Tackling Tradition 84: The 1946 Argument, the Bible, & Homosexuality

The 1946 argument is just a distraction.       It amounts to looking at one or 2 trees in the forest & not the forest itself.       The argument centers on the meaning of 2 words in 1 Corinthians 6.     Those 2 words are derived from Leviticus 18, where the subject matter is most certainly homosexual behavior done in the service of one or more pagan pseudodeities, so the issue isn’t whether or not the words refer to homosexuality.   The issue is what sort of homosexual behavior are in view.  There’s a history to the translation of “maltakoi”    & “arsenakoitai,” in 1 Corinthians 6 & 1 Timothy 1.    Ask yourself what readers of the Geneva Bible thought the term “buggerers” meant or what “abusers of mankind” meant in the days of King James.      In other words, focusing on these 2 words translated as “homosexuals” in the ESV doesn’t really do anything to confute the tradition bound view e...
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Is It True That God Does Not Love Everyone?

From time to time, Hyper-Calvinists & others will point to Romans 9 & Malachi 1:2 - 3 “ Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”  (Romans 9:13, ESV)  & allege that these two texts and similar texts (like Psalm 5:5) teach that God literally hates either all sinners or the Elect but not the Reprobate.

Is that at all true? 

No, it most certainly is not true. How so?

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”  (Matthew 22:34–40, ESV)


God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, justice, holiness, goodness, and truth who summarizes/encapsulates His Moral Law via 2 overarching principles that conduce to infinitely exhaustive, perfect love for God first, then everyone & everything else, & then one’s own self. 


God’s Moral Law commands us to love the same way He Himself loves.   God loves Himself first (because God alone is God); then God loves everyone & everything else next, & then God loves Himself.   


Therefore, God doesn’t hate anyone (as in an absolute privation of love).  Rather, these passages mean that God’s love when set upon those He has redeemed/intends to redeem is so very vast in comparison to His righteousness indignation & wrath that as to the targets of His indignation & wrath, it is as though God truly hates those He wraths, especially those who persist in wickedness like Edom (ie Esau). 


O LORD, Hear our prayer(s)!




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