WHEN OUR SILENCE WEAKENS OUR WITNESS
Christians must sometimes confess, with trembling honesty, that they forfeited their moral authority long before the present battle ever arrived. And one of those moments is this: we wonder why our voice carries so little weight in the debate over same-sex marriage, yet we forget that many stopped listening to us years ago—not because we preached truth, but because we preached “truth” bent and bruised by cultural prejudice rather than shaped entirely by the Word of God.
For generations, far too many believers opposed interracial marriage with a zeal the Bible never blessed. They quoted Scripture without context; they defended boundaries God never drew; they protected traditions God never sanctified. And in doing so, they added a burden to the gospel and placed a dividing wall where Jesus had torn one down (Ephesians 2:14).
The Scriptures are clear: God’s requirement for marriage has never been skin color—it has always been covenant, always been fidelity, always been one man and one woman bound together under the blessing of their Creator (Genesis 2:24). But when we elevated our preferences to the level of divine decree, we spoke where God was silent, and we were silent where God had spoken.
Is it any wonder, then, that when we now defend the biblical design for marriage, some shrug us off as inconsistent? Why should they trust our convictions today,they ask, when we were wrong—and loudly wrong—yesterday?
People remember when the church defended the indefensible. They remember when we acted as though ethnicity mattered more than righteousness, more than faithfulness, more than love. And so when we speak now about the beauty of God’s design—about the sacred covenant of one man and one woman—they hear echoes of an older argument, one we should have repented of far earlier and far more publicly.
But regret is not the end of the story. Grace never leaves us where it finds us. The same Christ who corrected Peter’s prejudice at the house of Cornelius (Acts 10:34–35) is the Christ who corrects ours today. And the same gospel that calls us to repent of yesterday’s distortions is the gospel that empowers us to speak clearly, humbly, and faithfully today.
Our failure in one generation does not excuse surrender in the next; it simply means we must speak with tears in our eyes and truth in our mouths.
So let the church confess the past without fear, and proclaim the present without apology. Let us say, with sincerity and Scripture in our hands, that marriage belongs to God—not to culture, not to politics, not to shifting winds of opinion. He made it, He defined it, and He blessed it: one man, one woman, joined as one flesh (Matthew 19:4–6).
But let us also say, with equal clarity, that He never restricted that union by race, and we were wrong when we did.
And perhaps—just perhaps—when a watching world sees a church that can repent of old sins while standing firm on eternal truth, they will hear us again. Not because our voice is loud, but because our hearts are clean; not because we are flawless, but because we are faithful; not because we seek to win arguments, but because we seek to honor Christ.
BD
