Quick Thought on the Queen James Bible (LGBT) Part 2

Earlier I posted “Quick Thought on the Queen James Bible (LGBT) Part 1.”  I found out that our friend Michael Coughlin has blogged about this pro-LGBT Bible version in a post with the witty title “My Rejection of QJV Onlylism.”  From that post I also learned that Matt Slick of CARM ministry has also a response page called “Queen James Bible.”

So there’s no need to re-invent the wheel.  But I thought I do respond to a statement found on the book’s Amazon page:

Anti-LGBT Bible interpretations commonly cite only eight verses in the Bible that they interpret to mean homosexuality is a sin; Eight verses in a book of thousands!

I thought that was an interesting argument.  Here’s my take of it.

1. There’s an assertion that there are “only eight verses” that have been used to claim that the Bible prohibit homosexuality.  I personally think there’s more than eight verses if we consider all the positive verses that Scripture teaches about the nature of marriage as between a man and a woman and how any sexual relationships outside of marriage is by default sin and therefore prohibited.
2. But let’s take it for granted that there’s “only eight verses” that would prohibit homosexuality in the Bible.  The Queen James Bible product page on Amazon found this observation astounding in contrast to how many verses there are in the Bible: “Eight verses in a book of thousands!”  We must ask: how many Bible verses are there total?  According to Google there are 31,102 verses in the Bible.  That’s 0.025721818%.
3. That argument might at first sound convincing but let’s compare it to other sins in the Bible to put it in perspective.  According to Biblegateway there are 59 total verses that mentioned the sin of murder.  If you do the math 59 verses out of 31,102 means 0.189698411% of the Bible talks about murder.  Obviously God talks about murder more than he did about prohibiting homosexuality but don’t miss the bigger picture that my point here is that no one would conclude from that observation and amount of percentage to mean that God doesn’t care about life or that He sees murder as not a big deal.
4. How do we know God does not approve of murder even though only 0.189698411% of the Bible talks about murder?  We know it is a big deal in God’s eyes when we see the consequence of this sin and God’s judgment upon this sin.  We also see the severity of the penalty.
5. Likewise we also see that though homosexuality is supposedly 0.025721818% of the Bible according to the skeptic we can still note how it is a sin that is a big deal in God’s eyes when we see in the Bible the consequence of this sin and God’s judgment upon this sin.  We also see the severity of the penalty for homosexual acts.
6. One might ask why is it that though murder and  homosexuality are serious sins why the Bible devote so little percentage to these sins.  I think we must not forget the nature of the Bible as more than law books; it is also history of what God has done in the past, it include letters that teaches doctrines of Christian truths for the church to believe and have implication for Christian practice, etc.  We not forget the centrality of God’s gospel saving grace in the Bible and other related motif, themes and topic.  Hence, the amount of verses devoted to specific sins are understandable in light of the bigger picture.
7. The argument from the observation that there are only “Eight verses in a book of thousands” is further weakened when we think of the example of the laws in the United States.
   1. First off consider the question: How many laws are there in the United States?  There’s so many laws no one knows how many there are.  Check this out for instance: https://govtracknews.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/reader-question-how-many-laws-are-there-in-the-united-states/.
   2. How many laws are there that deals with criminal offenses in contrast to how many laws are there?
      1. Read this here: “In an example of a failed attempt to tally up the number of laws on a specific subject area, in 1982 the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question.”
      2. If I could summarize: There’s only 3,000 laws covering criminal offenses out of 50 thick volumes of Law books.  If we say that there’s 10 laws per page in these 50 titles which total 23,000 pages we find that there’s only 1 % of laws that deal with criminal offenses.
      3. But no one in their right mind would think criminal offenses is not a big deal just because 1% of laws deal with criminal offenses.  Likewise we have a silly argument that homosexuality is not a big deal because of the percentage of the Bible that prohibits it.
   3. Of those 1% of all laws dealing with criminal offense a small subsection would deal with the crime of murder.  Again no one would reason from this fact to the conclusion that murder is not a big deal in US Laws but why do the editors of the Queen James Bible would use this terrible line of reasoning for a gay affirming Bible and belief system that is supposedly based upon the Word of God?
   4. I imagine the ratio and percentage of laws dealing with murder in contrast to all laws that exists in the US is even smaller than the percentage of verses prohibiting homosexuality in contrast to all the Bible verses.  Why do I say that?  Every year more laws are added some covering areas in which there were no previous laws before such as a new industry that has started, etc.  However there can be only so many ways you can prohibit murder.  Moreover we all know the severity of murder and of course laws dealing with it would have been given priority of being established earlier since most new laws take it for granted that civilization and society has dealt with the issue of the problem of murder legally.  Again, no one would deduce from this that murder doesn’t matter.  Neither should we use this terrible argumentation against what the Bible teaches about homosexuality.

 

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