CONTENTS
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LOOKING AT THE BACKGROUND
OF THE BIBLE
Is there ever an occasion when a law needs to be rescinded?
How about when that law no longer has any purpose? In some rural communities back east, if a motor vehicle meets a horse, the driver of that motor vehicle is required to remove the vehicle from the road and hide it from the horse, dismantling it if necessary. When the law was written, cars were noisy, put out a lot of smoke, and were very rare. They frightened the horses, sometimes injuring the rider. But those conditions no longer exist. Should the law be removed from the books?
How about when the law was based on false assumptions? In other communities, it is illegal for a mortician to swear or use profanity while working on a corpse. The corpse, being dead, was never affected by the language of the mortician. The corpse could never hear the mortician, no matter the form of his language. Maybe the people who wrote this law believed that such language might affect the eternal soul of that corpse. Should that law be removed from the books?
There are some who maintain that the Biblical laws against homosexual behavior fall into the first category, that they no longer apply because they were ceremonial and were removed by the cross of Christ. Paul would appear to disagree with them. These people are responsible for a lot of creative attempts to explain Paul's comments away.
I believe that the laws against homosexual behavior are like the law against swearing in front of a corpse, that the assumptions on which these laws are based are false and that they should have never been written in the first place.
In the first section we have discovered that both Isaiah and Jesus found some of the laws of Moses to be invalid. Then, through Jacob's story, we discovered that the people who wrote the books of the law just didn't think in the same manner that we do. They had a faulty view of reality. Now, it is time to apply these lessons as we explore the underlying reason for the biblical prejudice against homosexuality.
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