What does the Bible say about homosexuality?

God has provided the honourable institution of the marriage of a man and woman, yet people dare to abuse the very best that God has given, because of utter selfishness. We know too that such things bring painful repercussions (Rom. 1:26-27). God is not mocked. People may feel they get away with evildoing, but whatever one sows he will also reap (Gal. 6:7).

In Leviticus 18 the people being treated now as a holy people, everything that was contrary to the order of God in nature is here strictly and solemnly prohibited. It is important to hold the same principle always. God does not absolve from that which offends His natural order. Grace may bring us into a higher place, where we do not use our liberty as to nature; but God habitually maintains His own order there; and so should we.

Their visit gives occasion to the open and unnatural depravity of the inhabitants, "both old and young, all the people from every quarter." They foam out their shame shamelessly. Lot goes forth to plead for his guests, to remonstrate with his fellow-townsmen (sadly, he calls them "brothers"), and offers his two daughters. For he has lost the simplicity of faith, and, instead of looking only to the Lord in this scene of difficulty and danger and surrounding wickedness, he chooses in worldly wisdom what he thought was the lesser of two evils.

The miracle consisted in fire from the Lord out of heaven starting the mighty conflagration and eruptions that blasted these four cities out of existence, and left their sites to this day as "an example to those who were later to live ungodly lives" (2 Peter 2:6). The thought of the evil and its judgment has persisted, for the word "sodomy" is found in our language as describing sin of a specially vile and unnatural sort. This judgment, moreover, was a sample of what is yet to come on a much greater scale in "the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly" (2 Peter 3:7).

Sexual perversion marked them, going contrary to creation's order, whether with men or angels… The plain lesson that we must learn is that the destruction of the cities because of their vice serves as a vivid example of those who undergo the judgment of eternal fire because of such sins.

Three times over we get the phrase (with slight variations) "God gave them up to…" If men object to thinking of God and give Him up, they have no ground of complaint when He gives them up. And if they give up God, and so give up good, they naturally find themselves given up to everything that is evil and degrading. There is an ironic justice about God's government.

The apostle does not deign to describe them (though they were the greatest and highest — sages of earth, monarchs, conquerors, poets, philosophers, and what not) as men and women, but as "females" and "males," marked by ways below the animals, given up by God, and even now enduring the fitting reward of their deeds.

Let all who read these lines beware… I say to every soul, whoever he may be, if any of these wickednesses characterise you, and you die as you have lived, not the loss of the kingdom only, but the loss of your soul for all eternity, shall be your unspeakably miserable reward… How good it is to know that even should you find yourself in this catalogue of sinners, there is in this day of grace the assurance for the penitent that "all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter."

"And such were some of you." It does not say that they had all been this. But some of us are convicted. "And such were some of you: but you were washed." Is that not lovely, after this whole terrible list of sins? "But you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God."