“You shall not commit adultery…” Romans 13:9
The prohibition against adultery carries with it the commandment that sexual intercourse, as God has ordained it, is to be between a man and a woman in marriage. That’s it. Naturally, we bristle at this and want to be “sexually free.” But sexual freedom will come at great cost. It will ruin our souls, it will devastate our families, cast our children into alienation, depression and anger, and eventually, tear our culture apart. No attempt to “heal divisions” in society, or “bring people together” can happen without stable families and there can’t be stable families without sexual faithfulness in the Lord. Because this is the Lord’s world, and we are His creation, we live in a moral universe that reflects His holiness. Following His moral precepts brings blessing; rejecting His word/law (sin) brings curses and pain.
Modern western culture defines love as sex. The height of freedom, so the erroneous philosophy goes, is complete sexual license. It’s rather obvious why this is the case. The sin principle is the insistence on being one’s own god, primarily through the insistence of determining between right and wrong, good and evil, by one’s own (arbitrary) standards, right? Well, human beings can’t actually be God in any meaningful way; they can only pretend. And the easiest way to pretend is to break God’s obvious sexual structure. That’s much easier than, say, creating a world out of nothing.
So, what God has created for the blissful and intense pleasure and union of a married couple, giving them deep and noncontradictory joy, sin counterfeits. We might find it strange that adultery would be included in this short list considering that we’re talking about social strife. But when sex is outside of the family unit it causes all sorts of destruction – leading, of course, to violence. That’s why it’s on this list as we contemplate the principles of social justice and peace.
Sex outside of wedlock is the root cause of virtually every meaningful social vexation and disruption. Sex with someone who isn’t your spouse is, therefore, a direct threat to the entire society around you. This sounds fantastical to say since the lie we tell ourselves is that it’s no one’s business but our own, but we know in our hearts that it isn’t true. Even the most ardent atheists I know lament bitterly when they’re cheated on. I’ve seen it and I’m sure you have too. If we were true to the principle that sex is “no big deal” and “everyone has to be free to do their thing”, then why the caterwauling when someone strays? We know that the issue is honor and that betrayal is wrong. Well, how is it that we know this is true? You see, sin blinds us and we miss the obvious (as always). We apply the principle of faithfulness horizontally but not vertically. God is faithful and He demands the obedience of faith from us. This is why cheating and betrayal are wrong. Because the law of the Lord is, indeed, written on our hearts (Romans 2:15) and we know, when faced with the desultory consequences of sinful ideas, that sexual infidelity is a far cry worse than someone stiffing us on a loan. Both, after all, are a betrayal, but we all know that the intimacy of sex is vastly greater than money.
The law of sexual union between one man and one woman is written on the heart of all God’s people so we see it reflected in every culture, though we find it abused in places where God’s grace is most clouded.
For example, many false religions grant men multiple wives and/or concubines. The women, well…not so much. The more sin there is in a society, the more women are bartered as sexual toys. We see this as a normative principle in religions like Islam, where women are clearly second-class citizens. The man’s sex drive is, one can suppose by a precursory glance at the sexual ethics of such ideologies, the lodestar of their theology. We can also see what happens in cases of war. After Berlin fell to Soviet Russia, the rape of unprotected women was horrific. Millions of German women were brutally raped by unrestrained soldiers; girls as young as 8 or 9 all the way to old women were assaulted in a city stricken by war and depleted of men that could protect them. The Japanese rape of Nanking was equally, if not more, barbaric. Hundreds of thousands of defenseless Chinese women and girls were literally raped to death by the rampaging and remorseless Imperial Japanese army. In North America, Indian tribes like the Comanche were notorious for their maltreatment of captured women. For a woman to fall into the hands of those feared marauders was a death sentence – often carried out in the most sexually dehumanizing manner imaginable. John Wayne’s classic movie, The Searchers, dealt with this very topic.
Sexual deviance and sin can be seen in other ways too. For example, in the American south during slavery it wasn’t uncommon for a slave owning – and married! – white man to have several mulatto children. Because slavery itself was a horrific sin, fueled by violence and power, sexual sin followed it. The fact that so-called Christian men committed adultery with slave women who couldn’t reject their advances and then, due to the “social stigma”, didn’t grant full rights – or any in some cases – to the children that resulted from these sinful dalliances, is great evidence of sin’s incredible power to deceive. One scratches their head at the mind-boggling moral insanity of it all. But then we remember how quickly man fell into sexual sin after our collapse in the garden. Cain’s son, Lamech, is a perfect model of our pathetic condition. He had two wives, and he boasted of his prowess in violence – having killed a young man for striking him.
The point is, wherever sexual deviance goes, violence goes too because when men won’t restrain their sexual appetites, they won’t restrain their tempers or pride either. Sexual license is a supreme act of defiance against God – striking at His ethical sovereignty, so it’s no stretch of the imagination to figure that the man who would take the forbidden woman (that is, one who isn’t his wife) will also, when possible, take a life too (the rule of David, Bathsheba and Uriah). The rule of history is that where there is less rule of law, there’s more sexual violence and where there’s more and more sexual deviance, there’s less family stability, which leads to violence. God isn’t mocked and will never be played a fool. His world is hardwired with his rules and when we break them, we reap the built-in consequences of our rebellion.
Sex, like fire, has great power and must stay within its proper confines. Sitting by a fire with your sweetheart, cuddling and enjoying each other, is romantic; sitting on a curb watching your house burn down isn’t. In both cases, the couple is hugging by a fire. It’s like this that we need to see sex.
God defines the boundaries of all ethical issues, including sexuality. It’s simply not loving to redefine what God has made. The consequences of sin are so damaging, both in this age and certainly in the judgment to come, that violating God’s law is antithetical to love – it’s actually hate.
What used to be rather common knowledge to a more biblically literate America needs repeating today. The founding fathers saw biblical marriage as the cornerstone of political freedom because without it children wouldn’t grow up fit to self-govern. Liberty, after all, requires self-government, which is why it’s unpopular among the masses. Self-government requires self-control, respect and work-ethic. Sexual licentiousness is all about giving in to one’s base desires; it’s the pursuit of pleasure without commitment; it’s the taking of the pleasures of the sacred union without the character to preserve that union. When the founders’ said that any culture is a mere 18 years from anarchy at any point, this is what they had in mind. Children that are raised by a philosophy of hedonism make bitter, scared, and alienated adults (if we can call them adults).
The most sacred vow a man or woman will ever take under the sun is the one to love “until death do us part.” A child is brought into that union. What are they to deduce from a divorce other than the elemental fact that their parents didn’t love enough to keep their word, to tame their instincts, to control their emotions for the good of the family, to discipline themselves for the service of others? (If you’ve suffered through a divorce, we certainly apologize if this seems harsh and burns. The point isn’t to kick a person when they’re down but to point out God’s standard. Of course, we’ve all fallen short in this and so many other ways. Thankfully, we have the grace of God in Jesus Christ available for this and all sin, but we must point out that it’s sin.)
Sexual fidelity in marriage is what God commands of us and, as with all of His commands, it carries with it both a blessing and a curse. Follow that command and be rewarded with security, deep and abiding companionship, understanding, and consistency. Break that command and reap a whirlwind of chaos, regret, shame, anger, financial trouble, and pain. Did Rome fall because it was bested by a better army? Hardly. It fell because it became a land of laziness and gross self-indulgence. America is on the same path, glorifying sexual anarchy and cursing God’s word.
In this way, America is like a once great prize-fighter who doesn’t train anymore but sits around eating the easy foods – the chocolates and the pizza rather than the greens and protein. During a Super Bowl halftime show last year, the NFL, in all its worldly wisdom, trotted out Jennifer Lopez as one of the featured performers. She was, predictably, scantily clad, and she whirled around with all that talent God bestowed upon her, not to elevate viewers and help them think of transcendence and beauty, but to tantalize them. She swung around on a pole like a stripper; she pranced and bent over pruriently, provocatively. Her performance said not, “didn’t God make women beautiful and shouldn’t men love them in the Lord…each fully committed to the other…man and woman, husband and wife?” It said instead, “desire for its own sake is good…be a man of appetite, not character…go ahead, consume God’s gifts but don’t glorify Him and submit to Him…take, but don’t give.”
On top of Ms. Lopez’s sexual writhing, she brought out her 12-year-old daughter to sing with her. One supposes that under the banner of women’s power Ms. Lopez tells her daughter, and America’s daughters, that you’re free when you make men pant for you like a dog in heat. This was the message that was supported by all the sound and fury that money could buy. Freedom is sin. That was the message. Ms. Lopez later remarked that she did the show in honor of single mothers. It didn’t seem to occur to her that there were single mothers precisely because of sexual sin. Nor did she connect the principle of self-discipline to freedom either. To wit, at 50, she assuredly works hard toward the goal of looking good. To be proud of the way you look at that age requires a strict diet and exercise. It’s God’s law there too and it should bring her to repentance. The law is, freedom comes from Christ and separation from sin, and sin, like too much chocolate and pizza, is easy. Vice is always easy, virtue sometimes hard.
All of this said, no one who logically and honestly desires societal and personal peace will champion sexual ethics contrary to the Bible.
The Christian position, upholding the supremacy of God’s word, makes no compromise here. Sex in any other fashion than between a married man and woman is forbidden by God. The church must not give any ground, nor quarter on this issue as to do so is both unfaithful to God and unloving to others due to the consequences of sexual sin. Sure, it’s easy to give in to the incessant pressures of society and hand the world a blank check on the issue of sexual morality, letting them fill in whatever they wish. But, as we’ve shown, sexual sin unleashes a tsunami of devastating repercussions. The loving course of action is for the church and the Christian to continue, despite the opposition, to explain the high virtues of Christian marriage, in all its glory, and contrast that over against the devastating impact of going your own way. Betrayal, heartbreak, single parents struggling to get by, children growing up in the horrible shadow of divorce, disease, regret and alienation. The church must fight the good fight of explaining how sexual fidelity within a marriage is the plan of God for their lives. It’s easier to indulge one’s appetites and not do the work to make sexual intimacy a part of one’s life/marriage. That takes a commitment of character from both parties. What we have in our “hook-up” culture is not the blissful and secure intimacy of true marriage gained through submission to God but the mutual using of one another to counterfeit what we know we truly want and need.
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