NEW RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS MINISTER. On Feb. 2 I attended the churches’ first meeting of the year with the Minister of Religious Affairs. PM John Briceno had appointed Henry Charles Usher to this new cabinet position last year. And Usher began by affirming “the Christian fundamental principles upon which our country is based. The Constitution of Belize is very clear. It advocates the supremacy of God…”
Immediately he got blowback for those remarks from the increasingly anti-Christian media. And especially from the few small but vocal LGBT groups. Since then, he made efforts to hear them out too.
At our meeting we discussed Pope Francis’ recent statement that homosexuality is a sin, not a crime. It used to be a crime in the Constitution of Belize until 2016. At that time one man, Justice Kenneth Benjamin, opposed the popular will by striking it down. Now Minister Usher says that the government wants to enact still another gender policy on that basis.
I said that the Constitution understandably treated homosexuality as a crime against society. Because it affirms “the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions.” Homosexuality undermines families, which form the building blocks of such a society. Though some call it no more sinful than other kinds of illicit sex, the Bible doesn’t say that.
I shared from Romans 1 a passage that many LGBTs want to ban from public discourse. For that very reason we should pay all the more attention to it.
Rom 1:21-22.For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools…
Dishonoring God leads to dishonoring the bodies He created
They profess to be wise. In fact, they even want to take “the supremacy of God” out of our Constitution. But for those who stop honoring God as God, their thinking will become futile. And their foolish heart will become darkened. Not only that, they will dishonor their bodies.
Verse 24. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them…
This level of sexual sin includes opposite-sex adultery and fornication. But if If they persist in dishonoring God, He will give them over to a further degrading of their bodies. Homosexuality so degrades the body that God calls it an abomination in Leviticus 18:22. Yet God does not call the opposite-sex sins of that same chapter abominations.
Verses 26-27. 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.
Calling evil good and good evil
Such degrading passions also lead to a depraved mind and a whole Pandora’s box of sins.
Verses 28-32. “Furthermore, 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, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. For they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”
In the furthest depth of sin here, they approve of those who practice evils that worthy of death. But, as I said Minister Usher, woke partisans go even further. They force others to approve of those evils, or else get cancelled. And both he and I and everyone at this meeting risk getting cancelled if our opponents rise to power.
I thank God that Minister Usher listened well. Because he is our voice in the Cabinet, pray that He will not only listen to but speak God’s word. For it has greater authority than any of us.
Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash
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