A Southern Baptist theologian answers the question “Is it true Jesus never addressed sam-sex marriage?”

According to Daniel Akin, the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, the answer is flat out no.

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Akin presented his views in "Between the Times," the seminary’s publication, making the argument that Jesus undeniably talked about marriage as found in Scripture.

“When one goes to the gospels to see exactly what Jesus did say, one will discover that He addressed very clearly both the issues of sex and marriage,” Akin said.

He referred to Matthew 19:4-6 where Jesus says, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Akin also uses Jesus’ lists of sins in Mark 7 to show Jesus’ view on marriage. The list includes sexual immorality and adultery, which, in a biblical context, is sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage between a man and woman.

Throughout the commentary, the theologian emphasizes that Jesus said sin is ultimately an issue of the heart and that “Jesus was always after heart transformation.”

“Change the heart and you truly change the person. It is the idols of the heart that Jesus is out to eradicate. Among those sins of the heart that often give way to sinful actions He would include both sexual immorality and adultery (Mark 7:21),” the Southern Baptist wrote.

“It is a very dangerous and illegitimate interpretive strategy to bracket the words of Jesus and read into them the meaning you would like to find. We must not isolate Jesus from His affirmation of the Old Testament as the Word of God nor divorce Him from His 1st century Jewish context.”

Akin goes on by saying that Jesus knew that the cure for each of these sins is a change of the heart made possible only by Gospel.

“Jesus loves both the heterosexual sinner and the homosexual sinner and promises free forgiveness and complete deliverance to each and everyone who comes to Him. Whether one is guilty of heterosexual or homosexual sin, one will find grace, forgiveness and freedom at the foot of the cross where the ground is always level,” Akin said.