I recently read a blog post that asserted that lust and sexual orientation are two very different things. Lust is a powerful urge to act on the drive to enjoy sex. Sexual orientation defines the gender(s) and other qualities of the object of the drive to enjoy sex. That is the contemporary cultural view of things. People may be attracted to one gender or more than one, but the attraction need not be expressed in lust. The variability in the directions of the attraction are nothing more than the variability in the colors of roses. We would not expect every rose to be red, and we should not expect every human to be sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex. This is the secular view of human sexuality.

The Bible teaches us that this is not the way people are created. The notion that there is any normal sexual orientation other than the sexual attraction between two people of opposite genders is a deviant idea, which has been legitimized by means of aggressive social activism and a lot of name-calling. Nobody wants to be called a “homophobe” or a “bigot.” By using such words to describe people who assert and affirm God’s plan for human sexuality, activists have marginalized normality and optimized abnormality. They have led even spiritual leaders to adopt their agenda, because even spiritual leaders are vulnerable to aggressive name-calling.

When God created the universe, he created our earth and the plants and animals on it. Then he created human beings, and he breathed his own breath into humans. Plants and animals were created with gender, just as humans are, but plants and animals were not inbreathed by the breath of God himself. The beautiful story of the creation of man followed by the creation of woman is a story of the meaning of gender, the complementary nature of the two genders and the natural, normal, God-purposed attraction between the two human genders for blessing and procreation. This is God’s plan and purpose.

God didn’t give us genders and sexual attraction simply so we could be like animals, however. Animals are not in-breathed by God’s breath, and animals cannot be sinful. Whatever they do is instinctive or may even be driven by Satan, like the pigs in the story of the Gadarene demoniac. Animals engage in all sorts of sexual behavior which would be deviant in human beings. Human beings are created to live by a different standard. In fact, the human sexual standard is intended to point humans to God himself. The union of male and female as one flesh is intended to model for us the bliss, even ecstasy, of the union of God with his people. The union of male and female human beings is God’s gift for our joy as well as God’s way of teaching us how much he loves us. When humans use the gift of sexuality in homosexual or other deviant expressions, it belittles the gift of God. It is sinful, because, like all other sins, it worships self rather than God.

Humans invented the idea of sexual orientation in order to pretend to themselves that sin is not sin. Human beings prefer to worship themselves rather than God. The idea of sexual orientation is inspired by Satan as one more of his evil strategies to turn people away from God to worship themselves.

Is lust different from sexual orientation? It is not. The term sexual orientation is a Satanic strategy to fool people into believing that God is frivolous and beneath contempt, because he creates people with this propensity and then punishes them for acting on it. People are born with sinful human nature, and the lust expressed as sexual orientation is only one of the many lusts Satan has inspired. The lust for money, the lust of gender confusion, the lust for power, the lust to see other people grovel—all the lusts are part of sinful human nature driven by Satan’s work in the human spirit. God created people for something better, and he breathed his own breath into Adam as evidence of his high calling for the human race.

Those who suffer from deviant sexual orientation do not need to be accommodated. They need to be healed. Every human needs the same thing, because every human is born sinful. We all suffer from lusts we cannot control by our own power. The solution is to give ourselves and our lusts to Jesus. On the cross, he suffered and died bearing the weight of our sins, our lusts, our neediness. When we are tempted, we can give those temptations to Jesus, and he will bear them for us. We cannot bear them by ourselves. Satan is powerful and devious, and he makes us believe that we can and must do it all ourselves, but that is a lie. We cannot ever save ourselves from any of the multitude of lusts that consume our sinful human nature. The LGBTQ advocates are right about one thing: they can never give up their sexual orientation or their gender confusion by themselves. They need Jesus, just like everybody else.

Is there a difference between lust and sexual orientation? There is a difference in the definitions of these terms, but when a deviant desire is reclassified by secular culture in an attempt to pretend that abnormal, deviant behavior is normal, then there is very little difference between lust and sexual orientation. God has showed us in his own revelation of the creation of human beings that only one orientation for sexual fulfillment is normal. Everything else is as abnormal and sinful as lust.