Having wisdom is not the same thing as being clever or smart. When the Bible speaks of the folly of fools, the reference is not to those who struggle with the higher forms of calculus. In Scripture, folly is a moral issue, and many very intelligent people exhibit the problem. In short, knowledge is not wisdom.
When personified Wisdom speaks at the end of the eighth chapter of Proverbs, she says that all who hate her “love death” (Prov. 8:36). Application of this truth to the particular case of sexual orientation reveals a great deal. All who hate sexual wisdom love sexual death. Our culture-wide rejection of sexual wisdom is the real problem. In short, the problem of homosexuality extends far beyond homosexuals.
A man may talk quite a bit without revealing an understanding mind. In the same way, a culture may frantically pursue sexual activity, and may exhibit a morbid fascination with sexual issues, and yet be far removed from sexual wisdom. We believe ourselves to be wise in this area because we are “experienced” and because we reveal our pathological obsessions to others by talking about it all the time. But experience or practice makes perfect only if the practice is not muddleheaded.
We have come to believe that experience in sin qualifies us to speak authoritatively. But Christians should know better than this. The only man who can speak with full authority on the subject of sin is the Lord Jesus — who never sinned. A moment’s consideration should show us why this is the case. Suppose a company of us had to walk for a mile in hurricane-force wind. Suppose further that most of us blew over about ten feet after we started, and only one of us walked the entire mile. Who knows the most about wind? Those of us on the ground, or the one who walked the entire distance? In modern America, on sexual issues, we have all been toppled a long time ago. To this day we lie there, face down, congratulating ourselves on our experience.
Consider the brute facts about homosexuality for a moment. If we were to give a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to some visiting outer space alien, with some study he should be able to determine what goes where and why. Understanding the basic biology of human sexuality does not really pose a major intellectual challenge. Questions about nuts and bolts, or male and female electronic couplings, would be reasonable questions to put on an intelligence test, and failure to figure out the obvious would be grounds for wondering what the cognitive problem was. But we cannot chalk up homosexuality as a similar failure of intelligence, even though the error is one of the same magnitude. Homosexuals can rightly point out that their ranks contain many of the most gifted and intelligent people among us. This sexual folly, as pointed out above, is not a question of intelligence.
The issue is moral, but we have to take care not to run ahead of the argument. When we say the problem of homosexuality is a moral one, this is not the same thing as limiting the moral problem to those who practice homosexuality.
Why is straight America so nonplussed by the claims of strident homosexual activists? In response to the demands of homosexual activism, some proposed a Defense of Marriage Act. But as our political solons were sandbagging our legislative halls in preparation for the litigious floods of homosexual “marriages,” those who were defending “traditional” marriage were appealing to the most dreadful piffle. Their arguments made no sense and generally reduced to something like, “we’ve never done it this way before” (and they even got that wrong — we have too done it that way before).
Morality is defined by the Bible, and not by our general cultural experiences. Those who were proposing the Defense of Marriage Act, and those who opposed it (and he who signed it) uniformly make their appeals to the same god of human experience, autonomy, and “wisdom.” Their wrangles amount to nothing more than disagreements over interpretation down at humanism’s denominational headquarters.
In order to understand our culture’s inability to resist the claims of “gay activists” we must understand that they are reasoning from premises held in common by most of straight America, i.e. that sexual autonomy and sexual wisdom are consistent with one another. Because they are not, the homosexual activists have been able to build upon fundamentally rebellious principles and take us on to the necessary conclusion, which is high rebellion. As much as many traditional straights might want to disavow the homosexual movement, we must acknowledge that the homosexual activists are in the vanguard of our rebellion. Of course this does not excuse those guilty of sodomy — their behavior truly is a sexual form of cannibalism.
Still, rebellion leads to more rebellion. Heterosexual rebellion leads to homosexual rebellion. Our culture-wide refusal to acknowledge God as God, and our refusal to give Him thanks is bearing fruit. How has it come about that intelligent people are willing to maintain that a man may lie with another man as though he were a woman? The answer relates to how many intelligent people were willing to tolerate serial divorce and remarriage, rampant pornography, heterosexual promiscuity, and so on, ad nauseam.
So why can we not just stop, and now say no? Why can we not say, finally, that this is going too far? To use a hetero example, that is like trying to be a little bit pregnant.