God's Guidance
A Summary
For all sorts of issues we face today, we can’t just point to a verse in Scripture and say God says do this or don’t do this, because God doesn’t directly say anything! We need to avoid the fundamental error of the Jehovah’s Witnesses over blood transfusions in stretching verses of Scripture well-beyond their intended meaning out of fear that otherwise we’ll have nothing to guide us over what God wants of us.
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We need to remember that Jesus didn’t just leave us Scripture to guide us. In John 16:12-13 he told his disciples, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.”
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One big truth Jesus knew they couldn’t handle at that time was the need to end male circumcision. That may not seem a big issue to us today but to the early church it was going to be huge and a generation after Jesus’s death it nearly split them in two.
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But the Holy Spirit’s revelation of truths the church weren’t ready for at the time has continued long after the circumcision debate. Over the last two centuries it has included the abolition of slavery and the full emancipation of women. Is same-sex marriage a similar issue today? Is it another one of those truths that Jesus’ followers, living in their patriarchal world, were not ready to hear at that time, nor for centuries later? But is our Holy Counsellor now guiding us into another new truth: that the blessings of marriage should be opened up to same-sex couples?
On some issues like this we sometimes seem to act a bit like pre-Christian Jews with lots of written instructions setting out what we can and can’t do. We desperately scrabble around for some verses somewhere in Scripture which will directly tell us what we can and can’t do. So we find a few verses that superficially seem like they might have something to do with the issue. We then stretch them well beyond their original meaning because we fear if we don’t we won’t have any guidance from God we can trust. But we seem to forget Jesus’s words in John 16. Jesus’s intention was that we should not rely on Scripture alone to find truth but on his Holy Spirit.
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But this certainly does not make Scripture redundant on any issue it doesn’t directly address, because most often, I find, the Holy Spirit guides us through the words of Scripture. The two work hand in hand. After all Scripture is “the sword of the spirit” (Ephesians 6:17), and it is “alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword.” (Hebrews 4:12). And because Scripture is “alive and active” through it the Holy Spirit can “thoroughly equip us for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17). This includes equipping us to deal with the many situations we face today which Scripture never directly addressed. And my experience is that Scripture most often does this through the Holy Spirit illuminating its age-abiding truths - so that we can see how those truths apply to these new situations today.
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As with the end of circumcision, slavery and the emancipation of women, the Holy Spirit’s revelation of God’s will on issues not previously directly addressed by Scripture is not so much revealing a brand new truth as helping us to see a new application of ancient truths already there in Scripture.
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10 years ago, I became convinced that my previous traditionalist understanding of Scripture had got this issue all wrong. I came to see that, whilst Scripture did not directly address the issue, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit and using tests the New Testament itself gave us, God was telling us to embrace same-sex marriage as his good gift for gay and bisexual people.
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It seemed to me that my previous use of Scripture to support my position that all same-sex sexual relationships were wrong was like the ugly sisters in Cinderella trying to get one of their size nine feet into a delicate size three glass slipper to win the prince’s hand. But no matter how hard they try to stuff their feet inside they can’t actually get it to fit.
More recently I was strongly challenged to re-examine my position. But after a pretty exhaustive re-examination of Scripture and its surrounding evidence I came away more convinced than ever that the New Testament had left the door to same-sex marriage unlocked. But were we right to turn the handle and step through the door?
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For that I believe we need to listen out for the Holy Spirit speaking to us, especially through Scripture, and recognise what are the truly age-enduring principles there about sex and marriage. We then need to follow Scripture’s own tests for how those principles should be applied to a new situation that it had not foreseen: can and should people of the same sex be married in God’s sight?
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It’s those tests that we’ll look at next.