What’s the Difference Between True and False Faith?
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What’s the Difference Between True and False Faith?
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10 Things You Need to Know About the Bible and Homosexuality

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This content was created by our Core Christianity staff.

People in different situations and with varying perspectives have asked us questions about the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality. Sometimes it is from a Christian struggling with this issue personally. Other times it is from a parent trying to love and guide a son or daughter while also wanting insight from a biblical perspective. Still others want to know our position as a matter of record. In a highly politicized world, where important matters are reduced to sound bites and shouting matches, it is crucial to remember that we’re dealing with people, not just issues.

The first obligation we have as Christians toward other people, whether believer or unbeliever, is to love them. Loving someone, however, doesn’t mean acceptance of sin; in fact, love sometimes calls us to warn, correct, and challenge. To affirm people as human beings is essential, but to affirm rebellion against God and harm against our neighbor is dangerous.Remember: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Prov. 27:6).

I want to offer ten basic biblical truths that guide Christian responses on this question. Like facets of a single diamond, they have to be taken together. One of the problems in the contemporary debate among Christians is that one of these components may be singled out while the others are ignored. Unless we take them as a whole, we’ll end up with distorted and simplistic conclusions.

We are told in Genesis 1,

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.…” And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. (Gen. 1:26–28, 31)

Notice that “God created man in his own image,” not merely as male but “male and female he created them.” On this basis, as his vice-regents, God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply.” Obviously, the gift of sex is tied to sexual difference. Children are the fruit of a loving union on God’s terms. Even the way he made us, with different anatomy, underscores this point.

In Genesis 2, we are told, “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:18). Although Adam named the animals, “for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him” (v. 20), so the Lord created Eve from Adam’s side (vv. 21–22). The phrase “fit for him” is important: As grand a creature as Adam was, he needed someone equal to him but different. She is not a lower creature. In fact, the elation in Adam’s response is striking as he breaks into song:

Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.(Gen. 2:23–25)

For all of the talk about respecting difference, homosexuality itself is a refusal of the deepest difference of all among humans. Adam did not need another Adam, but an Eve. It was the difference from himself that made the two of them one complete unit, like two pieces of a puzzle.

This is why divorce, which is widely accepted now in our culture and in churches, is so tragic. In fact, in terms of devastating impact, heterosexual divorce trumps same-sex marriage as far as undoing God’s good design. Jesus told the Pharisees, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast 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 not man separate” (Matt. 19:4–6).

God Created Us Male and Female to Be “One-In-Difference”