Homosexual "Marriage"

The Light Can Shine More Brightly

Homosexual "marriage" is now on the cusp of becoming lawful--an institution recognized in secular law as a genuine bona fide marriage.  This outcome is not surprising.  It has both positive and negative aspects to it.

On the positive side, this piece of political theatre serves clearly to reflect the spiritual state of our society.  Not that we needed any revision.  All faithful Christians know that New Zealand was never a Christian country to begin with and it has long since committed itself to erasing adumbrations of the historical Christian faith.  In the names of modernity, progress, evolution, and freedom the vast majority of our Parliamentarians have decided that the testimony of Scripture on the matter of homosexuality and marriage is simply wrong, if not offensive.  No surprises there.

But it may be helpful to Christians who yet cling to the hope they can reason together with Unbelievers on some kind of common ground in order to get agreement and respect.
  On such fundamental matters there will never be any agreement.  The more Christians try to use the arguments of Unbelief to progress their case, the more tactically inconsistent and ineffectual their position becomes.  The fundamental issue here, as in all such matters, is authority and the ground of one's infallibility.  Both sides rest on such fundamental ground.  Those advocating homosexual "marriage"  draw upon an implicit claim to infallibility lying within the creature.  The infallible creed is: "man is the master of all things; nothing human is foreign to me".  Since some human beings engage in homosexuality and make homosexuality their identity as human beings, it's condign to all humans.  It is, therefore, ethical, right, and good.  Read the speeches in Parliament, review the debate--it's all there.  Homosexual "marriage" advocates and approvers share a fundamentalist, infallible position: Man is autonomous, self-regulating, self-authenticating, self-defining.


Thus the public debate may be helpful to the Church in making her more epistemologically self-conscious.  At least that's the way it has always worked in God's Kingdom in the past.  In the end, what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?  The City of God and the City of Man are two different civilizations.  Being reminded of this is useful.

Secondly, it reminds us that to advance God's Kingdom on earth we must have recourse to our own and we must focus upon the duties and responsibilities God has laid upon us.  The Kingdom of God does not come through the ballot box, nor through the passing of laws.  As the Kingdom comes it will eventually control the ballot box and parliamentary chambers.  But these are effects of the Kingdom, not its cause.  The coming of the Kingdom is primarily God's work (hence the leading petition in the Lord's prayer, "Thy Kingdom come".  But the Kingdom also comes via the means God has appointed--the means of grace: worship, preaching, prayer.

Moreover, the core institutions of the Kingdom are self, family, and the church.  There are also important derived institutions which Christians must build and control.  Amongst these are Christian schools, Christian charities, and Christian hospitals.  Because the state and its organs are now so pagan and anti-Christian, these derived institutions are going to need be more and more financially independent and separate from the secular State.  This means, in turn, that Christians must learn afresh that wealth and prosperity is for the purpose of glorifying God and serving His people, not for indulgent self-gratification.

Further, the homosexual "marriage" institution gives the Church yet greater opportunity to differentiate from the culture of Unbelief.  Christians and Christian churches need to consider carefully their response.  Our strong preference would be for the Christian community to make this deform a teaching and witness bearing opportunity.  It gives another reason and opportunity to show that we, God's people, march to the beat of a very different Drummer.  It is God we serve, not mammon. 

We now live and operate in a society where Christian marriage has been occluded--swamped by a tsunami of  secular rationalism.  Unbelieving people live together, in serial monogamy with multiple successive spouses, engage in licentiousness and practical polygamy, live in homosexuality as a perversion of the created order--and, oh yes, some still practice monogamous perpetual marriage grounded upon vows of lifelong fidelity.  The State recognises them all.  Ultimately the modern State could not care a fig.  If it's human, its not foreign.  If it feels good, if it works for you, go to it. 

Christians and churches need to reaffirm amongst themselves, and before the watching world, what marriage actually is and the divine institution that it is.  When folk increasingly come into the Kingdom out of these kinds of relationships and existences, having experienced the train wreck of conversion, the Christian community will need to help in putting lives back together.  It will require exemplary patience, love, care, and faithfulness.  For example, if a woman has had multiple serial sexual partners, and subsequently is converted, to whom is she married?  Which of these relationships ought the church to recognise and why?  At this juncture we must disregard the institutions and laws of the secular world.  The church must be faithful to her Head and lawgiver.

Or consider a man who has had multiple sexual partners and children by them all.  He becomes wonderfully converted and is added to the church.  To whom is he married in God's sight?  Is he married to one of them and are the others in a relationship of concubinage?  Is he responsible for the care and maintenance of them all?  If yes, on what terms and conditions?  If he is unable to support them all financially, does the church and wider Christian community have a responsibility to assist and help.  If he is married to one of them in God's sight then a proper Christian marriage covenant needs to be enacted within the Church.  The recognition of the State in such things will be increasingly meaningless.  The recognition and sanction of the Church will become more and more vital and important. 

These are some of the challenges ahead of us.  For our part we relish them.  As we live together in these ways, serving Christ in an ordered manner amidst a world falling apart, the Christian community and the church will increasingly be seen as a place of refuge.  That is as it should be.  The homosexual "marriage" law leads us one step further into realising our emerging duties and responsibilities in this regard.  In that sense, if we were to humble ourselves, and pray and seek God, it will prove a great blessing in disguise. 

The more the kingdom of paganism advances, the more the light of God shines on the hill.  The greater the darkness, the more the light shines.  It only remains for us not to place that light under a bushel of compromise and seeking common cause with our increasingly anti-Christian, pagan culture.