SAME SEX “MIRAGE” (Introduction)
Pastor Mike Harding1
Friday, June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling about same-sex marriage in the Obergefell decision:
“The 14th Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex.”
President Obama remarked approvingly, “It was a thunderbolt.” Seven years earlier he and Hillary Clinton boldly proclaimed on National TV that Marriage was exclusively between a man and a woman.
Justice Kennedy, the deciding vote, rationalized his decision by saying, “New dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.”
No Court in the history of the USA had ever redefined the core meaning of marriage until now. Five lawyers clothed in their black-robed wisdom enacted their vision of what marriage should be and then imposed that perversion upon the nation and the world. Chief Justice Roberts appropriately retorted, “Just who do we think we are?” Those who had no objective truth deposit sat speechless.
We should not be surprised. It is simply the next step in the nation’s descent into the modern moral sexual revolution. The past steps were removing prayer from school, legalizing abortion upon demand, partial-birth abortion, infanticide, providing free contraceptives to unmarried people, enacting no-fault divorce, perverted forms of sex education in the public schools, the unfettered proliferation of pornography, the acceptance of premarital and extra-marital sex, the numerical growth in co-habitation, and certain technological inventions including surrogate motherhood to allow same sex couples to have children. The end result is to have sex without babies and to have babies without sex. The future steps are polygamy, lowering the age of consent, transgenderism, and perhaps bestiality.
Such a ruling is God’s judgment on America according to Romans 1:26-27. Caesar has no right to take marriage from God. We must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). The NT Church founded upon the Scriptures, not human government, is the pillar and ground of the Truth (1 Tim 3:15).
Justice Thomas rightly noted that God alone is the source of our rights. Yet, these arrogant jurists set aside the truth that man and woman alone are made in the image of God as male and female. What God has joined together no man is to put asunder (Matt 19:6). Not only did these blackrobed jurists set aside the US Constitution, they set aside thousands of years of natural law and four thousand years of Biblical Revelation for a fifteen year novelty. It has been wisely stated by others that approval of Vice is itself a Vice in sanctioning what God has forever condemned.
Justice Roberts lamented, “people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.” Now all true Christians have officially been declared by the US government as bigots and homophobs.
Justice Scalia called the decision a “judicial putsch (sudden attempt to overthrow a government),” “irremediable corruption,” “a threat to democracy,” and after hearing Kennedy’s re-definition of marriage could only say one word, “Huh!”
What the Supreme Court and their supporters did had nothing to do with God’s definition of marriage. It was instead a human invention of man’s self-autonomous thinking. Instead of marriage, it is as one author describes “a mirage.” Their morally outrageous opinions rooted in black-robed wisdom are in direct conflict with the oracles of God (1 Peter 4:11). “Wisdom proclaims that all who hate her love death” (Prov 8:36).
Proverbs 16:12 It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness: for the throne is established by righteousness.
Psalm 94:20-23 Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law? They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood. But the LORD is my defence; and my God is the rock of my refuge. And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness; yea, the LORD our God shall cut them off.
The majority opinion concluded with arrogant hubris: “It is so ordered.” As one writer wisely points out, King Canute had his courtiers place his throne on the sea shore that he might command the tide not to come in. In his own self-rebuke he proclaimed, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”
The sun shall not rise, it is so ordered. One plus one is three; it is so ordered. Water shall flow uphill, it is so ordered. Male and Male are now married; it so ordered. A man is a woman and a woman is a man; it is so ordered. A man can use the girls’ public restroom, locker room, hotel room, and the women’s tees, it is so ordered. We will never answer to God for our actions and decisions, it is so ordered.
Chief Justice Roberts asked in his dissenting opinion, “The real question is … who decides what constitutes marriage?” The answer is the one true and living God, creator of Heaven and Earth, maker of man and woman, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the God before whom our sinful rationalizations with perish, the God before whom each man and woman will stand and give an account of every thought and action, the God who knows you better than you know yourself. There will be no where to hide and no where to run. Just you and your Maker alone.
To be continued…
Mike Harding is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Troy, Troy, Michigan.
This article is the manuscript form of a message preached June 15, 2016 at the Annual Fellowship meeting of the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International in Indianapolis, IN. The audio version of this message can be found here.
- Note: Special thanks to Doug Wilson for some introductory material, Andreas Kostenberger’s “God, Marriage, and Family,” Albert Mohler’s “We Cannot Be Silent,” Rolland McCune’s Systematic Theology, and Commentaries by Hugh Ross, Victor Hamilton, John Davis, and James Boice. [↩]