Q&A on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) issues

Some time ago, I gave a number of answers to a friend who had questions from a Christian youth regarding the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) issues. 

Here are the questions and my responses. Some slight grammatical and typographical changes have been made.

Question 1: Why should Christianity dictate national laws that govern non-Christians? Why should we impose this upon others who do not believe in this?

Singapore has a secular state and a multi-religious society. No one religion or religious group should “dictate” national laws. However, as a democratic society, every single citizen has the right to participate in the democratic process and engage with issues of public policy.

As Christians, we believe that the role of the State is to uphold what is good and punish what is evil (Romans 13:1-7; 1 Peter 2:13-14). Thus, we advocate for laws which are consistent with what is good, and we advocate against unjust laws which are not. 

It is the role of the State (not the Church) to enforce the law, and all laws impose morality on someone. For example, tough laws against drug abuse and trafficking impose on drug abusers and traffickers the seriousness of drugs.

Question 2: People often quote 1 Corinthians 5:12-13, or John 8:7 - We ourselves are not sinless. How can we judge others? How do we reconcile these Bible passages? 

The Bible does not create a blanket rule “do not judge”. This is based on a common misreading of Matthew 7:1. Once we read Matthew 7:1-5 holistically, what we see is Jesus emphasising the importance of applying consistent standards across the board, and to begin with self-examination before judging others. The important principle is to “judge rightly” (John 7:24).

This ties in very closely to 1 Corinthians 5:12-13, where Paul was exercising church discipline against an immoral man within the church who was sleeping with his father’s wife. Paul is telling the church to judge those within it, and to expel the man because he was openly living in sin while purporting to be Christian. On the flip side, it would not be the place for the church or church leaders to exercise such judgment of people outside the church.

Finally, in John 8, even as Jesus told the people “Let he who has no sin cast the first stone”, Jesus also told the woman, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” This is a beautiful picture of God’s grace. Grace does not deny the existence of sin or refrain from judgment. In fact, grace recognises that a person has sinned, but chooses not to hold that sin against the person. As Paul said, God’s kindness leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4).

It would be hypocritical of any human being to judge another human being by his or her own standards because, as this youth has rightly acknowledged, we are all sinners. It would be quite presumptuous of any human being to say to another, “I’m good, you’re bad.” How many of us even live up to our own (human) standards of behaviour, let alone God’s standards?

The message of the Bible is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). That is why we all need Jesus, who clothes us with a new identity and His righteousness, once we put our faith in Him. Our message is really, “We have all messed up, but we know Someone who makes things right.”

Question 3: He feels being picky and choosy on what we impose is pretty hypocritical. Do we still follow the laws of the Old Testament? He hates that we downplay the importance of the Bible by following whatever is convenient for us. How do we reconcile this?

I would like to affirm this youth on his desire to be consistent in our application of God’s Word, and his strong dislike of the downplaying of the importance of parts of the Bible whenever inconvenient. Indeed, Truth exists and it is not our place to play pick-and-choose with it, or to apply and disapply parts of the Bible according to our preferences.

The answer to this was put very nicely by William Lane Craig. We are Christians because we follow Jesus Christ. We do not follow the Law of Moses per se, but follow the Law of Moses only to the extent that Jesus tells us to follow it.

So, for example, we are not obliged to follow the food laws (kosher) of the Old Testament. (We can if we want to, but we need not.) This is because Jesus said that “nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’” (Mark 7:18).

On Biblical sexual ethics, our basis for understanding marriage and sexuality is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ and elaborated upon by the Apostles. Thus, we are not following the laws in Leviticus. Rather, we follow the teaching of Christ that marriage is a union between a man and a woman (Matthew 19:4-6) and that “porneia” (referring to all kinds of sexual behaviour outside of marriage) is immoral (Mark 7:20-23).

4. If the Bible is so clear-cut on its stance in LGBT, why do so many churches still support it?

There are many reasons why churches support LGBT ideas, and it is difficult to cover all the possible reasons why. However, I will speak from my experience engaging with people who profess to be Christians who also support LGBT, same-sex marriage, etc. as a matter of their church doctrine, and what I have read so far. 

At its very core, I believe that people on both sides want to do the right thing. We all want to do what is fair, just, and loving. 

Churches that support LGBT come from that motivation. They want to love their neighbours who identify as LGBT, and they believe that supporting same-sex marriage, ordaining clergy who identify as LGBT, etc. are the best way to do so. They also believe that the Biblical teaching on homosexual practice, whether in the Old or New Testament, are either confined to a certain cultural context or based on a misinterpretation of the Bible.

Most, if not all, of such churches also believe that God made people LGBT. It is a religious version of the “born this way” idea, where people argue that LGBT is biological and immutable.

Where I would point out as the main problem with their beliefs is the belief that God made people LGBT, which defines and identifies people according to their sexual desires or feelings.

From a Biblical perspective, we are made male and female in the image of God (Genesis 1:27; Matthew 19:4-6). Therefore, we do not derive our identities from our sexual desires or feelings, but from God and His design of human beings as male and female. Furthermore, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, your identity is as a child of God (Galatians 4:6-7), rather than any label you might give yourself or others might give you. 

Another mistake which they have made is what I would call their rather selective interpretation of the Bible. As we have discussed in the context of question 3, we should not be playing pick-and-choose with the Bible. For example, many of these churches want to affirm Jesus’s teachings on loving one’s neighbour (Mark 12:29-31), while at the same time ignoring His teaching that marriage is between a man and a woman (Matthew 19:4-6). 

In a sinful and broken world, our desires are corrupted by sin, including our sexual desires (which manifest in inappropriate desires for the same or opposite sex), and there may be some people who are born with indeterminate sex (i.e. intersex). 

But the promise of Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He demonstrated His love through His sacrifice for us on the cross. For those who put their trust in Him, He promises to clothe us with a new identity as children of God, and to give us a new life in Him. That is the message we proclaim.

Sacrifice as the Answer to the Fall

Psychology professor Dr Jordan Peterson ran a lecture series on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories. To be clear, Dr Peterson is not a Christian. According to him, he went to the United Church till he was about 13 years of age, but otherwise had "rather limited religious education". His approach to the Bible is influenced to a large extent by Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, and would be unorthodox by theological standards. 

However, in his lecture on Cain and Abel, he provided an interesting insight into the significance of sacrifice, as a means of delayed gratification and a bargain with the future (at 19:03 of the video): 

People watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years. And we thought it over and we drew a conclusion: The successful among us sacrifice. The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.

Reflecting further on the sacrifices of Cain and Abel later in the lecture, he said (at 1:06:56 of the video): 

You think "Oh how primitive! You know, how primitive these people were sacrificing to their God!" It's like you know those people weren't stupid and this is not primitive. Whatever it is, it's not primitive. It's sophisticated beyond belief because the idea, as I already pointed out, is that you could sacrifice something of value and that that would have transcendent utility. And that is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with. It's an answer to the problem that's put forward in the story of Adam and Eve... [Emphasis added]

Dr Peterson had his own extensive reflection on the matter and interpretation of the story, which carry much insight in their own right and are deserving of a careful understanding. However, there is a deep truth to the idea that sacrifice is the answer to the Fall. 

Part of the story of how humanity fell into sin was the desire for immediate gratification. Genesis 3:6 writes that, "the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom", and took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband. This is the classic lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride of life (1 John 2:16) that has plagued humanity ever since. Humanity traded the eternal bliss of Eden for that one moment of immediate gratification.

Sacrifice is the exact opposite of that. As Dr Peterson put it, it is delayed gratification, and a bargain with the future, where "you look into the future and you decide that by making today a little less impulsively pleasurable, shall we say, you'll make tomorrow a little bit more secure and productive" (at 10:44 of the video).

Thus, the answer to the Fall of Man is the ultimate Sacrifice of God. To borrow Dr Peterson's language, Jesus Christ looked far into the future and went through immense suffering, making a bargain with the future to make all our tomorrows completely secure and productive. "Christ was sacrificed one to take away the sins of many people; and He will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for Him." (Hebrews 10:28)

Dr Russell Moore and the Profanity-spouting Elderly Woman with Dementia

If you were a pastor and there is an elderly woman with dementia in your congregation who is spouting profanities during your sermon, what would you do?

Most pastors and church leaders, I would suspect, would kindly request the family of such a woman to relocate her to one of the isolated or overflow rooms (if any such rooms are available on the premises), so that she would not disrupt or "stumble" anyone with her profanities. Some might even request the family to keep the woman at home. In the minds of many, this would be seen to be quite justifiable and intuitive.

However, Dr Russell Moore had a very different experience. He shares about his encounter, early on in his ministry, with an elderly woman with dementia who was spouting profanities, and how her church responded, in a message at The Village Church titled "Restoring Holiness"(at 22:15 of the video):

I was in a church I served really early on in my ministry. We had an elderly woman in the congregation who was going through dementia.

Fairly… a serious form of dementia but she could still live at home and she came to church every single Sunday.

And I would be preaching and she would just randomly yell out in the middle of the service, but the problem was she would yell out strings of profanities. Now, this was a really, really sweet, proper, in-church-every-single-week lady, which is why those profanities were in her mind because she was shocked by them. Things that she would she would hear, she would take notice of them that’s bad, that’s shocking and that sort of embedded into her mind and came out.

And she would yell out, “Well you blankety-blank-blank-blank, blankety-blank-blank-blank!”

I found something happening in my heart while she is yelling this out. I’m looking around and I’m saying: Who do we have visiting with us today that’s gonna be totally freaked out by this taking place?

What Mom has just brought her four-year-old kid in here who says, “Hey Mom, what does blankety-blank-blank mean?” Not what they’re intending to learn at church today.

I’m trying to filter through; I look at this other group of ladies over here and thinking: How upset are they about this and how upset are they going to be with me about this?

Until one day a group of those ladies came up and said, “Brother Russ, when Miss So-and-So starts cussing, it seems like you’re embarrassed.”

And I said, “Yeah, I guess I am.”

She said, “Well, we’re here to rebuke you for that.”

“Because she can’t help this and when she’s screaming out this stream of profanities here, well that’s just her way of saying ‘Amen’. And if we’re going to be the Body of Christ to her, then we need to stop worrying about what everybody else is going to think that that takes place, and instead say to the outside world around us if you want to know the kind of church we want to be, we want to be the kind of church where our sister who is suffering and who is screaming out things that would humiliate her in any other period of her life doesn’t embarrass us. We love her and we receive her and she’s welcome here, because every single one of us are bringing to the table all kinds of other things that need to be borne up by everybody else that maybe aren’t quite as visible as what she’s grappling with right now. And that’s what the church does.”

I was convicted to the heart, because I realised I’m up here teaching about the worship of God, leading people in the worship of God, but the worship of God had become more important to me than her, which means that the worship of God had become a tool for me for something other than the worship of God; that is easy to do.

This is a remarkable and beautiful story, and the congregation listening to Dr Moore erupted in applause when he shared about the women's statements.

The tenderness and attitude of the women from that church who rallied around the elderly woman with dementia brings to mind the passage in 1 Corinthians where Paul describes the Church as the Body of Christ. As Paul said, "those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable we treat with special honour. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment." (1 Corinthians 12:22-24a)

Further on in the passage, Paul wrote, "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it." (1 Corinthians 12:26) Those women cared much less about what other people thought about them, but were willing to bear any possible reproach in order to come alongside that elderly woman. 

Are we prepared to do that as a Church for our fellow brothers- and sisters-in-Christ, whatever condition they may be in or whatever they may be going through?