Can committed love be wrong? Isn’t betrayal, or lack of commitment, or abuse that which makes any relationship bad? What’s wrong if consenting individuals both want something and stick with it? How can a single-minded, deed-seeded devotion to someone be a bad thing?
Levels of love
Love can be appropriate or inappropriate. For example, a man’s love for a woman is good, but if it causes him to neglect all of his other friendships, it is disproportionate. The good thing (love) can become a bad thing (obsession). Therefore, all of our loves must be properly ranked. I must love the most important persons in my life the most, and the less important, less. When a married couple begins to dote on their children so much that soccer games, school plays, and extracurriculars leave no time for romance or personal time, a love that ought to be subordinate (their care for their children) becomes insubordinate. Such dynamics often cause strained and/or broken marriages, which are ultimately destructive to the children anyway. Getting our loves out of order means both the over-elevated ones and the under-elevated ones are damaged.
God must be at the ultimate top of our love rankings. He wants to sit on the throne of our affections. All loves properly subordinated under our love for God become good things, and all loves that compete with or demote our absolute surrender to and pursuit of our First Love become bad loves. So, for any love, we must ask, “Do I love God more than this love, and is it submitted to my love for God?” If so, it is probably legitimate. If not, watch out. You might have an idol.
Furthermore, those loves that are most in danger of supplanting our love for God (being idols) are those that are the best natural loves. They fall high in the natural order of affections, and are thus easier to swap with the #1 spot. Among these include love for a spouse, love for one’s children, love of doing good works of ministry and service, and love and admiration for someone who is not a right candidate for that given level of love.
Love and obedience
How are we to love God? One way that we love God is to obey him. This concept is pervasive in scripture. One example is 1 John 5:3: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.” Obedience doesn’t mean that we slavishly obey, without genuine willingness — that would be outward obedience, but not inward, voluntary obedience. The love-producing obedience is the one that says, “I really want to do X, but I value you more, God, and I have reason to believe you don’t like X, so, for your sake, I’m not going to do it.” What that shows is that you value God more than X, which loves him. (I think, in a sense, all material things were created so we would have things over which to prefer God.) So, obedience is decisions to act against desire X, and according to the desire to please God. That’s self sacrifice. That’s real, meaty, hard-but-good love.
It is possible for a strong, natural, good love to collide with a commandment of God. The most powerful example of this, I think, is when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Literally kill him with a knife. “What? God, what are you thinking. That’s murder of a family member. That’s wrong.” We think that is wrong, of course, because the love for a child or wife is perhaps the highest love available on earth, and to desecrate it in such a heinous way rattles the moral senses. But there is one love that does still outrank this love. God must rein on the throne of our affections. God was testing Abraham, “Is your love for me more sacred and committed than even your love for your son?” Abraham passed the test, and God stayed his hand, providing a ram as the sacrifice instead. Therefore, since we love God by obeying his commands, and since the love of God must trump every other love, even the highest human love must surrender to divine command. Otherwise, we make an idol out of whomever we shunned God for, and our relationships both with that person and with God will become poisoned by a wrong ranking of loves.
Revelation
We must believe that the Bible actually contains divine revelation. It is not man-made wisdom, but God-made wisdom communicated to man. The Bible claims that about itself (2 Peter 1:16-20, 2 Timothy 3:16). If we challenge this, we must throw out all the happy teachings of Jesus too. If the document has been tampered with, let us be consistent. We cannot have our cake and eat it too; we cannot cherry-pick what we like and don’t like from a holy book because it “makes sense.” Holy books should not make complete sense, if they are really holy books. Advice columns make complete sense. So, I am assuming that what we have in the Bible is trustworthy enough to go to as a source for God’s communication to man, both blessings and curses, both promises and commands.
Now, having established the facts above about love, obedience and revelation, we are ready to look at the text of the Bible. Here are some verses that talk about homosexuality.
If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13)
Homosexuality shares very bad company in the passage. Parallel acts also described as “detestable” include adultery, incest and bestiality. Even in the New Testament, homosexuality shares very bad company.
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will 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, will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-10)
…law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted. (1 Timothy 1:9-11)
Homosexuality is depicted as immoral. Some argue for a concept of the Bible in which the moral laws against homosexuality were constructed by some mysterious religious leaders (who usually The New Testament explains this in terms of a deviation from human nature (not, notably, from cultural mores).
Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. (Romans 1:24-27)
Homosexuality is here said to be the result of buying into lies, impure, dishonorable, unnatural, indecent, and erroneous. Geez. What should we do with this?
Ben Taylor 