50 - Did Jesus ever discuss homosexuality?
- rcbarbas
- Mar 29, 2024
- 23 min read
Updated: Apr 20, 2024
There are a few factors to consider when deciding how to deal with this topic.
There are scriptures in the bible that address homosexuality that have been dubbed “clobber verses” by the LGBTQ community. You can look up the term, it’s out there. The biggest two are in Leviticus, 18:22 “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.” and 20:13 “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” These two verses are absolutely clear about God’s position regarding two people of the same gender having sex with one another. He says it is detestable. In the same search, you may also find a book titled Unclobber, by a “pastor” named Colby Martin. (I put the word pastor in quotation marks to indicate that while he may be the spiritual leader of a group, that does not necessarily connote he’s a Christian, properly leading a group of Christians) He makes a point of showing how, in the history of the church, people have taken scripture out of context and made others feel bad about themselves.
People have, in truth, used the bible to bash on folks who do not conform to every teaching of the bible, and Christians have bashed other Christians for having different beliefs on the same subject matter. That’s the human nature side of us; we have a tendency to use whatever information we find that we agree with to bash someone else who believes differently on the same topic.
Spanking is OK - you shouldn’t physically discipline your kids.
Drinking is bad – it’s OK to have a drink.
You have to be baptized to be saved – baptism is a sign of alignment with Jesus, not a requirement for salvation.
Liberal - Conservative.
Collard greens are good – no they’re not (I don’t know why there’s a debate on this – they’re just nasty)
The list goes on and on. It makes no difference, in reality, what some pastor says about how people have treated each other and people being upset by God’s word; the truth of God is the driving point here. We encounter people every day; people have faults and they are constantly on display. God’s word has no fault.
The two scriptures I just presented are unequivocal about God’s stance on the topic. When reading Leviticus 18 and 20, one should notice that chapter 18 states the sex crime and chapter 20 revisits it with the penalty that should accompany it. (I know, we now live in an age of grace and mercy and we are not supposed to be putting people to death for Old Testament crimes. I prefer the grace and mercy approach because I would probably have received beatings for Old Testament faults). The immediate aim of this section is simply – what does the bible say? The bible says it is detestable, don’t engage in the activity.
Nobody requires anyone to believe the bible; even God doesn’t require it. However, He does present the consequences of not believing. As a matter of fact, Jesus’ directive to the disciples in Matthew 28:19, 20, upon His resurrection, was to teach and baptize people and make more disciples; He did not tell them to make anyone believe His precepts. We all have the right to believe or to not believe what the text says. In John 1:12, John wrote “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name”. Believing gives us the right to become children of God, not believing gives us the right to remain not the children of God. Believing the bible is a requirement, according to the bible, to get to heaven. (I know; that particular statement is circular reasoning, but so is saying that if you speed you may get a speeding ticket, because speeding tickets are given for speeding – but it doesn’t negate the fact of the statement. The circular statement is my fault for not giving a better explanation – but brevity is key in these bible studies. These are not dissertations)
If you believe the bible, you need to believe all of it. If you believe the law, you need to believe all of the law. If I’m driving 46-mph in a 45-mph zone, I can be issued a ticket. If I don’t believe all of the law, I may well encounter the consequence side of the judicial system.
If you believe, or don’t believe the bible, you probably need to admit whether you care about it or not. Billions of people do not know, or care, what the bible says. I don’t care what the Koran, the Book of Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness version of the bible say – except in how they impact people. Muslims have murdered people because their holy scriptures lead them to do so. Jehovah’s Witness bible (New World Translation) teaches there is no Hell. The Mormons teach, from a great misunderstanding of text, that Jesus and Satan are brothers. These teachings impact people. Your behavior is impacted by whether you care what the bible says or not. I’ve known people who said they were Christians or Muslims, but who also said they didn’t care one whit about it, they just went along with what their parents said because it was easier on them than arguing or worrying about it. I had a Saudi friend/coworker when I worked in Saudi Arabia, who said that he didn't care about Islam, he just had to say he was a Muslim because it was the law. And he would drive to Bahrain on weekends to drink, then return for the work week.
It’s really that simple; First - do you care about the bible or not.
It’s very easy to be offended by what the bible says, even if we don’t believe it. It tells us how to treat others – and we usually don’t comply with being told what to do. It tells us that God is our creator and we need to love Him with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength – and we usually comply with that. It tells us to take our thoughts captive – and we don’t comply with that. It tells us not to use bad language – and we usually don’t comply with that... I could go on, and on, and on... When we are told, in Leviticus 18:23, not to have sex with an animal, or in 18:16 not to have sex with our sister-in-law, I have NO problem with those. But when Jesus said, in Matthew 5:22, not to call people stupid or we “will be in danger of the fire of Hell”, that rubs me the wrong way. Some people really are stupid – aren’t they? Shouldn’t we get to point that out?
When we think about it for a moment, we should realize that everyone has a different set of circumstances and experiences from which they developed, and if we had faced the same circumstances we might have turned out the same way, so nope – no one is stupid. Am I offended by the bible saying not to call people stupid? No. It's God's universe and His rule; I had better not be offended at His sovereign dictates. But it is really a hard thing to control, especially in the heat of a moment.
Emotion is ALWAYS the reason people are offended. If someone points out that I am wrong, I can be offended or not, depending on the situation. If someone tells me that I’m a fat, bald headed idiot in front of 350 people, I am likely to be offended – my feelings get hurt. If my wife shows me that I made a math error in our check book, I’m aggravated at my error, but not offended.
If I don’t agree with something someone says, why would I take it personally and be offended? The only way I can be offended by someone’s words is by allowing them to have value in my life. Is their opinion more important to me than what I think is right and wrong? I’ve had people call me “stupid” before and it didn’t bother me in the least; I knew that it was just a personal attack from aggravation. If someone called me “stupid” and really believed it I would be insulted and hurt.
If my belief is anchored in right and wrong, then why would I care about someone saying something that I think is wrong? (I understand that if I believe something is right/wrong, but others believe something else is right/wrong there may be social consequences to my disagreement with their ideas, but that is a bit off topic). However it plays out – offended is still based on emotion, not necessarily based on fact. If someone calls me stupid, I shouldn’t be offended. It’s not a fact; I’m not stupid. If someone calls me fat and ugly, it may be a fact, but my response of being offended would still just be an emotion; me being fat and ugly just keeps me from winning a beauty contest or bodybuilding competition, it does not negate my value as a person.
Being offended is our personal response to a topic/situation and how it is presented to us.
This one is kind of tough to answer. Most people misquote, misunderstand and misinterpret (which leads to the misunderstanding) the bible. (If most people understood it correctly, then they would be Christians, and because most people are not Christians it can be easily asserted that they misunderstand the bible). Colby Martin, the pastor mentioned in the first section above, tries to explain the bible position on homosexuality in light of the times it was written. He has the audacity to suppose that as society has changed and become more accepting of the LGBTQ community, then we should accept them as well. Jesus taught love, and if we don’t accept them then we don’t love them, blah blah blah.
Has Jesus' opinion, or society changed, over the millennia? No. In Hebrews 13:, the writer penned “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” In Genesis 6:5, God said “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time”. In Ecclesiastes 1:9, Solomon wrote “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” People are people and we behave the same way repeatedly, over and over. We are bad, we sin, we try and make others feel worse about themselves so that we feel better about ourselves.
The fact is, we are supposed to love others we love as ourselves. That means we are supposed to be concerned for the welfare of others as we care for our own welfare. We should care for their lives and that includes what happens after death. We don’t have permission to hate anyone. However, there are scriptures that show some bible “heroes” being tired of others and dismissing them.
In Psalms 13, 31, 37, and 94, the writer (usually King David) states disgust for, and requests God’s revenge on, people who did him wrong (all of chapter 13, then 31:6 “I hate those who cling to worthless idols; as for me, I trust in the Lord.”; 37:1, 2 “1 Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong; 2 for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.”; 94:1, 2, 23 “1 The Lord is a God who avenges. O God who avenges, shine forth. 2 Rise up, Judge of the earth; pay back to the proud what they deserve... 23 He will repay them for their sins and destroy them for their wickedness; the Lord our God will destroy them”). In Acts 15: 36-41, Paul and Barnabas had such an argument about John (a.k.a.) Mark, that they parted company. Paul didn’t want to take John along with them because he had already deserted them, while Barnabas wanted to give him another shot at helping. Paul said I don’t think so, and “they parted company”. The point here is that King David was a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22) yet he understood that God’s wrath will be served and even went so far as to ask God to bring it on his enemies. Paul wrote half the New Testament, and most of the people who have been saved have done so by understanding, at least, some of Paul’s writings, yet he walked away from working with someone he didn’t trust. They both understood love, but they also were humans with emotions and a keen understanding of God and His ways.
If we are offended by what someone says the bible says, are we sure they know what they’re talking about, or are they just blowing out some smoke they heard from someone else?
There is a group that calls themselves BHI (Black Hebrew Israelites); they believe that true Jews are black and many blacks are Jews. They tend to take sentences in the bible and extrapolate them onto their own ideas.
One of their bible studies says that Job was a black man because in Job 30:30 he said “My skin grows black and falls from me; My bones burn with fever.”. The problem with this is that Job says “My skin grows black” not "my skin is black". Something was making his skin change color. Recall that in Job chapter 2, God allowed Satan to wreak havoc on Job up to the point of killing him, but to not kill him. And Satan had imposed such illness and physical discomfort on him that Job’s wife said “curse God and die”. He was covered with all sorts of sores and scabs; his body was ill and burning with temperature. The black on his skin was most likely scabs and sores, dried pus, etc. The burning in his bones was most likely excess temperature from his body trying to heal itself. The bible doesn’t say that Job was an Israelite; as a matter of fact, Moses is credited with penning this story, and he didn’t mention Job’s ancestry – ancestry is a big deal to Israelites - in order for Job to have been an Israelite his parents would have been, but there is no mention of his background as being an Israelite. They take this completely out of context to make the bible say what they want it to say.
Now we move to their use of Song of Solomon 1:5 “I am dark, but lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.” They say this is proof that Solomon was a black guy. Again, reading in context is not their strong suit. Why would Solomon refer to himself in the third person as “dark ...like the curtains of Solomon” instead of dark like my curtains. But even more amusing is that the context of this is poetry, not self-revelation. This is the saying of a woman, one of Solomon’s women. I would posit, a black woman. From verse 1 she begins her poetry with “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” and continues, vs. 4 “The king has brought me into his chambers.”. This is NOT King Solomon speaking; it is one of his wives or concubines. This is poetry of one his wives or concubines, of which he had some 1,000 total (1 Kings 11:3).
Reading out of context continues. They use Deuteronomy 28:68 to say the bible spoke of blacks being sold to American slave traders. “The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.”. They translate “Egypt” as bondage – and that is NEVER the case anywhere in the bible. The word “Egypt” comes from the Hebrew word Misrayim, Mizraim (one of Noah’s grandsons through Ham) and that word is translated as ‘Egypt”. In the bible, it ALWAYS means the people or the location of the nation – it is NEVER a verb. And the misunderstanding of comparing them to American slaves by saying “but no one will buy you” is absurd. The entire American slave trade was based on people being bought and sold – not people who couldn’t be sold. As bad as the slave trade was, it was commerce, and no successful business person would buy a product, take it to the ocean and dump it and go back for more, or purchase a product that will not sell.
There actually is a recorded event of a crew throwing slaves overboard due to poor navigation resulting in lack of supplies. I'm not the right person to announce what the judgement was in that circumstance, but I would imagine a few of those folks probably went to Hell when they died; I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
"The Zong massacre was a mass killing of more than 130 enslaved African people by the crew of the British slave ship Zong on and in the days following 29 November 1781. The William Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the ship as part of the Atlantic slave trade. As was common business practice, they had taken out insurance on the lives of the enslaved Africans as cargo. According to the crew, when the ship ran low on drinking water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw enslaved Africans overboard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre. There were probably other situations wherein people were thrown overboard, but by and large, this was not a typical business practice.
I am offended by the BHI teachings/beliefs as well as I know why they are wrong factually. (I'm offended by Nazi beliefs and Muslim teachings as well.)
It’s OK to be offended by what someone says that the bible says. Sometimes people are just wrong and it needs to be recognized. King David recognized it; Paul recognized it (he didn’t want to work with John Mark, in 1 Tim 1:20 he turned Hymenaeus and Alexander over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme); We can see wrong teaching everywhere (BHI in this example) and it’s OK to be offended; we should be. It’s not OK to disagree with the truth though.
In 2 Peter 2:6-8, Peter penned “if he (God) condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)”. In Genesis 13, Abram and Lot had so much stuff, people and animals that the land could not support them both, so Abram gave Lot the option of where he would choose to live. Lot chose the plain of the Jordan, near Sodom (verses 12 and 13 say “Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom. Now the people of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord.”), because the land was well watered like the garden of the LORD (Eden) and the land of Egypt (in verse 10). In the long run, it turns out that Lot wasn’t very pleased with the results of his choice of where to live. Peter said Lot was distressed by the lawless conduct of the residents of the area. And he said that God made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly. Lot was emotionally offended by the fact that the people were nasty.
In Romans 1:32, at the end of an 11-verse diatribe about sin – including homosexuality, Paul wrote “Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them”. His text sincerely suggests that we should be offended by what people do, and that can include what we do ourselves.
Just be offended by the right stuff.
So, what did Jesus say about homosexuality? Most people would argue that He isn’t recorded as having addressed it. Certainly there is no text wherein Jesus said “thou shalt not be a dude dating and marrying other dudes”. Sometimes, not saying, or doing, something directly is just as powerful and directive.
Say, for example, (30 years ago) I had Chuck Norris’ son by the arm and had a stick in my other hand getting ready to smack his kid for splashing me with water. Let’s also say that Chuck Norris was standing close by and saw this, and I saw him seeing this. Now, let’s say Chuck gave me the stink eye about the present situation. Would I need to have a conversation with Mr. Norris to see if he approved me hitting his son with a stick? Sometimes, the exact words you want to hear are not required for a statement to be made. Wherein does this apply to Jesus and LGBTQ?
First, let’s understand that God wrote the bible. 2 Timothy 3:16 says “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”. And we need to understand that Jesus IS God. Colossians 1:15 says “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation”, and Colossians 2:9 says “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form”. (If Jesus is the image of the invisible God – He is the physical version of the invisible. Jesus cannot be God unless all of God exists in Him, and according to Paul, all of the fulness of God lives in Jesus – so Jesus is God). If the bible says something, we can be sure that it is God’s fact.
In Genesis 2:24, God said, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (they become united).
In Matthew 19:4-6, Jesus said, ““Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.””
In Ephesians 5:31, 32, Paul wrote ““For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
Notice that Christ is the husband/groom of the church and the church is the bride of Christ; there are NOT two Christs marrying each other, or two brides. Marriage (man and woman relationship) is based on the relationship Jesus has with His bride – the church. (not that the church is a "girl", but we are referred to as the bride, and Jesus denoted that the bride is not a man.)
Jesus was very clear about marriage – it is between a man and a woman. He didn’t have to specify that two dudes can’t marry each other any more than a cat and a fig tree can’t marry each other. He said – for this reason a man and a woman become united. That’s it. Nothing else needs to be said.
Chuck Norris doesn’t NEED to tell me not to hit his kid. I get it from what he didn’t say.
Then we could go on to examine Sodom and Gomorrah and see their destruction. It was for sin. Some people have argued that homosexuality was NOT the reason, because in Ezekiel 16:49 God said ““‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”. No mention of homosexuality there; just sin. BUT... let’s look at the next verse., 50 “They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” Just as Leviticus 18:22 said – detestable. The bible doesn’t say that arrogant, overfed and unconcerned are detestable; it describes them as bad behavior, but not detestable. It does describe homosexuality as detestable though; twice, in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.
One should easily see that when Ezekiel penned “They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.”, “therefore” indicates a result of a previous action – it means “for that reason...”, “because of...”. For the reason of the detestable things they did, God did away with them. Not because of the regular sins of arrogance, being overfed and unconcerned about others; I’m pretty sure that the usual sins of mankind played a role in their demise, but the detestable sin of homosexuality is what got the main billing for their demise.
According to Colossians 1:15, 16 Jesus created ALL of nature, everything that exists. (“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.”) When Paul wrote “thrones or powers or rulers or authorities” he was describing angels and their positions, things that we consider beyond our natural world. Jesus created all of nature, including what we consider super-natural, and in all of that, there is nothing that leads one to believe that two guys, or two women, can reproduce after their kind. (Recall that in the creation account of Genesis chapter one, Moses wrote “after its/their kind” ten times showing that things reproduce according to what they are, not something that they are not; it requires a male and female human to reproduce.) In Genesis 1:26, 27 God made mankind; In Genesis 2:20 God said that there was no suitable helper for Adam, so God made Eve to be Adam’s helper (notice that Adam and Eve had the complementary body parts to fulfill the directive God gave them in Genesis 1:28). In Genesis 1:28, God told Adam and Eve to procreate and populate the earth. God made a male and a female and assigned them roles according to their design. He didn’t ask Adam if he would prefer a male or a female partner; God decided to make them male and female and nature supports that decision.
If all of the human population decided to be gay, the human race would cease to exist because nature says NO, and God created nature.
Jesus DID give a recorded opinion on homosexuality, no matter what someone wants to read into it. It doesn’t matter if Adam and Steve say "don’t ridicule us, it hurts our feelings"; nature says don’t do it, it doesn’t work.
BHI (Black Hebrew Israelites) reads into the bible that blacks are the true Israelites, but that doesn’t make them right. There are plenty of white folks who believe the bible, or just nature, make them better than others - but they're wrong. It’s what the bible says, not what we try and make it say, that counts. The bible says to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, do not steal, do not murder, etc.; it also says do not have sex with your mother or animals. Read what's there and understand that; don't try and put your feelings into the rules of the universe, the universe doesn't care what we think or how we feel. Our feelings don't make any of us right; sometimes our feelings just get hurt, and that's too bad.
Jesus did not tell us, straight up, how to deal with gay folks, such as saying “this is how you deal with people of the LGBTQ community...”. But we can read of His other dealings with people and probably get a good hint.
In John 4:1-26 He met a Samaritan woman at a well and asked her for a drink of water.
A little background may help here; the Samaritans were Israelites – but they were considered low class people by other Israelites. When the Israelites were taken as slaves by the Babylonians, then the Persians, some of them intermarried with Babylonians and Persians and “polluted” their blood line; when the Israelites returned to Israel in the time of Nehemiah and Zerubbabel and these people returned as well, they were treated as 2nd class citizens. The area of Samaria was assigned to them and the rest of the “righteous” Israelites would actually go around Samaria to get to the other side, to prevent them from walking through Samaria.
Following is an image that I hope helps.
This is a map of the Berlin U-Bahn (subway) system when the Berlin wall was up in the 1980s.
I was stationed there, in the U.S. Air Force, for three years and we were not allowed to ride the U-Bahn through East Berlin. In order to get from A to B on this map, we had to go west, around the wall, to the Zoologischer Garten (Zoo) and then northeast. It was a 45-minute ride to go around a 5-minute ride. But the rule was “you will not go through East Berlin.” If a U.S. military member got caught in East Berlin without proper paperwork, it would start an international incident between the U.S., Russians and East Germans.
The purple area of the following map was Samaria, in Israel during Jesus' lifetime here.
You can see that if you were to walk around it, it would take you a couple of extra days to get from point A to point B. Samaria was about 45 miles north to south and 35 miles east to west. Jesus decided to walk through it instead of around it, and He took His disciples on the trip. He sent them to town for food and met "the Samaritan lady" at the well. When He asked for water, she balked and said, in verse 9 ““You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans)” (The Jews treated Samaritans like 2nd class citizens) In His conversation with her, it gets to the point where Jesus told her to go call her husband and come back. She said she didn’t have a husband and Jesus recounted, for her witness, the five husbands to whom she had been married, as well as not being married to the man she was presently with.
He did NOT speak with her to condemn her, but to discuss the truth with her; the truth about who He is and what He offers, even though society said she was a 2nd class citizen, He went out of His way to offer her what she needed to get to heaven. When He described her personal history to her, she was shocked and realized that He must be God, or at least an envoy of God. She went to town and said she met someone who could actually be the Messiah. As a matter of fact, in Acts 1:8, Jesus told the disciples “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."”, Jesus specifically included Samaria in His directive to His disciples to witness to all people because all folks matter. It might have been a stick in the eye to some that Jesus specifically included Samaritans in His directive, but He is interested in EVERY person He created, despite our perceived baggage.
In John 8:2-11, the Pharisees (legal teachers and experts) took a woman caught in adultery to Jesus to see how He would deal with her. In verses 4&5, they said ““Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”” – referencing Leviticus 20:10 ““‘If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death”. John wrote that Jesus’ response was (verse 6-8) “...But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground”.
The story doesn’t tell us what He wrote on the ground, but I don’t think it was;
“Well, we were just another band out of Boston,
On the road to try to make ends meet
Playin’ all the bars, sleepin’ in our cars
And we practiced right on out in the street,
No, we didn’t have much money,
We barely made enough to survive,
But when we got up on stage and got ready to play
People came alive,” (That’s a great song by Boston, but I don’t think Jesus scratched those lyrics in the dirt that day .)
Most scholars seem to think He was probably writing the Ten Commandments in the dirt. It seems as if everyone was standing around watching Him write without any personal reflection, but when He stood up and said “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” then bent back down and kept writing, it was probably a Chuck Norris moment before Chuck Norris existed. Jesus didn’t exactly say “I’ll beat you senseless for messing with this woman” but He invited everyone there to examine themselves in context of what He was doing. And I would suggest that it might have been a threat when He mentioned throwing the first stone. No one took Him up on His offer; everyone walked away. When everyone realized they weren’t any better than the woman they had intentionally embarrassed, they ALL shut up and shrunk back, and Jesus said “neither do I condemn you”.
Jesus didn’t come to condemn people; He came to offer salvation to us. John 3:17 “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”. Surely we all deserve condemnation, but that’s not God’s plan – unless we die without believing in Him.
Jesus didn’t give us permission to denigrate people, so we can’t rightfully go around being nasty to them. We CAN discuss what the bible says about different sins, righteousness, holiness, Satan, Jesus, salvation, God, mercy, grace, and any other topics in the bible – without fault, as long as we are discussing and discovering bible truths. I can say it’s a bad thing to murder or rape people and most everyone will agree. If I say being gay is wrong, many people will be offended because of emotion, not because of fact. The fact is, God said it is wrong, and nature supports that.
Jesus’ example is for us to be considerate toward others with all their flaws – everyone has flaws. We are not supposed to accept their behavior as OK - Paul makes it clear in Romans 1:32, above, that is wrong – but we are to be considerate of people as God’s creation, and offer them help as needed.
One final thought on the topic, as this is running a bit long; the Old Testament scriptures in Leviticus 18 and 20 were addressed to Old Testament Jews, not to the New Testament Christians. Borrowing this point from Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, founder of the Dallas Theological seminary - We should NOT confuse scriptures for Jews with scriptures for Christians. 2 Timothy 3:16 says “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”; one would be wise to note that there is a distinct difference between Old Testament and New Testament approach to issues. A major flaw that we experience is when we confuse the two and apply scripture teachings across belief lines. Scripture may be useful for teaching a moral topic, but the same action may not necessarily be applicable in Christianity and Old Testament Judaism.
The Old Testament directives were that certain sins were to be punished by death, the New Testament doesn’t offer such suggestions. The moral teaching from the Old Testament directive is that God declared certain acts to be detestable; we should maintain that thought. The actions are detestable, but the person’s soul is not without value.
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