Introduction
In the previous lesson we discussed the Bible’s teaching about our sexuality. The Lord created men and women with a strong desire to be together, and in the context of love, marriage, and family this is a very good thing. The intimate and passionate nature of sexuality also means that we should protect it carefully as something holy and precious.
For a long time this was generally understood and accepted in our culture. There have always been sexual sins and scandals, but there was a clear norm. You could ask school children: “If a man and a woman are not married, should they live together,” and everyone knew the answer was: “No!” You could ask: “Can a child have two dads?” and the answer was: “Of course not!” You could ask: “Can you choose whether you are a boy or a girl,” and the answer was: “No, because boys and girls are born with different kinds of bodies.” Today, all of these norms have been rejected by the “culture-makers” in our society; in fact, if you publicly affirm them you can get into legal trouble! There seems to be no end to the overthrow of sexual norms; currently our world is trying to normalize and even promote paedophilia and polygamy.
It is not just “the world”. The Christian community has also been affected. Many Christian young couples live together unmarried, and don’t think anything is wrong with it. Same-sex marriages are approved of and celebrated in many churches. There are Christian ministers who say that being male or female is a personal choice rather than God’s design.
But I must proclaim, on the basis of God’s own revelation in the Bible, that these things are wrongheaded. They dishonour the Lord’s design for his creation, and damage human society. It is therefore the calling of the church to speak up against the new sexual morals of our society. To show honor and respect to this beautiful, but fragile aspect of our human nature. Not because we are old-fashioned and prudish, but because we understand that God has a careful design and purpose for our intimate relationships. We must insist on this, in a gracious, humble, and winsome way, but clearly and without apology.
Folly and freedom in an oversexed world
1. Dynamics of sin and judgment
2. Dying to our perverse self
3. Direction to real fulfillment
Dynamics of sin and judgment
The most famous chapter in the Bible about sexual sin is Romans 1. In his letter to the Romans, Paul builds a careful presentation of the Christian gospel. His first point is that everyone needs salvation. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” To make his case, Paul begins with the sin of the pagan world, before addressing the sins of Jews and other god-fearing people. So he begins in 1:18 by declaring that God is clearly angry at all the wickedness that fills the world. God created the world, and his fingerprints are all over that creation, yet people ignore him and serve other gods, gods made in their own image, gods that are based on the things in this world. People are blind to the reality of a greater Lord by whom and for whom they are created. As v. 23 says, they “exchange the glory of the immortal God for images” of mortal, earthly things. They lose their perspective on eternal truth and heavenly glory, and replace these by an obsession with things of the earth. This makes them fools; their minds don’t have true understanding, and their actions do not have a meaningful purpose.
It is in this context that Paul brings up gross sexual sins. They are the natural consequences of idolatry. But it doesn’t happen without God’s involvement. Paul says three times that “God gave them over” to these things. The sexual perversion of our society is not only sin, but also judgment of God over sin. Paul works out two examples in more detail in verses 24-27. The first is the degradation of sexual relations; the second is the pursuit of unnatural sexual partners. If foolishness takes hold among people, God gives them over to such things, which themselves are foolish, wicked, unholy, and against the purpose of human life.
By the way, Paul knew what he was talking about. He was a Jew by birth and a theologian by training, and seemed to have lived a sexually disciplined and pure life, even as an unmarried man. But he knew the world around him, where sexual excess was commonplace. Lewd scenes were displayed publicly in statues and in theater plays. In most cities, men routinely visited temple prostitutes as their religious duty. As for homosexual practices, we know that most upper-class men in the classical world liked teenage boys just as well as teenage girls. Romans 1 is not written from a naïve, prudish cultural climate; it is fair to say that Paul’s message here was even more countercultural in his day than in our world.
Let’s briefly consider the two examples of sexual sin described in this chapter. Verse 24: “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” It starts with the heart, which produces all kinds of desires. If we know God, we learn to recognize which desires are good and which aren’t, and we learn self-control. But without this wisdom, lust has free reign and makes people do all kinds of impure things with their bodies and the bodies of others. These impure things are not just wrong in themselves, but they are degrading, literally “dishonoring their bodies”.
What is the standard here for “impurity” and “degrading”? You can be sure that Paul as well as his readers judged from the perspective of Old Testament morals, from the perspective of the Law of Moses. There we find a clear, narrow concept of sexual purity. It is this: that sexuality belongs to a committed, loving relationship of a husband and wife, and to the context of family and procreation. Anything outside of that is impure and forbidden.
What does this have to say to our world? I don’t want to get too explicit, so let’s keep it to a more general list: recreational sex, for fun without a relationship; kinky sex involving pain, humiliation, and other fetishes; and a big one is pornography, which debases both the person watching and the people who are paid to “perform” before the camera. All of these violate God’s design for sex, and bring humiliation, regret, and shame. The sin is its own punishment, because those who engage in it often become addicted, ruin their relationships, and no longer enjoy their sexuality in a healthy way.
Paul’s second example in verse 26 is the most famous one, because now he speaks explicitly about homosexuality: two men or two women who have the type of intimacy that was designed for a man and a woman. I state this deliberately in terms of “design”, because that is Paul’s point. There is a “nature” to male and female sexuality; our bodies are made for intimacy with someone of the opposite sex, in a way that often even produces new life. But now, says Paul in v. 25, when people ignore God’s truth and give their worship and reverence to the creature rather than the Creator, they lose sight of this purpose; and they do things that go against this nature. Their only concern is what they feel like doing, not what is right and proper. And so the beautiful act of intimacy, which was designed for man and woman in a relationship of love and care, turns into a gross caricature of itself.
That is the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality—and it is echoed in other passages. This is what the church has taught over the centuries and should still preach today. Until recently, the Western world had no problem with this, and even encoded this understanding of sexual sin in its laws. Today, people think it is terribly narrow-minded and even hateful to say these things. The reason for this, I believe, is that most of the world today has no use for the concept of God, of a moral law, of a purposeful design, and of the need for wisdom from above. Above all, the world simply hates the idea of sinfulness as a deep-rooted problem. If you call someone’s behavior a sin, you must hate that person. They cannot see it otherwise.
Having affirmed this traditional teaching of the Bible, I want to make three practical points about how we deal with this. First of all, let us make very clear that our Bible-based disapproval does not look like hatred. The gospel way of approaching a sinner is not to call out the sin and shun, but to call out the sin and show Jesus, and invite the sinner to salvation in his name. If we denounce sexual perversion without clearly proclaiming a generous gospel, we do act hatefully, and do injustice to the great love of the Lord Jesus, who came to save sinners.
Second, we must recognize that different people have different struggles with sin. The most obvious example is homosexuality: in some people it is so ingrained that it seems they are born with it. It is deeply tied up with their sense of identity. It would be callous to tell these people: just don’t do it, flee from your sin, like we all must do. As Christians we should know that sin is stronger than any of us, unless the Spirit of God helps us overcome it. This must move us to a charitable attitude and much patience with those who struggle with sexual sin.
Third, we ought not make sexual sin a bigger deal than other sins. There is something unique to it—it affects us and others more intimately than most other sins—but an adulterer or homosexual is not a worse category of sinner than an embezzler or a slanderer. If we read Romans 1 to find a Biblical view on sexual sin, let’s make sure to read on through verses 29-31. There we find a catalog of many sins, to which the Lord gives us over if we fail to reckon with his wisdom. Twenty-some sins: I would be surprised if anyone here can honestly say to be innocent of all of these. If you say: “I may be rude to my wife and fail to control my anger, but at least I am not a homosexual,” you have missed how broad Paul’s indictment in Romans 1 is.
This chapter of the Bible is not meant to make the sexually addicted or homosexual feel bad. Or rather, it is, but it is meant to make all us feel bad about all our foolish sin and stubborn failures. So that, in later chapters, we all can be all the more grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ, who delivers us from all those sins.
Dying to our perverse self
Because that is the Biblical pattern. There is no doctrine of salvation without doctrine of sin. And thankfully, the Bible never preaches a doctrine of sin without also inviting all of us to salvation. Even this long lesson about sin must be concluded with the good news of Jesus Christ, also with regard to our sexuality. We will briefly look at the Bible’s teaching in Colossians 3.
Verse 1 says: “You have been raised with Christ.” The Lord Jesus died and rose into a greater and better life; if we belong to him, we too receive that new life. Verse 3 adds: “You died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” By saying: “we died with Christ,” we distance ourselves from the old us with its incorrigible flaws, with its perverse sexual lusts, and with its shameful acts. What is more, God distances all these things from us, as he forgives our sins and looks at us with the love he has for his Son Jesus.
And there is growth. Paul makes it a command: “Set your hearts on things above, not earthly things.” Romans 1 identified the core of the problem as being focused on the created earth rather than its heavenly Creator. But Christians learn to keep the right focus. This leads to a new life in which we purposefully leave behind all those shameful and debasing things. Verse 5: “Put to death … sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed.” This is a painful process, a real training in self-denial, and sometimes I wonder if we should not be more deliberate about these things. Just as an addict will suffer withdrawal symptoms when he finally gets clean, so we must go through a challenging time when we put to death that old sin. But that is our Christian calling, whether it concerns sexual perversion or other wickedness in our lives.
Direction to real fulfillment
A final question: What about people who will never be able to shake their sexual sin completely, and therefore cannot enjoy a proper relationship? Should their lives remain unfulfilled in this regard? Is it fair to demand that of them? This argument has often been made to condone homosexual relationships, even in churches. To answer this, it is crucial that we have an understanding of our life beyond the here and now. If the goal is to find as much fulfillment in our current earthly life, before we die, then these arguments are compelling. But we live for a greater life. One thing every Christian ought to learn is that this fallen world will not give us the ultimate, will not fulfill us as much as we would like. For that, we look forward to the new heaven and the new earth.
We do not hoard all our money for ourselves but are generous to others, because our real treasure is in heaven, not on earth. We do not take revenge but leave injustice for God to deal with, because he will justly mete out the ultimate judgment. We do not pursue praise from other people here and now, because our heavenly Father will reward us in the end. This Christian way of thinking applies likewise to our sexual fulfillment. We do not need to maximize our sexual pleasure, as the world encourages us to do, because we will find our deepest fulfillment in fellowship with Jesus Christ in the Kingdom of his Father. What that will be like, I don’t know; and in what way our sexuality will function on the new earth, I cannot guess. What I do know is the promise of Scripture: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived—the things God has prepared for those who love him.” Because of that, I can forego pleasures on earth, painful as that may be, so that I can honor my Lord.
Jesus once proclaimed a proverb which speaks to this, in Mat. 19:12. “For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept this.” A eunuch is someone who cannot have normal sexual relations, because his body has been maimed, either as a birth defect or because his body has been cut. But Jesus adds a third category: people who forego sexual relationships for the sake of God’s kingdom. In this category, I would suggest, belong unmarried Christians who keep their bodies pure; celibate people, who deliberately remain unmarried so that they can focus on serving God; and also those with homosexuals desires, who rather live unfulfilled than give in to temptation. The world thinks that this is a rather foolish category of sad people; but God keeps them in honor, and so should we. After all, both Jesus himself and the great apostle Paul belonged to this category. And those who follow in their footsteps, keeping their focus on the glory to come rather than the fleeting pleasures of this world, will be richly rewarded.