Dear Editor,

My name is Jesse Hill, and I am the pastor of Unionville Baptist Church in Unionville, Iowa. I just heard the Iowa Supreme Court ruling concerning gay marriage. Congratulations Iowa, we’ve just become a mecca of homosexuality in the United States. We poke fun at California for being ultra-liberal wackos, but we’ve just outdone them. Right now I am in a blind rage about this ruling (as I’m sure many of you are also). Before I get to what we as Christians should do, let me lay out what this ruling means, and why it is evil.

First of all, you must know that the Bible strictly forbids homosexuality, bestiality, polygamy and pedophilia, and teaches from beginning to end that marriage is between one man and one woman (You may read Leviticus 18, esp. v 22, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Romans 1:26-32, Genesis 2:18-25). The term ‘gay marriage’ is an oxymoron. Marriage is a spiritual union between one man and one woman, sanctioned by God, and defined by God. So it doesn’t matter what any human court says, what piece of paper these gay couples are granted, or what tax status they are given, they will NEVER be a married couple in the sight of God. Human courts cannot go over the Creator’s head to declare as righteous that which God declares unrighteous.

Some will argue that people will be homosexual if they want to be, and we can’t stop them. “We can’t legislate morality,” they say. That’s odd. We’ve made it illegal for a 25-year-old to have sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend, statutory rape. Anybody want their 14 year old sleeping with old men (25, 35. . .older)? With anyone? Do you think that young teen (or younger!) is ready for the emotional and spiritual consequences of sex, not to mention the physical consequences? Some of you reading this were sexually active at that age; are you proud of yourself? Do you tell your kids about your sexual experiences as a young teen? Do you talk with your family members about it? Do you visit with grandma and grandpa about it? Hmm. We also make it illegal to expose yourself in public. We make it illegal to make or distribute child pornography, and we restrict children from seeing pornography. So don’t give me this bologna about not legislating morality. We can, we do, and WE MUST! It is one role, if not the key role, of civil government, “. . .it [government] is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil” (Romans 13:4). Some will argue that this is a civil liberty being denied a group of people who “can’t help the way they are.” Let’s address the second part of that statement first. Folks, the Bible teaches original sin. We ALL are evil by our very nature, although our depravity manifests itself in various ways. So none of us can help being sinful. We have that genetic predisposition as the offspring of Adam to be evil (see Romans 5:12). But the thing is sin is also a willing choice of ours. We do it because we want to. Some choose sins like lying, stealing, idolatry, adultery, pornography, or greed. (We have laws concerning every one of those items!). And some choose the sin of homosexuality. Nobody is forcing them to be homosexual. The fact that they are slaves to their own inward fallenness does not excuse them for responsibility. It doesn’t excuse any of us.

As to the first part of that argument, that marriage is a civil liberty, I say the following. Civil government is an institution of God for the reigning in and curbing of this inner depravity. Note that I did not say a solution for evil (the solution is found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ); but a means of restraining evil. The government and human courts do NOT have the right to declare what is or isn’t a civil liberty. Those have been set down in the Law of God. Our own Constitution begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Our founders recognized that our rights come from God. God determines what is and is not a civil liberty. We cannot create new ones. And we have the rule of law because liberty does not mean anarchy.

So this ruling means that we are going to sanction as righteous, that which God does not. Obviously, it isn’t the first time this has happened in this country, or in this state. We sanction the immorality of heterosexual people. I would venture to say that if you are reading this, you are related to or know a heterosexual couple who is living together out of wedlock. It has become socially acceptable, while still morally reprehensible. You don’t get fired up about that sin. We sanction the murder of the unborn through abortion. Roe v. Wade might have changed this government’s position, but God’s stance on it remains unchanged. We sanction divorce as being of no consequence. And if you weren’t ticked off yet, this will tick you off: in all but a very few specific cases, divorce is sin. It is a rejection of God’s plan for the family (See Matthew 19:1-9, 1 Corinthians 7). But what does it mean when a government sanctions evil? What do we make of it? It means that we, as a nation, are under judgement. And I intentionally use the present tense “are” instead of the future “will be.” I support this from Romans 1:18-32, which I encourage you to read. In this passage, we find that as people reject God, and go after their own desires, God lets them. He has a strange way of giving us exactly what we want (to a point), even if that desire is utterly evil.

Some past judgements have been terrifying: famines, wars, plagues, etc. But this judgement is perhaps the scariest of all: God letting go of the wheel, and letting us drift wherever our desires take us. Perhaps if we had a famine or war or terrible plague, we’d quickly see our wrong and repent and return to God. But in this judgement of silence, nobody even notices they’re being judged. Two Peter 3:3-7 speaks of those who look around at the seeming lack of any judgement, and conclude that God is not real and doesn’t care about our actions, that there will be no judgement. What they fail to realize is that “By His word, the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgement and destruction of ungodly men” (2 Peter 3:7).

I am convinced that there has been a “letting go of the wheel” kind of judgement for quite a while. But as God loosens His grip, and lets a society chase after evil with less restraint, the drift towards evil accelerates rapidly into a sprint. This ruling sanctioning homosexual marriage, this present judgement, raises a difficult question. What are we as Christians to do? How do we respond? To be honest, my first reaction (past the gagging), was to move. Just get out of the state. I only live about 20 minutes from Missouri, I’ll just take my family and leave. But as my blood pressure returned to semi-normal levels, I realized that no state is perfect, no country is perfect, and there’s not a government on earth that I can expect to reflect a Judeo-Christian, biblical worldview. Besides, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5:9-13 that to avoid association with evil we’d have to exit this world.

My next reaction involved violence on which I won’t elaborate. I will say that God praised the zeal of Phinehas in Numbers 25. If you read it, you’ll understand my meaning. Then I thought, I’m going to call my state Representative and state Senator and let them know how I and the people in my church feel about this ruling, and just what I want them to do about it. I’m sure many of you have taken this route, and that’s fine. But Christians, don’t take a pea-shooter into battle when you’ve got heavy artillery. Our power, as Christians, is not found in political action, in court cases, in lawyer’s offices. Our real power is found in prayer. And if you rolled your eyes when you read that, please stop calling yourself a Christian. You’re embarrassing the rest of us. You obviously know nothing of God or prayer. If you want to see this ruling overturned, go ahead and call your representatives, fight this through the channels in place for fighting such things. But do your hardest fighting on your knees. If you don’t go to a prayer meeting, GO, or else stop whining about why such rulings are handed down in our country. Go to prayer as a church, and at home, and as a family, and you plead your case in the High Court that really matters. And you beg God, the one true Living God, Creator of the universe, that He might be merciful to us. You beg Him for a revival so that ALL sin, not just homosexuality, would be as abhorrent to us as it is to Him. You confess your own faults (first remove the beam from your own eye), and confess your prior apathy regarding righteousness in our land. Perhaps it is not too late, and God might bring about true and lasting revival in our land. In a democracy, godly leaders will only be chosen when God changes the hearts of those who elect them.

This is what I will call my church to do when we next meet: fervent prayer. Fellow-pastors, I don’t care what your Sunday morning rituals are, or what sacred cows get slaughtered to do this. I challenge you to dwell in prayer on Sunday. Have a prayer meeting. If that feels strange and awkward, then shame on us, because His house shall be called a house of prayer. We’re in a bad place spiritually if it is strange to devote ourselves to prayer together as a church. I close with Isaiah 40:22-23, “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. He it is who reduces rulers to nothing, who makes the judges of the earth meaningless.”

Jesse Hill

Pastor Unionville Baptist Church

Unionville, Iowa