Last Tuesday, a full-page advertisement appeared in The Washington Post. It appeared the next day in USA Today. It was titled “An Open Letter to the Supreme Court Justices of the United States” and asked them not to “force us to choose between the State and the Laws of God.” Because that is precisely the choice we face if the Supreme Court overturns marriage.

The letter was signed by Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical and mainline Protestant Christian leaders, along with Jewish leaders. It directed the reader to the Defend Marriage site  where they can join with tens of thousands from across the confessional spectrum and add their name to a petition in solidarity to defend marriage.

With my friend, fellow constitutional lawyer and evangelical Protestant Mat Staver, I drafted the petition and the advertisement. This effort to bring Christians together to defend marriage was championed by the founder of The Stream, James Robison. The leadership to raise the funds and place the ads was provided by Pastor Rick Scarborough.

The Supreme Court Decision

Now, we wait for the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v Hodges and the three linked cases. However the justices rule, marriage will not change because no court, legislature or executive can change the nature of an institution that precedes civil government, is revealed by the natural moral law, and is part of the Divine Design for the entire human race.

If the court overturns marriage, as I’ve written here before, the faithful must follow God and not men. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote that we have “a moral responsibility to obey just laws.” But “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”

If a majority of the Supreme Court purports to change what is unchangeable, what will change is our duty as Christian citizens. We may soon find ourselves openly at odds with the State.

This will not be new territory for us. Christians in the first few centuries faced the hostility of the State when they refused to offer sacrifice to Caesar. Their fidelity to the Lord was used by the state to call their loyalty as citizens into question. It also proved the reliability of a promise of Jesus we do not hear in many contemporary Christian circles: “Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you” (John 15:20).

The persecution against the Christian Church in the early centuries had many effects, but two are noteworthy. First, it accelerated — before it subsided. So it will be in this hour. Unlike the undivided Church of the first millennium, we are divided. However, this movement to defend marriage has demonstrated that persecution has an uncanny way of bringing us together.

Second, it led to a falling away. So it is doing in this hour as well. I was saddened to read of one more evangelical protestant leader rejecting Christian orthodoxy concerning the unchangeable teaching on the nature of marriage. Efforts by self-identified Christians to redefine marriage to include relationships which cannot achieve the ends of marriage are a falling away from classical, biblical, creedal Christianity. They reject the teaching of the Scriptures and the unbroken Christian tradition. They are preaching what the Apostle Paul called “another gospel” (2 Cor. 11:4, Gal. 1:8).

Sifting and Shaking

The battle for marriage is sifting the Church and shaking the nation. The shaking has begun. After a teaching on the example of Jesus for Christians facing persecution and struggle, the author of the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that we are “receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” He exhorts us to “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.” Let us heed the warning and live ready — ready, if we’re forced to it,  to choose between the state and the Laws of God.