“What About the Abominations?” Lev. 18:20-30; Prov. 15:8,9,26; (Mt. 24:15; Rev. 17:4-6; Rom. 1:26-29a)
It is a bit with fear and trepidation that I preach today. Yet, it is important not to avoid the controversial topics of our time, or the obscure scriptures of our day, for they often are where God speaks to our souls. Yet there is much disagreement about this topic, but there is little real disagreement about what these passages say.
Lev. 18:20-25- Hear the Word of the Lord:
Do not have sexual relations with your neighbors wife and defile yourself with her. Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God- I am the Lord. Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman, that is an abomination ["detestable" NIV]. Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it, that is a perversion. Do not defile yourself in any of these ways because his is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled; Even the land was defiled to I punished it for its sin and the land vomited out its inhabitants.
Rom. 1:26-29a- Hear the Word of the Lord:
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermoe, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness...
Most people cannot stand something. It may be a food. My son John is allergic to peanut butter. If he were to eat a spoonful of peanut butter he will most likely die. If he smells peanut butter in the house, it can make him sneeze. So he avoids and detests peanut butter. In all likelihood, he will not outgrow this. Some people have an aversion to certain smells. I knew people who would come to Georgetown and smell the paper mill and couldn’t stand it- getting physically sick, while others had grown used to the terrible smell of the acid produced by paper mills. God is averse and allergic to evil. It cannot stand in His presence. Evil is poison to God as well as to His creation. It is not something that he will ever get used to.
If we seek to really please God, to glorify God, to be the kind of people God designed us to be, then we must have some kind of idea of what God really, really doesn’t like. If we get some idea of that, then, we need to seek to avoid such behavior or things. There are some things that are so evil to God, that He describes them as detestable or abominable.
If you don’t remember anything else from this sermon, I hope you will remember that God still does not like the things that He says are abominations in scripture. He has not changed His mind. Ironically, this past week the top soldier of the United States, General Peter Pace, was told he would not be picked as the nominee for a second term because of pressure from senators. This pressure was in one interview on NPR, not because of his plans in Iraq as much as for what he said about two months ago (3/14/07) to the Chicago Tribune. He said this, “I believe that homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” We have gone from recognizing such sins as abominations to demoting people who disapprove of things the Bible clearly says is wrong. Frankly, many ministers say that such things in the Bible no longer apply, and that is one reason I want to talk about this. The passages that I read today are not just about homosexuality, that is a symptom of the problem. It is about whether the Old Testament laws apply today in any sense.
The Bible was written in part to record what the people of God found didn’t work with God. It was not only their experience that it didn’t work, they also claimed that God Himself revealed this is what he liked or didn’t like.
The problem is that some of this was written in an historical context. That is it was written to a particular people at a particular time. But there is timeless truth for us found in that context. Because the truth we are looking for is from God Himself, then we need to pay special attention. If I told one of my children, “you cannot listen to that music because it has nasty language and it promotes the degradation of women and human beings.” The next child may come along and listen to a different song-equally bad, and try to explain that I didn’t forbid that particular song. That doesn’t cut it. Yet there are people who treat the Old Testament that way. They assume because it was written a long time ago, and because the circumstances were different, maybe the principle of the rules no longer apply. You know, I as a parent, might forget rules- my knowledge and memory are limited. But God sees all things as present. I as a parent may actually give in out of my own softness to sin, but God still stays allergic to unholiness. God still wants us to be a holy people. It is an old heresy called Marcionism that holds that the Old Testament is full of wrath and law, and we are saved by grace, therefore we can ignore the Old Testament. The great problem of that is that there is much grace in the Old Testament, and the New Testament writers depended and built on the Old Testament. It’s a bit like the new generation totally chunking everything the old generation found useful. That is fool hardy and allows the new generation to repeat the same mistakes of the old generation.
It is very important to understand how the laws of the Old Testament have been perceived in theology. There are three different kinds of laws in the Bible: civil, ceremonial, and moral. Civil and ceremonial laws change with the passing of the nation, and the passing of the covenant. Moral laws remain.
1) THE CIVIL LAW- This is the laws in the Bible written for the nation of Israel. Originally, the second through fifth books of the Old Testament were written for the nation of Israel. The nation was the particular people of God at that time. Just as the rules of our nation change with context, so we cannot expect the rules of a particular nation to stay with us today. But the basic principles of fairness and justice can remain. There is a law in Pennsylvania that if a driver sees a team of horses coming, he must pull to the side of the road and disguise his automobile with a blanket so as not to scare the horses. The law may be outdated, but the principle is to be considerate of other travelers. The laws of abomination are not civil laws.
2) THE CEREMONIAL LAW- These are the laws, rituals, and ceremonies regarding Old Testament sacrifices and cleanliness. This would include not eating unclean things. In the Old Testament, for example, a Hebrew could not eat reptiles or pork. While the principle of healthy eating still abides, the New Testament declares all things clean. While we do not sacrifice sheep anymore, the principle of getting right with God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ abides.
3) THE MORAL LAW- The moral law is another kind of law, and a more abiding one. It does not apply just to a nation, or just to the ceremonial things of the priesthood. These are general principles of justice that fit into the very nature of humanity. John Calvin, founder of the Presbyterian church noted that the moral law can guide us in our every day lives. The Ten commandments are examples of the moral law- they have a religious tone-not making idols or worshipping other gods, not blaspheming God and abiding by a Sabbath- but they also have an ethical tone- honoring parents, not murdering, committing adultery, stealing, lying, or coveting what is not yours. We are not saved to heaven by such laws, but such laws keep us out of trouble and allow human beings to co-exist better. The abominations in the Bible- the things seen as detestable to God are not part of the civil or ceremonial law that changes, but the moral law that abides.
I hope I did not lose you here, but we cannot approach all the rules of the Old Testament as if they were the same genre. We do not listen to poetry today the same way we listen to imperatives or narrative, though it is all communication. There are people who say, we don’t forbid eating pigs anymore, and we don’t sacrifice sheep anymore, therefore all the Old Testament laws no longer apply. We are New Testament believers, they say. But Jesus said this, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Mt. 5:17,18). To obey is better than sacrifice. If we ignore God’s standards, it is to our own detriment.
In the passage we read in Leviticus it says some strong words. It says that the behavior of the people of God has a direct relation to the blessing of God Almighty. It says that if the people of God defile God, God will withhold His blessing, and specifically the blessing of the land. God says that the people before the Israelites defiled the land with their abominations. The word “abomination” in the KJV and NRSV is translated as “detestable” (NIV and TNIV), “an enormous sin” (LB); The Hebrew word for abomination is close to the Polynesian word “taboo.” It forbids child sacrifice to a foreign God. It forbids the homosexual act and bestiality. All of the versions say that the land became defiled and “vomited out its inhabitants.” That’s a pretty graphic illustration. Last Thursday night I gave our little dog some flea and tick medication, and the dog had a rare reaction. It’s tongue became twice its normal size, it started itching all over, it started drooling everywhere, and it lost its supper. The flea medicine was poison to it. Sexual immorality, idolatry, wicked ways and wicked worship (as in Proverbs 15), are seen as abominations to God. Such acts and ways do not exist in heaven. The holy God cannot abide by them.
Each act called an abomination is a corruption of something good. Sexual immorality is a corruption of the good gift of sexuality given by God. Idolatry and the worship of the wicked are corruptions of holy worship with a sincere heart
I want to be frank with you here-specifically about homosexuality. This is dangerous because it is a hot topic and a sermon is not a full treatise. There have been many debates about this issue of the interpretation of scripture and specifically the issue of homosexuality. What our denomination has decided is that an orientation toward homosexuality is not a sin, but the act of homosexuality is the sin. It also says that everyone is welcome, but not everyone can be ordained. When I have run into people who have this orientation, I often wish God had said something else in scripture. But I cannot get around what God has said. Sexual immorality is definitely not the only sin, but it is a sin that is consuming our society today. It is a sin that is driving our own people away from God.
When I was a kid there was a lot of interest in the monster of Mt. Everest- named “The Abominable Snowman.” I had nightmares about this big white hairy sasquatch or Yeti. There were reports in the time of my childhood of huge Yeti footprints and one climber even brought back what he said was a yeti scalp. Many children would hear such reports and the distance between our home and Nepal became short and we imagined the abominable was coming to get us. But then something eased our childhood fears. The longest running holiday movie, “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” (1964- starring Burl Ives) had the abominable snow man as a animated character. In the movie the abominable snowman eventually had his teeth pulled out by a dentist-elf, and then actually changed into a helpful creature. When what was abominable lost its teeth, it became a friend. After this movie, we didn’t lose sleep over the abominable snowman. The lesson is clear, what is abominable is the sin, not the creature. The acts in Leviticus and Proverbs are abominable, not the people. Acts can be stopped. Temptations can be resisted. We do not need to discount the grace of God that can change anyone. I invite you to remember what the Bible says is an abomination. Remembering such things is important (according to our passage of scripture) if you want to please God and have God’s blessing.