For the Bible Tells Me So: The Real Story, Part 2

BY BOB ELLIS
DAKOTA VOICE

This is the second installment in a 7-part series examining the DVD "For the Bible Tells Me So."

Introduction

Part 1

Nineteen minutes into the DVD "For the Bible Tells Me So" (FTBTMS), when "what the Bible says" about homosexuality is finally examined, the brief segment is introduced by a song with the words: "The things that you’re liable, To read in the Bible, It ain’t necessarily so."

Several people on the street are asked what the Bible says about homosexuality; some answer correctly that the Bible says it's wrong, while others aren't so sure.

Reverend Peter Gomes of Harvard University, who is a homosexual, says there are "six or seven verses" in the Bible that speak "even remotely" to homosexuality. In this, he's not far off. Here are a some which speak pretty directly to homsexuality:

- Genesis 2:24 Where God outlined his design for human sexuality: "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh."

- Genesis 19 where men of Sodom wanted to have sex with the male angels, and it was called a "wicked thing"

- Leviticus 18:22 "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable."

- Leviticus 20:13 "'If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable."

- Judges 19 In Gibeah where "wicked men" wanted to have sex with a Levite man, and it was called a "disgraceful thing"

- Mark 10:6-8 Jesus reaffirms God's design for human sexuality: "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.' '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."

- Romans 1:26-27 where the Bible talks about "godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness" and says "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. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."

- 1 Corinthians 6:9 says, among other habitual sins, homosexuals "will not inherit the kingdom of God"

- 1 Timothy 1:10 condemns "men who practice homosexuality"

Reverend Steven Kindle of Clergy United cites Leviticus 20:13 from the King James Version: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."

He says, "If you read the Bible on a face-value level, that reading disregards several very important things. The first one is, just a few verses before that, Moses teaches in Leviticus that it is an abomination to eat shrimp."

Actually, rather than "just a few verses before that," it's a "few chapters" before that, nine to be exact, in chapter 11 of Leviticus; or measured another way, these references are separated by about 8,500 words, or about seven pages in the average Bible.

Chapter 11, unlike chapter 20 which deals primarily with immoral sexual conduct, outlines the dietary laws God gave to the Jewish people, and even says so at the end of chapter 11: "These are the regulations concerning animals, birds, every living thing that moves in the water and every creature that moves about on the ground."

Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer, says "a few verses above and below" (the reference to homosexuality) it says you shouldn't plant two types of seed together. It actually says this in the previous chapter, chapter 19, separated by about 750 words. Again, a perception is being promoted which doesn’t accurately reflect reality.

What's more, the Old Testament dietary laws the Jews lived under were explicitly done away with in Acts chapter 10 when God told Peter that all animals were now acceptable to eat. Unlike the dietary regulations, the New Testament never indicated a change of God’s moral requirements, specifically His disapproval of homosexuality, as evidenced by Romans chapter 1, 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and others references.

Next, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, tells us that the Bible was written particular to the time of those who wrote it, and we shouldn't take it literally.

While there is some truth in what Tutu says, even those passages of the Bible which contain references to customs and instructions particular to a historic setting hold lessons and principles which teach us principles of right and wrong. As the Bible also says</