God is a personal being who is love (1 John 4:8). The Bible teaches that He is our Creator; He designed and created humans as male and female. He made us in His image. He made us morally similar to Himself, differentiating good and evil, shunning the evil. He created His universe with clear distinctions. There is a difference between the light and the dark, one species and another, one sex and another, which is to say, between a right-ordering of the world and a rebel ordering.
The Bible is God’s sovereign Word. He does not leave us with questions about what He does and does not sanction as marriage. “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”(Genesis 2:24) Scripture unambiguously identifies same-sex sexual activity as wrong.
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination (Leviticus 18:22).
If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination (Leviticus 20:13).
Even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due… God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting (Romans 1:26-28).
Paul plainly says in 1 Corinthians 6:9 that the effeminate will not inherit the kingdom of God. In Deuteronomy 22:5 women are commanded not to wear male clothing, and men are forbidden from wearing the clothing of women. In God’s ordering of the world, strict lines are drawn between the sexes. To blur His clear lines is to attack His order.
The Designer knows how best to guide the designed, how best to give us gifts. Maleness and femaleness are divinely-ordered. Sexualities which stand outside His divinely revealed design for humans are antihuman. Indeed, they are in opposition to Christ’s order, they are antichristian.
God provides clarity through His word for us, while Satan crafts lies to make fools of us. Satan offers a buffet of sexual options. Will Christians will take the bait?
A New Development
In January, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor in Hamburg, Germany, in a sermon viewed more than 11,000 times on YouTube, told his congregation that he is bisexual. He told his church,
I’m bisexual. That means I can fall in love with both women and men. I have known this since I was 14 years old.
It was always clear to me that one day there would come a time when I would like to tell you this… It’s important for me to say at this point that just because I didn’t tell everyone everything doesn’t mean I wasn’t honest.
In 2022 he told his family and his employer. His situation was discussed in conference committees. Finally, his January 2023 coming-out sermon was live-streamed over the internet. In a following interview, he said that this was done “so that people all over Germany could see it for themselves, and my words wouldn’t get contorted through the inevitable rumor mill.”
He also said that “after many years of struggle I have understood that my being is not a sin, because we cannot choose our sexual orientation and identity.” In the interview referred to previously, he said, “I made it my mission to change the church for the better by expanding the reach of its love, which, in my opinion, should truly know no bounds.” And,
I hope that our churches become places where queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and intersex people can feel at home, loved, and accepted. Where we can openly live our partnerships, and dress and present the way we want, just as our heterosexual siblings are able to.
In his January message he complained, “there are many who are not satisfied with the official view of our church because it does not give the people concerned any real, livable answers.”
A few days after his message, the Hasse Conference published that it had no reason to act against him, declaring, “We want a church where queer people are not afraid of negative consequences and can live without secrecy and loneliness…”
On Whose Terms?
Like everyone else, Sasha Gunjevic is a person whom Jesus died for, with a face, a name, and a story. We can be certain he has experienced heart-wrenching trials and anguish in his struggle with his sexual attractions. I appreciate that he wants to serve God well. I am glad for every person who is willing to sacrifice for God’s cause. Here is a man who says he wants to be right.
Still, we always return to the fact that we do not follow Jesus on our own terms but His. We are not called to follow, cunningly devised, fables, but truth. We have not called Him to be God; He has called us to be His disciples.
An ordained minister is a shepherd, a man recognized by his church as a leader and a moral guide. At his ordination he is charged by the church to “preach the word” in season and out, when that word is socially acceptable and when it is not. How can the church entrust one to shepherd God’s flock when his teaching is unbiblical?
Adventist Christian experience is based upon Scripture. In so-called Queer theology, experience dominates. It is what God’s Word says versus what we interpret ourselves presently to be feeling. How can a teacher who forms his conclusions from his interpretation of his sexual experience be depended upon to teach and uphold the claims of a Bible which contradicts that experience?
What happens when God’s order is replaced by a buffet of sexual “identities?” By proclaiming he is bisexual, and suggesting that bisexuality is a non-negotiable part of his person, Gunjevic endorses the contemporary buffet.
How can the truth expressed from the very Creator Himself, that same-sex relations are abomination, be countermanded by the creature who says such partnerships are to be accepted? Were his voice another voice from the world, that would be sad. But his voice comes from the position of a sanctioned teacher in the church.
We are not guilty for DNA received from our biological parents; neither are we condemnable because of the environment we grew up in. But we are moral creatures; we are accountable before a holy God. Nor has our Creator been silent. From our childhood His Holy Spirit has worked to influence us toward the right, all while refusing to interfere in our personal choices. He shows us what is right and what is wrong and encourages us toward the good. He warns us that the consequence of sin is separation from He who is life.
When we choose to give ourselves to Him our perspective changes. We accept that God designed us and that He has a place for us in His universe. It’s still His universe.
The universe is temporarily defaced with the results of human sinning. Death and disease and errors and suffering entered this world when human rebellion became a thing. All are born disordered. We all are subject to suffering even before adding own choices and habits of disorder.
Fallen and sinful as we have made ourselves by our own choices to self-serve, God is ready to receive us. He is quick to forgive and to strengthen and empower. Some find a spouse. If one experiences a kind of attraction to another person that stands outside of God’s created order, God promises that His grace will be sufficient. All who desire His help can receive it for faithful celibacy.
Christianity is Hard; Culture is Easy
Christianity is hard; culture is easy. Of course we are inclined to go along with the music and the (im)morality we grew up with, the screens we grew up watching, the skin and hedonics we have seared into our minds. We have an unnatural appetite for it. We feel entitled. We excel at self-service and how astonished we are when any dare intervene!
No matter how arrived at, approving sexual acts which stand outside the authentic morality of love is an impossibility. Sexuality closely touches who we are. And yet, surrendered identities are surrendered. We are new creatures in Christ.
Now we are sons of light. Now we war bitterly against self. In strength from Jesus we drag ourselves to the scarlet swatches in the mud beneath the cross and look up. We see Him crucified, dying for us. He is punished for our sins in which He had no share, to give us His righteousness in which we had no share.
At the cross we are crucified with Him. As He rose so we rise in newness of life. Sin no longer has dominion over us. Yet the old behaviors are still imprinted in our habits; the old desires are always ready for replay. In God’s help we resist.
Gunjevic framed his January message on the story of Hagar. He identifies with Hagar’s situation. Abram could not conceive a child by Sarai at first, and Sarai told Abram to have sex with Sarai’s maid Hagar. They did and Hagar conceived. When Ishmael was born, Hagar despised Sarai and Sarai reproached Abram. Abram told her she was free to discipline Hagar, and she was so harsh that Hagar fled.
Hagar was trapped in an apparently no-win scenario. But God encouraged her and told her to return and promised numerous descendants. She found God to be her advocate. Gunjevic claims God as advocate for his bisexuality. Hagar was treated badly by Sarai and God encouraged Hagar. But Hagar was not engaged in any advocacy to overturn God’s creation order for maleness and femaleness. She did not ally herself in the rebellion against God’s order, nor did she permit herself to be used as as tool for any such rebellion.
Were Gunjevic a non-Christian, I would understand his viewpoint. For the non-Christian, human origins allegedly begin in a murky puddle of dead acids, followed by an infinite leap from non-living to living material. But the evolved man is not made in God’s image; he’d has no plan, no holiness, and no purpose.
How can it be consistent to profess to be a Christian, to be made in the image of Him who designed us exclusively male and female, and then invert His purposes for His church? The church is God’s fortress which He holds in a revolted world. The church cannot permit its machinery to be employed in subverting its Creator’s order.
God’s goal for humans is that they find true fulfillment in Him. Heaven is our home, not Berlin. To be a follower of Jesus means one agrees with God’s order and chooses not to replace God’s word with his own word.
Necessary Actions
The Hanseatic Conference appointed Gunjevic pastor of one of the most significant Adventist congregations in Germany. Now it is approving his teaching. This is cultural compromise. Rather than demonstrating an authentically loving alternative, this is the open embrace of self-serving cultural hedonics.
This is moral cowardice.
With only good will toward Sasa Gunjevic, the fact that he has openly stated he is bisexual, that he openly teaches such identities to be acceptable, that same-sex partnerships should be accepted into the life of the church, shows him in contradiction to God’s revealed truth. God permits men to live as they will during their earthly sojourn, but calls them to return.
No man should continue as a shepherd in the church who teaches bisexuality as an acceptable pattern of life. It is the duty of the Hanseatic Conference to discontinue Gunjevic in its employ as any kind of spiritual leader. To retain him in such employ would be to set him before the men, women, and children of our congregations as a spiritual example.
Knowing it will be poorly received by the godless, knowing that it will make Gunjevic a kind of martyr, the world church still must see he is immediately removed, and either reform the Hanseatic Conference leadership or disband and reconstitute the conference. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church regards bisexuality as a destructive teaching and an abomination.
We cannot as members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church stand idle. We need to be aware of what is being done under the church’s name. A relationship of friendship with the world is a standing of warfare against God.
****
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
