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“The Sin of Sodom”
Categories: Meditations
Some ways of thinking seem to lend themselves naturally to apostasy. There are some arguments that, if you find yourself making them, are signs that you are about to abandon the truth. Among these is the cultural-coincidence argument.
It goes like this: “I know that X has been the traditional understanding of Scripture for hundreds or thousands of years, but I’m a better Bible student than all of those other people, and I have arrived at the more enlightened understanding of Y. Coincidentally, X is something that the worldly culture around me dislikes, and Y is something that it celebrates. Isn’t it wonderful that my new, 100 percent intellectually honest, interpretation is helping me to win the friendship of the world?”
Perhaps this is cynical of me, but when I see people making arguments like this, I tend to suspect that maybe, just maybe, they are using the world to understand the Bible rather than using the Bible to understand the world.
One of the more obvious places where this occurs is in the recent re-reading of Scripture to endorse the practice of homosexuality. Apparently, all those passages that people of faith have always understood as condemning same-sex intimacy do nothing of the sort.
For instance, this revisionist interpretation claims that the sin for which Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed was not the homosexual lust expressed in Genesis 19:4-5. It was hostility to the poor. This argument is based on Ezekiel 16:49-50, in which Judah is warned not to imitate the pride and greed of Sodom.
If Ezekiel contained everything the Bible says about the sin of Sodom, the argument would be valid. However, it doesn’t. Jude 7 says that Sodom and Gomorrah sinned by engaging in gross immorality and going after strange flesh. This does not contradict Ezekiel; instead, it adds to our understanding of the wickedness of the Sodomites. Their hearts were filled with both greed and lust (and yes, it is still sinful today to be hard-hearted toward the poor).
In response to this, revisionists will sometimes argue that “going after strange flesh” means trying to have sex with angels because that’s what the visitors of Genesis 19 were. Merely having sex with men, then, would be OK.
The problem with this claim, though, is that “going after strange flesh” is a statement of intent, of desire. The Sodomites did not know that the visitors to their city were angels. As is evident from their speech, they believed they were men. They did not intend to have sex with angels (which I don’t think is possible anyway). Instead, they intended to have sex with men, and they were destroyed not for making an innocent mistake, but for acting on an evil desire.
Whenever we think we’ve found a way to re-read the Bible to accommodate what we want to believe and do, we should be very concerned. So it is here. I don’t agree with the people who reject the Bible because they believe the practice of homosexuality is good, but at least they’re being honest. On the other hand, those who twist the Scriptures to fit their pre-conceptions are not succeeding in reconciling the two. Instead, they are endorsing sin and adding to it self-deceit.
