Have you noticed anything missing in the arguments Christian-minded people are using to oppose same-sex marriages? We hear: "For thousands of years, marriage 'has meant' a union between a man and a woman." Who says so?

The answer is, God defined it. After completing His creation of mankind, God announced: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). God also told the man and the woman, the husband and the wife, "Be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28). So one of God's purposes of marriage is for the man and the woman to have a family.

Thousands of people in the United States are unashamedly challenging this legal definition of marriage. We're not speaking of the California proposition that defined marriage as between a man and woman; we aren't referring to the statutes on the books of nearly 40 states that order marriage to be between a man and a woman; we aren't referring to or joining the national debate over a constitutional amendment.

We're referring to God. His Word is law.

That's a reality that all too many Christian-minded people shy away from, and it's failing them and their leaders in the culture war raging in America. Christian religions have long taken a "politically correct" approach toward God's law, instead of a biblically correct one. Most have sought to "soften" the force of God's law. In the current debate, their wrong-headed theology makes their words hollow.

Christianity has run from the law of God for so long, it cannot say with clarity what sin is. What is it? Is it doing something that hurts others? Is it going against your conscience? This approach has no form or shape. God is love. True. In love, God told the man and the woman He made how they and their children should live for their own happiness. When people fail to live by those rules (God's laws), they sin.

Breaking the law of God is sin (1 John 3:4). Many Christian teachers talk of "grace" without understanding. God's grace is the extension of a pardon, the suspension of the death penalty. It is only common sense, as well as the teaching of the Bible, that God expects the pardoned individual to be law-abiding, submitting to His spiritual law from that point on. There is freedom in grace—freedom from the death penalty, as well as freedom and help to live life the way God wants us to live.

But it does not include the freedom to break the law of God.

Compare the law of God with the rules of a household. God's laws are simply rules for His household. In a healthy family, parents lay down reasonable rules or boundaries out of love for their children. Just as obeying one's parents is normal and healthy, so obeying God's law is spiritually healthy. Plainly, a loving and respectful child of God will live by the rules He has set for the household.

Society expects every citizen to be law-abiding. Indeed, a citizen who refuses to submit to law is a criminal! How strange that some who teach the Bible think there's something wrong with believing that God's children need to be law-abiding.

So long as Christians remain ignorant about God's law, their arguments about same-sex marriage will continue to be hollow, without a center. So long as the debate before Western culture pivots on human opinions, society will drift further and further from the way God told us to live.

We are the children of the man and the woman He made in the Garden. We're supposed to live by the rules He gave them.

Are you aware of God's law? Do you know how it applies to you? Are you wandering in the fog of today's Christianity's view of law? You can't afford to be wrong on this. Request our booklet The Ten Commandments.