In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
- Genesis 1:1
April 15 of this month marked the 109th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. In commemoration of the event, one of the YouTube channels I followed put out a multi-part series covering the events of the April 14 and 15 1912, the night of the sinking.
One of the videos featured and interesting fact that I had heard about previously but had not appreciated its importance. As part of the evacuation, Charles Lightoller, the Titanic’s second officer and senior surviving officer, opened the gangway door on D-Deck to help with the lowering of one of the lifeboats. As it turned out, the door was never used during the ship’s evacuation, and in the chaos, was forgotten and left open. This, as it turned out, was a significant oversight.
The D-Deck gangway door was about halfway up on the port (left) side of the ship and normally well above the waterline. According to one article, it was the ‘front door’ for first class passengers boarding the ship. But as Titanic settled, eventually the water made its way up to the door and started pouring in. The way it was explained in the video, the area the gangway afforded to the advancing water was actually larger than the sum of area of the original punctures made by the iceberg on the starboard (right) side at the time of the collision. With this additional route for water to enter the ship, the sinking of the Titanic rapidly accelerated.
So just what does this bit of Titanic trivia have to do with today’s subject at hand, marriage? I admit, the connection may not be immediately obvious, but hear me out.
The stated purpose of this series, going back to Part 1, is, “to apply the revealed history found in Genesis to the current moral, political, scientific and economic problems of our day, refuting the contemporary confusion and setting forth the mind of God on these issues.”
This brings us to the subject of marriage.
Back in the day, and we don’t have to go very far back for this, most Americans accepted the Biblical definition of marriage, whether they themselves were Christians.
But all that has changed in recent years. If recent polling is to be believed, a full seventy percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage. As one measure of how things have changed, I recall that the State of Ohio amended its constitution in 2004 to specifically define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. There was widespread public support for the amendment and the measure was adopted with little public outcry. This was a mere seventeen years ago.
The Ohio amendment and all other state-level prohibitions of same-sex marriage were overturned in 2015 by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, which originated right here in river city, my hometown of Cincinnati.
To return to my earlier point about how the mistake of leaving the D-Deck gangway door open sped up the sinking of the Titanic, in like fashion, I believe, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision sped up the sinking of the America’s ship of state, which already was well under way in 2015. It’s not as if leaving the gangway door open is what sealed Titanic’s fate. The ship was going to sink anyway based on the damage already done by the iceberg. But leaving the door open sped things up. The same with America. American’s have been losing their liberties since the Progressive Era – I always thought it should be named the Regressive Era – so the process has been going on for well over a century at this point. The loss of liberty was well underway even in 1912 when the Titanic sunk. But the rate of our loss of liberty, almost imperceptible at first, has sped up greatly in recent years. In my opinion, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision can be likened to the leaving open of the D-Deck gangway door. We were well on our way to sinking before that, but same-sex marriage sped things up.
I say this because it allowed evil to access new parts of our society that had remained untouched until that time. Over the years, there was greater and greater acceptance of same-sex marriage, but the legal recognition of it has seemed to speed up, not only the rate of acceptance of same-sex marriage, but also other parts of the homosexual agenda such as the recognition of transgenders as the new Brahmins of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement.
But despite what the wokesters would have you believe, there is a valid definition of marriage that is binding on all men and women for the very reason that it is God’s definition of marriage. And God’s definition does not agree with the Supreme Court’s.
What is Marriage?
Genesis 2:24 gives us a definition of marriage with the words, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Based on this and other verses, the Westminster Confession of Faith gives this definition of marriage, “Marriage is to be between one man and one woman.”
As we can see, there’s no confusion at all as to the Bible’s definition of marriage, nor is it a thing hard to understand. You don’t have to be at the level of a Martin Luther, John Calvin or Gordon Clark to get it. And the Bible’s definition of marriage was so widely accepted even as recently as twenty years ago that, as noted above, Ohio was able to amend its Constitution to define marriage using the same words as the Westminster Confession.
Ohio’s decision and the decision of other states – Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee in this part of the country - to define marriage in a way that is consistent with the Scriptures is the very essence of good government. But all this was preempted by the evil 2015 decision of the Supreme Court.
Is Government Free to Define Marriage as It Sees Fit?
Now some may say that to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman is all well and good, but in the end, it’s only your opinion and you don’t have a right to impose your opinions on others. Put a bit differently, some people like to argue that “you can’t legislate morality!”
To which I would answer, the Christian definition of marriage is not an opinion, it is the Law of God. And Christians have, not only the right to impose the Law of God upon the nation, but the duty to do so. As to the objection that “you can’t legislate morality,” this is nonsense. All criminal justice codes are, by definition, attempts to legislate, at least in the outward sense, morality.
Government is not free to define marriage as it sees fit for the simple reason that civil government is a creature of God. The Apostle Paul asked the rhetorical question, “Does the thing formed say to him who formed it, why have your made me like this?” To which the obvious answer is, no, it does not. And if civil government is a creature of God, and it is, then magistrates are not free to define terms as they see fit. The Apostle Paul describes the civil magistrate as “God’s minister.” And if he’s God’s minister, his job is to carry out God’s will, which as a civil magistrate means punishing those who practice evil and rewarding the good. And it is God who defines what is good and what is evil.
When civil magistrates, and this includes Supreme Court justices, pass laws or give rulings that are contrary to the Law of God, they come under God’s judgment for calling good evil and evil good.
One way in which civil magistrates punish evil and reward the good is by enforcing just contracts. Jesus gave an example of this in his Sermon on the Mount, where he told his hearers to agree quickly with those who are taking them to court, lest they be turned over to the magistrate for punishment.
But what if the terms of a contract are unjust? For example, we’ve probably all heard of cases where someone hired a “hit man” to murder someone for them. In this case, the two parties agree to the terms of the contract, what is to be done the amount to be paid, but would the government be right to enforce such a contract if the hit man was not paid the agreed upon amount. Of course not, for the simple reason that the terms of the contract themselves are immoral.
For this same reason, the civil magistrate cannot recognize same-sex marriage or enforce the terms of such unions for at least two reasons. First, there is no such thing as same-sex marriage, and civil magistrates are not free to redefine marriage to include such unions. Second, because the terms of the same-sex marriage contract themselves are immoral. Not only do the Scriptures define what marriage is, they also explicitly condemn Sodomy. It was expressly outlawed in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament we read that persons who practice it, as Paul makes clear to the Corinthians, “will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
Calling Evil Good and Good Evil
In Chapter 5 of Isaiah, the prophet pronounces woe on those who call “evil good and good evil.” Even a cursory glance at the news should tell you that this is a common occurrence in our own day. As the men of Judah in Isaiah’s day, Americans in the 21st century have “gone away backward.” That is to say, not only have we as a nation gone wrong, we’ve gone 180 degrees wrong to the point where we think darkness is light and light is darkness and seek to punish anyone who says otherwise.
We have, in short, lost our ability to discern good from evil.
What accounts for this lack of discernment, the ability to make distinctions? In his Trinity Review “The Church Irrational,” John Robbins tells us the fundamental answer is the will of God. Men lack discernment because God causes them to lack it. There’s an old saying Robbins quotes in “The Church Irrational” which reads, “Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Translated into Christian terms, one can find this idea expressed several times in Scripture. One such example is in Romans Chapter 1, where the Apostle, after calling the readers’ attention to the reasons for God’s revealing his wrath against all ungodliness, writes, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient (or “fitting” as the NKJV reads).”
In looking at the moral, economic and political landscape in which we live in America in the early 21st century, it is clear that God has given many of my fellow countrymen over to a reprobate or debased mind for their refusal to honor him to “retain God in their knowledge.” The widespread acceptance of homosexuality, the successful demands to change the law to allow for same-sex marriage, and explosion of interest in transgenderism in our time are clear demonstration of the curse of God Paul wrote about in Romans.
As Christians we mut pray, in the first place, that God would grant us discernment that we also are not deceived. “Don’t be deceived,” was a consistent injunction of both Jesus and Paul. As modern day Americans, we are subject to perhaps the most sophisticated and powerful propaganda machine the world has ever seen in the form of the media, entertainment and educational complexes, all which have repeatedly shown themselves hostile to Christ and all that is called God. We must pray for discernment.
We must also pray for courage. Near the end of 1 Corinthians, Paul tells his readers, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.” I always liked the King James translation of this verse, because it really does capture the sense of the Greek with the turn of phrase “quit you like men.” The Greek verb translated by these words literally means “act like a man.” It reminds me of Hugh Latimer’s heroic last words. While the executioners were lighting the fires to burn him, he said to his fellow martyr Nicholas Ridley, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England that as I trust shall never be put out.” Who knows, maybe Latimer had Paul’s words in mind when he said this.
Latimer’s courage, as great an example as it is of steadfast Christian faith, was not of him. It was a gift of God. And it is to the Lord we must look for the courage to fight the good fight of faith in these difficult days as well.