God's Guidance
When Scripture is “Silent”
This section is short enough that it doesn’t really need a summary – honest! However, because I’m nice, I’ve done a summary here anyway!
And for those wanting to explore further about how God guides us through his word, please read my long essay which I will link here with my further thoughts on this topic.
It would have been nice for us if Paul had added to one of his letters, "oh, by the way, if you’re reading this in the 2020s … now is the time to embrace same-sex marriage" OR "Have nothing to do with the false teaching of those supporting same-sex marriage!" Likewise, if he’d directly addressed questions like when and whether abortion or war was ever acceptable or issues like IVF treatment, gene therapy, AI, what fuel-type car we buy or how often we fly. But that isn’t how Scripture is written.
Our Holy Guide
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 the Bible 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.
We need to remember that Jesus didn’t just leave us Scripture to guide us. In John 16:12-13 Jesus didn’t say you’ll get all the answers you need on any issue from Scripture once you’ve finished writing it up. He said, “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.”
One big truth Jesus knew they couldn’t handle at the time was the need to end male circumcision – previously required of all males before they could be accepted into God’s family. That may not seem like a big deal to us today, but to the early church it was huge – far bigger than same-sex marriage is for the church today. Within a generation it nearly split Jesus’ new church in two.
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 the acceptance of same-sex marriage another truth that Jesus’s followers, living in their patriarchal world, weren’t ready to hear at that time, nor for centuries after? But is our Holy Counsellor now guiding Christians into another new truth? That the blessings of marriage should be opened up to same-sex couples?
On some issues like this it seems to me as if Christians are sometimes acting a bit like pre-Christian Jews with lots of written instructions setting out what we can and can’t do. (In their case, not just in Scripture, their Torah, but the Talmud and other traditions). We’re desperately scrabbling around to find 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. I've certainly done that in the past. (And who knows maybe I still do this with some things?)
Sometimes we seem to forget Jesus’s words in John 16. God never said that we will find all the truth we need spelled out in Scripture in black and white. If that were the case why did he send us the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth? Surely our Lord himself told us here that his intention was that we would not rely on Scripture alone to find truth but on his Holy Spirit.
The Word and the Spirit working together
But this does not make Scripture redundant on any issue it doesn’t directly address. Because, although I do believe God still speaks to the church today through the gift of prophesy, my experience is that most often the Holy Spirit guides us through the words of Scripture. After all, Scripture is “the sword of the spirit” (Ephesians 6:17). Likewise, the words and principles of Scripture, as properly understood, should be used to test the truth of any supposed words of prophesy.
Scripture may not directly tell us the answer as if it were a book of rules but then Scripture is not a book of rules. It’s much better than that; it’s a training manual for life - “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness ... (2 Tim. 3:16). Scripture is also “alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.” (Hebrews 4:12). Because Scripture is “alive and active”, through it the Holy Spirit can “thoroughly equip us for every good work.” ( 2 Tim. 3:17) And my experience is that Scripture particularly does this through the Holy Spirit illuminating its age-abiding truths, so that we can see how those truths apply to our new situations today.
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As with the end of circumcision, slavery and emancipation of women, the Holy Spirit’s revelation of God’s will on issues not previously directly addressed by Scripture was not so much revealing a brand new truth as helping us to see a new application of ancient truths already there in Scripture.
For 20 years my sincere and certain belief was that New Testament Scripture strongly condemned all same-sex sexual relationships as wrong for all time and that God insisted marriage, as the only proper place for sex, could only ever be between a man and a woman. For another 10 years I was frankly just confused. Then 10 years ago I became convinced that I’d got this 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.
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 tried to stuff their feet inside and how much pain they suffered or blood they shed they couldn’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 unlocked door to same-sex marriage. But were we right to turn the handle and step through the door?
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.