Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason gave good advice to a caller regarding how to respond when people ask “gotcha” questions such as, “How do you feel about ‘same-sex marriage?'” The question and answer were in context of beauty pageant contestants, but the situation can come up with any of us. We’ll be getting those questions more and more and we need to be prepared to answer in a wise and winsome way.
If you get questions like that just say, “I agree with Jesus on that subject.” That takes you off the hot seat and puts the burden on the questioner. Few people — even non-believers — want to be seen as being on the record as opposing Jesus.
They might ask follow-up questions, which is good, because now you are talking about Jesus and what He said!
Yes, false teachers like the “Christian” Left could use the first part of that tip as a rhetorical trick (after all, among other falsehoods, those ghouls will insist that Jesus supports abortions up to the child’s first breath*). But we’re not worried about them right now. This is about you navigating through tough questions and giving truthful but wise replies and using opportunities to share the truth if people are open to it.
Here’s a good verse to have handy: Matthew 19:4–5 He answered, “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’?”
Note how Jesus defeats Darwinian evolution, oxymoronic “same-sex marriage,” same-sex parenting and transgenderism arguments in that one simple passage. No true follower of him should disagree on any of those topics.**
So if they want to know more, you are ready. You have an easy segue to explaining why you care what Jesus said about the topic (i.e., He is divine, He is your Savior, etc.). But at a minimum you’ve put the burden on them instead of saying something foolish, or worse yet, denying Jesus.
This is a completely legitimate way to being as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.
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*From the “Christian” Left: “According to the bible, a fetus is not a living person with a soul until after drawing its first breath.”
**Jesus is still asking them that question today, and the answer from the “Christian” Left is, “No, we haven’t read that” — or, rather, “We read that but didn’t like it so we ‘know’ you didn’t really say that.”