Who Gets To Decide?

Dear Fellow Believers,

The Supreme Court of the United States decided this week that we couldn't make a distinction between marriage and not-marriage. The justification is that if two people love each other and want to make a commitment to each other, they shouldn't be denied the "right" to make that commitment.

Many Christians are shaken and outraged by this. A surprising number are not, but many are.

This letter is to you.

When Believers decided we could cross out various parts of God's instructions and state which we were comfortable following and which we could righteously ignore, we set a long stage for us to be in the bind we're in now. We have trouble being able to distinguish right from wrong or have a leg to stand on when objecting to things like men "marrying" other men. The decision this week, based upon relentlessly emotional statements like "when two people love each other", is the logical outcome of our society's abandonment of God's principles and instructions. The shocking number of Christians supporting it while saying, "No one chooses to be born this way" is proof that we in the Body of Christ have forgotten our compass. We can't find North because we have rejected the measuring stick God gave his people. We are going the same way as the rest of the world when we were supposed to stand up and say "no!", to be a light on a hill, to not be like those whose eyes are blinded because they do not know the true Light.

I am filled with grief - not because Unbelievers do things God abhors, but because Believers are being persuaded they cannot object.

Hear me out on this.

When we decided that God's careful instructions could be parsed into categories like "Moral", "Sign" or "Ceremonial" laws and some could be dismissed, we opened ourselves to the argument of which instruction was which. It's now only a matter of opinion which we should keep and which we should ignore. One Christian keeps the Sabbath, another doesn't at all, another says it's been changed to Sunday. We have no clarity because we are using our own standards to judge God and his commandments instead of using God's words as our guide.

By taking it on ourselves to judge which of God's instructions are still valid, we have given ourselves the power to judge God. Once you give men the power to judge God, you've already made all evil things allowable. That is our sinful nature. And by discrediting God's commands, we have no recourse for objection. It's only a matter of time. When God says eating pigs is abominable to him and so is homosexuality, we are tearing down our own foundations when we say, "God's changed his mind about the pigs but not the homosexuality."

But who makes the determination that pigs are now clean but my homosexual neighbors are not?

God has not given good and evil instructions. If we find any of his instructions good, why would we then discard others?

The reason, one everyone I know including myself has used, is that some of God's commands are for us but some aren't, and if we try to keep the ones that aren't we have cursed ourselves. But it's very difficult to understand who has drawn the dividing line between the good and the cursed.

Many - including me, in my heart - have cited Paul's writings when saying it's actually evil to regard the body of God's instructions as still valid. The problem with this is that by accepting any of those instructions as good, we have invalidated this whole point and set ourselves up as the judges of God's Law. Paul himself never divides the commands into groups of what we should and shouldn't follow. He differentiates - as Jesus did - between the Laws of God and the Traditions of Men, but when he says "The Law", he never condemns part while clinging to part. If he's really speaking of God's instructions and condemning them as evil for Christians to follow, he's calling ALL of them evil. If this view of Paul is correct, then we can't say even the 10 Commandments are still valid without a lot of mind-bending roundabouts.

So do not do the easy thing, the thing I always took for granted we should do, and retreat behind Paul's difficult writings to say we can't possibly follow God's Instructions. Because if Paul said that, we're free to commit murder now. Without the whole validity of God's Instructions, there's nothing to say there's anything wrong with men "marrying" men or women "marrying" women or a father "marrying" his young daughter or a woman "marrying" her favorite horse.

Since it's ridiculous to suppose Paul really advocated murder or adultery, it's time to give up the untenable position that we in our power and wisdom can do what even the Apostles personally taught by Jesus could not: we cannot pick and choose which of God's commands are just and holy and which we may ignore.

That thought is what catapulted me out of feeling at ease with my attitude toward God and made me realize I have been content not following him with my whole heart. I realized with this one statement that I had allowed myself to choose how much of God's will I was content with.

It's not God's Instructions themselves that are the dividing line between the holy and profane in our Christian, God-fearing hearts. It's the attitude that we have the right to examine all God's words and decide which we will follow. Not which we CAN follow. Which we WILL.

If we keep giving ourselves that right, we'll increasingly find there is no evil and perversion we can truthfully object to because our only foundational reason will be, "I'm not comfortable with homosexuals marrying, but I am with eating pigs, so one is permissible but the other is a clear abomination."

That isn't a good reason. My comfort level is not something anyone else should have to change their behavior for. To demand my neighbors conduct their lives just in ways I personally approve is tyranny. It is only when a person believes in conducting their life according to the ways of our Creator and expect others to do the same that we have any moral, justifiable grounds for objecting to any disgusting behavior.

If we love what our Creator loves and despise what he despises, then we will no longer be hypocrites but will be able to firmly and consistently stand for what God defines as right. It's no longer an opinion. It's based on Truth, the Truth of God.

Until then, we can't in good conscience criticize homosexuals by saying, "that's a sin because God said so." They have every right to come back with, "God said eating shrimp is a sin too."

"Come back to me with your whole heart," God tells his people over and over. If we want to see evil beaten back, if we want to see perversion stop invading even our churches, we must repent of the arrogance we are showing toward God and accept his direction alone instead of trying to invent our own.

If we want to know our Messiah when his feet hit the ground on the Mount of Olives sometime in the perhaps-not-so-distant future, we have to be willing to give up our right of picking and choosing what we will do for the sake of our love for him.

It's still not too late.


30“And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. 31The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. 32And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls." - Joel 2:30-32