What did Paul mean by homosexuality?
Watch the complete sermon here: https://www.bridges.church/messages/a-big-mess-1-corinthians-5-1-6-11/
Hey. This last Sunday, as we’re moving through our study, in the letter to the Corinthian church, we addressed various promiscuous practices among the Corinthians which had bled into the church. And one of those practices that Paul lists is homosexuality. And I said in our sermon question video this week, we’re going to do a bit deeper dive on what Paul meant by that term and a lot of the debate that surrounds that term today, even in Christian circles.
The debate over the last 30 years, and as I said in the sermon, it’s really only been in the last 30 years.
Before that point, the church was 100% unified in its understanding of what Paul meant when he used the term homosexuality. But since gay relationships have become much more celebrated in wider culture, it has caused some Christians to go back and, and rethink the historic teachings of the church. And if those are actually correct.
And so I’m going to go through a couple of the bigger debates that you may hear and how we know, really that the historic understanding is the correct understanding. So first, one of the first things that you may hear is when Paul uses this term, either here in 1 Corinthians 6 or over in one timothy one, it’s, we don’t know what he meant.
Paul made up this word, so who knows what he was trying to say. So we can’t really be definitive about prohibiting anything because it’s a made up word. We can’t have any confidence of what he means. It’s partially true that it’s a made up word. And Paul actually does this from time to time.
He uses a word in a new context that it has never been used before. Or he puts two words together as one word, and we do this kind of thing today, people will turn nouns into verbs. I heard someone say the other day that they were “mathing”, as if they’re doing math right now. So they are “mathing”. They took a noun and made it a verb.
But when someone does that, it’s not like we don’t know what they mean. Of course we know what they mean, even though it’s a brand new word to us, “mathing”, we could decipher the meaning without any difficulty at all. And so Paul here, he did make up a word. It’s true that he made up a word, but what he did was he took two already existing words and smashed them together.
He pulls them from the Old Testament, Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20, where it says, where it forbids men to lie with a man as they do with a woman.
And so the two words are kind of like man, liar. And in Leviticus 20, actually, those two words are right next to each other. So Paul smushing them together, he’s just taking them from the scriptures that he would have been very familiar with, takes those two words and makes them one word. In Leviticus 18, they’re a couple of words away from each other.
But it’s men sleeping with men.
That’s the two words that are smushed together. And so that’s not any mystery of what he is talking about.
We’re confident what he means. Now, for those of you who are maybe more astute, you would say Paul’s letter to the Corinthians was written in Greek and the old Testament’s written in Hebrew. So how could he take two words from the Old Testament, smush them together, and it’d be a different language, and we know what they mean.
Well, there was a Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. I’m sorry.
We only do one take on these videos. So you get what you get. So it’s the Greek version of the Old Testament. We know Paul had it because of how he quotes other things from that version of the Bible. And so he’s pulling from that version, smushing these two words together.
Again, not any mystery what he means there when he says, men who sleep with men. Right. The next question that you might hear people ask if Paul actually. If we actually have the right understanding of what Paul is saying, there is. They’re like, yes, Paul forbid certain homosexual practices, but it was only as it associated with, like, idol worship.
Temple prostitutes. That’s what he was condemning. And the reason we know that that is not true is because, well, for one thing, maybe the most obvious that you can look at yourself is Romans, Romans one, verses 26 and 27, was talking about both men having relationships with men and women having these romantic, lustful relationships with other women.
And what we know is, yes, there were men who engaged in temple prostitution, especially with, like, young boys. That was very common.
But women did not do that with women in the context of temple worship. There’s not evidence from that in history. And so because there in Romans one, where Paul addresses both men and women, we know it’s broader than just this idol worship practice. It would certainly include that. That’s not okay either, but it’s really pursuing a homosexual relationship in any way, is what he’s talking about.
The last thing or another thing you might hear people say, the last one we’ll cover today is yes, they had one night stands with each other back then, but there wasn’t these ongoing committed relationships, and especially not marriage. And if they had ongoing committed relationships, then that would have been okay then.
And especially if they had marriage then, then that would have been okay. And the first thing to say is they did have relationships back then all throughout the history of the world. I mean, there’s much speculation about various famous figures, really, from every culture that has ever existed that, you know, they probably had a family over here, but their real relationship was with someone of the same sex over here.
And so that’s actually very common throughout all of world history. These kinds of relationships were known about. And they didn’t just spring into existence here in the 20th century, for example. They’ve really always been around as far as marriage goes. Yes, of course, they didn’t have gay marriage in antiquity, but their idea of marriage, which is deficient, for sure, but their idea of marriage was all about having a family.
The reason you got married was to preserve your family line, to have descendants, you know, to pass along your land, you know, preserve your family name, you know, expand the number of your ancestors. That was the. That was the entire point of marriage. It wasn’t. It wasn’t for love, personal gratification, although sometimes those things happened.
It was really for the establishment of family. And so. So, of course, if that’s what you think marriage is, then you’re not, you won’t have homosexual marriage because you can’t. You can’t have a family that way, especially in antiquity, wasn’t going to happen. So to say, you know, if they had marriage, then they would have been okay with it.
It’s really like saying, if they had thought completely differently, then they would have thought completely differently. But the prohibitions are clear. It’s for really any type of gay relationship or pursuing those, or fantasizing about those, dreaming about those, all of that is going to be outside of God’s design, from what he wants.
And, you know, positively, the way the Bible speaks about marriage is it’s one man and one woman. It goes all the way back to the garden, to Genesis two.
A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife. That is the design for marriage. The two shall become one flesh, which involves the sexual union, but it’s actually the union of your lives in every way. A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife. Is wording it positively.
That is the biblical position. Jesus actually repeats this, right? Matthew 19, for instance. Jesus quotes back to the garden. So sometimes people will say, Jesus never talked about homosexuality.
Well, he talked about what marriage and sexual union is meant to be in a positive way, not a, not the negative prohibition, but the positive affirmation is how he talked about it. And it’s one man and one woman, to which some people will say, well, there’s lots of other kinds of marriages in the Bible.
Polygamy is all over the place, you know, so it’s not always one man and one woman in biblical marriage. And I would say, yes, you see polygamy in the Bible, but you also see murder in the Bible. That doesn’t mean that murder is okay just because somebody did it in the Bible.
And actually, when you anytime these accounts of polygamy in the Old Testament, these kings who had all these multiple sons, you kind of see the chaos ensue from polygamy. So you read that story and you’re supposed to get the idea of like, oh, wow, this is a bad idea. And in fact, goddess forbid kings from having multiple wives, and then they went ahead and did it anyway.
That doesn’t, just because they did it doesn’t mean it’s okay, right? Going back to the garden, which is what Jesus does when they ask him about divorce, he goes back to, guys.
The original good design is a man and a woman to be united. And anything other than that original good design is what is out of bounds from God’s good, from God’s plan, from what he wants for us, for his best for us. That doesn’t mean we made reference to this last time that everybody needs to be married or you’re somehow lacking in life if you’re not married.
Jesus was single. Paul was single, Paul.
We’ll talk more about this week coming up. Christians have a very high view of singleness. You can lead a totally full and complete life as a single. It’s even preferred, it seems, to be in 1 Corinthians seven to marriage.
But if we are in a relationship, in a romantic, sexual marriage relationship with another person, it’s with one person of the opposite sex. That is consistent throughout the whole Bible. And as. But, you know, we always want to put. And whenever we talk about a subject like this, we always need to say, that doesn’t mean if somebody’s not matching up to the biblical design, we love that person.
We don’t hate that person. We don’t shun that person. We invest into their lives. We care about them. We certainly stand against any kind of hate of anybody.
We would never want to see that. That is very out of pounds from what God wants for us. We support, we encourage, we go the extra mile, we bend over backwards. We sacrifice ourselves for their benefit, even if they’re totally wrong, because that’s what Jesus did for us, right? While we were still sinners.
He died for us. We didn’t get our act together before. Jesus totally poured himself out for us. And so we don’t force people to get their act together before we totally pour ourselves out for them. Right?
That. That is the Christian way. Okay. So we hope that’s helpful. There’s always more that can be said, and you might have heard other arguments.
And if so, feel free to send them in, and we’ll try to address them. We’ll see you next time. Bye.