On the same day Oreo Cookie showed a rainbow-filled cookie on its Facebook page to show the company’s newfound support for so-called gay rights, my daughter presented me with a rainbow-colored work of sand art.
“What does the rainbow mean?” I asked.
“Daddy, you know,” she said. “The rainbow is the sign of God’s promise that He will never again destroy the Earth with a flood.”
My mind flashed to Titus 1:15, which says “To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure.”
For more than five millennia, God’s people have known the rainbow to mean one thing: God’s promise. Today, our society sees a rainbow and thinks of the gay-rights movement. What a telling statement about our culture.
Indeed, expressions in favor of gay rights and so-called same-sex marriage are getting increasingly popular and hard to ignore. The popular retailer JC Penney featured Todd Koch and Cooper Smith, a same-sex couple, playing with their two children in a Father’s Day advertisement. These companies represent a harbinger of pro-gay lifestyle advertising to come.
Barack Obama also recently placed himself squarely on the same-sex “marriage” bandwagon with his personal backing in May. What is most interesting (and disturbing) is that the President cited Christian teaching to back his views.
Obama told ABC News that he and the first lady “are both practicing Christians and . . . . when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing Himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.”
In invoking the Golden Rule, Obama attempted to seize the upper hand to those Christians who recognize that the homosexual lifestyle is at odds with historic, biblical Christian teaching.
What Obama failed to mention is that homosexuals already have equal rights as heterosexuals. They, too, may marry anyone they wish. So long as that person is of the opposite sex. So long as that other person is not a minor, is not a relative and is not multiple people. In other words, what the gay-rights movement wants is not equal rights, but special rights.
Be that as it may, Obama is plainly missing the teachings of Christ against fornication and sex outside of marriage, which He defines as one man and one woman (Matt. 19:4-6). Jesus likewise upheld the Mosaic Law, which strictly forbids homosexual acts. Moreover, the Apostle Paul spelled out in painful detail the sinful nature and devastating consequences of homosexual acts, desires and living.
Yet many Christians will not speak up on this for fear of being considered hateful. We must recognize, however, that we are not the ones singling anyone out or forcing the conversation. The conversation has come to us. It is therefore our right—nay, it is our duty—to speak the truth, yet in love.
The true violation of the Golden Rule in this instance would be to allow a person to continue on in a destructive path as they approach eternity and not warn them.
While America is a free country in which companies—and even Presidents—can contend for their views in the manner in which they wish, it is the same country that offers Christians the right to speak out for goodness.
The famous British novelist, George Orwell, once said of his times, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
Brothers and sisters, it is our duty now to restate the obvious about marriage and morals, doing so in gentleness and with love.
