lacking pigment) grays.  I am going gray because of our broken world.  Sin.  The Fall of Man.  Call it what you want, but our bodies don’t always work like they were designed to work.  We experience this in all kinds of ways.

So the right question is “What will be my response?”  My response, “color my hair,” is thankfully not a sin.

This same thought applied to my daughter Julia’s stillbirth.  We live in a broken world and sometimes babies die.  It’s not appropriate to blame myself or the doctor or the hospital.  But, what about God?

God is a life-giver.  We see this in the Bible as proven by our history, God’s revealed nature, and His holy character. 

So how have death and pain entered the picture? 

They are a direct consequence of The Fall of Man. 

Therefore, my response to my personal tragedy has been:

 Allow the Gospel to REDEEM it.

So let’s bring this all to bear upon the topic of homosexuality.  Our sex drive (procreative instinct) was given to us at Creation.  We are wired to reproduce in accordance with the blessing:

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it…”

When sin entered the world through the first man Adam and the first woman Eve, every blessing remained in place.  But every blessing would exist within an environment of brokenness just as the image of God present in humanity at creation was not lost completely, just broken.

Now there is pain inserted in every aspect of life.  Pain is the tip of an iceberg called death.  It’s what God said in stating the consequence of sin, “for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17).

Dust to dust is our reality.  It’s a consequence, but it was not God’s original intent.

So now there’s pain inserted in relationship:

1. in childbearing (infertility, stillbirth, deformity, illegitimacy…).
2. in our procreative instincts (lust, pornography, rape, adultery, homosexuality…)
3. in authority (wars, abuse, coveting power, control and position, the Holocaust…)
4. in community life (murder, divorce, theft, assault, abortion, torture…)

All these happen in a broken world yet NONE were God’s idea at Creation.  Not even one!

But here’s the Good News: the Gospel can minister in each of these hard places.  Good Theology Answers Hard Issues, reflecting both Truth and Love.

Would you like to see how Truth and Love can address the issue of homosexuality?  Join me on the next page.

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