Sex in a Disordered World
The problem is that neither our desires nor the world in which we experience these desires lines up in a simple way with the theory I have suggested. It would be fine if, as we grew into puberty, the following occurred: We experienced a simple sexual urge towards one person of the opposite sex. She or he reciprocated those desires. We got married and lived happily ever after, our sexual urges cheerfully channeled into the procreation of children and the creation of an outward-looking, God-honoring home that helped humanity govern God’s world in an entirely harmonious and responsible way. As if!
Sexual Frustration
But in fact we experience as much frustration as we do sexual satisfaction. There may be a long period before marriage. Some never marry. Others are widowed young. Many experience same-sex desire in some measure for a time, and for some these same-sex desires intensify and stay with them for a long time, perhaps a lifetime. Most people experience sexual desire towards not one, but many other people. Married people experience frustrations and disappointments in the physical intimacy of their marriage relationships. Even those whose sexual relationships are mostly satisfying and easy will experience adulterous or pornographic desires at times. Many who desire children will find those desires frustrated by involuntary childlessness. Others have children, but the children get ill and die, or the children disappoint by godlessness. In many ways, sexual disorder rears its ugly head in all of us.
Perhaps one of the more obvious manifestations of this in western cultures is our obsessive preoccupation with sex, verging on cultural addiction at times, and exaggerated and magnified by the proliferation of easily available pornography on the Internet. It is generally assumed that a person is eccentric and odd if they are not sexually active. And yet a promiscuous young person may carry around with them a dream of happy marriage and children that is quite at odds with their current behavior.
So the practical question is this: What are we supposed to do with our sexual longings and desires in the real world? It is all very well saying that sex is created by God to be used in the service of God, but what if I can never marry, or if my marriage is a great disappointment and doesn’t seem to serve God in the way I had hoped? Does the Christian worldview have anything to say to me in the real world of frustration and confusion? How does Creation Order impact living in a frustrated and frustrating broken world?
A Test Case: Homosexual Desires
I want to address this question by taking as my example perhaps the most painful and certainly the most controversial issue in contemporary culture wars: “gay marriage.” I choose this, not because it is the only example of desires that are not ordered according to God’s will, but because it is perhaps the most acute of those disordered desires. It is well-known that the past half-century has seen a sea change in social attitudes towards homosexual desire and practice, epitomized in the USA by the decision of the American Psychological Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.59
The Bible regards all same-sex attraction as a disordered desire, and same-sex intimacy as sinful. The arguments of those who wish to claim that the Bible actually accepts and approves homosexual desire and practice have been comprehensively refuted by Robert Gagnon.60
So instead of engaging with that issue, I want to ask two questions. First, what is the origin and cause of homosexual desires? Second, what does the Christian worldview have to say to those who experience them?
The Origin of Homosexual Desires
In Romans 1:21–23, Paul speaks of a terrible “exchange” by which human beings cease to worship the one true God and begin to worship idols of their own choice, created things rather than the Creator. This is followed in verses 24–31 by a threefold “handing over” by God, in which human beings are handed over to the consequences of false worship. These verses give a picture of moral disorder, disordered morality that is the consequence of disordered worship. He chooses homosexuality as his prime example.
But why does Paul take homosexual desire as his leading example in Romans 1:24–27? We feel uneasy because Paul seems to make a minority group his prime target for disapproval.
Before answering this, we need to be clear that he is speaking of all homosexual desire and practice. He is not just speaking of the Greek practice of sex between men and boys, since he speaks of lesbianism as well: “even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another” (Romans 1:26–27). The word Paul uses here for “natural” means behavior that is in line with Creation Order; it does not mean what an individual finds subjectively “natural” for himself or herself.
There would seem to be two reasons that Paul begins with this disorder. The first is that it graphically illustrates an “exchange” between order and disorder. He picks up the word “exchange” from verses 23 and 25, and uses it in verse 26 of lesbian desire. Same-sex erotic desire is one of the clearest expressions of disordered affection. But we must remember that this is not the root of sin; it is but one example of a sin that is a consequence of the fundamental sin, which is idolatry. Further, we cannot draw a one-to-one equation between individual idolatry and individual homosexual desire
(cf. John 9 in another context). Paul’s point is that the very existence of these desires in society is an evidence (among others) of God’s handing us over to the consequences of our idolatry. All the other examples in the list also illustrate disordered desire (Romans 1:29–31). All these are the result of disordered worship.
The second reason Paul begins with this is that homosexuality was supremely the Gentile sin. When the Jew looked at the Gentile world, one of the things that most horrified him and made him most happy to be a Jew was the appalling practice of homosexuality. Popular religious books railed against Gentile homosexuality as proof of the moral superiority of the Jews. The Jewish Christian hearing verses 24–27 would have been cheering Paul on, which sets Paul up for the next stage of his argument in
Romans 2. He ends chapter 1 by lamenting a pagan society in which people not only do terrible things; they actually give public approval to those who do them (Romans 1:32). These behaviors become accepted and acceptable. Nevertheless, some of his hearers (notably Jewish ones) would have responded to this by saying, “Dear Paul, I quite agree. You may be sure I don’t approve at all of such terrible behavior.” Paul then begins chapter 2 by writing, “You, therefore, are without excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else” (i.e., who don’t approve). In a way, he wants the self-righteous listeners to applaud the argument of chapter 1 so that he can humble them under grace in chapter 2.61
Paul’s main point is that the moral chaos of the world is the visible evidence now of the wrath of God. God’s wrath is neither vindictive nor arbitrary (i.e., not a celestial temper tantrum, as someone has put it), but rather his hot, settled, personal, and utterly necessary and right hatred of evil. How is the wrath of God being revealed (Romans 1:18)? Answer: by moral chaos. As someone has said, “The history of the world is the judgment of the world.” “Look at a messed-up world,” Paul says, “and you will see that God is angry.” This is clearly not the world as it was meant to be. God’s anger is revealed in present degradation, of which homosexual desire and practice is one example. We must therefore be clear that the existence of homosexual desires is one evidence of the moral disorder let loose on humanity by disordered worship. It is but one terrible result of the fundamental human sin of idolatry.
The Gospel and Homosexual Desires
What does the Christian worldview and gospel have to say to those who experience these desires? In principle, much the same as it says to us all who experience disordered desires in other contexts (cf. Paul’s list in Romans 1:28–31).
First, we must not deduce from our desires that this is our identity or that this is necessarily right. The existence of a desire is no evidence of the rightness of that desire, as we readily admit for a desire like greed. Our identity is not defined by our sexuality. We are human beings made in the image of God. If we trust in Christ, we are defined by being “in Christ” and not by anything we feel, desire, say, or do. We learn that as fallen men and women in a broken world we experience all manner of disordered desires, longings, and aversions that are not in line with the order God has placed in creation. For example, we may feel pleasure when misfortune comes on another (being pleased it did not happen to us); this is a disordered affection, one that we ought not to feel. The erotic desire of a woman for a woman or a man for a man is likewise a disordered desire.
Second, we need to recognize that sexual desires go very deep indeed. The teenager especially is vulnerable in that awkward stage of life when they wonder who they are and begin to experience strong and often confused sexual urges. Although it is mistaken to equate sexuality with identity, sexual feelings go so deep that it is not surprising they are sometimes confused with “who I am.” Those who have not experienced strong same-sex desires need to recognize that it is much easier for us to speak about these desires from a distance than it is for those in the midst of these desires to make sense of them.
Third, Christian people must never forget that our message is one of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, which comes to all of us as moral failures and begins with washing and forgiveness rather than with moral exhortation. Writing to a context of sexual disorder in Corinth, Paul says of the Christians there, “And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). In his earthly ministry, Jesus attracted to himself those who knew their lives were a moral mess, but those who thought they had got their morality sorted out found his message of grace offensive. It ought to be the same today.
Fourth, Christian people affirm and believe that the free grace of God in Jesus Christ has the power to change us.
[The grace of God] teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good (Titus 2:12–14).
This power may simply take away homosexual desires. Some testify to a real measure of healing in this regard, and there are wonderful stories of those who were deep in homosexual lifestyles but who now experience natural heterosexual relationships in marriage. Others have to endure ongoing homosexual desires, and it is very painful for them. The Christian faith does not promise a magic bullet to change our desires in a moment. What it does promise and offer is a faithful God whose grace is sufficient to carry us through all the moral disorder of a broken world until Jesus returns.