Christians: Is It Time For Civil Disobedience? (Part 2)

I commend to your reading these words primarily from Matt Barber – founder and editor-in-chief of BarbWire.com.  [If you’ve not read my previous posting of July 13, read it before reading this blog.]

“Central to Christianity, and clearly delineated throughout both the Old and New Testaments, is the unambiguous and timeless proposition that any sexual practice outside the bonds of true man-woman marriage constitutes sexual immorality and results in separation from God.  This, of course, includes sexual acting out between members of the same sex, whether or not such acting out is tied to the novel notion of so-called ‘same-sex marriage,’ says Barber.

Barber goes on to clearly explain, “Christians, true Christians – regenerate, Bible-believing Christians who strive their level best to maintain fidelity to the Word of God and honor His commands – will not, indeed cannot, participate in, approve of, facilitate or encourage certain behaviors deemed by the Holy Scriptures to be immoral or sinful.  This is both our constitutionally affirmed human right and our Christian duty.  It is not so much that Christians wish, willy-nilly, to call homosexual behavior, polyamory, fornication, adultery, bestiality, incest or any other disordered sexual proclivity ‘sinful.’  It is, rather, that we must.  For the true Christian, God’s objective truths will always trump man’s subjective desires.”

Over the past 2,000 years of church history, whenever such conflicts have arisen, Christians have placed the laws of God above the laws of man.  In the early church the Christians refused to bow a knee to Caesar in worship.  So, will today’s Christians refuse to obey any court opinion or man-made law that presumes to make sin obligatory?  If the ancient church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, was able to face the lions in hopeful anticipation of joining Jesus, then why wouldn’t today’s Christians, under the same Spirit, face anything today’s pagan left can threaten?

“In the ongoing culture war, it seems there are no rules of engagement.  The secular left will accept nothing short of unconditional surrender.  That is to say, the pagans demand that we Christians abandon the biblical worldview altogether, and adopt their own.  This will never happen,” says Barber.

In his “letter from the Birmingham jail,” the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously declared, “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”  He explained, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.  An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”  An unjust law is, in point of fact, lawlessness.

Barber concludes, “ … [Justice] ‘Kennedy’s folly,’ will result in, must necessarily result in, widespread civil disobedience – disobedience of the sort we haven’t seen since the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. … One can imagine nothing more ‘out of harmony with the moral law,’ than the twisted and oxymoronic notion of so-called ‘same-sex marriage.’  And so, Mr. Kennedy, our answer is no.  Come what may, we will not obey your unjust lawlessness.”

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel