When you reject a historical Genesis, you open the door to further compromise because God’s Word is no longer your authority: man is your authority, and you’ll often alter the Word of God to fit with man’s ideas. I’ve been saying this for decades, and an article from a pastor and professor of Christian ethics just confirmed, once again, the truth of what I’ve been saying for so long.
In the final part of a four-part series on how this pastor of almost three decades became “gay affirming,” he writes:
I embarked on a fresh study of the “Big Six” passages that “everyone knows” establish absolute heterosexual normativity, a strict male-female gender binary, and a ban on any deviations. I concluded that it came down to two main passages (Gen. 1-2 and Romans 1) and one main theme — divine creation order.
Yes, I would agree—when it comes to human sexuality, it all goes back to Genesis (you could say the answers are in Genesis!). God’s Word is clear: he created us male and female and designed marriage to be between one man and one woman for life (Genesis 1:27, 2:24 and confirmed by Jesus in Matthew 19:4–5).
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The pastor then goes on to radically reinterpret what God’s Word clearly teaches about marriage, sexuality, and gender. How can he “get away” with this new interpretation of God’s Word? He writes:
It also struck me like a thunderbolt that the LGBTQ+ issue was the ultimate current example of the old faith and science problem.
I then reasoned by analogy from other moments where the creation narratives were read woodenly or literally and created faith/science problems – earth as the center of the universe, a 6,000-year-old earth, a literal six-day-creation, the impossibility of accepting anything like the theory of evolution.
It dawned on me that this was a solvable problem in integrating our primal cosmology (creation narrative) with an honest appraisal of the world as we find it.
So, to solve the “problem” of wanting to be LGBTQ affirming but having to go against the Word of God to do so, he simply reinterprets God’s Word “with an honest appraisal of the world as we find it.” In other words, God is not his authority—man is his authority! As I’ve always said, the way a person takes Genesis is an authority issue!
It’s a temptation as old as the garden of Eden when Satan tempted Eve with “Did God really say?” and “You will be like God!” Our sin nature is such that we have a natural propensity to doubt God’s Word, twist it to confirm what we want to believe, and make ourselves god over Scripture.
To fall for the temptation to reinterpret God’s Word regarding marriage and gender, this pastor first rejected a literal Genesis—that God created everything in six, literal, 24-hour days just a few thousand years ago. He allowed man, not God, to be his authority. So then when it came to questions regarding social issues in our culture, it was easy for him to reject God’s Word as the authority and reinterpret Genesis yet again.
As I’ve always said, a historical Genesis is an issue of authority: do you start with God’s Word or man’s word?
