I often hear the claim that it’s unloving to tell people like me that God doesn’t want us to act on our experience of sexual attraction to people of the same sex. Sometimes the words of Jesus (quoting Leviticus) are invoked: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:39). Surely that means allowing people like me to enter into a same-sex relationship?
But it all comes down to what it really means to love. I recently spotted that Romans 12 has something helpful to say on this point. In Romans 12, having spent 11 chapters expounding the truths of the gospel, Paul turns to talk about some of the practical outworkings of the gospel in the lives of Jesus followers. Much of what he says is about how we relate to other people, including how we love well.
In Romans 12:9-21 Paul gives us a long list of quick-fire instructions, all of which are telling us how to love well. The opening words of Romans 12:9 are often translated ‘Let love be genuine’ (ESV) or similar. Such translations nicely capture the sense of what Paul is saying, but there’s actually no verb in what Paul writes. Paul is really making a statement that acts as a heading: ‘Genuine love’. The instructions that follow are designed to help us understand what genuine love looks like.1
The first pair of quick-fire instructions are particularly helpful when it comes to the debate about same-sex relationships: ‘Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good’ (Romans 12:9). Genuine love involves hating (strongly, Paul’s word choice implies) what is evil or wrong and clinging onto what is good.
But how do we know what God considers evil and what he considers good? Only Scripture can reveal that to us. Our own desires or our intuitions about the world can’t be trusted, impacted as they are by sin (Jeremiah 17:9; Psalm 58:1-3). To love genuinely, we must learn God’s way of viewing things and love accordingly.
Tim Keller, commenting on this verse, nicely summarises why this is so important:
‘[O]ur love must be true to God’s will. Our love must operate on the basis of God’s moral order. We must “hate” (literally “be horrified” by) what God calls evil, and we must “cling” (literally, glue ourselves inseparably) to what God calls good. Why is this so important? Because when we love someone, it often distorts our view of good and evil. Song lyrics capture the problem—they tell us things like: If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right! or: It can’t be wrong, if it feels so right! In other words, if you love someone, your heart is bound up with his or her heart.
‘Your beloved’s distress becomes yours, and his or her happiness becomes yours. Therein lies the temptation to give the loved one what creates emotional joy, rather than what is best (but which may create emotional sadness or anger).’2
We love genuinely, we love best, when we allow our loving to be shaped by God’s ways as revealed in his word. Since God has revealed in his word that sex and marriage are reserved for unions of one man and one woman, it’s not unloving to say that someone like me shouldn’t enter into a same-sex sexual relationship. Truth and love are not separate. We love genuinely when we hold to God’s truth.
- See Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Eerdmans, 1996), pp.774-775.
- Timothy Keller, Romans 8-16 For You (The Good Book Company, 2015), p.118.
