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The Irish Referendum

What just happened in Ireland?

      Why has Ireland, long a bastion of “Christian Values”, just decided by referendum to enshrine the right of homosexuals to marry each other into its Constitution? Firstly, and most importantly, this can be explained directly from the Bible. Ezekiel 16:49 says: “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me:”

      Most people, when Sodom is mentioned, think immediately of the sin of homosexuality, and the Bible does say elsewhere that this is a sin. But it is something that happens as a result of far more fundamental sins, which most critics of homosexuality hypocritically ignore: pride, prosperity, idleness, and a critical spirit towards the poor. Homosexual behavior is a symptom of apostasy and decline, not a cause of it. Also, what happened in Sodom was not just homosexuality as we think of it, but complete and total sexual perversion – the crowd didn't care about the sex of the victims.

      Pride is mentioned first. Most Christians have no problem seeing pride as a sin, they have a problem seeing pride in their own hearts. We are “proud to be an American”, proud of what we have accomplished in our lives, proud of our careers, our possessions, our money, our children and grandchildren – as if it all, or any of it, was a result of our own actions apart from God and had nothing to do with God. We are not thankful to God for what HE did! Pride puts “me” in the place of “God”. Ireland was blessed with great economic growth for many years, and went from poverty to great riches. In the process, they became proud. Instead of being grateful to God, they attributed their success to their own efforts, values, and economic system and forgot to be thankful to God.

      Fulness of bread and abundance of idleness. Is prosperity a sin? Not always, it can be a blessing from God, but more often than not, it is. Jesus said we can't worship God and Mammon (money). Money is usually an enemy of God. It is very crafty and subtle at replacing the trust of God in our hearts with the trust in money. I found when I got laid off in the 1970's that though I had sincerely believed I was trusting in God, I was actually trusting in my job and my own ability to make money. Having more than enough day to day leads us to forget God, expect that as normal, not be thankful, and trust in ourselves.

      Proverbs 16:27 (Living Bible): “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece.“ Americans have more free time and idleness than any other people in the history of the world! Only about 63 percent of working-age Americans have a job or are even looking for one. The rest exist on one form or another of public assistance. Even those who have a job have more free time than ever before in history, though it may seem like just the opposite to them, because there are ever more activities and opportunities to use or misuse their free time. Many waste hours on the Internet, playing video games, watching TV or movies, etc., etc. Much of this is just wasting time – it does no one any good, doesn't honor the Lord, and doesn't educate the person involved or improve them in any way. What it does do is to fill people's minds with all kinds of ungodly ideas and leads them away from God. We do need hobbies and some downtime, but how much time and money are wasted on different forms of entertainment? We are entertaining ourselves to death!

      Christians, especially conservative ones, seem to have developed a contempt for the poor. Mostly this is because they aren't thankful to God for what they have, but falsely attribute it to their own efforts. Therefore if someone else is poor, it must be their fault. If they just changed their attitude, worked harder, were better educated, etc, etc, they wouldn't be poor. If I am well off through my own efforts, then someone else who isn't must be poor because they failed to make the effort I did! God doesn't enter into it, except perhaps for a brief verbal acknowledgment that doesn't come from the heart.

      So from all this comes haughtiness. It is us, our personal talents, our superior economic system, our work ethic, our political system, our traditions that make us great as people and as a nation, not an ancient God. We are the “greatest nation in the world”. We have the “most powerful military in the world”. Our economic system is the “best in the world”. We don't need God anymore. We can make our own rules and laws, based on popular opinion and what we feel about the issue. In essence, we become our own god. If we say homosexuality is fine, then it is. We change the Gospel to make greed acceptable. Corruption runs rampant. Sexual sins are common among Christians, not just the unsaved. But all these sins stem from our pride and lack of thankfulness to God.

      Moving on from this, another major reason for the Irish debacle was the failure of the church – in this case the Roman Catholic Church, as most Irish are Catholic. Sin was allowed to flourish in the church itself, and covered up rather than being severely dealt with when it became known. But God says: “be sure your sin will find you out.“ Numbers 32:23. Also He says: in Luke 8:17: “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad”. Child abuse, sexual immorality, and all kinds of corruption began to come out, turning many people away from both the Church and God. The cover-ups were actually far worse than the sins! The message coming from the church was that of total hypocrisy, not purity and holiness. This came out first in the Irish Catholic Church, but it isn't restricted to Catholics or the Irish by any means.

      Finally, though poorly reported on, there were accusations from both sides about the other side being funded by US interests. The truth of this is hard to determine – if any funding was made, it was done secretly through backdoor ways to avoid strict Irish laws. In any case, it probably had little effect on the referendum's outcome.

      Unfortunately, the way the Irish dealt with the issue, by public referendum rather than the American way of shoving things down everyone's throat through court rulings, makes it much more difficult to ever undo in Ireland. The Irish also wisely exempted churches and restricted it to civil marriage, which diluted a lot of the opposition, whereas American gays seem determined to force gay marriage onto Bible believing people and silence all opposition.

      So what really is the issue? The real issue is not gay marriage, but that we have the world in our hearts. We fail to win people to Christ, because we might offend someone by talking about Jesus! Even more important, we fail to disciple those we do win so that they know what the Scriptures teach, follow those teachings, and are able to repeat the process. We desperately need to begin living as Christians, obeying Jesus, evangelizing our communities and nation, discipling and training converts, and weeding out the chaff in our churches by making clear the costs of following Christ.