Of all the subjects a Christian must speak about today, few are harder than this one, and few are more urgent. Our age has redefined what it means to be a man or a woman, and it has redefined marriage and sex along with it. The church is told to celebrate these changes, and to be called hateful if it will not. So let us be clear from the start about two things. First, love does not mean agreeing with whatever a person wants to do. Sometimes the most loving thing is to tell a hard truth. Second, this study is not written out of contempt for anyone. Every person it speaks of is made in God's image and is loved by the God who made him. The aim here is not to wound, but to tell the truth that saves. With that settled, let us ask what the Bible actually says.
God Made Us Male and Female
Everything in this subject goes back to the beginning, to how God made us. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27). Male and female. These are not interchangeable, and they are not our invention. They are God's design, written into us before we ever drew a breath.
From that design God built marriage. He made the woman for the man, brought her to him, and said, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). One man, one woman, joined for life. That is not a custom that grew up over time. It is the pattern God set in the garden.
And Jesus settled the question for all time by going back to that same pattern. When He was asked about marriage, He said, "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?" (Matthew 19:4-5). The Lord did not treat male and female as a starting point we have outgrown. He treated it as the fixed truth that every question about sex and marriage must be measured against. We will follow Him and do the same.
God's Design for Sexuality
Because God designed marriage, He also designed where sexual union belongs. It belongs inside the marriage of a man and a woman, and nowhere else. "Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge" (Hebrews 13:4). The bed is honored inside marriage and judged outside it. Paul said that to avoid fornication, "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband" (1 Corinthians 7:2).
This means that homosexual conduct is not a strange new category that needs its own special rule. It is one of many ways that men and women step outside the place God set for sexual union. The man who commits adultery, the unmarried couple living together, and the man who lies with another man are all doing the same basic thing. They are taking what God reserved for the marriage of a man and a woman and using it where He did not give it. We start here so that no one imagines the Bible has singled out one sin to frown upon while winking at the rest. It has not. It calls all of them sin.
What the Bible Says About Homosexual Practice
With that foundation laid, the Bible's teaching on homosexual practice is plain and consistent. It is named as sin in both Testaments, and it is never once approved.
Paul wrote the clearest words in the New Testament. Describing a people who had turned away from God, he said, "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly" (Romans 1:26-27). Paul calls it what it is, against nature, a turning away from the use God built into the man and the woman.
He says it again in a list of sins that shut a person out of heaven if they are not repented of. "Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind... shall inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). The same warning stands in another letter, against "them that defile themselves with mankind" (1 Timothy 1:10).
This was God's view long before. Under the Law He had said, "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination" (Leviticus 18:22). We do not live under the Law of Moses today, but that command shows us that God's mind on this has never changed. And Jude points back to Sodom, whose people went "after strange flesh", as a warning "set forth for an example" (Jude 7). From the garden to the last days, the Bible speaks with one voice.
Temptation Is Not the Same as Sin
Now we must say something that careful Bible teaching requires, and that mercy requires too. Being tempted is not the same as sinning. A person may feel a pull toward what is wrong without having yet done wrong. The Lord Jesus Himself "was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15). He was tempted, and He never sinned. So temptation, by itself, is not the sin.
The Bible is precise about where sin begins. "But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin" (James 1:14-15). Sin is born when we take up the desire and act on it, in the heart or in the body. This matters for the person who says, "I did not choose to feel this way." He may be telling the truth. But feeling a desire and yielding to it are two different things, and God holds us accountable for the second, not the first.
And this is no heavy burden laid only on some. Every Christian carries desires he must refuse. The man drawn toward another man's wife, the woman drawn toward the bottle, the heart drawn toward greed or anger, all face the same command, to deny the desire rather than obey it. Nor does God leave us helpless. "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape" (1 Corinthians 10:13). No one is doomed by what he feels. By the grace of God, he can say no.
Transgenderism and the Place of the Creature
The same God who made us male and female also made our bodies, and that brings us to the question of transgenderism. The claim of our day is that a person may be born in the wrong body, that a man may truly be a woman or a woman a man, and that we may reshape ourselves to match how we feel. The Bible answers this at the root.
We did not make ourselves. God made us, and He made us male or female on purpose. The psalmist said to God, "thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:13-14). Your body is not a mistake that you have the right to overrule. It is the careful work of God, and it tells the truth about who you are. To insist otherwise is to set the creature above the Creator. God asks, through Isaiah, "Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?" (Isaiah 45:9), and through Paul, "Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?" (Romans 9:20). The pot does not correct the potter.
This is the very error Paul names at the heart of rebellion against God, that men "changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). To deny the body God gave is to call His truth a lie and to put our own feelings in His place. Even under the Law, God guarded the line between man and woman and would not have it blurred (Deuteronomy 22:5). He made the difference, He values it, and it is not ours to erase. And since the body belongs to God, we are to honor Him with it. "Ye are not your own... therefore glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
The Same Sin, and the Same Savior
Two things must be held together here, or we will go wrong. The first is that these are sins, named by God, and not to be excused. The second is that they are not worse than the sins the rest of us carry, and the people caught in them are not beyond saving.
Look again at Paul's list. Beside the man who lies with men he sets the fornicator, the idolater, the adulterer, the thief, the covetous, the drunkard, and the reviler (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). The gossip and the greedy man are on that list with everyone else. So the Christian who would speak about these sins has no room to look down on anyone. He is a forgiven sinner talking to sinners who can also be forgiven.
And forgiven they can be, fully. After naming those sins, Paul wrote some of the most hopeful words in all the Bible. "And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God" (1 Corinthians 6:11). Such were some of you. In the church at Corinth sat people who had come out of these very sins, washed clean and made new. What the blood of Christ did for them, it can do for anyone. No one is too far gone. No sin in this study is stronger than the cross.
Speaking the Truth in Love
So how should we carry all this? Paul gives the rule in three words, "speaking the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15). Not truth without love, which only crushes. Not love without truth, which only flatters and lets a soul go on to ruin. Both together.
If you are a Christian who is tempted in these ways, hear this plainly. The fight you are fighting is hard, but it is the same kind of fight every faithful person wages against his own flesh, and you are not alone in it. The Lord said, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me" (Luke 9:23). That cross is heavy, but it leads home, and the grace that carries every other Christian will carry you.
If you have lived in these sins and never turned from them, the door is open to you exactly as it was to those at Corinth. Repent, believe on Christ, be baptized into Him, and be washed. God is not standing at the door with His arms crossed. He is waiting to forgive.
And if your temptation is to despise the people this study speaks of, remember Paul's word to "restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted" (Galatians 6:1). We are all clay in the same Potter's hands. The only safe place for any of us, whatever our sin, is on our knees before the God who made us, asking Him to forgive us and to remake us after His will, and not our own.