The Church has always known and always held that marriage is a sacred institution, created by God for a man and a woman. When the state attempts to redefine marriage, it is the Church’s solemn duty to speak out against this immoral and unnatural law and not to accede to the accusations that we are being bigoted or unloving in so doing. On the contrary, we are obliged for the love of God and our fellow man to say what the Bible says and what the Church has for all of its history taught.
—Eric Metaxas1—
Key point: If you value stability in society, if you value ordered freedom, if you value religious liberty, if you love your children, if you care about America and her future as a free nation, speak up to uphold and defend natural marriage — for the sake of all, even those who disagree strongly with you.
Following the vote in the US Senate for the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act” on Tuesday, November 29, 2022, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins issued a statement in which he said this, in part:
Republicans clearly acknowledged by their support of the Lee, Lankford, and Rubio amendments [that would have taken steps to protect religious liberty] that this legislation is a threat to the First Amendment freedoms of individual Americans. And yet 12 of 12 Republicans [—these—] still chose to vote for the (Dis)Respect for Marriage Act [ — a bill that would enshrine same-sex marriage into federal law]. The (Dis)Respect for Marriage Act makes people prime targets for government harassment, investigation, prosecution, even civil action. This bill is a club, with which the Left will attempt to beat people of orthodox faith–who believe in marriage as God designed it and history has defined–into submission to their destructive sexuality ideology.
Perkins continued, stating that the greatest threat to religious liberty is not “military force” implemented to eradicate it directly, but
policies like the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. They are what curtails the exercise of religious freedom — which leads not to a violent overthrow of this fundamental freedom, but to its systematic suppression and eventual loss. In other words, the government has declared open season on anyone who believes in marriage as it’s always been, the union of a man and woman.
Scripture tells us this about the first man and the first woman, and consequently the first married couple, the two people God Himself created at the beginning of time:
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 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
The True Meaning of Marriage Cannot Be Separated from Procreation
God did not give the command to “be fruitful and multiply” to two men or two women, but to a man and a woman — the first two human beings who, having been designed and fashioned by God, also had been divinely equipped to reproduce by bringing their bodies together sexually. This is how humanity got its start, and it is how it has continued in successive generations through thousands of years of human history. There is nothing bigoted about this. The true meaning and nature of marriage cannot be separated from procreation; marriage can only be a relationship of an opposite-sex couple.
The true meaning and nature of marriage cannot be separated from procreation; marriage can only be a relationship of an opposite-sex couple.
Centuries later, during Jesus’ earthly ministry, the Pharisees sought to trap Jesus when they asked Him if He approved of divorce. These Jewish religious leaders expected Jesus to focus on Moses’ law, which allowed for divorce, Jesus would explain, “because of the hardness of your hearts…but from the beginning it was not so.” Instead He went straight to the creation account in Genesis and chided the Pharisees, who should have known better. The Lord replied,
Matthew 19:4 Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning “made them male and female,” 5 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”? 6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Why marriage? Because God created human beings male and female!
For what reason shall “a man…leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two…become one flesh”? In other words, why marriage? Jesus told us, and when He did, He echoed the Genesis account of the beginning of humanity and the establishment of the institution of marriage. Why marriage? Because God “made them male and female“!
Nature’s Proclamation
This certainly is what the Bible teaches us, but this is not solely a religious tenet. It is a self-evident principle of nature. That being so, why do so many people today not “get it”? I believe there are two reasons.
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- First, lies and myths about marriage have infected America and are now deeply imbedded in the culture. As Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels observed, “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
- Second, increasingly, people don’t want to believe the obvious, because many obvious truths are offensive; and in our society, a great many people consider only a few things worse than being offended or offending another.
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Sometimes, however, the truth offends. Does this make it our enemy? Only if we allow it to become our enemy. If we instead cooperate with it, it becomes our friend. One thing it will not do, however, is yield to our opinions and feelings. That’s not what truth does. When we oppose it repeatedly, it inevitably will bite back. When that happens, it won’t be truth’s fault, but our own.
America Has Positioned Herself as an Enemy of the Truth About Marriage
Christian psychologist W. Peter Blitchington made this profound statement about the family in 1980:
The foundation upon which society is constructed—the central unit linking people to a social structure—is the family. And the most important component of the family is the husband-wife relationship. Any changes in that relationship will produce far-reaching effects upon the community as a whole. As long as the husband-wife tie is intact, an emotional cornerstone will be created upon which the happiness and satisfaction of everyone can be constructed. But when the tie is weakened, every other bond in society also will weaken.2
In 1980, we weren’t talking about redefining marriage to include same-sex couples. Still, it is beyond dispute that institutionally, redefining marriage weakens the core marital relationship. Of course, individual marriages between husbands and wives can remain strong, but marriage itself cannot remain strong as an institution if society no longer recognizes it as what it genuinely is, and what it, in its authentic form, does for society, the culture, and individuals.
There’s more! Attorney Jeff Shafer has warned that “marriage equality” — the term so often used to describe marriage redefined — inevitably means that in the eyes of the state, all marriages essentially are same-sex marriages. Why? Because to recognize the procreative abilities of a man-woman relationship would be to elevate that marriage above the relationships of two men or two women — even though innately, only the opposite-sex couple can have a marriage, and even though inherently the same-sex couple is incapable of having one.
What does this mean in practical terms? If all marriages are equal, no marriage can be recognized as able to produce children on its own; therefore the children — all children — become the property of the state! This is not far-fetched. It is the reality we in America now face, and it’s the reality Congress, with President Biden’s signature, will soon officially enshrine into federal law.
On the Road to Destruction
Even a casual observer ought to recognize that unless things change in this country, this will not end well for America or for Americans, especially her children. The observer, however, must not have been brainwashed by the lies and myths so prevalent in our culture today.
Someone has well said, “I love my country, but I detest what my country’s government has become.” This is not the America our Founding Fathers established in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence or that they envisioned when they drafted the Constitution in 1787. It is not the nation that ended slavery through a bloody civil war, nor is it the nation that enacted civil rights laws, finally making good on its commitment to the ideal that “all men are created equal.”
Take note! Created equal isn’t the same thing as manipulated by government to achieve some semblance of equality. In a free and just nation, equality cannot mean having the right to impose on society-at-large standards that contradict reality, or, as our Founders put it, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Our government has charted a path to destruction, and there never has been a more critical time to speak up and to to uphold and defend the truth in a society held captive by lies! Remember what Dr. Blitchington said:
The foundation upon which society is constructed—the central unit linking people to a social structure—is the family. And the most important component of the family is the husband-wife relationship. Any changes in that relationship will produce far-reaching effects upon the community as a whole.
Which would you rather occur —
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- America loses its liberty and its freedoms because it has no standard of guidelines or “rails” on which these can operate, and no one is offended, or
- America faces the harsh truth and comes to understand that homosexuality is contrary to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and therefore incompatible with genuine marriage?
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Pastors, Take a Stand!
This second scenario cannot occur if Christians do not stand up and speak up. Also, every pastor who cares about the truth of the gospel and marriage as a picture of Christ’s relationship with His bride, the church, must find a backbone and do what he has, for the most part, not been doing up until now. Recently, I wrote about the silence of America’s pastors against the backdrop of the help that a significant number of Republicans were continuing to give Democrats to enshrine same-sex “marriage” into federal law. Here’s what I said,
These Senators are at fault, but so are all the pastors in America who have, over the last several years, refused to talk about marriage from biblical and theological perspectives, emphasizing that marriage is sacred and holy and a picture of Christ’s relationship with His church. They say they care about evangelism, but they have refused to uphold natural marriage in society and so refused to point to an image that helps the world understand Christ’s sacrifice for sinners. They are cowards, and they need to repent and ask God to empower them to speak the truth on this issue. When the state dictates that marriage is something it is not, it acts as god, and tyranny reigns. This is another reason pastors must speak out! The state has abused its God-given authority to commend good and punish evil. Our government instead is calling good evil and evil good! Just as the silence of the German Church in the 1930s led to all sorts of horrors, the American church in our day is passively allowing this nation to travel the same kind of path. Unless things change, this will not end well. All of this is rooted in the same toxic soil that has given rise to puberty blockers and surgeries that mutilate otherwise healthy bodies, exacerbating poor self images and robbing young people of their ability to become fathers or mothers. It is time for Christians to speak out against this evil! Read Eric Metaxas’s new book Letter to the American Church.
With this plea for Christians, and especially Christian leaders, to speak out and to uphold the true meaning of marriage, I will pause, for now.
Whatever we risk in speaking out now will be minimal compared to what we will lose if we remain silent!
Expect more of these same warnings and urgings from me, however; too much is at stake.
Meanwhile, keep this in mind. Whatever we risk in speaking out now will be minimal compared to what we will lose if we remain silent!
Copyright © 2022 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
Note:
1Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church (Washington, DC: Salem Books, 2022), 99.
2W. Peter Blitchington, Sex Roles & The Christian Family, (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1980), 49. Of this book, Dr. James Dobson wrote, “Never before have I volunteered a statement of endorsement for a book, but this one deserves that distinction. These issues are crucial to the survival of the family, and I wish every Christian in America would read it.” Dr. Dobson’s endorsement appears on the cover of the book.
top image credit: Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash
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