Homosexual "Marriage" Is an Oxymoron

There Is No Such Thing as "Gay Marriage"


Lindsay Elizabeth
Author

In a recent podcast, a well-known theologian and reform-baptist John Piper answered a question regarding the biblical stance on homosexuality.  “Should a gay couple, once converted, stay married?” Cameron asked.  “No, I would not recommend that two men or two women living together, practicing homosexuality, remain in that relationship,” Piper began. “The reasons are several.”

Piper explained that while heterosexual couples can enter into a marriage in a way that goes against the Bible, they can make decisions to change that. When it comes to homosexual couples, they can’t change anything about their relationship to move it in a Biblical direction because at the basis, it is wrong.

“I conclude that while it was an adulterous act to marry under the conditions that Jesus disapproves of in Luke 16, nevertheless, it’s called a marriage,” he explained.

May We Be Spared . . .

The Aching Void

How My Parents’ Divorce Ruined Our Holidays And Family Life Forever

In the decades since my parents’ divorce and through the years of my marriage, I have learned no-fault divorce is one of the biggest lies of our culture.

December always reminds me how much I hate divorce. As the lights on the Christmas tree twinkle while we wrap presents, I am anxious about family gatherings and travel plans. Three decades ago, when my parents divorced, family Christmas gatherings became very complicated.

My parents’ divorce is the one that their generation was told to have. Like many others married in the 1970s, their marriage ended with a no-fault divorce. One of them wasn’t happy and felt the only way to solve that was not to be married anymore. In the name of fulfillment and contentment, our family broke apart.

Fast-forward 30 years, and you’ll find the children all thriving in adulthood and two parents who rebounded and eventually remarried. On the surface, it seems like we all lived happily ever after.  The media loves to feed these sort of lies to their audiences. For example, The New York Times runs terrible pro-divorce articles regularly; here’s a particularly disturbing one.

Pro-Divorce Arguments Are Built On Lies

The writers at The Times of London currently have a campaign trying to reform England’s divorce laws. They believe divorce should be easier to get than current legislation that requires “a married couple wishing to split up [to] show evidence of irretrievable breakdown in the form of adultery, unreasonable behaviour, desertion, two years’ separation with consent or five years’ separation without consent.”

They propose instead: “Divorce, wherever possible, should simply be an acknowledgment that people have moved on. A marriage that lasts only ten years can still be deemed a success. It should be assumed that divorces are no one’s fault and that people need a simple, dignified, relatively fast way to split up, while also acknowledging that a partner who has sacrificed their career to look after children will need help to set up again.”

Pardon me while I roll my eyes. As our culture tries to negate the beautiful union of covenantal marriage, we look the other way from the hurts and hardships divorce creates.

In the decades since my parents’ divorce and through the years of my marriage, I have learned that no-fault divorce is one of the biggest lies our culture tries to get people to believe.

Fundamentals of Christian Living

Don’t Take It from Me

Reasons You Should Not Marry an Unbeliever

Kathy Keller
The Gospel Coalition


Over the course of our ministry, the most common pastoral issue that Tim and I have confronted is probably marriages—either actual or proposed—between Christians and non-Christians. I have often thought how much simpler it would be if I could remove myself from the conversation and invite those already married to unbelievers do the talking to singles who are desperately trying to find a loophole that would allow them to marry someone who does not share their faith. That way, I could skip all the Bible passages that urge singles only to “marry in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39) and not “be unequally yoked” (2 Corinthians 6:14) and the Old Testament proscriptions against marrying the foreigner, a worshiper of a god other than the God of Israel (see Numbers 12 where Moses marries a woman of another race but the same faith).

You can find those passages in abundance, but when someone has already allowed his or her heart to become engaged with a person outside the faith, I find that the Bible has already been devalued as the non-negotiable rule of faith and practice. Instead, variants of the serpent's question to Eve—“Did God really say?” are floated, as if somehow this case might be eligible for an exemption, considering how much they love each other, how the unbeliever supports and understands the Christian's faith, how they are soul-mates despite the absence of a shared soul-faith. Having grown weary and impatient, I want to snap and say, “It won't work, not in the long run. Marriage is hard enough when you have two believers who are completely in harmony spiritually. Just spare yourself the heartache and get over it.” Yet such harshness is neither in line with the gentleness of Christ, nor convincing.

SADDER AND WISER

If only I could pair those sadder and wiser women—and men—who have found themselves in unequal marriages (either by their own foolishness or due to one person finding Christ after the marriage had already occurred) with the blithely optimistic singles who are convinced that their passion and commitment will overcome all obstacles. Even the obstacle of bald disobedience need not apply to them. Only ten minutes of conversation—one minute if the person is really succinct—would be necessary. In the words of one woman who was married to a perfectly nice man who did not share her faith: “If you think you are lonely before you get married, it's nothing compared to how lonely you can be AFTER you are married!”

Daily Meditation

Love and Marriage, Horse and Carriage

C.S. Lewis

If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married’, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?

But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.

They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Daily Meditation

Marriage

C. S. Lewis

The idea that ‘being in love’ is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made. The curious thing is that lovers themselves, while they remain really in love, know this better than those who talk about love. As Chesterton pointed out, those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy. The Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to that passion’s own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do.

And, of course, the promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel hungry.

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Christian, Not Pagan

Marriages and Families are Not Created Equal

In the West we live in a society still influenced to some extent by vestigial Christianity.  It is easy for the lazy mind to assume that Christian institutions, such as marriage, are the norm for all humanity, all cultures, all times.  In other words, many naively assume that one man marrying one woman with a long life of mutual fidelity "as long as they both shall live", and raising children within the secure confines of such a bond, is the norm.  This is naive nonsense.

When Unbelief gets hold of marriage, the Christian or biblical prescription and definition are mutated.  The institution itself becomes mutant marriage.  When we speak of the "breakdown" of marriage and family and the kind of rotten fruits that are borne to it and in it, we are implying that there is a standard and norm, enshrined in God's law--and, therefore, ought to be enshrined in civil law.  The logic is sound; but, of course, Modern Man threw all this out long ago.

Modern Man thought that he could legislate no-fault divorces, recognise homosexual "marriages", and ignore--if not celebrate--an endless series of sexual encounters in the name of love and freedom.  Yet, at the same time, Modern Man professes to believe in true love, loyalty, and fidelity.  In our day and times this should be seen for what it is, a Christian hangover, a reflexive yearning for true love and true marriage, which is inscribed in the heart by God Himself, but which can only be sustained societally if society itself is built upon the foundations of Christ and His law.

When the Gospel of King Jesus confronted the Roman Empire, marriage and family became part of the battle ground.

The Post Marital World

Light in Dark Places

The nuclear family is finished, dead, and buried--we are told.  Not so fast, says Family First, an organisation devoted to the promotion of family life, resisting the deconstruction of families.  Many of the headlines about the "research" celebrating the end of the nuclear family in Western societies is suspect and oozing with cant, it says.

Consider, for example, a recent release by Family First slamming a particularly biased  piece, masquerading as serious research.  Nevertheless that piece garnered sensational headlines.  The point of those headlines was to announce that the nuclear family was passe.  The "traditional family" was now thoroughly deconstructed, implying that anything or everything which might replace it was to be welcomed as part of the Brave New World.

But the broader point at issue is worth considering.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Brief Sexual Catechism 2.0

By Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

1. How was mankind created?
We were created by God in the image of God, male and female together (Gen. 1:27).

2. Who is the author of marriage?
When God presented the first bride, our mother Eve, to Adam, He was establishing the first marriage (Gen. 2:22).

3. After the first marriage, how are marriages to be formed?
A man should leave his father and mother, be joined to his wife, so that they might become one flesh (Gen. 2:24).

4. What is the biblical standard for marriage?
One man devoted to one woman for life.

5. How do we know that such monogamy is the normal biblical standard?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Old Gray Mare

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

November 25, 2014

The goal of the pansexualist movement is to remove all creational distinctives. They want to batter down every border, every barrier, so that when we are all done, every sentient being has been melted down into their great cauldron of lust. If you really think that when same sex mirage is a done deal, everyone will settle down into a recognizable normal, then you are a chump, a patsy. We are already at the stage when mainstream publications can run puff pieces on guys who like to have sex with horses.

The issue is not the fact that there are pervs who do this kind of thing. We have always had them, and the Bible prohibits it for a reason. The issue is how everybody else is being manipulated. The issue is not the sin, but rather the societal response to the sin. Get a load of the first lines.