Rights and Righteousness

We are concerned here with the vast sea of ideas, propositions, perceptions, guesses, affirmations and denials related to God or God assumptions.  Many have come to us from primitive and ancient times. They are played to us as though they were serious toys, and often include a form of judgment about God that not many logics can manage.  The very theories and perceptions may, in fact, repel God from any interest in contexts they create.  Because the world activists are, at this writing, largely taken by the shift in meaning of homosexuality, and some success in major change in the concept of marriage, so making the marriage of two persons of the same sex legal, and of the same meaning as traditional marriage of one female and one male, the theme will be used here as illustration of the point of this Page.  The point is that God is God.  God is God as stated in Scripture, and affirms that he will not admit to his kingdom persons who will not, on their own volition, accept holiness as the context of his kingdom.  This ultimate acceptance relates to faith in Jesus Christ that causes the person of faith to seek righteousness in natural life.

Defenders and intense activists, for right or wrong change, often advance their affirmations with excessive treatment.  This is demonstrated in history in various contexts.  For example, the excesses of some abolitionists broke away from both the church and other institutions in their efforts to end slavery in America.  Their purpose exacerbated the situation so as to end any possibility of a peaceful and thoughtful way to end slavery and keep the sense of national unity and tranquility after the necessary changes would have been made.  Those so stern about either retention of that institution, or the dissolution of it were the enemies of solutions to proper change.  Only in my lifetime, long after the Civil War has the issue found fair, just and rational objective.  That was generated not in name-calling, hating, lynching, segregating and fighting, but in the peaceful resistance and the belief in right by those who were dedicated to the right and justice for all human beings.  Even so government and individuals may err in correcting former errors.

The matter of same-sex marriage is advanced by many persons who learned from the past that right is not the consequence of murdering opponents.  However, the defense in the public arena maintains some negative approaches in the call for change and equality.  God is made the defender of contrary sides and the public loses awareness that God does not contradict himself.  He interprets what is righteous and what is not.  If he approves this or that he will not approve what contradicts this or that.  Those who use name-calling to identify opposition to their viewpoints and practices are not following the Christian policy. If I were oriented in the homosexual lifestyle, and wanted to be a Christian, I would want to present to my fellow traditional Christians a persuasive case for my shift in practice from a traditional family so honored in Scripture and in the history of society.  I would want to find righteousness from Scripture that appears to support/fault any lifestyle, new or old.  We do not finally rest on society’s competing contradictions.

It is Christian to support equal human rights for all persons.  It is Christian to respect all persons.  This is Scripture and applies to all social institutions.  I am, as a Christian, to hold respect for every person, in the understanding that every person has something of the image of God in his or her person.  That image includes self-conscious life.  The breath of lives came from God and belongs to every human being since it was given as the point of human identity.  Not everything the person does reflects the image of God.  Some things deflect that image.  Our purpose in life is to discover what reflects that image.  God is God: mankind is mankind.  Bishop Tutu who has served his generation rather well – an African Bishop in the church has been reported in the news as saying that if God does not include the homosexual in heaven, he will ask to go to the other place which is to say hell.  Such a statement from a witnessing Christian is deeply troubling.  It informs me that the good Bishop is telling God what he can or cannot do.  Who believes such a statement?  If they do believe it, where did it come from?  What kind of God is to be judged on the basis of the judgment of mankind on that which is mankind’s standard of justice?  This is major human folly – telling God what he may or may not do.  Biblical truth includes address of morality.