All R Called

Everlasting.
Not "everlasting if."
Not "everlasting unless."
Everlasting.

This month we have walked through the 7 clobber passages — the verses that have been weaponised against LGBTQIA+ people for decades:

📖 Genesis 9 (Noah and Ham) — a story of shame and r**e, not orientation
📖 Genesis 19 (S***m) — about gang r**e and inhospitality, confirmed by Ezekiel
📖 Judges 19 — a parallel S***m story where a woman is the victim
📖 Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 — addressing Canaanite cultic prostitution and the exploitation of boys
📖 Romans 1:26–27 — addressed to idol-worshipping cult practitioners, possibly the Isis religion
📖 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 — using a word Paul invented, likely targeting pederasty and s*xual trafficking

Not one of these passages, understood in context, condemns a committed, loving, faithful same-s*x relationship.

Not one.

And over all of them — over every chapter, every letter, every poem — hangs Jeremiah 31:3:

Everlasting love. Unfailing kindness.

This is what overarches everything. This is what cannot be broken — not by 7 misread verses, not by centuries of mistranslation, not by the voices that told you that you were the exception.

God's love is not a policy.
It is a Person.
And that Person has drawn you — yes, you — with unfailing kindness.

💛 Share this with someone who needs the full picture today.

The very first baptism recorded in Acts outside of Israel was a gender-nonconforming African.

A eu**ch was a person who did not fit the gender binary of the ancient world. In many cases they were castrated, but the term also encompassed those who were simply "different" — outside the expected male/female categories of the time. The Old Testament law (Deuteronomy 23:1) explicitly excluded eu**chs from the assembly of God.

And here, in Acts 8, one approaches Philip and asks: "What is to prevent me from being baptised?"

And Philip baptises him.

No condition.
No "but first you must change."
No asterisk.

And the Spirit? The Spirit confirms it — snatching Philip away, leaving the eu**ch alone, rejoicing, on his way.

The very first recorded baptism beyond Jewish Christianity was a gender-nonconforming person from Africa.

And they went on their way rejoicing.

That's not a footnote in the story of the church. That IS the story of the church: a Spirit that outpaces our prejudice, who welcomes who we would exclude, and who writes the outsider into the very first chapter of global Christianity.

The doors of this kingdom have always been wider than we imagined. 💛



Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

The Psalmist didn't write: "I am fearfully and wonderfully made — except for this part."

He wrote: I am.
Fully.
Wonderfully.
As made.

We have spent this month looking at what the Bible does NOT say about LGBTQIA+ people. Today we look at what it does say — about every human being:

God knit you together.
God saw your unformed body (v.16).
God knew every day of your life before you were born.
And the response to knowing all of that — every cell, every trait, every part of who you would become — was to call His work wonderful.

If God is the one who formed your inmost being — including how you love, who you are, the full texture of your humanity — then your identity is not a mistake. It is not a flaw in the fabric. It is part of the weaving.

You were not made in spite of being LGBTQIA+.
You were made.

And the One who made you looked at you and said: wonderful.

This month has been about truth. The truth of the text. The truth of history. The truth of scholarship.

But underneath all of it is this simpler, deeper truth: You are loved because you are known. You are known because you were made. And the One who made you has never stopped calling you His own. 💛

🔗 Join a community group — link in bio. You don't have to walk this alone.

Everything.
All of Scripture.
Hangs on love.

Here is something that doesn't get talked about enough:

Jesus — God in human form, who walked the earth, who knew everything, who addressed sin directly and unflinchingly — never once mentioned homos*xuality.

Not once.

He spoke about divorce. About wealth. About hypocrisy. About judgment. About pride and legalism. He spoke to and about women, Samaritans, Roman soldiers, tax collectors, Pharisees, adulterers, fishermen, lepers, and outcasts of every kind.

He never mentioned same-s*x love.

Some say: "Silence doesn't mean approval." But consider this: homos*xuality existed in the Greco-Roman world of Jesus's time — openly and visibly. He encountered it. He chose not to address it. And He chose instead to make love the measure of everything.

Jesus condemned judgment ten times more frequently than any s*xual sin. He condemned religious hypocrisy constantly. He called out the self-righteous who used religious law to exclude the people He came to embrace.

When the church uses 7 debated verses to exclude LGBTQIA+ people from God's love — and does so in the name of Jesus, who never said a word about it — that is worth examining carefully.

Love God. Love people. On this hangs everything. 💛

Paul wrote this.

The same Paul whose words have been twisted to exclude LGBTQIA+ people — this same Paul, writing to the Romans, ends his great theological argument with this declaration.

Nothing.
Not death. Not life. Not powers.
Not your s*xuality. Not your gender identity. Not who you love.

Paul lists every force he can conceive of that might try to stand between a person and God's love — and then says: none of it works. None of it.

The love of God is not a reward for correct theology.
It is not contingent on your denomination.
It is not withheld from the LGBTQIA+ community.

It is the ground on which every human being stands, whether they know it or not.

We have spent two weeks walking through the 7 clobber passages — not to be controversial, but because we believe that the truth about God's Word frees people. Today we simply stop and stand in that truth:

You are loved. Without condition. Without asterisk. Without end.

That is the gospel. That is the core of all Scripture. And not one verse — properly understood — contradicts it.

💛 Save this. Read it on the hard days.

Before 1946, no English Bible translation used that word. Not the King James. Not any of them.

In 1946, translators of the Revised Standard Version made a decision to combine two Greek words (malakoi and arsenokoitai) and translate them together as "homos*xuals" in 1 Corinthians 6:9. The lead translator, Dr. Luther Weigle, later admitted this was a mistake when challenged — but the damage was done. The word spread into other translations and into pulpits around the world.

One translation decision. 1946. And millions of LGBTQIA+ people were told they were excluded from the Kingdom of God — based on a word that didn't exist in the original text.

The concept of "s*xual orientation" — the idea that a person IS homos*xual, that it is an identity rather than an act — simply did not exist in the ancient world. Ancient people thought in terms of actions, roles, and power, not orientation.

Paul could not have condemned something he had no concept of.

This doesn't shake our faith in Scripture — it deepens it. Because it means the Bible, read faithfully, has never excluded you.

Jesus said the truth sets you free. This is that truth. 💛

🔗 Watch the All R Called YouTube channel for the full teaching. Link in bio.

#1946

Here is something remarkable: Paul appears to have invented this word. It does not appear anywhere in Greek literature before Paul. It was his own compound — arseno (male) + koitai (bed) — drawn from the Greek translation of Leviticus.

Because the word is unique to Paul, we genuinely don't know with certainty what he meant.

But here's what we do know:
→ Early Christian writers who used this word after Paul placed it in lists with economic crimes and exploitation, not s*xual identity.
→ In 1 Timothy 1:10, arsenokoitai appears directly alongside "slave traders." Many scholars believe these three words together describe the buying and selling of boys for s*x — i.e., the trafficking and s*xual exploitation of children.
→ The word was first translated as "homos*xuals" in 1946 in the RSV Bible. Before that, no English Bible used that word in this verse. Not one.
→ The other word in the same list — malakoi — literally means "soft." In context it likely referred to the passive victim in a s*xual transaction, often a slave or young boy.

Paul was condemning exploitation and abuse.
Not orientation. Not love. Not commitment.

A committed, loving gay relationship is the opposite of what Paul was describing. It is — as Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it — the kind of faithful relationship these passages were never about.

The God who IS love (1 John 4:8) is not threatened by love between two people.

💛 You are not an arsenokoitai. You are a child of God.



Photo by Damiano Lingauri on Unsplash

Paul says: people who worshipped idols were "given over" to "degrading passions" — women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and men burned with lust for other men.

Here's what scholars — including at Loyola University and in the Biblical Theology Bulletin — say Paul was actually describing:

🔴 The Isis cult was the most prominent imported Egyptian religion in Rome when Paul wrote. Its gods were depicted as animals (Anubis as a dog, Horus as a falcon, Hathor as a cow). Paul uses exactly this animal language in v.23.

🔴 In the Isis cult, male priests practiced s*xual abstinence OR engaged in cultic s*xual acts. The priests who abstained were sometimes mocked by Romans as secretly loving one another. Paul may have been satirising this.

🔴 The phrase "for this reason" (v.26) is critical: the same-s*x behaviour Paul describes is directly connected to idolatry. He is describing the same specific group — idol-worshippers — not a universal statement about orientation.

🔴 Paul never uses the word "homos*xual" (it didn't exist). He was speaking about specific people performing specific acts within a context of pagan worship and exploitation.

He was not describing a gay Christian in Cape Town who loves Jesus.

He was not describing you.

The 3rd century church father Hippolytus connected Romans 1:26–27 to castrated pagan priests — not to same-s*x loving relationships. The condemnation of all gay people from this text is a recent invention.

Romans 8:1 remains: no condemnation for those in Christ. That includes you. Always has. 💛

Ezekiel — written long after Genesis — tells us exactly what S***m's sin was: pride, abundance without compassion, and failure to care for the vulnerable.

No mention of s*xual orientation. None.

And look at the Genesis 19 text more carefully:
→ ALL the men of the city surrounded Lot's house (v.4). Every population cannot be homos*xual.
→ The crowd wanted to "know" the angels — an act of gang r**e designed to humiliate strangers. This was a violent assertion of dominance over outsiders, not an expression of orientation.
→ The sin was condemned BEFORE the incident even happened — God had already decided to investigate S***m (Genesis 18:20–21).
→ When Jesus referred to S***m (Luke 10:10–12), He said the sin was the failure to show hospitality to strangers.

So when someone says "God destroyed S***m because of g**s" — they are not quoting the Bible. They are contradicting it.

The God who did judge S***m is the same God who declared: He defends the cause of the poor and needy. (Ezekiel 16:49)

His love is not the weapon it has been made into. His love is the truth that sets people free.

💛 Share this with someone who has been hurt by the S***m story.

***mAndGomorrah

Photo by Emir Aydın on Unsplash

Here's what's important to know — and what most people are never told:

1️⃣ The original Hebrew has no word for "homos*xual". That word didn't exist. What the text describes was placed directly between the prohibition of child sacrifice to Molech (v.21) and s*x with animals (v.23). Scholars widely agree this section was addressing cultic, idolatrous practices of Canaan — specifically what happened in pagan temple worship — not loving relationships.

2️⃣ Some older Bible translations — including early German and Swedish versions — used words that meant "young boy" instead of "man". This points to pederasty (the s*xual exploitation of minors) as the more likely target of these laws.

3️⃣ The same Levitical code also forbids: eating shellfish (11:10), wearing mixed fabrics (19:19), and trimming the edges of your beard (19:27). No one is protesting Red Lobster.

4️⃣ Galatians 3 and the entire New Testament makes clear that Christians are not under the Mosaic law. The law was a guide for ancient Israel's national and cultural identity — not an eternal moral code applied selectively today.

Christ fulfilled the law. That's the whole gospel.

If Leviticus condemns you for loving, it also condemns the person quoting it for wearing a polyester shirt.

But here's the bigger truth: God's love is not a Levitical code. It was demonstrated at a cross. And it has never excluded you. 💛

🔗 Link in bio — find your community at All R Called.