but she was different. When Adam saw Eve, he knew he'd met his match-his perfect match. His, and mankind's, first spoken words trumpeted the harmony between man and woman. "Finally!" he declares, "Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh! Name her Woman for she was made from Man." (Gen. 2:23 MSG)

Lest we miss the immensity of the moment, Moses follows the first spoken words with the first commentary: "So a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife and the two will become one body."
(Gen.2:24)

Note the steps. First there is a leaving: man and woman wave goodbye to mom and dad and unite. They cleave. This is no casual date, no clandestine affair. Marriage is a covenant publicly sealed between a man and a woman. God could have given Adam a man, but he didn't. God could have given Adam two women, but he didn't. God could have given Eve to Adam for one night, but he didn't. He gave her to him for life. And, in doing so, he gave us his definition of marriage. One man-one woman for life. Heterosexual monogamy.

We cannot overestimate how radical this was. In the ancient east, no other religion honored the female as an equal partner of man and no other moral code called husband and wife to sexual fidelity. 

By the time the Torah was presented through the Jews to mankind, religions were promoting flagrant, unbridled sexual activity. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyrus, Canaan...religious life in each of these nations was marked by temple prostitution and ritual sex. This is understandable since early religions saw their gods as sexual beings. The Babylonian god, Ishtar, seduced a man. The Egyptian god, Asiris, had sex with his sister. Krishna, the Hindu god, had many wives. According to the Greeks, Zeus married Hera, and Poseidon married Amphitrite.

In such a sexually-saturated era, homosexuality was widely practiced.  Martha Nussbaum of Brown University describes gender as a non-issue in ancient sexual activity. Sex was seen not as interaction, but more as doing something to someone. "Homosexuality," agrees Jewish commentator Dennis Prager, "was universally accepted, valued, and practiced." David Greenburg writes: "...none of the archaic civilizations prohibited homosexuality per se."

It was into such a world that the Torah entered. And it was against such a downstream flow that the teachings of Yahweh swam. According to the Torah, God is not sexual, but holy. Man was not conceived in a sexual act, but created in a divine one. Men and women were not intended for identical gender but opposite. Woman is not a sexual object, but a God-given partner. And sex is not a recreational sport but a matrimonial privilege. The God of the Jews put the genie of sex into the bottle of heterosexual marriage. Homosexuality, by its very nature, resists this truth. Which takes us to the next question.

II. What Does God Say About Gays?

Were Jesus to come face to face with a homosexual what would he say?  What would he do? Though the New Testament contains no such conversation, we know how he would act.