The Great Lie of 50/50

I almost titled this blog, "Gayness." Not gayness as in a derogatory term to describe something I don't like, but rather the real issue of homosexuality. Let me make no bones about it: homosexuality is perverse. It is a sin like all sin. And anytime we take a sin, add our pride to it and then add to the word of God to say that it is not a sin, we lead ourselves down a treacherous path.

But here's an interesting twist. The huge marriage movement within the church has affected our thinking enough to pacify homosexuality. What? I wish I was kidding. But this is how deceitful the Deceiver is.

I don't know how it got started, whether in the church or secular psychology, but somehow along the way we have come to the conclusion that marriage is 50/50. There is even a popular marriage series called Love and Respect. The basis is that husbands must love and wives must respect irregardless of how the other behaves. That's what the scripture says, right? Ephesians 5:33.

Here's the problem. Marriage is not a contract deal. It is not a business agreement. It is a union comparable only and solely to Christ's relationship with the church. Now, what about Christ's love for me is 50/50? Let me be blunt. I do nothing for Christ. It wasn't even me who found Him--He found me. By taking marriage and applying mechanical rules to it, we profane a holy sacrament.

There are other problems with this 50/50 idea (e.g., the original Greek writing of Ephesians tells wives to respect husbands as a result of the husband's love for them--not arbitrarily as the church & world would have us believe, the wife wasn't created to love her husband--not as primary role--rather, she was created to help him, a woman is indeed weaker than a man but not according to the thinking of the world--by denying that verse, we only harm our own understanding), but here's a kicker:

If God established marriage to be a 50/50 contractual agreement, then homosexuality is surface-level acceptable. Granted, scripture is clear that marriage is for one wife and one husband, but these are merely semantics.

Hey, if all marriage takes is love and respect than there may very well be a gay or lesbian couple who can fulfill that. Maybe even better than a lot of heterosexual marriages I know.

But this was not, is not God's design.

If we had instead held to God's original plan for marriage that man is need of help and that a wife is uniquely created to help him become Christlike, to point out his need and his struggle, to reveal where he is falling short, then a homosexual couple would have no place.

Had our society held to God's ways, we would not be so easily swayed that two men could as competently fulfill the role of marriage as a man and a woman. It would be nonsense. We would have been able to call it as it is: a lie, a degrading passion, unnatural (Romans 1:24-28).

But instead, we secularize this sacrament: it's a 50/50 relationship, dependant on two individuals performing as they ought.

No. It's a holy sacrament dependent wholly and entirely on the work of Christ and the life of a husband. There are no two ways for it to work.

I am afraid that we have twisted God's ways just enough to make it convenient for us. And in so doing, we begin to look more and more like the world: the divorce rate among Christians and non-Christians is exactly parallel.

Let us be very wary of anything that makes us more comfortable.