From courtrooms to classrooms, from boot camps to church steps, the issue of homosexuality continues to make headlines and raise questions. Of course, the most important question of all, what does the Bible say about homosexuality? We'll consider that today on Grace To You. Perhaps you heard about the recent decision by California's Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage, as well as plans to give California voters their say in November's election. The debate's probably not going anywhere anytime soon. Of course, if you really want to settle issues about homosexuality, you do need to consider what's most important, namely, what does God's Word say? Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur considers that lightning rod issue, launching a study simply called Homosexuality in the Bible. John, the issue you're about to look at is as talked about as ever. Of course, the last thing you want to bring to the discussion about homosexuality is more opinion. Yeah, basically I'm not much interested in opinion, even my own, when it comes to the issues that our world faces and that people face in their lives. I'd far rather weigh in from the Word of God, an authoritative Word. I remember having a lunch with the editor of the LA Times, and he says, why don't you give your opinion more often? You have so much influence. I said, do you really want another opinion? And why would I give my opinion when I can give the final word from the Word of God? And you know, the subject of homosexuality is a huge, huge subject today, and we're not here to give you an opinion on it. We're here to launch a study called Homosexuality and the Bible, God's View of Homosexuality. In a world where tolerance is king, where everybody thinks they have a right to make their own moral choices without any consequence, we want to tell them there are consequences, and there are serious consequences to the sin of homosexuality. But just exactly how does God feel about homosexuals? How should we feel about them? We're going to deal with what it is, how to respond to it, in this series, Homosexuality and the Bible. Don't miss a day. What homosexuals and all sinners need is the truth of God's Word. Learn how to present that truth with compassion. Follow John MacArthur now as he begins the look at Homosexuality and the Bible. The subject is the subject of the divine perspective or the divine view of homosexuality. We want to look at this particular issue from the eyes of God and thus through the Word of God. I suppose there should be some justification for isolating a sin like this and preaching on it. When there are so many sins which are equally heinous to God, the answer to those who might wonder why we would isolate this one should be apparent, but just in case it isn't, This sin has taken on unique properties in our culture. It has been declassified as a sin and turned into a sort of civil rights group. It is, at this particular point, a political issue and not a moral one, an issue of freedom and not a moral one or a spiritual one. The fact that it is being advocated not only in the private sector, but in the public sector, in public schools, and in government political parties and conventions, and that it is being ruled on in courts, and decided on in legislatures, and dealt with by governors and presidents and mayors and so forth, has taken this sin and sort of extracted it out of the general plurality of sins and given an identity all its own and consequently because of its prominence in our culture, it needs to be addressed. I want to begin by reading a very pertinent scripture and I want you to turn to it, 1 Corinthians chapter 6...1 Corinthians chapter 6. Three verses stand out with regard to this issue, verses 9, 10 and 11. 1 Corinthians 6 and verse 9. Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God." This is one of those bad news, good news passages. The bad news is the unrighteous don't inherit God's kingdom. The unrighteous who don't inherit God's kingdom are characterized as fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, and swindlers. Those are the kind of people who do not go into God's kingdom. So if you're one of those kinds of people, you don't go into God's kingdom. That's the bad news. But the good news is in verse 11. Those kind of people can be washed. Those kind of people can be sanctified. And those kind of people can be justified. And they have been. And they are being. So that he can say to the Corinthian church, such were some of you. You used to be fornicators and idolaters and adulterers and effeminate and homosexuals. You used to be thieves and coveters and drunkards and revilers and swindlers, but you aren't anymore because you've been washed from those sins and you've been sanctified and you have been justified. That's good news. I'm here to say God has good news for homosexuals. They are redeemable. They can be saved. They can be delivered from that sin. They can be washed from its stains. They can be set on a road of godly, holy, pure living called sanctification. And that had happened in the Corinthian church. When Paul wrote earlier to the Corinthians in the first part of his letter, he said, not many of you are noble. Not many of you are mighty, but God has chosen the base things to confound the noble and the mighty. You are a base, ignoble, humble people. You want to know how base they were? The Corinthian church was full of ex-fornicators, ex-idolaters, ex-adulterers, ex-effeminates, ex-thieves, ex-coveters, ex-drunkards, ex-slanderers, ex-extortioners, and even ex-homosexuals. But they were washed. Clean and they were sanctified that is separated from a life pattern of sin and they were justified that is declared righteous by God on the basis of the merits of Christ Such were some of us But we've been washed and we've been sanctified and we've been justified because God has set his saving love on sinners and forgiven them and I have stood on many occasions and have baptized many who have been delivered from a life of homosexual sin, a life of sodomy. By God's grace and through His saving love, homosexual sinners are redeemable. They are recoverable. They can be washed. They can be separated from that sin and they can live a pure life. They can be given a new heart and made fit for heaven. Some months ago I was standing in my office and I was looking at the little spindle that contains the messages that come in by phone and I noticed one that said, a young man has called and asked that you come to the hospital to see him, he's dying. And so I decided to go immediately and I went to the small hospital located there and went in the door and asked the person at the desk what room he was in and I walked down the hall and turned into the room and took a look at this man in bed, a man I didn't know. But I could take one look at him and tell he was dying of AIDS. He was just about skin and bones, gaunt with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, almost lifeless. And as I saw him, my attention moved to another man who was lying kind of casually across a small sofa that was in the hospital room. And I said to him, my name is John MacArthur, at which point this man hastily exited the room. and said, I'll leave you alone. I walked over to the bedside, knowing what I was about to hear. I took hold of his hand and he said to me, I'm dying. I have not long to live. I have AIDS and cancer is eating my body at a rapid rate. And then he burst into tears and said, but I'm afraid to die because I know I'm going to go to hell. He said, I've lived a sinful, sordid, homosexual life for I think 26 years. And then he went on to tell me, I said, tell me about yourself. And he told me about a Christian mother and a Christian father. He told me about being raised in a Christian home. He told me about attending two years of Bible college. He told me about all the rebellion in his heart and the beginnings of that homosexual sin and how eventually it blew him right out of the the Bible college into 26 years of the most gross kind of living in the mainstream of the rabid homosexual community. He said, now I'm dying and I know I'm going to go to hell. I said, tell me about homosexuality. Tell me about it. Tell me how you view it. Tell me what you think of it. And as he sobbed and cried, he said, it is sin, I've always known it's sin, I hate it, God hates it, and it damns men. And he said it over and over about, I suppose, a half a dozen ways, just as a cathartic to his own soul, the confession felt good. And I said, David, do you understand the gospel of Jesus Christ, the saving gospel of Jesus Christ? He said, yes. I said, tell me the gospel. And he reiterated to me unhesitatingly how Christ was God incarnate, born and died and rose again for our salvation and the efficacy of His death on the cross as a substitute for sinners. And he knew it well and he understood that salvation was by grace through faith and only God could save out of His own mercy the one who willingly believed and was eager to turn from his sin. I said, are you willing to turn from your sin to repent, cry out for God and ask Him for salvation? He said, yes, yes, yes. So I said, well, salvation is a gift that only God can give. Let me pray for you and ask God to give it to you. And so I began to pour out my heart. And as I was holding his hand and praying, he was squeezing my hand tightly, the emotion of his heart coming out through the hand. And I pleaded with the Lord to be gracious and save him and forgive him all this life of horrendous iniquity and deliver him. And I prayed for quite a long time, after which he burst into prayer, a sobbing kind of prayer, and confessed his sin again probably half a dozen times to the Lord and pleaded with the Lord to be merciful and to forgive him for the way in which he had blasphemed his name and rejected the gospel and lived in sin. Now this man is, by all intents and purposes, an absolutely inveterate homosexual who has sinned in ways that are beyond description. And he's crying out for mercy. After his prayer was over, there was a peace and a calm that came over his heart. Within five days from the day that I had prayed with him, he was gone, dead. But I said to him that day by the bed, I said, now that you've become a Christian, what's going to be different? He said, my whole life is going to be different. He said, the first thing is, my whole life is filled with people who live in a homosexual world. The fellow who was in here when you came in is my lover. My male nurse here is a homosexual and the AIDS Association has sent me an AIDS worker to be with me in these days who is also a homosexual. Everybody in my life is a homosexual." And he said, now I have the responsibility to tell them all of the sin that they're engaged in and call them all to come to Christ. God gave him five days to do that and then he was gone. Let me tell you something. One of the supreme tragedies of our time is the declassification of homosexuality as a sin. Because when you declassify it as a sin, you cut them off from their salvation source. It is a damning declassification. You're not being nice to homosexuals to call it an optional lifestyle. sexual preference. You're not nice to them to do that. That isn't kind. That isn't thoughtful. That isn't loving. That is damning. The kindest thing you could ever say to someone engaged in homosexual sin is, it is a sin that will damn you and it will exclude you from the kingdom of God forever. That's the kindest thing you can say. A proper diagnosis is absolutely crucial. This is not a preferred sexual orientation. This is not an alternate lifestyle. This is not a genetic thing. This is sin and perversion that damns men's and women's souls. The massive movement to appease the guilt and to release lust unchecked To free up homosexuals to live any way they want and to feel good about it by defining their blasphemous sexual conduct as nothing more than an alternative lifestyle is a damning thing. As we shall see later, those who advocate homosexual rights will have the blood of dead homosexuals on their hands. Homosexuality is an insatiable lust It is a drive that goes beyond anything that heterosexual people experience. And these people are not only trying to justify their own lust, their unchecked, unbridled, insatiable desires, but they are trying to sell it to everybody else because then that becomes even a greater justification. The more they can normalize it, and so they're selling it to your children. Massive propaganda campaign is geared to make society and the church believe that Homosexual practice is normal moral and proper for some people for many people Maybe for you Homosexuals, they say, are just another minority and they should enjoy every human right and every human freedom and they should be allowed to express their sexual acts as any minority has the right to freely express its cultural heritage. Of course, this is ridiculous. They are not a race of people. This is not a racial issue. This is not a cultural issue. They are deviants. They have a perverted view of sex and they want to identify it as if it were a racial minority. Allowing them to express their preference in the way we have has become the cause of the most devastating public health epidemic in the history of this nation. Allowing them to express their preference has become the cause of what will be the most devastating financial eruption The field of medical health has ever known and threatens to bankrupt the whole of America as we try to pay for the AIDS epidemic. Allowing them to express their preference is going to lead tens of thousands, if not millions, of children and young people into the pit of perversion, all under the tolerance of the state and the direction of the Board of Education. June in Los Angeles, in the public schools, was Gay Pride Month and it will be every June from now on. This kind of behavior is simply the expression of sexual lust twisted and uncontained. And when I say it is sexual lust twisted and uncontained, I mean exactly that. I understand that fornication is a sin and I understand that adultery is a sin in the sexual area. But there are proportions to homosexual sin that catapult it beyond what I can understand. I could go on and on with a litany of statistics, but it's not necessary. Just a few will suffice to give you the sense of what's the uncontained character of this lust. The average homosexual has had relationships with more than 500 different sexual partners. In LA, which is above the average, the average homosexual has 300 sex partners a year. Almost one a day, and that's different people. 30% of them have had over 1,000 sexual partners, and many of them have had over 1,500. They stop counting when they reach 1,600 partners. The conduct of the act that they do has no bounds. It's not some kind of heredity. It is unbridled, twisted, uncontained lust. I could give you more statistics but I think you have enough to understand. It isn't going to help to discuss the problem anymore. We're very much aware of it. What I'm here to say is this, this vile, wretched, wicked sin, like every other vile, wretched, wicked sin is forgivable by the grace of God. That's what I want to announce. Jesus Christ died on the cross and in his body he bore the sins of homosexuality. He bore in his own body our sins on the cross. I don't know if you ever thought about it like that, but think of the horror of what he bore. And he did it that he might redeem homosexuals. But to receive that forgiveness, the sinner has to see what he's doing as a sin. And as long as we cover up the wretchedness and the sinfulness of it, we are aiding and abetting the damnation. And that's why there is blood guiltiness. And I believe that we bear the blood guiltiness for the execution of homosexuals that's going to come at the hands of Almighty God and is already coming through AIDS because those who have advocated that as an alternative lifestyle or a civil right bear some of the guilt. There's an almost tireless effort on the part of homosexuals. They're vicious and they're violent in trying to prove that this is a normal kind of life for them because they have to deal with such unbearable guilt. We're trying to prove it's genetic, it's hereditary, it's somehow in the genes or the chromosomes. Let me sum it all up by saying this, I have read a myriad of things about this. The bottom line is this, there is absolutely no proof in any scientific realm that this is genetic. There is no physiological difference verifiable between a homosexual and a heterosexual. And you might also want to know that the vast majority of homosexuals also have sexual relationships with the opposite sex. It is a choice. It is sin. It is not just some kind of hereditary orientation. Now let's go back to 1 Corinthians 6 and look specifically at two words. In verse 9 is the word effeminate, followed by the word homosexuals. These are two kinds of people that do not enter the kingdom of God. Effeminate is malakos. The word means soft. It came to mean feminine or effeminate, a man who acts like a woman. who is soft, feminine. It also became a technical term for the passive partner in homosexual relationships, the one who takes the female role. Arndt and Gingrich, one of the classic lexicons, says the word also included men and boys who allowed themselves to become male prostitutes for homosexuals. You see, there are men and boys who aren't really desirous of homosexuality as much as they're desirous of money. And so they prostitute themselves for homosexuals. They don't maybe have that same passion, that same consuming perverted drive that the homosexuals have, but they will sell themselves to them. That word would encompass them, male prostitutes who are the passive partners to service the aggressive homosexuals. or passive partners who are homosexual who take the female role, the effeminates. And then the word homosexual, arsenokoites, it just means that, someone who has a relationship with the same sex, namely a man who has relations with a man. Paul says, those kind of people don't enter the kingdom. And he's really covered the ground. The active, aggressive homosexual, the passive, accepting, soft, effeminate homosexual, the one who aggressively engages in that, the one who is the passive partner, the macho kind of homosexual, and the soft, effeminate homosexual, all of them are excluded from the kingdom. They don't inherit it. Why? Because that kind of pattern of sin is exclusive of God's kingdom. They will never belong to God's kingdom with all its blessing and all its glory. The church then has to tell people that the door to the kingdom is shut if you live like that. If that's your choice and you're not willing to recognize it as sin and repent of it and bow the knee and accept the forgiveness of Christ, you're going to be shut out of God's kingdom. The church must, as the gatekeeper, Announce that we have to say to homosexuals if you continue that life pattern and you choose to live that way you have the door to the kingdom of God shut If you're willing to repent come to Christ for forgiveness and be washed and cleansed the door to the kingdom is open as the gatekeepers as the ones who hold the keys to the kingdom as the ones who open and close the church and its leaders must give that message and As Jesus said, it's not the healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. And sin is what he heals people from. So why have some churches stopped following the Lord's compassion example? And why do they withhold life-saving truth from people who need it, in particular homosexuals? Why do they instead tell homosexuals that Jesus accepted them just as they are? Important questions to keep in mind here on Grace to You with John MacArthur, his current focus, homosexuality and the Bible. Now, it's never been more important to know what the scripture says about homosexuality. Let me encourage you with that in mind to purchase John's entire study called Homosexuality and the Bible. It's on CD, tape or MP3. Contact us today. Call our toll-free number anytime, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's 1-800-55-GRACE. That translates to 800-554-7223. Homosexuality in the Bible is available on CD or MP3 download. If you pay $12 for the CD set, shipping is free, or $6 for the two MP3 files, just call 1-800-55-GRACE for the CDs, or go online for the CDs or MP3s at gty.org. Now, you can imagine this radio series on homosexuality in the Bible is, well, difficult for some to listen to because of the struggles that a family member or loved one has had with homosexuality, or because of that listener's personal struggle with homosexuality. I encourage you to pray for those folks that God's word would challenge and strengthen them. and let us know that you're praying we would appreciate your letter address to grace to you box 4000 panorama city california 91412 or contact us by email letters at gty.org that's letters at gty.org And now, for John McArthur, I'm Carl Miller, encouraging you to tune in tomorrow as he continues his look at homosexuality in the Bible, 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, here on Grace to You. What do you say to a person who sincerely believes he's a woman trapped in a man's body? How do you show compassion and still confront his sin? We'll consider the question tomorrow on the next Grace To You.