Sound of Faith

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Praise the Lord. I'm Sharon Knotts, thanking you for joining us today on the Sound of Faith because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. You are about to hear a penetrating word from Scripture addressing the volatile issue of same-sex marriage following the Supreme Court's ruling to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states of America in the name of equality for all. But they have essentially redefined marriage, an institution created by God, not man, because the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being.

R. G. Hardy: I have a message that the Lord wants me to deliver, and I believe it's not only for you that are here but for others who will hear it. Amen? Friday night before going to bed, I was watching the news and I cringed to see the White House lit up in rainbow colors, which, as you know, are the colors of the LGBT community. The White House thumbing its nose at God, America thumbing its nose at the Bible, at Bible-believing Christians like you and me. Amen?

The President said about the ruling, the Supreme Court ruling on Friday to legitimize gay marriage throughout the whole nation, all 50 states, regardless of what any state's voters may have voted, he said, "Today we can say in no uncertain terms that we have made our union a little more perfect." Now, back in 2008 in the election season, God gave me a very strong word which I delivered about abortion and homosexuality and how imperative it was that we would elect congressmen, senators, and a president and cabinet who would be pro-life and who would be pro-marriage.

At the time, we had the DOMA Act, Defense of Marriage Act, that simply stated this: marriage is between a man and a woman. That's all that was to it. But it has been struck down since then, and then the floodgates opened up. Amen? I said that it was important who we elected as president, not only because of having a pro-life view and a pro-marriage view, but also it is the president who elects the federal judges. It is the president who appoints the federal judges to the Supreme Court.

And at the time, we had several aged judges who were in very poor health, indicating it wouldn't be very long before there would be openings and the president would have to fill those openings. And so I said, you know, it's so important to understand. A lot of people don't give it a thought until something like this occurs with the Supreme Court. They don't think about how those judges get there. They are not elected like our senators and our congressmen and our president. They're not elected; they are appointed, and not only that, folks, they're appointed for life.

I don't know if I agree with that. They're appointed for life. They can be in there, depending on how old they are. Some of the judges just put in are fairly young, so they can be in there 20 or 30 years with no problem. There's a reason why they changed the law that a president can only serve two terms. And so I said it was very important, and sure enough, we had openings on the bench there in the Supreme Court and they did get filled with liberal judges who are not for pro-life and who are not for marriage. Amen?

And so now we see seven years later how quickly, how quickly everything has changed. But let me say this: the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being. Last week I opened up with a verse, and I'm going to open up with the same verse today. I had no idea what would ensue during the week, but I'm going to use this same verse as my opening text, Psalm 11:3: "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" On Friday, June the 26th, 2015, the final stone in the foundation of marriage in America was removed by the Supreme Court.

This is not about equality for all people; this is the redefining of marriage, which authority is not governed by human law. The Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being. Marriage is not an institution that was created by man. Marriage was God's idea. He created the blueprint for marriage, and He is on record in His word that marriage is between one man and one woman. When He first created man, a woman from man, He personally brought the woman to the man. God never brings a man to a man and a woman to a woman.

So just for the record, so we can go on record, let's turn to Genesis and let's read a couple verses. Let's read Genesis 2, starting with verse 21: "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."

Verse 24 is the most important verse that is repeated twice in the New Testament: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Now, I want to point out that at the time, Adam didn't have a father and a mother. So why would God say this? Because He was laying as a foundation for all time to come the governing principle that marriage is between a husband and a wife. A man and a woman are to cleave to one another.

Now, there are proponents of same-sex marriage that are quick to argue that Jesus never addressed the subject of homosexuality in His teaching. But Jesus did, because He ratified Genesis 2:24. Hold your place in Genesis and turn to Matthew 19. In Matthew 19, He was having a discussion with the Pharisees, and in verse 3 it says, "The Pharisees came also unto him, tempting him," in other words, they were setting him up to try to snare him in his words, which they were fond of doing.

And saying unto him, asking him, "Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?" Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason? And they were going to try to snare him, and if you read the whole discussion, you see that they threw up what Moses allowed them and, you know, they were trying to use Moses' words against Jesus because if they could succeed in getting Jesus in some way to disagree with Moses, oh, well, they would have him where they wanted him.

But Jesus skipped over Moses and went back to the beginning, to the blueprint, to God, to the Creator. And we read that it says in verse 4, "And he answered and said unto them, 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?" And He didn't stop there. He attached a severe warning and said in verse 6, "Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

He was punctuating this with this strong warning: do not undo marriage the way God has designed it to be. Amen? So yes, in this we see that He did address homosexuality, because He made it clear that it's heterosexual marriage that God created in the beginning and do not let anyone divide that or put it asunder or negate it or void it or annul it. Amen? Now Apostle Paul quoted this same verse, in Ephesians 5:31 he quoted the very same verse going back to Genesis: "For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh."

So according to God's own prescription, in the mouths of two or three witnesses let every word be established. We have what God said in the beginning when He created Adam and Eve, and because He's the Creator and He's the designer, then what He says is the principle that governs marriage for all time. Amen? Clearly it is God's intention for a husband to cling to his wife, not his significant other. In this one verse, Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:6, Ephesians 5:31, in this one verse is the mandate of two of the pillars of man's creation. This one verse covers that marriage is to be a marriage of monogamy and heterosexuality.

How many see it? This one verse clearly shows it's God's intention for monogamy and heterosexuality. Now let's go back to Genesis and let's look at chapter 1 verses 27 and 28: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." This is an important point. I won't go on, you know, elaborate on it here, but we're all created in the image of God. "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth."

And He went on to say and subdue it or have dominion over it, over the fowl of the air, the heavens, over every living thing that moves upon the earth. And so God created man and woman in His own image and He blessed them and the very first blessing He gave them was "Be fruitful and multiply." And folks, there is no way that two women or two men can multiply and pass on their unique genetic material. It's impossible. It will always be impossible.

They have to bring in a third party of the opposite sex. If they're going to use the egg of, if it's two women, then they're going to use one of their eggs, they've got to bring a man in. If it's two men together and they're going to use one of their sperm, they've got to bring in a woman. But even when they do that, which by the way negates "two shall be one flesh" because now we've got three, but even if we overlook that, the child that is born is not the fruit of the two men or the two women. Their unique genetic material is not passed on because one of them is missing from the equation. Amen?

So there's no way that such a union can ever produce a godly seed. It can only serve to perpetuate perverse and unnatural lust, which the Bible condemns. And God is not reticent, He's not reticent in His abhorrence of homosexuality. And you don't have to try to read between the lines or manipulate the Scriptures to see that He has denounced homosexuality as an abomination. Amen? He clearly said in Leviticus 18:22, "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman, it is an abomination."

What is an abomination? That is something to be abhorred, to be viewed as loathesome, detestable, and repugnant to God. Not only does God not approve of same-sex marriage, He is against it. Leviticus 20:13: "If a man also lies with a man as he lies with a woman, both have committed an abomination and they shall be put to death." Now proponents of homosexuality will jump on this. They love to jump on the fact of the Old Testament death penalty as being radical.

Now, there is no genuine Christian who would advocate the death penalty for homosexuals. I expected to hear more than one "amen" on that. Amen! No Christian, no Christian would ever advocate the death penalty for homosexuality any more than we would advocate it for adultery. And the same Scriptures that teach the death penalty in the Old Testament for homosexuality teach it for adultery. But we wouldn't advocate that. We wouldn't advocate the death penalty for any sin, even though all sin, keyword all sin, is worthy of the death penalty.

According to the Bible, all sin, "the soul that sinneth, it shall die." So we're not going to advocate the death penalty, why? Because God sent His son Jesus Christ to die on the cross in our place to pay the penalty. He did not rescind the penalty. He did not rescind the death penalty for sin, all sin. But instead He sent His pure, holy, sinless son to be our substitute. For Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages of sin is death." This is New Testament. Death. But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen?

God didn't rescind the death penalty. He didn't rescind the Ten Commandments. He didn't rescind any of these laws on morality. And in righteousness, God judges. But in His mercy, He laid the sin and the penalty upon His son. Amen? Does God hate the sin of homosexuality? Yes. God hates all sin because He knows what it does. He knows the destruction and the eternal damnation it will bring if a person stays in their sin. Amen?

All have sinned, the Bible says in Romans 3:23, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." So we need to make that clear. We have to make that distinction. God hates homosexuality, but He doesn't hate homosexuals. And neither should you if you're a real Christian. Amen? It is those people who call themselves Christians that use this kind of terminology that adds fuel to the fire, amen, and gets people off-track of the word of God and gets conviction off of them about the word of God because they say oh, they're just a bunch of haters.

And all that does is allow Satan to remove the conviction off of them and dismiss us as radical haters. Folks, homosexuality is not the unpardonable sin. I know there are some people that try to make it, but it's not. Amen? But having said that, I will say this: that following the commandment in Leviticus 18:22, there's a startling companion consequence. After it says that you should not lie with a man as you would with a woman, it says in verse 24, "Defile not yourselves in any of these things, for in all these things the nations are defiled which I cast out before you."

And listen to this in verse 25: "And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants." Now, what is being said here? God is saying that the practice of homosexuality brings defilement to those who engage in it. Amen? He says, "you defile yourself." But we also see that when this sin becomes rife in a nation, when this sin becomes prevalent in a nation, God says that the very land, the very nation is defiled in His sight and He will visit it with judgment. Amen?

And you will certainly get backlash on that. But Scripture says in Proverbs 14:34, "Righteousness exalts a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people." Amen? And folks, there are two sins that defile the land itself. There are two sins that actually defile the land: murder and homosexuality. I don't have time to go there and get the Scriptures and all, but there are many verses that talk about that the land is bloody, the land is bloody with violence. The first murder, Cain killed Abel, and God said, "The blood of your brother cries out from the ground." Amen?

When God was going to destroy the city of Nineveh, which was a huge city, probably 600,000 people, every bit as big as Baltimore, maybe bigger, and God was going to destroy the city, and He sent Jonah there to warn them, God said, "It's a bloody city," because they were filled with violence. Amen? So these two sins actually defile the land. Now the New Testament is not ambiguous when it comes to homosexuality. And most homosexual proponents will try to stay on these verses in Leviticus and keep you bound up in them.

And they'll try to get you all off-track and say, "Well, it also says you can't eat bacon. Well, it also says you can't eat crabs. Well, it also says dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. You can't get tattoos." And I'm not disputing any of that. That's what it says. But they'll try to get you all bound up in that to make you think, "Well, that is absolutely ridiculous and foolish and crazy," so that you'll say the part about homosexuality is crazy too. And they don't have enough knowledge of the Bible to know the covenant that God made with Israel.

They don't have enough knowledge to know that it was a covenant He made with them and that later on, way down centuries down the line, we would figure out and find out why God put these prohibitions on certain things. They didn't know about diseases and germs, etc., etc. They didn't know about that then, but God did. Amen? You know, and they'll throw it up and say, "Yes, and a woman when she's having her time of month she's unclean," and boy, you'll get all the women riled up, oh wow.

They didn't know about sanitary laws and such. So you've got to not get hung up there, amen, because the New Testament is not silent on the matter. Amen? And the New Testament, it's again, you don't have to manipulate the language or read between the lines to try to get it to say what you want it to say. It is clear, it is very clear that homosexuality dishonors the body. It goes beyond the sexual act, because God sees it as a lie that corrupts His creation.

And when the Lord showed this to me several years ago, I was really in awe. Maybe other ministers are preaching it. I'm not saying they're not. I'm just telling you I never heard them. So turn with me in Romans, the first chapter. And most of you are familiar with these verses, but we're putting everything on record. Amen? Romans 1, verse 22: "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen."

Let's stop for a moment and look at this. The term uncleanness in the Greek means aberrant sex, in other words, sex that is unnatural and abnormal. Sex that is against nature, it will go on to say as we shall read, against God's blueprint of heterosexuality. So in order to accommodate the sin of homosexuality, they had to change the truth into a lie. The only way that they can practice homosexuality and try to have a clear conscience, what they would consider a clear conscience in doing so, is to change the truth of God into a lie. Amen?

And so that's why homosexuality dishonors the body, because it changes the truth of creation, the way God created it to be, man and woman. And it's a lie against God's design as the Creator who is blessed forever, amen, who said, "I am God and I change not." Amen! It's a lie against the Creator and the design that He created. So homosexuals depart from God's design, burning in their own lusts, and the sexual act is just the fruit of the lusts that are in their hearts.

Let's read verse 26: "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, working that which is indecent, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet."

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Amen. I hope you're being spiritually stirred and socially enlightened to the truth of the homosexual redefinition of marriage, because that is exactly what the Supreme Court's ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states of America has done. But the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being. This is not about equality for all people. Marriage is an institution created by God, not man. Marriage is God's idea, and He created the blueprint: one man and one woman.

When He created Adam and Eve, He said, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh." And Jesus Christ ratified it in the New Testament and added the solemn warning: what God has joined together, let no one put asunder. Let no one undo God's marriage design. Some claim Jesus did not address homosexuality, but in this verse, which was also cited by Apostle Paul, God laid down two pillars of the foundation for marriage: monogamy and heterosexuality.

There is no evidence that God created people to be homosexual. He would not condemn what He created, and He does solemnly condemn the practice of homosexuality. The Bible is clear: any who practice homosexuality and claim to be a Christian going to heaven is deceived. But the good news is homosexuals can change, and have changed, and will continue to change by the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Apostle Paul was an eyewitness to this, and he rejoiced with them, proclaiming, "You were homosexual, but now you are washed, separated from your sin and righteous in God's sight."

But the danger for Christians, especially ministers who preach like this, is that the homosexual agenda wants to make it a hate crime to speak out against homosexuality. So even if you read Scripture straight from the Bible, you could be prosecuted for a hate crime. They've already succeeded in prosecuting Christian bakeries and florists and wedding reception venues who refuse to participate in same-sex marriages.

Saints, we must not allow our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion to be stripped from our pulpits. I urge you to order "The Supreme Court is Not the Supreme Being" on CD for a love gift of at least $10 to help us keep this program on the air. Request offer SK180. Mail to PO Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203, or go online to soundoffaith.org where you can also order on MP3s. But to order by mail, send a minimum love gift to Sound of Faith, PO Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203. Until next time, this is Sharon Knotts saying Maranatha.