For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth…..
2nd Timothy 4:3-4

NEWSWEEK magazine should change their name. Their recent article, Our Mutual Joy, is not news. It is a repeat of old contortions in Bible ‘interpretation’ that are contrived to condone the practice of homosexuality. But not, however, merely to levels of justification that have been attempted before. Now the demand is for the justification of homosexual marriage, and those making this demand are once again appealing to a twisted view of the word of God in order to pressure the rest of us into consent.

What we call ‘nature’ alone tells us that there is something wrong with a man getting sexually excited over another man and lusting to do with him what God designed only to be done between a man and a woman. If this is not perversion, is anything? Where will the line be drawn? Or is there even a line at all?

It is bad enough that nature itself is being denied a hearing; but now we are treated to an out and out contradiction of everything God teaches us about the practice.

Jesus set the record straight on marriage in Matthew 19:4-6 and wanted to know if those listening to Him had not previously heard what He was telling them?

Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED 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 no man separate.

Really, have those now wresting the very word of God not grasped in this text how Jesus went back to the beginning, setting the record straight not only on the divorce question, but also on God’s design for, and definition of, marriage? For anyone to use the rest of holy scripture to navigate others away from this truth is dangerously erroneous. Jesus was openly condemning the Pharisees for their refusal to accept God’s original intention for marriage. His explicit definition as written here is what He has given us to learn and follow.

Just as we do not have the right to ‘separate what God has joined together’, we do not have the right to redefine, and so separate or tear apart what Jesus defines for us as marriage.

Marty Kessler