I’m looking at the affirmations I made about marriage in a sermon last week. I’m up to the seventh affirmation:

Gay marriage is not Christian marriage.

I’ve already discussed this a bit in the comment section of an earlier post. I think that Jesus shows us what marriage is in Matthew 19. There he says that in the beginning, God created two genders, and marriage occurs when those two genders come together.

Let’s be clear. The driving force behind the move to legalize gay marriage in the Western world is not about being right with God. It’s about property and civil rights. That’s one reason I think we need to clear that civil marriage and Christian marriage are not the same thing. If judges and politicians decide to amplify the definition of marriage to include homosexual unions, that doesn’t change what Christian marriage is.

Homosexual marriage existed in the first century. The Greco-Roman world knew of such unions. It’s not a modern invention. (It’s interesting that the Wikipedia article on the history of same-sex unions says: “These same-sex unions continued until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.”) Yet the Bible is consistent in excluding homosexuality from the definition of a holy life and using heterosexual terms to speak of marriage.

Our society is changing, and our laws will surely change. But none of that will change what the Bible has said.

Affirmation #7: Gay marriage is not Christian marriage.