““God sends homosexuals to hell.” This is an explosive statement because, like a gun in a war, it is loaded . To make both guns and questions safer to handle, we have to unload them. Unloading a gun is simple: we take out the bullets. Unloading a statement is more difficult: its ammunition is an idea, encased in words and propelled by assumptions.

As for this particular statement (“God sends homosexuals to Hell”), it is loaded with one assumption and one half-truth, and it is poorly aimed. The assumption is that homosexuality is a sin. The half-truth is that God sends people to Hell. Thirdly, the statement is aimed at a scapegoat target — people who are homosexual go to Hell — rather than focussing on the real issue. We’ll examine these one by one.

I. The grand assumption beneath the statement is “Homosexuality is a sin.” The reasoning runs like this: “Homosexuality is a sin; people who sin go to Hell; therefore people guilty of homosexuality go to Hell.” Some people reject this belief, saying that the Greek word arsenokoitēs refers solely to homosexual rape or pederasty, not to consensual homosexual intercourse . This is false: arsenokoitēs can mean pederasty — certainly paedophilia is condemned — but it doesn’t mean only that, nor does it have to mean that. The precise nuance of a word depends on its contexts, so these should help us tell whether arsenokoitēs carries the more restricted meaning or whether consensual homosexuality is included in the prohibition. There are only two passages in the New Testament that use the word arsenokoitēs, and nothing in them indicates that only rape or pederasty is forbidden while consensual sex is permitted.

The issue is further clarified in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where we find this assertion:

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

It is difficult to show that homosexuality in these verses means rape and paedophilia but not consensual copulation. Verse 27 says “with other men”, not “with boys”. To turn from heterosexual to homosexual (as these verses say people did) does not imply that one turns also from adults to children, or from consent-only sex to rape. However, it is obvious that if same-gender sex between consenting adults is forbidden, then the other acts are also. They are reprehensible no matter what our sexual orientation is.

It may also be argued that homosexuality isn’t a sin because it’s a desire or inclination that people are born with. This is specious: our desires seem natural to us, but that doesn’t mean they are good for us. We may be greedy or lazy or self-centred or sarcastic without even realising: we act naturally, but these responses are wrong nonetheless. Whoa, you might say, these examples are about how we relate to people; that depends on our personality, which is independent of sexual desire. So (you continue) a person might be homosexual or heterosexual, irrespective of their personality.

Not quite. Our desire for relationship is innate, but how we relate to others is almost entirely learned, mainly from how we have seen our family relating to one another. Similarly, the existence of our sexual desire is inborn, but its focus (who we view as a potential partner) is learned, at least in part. Having said this, it matters less whether homosexual desire is innate or learned or both: what matters more is what God says about it. The Bible is clear about homosexuality: it is wrong.

II. The second type of ammunition is the half-truth that “God sends people to Hell”. The true part is that Hell is punishment from God. If we go to Hell, it is because we have rejected God’s word, and usurped His authority: we have claimed His right to say what is good and bad. But if this act of lese-majesty is not bad enough, we are guilty of something worse. Romans 5:6-8 says:

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

In the person of Jesus, God died to save people who hated Him! If, after all this, we deny God His right to rule, we are guilty of disrespect and ingratitude of abominable proportions. After God has sacrificed Himself in our stead, can we doubt that deserve Hell if we continue our rebellion? His judgement is nothing if not just: it is His proclamation that we deserve our separation from Him. In the person of Jesus, God will judge us and deliver us to our final destination.

That is one part of the truth; here is the other. Hell is a destination we choose for ourselves. God knows and wants what is best for us; He doesn’t want us to reject Him.

For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live!

For he [God] is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

God wants us to love Him. However, love is given; it cannot be earned and it cannot be coerced; even God cannot make people love Him. He pursues us, offering us the life that Adam and Eve forfeited. But if we continue to turn away from Him, He will eventually acquiesce: Very well, O Man, your will be done. Chapter one of Paul’s letter to the Romans speaks of God allowing our rebellion to run its course.

Furthermore, since they [people who rebel against God] did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Part of our punishment for rebelling against God is that He allows us to do so. He may not stop us, but will convict us and prick our consciences. If we continue to insist on doing what we want, He will eventually withdraw from us and allow us to go our own way until we end up with our desire to live in a God-free zone. That is Hell.

If we go to Hell, it isn’t because our bad acts outweigh our good ones; it isn’t because we’ve committed any of the “big” sins, and it isn’t because we’re homosexual. If we go to Hell, it is because we shut God out of our lives. This is what the Bible calls unbelief: it is our rejection of God’s self-expression, through the Bible and through Jesus. If we understand the Gospel — that God became human, and died to save us, we who deserve Hell — it is irrational to continue our rebellion. So why would we? The reason is our nature.

III. Many people, even some Christians, think that we are born good or at least morally neutral. But in his letter to the Christians at Ephesus, Paul wrote:

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.

“… dead in … transgressions and sins”; “by nature objects of wrath”. Does this describe moral neutrality? Yet this is the nature we inherit from our parents: Adam and Eve rejected God and were cut off from Him; as like reproduces like, all their offspring are born in the same state — dead to God.

… sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.

Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.

What does it mean to be dead to God? It doesn’t mean we don’t believe in God, nor that we don’t try to please Him, which is what most religions are about. Have you heard the phrase “dead to the world”? It means to be asleep. When we’re asleep, we don’t respond to what’s happening around us . When we’re dead to God, we don’t respond to Him as we should. This is how we are born, and if we insist that God leave us alone, this is how we stay.

Think of this death-and-sin situation like an illness. When we are sick, we have symptoms: a blocked nose, abdominal pain, headaches, tiredness, and so on. We get rid of the symptoms by curing the illness, the source of the problem. The foundational illness of humanity is that we’re dead to God: we don’t respond to Him in trust and dependence. Our symptoms are the bad things we do: our sins. The difference between most illnesses and being dead to God is that for the latter, most symptoms are different for each person. Some people are tight-fisted, others are sadistic, others are arrogant, envious, apathetic, callous, selfish, ungrateful, proud, disobedient … and dare we think that God considers inciting hatred to be a sin?

And meeting God’s standard is more difficult than just not doing bad things; there are also the good acts we don’t do. And more than that, if we have failed to love God with everything we have and everything we are all of time, we are condemned. Whatever form our rebellious nature takes, we rebel because we are born dead to God. So like every other sin, homosexuality is a result of our separation from God, rather than a cause of it.

If homosexuality is one sin among many others, and if all sins are worthy of condemnation, why do people single out homosexuality for a beating? Maybe it’s because we all sin in some way almost all the time. (See the list in the previous paragraph.) To make our sins easier to overlook, to bolster our self-righteousness, we seek out a scapegoat: a sin that we don’t commit, that’s more … spectacular. Sins like greed and pride and envy are humdrum compared to sexual sins. Our sexuality is a powerful part of our nature: it can be a source of intense pleasure or grief, and it involves other people in a more obvious and intimate way than other sins do.

We rationalise our comparison between our sins and homosexuality (or murder, paedophilia, or any other “big” sin) like this. Okay, we tell ourselves, some of the things we do aren’t nice, but evil? Sinful? No. If they are, that means we’re sinners. But everyone does stuff like that: it’s normal. And if we are like this, it’s how God made us. (This was what Adam did in the Garden: he blamed everyone else for his sin.) Sure we’re not perfect, but at least we’re not gay!

So we may try to justify ourselves: and we sin in doing so! Nonetheless, the Bible does condemn homosexuality, just as it condemns every sin. No-one is guiltless. If people guilty of homosexuality will go to Hell, any person who is guilty of any sin will be there with them. James wrote:

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.

If we condemn people for homosexuality, remember to also condemn members of the human race who are greedy, selfish, unmerciful, or arrogant; who gossip, talk behind others’ backs, lie, are disobedient to their parents, and so on, as well as those who fail to be 100% devoted to God all the time.

IV. What have we seen so far? Homosexuality is a sin. All people sin because we are dead to God. However, homosexuality has been seen as a worse sin than others, because sexuality is a strong part of human nature, and how we deal with our sexuality can have a powerful effect on other people as well as on us. We might also use homosexuality to blinker us to the everyday, mundane sins that we all commit, so we can feel better about ourselves. This self-righteousness is natural for us, but it’s still wrong. It is born from our pride. Wherever homosexuality stands in your list of sins, pride should be on the winner’s podium. If there is any one sin that will get us to Hell, it is pride.

Pride is deadly because it fuels a belief that, more than any other, is natural to us. This belief is that we can be good enough to meet God’s standards. Pride is the target of this parable of Jesus:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men–robbers, evildoers, adulterers–or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

What is your first response to this parable? A prayer: “God, thank you that I’m not like that Pharisee”?! Physically, humans are 70% water; morally, we are 100% pride. Pride is the chief symptom that marks our unresponsiveness to God; it is the antithesis of humility. Pride says: “I know what’s right; I say what’s right; it’s my choice!” Humility says: “I could be wrong, but God is always right. It’s His way, not mine.”

The proud person won’t admit that they’re wrong and God is right. If I had to choose between being homosexual and humble or straight and proud, I would rather the first. Being humble, we can admit that we are dead to God and need His mercy. And this is the only way we can be brought to life. God rescues those who take Him at His word — no matter who we are or what we have done.

References
W. Günther, C. Brown. “gameö”. NIDNTT.
C. Brown. “arsën”. NIDNTT.
H. Reisser. “porneuö”. NIDNTT.

copyright Troy Grisgonelle 2007.

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