Gay Christian Book is the Straight Christian’s Guide to the Gay Issue
It is so confusing to hear respected and popular Tampa Bible leaders here and on television make sidewise comments about homosexuality. Are we to love our gay brothers or not? Are our gay brothers and sisters all are equal before God or not? The Bible says that we are not to be crippled by trying to hold two differing opinions at the same time. Does God love gay and did God make gay or not? That’s why I love this book, “God is Gay”.
So first we in Tampa must know that the Jesus who lives today is the same Jesus who lived yesterday, the Jesus who only did what he saw his father do, and this is the same Jesus who lives today, tomorrow, and forever. So no amount of revisionist sermonizing is going to turn the one and only Jesus into a homophobic gay-basher.
The book “God is Gay” is not a sensitive recounting of someone’s awakening to God. It’s a tough book and straight-forward about what the Bible says and how it has been distorted to support a contemporary bigotry. The author has laid the facts out clearly and unsentimentally. Do you have a gay child or gay friend? Or does your heart just tell you that God is not a homophobe but you don’t know how to prove it? This is your book. It uses scripture to prove the points, not humanistic philosophy.
Does God hate gays? No. Does Christianity forbid homosexuality? Jesus didn’t so, No. So how can the media and many television preachers have it wrong? Because they are not accurately reading the Bible.
What would Christianity be like today if all the Tampa churches and preachers accurately taught what the Bible actually says about the gay issue? I think it would be more accepted to be a Christian. I think more people would be happy to go to church. I think there will be more gay Christians. I think Christianity might even become considered in some circles as a “gay religion”! I think it would change the culture in profound ways that would enrich our world.
God is gay and this book says this is proof. The author walks the reader through God’s word, the Holy Bible, and demonstrates over and over again that God made gay, God loves gay, and God’s plan for all of his gay sons and daughters is a good life and that he has a place and plan for all in his Kingdom. Any scripture that appears to say otherwise is a distortion that any Bible scholar could explain. The distortions are all identified here and are quite obvious.
There are Christian basics that people would have to totally violate if they believed gay was wrong and that straight was “better”. The Bible says that God made gay and that we are not to criticize any of God’s creations. That includes you, me, and everyone on this Earth. To criticize another person and single them out, saying that they are wrong and against God’s word is nothing new. This happened back in biblical times, too. And that’s why we have this admonishment that since God made us all, to criticize someone is to criticize God who made that person. God created nature and gay is natural. We see it in the animal population with every species so how can we call our human brothers and sisters who are gay unnatural? Having sex with someone you are not attracted to is unnatural.
Even if someone believed that being gay is a sin, it is hypocritical to point a finger at anyone since it is understood that everyone in this world is imperfect and sin. A serious study of Christ’s statements about the Pharisees and hypocrisy makes it clear that we cannot follow Jesus and also point fingers at anyone else. This is a foundational argument, that only God can judge others and we are commanded to not judge and not proclaim ourselves superior.
God’s love is for all. “All” means all. Jesus did not turn to the thief on the cross, promising he will see him in Paradise, but then say “Unless, of course, you’re gay.” I will prove that homosexuals are in the Bible and that they are included in God’s plans of us all.
Many Christians are convinced that their prejudice against homosexuality is scripturally supported because of passages that refer to ‘sexual impurity’ and ‘sexual sin’. The book peels back the actual meaning of those terms and proves that they have been misinterpreted as representing homosexual behavior. In fact, sexual impurity in all its many forms is exclusively to mean the use of another person for one’s own selfish gratification, outside of a committed relationship. The author proves that there is no language in the Bible that refers to gay sex. In the times of the scriptures, there were understood to be three genders, male (referring to straight males), females (referring to all females), and eunuchs (referring to Jewish gay men or castrated or gay non-Jewish men). In the Bible a man is never identified as both a eunuch and a male. So the scriptures actually state that it is a sin for a straight male to sodomize a straight male. This was never a statement about gay sex.
Also in the times of the written text, the competing religions were also sex-based religions with temple prostitutes and ritual orgies. Language in the Bible that refer to that religion are often misapplied to contemporary gay sex.
In the Book “God is Gay” there is also an exacting study of what “marriage” in the Bible really means. It’s not what you think. God says he himself is married to us, men and women, so God’s idea of marriage is not about gender. This turns the argument against gay marriage on its head.
The book “God is Gay” conducts a thoughtful exploration of the Law. Most of the scriptures that have been used in these contemporary times to ‘prove’ that God is against gays are part of the laws handed down by Moses. These are not the Ten Commandments laws. These are the how-to-buy-a-slave and what-to-eat laws. So this book explores why God gave mankind the Law and what place does the Law hold for us now that Christ has fulfilled the Law. Yes, Jesus is the end of the Law. But that is just an aside. The author has proved many times over that God is made gay, on purpose and for a purpose.
But how are we to know the true nature of God? One true way is by training our eyes on Jesus. Jesus, like God, does not lie. Jesus, like God, does not change. Everything Jesus said, he heard his Father God say, and everything Jesus did he saw his father do. We are to be like God and love our gay brothers and sisters!
Today to hear our Tampa preachers claim that God is against gay men and women leads some people to think the gospel is other than what the Bible gives us. The gospel is good news, love, salvation, and total acceptance by our Maker for us all. Contrary to popular belief, the gospel is not a book of rules for straight people to smack over the heads of gay people. For people to pervert the gospel is to pervert the Bible and to preach a different Jesus than the one that walked the earth and lives among us now.
All of Scripture is good. If there is something in God’s Word that appears to be a contradiction, then that is only alerting us to a blind spot in our interpretation. Every part of the Bible serves a purpose. We are not to pick and choose the verses we like and disregard the verses we do not like.
The Word of God, the Bible sitting on your shelf, is as current today as it was when it was originally penned. It is a living document. That means that every generation that reads it, every person who reads it, has an opportunity to see new revelation that prior generations did not see. The layperson has the exact same opportunity to receive new insight and information from the Bible that had escaped his or her pastor and maybe every pastor in the whole world up until now. An example of this is Martin Luther, who read the same Bible that generations of Catholic popes had read and yet he received such profound insight from the written Word of God that it started an entirely new branch of Christianity.
There are many blind guides today that are just as blind as the righteous religious leaders of Jesus’s day. In the not too distant past, scripture was used to prove heavenly support for slavery, racism, stands against mixed-race marriages, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and, of course, homophobia. Of these historic and wrong-headed abuses of the Word, I pray that homophobia is the last popular ‘lie’ about God. Just as you will rarely hear Tampa preachers pound the Bible to support women being silent in church, I believe that pounding the Bible to punctuate anti-gay beliefs will end now. I am optimistic that the church is on the cusp of a new paradigm – a total shift in popular understanding of God’s Word that proves there is nothing against any of God’s children who believe, and that God loves and made on purpose the gay population, the lesbian population, the bisexual population, and the transgender population.
To know what the Bible says we must look at the entire Bible. One would not pick up any other book and read a couple of selected pages and claim to know what the book says. The Bible reads like an exciting novel. It’s like a movie. The Old Testament is the foundation of the movie narrative and puts in place foreshadowing and rituals that are symbolic of the coming of Christ and his teachings. The New Testament is the climax to the story and resolves the conflicts related in the Old Testament – it explains the Old Testament and puts in place an understanding of all that came before.
The Bible can only be understood when seen as a whole work. Through studying the entire Bible, this book, “God is Gay”, will reveal itself to the reader that God is as much gay as he is straight, that God loves gay as much as he loves straight, and that he does not approve of any so-called Christian dogma that chooses to make a distinction between straight Christians and gay Christians.