“Today Satan is weakening the nations through homosexuality, the sin that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah,” writes Bible scholar Dr. Noah Hutchings (www.swrc.com) in his 1998 book, “God Divided the Nations.” “He is weakening the nations to prepare the way for the rise of a world government over which his own king, the Antichrist, will reign.”

His reference to “weakening the nations” comes from Isaiah 14:12, which reads, “How are thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How are thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”

What’s often forgotten is that homosexuality is one of the major sins that dates all the way back to the pre-Flood era.

“Before the Flood, sexual perversion was rampant,” confirms Hutchings in his book, quoting terminology from Gen. 6:5-6, 12. “In all probability the Apostle Paul was referring to the destruction of the (pre-Flood) Antediluvians when he wrote in Romans 1:26-27:

‘For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly. . .’

“God did not create men and women to be sexually perverted. This condition developed afterward, and it would appear from the entire text of the Scripture that it resulted from the union of fallen angels with women. We read of the fallen angels and their associations with sexual perversion in Jude 6-7:

‘And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.’ ”

As I’ve written about before on this site (Editor’s Note: Click on ‘Back Issues’ for the article “Big Problems,” Feb. 12, 2006), there were fallen angels aligned with Satan who fornicated with females on the earth in the years before the Flood, and the result of their sexual union was children who possessed unusual strength and grew to be giants. First Century historian Flavius Josephus says “these men did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants.”

“What the people in Sodom and Gomorrah did was like what the (fallen) angels of Genesis 6 did—they went after ‘strange flesh,’ living contrary to their nature,” explains my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) in a study I have on tape. “The name ‘Sodom’ has become synonymous with the whole sin of homosexuality.”

In the account about Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction by fire and brimstone in Genesis 19, we’re told that when two angels (both male, as were all angels described in the Bible) entered Sodom just prior to its demise, Lot had to protect them from the lustful men in town who were adamant to have sex with them.

These Sodomites, in fact, were so determined to fornicate with these male angels being safe-guarded in Lot’s house that they were about ready to pounce on Lot and knock down his front door when the angels interceded and “smote the men that were at the door of the house with blindness, both small and great: so that they wearied themselves to find the door.”

Hutchings, along with other Bible scholars through the ages, speculates that homosexuality first recurred after the Flood with Noah’s son Ham in Genesis 9, in which he finds his father unclothed and passed out from drunkenness.

“As Noah lay naked in his tent, the Scripture declares that Ham saw him,” writes Hutchings. “The terminology used may imply more than just seeing with the eyes. For example, the Bible uses the verb ‘knew’ to explain the act of conception. . . We note the specific wording of Genesis 9:24: ‘And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.’

“It would certainly appear that there was more involved here than Ham just stumbling by chance upon the drunken body of his father. We read in Gen. 6:9 that Noah was ‘perfect in his generations.’ Noah was not perfect in that he was sinless, he was perfect in that he escaped the corruption that had affected all flesh. However, nothing is said about Noah’s wife, or the wives of Ham, Shem, or Japeth, so a genetic flaw may have passed on to Ham and Canaan through Mrs. Noah.”

The Genesis 9 account, says Hutchings, seems to suggest Canaan, the son of Ham who received Noah’s curse and fathered the descendants who later settled Sodom and Gomorrah, was also involved in the sin of Ham.

“He could have been with his father and a participant in the deed, or while Ham was gone to tell his brothers about their father’s condition, Canaan could have become equally guilty,” writes Hutchings. “We readily admit that our explanation of what possibly happened is conjecture; however, God would not have extended the curse to Canaan had he been only an innocent bystander. It is no wonder that Noah was upset because one of the sins that brought about the judgment of the pre-Flood society had now appeared in his own household.”

Today, homosexual proponents will tell you the Bible either doesn’t have anything to say against homosexuality or it’s limited to one simple little verse in Leviticus 18: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

The reality is negative references to the sin can be found scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments—Deuteronomy 23, I Kings 14 and 15, II Kings 23, I Corinthians 6 and Galatians 5.

“Paul lists homosexuality as part of the sins of the flesh, but can I remind you it’s not listed as any worse than drunkenness or adultery or anger and wrath,” says Jordan. “Sometimes people tend to think of homosexuality as the most evil sin, but when God lists it, He just puts it in the garden variety of sins. God looks at all sin the same. It’s all sin. It doesn’t mean it’s not serious or bad, it just means that sometimes we get fixated on one as opposed to another—usually we’re fixated on the ones we don’t care for and the rest of them we like to leave alone.”

What God was warning the Israelites about in Leviticus 18 (where homosexuality is listed as an abomination) is how the Gentile nations had forsaken God and let sin become their lifestyle, and that perversion as a lifestyle was rampant in their midst.

When gays today encourage others into “coming out of the closet,” what they’re saying is, “Don’t hide this lifestyle anymore.”

“When sin is not a way of life, you keep it in the closet, but when it becomes a way of life, you bring it out of the closet—this is just a principle of life,” says Jordan. “Those of us raised in America gained the fruit of the impact of the Protestant Reformation—which put light and godliness into our culture whether the people in it were Christians or not—

and that light drove out the darkness, but what’s happened in the last 50 years, at least since the ‘spiritual awakening’ in the ’60s, is for the first time in our nation’s history the culture’s not based on the Bible. . .

“It shouldn’t surprise you that when the light goes out, darkness comes back in, and as the darkness comes back in, these sins that once were not the lifestyles, and were kept in the closet, get out into the open. And as you see sin gain the open lifestyle in the culture, you know what’s happened? The culture’s adjusted to it.”

As Jordan explains from the Old Testament, the consistent resurgence of homosexual activity into the lifestyle of the nation Israel came when Israel forsook God’s Word.

“Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people,” warns Solomon in Proverbs 14:34.

“When sin becomes a lifestyle for a person or a nation, it all comes out in the open, and when it does, it requires that the institutions that would check it and stop it, or limit it, be overturned,” says Jordan, referring to the God-given divine institutions of marriage (between a man and a woman) and family.

“There will always be a consistent social struggle with the sins of the flesh when God’s Word is not honored—that’s true anywhere you look in the Bible,” he says. “When you despise God’s Word and say, ‘I know better than God does, I’ll do it my way, I don’t care what He says,’ you’re looking for, and you’re inviting, and you’re putting yourself on a flight headed toward the destination of destruction.

“In troubles, people sometimes say, ‘Well, where’s God?!” He’s right where you left Him. ‘Well, why didn’t God do something in this situation?!’ Because you threw Him out, that’s why. You said, ‘I don’t want Him. I’m smarter than He is. I’m better than He is.’

“God doesn’t take a two-by-four and hit you in the back of the head and say, ‘You can’t do that!’ He says, ‘Hey, that isn’t what I had for you,’ but He doesn’t violate your volition. He honors your volition, but you have to accept responsibility for your choices.”

What Paul describes in Romans 1: 28-32 is the downward spiral that occurs in a person’s life when God’s Word is despised and sin is indulged in. Along with the sin comes haunting guilt, mental and emotional disturbances, abnormal personality changes, etc.

With the sin of homosexuality, as well as other sins, Jordan stresses, “The sin is not in being tempted, the sin is in yielding to the temptation. . . It becomes a sin once it becomes a practice.” As for the answer, he says it’s “always in Jesus Christ.”

“The way we oppose it is not by going out and trying to pass some kind of law that’s going to make people be different, because you can’t make people be different by a law,” Jordan says. “You make people be different because they’re in Christ—God makes them different. As Paul says, ‘Such were some of you, but you’re washed, you’re sanctified, you’re justified.’ The way you oppose it is by turning on the light, holding forth the gospel.

“It doesn’t make any difference if you’ve been associated with the homosexual lifestyle, or you’ve been pristine virginal clean and a religious nut. Outside of Christ, you’re just as far from God one to the other. God doesn’t save people because they go to church, and He doesn’t send them to hell because of the way they have sex. He saves people because they’re in His Son, and He sends them to hell because they’re not—because they’ve chosen to go to hell in spite of His love and grace for them.”