Homosexuality and the Bible: Misunderstanding Sodom

This is part three of a series refuting the best defenses of the “Gay is Ok” crowd in the church (notice the “c” is lower case). You can read part one here and part two here. These people have no Biblical case whatsoever. Nevertheless, they do some impressive hermeneutical gymnastics to try to distort, ignore, or misinterpret the clear teaching of God’s word so they can make a case that homosexuality is not immoral. We will deal with another of their favorite passages where they attempt to show that we who hold to a Biblical understanding of sex being between one man and one woman only within the bonds of matrimony are just short sighted, ignorant bigots. Let’s take a look at the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and see what the Bible has to say.

In Genesis 19, we read that God has sent two angels to Sodom to destroy both Sodom and Gomorrah if they cannot find 5 (?) righteous people within the city. Lot, upon seeing these men in the city, invites them to his house. At first, they refuse saying they will spend the night in the open city. Lot insists that they come to his home and spend the night. Later that night, a mob of men from the city crowd around Lot’s door. In verse 5, they say they want Lot to bring these men out so that they can “know” them.

Now, here’s where the homosexual revisionists try to make like Mary Lou Retton. They say the Hebrew word used here for “know” (yada) can mean to have sexual relations with someone but it can also mean simply to know someone in the sense of a relationship. In other words, these men merely wanted to get to know these strangers. Also, this may have indicated that these men from Sodom were simply suspicious and did not want strangers in their town. Traveling was difficult back then and these men were not guilty of the sin of homosexuality but rather were inhospitable to strangers. That is the sin God punished them for in Sodom. We Christians who claim homosexuality is immoral at all times, you see, have totally missed the point due to our prejudice. For shame.

However, we who are students of the Bible should continue reading. In verse 8, Lot offers to placate the crowd by offering his two virgin daughters so that the crowd of men “could do to them whatever [they] like[d]”. There is nothing in the text to suggest that his daughters did not live in the town. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that Lot knew they intended to have sex with the two men (angels). Therefore, we know that they were not interested in running a couple of strangers out of town but were looking to satisfy their lust through homosexual sin.

It’s really sad that some people just don’t want to take God’s word as meaning what it means or saying what it says. We have seen clearly in these three examples that the arguments of the “Gay is OK” crowd just don’t stand up to the weight of clear scriptural evidence against them. We, as Christians, should continue to proclaim the truth of God’s word about sin and the remedy for sin—a relationship with Jesus Christ.