What the Bible Says About Same-Sex Marriage

They believed it was love. We will let that case make its strongest argument, in its own words — and then hold it to the line that does not move.

The Church and the Christian Church • Part Three • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board

The Big Three

The affirming case deserves a fair hearing. We give it one here, at full strength, in its own words.
But every form of it rests on a single move: Scripture is lowered from the judge’s bench to a seat among the witnesses. Once the Word is one voice among many, any verdict is possible.
Held against the Word it claims to honor, the case does not survive. The verdict is not ours. It was written before the first vote.

In Part One we read the receipts. In Part Two we watched the marriage canon edited in the church’s own hand. Those articles asked what the Episcopal Church did, and how. This one asks the older question. It outranks every resolution ever passed. What does God say — and does their case survive His Word?

Before you decide this is the Episcopal Church’s problem and not yours, hold one thing in view. No church in history has ever fallen because its enemies were strong. They fell because the watchmen assumed the wall would hold. Keep that in mind as you read. The case below was made in one denomination. The pressure behind it is leaning on yours.

Here we slow down and become fair in a way that costs us something. Before we answer the affirming case, we will make it. We will make it at its strongest, in the form its most thoughtful defenders would own. Not the caricature. The real thing. A verdict reached without hearing the defense is not a verdict. It is a prejudice. And we are confident enough in the Word to let the other side speak first.

The Case, at Its Strongest

Heard at its most sincere, the affirming case is not a shrug at Scripture. It is an argument from compassion. It runs something like this.

God is love, and the church is meant to be the wide table where the excluded are finally welcomed — as Jesus welcomed the tax collector, the Samaritan, the woman at the well. For centuries the church wounded gay and lesbian people, drove them from the pews, and called it holiness. The Episcopal Church, in its own words, sought instead to “respect the dignity of every human being” — and surely that instinct is the very heartbeat of the gospel.

An Argument from Compassion

As for the handful of texts usually cited against same-sex relationships, the affirming reader says: look closer. They address exploitation, idolatry, temple prostitution, the abuse of the powerless — not the faithful, lifelong, covenant love of two people who simply wish to give themselves to one another before God. Jesus Himself, in four Gospels, never once mentioned the subject. And did not the Lord promise that the Spirit would “guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13) — a Spirit still speaking, still leading the church forward, as He led it past slavery, past the subjugation of women, past so many old certainties we now blush to recall? This, the affirming case concludes, is not abandoning the faith. It is the same Spirit-led growth the church has always undergone, applied at last to people too long left outside.

That is the case at its best. It is not stupid. It is not, in every heart that holds it, cynical. Many who hold it believe they are loving their neighbor. We will not pretend otherwise, and we will not answer a weaker version than the one they would own. But the case cannot survive one thing. It cannot survive the line. So we lay it there now.

The Question Beneath Every Question

Before a single verse about marriage is weighed, one prior question must be settled. Every argument above depends on the answer. What kind of book is the Bible?

If Scripture is merely a wise human record — the best religious thinking of its age, honored where it serves and outgrown where it does not — then the affirming case is not only possible. It is obvious. But that is not what Scripture claims for itself. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16, ESV). Christ sealed it in prayer to the Father: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17, ESV). Not contains truth. Is truth.

A Mirror, Not a Judge

Here the affirming method shows itself. It does not deny Scripture. It selects from it. It keeps the verses that warm the heart and explains away the verses that bind the conscience. Theologians have a name for this: a canon within the canon — a smaller, friendlier Bible drawn out of the real one. No court allows it. No judge lets a witness read a contract that way, honoring the clauses he likes and dismissing the rest as the author’s bias. A Bible edited down to what already agrees with us is no longer an authority over us. It is a mirror. And a mirror has never once corrected the face in it.

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This is the hinge. Keep Scripture on the bench, and the case collapses. Move it down among the witnesses, and there is no verdict it cannot reach. The affirming case does not win the argument from the text. It wins only by first lowering the text.

And still the plumb line hangs straight.

Settled Before Moses, Before Culture

Take the most common claim — that the prohibitions are dusty Levitical rules, bound to a vanished culture. The answer is short. God’s design for man and woman was not handed down at Sinai. It was laid in the garden — before the law, before Israel, before there was a culture to be bound to.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created him” (Genesis 1:27, ESV). Then the pattern for their joining: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24, ESV). This is not one rule in a code we have outgrown. It is the architecture of humanity, set on the same page that calls us image-bearers. It cannot be dated to a culture. It predates every culture. It is creation, not legislation.

What Jesus Actually Said

Then comes the argument the affirming case leans on hardest. Jesus never spoke of it. The four Gospels, it is said, record no word from His mouth on the subject. So how central could it be?

This sounds powerful until you open a Greek New Testament. The word Jesus used, again and again, was porneia. It was not a narrow term. Standard Greek lexicons give it a broad range — sexual immorality in general, not heterosexual promiscuity alone. And in the Jewish world where He taught, that range was understood in light of the sexual ethic of the Law, the prohibitions of Leviticus His hearers knew by heart. When Jesus condemned porneia, no first-century listener heard a vague generality. Within the moral framework He affirmed, they heard the whole catalog the Law named — and they heard it in one familiar word. Silence on a modern English term is not silence on the thing itself.

But Jesus did not stop at naming the sin. Asked directly about marriage, He went back to the garden. “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4–5, ESV). He did not leave the definition open for a wiser age to revise. He quoted Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24 in one breath and called it the Creator’s design — from the beginning. The argument from silence fails twice. Jesus named the sin. And He affirmed the design. A church cannot claim His silence while standing on the very passage where He spoke.

And still the plumb line hangs straight.

Love, and the Spirit, and the Oldest Question

What, then, of love — the tenderest of the affirming appeals? The answer is that Scripture refuses to set love against truth. In Scripture they are never two things. “Love… does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6, ESV). And from the Lord Himself: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15, ESV). A love that requires the Word to be overruled is not the love the Bible commends. It is sentiment wearing love’s name.

And the Spirit who “guides into all truth”? He is the Spirit who breathed the Word out in the first place. He does not lead the church to reverse what He authored. A spirit that contradicts Scripture is, by Scripture’s own test, not the Spirit of truth. As for the claim that the church has “changed before” — on the historic reading, abolition and the dignity of women were not the overturning of Scripture. They were its fulfilling: the church catching up to what the Word had said all along. This change runs the other way. Not toward the text. Away from it.

Underneath every version of the case, if you listen, is a single ancient whisper. It is the oldest reinterpretation in the world. “Did God actually say…?” (Genesis 3:1, ESV). It did not begin in 2015, or 1976. It began in a garden, with a question built not to deny God outright but to make His Word negotiable. Every drift since has been a variation on that first one. And the answer has never changed either. “It is written” (Matthew 4:4).

The Verdict

So set the case against the line. It does not survive. Not because its defenders are wicked, but because the case stands only if the Word is first moved off the bench. Held against creation, against the words of Christ, against the whole counsel of Scripture, the wall is bent. And the verdict is not ours to render. We did not write it. We are not the judge. We are the court reporter, reading back a sentence settled before the first vote was called.

This is the heart of the series. A church may pass any resolution it pleases. It cannot repeal the Word of God. It can strike “a man and a woman” from its canon. It cannot strike it from the mouth of Christ. It can vote the line down in committee. The line does not move, because the One who hung it has not moved.

We have not made this case in anger. We do not make it now in triumph. There is no joy in measuring a church and finding it bent. Many inside the Episcopal Church meant to love their neighbor, and that intention is not nothing. But a good intention laid against a true line is still measured by the line. The kindest thing we can do is refuse to lie about where it falls.

The Reader Who Feels Safe

By now some readers have relaxed. That is the Episcopal Church. Not mine. Hold there a moment, because that comfort is the most dangerous thing in this article.

The serpent is not a denominational creature. He was “more crafty than any other beast of the field” (Genesis 3:1, ESV) — older than every church on earth, and craftier than all of them. He has never once attacked a wall head-on. He oozes through the unguarded seam. He works the back room, the study committee, the gentle footnote, the kind word that quietly lowers the Word a single inch. He does not announce that he is changing your church’s mind. He simply asks, in a voice that sounds like compassion, “Did God really say?”

The same pressure that bent this church is leaning on yours tonight — the same culture, the same question, the same patient hand on the same seam. The Episcopal Church is not the exception that proves your church is safe. It is the autopsy that shows your church what kills. The only church the devil cannot enter is the one awake at the wall.

The Way Back Has a Name

And here is the hope, because there is always one. The same Word that renders the verdict is the Word that can restore. The definition the church removed from its page still stands, unstruck, where Christ left it. The way back is not lost. It is only unwalked.

And the way back has a name. The Word gives it plainly: repentance. Not a better vote. Not a reform committee. Not a softer culture. Repentance — the turning of a church, or a soul, back to the line it abandoned. There is no other road back to plumb. A wall does not straighten itself by waiting, and a church does not return by drifting more gently. It returns the way every prodigal has ever returned: by getting up, and coming home. That door has never once been shut by God to anyone willing to walk through it.

No council has ever voted a church back to life, and no argument on a page has ever raised the dead. But the God who set the plumb line still stands over His house — and the wall He measures crooked, He can also make straight. In the final article, we count the cost of the leaving. And we find, even there, that the door is still open.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV). The full exegesis behind this article — the original languages, the porneia argument, and the verse-by-verse response to the affirming case — is set out in the Virginia Christian Alliance reference document Thus Saith the Lord: A Biblical Defense of God’s Design for Human Sexuality, free for any ministry to use.