“Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:2
The easiest and most dangerous way to be conformed to this world is to breathe the poisoned air of modern sexual ethics. The Bible is our gas mask. And, trust me, the air is poison. The ethic that’s swirling on culture’s winds tells us that all is permissible except the belief that all isn’t permissible. To be faithful to this verse, and it’s a big one, starts with this issue. You’re not going to stand as a Christian unless you’re ready for this tempest.
To be renewed in our mind is to look at everything and ask what does Scripture say? What does God say about sex? God has ordained it to be between a man and a woman and only within marriage.
That’s it.
Naturally, we bristle. Naturally, we think our sex life is no one’s business. Ah, yes…that’s the default setting. But there’s a serious error of omission at the root of this childish evaluation and that’s that God is our creator. “And whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”
Modern western culture defines love now 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, right? Well, human beings can’t actually be God in any meaningful way; they can only pretend. And the easiest way to pretend to be your own god is to break God’s obvious sexual structure. This is why we have Romans 1:24-27. The logical consequence of the suppression of the truth about God (the Great Exchange of Romans 1:25) is the dishonoring of ourselves sexually. Atheism leads men and women not higher, not to transcendence, nor to glory, but to the sewer. Life without God is wretched and animalistic. The strong will prey on the weak and the weak will self-medicate in anyway they can and Satan will have us all heel on that great leash of sin if we’re outside of Christ.
So, what God has created for wedded bliss, sin subverts. What He created to be experienced within the spiritual intimacy of biblical marriage, sin has rerouted as its own good. What is made for honor, what is resplendent in that trust and life-long devotion are central, sin destroys through self-indulgence. Where there should be the majesty and beauty of trust wrapped like a warm blanket around the physical act, sin has drained all the romance and left us broken, ashamed, betrayed, and hurt. Where there should be utmost joy, regret has clawed and chewed through the foundations of our soul.
To this end, racism, poverty, or any other ill aren’t a culture’s central social challenge. Fornication and adultery are. A world of hedonism is a world of hell. It’s a world of children abandoned and shuffled around due to uncontrolled lust. It’s a world of agonizing heartache, divorce and bitter betrayals. When sex is outside of marriage it causes destruction. That’s why any talk about social justice and peace that omits sexual ethics is vacuous.
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 because 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 lament bitterly when they’re cheated on. If they were true to their principle that sex is “no big deal” and “everyone has to be free to do their thing”, then why the caterwauling when someone strays? Because the law of the Lord is, indeed, written on their hearts and they know, when faced with the desultory consequences of their ideas, that sexual infidelity is a far cry worse than someone stiffing you on a loan. Both, after all, are a betrayal, but we all know that the intimacy of sex is vastly greater than money.
We were made by God for relationship, not isolation. We were created by Him, who is love to love and be loved…by Him and others. Fellowship is union. Fellowship is the security of acceptance by God and His people. Sex is the celebration of this aspect of creation – this relational reality – on the deepest level. Sex is made by God to be the intimate celebration of our deepest unity with our most cherished and special love. It’s a jubilant and mutual giving, not a taking. It’s the clearest example of the intensity of union, of one’s heart and spirit – their whole being – given in the physical world and received and accepted by their highest among friends. The husband and wife are God’s creation. To follow Him is to be lifted up; to reject Him is to debase oneself sexually and to sever body from soul.
And nowhere is that schism and rupture more evident than in how we view and use sex.
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, most false religions grant the 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. This is the normative principle in religions like Islam, where women are clearly second-class citizens, and atheism alike. 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. And we can see from our perch what happens in cases of war. After Berlin fell to Soviet Russia, the rape of unprotected women was ghastly. 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 the 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 shocking 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, was 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 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 not loving to redefine what God has made since the consequences are so damaging. When men insist on choosing right and wrong on their own terms, rejecting God’s word, they cast themselves into moral oblivion and become monsters and dogs.
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 license is all about giving in to one’s base desires; it’s the pursuit of pleasure without commitment; it’s the taking 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?
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 lethargy 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 recently, 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. Her goal was to provoke desire in weak men, not inspire the adulation and pursuit of glory and excellence. 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.” God says: life’s greatest physical/emotional pleasure requires your deepest commitment – your word and your honor. The world says: sex is like any other appetite…consume and move on…it’s all about you.
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 are 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. Sin is freedom, they think. That was the message. Ms. Lopez later remarked that she did her 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 sexy. 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.
A man or woman who settles for sexual “experience” rather than true union drinks a venomous poison that erodes the soul by shattering the bonds of trust between lovers. It’s a theft – sex without commitment and honor; it’s a hateful act to the other, not a loving one, in that it involves them in the deeply personal act of self-abasement. Sex is meant by God as a consummation of the giving of one’s whole person and life to another and vice-versa. Sexual sin takes what God gave us as sacred and turns it animalistic. We have turned sex into a taking, not a giving. We’ve severed the demands of character and personal honor from the issue, reducing life-long commitment to a single act of lust and passion, performed without duty, obligation or assurance of tomorrow.
This is why sexual sin is at the top of the list – sexual sin causes the degradation and humiliation of all who engage in it and is the supreme and ubiquitous carrot dangled before us by the Devil. Sexual sin is connected to violence in that both acts are similar in that they are the using of another’s body in ways the Lord forbids. Sexual sin breaks down our reverence for the sacred boundaries of life, shatters personal honor, creates and sows seed of deceit and betrayal where there ought to be selfless love and accountability, and sends us on a path to personal dissolution.
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