America Saying: “Do Whatever the Hell You Want

Proverbs 14:12 — There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.

Proverbs 14 tells us that there is a way that seems right, but that leads to death. With the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision against DOMA and Proposition 8, it was a clear sign that this country has drawn a line in the sand. Not only is our country drawing the line, but unfortunately many Christians as well.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s Decision, Rachel Held Evans released a statement on CNN (here).She said:

“There’s a misconception among many faithful folks that religious convictions, by their very nature, are set in stone.”

If Christians are honest with the public and themselves, they know that the Bible clearly distinguishes between personal convictions that “aren’t set in stone” and other convictions that are absolutely set it stone.

I believe that Rachel’s response to the decision of the Supreme Court is sending the wrong message on behalf of the church. It hasn’t been just Rachel. Rob Bell also recently commented on gay marriage:

“And I think that’s one of the things you’re seeing now, is you’re seeing God pull us all forward into a greater realization that we need more love, we need more fidelity, we need more monogamy, we need more people who are committed to each other.”

Another way in which people are dismissing the Bible’s position on sexuality, gay marriage, or societal concerns is to discredit it based on the actions of Christians who have wrongly used the Bible to support their own greed, racism, hatred or misinterpretation. Brian Mclaren does this in his response to a pastor whose life had been incredibly affected for good by Brian. He states:

In my case, I inherited a theology that told me exactly what you said: homosexuality is a sin, so although we should not condemn (i.e. stone them), we must tell people to “go and sin no more…Over time, I could not square their stories and experiences with the theology I had inherited. So I re-opened the issue, read a lot of books, re-studied the Scriptures, and eventually came to believe that just as the Western church had been wrong on slavery, wrong on colonialism, wrong on environmental plunder, wrong on subordinating women, wrong on segregation and apartheid (all of which it justified biblically) … we had been wrong on this issue.