What's so wrong about same-sex marriage?

"Why can't Christians just join the revolution?" In an oped for The Wall Street Journal ("Evangelicals and the Gay Moral Revolution") R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky asks why evangelical Christians can't join in the "moral revolution" and embrace homosexuality and same-sex marriage the way liberal churches and denominations have. We can't, he says, because "we believe the Bible is God's revealed word" and "we cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches" that homosexuality is wrong and that marriage is "the union of one man and one woman."

It's a matter of the gospel, he continues. "Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and for the forgiveness of their sins." The church is being tested, he writes, "to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach." Will we "see the challenge of homosexuality as a Gospel issue"?

Rev. Mohler is right: it is a matter of the gospel, because marriage between a man and a woman is a picture of the gospel (see my earlier post).

The "original fact" God had in mind when he made Eve was Christ and his church ("Canticles," Fausset's Bible Dictionary). As Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 11 and Ephesians 5, Adam represented Christ and Eve represented the church in their relationship as husband and wife. Marriage is natural revelation; that is, it teaches us about God and our relationship to him. (See, for example, Mike Mason, The
Mystery of Marriage). The marriage relationship involves all the senses; it is the most intimate and "complete" of the metaphors that Scripture compares to our union with Christ (cornerstone and building, vine and branches, head and body, husband and wife).

Marriage between a man and a woman is a "great mystery" because it depicts the relationship between Christ and his church (Ephesians 5:31-32). This was God's original intent, when he made Adam and Eve. And so, Calvin said, the church is built from Jesus' riven side, as Eve was built from Adam's. So then, as Jesus sacrificed himself for us, a husband should love his wife sacrificially. He should "nourish" her as he would his own body. And as the church submits to Christ, so a wife should submit to her husband and respect him. A loving and harmonious marriage is a preaching of the gospel.

May God preserve and protect marriage as a picture of the gospel!