One small step

Link between compromises on origins and marriage

illustrated by Caleb Salisbury

by Marc Ambler

After the abolition of apartheid, under the new ‘broom’ African National Congress Government, in 2006 South Africa became one of the first countries in the world to legalize the ‘mirage’ of same sex marriage. As Creator, God has the right to, and has already defined marriage, and so any claim to a union outside of that definition is just a chimera. An argument often employed to justify homosexual marriage, was that discrimination against them parallels the discrimination against black people under the apartheid policies of previous South African governments, or the segregation policies prevalent in the U.S. until the 1960’s. South Africa’s first black President, Nelson Mandela, claimed to have turned from believing that homosexuality was wrong to supporting gay marriage based on this comparison.

It is a completely fallacious argument. The unjust policies of apartheid were based upon one’s skin colour (or as we have often pointed out it is shade of colour because all humans actually have the one skin colour).¹ This is something as spiritually irrelevant in the design of God as the shape of one’s nose or eyes, or size of one’s feet. Resistance against homosexual practices is based on actions, on activity; men having sex with men (born with XY chromosomes) and women with women (XX chromosomes).² The truth is that we all discriminate against actions all the time even when it is argued that people ‘cannot help themselves’ feeling a certain way (orientation). Most people making this spurious argument would have no problem with discriminating against people stealing their belongings (trying to stop them or putting them in jail), or against those involved in the trade in rhinoceros’ horn. And so it is not a general argument against action discrimination, but the argument against this particular action of same sex, to which the gay lobby object. Of course, some but not all gay lobbyists argue that people are born homosexual. Besides the growing evidence that the idea of genetic causality in human behaviour is culturally rather than scientifically driven, the fact is that none of us are born having sex.³ At some point in our lives we take an action, we choose to have sex with a partner; whether within the biblical confines of marriage between one man and one woman; or the license of pre-marital or adulterous or homosexual or polygamous or the many other perversions of sexual relationships the Bible condemns; which we fallen humans have invented, and to which we are prone, and increasingly excuse or condone in a politically correct charged environment.

While churches at this stage are not obliged to sanctify these unions in South Africa, the writing is on the wall. And many church leaders are only too happy to oblige in this regard. One of them, described by his church website as being a “trailblazer” in this corruption of marriage, has been the Reverend Doctor Martin Young of St Columba’s Presbyterian Church in Johannesburg, South Africa.⁴ Having for a long time openly provided the ‘blessing’ at gay weddings, he was brought before his denominational Court of the Presbytery in December 2015 and cleared of the charges brought by another minister from the same denomination. The Reverend Young had a massive aneurism on 2nd April while officiating at a wedding and died the next day in hospital.

It’s ultimately about the authority of Scripture!

I had a glimpse of the process that leads to this wholesale abandonment of biblical authority when I spoke to the interim moderator of this congregation and longtime churchian collaborator in the gay marriage agenda of Reverend Young, the Reverend Professor Hansie Wolmarans.⁵ After a polite introduction, on hearing of my creation stand he immediately took an aggressive and arrogant tone, refusing to allow me to get a word in and calling a belief in biblical creation a “Mickey Mouse” belief. He unequivocally stated that he “believes in evolution” and that his colleagues at the University of Johannesburg where he is “Professor & Head of the Department of Greek and Latin Studies. Having studied theology at the University of Pretoria”⁶, were experts in the subject. Our one-sided conversation ended with him asking me to SMS him my email address so he could send me something to read. Wolmarans sent me the details of a book by Lawrence Krauss, the atheist cosmologist, physicist and professor at Arizona State University who infamously said to his class of students “forget about Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today”.⁷ Hardly edifying reading for a ‘Christian’ minister to be recommending with approval.

Another denomination in South Africa involved in a wholesale abandonment of biblical values, is the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk or NGK), the largest and most influential denomination in the South African Afrikaans-speaking community. Their church synod recently approved gay marriage and even ‘non celibate’ homosexual clergy, but leaving it (for now) up to individual congregations to decide their own practices in this regard. In a meeting with the minister of a large NGK congregation in a fairly conservative community, before I had explained where I and CMI stand on the creation subject, he asked me in Afrikaans, “What do you say to those naïve people who say they believe the Bible is true from Genesis to Revelation?” I replied, “I begin by telling them that I am one of those naïve people that believes the Bible is true from Genesis to Revelation”. I went on to gently challenge him about those Christians who “naively believe that the secular science of today is true from the Big Bang to … nothing”.

It’s no surprise that once the NGK increasingly abandoned the historicity of the biblical account of creation decades ago, they are now increasingly reaching the end of the ‘slippery slope’ of compromise on a range of issues. Interestingly, they were one denomination that was complicit by its silence over the treatment of black Africans under apartheid due to the ‘curse of Ham’ arguments that proliferated in their ranks.⁸ Ironically, while proudly advocating their acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle as avoiding the mistakes they made in accepting apartheid policies, they are in fact doing exactly the same thing they did back in the middle of the 20^th century, going along with the spirit of the age. It is nothing more than timid acquiescence born of a love for the opinions and approval of the world. For many years we have struggled to get a hearing in the vast majority of NG churches, but thank the Lord, we sometimes do get a door opened to us in some of them where there is still a remnant of regard for biblical truth.

As a ministry we are continually troubled that, in spite of the clear historical narrative on origins in the Bible, and the incredible weakness of evolutionary science, some good, otherwise Bible-believing Christian leaders and pastors, do not see the inevitable problem of Christian compromise with the creation myth of secular humanism—evolution. Whether full-blown theistic evolution, or an accommodation of deep time (which cannot be separated from death and suffering of sentient creatures, including beings that used tools and fire, lived in dwellings and who were obviously human beings, and yet typically classified as Homo erectus; millions of years prior to any possible date for Adam’s sin, to which the Bible attributes the cause of death and suffering), this inexorably leads to an increasing questioning of the inerrancy, authority and accuracy of God’s Word.⁹

The same old problem—“Did God really say”?

Satan undermined God’s position as Creator when he lied by asking Eve, “Did God really say?” For Christians questioning the creation of the universe in 6 earth rotation days (clear from the text of Genesis chapter 1) a few thousand years ago (clear from the genealogies of Genesis 5, 11 and others); it is only a small step to questioning other clear teachings and deductions from Scriptures such as; that marriage is between one man and one woman; and that homosexual (and other unbiblical) sexual practices outside of His definition of marriage are a sin, offensive to our holy God and Creator. Sin leaves us physically dying and spiritually dead, eternally separated from our Creator God. The Good News is that God sent His eternally begotten Son to die on the cross in our place Who “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24)

For a good summary of the issues, objections and questions raised by the ‘gay’ lobby, and more importantly, some good answers to same, I recommend the booklet Gay Marriage: right or wrong? And who decides? by Gary Bates (a frequent visitor and speaker to South Africa) and Lita Sanders. It has been commented that the tone of the book is suitable to give to those whose thinking is not really clear on this issue. Many churches have bought hundreds of copies to give to their congregations and youth.