Nature Itself Speaks of God’s Decrees

The apostle Paul is saying that, far from being a human right or behavior acceptable to God, homosexuality is rather the consequence or manifestation of God’s wrath upon humanity, or upon a segment of human beings, who have stubbornly persisted in resisting His Will and trying to ignore what God says about precisely what behavior He wants men and women to follow in the area of sexuality and in the area of marriage.

So Paul tells us in Romans 1:18 and following that there are people who have stubbornly persisted in obscuring and obstructing what God has declared in nature itself. The first argument that we as Christians must offer against homosexual behavior is that nature itself is clear about what God wants concerning human sexual behavior. Indeed, animals themselves are clearly structured as male or female, and in the animal world animals behave in a heterosexual, not homosexual, manner.

As for reproduction, this does not apply in exceptional cases such as amoebas and microbes and all those sorts of things, but among mammals and animals with a defined sexuality, the relationship is always between a male and a female. Nature itself speaks about this.

Even in the universe itself there are, as it were, masculine energies and feminine energies. For example, people speak of the sun and the moon, even ascribing a kind of masculine and feminine quality to the heavenly bodies—not that those things have a sexuality, but throughout nature there is this idea of a masculine force and a feminine force.

So Paul says that if people looked at nature impartially, they would realize that nature itself speaks of a God who has clearly decreed that sexual relations should take place between a man and a woman.

Certainly, in the very physiology of men and women, the sexual organs are made to complement each other so that sexual relations take place between a man and a woman. Anatomy itself speaks about this, and that is why the Church has traditionally spoken of homosexual behavior as something that is against nature, that is, something that goes against the design of nature itself.

And that is why the apostle Paul says that these men, who have hardened themselves in resistance to the Will of God, abandoned the natural use of the woman in the case of the man and the woman, and he also says that even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.

God has a purpose; God has a preference for how men and women should govern their sexuality, and it certainly does not accord with homosexual behavior. So the first line of the apostle Paul’s argument is that when people stubbornly try to justify homosexuality, they are going against what is evident in nature, and Paul says this is obvious. If someone says otherwise, what they are doing is trying to hide the sun with one finger; they are trying to resist all the evidence that God has scattered throughout the natural world, and therefore Paul says: there is no excuse whatsoever. Any impartial observer, seeing the way nature governs sexual energy, will have to conclude that the world has been designed for the male to unite with the female in a sexual relationship for the reproduction, for example, of other beings, whether animals or humans.

Today we know that a man cannot reproduce by uniting with another man; a woman cannot reproduce by uniting with another woman, because that is how human anatomy is designed, that is how human and animal biology are designed. Therefore, trying to argue that nature suggests otherwise is, rather, an act of intellectual dishonesty. That is the first argument Paul offers.

But then he will make another argument that is even more important: the argument about how God Himself has used homosexual behavior as a way of judging people who have stubbornly persisted in exchanging His glory for an inferior glory. We will study that in our next message. May the Lord bless you, and until our next message.