After we are justified by God, we can never return to Adam. What does this mean for someone like me who lived as a lesbian for a decade and believed I was gay? It means that homosexuality is part of my biography, not my nature. My nature is securely chained in Christ (Colossians 3:10-20). What does it mean if a Christian falls back into an old sin pattern? It means that he is acting against his true nature. How do we stop acting against our true nature in Christ when our flesh craves our old sin patterns? By going to war with our sin through the power of Christ’s blood.
What Is Truth?
The Bible is Truth, both in word and in substance. When one passage of scripture may seem unclear to us, we interpret it in light of the clarity of God’s unified Biblical witness.[1] There are no problem passages in scripture.
In His image, God created human beings ontologically as men or women. Our sexual difference is part of our origin and eternity. We bear the image of God in purposeful pattern.
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them’. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’” Genesis 1:26-28
This magisterial passage, known as the Creation Ordinance, reveals that God established men and women for the normative and godly calling of biblical marriage. God planted the seed of the gospel in the Garden of Eden. Scripturally speaking, heterosexuality is natural, and homosexuality is unnatural.[2] When the Apostle Paul revisits the Creation Ordinance in 1 Timothy and Romans 1, he states that homosexuality is “contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:10) and denies the being of God (Romans 1:25-27).
When Eve obeyed the serpent over God, all of humanity was plunged into sin, a sin recorded as Adam’s (Genesis 3). Adam’s sin, imputed to all of mankind, created a cosmological crisis. Puritan Thomas Goodwin depicts this crisis in the form of two giants: one is Adam, and the other is Christ.
Goodwin’s word picture looks like this: chained to Adam’s belt are all men and women born after him. God in mercy removes the chains of his chosen ones from Adam and locks them onto Christ. God’s mercy has a name: justification (Romans 3: 24-25). Justification is “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”[3] In justification, God secures every saved person’s chain to Christ, guaranteeing a new nature and future. From our posture of justified men and women, chained firmly to Christ, we begin the lifelong journey of sanctification (Ephesians 4:23-24): “a work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.”[4]
[1] “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the full and true sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold but one) it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly,” Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1.9. The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, ed. Joel Beeke. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014: 2029.
[2] See Rosaria Butterfield, Openness Unhindered, chapter 4, “Sexual Orientation: Freud’s 19th Century Category Mistake,” (Pittsburgh: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2015); 93-112. While sexual orientation as a category of personhood is a Freudian addition, heterosexuality and homosexuality are not equally problematic examples. Heterosexuality is always the biblical pattern, although its application may be sinful, as in the case of adultery. Homosexuality is always the unbiblical pattern and cannot be “sanctified” without being obliterated. Calling people to celibacy and rejecting the idea of sanctified change that allows either for heterosexual marriage or content singleness is unchristian. In addition to being sinful, homosexuality is pagan. For more on this, see Peter Jones, The Other Worldview. Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2015. When current self-described “gay Christians” feel “othered” by biblical Christians, there is wisdom in this recognition. Gay Christianity is another—a separate and a different—religion.
[3] Question 33 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is Justification?” The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, ed. By Dr. Joel Beeke. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Press, 2014: 2055.
[4] Question 35 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is Sanctification?” The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, 2056.
