 Paul, when he does the same thing in Galatians 5, same kind of vice-list, first three sets of vices, sexual offenses. Those who engage in porneia, sexual immorality. Those who engage in akathesia, sexual impurity or uncleanness. Those who engage in alsogea, sexual licentiousness, lack of sexual self-restraint with respect to the commands of God. All these are basically repeating themselves, looking at sexual sin from different angles. First three vices, sex. And when Paul finishes the vice-list, he says, those who engage in this behavior won't inherit the kingdom of God, just stop deceiving yourselves. And again, the deception is thinking I could engage in it and get away with it. So really, what is love here? Why don't we stone people? Because everything is at stake, and love is about recovering people for the kingdom of God, not consigning them to hell. The irony is here, it's actually those who are tolerating the serial, unrepentant sexual immorality that are consigning the individual to hell. And no matter what they feel affectively in themselves, functionally, it turns out to be hate. If a person has two young children, and those young children want to touch a hot stove, and the parent says, they're there, knock yourself out, go ahead and explore, those parents are not considered loving. In fact, state social services takes the children out of the home, and the parents go to prison. So clearly, tolerance is not always loving. The issue that has to be phased here with regard to homosexual practice is first the truth question. Are people genuinely at risk in their relationship to God through serial, unrepentant behavior, not only of this sort, but of course other sexual offenses that we could bring out as well? And if the answer to that question is yes, they are at risk, then what does love mean in that context? Clearly, once that truth question is asked, love cannot mean perpetuating the behavior in question with the fewest negative side effects. Love must mean ending the cycle of behavior, lest the individual not inherit God's kingdom. So at root here, again with the woman caught in adultery, at root here is the issue of what love means. The Pharisees, they looked at Jesus, they could not get their theological imaginations around the notion that Jesus could both actively intensify God's ethical demand in our lives, on the one hand, and on the other hand, reach out aggressively in love to the biggest violators of that intensified ethic. They concluded if Jesus is reaching out aggressively in love to the violators of that ethic, that he must not be stressing the ethic, because they are stressing the ethic and they want to have nothing to do with the violators. But Jesus is aggressively reaching out in love, fraternizing, inviting himself into their homes, eating with them, preaching the kingdom of God, focusing his ministry mostly on them for the very express purpose of recovering them for the kingdom, where others didn't care that they were drowning, Jesus cared, and he reached out aggressively in love to bring them. Pharisees couldn't put those two together. How can you love and at the same time follow God's intensified ethic? Jesus said those two go together beautifully because it's precisely because of God's intensified ethic people are put at risk if they don't obey it, and we want as many as people as possible to inherit God's kingdom. So we ought to integrate those two in the church and not try to separate them. Well, love is certainly more than feelings and hormones, and love is also distinct in its generic usage and its sexual usage, that there are certain requirements and certain parameters for sexual relationships that don't attend to non-sexual relationships because sex is not just more intimacy, it's about merger, it's about reuniting constituent parts, in this case male and female, and that has with it a whole set of parameters that it has to be a male and a female as sexual counterparts, sexual complements. It has to be restricted to two because we brought together the only two parties in the sexual spectrum, male and female. It must be a certain amount of structural difference while still being complementary. Again, the analog of incest we reject on the basis of trying to pair two persons who are too much structurally alike, that there's a set of parameters that involve with sexual unions that don't involve merely because two people have a wonderful nice warm feeling about each other. There are other requirements in place. Many people do argue that the silence of Jesus, you know, or as I like to rephrase it, the silence of the lamb. How do we look at that? Well, Jesus, interestingly enough, he never said anything about incest, including a man-mother incest, for example, and yet when Paul dealt with the case of incest in Corinth, he didn't go w-w-j-d. What would Jesus do? I have no clue. I don't have a single Jesus saying on incest, let alone man-mother incest. I know let's set up a denominational task force and we'll look at it and talk about it. You give some ground and we'll give some ground, we'll find a middle way somewhere. He never had to say that. He simply said, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, take the following action. Now, how did he come to that conclusion? Because Scripture's view on the subject of incest, certainly man-mother incest, which is considered in Leviticus 20 in the first tier of sexual offenses, is regarded as a egregious offense, pervasively prescribed in the Scripture, strongly prescribed, absolutely prescribed. No exceptions are made any place for incest with your parent. It doesn't matter whether you're adult, committed, you intend it to be long-term and loving. All that is totally irrelevant because you haven't met the formal or structural prerequisites that establish the relationship to begin with. So Paul knew exactly what Jesus's view was in the absence of any Jesus saying. He also took Jesus the same approach to the issue of polyamory, multiple partner sexuality. So in Paul cites Romans 124 to 127, he echoes Genesis 1, 26 to 127. We see he talks about humans being made in God's image and likeness. And then he talks about the three different animal groups of birds, fish, and reptiles, and four-footed animals. And then he talks about male and female. We have eight points of correspondence in the matter of a couple of verses and two sets of texts, which is what the Bible scholars now call intertextual echoes. He doesn't have to cite Genesis 1. He simply creates an echo chamber of meaning in a very short compass of text. So in the background of Paul's prescription is Genesis 1, 27. And when he talks about men lying with males in 1 Corinthians 6, 9, what does he have in the background there? Later on, within a few sets of verses, he cites Genesis 224. So very interesting, the same two texts which Jesus regards as normative and prescriptive, with proscriptive implications for all manners of human sexual ethics are the very same two texts that Paul takes and then applies to his rejection of homosexual practice. Jesus didn't have to talk explicitly about homosexual practice. He presumed as the foundation for his utterance about marital monogamy and indissolubility, the tuness of the sexes at the very beginning. Without that foundation of the tuness of the sexes, he could not have reached his limitation of sexual intercourse to two persons. So the foundation, of course, must be more important than the structure that's built on it. What Jesus did take, and incidentally, there's no dissenting opinion in early Judaism, we have no record anywhere within centuries of the life of Jesus, of any Jew engaged in homosexual practice. In fact, when they had what we call Noahide laws, even the forms of moral commandments that would be incumbent even on non-Jews, always at the top of the list were sexual offenses, and always at the top of the list of sexual offenses was the issue of non-engaging in homosexual practice. There's no dissenting opinion anywhere in Judaism on the subject. It's regarded as one of the most severe offenses. So Jesus, it would have been ridiculous for Jesus going around in first century Palestine and saying, you men stop having sex with other men, you women stop having sex with other women. They would say, who's doing that? Nobody's questioning it. We all know that there's a very strong rejection of it in the Hebrew scriptures. So let's move on to another subject. What he did do is take the only remaining loopholes that existed in his current cultural environment in Palestine and close those on the basis of a foundation of a two sexes per requisite. So when we get Paul moving into a Gentile environment, he can no longer presume the fact that Gentiles know that this is wrong. In fact, he has to presume the exact opposite. Jesus is doing exactly what Jesus would have done in a Gentile context. When Paul talks about homosexual practice in the Weisles in 1 Corinthians 6-9, he uses two sets of terms. One is malachoi, which means the soft men. We actually have some parallel the parallel term Latin would be mollusks, also the soft men. And sometimes it's simply transliterated into the Latin from the Greek as a way of showing continuing Roman aversion to it. It's a term that could have both wide valence and specific use. In the context here, definitely a specific use, which is a reference to men who effeminate themselves to attract male sex partners. And it's actually primarily used in a Greco-Roman context, not for boys or youths, but rather for adult men, who usually are thought of as having a biologically predisposing condition. In effect, an orientation. Most of the orientation theory that exists in Greco-Roman material of the period from moralists, from medical doctors, except from scientists, so called from the period, happens to apply to these figures, the malachoi. So when people say, well, but what if it's with men and they have an orientation? That's exactly that kind of figure we're talking about when we're looking at the soft men, the malachoi, men who effeminate themselves to attract male sex partners. Now, the other term, very distinctive term, arsino-coitai, is distinctive because it's formulated out of the Septuagint or Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It's drawn from two terms, arsino, meaning male, and coitai, meaning lying, not in the sense of telling a falsehood, but lying in the sense of lying down with having sexual intercourse with. And it's formulated from the Greek of the Levitical prohibitions of man-male intercourse. You shall not lie with a male in the Greek, right, arsino. Sikor, Sikai, actually in Hebrew, Sikor in later Hebrew or Aramaic. We'll see a parallel Hebrew term in a moment. And then the term for lying, coitai in Greek. So they simply put the two together, lying and male. The prefix is actually the object. There's many words where arsino as a prefix male turns out to actually be the object of the implied verb of the following compound element. It's hard to get too technical there. Pardon that, skip over that if that's a problem. And it's formulated directly from the Levitical prohibitions and we find it for the first seven or eight centuries only in Jewish and Christian texts. It's not a word that we see in the Greco-Roman context in a non-Jewish, non-Christian context. And the reason why it's again formulated from the Levitical prohibitions. We have a parallel, the parallel Hebrew phrase, which is now the abstract term, lying with a male, Mishkav Sikor, is likewise formulated from these prohibitions, now obviously again from the Hebrew texts. So we find in the Talmud in Traktate Sanhedrin when it refers to a man lying with a male it refers to this phrase Mishkav Sikor and incidentally it makes a point in this very context that the male with whom the man lies can be either a boy or an adult male. So they clearly not restricting their prescription in the context of early Judaism only to pedorasty, but they mean it to be held universally. And when Jews and Christians use this specific term they use it and not another term. There are many other terms that they could have used including pedorast, including men who are mad after males and so on and so forth. There are many different terms that they use. They use this specific term formulated out of Levitical context as a way of saying the prohibition that we have of man-male lenticorus is absolute and it's strongly held. The term Isenokoi Tai, men who lie with a male in 1 Corinthians 6-9 is formulated from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible of the prohibition of a man lying with a male in Leviticus 18-22 and 2013. Early Jewish rabbinic texts also formulate from the Hebrew Mishkav Sikor which also means lying with a male and is formulated from the Hebrew texts of Leviticus 18-22 and 2013. They formulate a special term for men who lie with a male from the Levitical context as a way of saying that our prohibition of man-male lenticoruses absolute. No exceptions, unlike what we find in a Greco-Roman context. Exceptions exist there, but not for us and we feel very strongly about this because you can see the prohibition and the penalty for it in Leviticus 20. It's a way of setting their own view of man-male lenticorus out from the rest of the cultural environment. We're not going to make any exceptions for boars. We're not going to make any exceptions for slaves. We're not going to make any exceptions for foreigners. We're not going to make any exceptions for consensual unions. We're not going to make any exceptions for committed unions. There's something distinct and special about the way in which men image God and about the way in which women image God. They're both in a sense fully created in God's image, just as any individual is made in one sense fully in God's image. But we also know, we go to a church for example, we see a much fuller representation than that full image that we see in any individual. And of course when we look at Jesus, we get the fullest representation of God's image of all. So we say that a man represents God's image in a way that a woman doesn't and vice versa. It's not to say anything negative or to say we're only half made in God's image because men are fully in God's image as male and women are fully in God's image as female. But it's a sort of angular expression of that image that is looking at God from a particular angle. There are ways in which men excel and ways in which women excel. And to try to compromise that in a sense by engaging in a same-sex homoerotic relationship is dishonoring that particular angular representation of who God is and trying to be somebody that God has not intended us to be.