By “sexual ethics,” I mean the right and wrong of any activity that is sexual in nature. Strangely, there are people today who are not atheists but who nonetheless do not associate God with the subject of sex. This is due in large part to the current widespread acceptance of evolution as a reasonable explanation for how the universe came to be, and to a metastasizing secularism that is crowding common sense out of the human mind. Unimpaired common sense would tell you that God has everything to do with sex.
The Author of Sex
We are creatures. We have a Creator. He who created our non-sexual organs created our sexual organs as well. Production of the latter was not outsourced. God is intimately acquainted with every single part of us. He doesn’t get squeamish.
When there was only one gender – Adam’s – God said it was “not good” and that he needed “a helper” (Genesis 2:18). Then God spent some time letting Adam come to this conclusion on his own (Genesis 2:19-20). He then put Adam to sleep and had Eve waiting for him when he woke up. God could have created every single new human being that way, but He chose instead to involve a man and a woman in the process going forward. That is, God brought the first two human beings into existence all by Himself, but from that point on, it would be a collaborative endeavor.
Without sex, humanity would be a one-generation phenomenon. That sex is the means by which the human species has avoided extinction for 6,000 years makes clear that sex has a purpose more profound and lasting than pleasure.
Moses declared (Genesis 1:27; 2:24) and Jesus affirmed (Matthew 19:3-6) that God was the author of sex, and that its essential purpose was family formation – family being the mechanism God designed to transform helpless infants into productive adults. Thus the purpose of sex is family…yet how many people in American culture today think of it that way? They have confused the product (family) with the by-product (pleasure).
The more time that secular people spend thinking and talking about sex, the less they understand it. Sex is like electricity – an enormous blessing when properly harnessed but extremely dangerous otherwise. Prominently included in the Ten Commandments was the prohibition against adultery – all forms of sex outside of marriage being an adulteration of marriage. Not far from that commandment were other commandments which are often committed in conjunction with adultery – such as lying, coveting, and even murder. From one end of the Bible to the other are examples of humans unwilling to keep fire contained to the fireplace.
The Sexual Revolution
The 1960’s did not invent sexual promiscuity…but “sexual liberation,” which is still ongoing, did take promiscuity to a whole new level, at least when considered against the backdrop of American history. Called the beginning of the “sexual revolution,” the decade of the ‘60’s marked not just an increase in the breadth and depth of immoral behavior but, more importantly, a claim that new standards for morality should apply. Yet, as has been rightly said, that new morality was nothing but the old immorality described by a new vocabulary.
“As long as we both shall live” was replaced by “as long as we both shall love.” And even that justification for sex was quickly replaced by “helping someone make it through the night.” Cole Porter may have written “Anything Goes” in the 1930’s but the idea came to blossom in the 1960’s and following decades in ways no one could have imagined in Porter’s day. Sins, one by one, came out of the closet…re-branded as righteous activities in the process.
Here are some of the euphemisms that the sexual revolution has brought us over the last six decades:
| The Old Immorality | becomes | A New Morality |
| adultery | is renamed | “an affair” |
| abandonment of marriage | is renamed | “no fault divorce “unilateral divorce on demand” “a conscious uncoupling” |
| abortion | is renamed | “women’s reproductive health” |
| a homosexual | is renamed | “gay” |
| lust | is renamed | “sexual orientation” |
| female impersonator | is renamed | “a trans woman” |
Again, it’s not just that immorality is now tolerated by society – it’s that it is condoned, normalized, and even celebrated. Nowhere is this more dramatically seen than in the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex “marriage.” The court’s written majority opinion explicitly sought to confer “dignity” on this kind of relationship – as if that is sort of thing U.S. Courts were designed to do.
Of course, a “marital” arrangement like this can never produce what God designed marriage to produce – children. But government will help with that, too – not just adoption will be offered, but also an array of third-party reproductive technology solutions. Thus has the God-designed family been replaced by man-made families – and we have yet to learn the full extent of the calamitous harvest will come from these “new” ideas we have sown.
To fully catalog the list of immoralities associated with the sexual revolution would take pages upon pages, so there’s no sense trying to say more here. What does need to be said is that the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion was even a worse travesty of justice and contortion of the Constitution than its 2015 decision to legalize same-sex “marriage.” I say worse because of all the innocent victims and all that we have lost as a country by losing those persons and all that they might have brought to us. As is implied by the Ten Commandments and their arrangement, murder is never very far away from adultery.
Redemption through Repentance
The only way for us as a society to be redeemed from this deep pit of immorality and sham righteousness is to repent before our Creator. That means turning from our evil, self-justifying ways back toward the simplicity and purity of God’s way for sex – which is restricted exclusively to the context of marriage between a man and woman. Jesus’ apostles converted many 1st-century Roman pagans with just such a simple exhortation (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8).
We don’t get to decide sexual ethics. They’re hard-wired into creation…and therefore into us. Man-made sexual ethics is an oxymoron.
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