The Imploding Argument of 1 Corinthians 6:9

My study group started to take in questions from others in order to better understand the Bible and Biblical principals as they apply into the modern world around us. It became quickly apparent that we would not ask certain questions that others may and so we opened the invitation. The first question we received led us down a rabbit hole and I ended up calling for the help of a source that I will cite at the end. In the end, I learned quite a lot about a certain topic and it will help myself and my group be better equipped to handle others like it in the future.

The Question:

"Why do Christians today put so much focus on homosexuality when what the Bible really means is pedophilia?"

Not Sin (Paederast) Argument #1:

1 Corinthians 6:9 defines the homosexual under the term “paederast” which means adult male who lays with children. This was a prominent and detestable act in the time of Paul and was common in places such as Corinth. Researching back in the times of Paul we can find that Corinth was full of all detestable act. For instance, at night, the streets would fill with the harlotry that Paul reflected on in these few verses. By harlotry I am saying that prostitutes would fill the streets and were so loved, so coveted that they could be considered idolatry.

Sin (Paederast) Argument Rebuttal:

For the purposes of this, however, we need to take into account the entire Bible. Paederast was used as a word to reference what was later translated as homosexual but may have been more apt to be known as pedophile. However, there is much more to it than this. For example, in 1 Corinthians 9 there is a word placed next to this which means soft. All of the articles that you can find on this subject pull this word apart and try to make it mean something else, like soft skin, for instance. But anyone who studies the Greek or the Bible at any length can conclude that certain words in the Greek change their meaning almost completely when placed next to others. For instance, this word, soft, when placed next to paederast means passive. And when these two words are combined, it is retranslated to “Passive and Active Paederast” which means, in a manner of speaking, the one who does the giving and the one who does the taking. The reference, then, by this verse, suggests that both of these are guilty of the sin and not just the one which, if we are keeping a tally, doubly damns the homosexual young and old.

When we take a look back at the Old Testament we can already assume that many people will claim that we are no longer under the law and are, therefore, not under whatever is told to us through Moses. Despite this being the case, I want to include it so that you have context into the arguments that we are going to discuss. Leviticus 18:22 says “And you shall not lie with a male as lying with a woman; that is a detestable thing.” When you take it back to the original language, the argument is used because of how the word is defined that this is talking about pedophilia, as well, but it is not. You must look in the context of the words being used. The same word is used to describe man all throughout the old testament in the Hebrew. It is just like an English word that is used to describe the offspring of something else.

Not Sin (Sodom) Argument #2:

Then we, of course, have the story of Sodom which, upon my own further research, people are attempting to twist as well to their own understanding. If you read it in context and through the understanding that God gives us through Moses we see that the people of Sodom attempted to gang rape the angels, men on men. The argument liberal theologians have in the regard of the Sodom narrative is that the sin, in question, was not that the angels were being homosexually raped, but the rape in general as it is mentioned in a broad scope. The problem with this is that if they are successful in proving that rape is what the sin was and not the homosexual aspect, many of the terms used in the New Testament would lose value as they refer to sexually immoral people as “Sodomites.”

The problem I have with the Sodom twist is that people are changing the text of the Bible in order to fit their agenda, either making it a hate book that “twists scripture to fit a hate” or trying to make it as if these sins are okay. It is heresy of the utmost highest order in an attempt to justify a sin that God has deemed a sin. I do not care, personally, if they manage or not. Because God is the same today, yesterday, and will be tomorrow. So while these people will make themselves feel better, that’s an earthly feeling and will come to a head upon judgement. And woe to them for all of the souls they have deceived on their way to feeling better.

Sin (Sodom) Argument Rebuttal:

Let me start with a premise, firstly. And I am going to borrow from an argument that I will cite at the end. Sodom was a “kitchen-sink” of problems. What I mean with that is that it was not one sin that did Sodom in - they were doomed for destruction before the rape attempt. So the kitchen sink, then, is a cesspool of different sins. Let me name and cite just a few in the next paragraph.

Ezekiel 16:49 says “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy.” This first one, as we see in Ezekiel, is pride. Genesis 19:4-5 says “Before they went to bed, the townsmen of Sodom, both young and old—all the people to the last man—surrounded the house. They called to Lot and said to him, ‘Where are the men who came to your house tonight? Bring them out to us that we may have sexual relations with them.’” This is the NASB, the more common translation would leave it at “know them” or “be intimate with them.” We see the sin of rape, and homosexuality, as well as the sin of a lack of hospitality which was very important at this time. It was so important, in fact, that Lot would have rather given his daughters to the men rather than the angels. It was so important that his own children’s safety was held as less of value than the importance of hospitality; I want to rephrase this. It was so important that obedience to God was held to a higher value than his children.

I am going to use a passage from my source material on this for this next paragraph:

“I think that there is good reason to believe that the story of Ham’s offense against his father Noah in Gen 9:20-27 is a similar instance of a “kitchen sink” story of multiple offenses designed to present the action of the perpetrator as particularly heinous. The arguments for reading the story in this way are numerous: (1) the expression “see the nakedness of” (Gen 9:22) appears elsewhere as a metaphor for sexual intercourse (Lev 20:17); (2) Noah “came to know what his youngest son had done to him” (Gen 9:24; the Babylonian Talmud records a debate about the meaning of this phrase in which one rabbi suggests homosexual relations, the other castration; Sanhedrin 70a); (3) the severity of the curse and its placement on Ham‟s son rather than Ham himself better suits an act of sexual assault on Ham‟s part (note the subtext: the curse falls on Ham’s seed/son because Ham offends with his seed/sperm); (4) the same narrator subsequently tells a similar story of Lot‟s daughters having sex with their drunken father (Gen 19:30-38); (5) a similar story of incestuous same-sex rape as a means to establishing familial dominance exists in the Egyptian tale of Horus and Seth; (6) the narrator shortly after links the Canaanites, i.e. Ham‟s descendants, to the Sodom story (Gen 10:19), suggesting that the narrator understands both stories in a similar light; and (7) there is an ideational link with Leviticus 18 (specifically, 18:6-18, 22) inasmuch as both texts show that incest and man-male intercourse were pivotal reasons why the Canaanites were subjugated or expelled from the land. Clearly the editors of Leviticus 18 have not limited their critique of incest or of man-male intercourse to coercive forms. If the narrator of the Ham episode is not limiting his indictment of incest to coercive forms, there is little reason to suppose that the same narrator of the Sodom story is limiting the indictment of man-male intercourse to coercive forms.”

This understanding doesn’t just satisfy the interpretation as given by the author in Genesis but also to all references of Sodom in the New Testament as a “Sodomite” is not just used as one direct sin but typically to someone who exhibits a “Kitchen Sink” full of problems.

Briefly touching on Romans 1:26-27

In Romans 1:26-27 Paul plainly says “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged natural relations for that which is contrary to nature, and likewise the men, too, abandoned natural relations with women and burned in their desire toward one another, males with males committing shameful acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” I want to touch on the context so you know just why this is so vile. Romans 1:22-23, Paul explains, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind, of birds, four-footed animals, and crawling creatures.” Let me break this down a bit more.

“They exchanged God for an image” is what precedes all of the atrocities we see listed off by Paul, to include a mention of homosexuality. Paul is referencing these things as idols to the Romans. People use this explanation in order to argue that it’s not a sin as long as it does not become something that is in the form of idolatry. Idolatry, though, is not something that can be “done sometimes but not others.” It is the worship of manmade things, in this case, homosexual sex. And it has become so lucidious and reverent in the case of the Romans, as it would for someone claiming to be homosexual, that it is placed by Paul in the defintion of an idol. The argument for this verse not being a damning exclamation that homosexuality a sin is, therefore, used in a stronger case to say that it is held to an even higher degree of sin as it is idolatry.

Final Argument That Homosexuality is a Sin (Marriage)

“Biblically, sexual immorality is defined as any activity, (in the realm of sexuality of course), that lies outside a marriage relationship, and biblically, a marriage relationship is defined as one man and one woman.” With this being the case, let’s pull out a number of verses that define marriage in one way or another.

• Genesis 1:27-28 - "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.' "

• Genesis 2:23 - The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”

• Genesis 2:24 - "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."

• 2 Malachi 2:14-15 - "But you say, 'Why does he not?' Because the LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant."

• Ephesians 5:25 - "For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her."

Woman was made as part of man to complete man and this was designed upon creation. As woman and man are designed for one another to be given in marriage, or not in Paul’s case, to pervert the idea of marriage by combining two men or two women would be to pervert the marriage as a covenant and creation by God. And as two men and two women are biblically not able to be married, any form of sexual relation outside of the marriage covenant is a perversion of God’s creation and is sexually immoral. This will not change just because the world believes it is time to do so. Hebrews 13:8 says “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

Conclusion

Born again believers have handled homosexuality wrong for years. Not all, but the ones that make the news, of course. Though they are living in sin, we are to never stop offering grace. We cannot judge them based upon their worldly view until they claim to be born again Christians. As soon as they make the simple statement that they are born again Christians we are allowed to hold them accountable from a place outside of hypocrisy. As this is a sexually immoral sin, someone who is not sexually immoral can hold them accountable. And, honestly, a true born again Christian, any of them, can hold them accountable for their sin. Because if you are truly as you claim to be you will be repentant of your own sin and broken over it. If that is the case, you are not doing so from a place of hypocrisy and, thus, you can judge them. But, as they claim to be Christian, you need to do so from a place of church discipline that Paul lines out for us. That is, unless they are teaching this heresy to the public. That requires a different level of confrontation.

These steps are to rebuke them in private, and then with others (including Jesus), and then excommunication or cutting them off completely. But these steps must be done from a place of love. Love is absolutely not allowing them to live in their own sin. Love is not watching them work their way to hell. Love is not sparing their feelings but signing their warrant to death. Love for God is obedience to His commands, 2 John 1:6. If you are not obedient to God then you do not love God. If you are not obedient to God, James makes the claim that your faith is dead. And if your faith is dead, James would consider you not saved, despite what you claim, and I would agree.

God is love. But God is also holy, sovereign, just, and jealous.

Soli deo gloria.

Sources and Thanks to:

Robert A. J. Gagnon, Ph.D., http://www.robgagnon.net/articles/homosex7thDayAdvArticleSodom.pdf“Why We Know That the Story of Sodom Indicts Homosexual Practice Per Se”, Pg. 2, 3

Grayson Gilbert, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/chorusinthechaos/we-cant-agree-to-disagree-homosexuality/?fbclid=IwAR3Pqk0Xq5o7oD0jpmfkG4ZeUUEwmVxqEhYrk8i7ggyNRnM_1CGA8NAicDc“We Can’t Agree to Disagree on Homosexuality”