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There are hordes of self-righteous bigots masquerading as born again Christians. With bloated egos they feel morally superior to lesbians and gays and bisexuals and they despise them as low life. These disgusting hate-mongers turn everyone's stomach. They are so obviously wrong that we can dismiss them immediately. Jesus himself would be ashamed of them. What we often fail to realize however, is that there are literally millions of other Christians who likewise believe that homosexual activity is a sin worthy of hell, and yet these people are so different from those described above that arguments hurled at the first class of so-called Christians go right over the head of this other type. We cannot hope to prove these millions are wrong without first discovering what they believe.
To grasp what makes these people act the way they do, imagine going back in time before the discovery that deadly cholera can be contracted by drinking contaminated water. Consider how you would feel trying to convince people not to drink from certain wells. "It's harmless. We've been drinking from that well all our lives," they would tell you. "Who are you to tell them what we should do?" Their lives would hinge on whether they believed you, and yet they would consider you mad. You wouldn't be superior to them, nor would you feel superior. You would simply have a little information that carries with it a grave responsibility. The ego trip of being right would not interest you. On the contrary, as you see people drinking deadly water they think is harmless, you would give anything to be wrong. All that would matter to you would be saving lives. This is like the dilemma these Christians find themselves in. They are convinced that sin is far more serious than cholera because a deadly disease can only shorten a person's life; sin can destine a person to a fate worse than death for all eternity. They believe the horrific consequences can be easily avoided and that a key factor in escaping eternal disaster is simply for people to acknowledge their sin - in this case acknowledging that same gender sex is immoral. It is compassion, not bigotry, that drives them to warn against homosexual activity. To prove these people wrong, and sexually active homosexuals right, we must realize that claims that born again believers are self-righteous will go straight over their head! They believe that God is so perfect and his moral standards so high that relative to Christ they stand as guilty and as worthy of hell as serial rapists or sadistic mass murderers. Although they passionately believe same gender sex is a grave offense against the Creator of sex, they believe they themselves have been equally depraved and have perverted God's gift of sex by such things as mentally treating someone as a sex object. Surprisingly, regarding themselves as worthy of hell has turned out to be a peculiarly liberating experience for them. Unlike most of us, who feel the need to devote considerable emotional energy to trying to justify ourselves and finding others we can regard as being morally worse than us, these people feel no such compulsion. Moreover, they believe that simply by facing up to this truth about themselves and asking Jesus to take their sins from them, they are now, in the eyes of the Judge to whom they must give account after death, as pure as the driven snow. They believe that this option is as freely available to every gay person as it is to the most innocent virgin. What deeply grieves them, however, is that anyone - straight or gay - who refuses to acknowledge his sin will miss God's free pardon and so face a horrific eternity.
If he is indeed a God of love, he has not abandoned us, nor would he have a couldn't-care-less attitude about how we live. He would be passionately interested what we do with our lives, and be humanity's final Judge. And if he is the Designer of the human body and the Creator of sex, one would expect him to have strong views as to what is right and wrong sexually. If God loves everyone, it means when we emotionally or physically hurt someone or cheat or deceive or slander a person, we hurt the God who is passionately concerned about that person's welfare - and the God who keeps us breathing. [It means that if, for example, we sexually violate someone, or morally corrupt a person by seduction - what we might euphemistically call consenting sex between uncommitted adults - he is doubly angry.] The Almighty would be angry because we have messed up our own lives by failing to reach our God-given moral potential, plus he would be furious that we have corrupted someone else who is dear to God. The Lord feels as fiercely protective of his loved ones (regardless of their age) as the most loving father feels toward his ten-year-old virgin daughter. This does not imply God will respond instantly. The eternal Lord is not a slave to time. If the Almighty did not hold off, giving us time to come to our senses and beg forgiveness through Jesus, this planet would be devoid of human life. But God's love for those we hurt fuels a fearsome passion for justice that must be satisfied. Justice can be deferred for a while, but to be deferred forever would be a farce, not justice. Every time we've ever thought we've got away with something, we haven't. We are only deferring the time when we will deeply regret our action. God is graciously giving us time to come to our senses. If we don't voluntarily reach that point of deep regret on earth, we'll still regret it, but for eternity. For each of us the time when we face our Judge is hurtling toward us. We could expect human views to be fickle and fluctuate, but God's views wouldn't change. And if he cared about humanity and human sexuality, he wouldn't leave it to our era to get around to informing us how to live.
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