Two Views of Sexuality
This is the script for a message I gave last week at the New Life Conference in Shropshire, UK. It’s my best reflections on the huge issue of human sexuality and in particular the widening gap between the Christian perspective and the secular perspective on this issue. It was written to be spoken, so please excuse the style!
Introduction
If you’ve got predictive text on your phone you have to be careful that you communicate what you really want to say. There was a girl at university and she got talking to a male friend at the Christian Union. They chatted and later on in the day he sent her a text asking if he could take her out for a meal. She sent a text back. But in the days that followed she heard on the grapevine that he was rather upset and that she was the cause of it. A bit puzzled, she looked at her phone to see what she’d written in her text. She thought she’d put, “I won’t be free now until the end of term” but actually what she’d written was, “I won’t be free now until the end of time”. There is no greater put down than that! The perils of predictive text miscommunication!
Now you don’t need me to tell you that nowhere is there a greater diversity of opinion between what the Bible teaches about sexuality and what our culture is currently saying. And part of the problem is that we Christians have not done very well to communicate what Scripture teaches about sexuality. Miscommunication is not the only problem, but it is part of it, and so what I want to do this morning is to clarify what the Bible does teach on this subject but also to help us to be better communicators of a Biblical view of sexuality.
In the history of the Christian Church there invariably has been some issue where Christianity has jarred against the culture, something that makes the Christian faith implausible for that culture. In the first century it was the idea that the Son of God could become human, flesh, material matter. In Greek philosophy (which shaped so much of the thinking of the Greco-Roman world), matter was bad, even evil, it was subject to decay. How could the Word (The Son) become flesh? It was a ridiculous idea. Christianity jarred against the culture of the day.
Or to take a more recent example, if we go back to the Victorian Church of the 19th Century, lots of people were saying something like this: we’ve now discovered all these laws of science and the one thing we’ve learned is that they never change. Science tells us that water stays water, it doesn’t get turned into wine. Science tells us that people are not healed of leprosy. It tells us that dead men don’t rise again. And if that’s the case, we now know that all the miracles in the Bible must have been made up by primitive people who didn’t know any better. But now we’ve come of age and so we know that Jesus was never born of a virgin and he never rose from the dead. Again, Christianity jarred against the culture.
There always seems to be something about Christianity that is particularly hard to swallow in a fallen world and today let me suggest that the issue is human sexuality. That’s where the beliefs of Christians seem to be most at odds with contemporary society – they are in fact downright offensive – and in some sense the heat is being turned up on us because of it.
Now just in passing we need to remember that we believers in this day and generation are not entitled to a more culturally-comfortable world. We might like one, but we need to remember that the easier time that existed – say 50 years ago – was not normal. Jesus warned us to expect that his church would come into conflict with the world; we need to get used to it!
(1) Just Sex?
Lots of people today who are critics of Christianity (and sadly some within the church too) will say something like this: “Why do Christians get so hung up about sex? Why not instead concentrate on more important things like tackling global poverty, people trafficking and the arms trade? Why do Christians always want to spoil other people’s fun and prescribe for others what the parameters of sex should be? Why be so judgemental?” The answer that we must give is this: Christians are bothered about this issue because in human sexuality (as laid out in Scripture) the story of the world is told.
You see, every marriage – a man and a woman in lifelong faithfulness (however imperfect) – is a picture of the covenantal relationship between Christ and his bride the Church. And that in the end is what the world is about. You see to concede away a Biblical view of sexuality and embrace a secular view on issues like the definition of marriage and gender expression is equivalent to giving up the Gospel and the hope that it brings into this dark world. If we lose the Gospel we lose everything; every man and woman outside of Christ is not just misguided but lost. That’s why this issue matters so much. We dare not give in here, as sadly many within the Church in the West are doing, and will do so increasingly in the future I fear.
Instead a right response must be that we seek to persuade others that the Bible’s understanding of sexuality is a far better story and much more life-affirming than the one increasingly believed by our society. Even when they don’t believe that to be true, we must still not give in. On the issue of sexuality hangs the question of what the world is about. On this point, words attributed to Martin Luther are very helpful:
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
This morning what I want to do first of all is to set out before you two competing views of sexuality: a contemporary Western view and then a Biblical view.
(2) Contemporary Western Sexuality
I think it’s true to say that sexuality virtually acts as a worldview in the West. Just as we Christians realise, there is a sense in which our secular society also realises that life is about sex, but in a completely different way to us. You see, in a world increasingly characterised by boredom and meaninglessness, human sexuality provides some helpful ingredients to get us through life: mystery and excitement; scope for endless experimentation and the pleasure that comes from trashing old taboos! I came across one commentator on modern life who said: “There is meaning before death after all, sex”. Now if that’s true then you can see why our society is saturated with sex: in films, adverts, music, on the internet, fashion, in our language. Sex is everywhere.
Now to understand any society, we have to ask what the basic beliefs held by its people are: unexamined beliefs have huge power over us. So here we’re asking what are the things believed in the West that are so assumed to be true about the world, that they’re not even debated? What are the things all ‘normal’ people believe that are just self-evidently correct? We’ll call these commonly held worldview beliefs: things that are so accepted by a society that if you don’t believe them people laugh at you, think you at best a bit odd and at worst at bit dangerous. Remember that beliefs are not the preserve of the religious: everyone has beliefs.
We must be very careful that we don’t swallow the myth that secularism is not a belief system or that secularism a neutral worldview. There is nothing neutral about a worldview established on the belief that there is no God.
So what are the beliefs of secular folk? Well, the world is probably some cosmic accident; there is probably no God and certainly no God to take seriously or be held accountable by or who has spoken to us so that we need to listen. And we humans? We’re accidental too, just highly evolved pond slime, now complex animals. And how do we live as accidental animals in an accidental universe? Well life is essentially about me. Truth is how I define it. My job in life is to carve out a piece of happiness during my 80 years before I cease to exist. The beliefs of the secularist.
Now as a Christian I would say that if you want to understand any culture you have to ask what it deifies. In other words what does the society give divine status to? What its god? What does it worship? In some cultures it’s the sun (The Aztecs); in others it’s fertility (the Canaanites); in others it’s the spirits of your ancestors (historically much of Africa); in others the nation state (Nazi Germany); but in the West it’s the self. Me; I worship myself. My needs and my preferences and my rights are everything. I create reality according to my preferences: every cause must be made to serve the needs of me.
And so in this model how do secularists understand human sexuality? Well, by viewing animal behaviour. Sex is the means to survive, pass on your genes by procreation and gain pleasure. Nothing more really. Sex is all about me and my happiness and self-expression.
And what might be the restrictions in my path to happiness through sexual expression? They could be restrictions imposed by the confines of marriage: confining sexual experiences to marriage or when marriage is defined too restrictively so as to leave people out who don’t come in the one-man plus one-woman model. Or they could be unhelpful ways in which we categorise people into male or female, ignoring the fluidity of gender. To put this another way, we could say that for the secularist the limitations on sexual joy and fulfilment are the result of Christian sexual morality which lingers on from the past. That’s the problem: old-fashioned thinking that represses people and works to deny them their right to sexual expression. I suggest that that’s the mood of the times that we live in; the underlying narrative that underpins UK society regarding reality and sexuality.
Now if you understand this, you’ll see how a commitment to sexual freedom underpins all sorts of other arguments: about abortion; about teenage sex and contraception; about sexually transmitted infections (STIs); about homosexuality and transgender.
So for example abstinence outside of marriage has all sorts of benefits: in the arena of preventing abortions, fewer STIs, less emotional damage to young people and so on. But in sex education abstinence is never considered. In fact it’s mocked and laughed at even when promoted for children of school age. Why? Because free sex is held as a religious commitment; it is the path to meaning and joy. Freedom is everything
But you might say in our land adultery, affairs and broken relationships and divorce dominate the horizon and the children suffer. As the saying goes: while the parents’ play the children pay. But we don’t change our ways and the answer is because giving free reign to our sexual desires is an article of faith. Increasingly we’re making our sexuality the one way that we define who we are. And if that’s true, can you see why Christianity and UK society are increasingly coming into conflict?
You see according to Christians, sexual freedom is part of what’s wrong with the world, but to many people today, sexual freedom in any form you decide is the solution to what’s wrong with the world. Sexual freedom is the path to self-fulfilment and happiness.
Now here’s the really worrying bit. You will know that advocates for sexual freedom and LGBT causes have successfully persuaded a whole generation of young people to be activists for this cause, to battle for sexual expression especially for those who historically have been considered to be discriminated against; people with same sex-attraction and transgender struggles. To the point that anyone who disagrees with the cause must be faced down and silenced. To commit yourself to this cause has almost become the definition of being heroic today for the millennial generation.
We as Christians might look out and say, ‘how immoral our society is getting’, but for many people today promoting sexual expression is the path to making our society more moral than ever. People previously denied their rights are finally getting them.
(3) A Biblical View of Sexuality
If you want to understand how a secular worldview took over from a Judeo-Christian worldview in our land, there are lots of comments that we could make, but perhaps none as significant as this: The West ceased to believe the Book of Genesis. And most significantly we ceased to believe the first four words of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God’ and then the fifth one ‘created’. The results have been a disaster for humanity.
Everything hangs on the acceptance or the denial of these two things: that God is and that He created. We Christians must never think that we can tweak the secular worldview here and there to make it ok. No, we are saying the secularist’s very notion of reality is radically wrong, that the world is a completely different kind of world from that one that they believe in. Christianity is more than an experience; it’s a truth claim about reality.
And so against the secularist’s cosmic accident to explain the universe, Christianity states that the centre of all things is an Eternal God who exists in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; perfectly holy, perfectly love. He spoke and the universe leapt into being, and He created men and women. So the final reality is not the rock, the clock and the dice; it’s not matter, time and chance, it is a God who eternally lives and eternally loves and is infinite in His power.
Hasn’t the story got better already? How imperative it is that we communicate these things to a lost world. In the end there are really two important days any life: the day we’re born and the day we find out why. And the why is all connected to coming to know this God who made us.
Turn in your Bibles to Genesis 2. While you do, let me say this: remembering that the culture that we’re living in mocks the very idea of truth. This Book is the Word of God, the truth of God. We can ever have a high enough view of this book. Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise. John Bunyan wrote of Scripture in Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘every jot and tittle thereof stood firmer than heaven and earth’.
We’re looking at the context for human sexuality right at the beginning. Having created Adam from the dust of the ground we read these words:
Chapter 2: 20-24
20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for Adam[h] no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs[i] and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib[j] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,[k]’
for she was taken out of man.”
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
These verses concern the creation of the first woman, but they also establish marriage in the world. A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife and the two become one flesh: two independent beings with the potential to become one, amongst other things through sexual union.
So God invented sex: it wasn’t invented by the 1960s generation. In fact, the Bible is very pro-sex in the right context. Here in Genesis, we have God’s blueprint for the world for sexuality. You see the implication is that maleness and femaleness and the institution of marriage are brought into being by God and apply to all cultures because creation precedes every culture.
Now some things are cultural: the length of our hair; who does the washing up at home; whether we drink wine or not at meals. But other things are not up for grabs, they are not cultural, but part of the way God has made the world and so must never be tampered with. Maleness and femaleness and marriage are in this category. God defines reality, it’s not some social construct but it is His design and he called it good. Reality is not plasticine to be shaped according to our preferences and opinions.
Now let me come at it from another angle because this is so important.[1] In the Genesis 2 account, Adam is told by God to name the animals. He classifies them and gives them names to differentiate them from one another. So some bits of the world are defined by Man and we could change some of our naming if we wanted to. For example, we could classify foxes as dogs if we wanted to, but we don’t. So human beings have some scope for naming reality.
But we also note that in Genesis 2 other things were defined by God and not by Adam.
After the creation of Eve, Adam was not given the task of classifying who he was, or who she was or the nature of their relationship. What happened was that they received God’s categories on these things from Him. So Adam was made from the dust of the ground, he wasn’t made from Eve. Eve was made from Adam; she wasn’t made from the dust of the ground. So sexuality comes from God: he makes some men and some women. Our sexuality, like our skin colour, is a sacred gift from God. And we note that the man was told to leave his father and mother not to stay at home with mum and dad. The man and woman were told to cleave to one another, that’s commitment, it’s marriage and to become one flesh, that’s sexual union in marriage. And out of their union would come children into a situation of commitment and faithfulness. So God’s blueprint is not sexual freedom, it’s not loads of partners. It is one man and one woman, cleaving to one another. In the blueprint we don’t have a man and a man. We don’t have a woman and a woman. We don’t have a man and three women, polygamy. We don’t have one flesh union without commitment, one-night stands. Can you see that the ordering of sexuality comes from God? So God defines human sexuality; it is fixed by Him and it’s not up to us to redefine. When we try to, in the end the results are catastrophic.
Now when you and I speak to people who are not Christian we need to try and get this across. We don’t oppose homosexuality because we don’t like it or because we don’t like people who call themselves gay. We oppose homosexuality because we don’t believe that God made the world that way; we oppose it because we’re persuaded that it goes against the way we were made, that it’s a wrong way to live before our Creator and it is in the end hugely damaging to human welfare.
In today’s climate with transgender issues so much in the news, we need to say that our physical bodies inform us about the divine purpose for our sexuality; our maleness and femaleness reflect the purpose for which we were created. But that’s not all. In the end in the Christian worldview, sexuality is much more than our biology; sexuality far from being merely a mechanism for pleasure and survival is actually a visual aid to explain reality.
In America there was a court case brought by a man against another man whom he argued had stolen his car. When the trial opened the lawyer representing the plaintiff placed a toy car on the judge’s desk to remind him of what the case was about. Now it transpired later that the judge came to believe that the case was about a toy car not a real one!
And we can think that about marriage – that human marriage is the real thing – when actually marriage is a picture of the true marriage to come, the marriage of Christ to his church, a perfection of union. Isn’t that in the end why God made the world: that he should prepare a bride for His Son?
Listen to the words of Jonathan Edwards:
“There is as it were, an eternal society or family in the Godhead, in the Trinity of Persons. It seems to be God’s design to admit the church into the divine family as His Son’s wife”
You see in marriage the story of the world is told: God created men and women and marriage and sex union and in doing so He set about illustrating some of the things that are most precious to His heart. Now I know that bad marriages can be terrible testimonies, but still, in terms of the way God intends it, every marriage is supposed to point to the meaning of history with the marriage of the Lamb at the end of the age.
Let me anticipate some questions/comments:
(4) What about singleness?
Here I’m asking, what about all those people who would have loved to have been married and are not? Are they left out of imaging Christ and his bride?
Recently I heard a man preaching (who is single) and he said, “For years I felt left out of the means to model the divine plan but then I came to see that in my refusal to live a promiscuous life, I am daily displaying my devotion to my heavenly bridegroom, Christ. I wasn’t left out after all.”
A preacher I heard told the story of a lady in a church where he served. She’d been a missionary in Africa almost all her adult life. One day she said to him, “I’d have loved to have married but serving where I was, I never met any eligible men.” The preacher explained that during her retirement years in the church in Oxford she wore a heart-shaped locket every day. People wondered what was in it, but she never said; a photograph of someone special everyone assumed. When she died her friends opened her locket. Inside were words from 1 Peter 1: “Having not seen him I love him” and then she’d added the words, “Engaged, to Jesus”.
(5) A Broken world
Now so far, we’ve thought about creation in the Christian worldview, the ‘why is the world here’ question. We’ve thought about the, ‘where is the world heading’ question and given the answer, to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. But at this point we need to ask another huge worldview question: ‘what’s wrong with the world’ and ask it in the context of sexuality.
You might well ask, “If all you’ve said is true, that we were made for one man, one woman marriage and for lifetime faithfulness, why is it that some people experience same-sex attraction?” Or “How is it that some people experience a deep sense of gender dysphoria, they feel that they are a male trapped in a female body or vice versa?” Or “How is it that many happily married men still feel a strong urge to pursue other women than their wife for sexual experiences?”
And the answer of the Bible is that this world is not the world that God intended; this world is a broken world and we are all broken people. We’re all part of a race that has turned its back on its Maker. Created high in the image of God meant that we fell a long way from the design that God intended. And the result is that all of us are messed up badly by The Fall. All of us trace our ancestry back to two men; a crooked farmer and a drunken sailor (Adam and Noah)!
I don’t have time to develop this, but since the Fall all our us experience various kinds of dysfunctionality: in our minds, in our bodies, in our wills and in our affections. For all outside of Christ, and still to some extent even after we become believers, our sexuality will be bent out of joint in some way or another. And this dysfunctionality manifests itself in almost as many ways as there are people: for some it will be the desire to sleep around before we marry; for others it will be to find sexual pleasure away from our spouse; for others it will be homosexuality; for others pornography and for others gender dysphoria. Everyone has a battle – everyone – for some it’s harder than for others but we all have one.
But in the end the human heart is so deceitful about what is right and wrong that we all need the Word of God to be our guide to what is moral and right – not how we feel – not what our society says.
And so we come to our last worldview question: how are things fixed?
You know if the Christian Gospel stands for anything it stands for redemption, for forgiveness and transformation of life. In the end there can never be fulness of life outside of God’s pattern for our lives. That takes me to my last heading.
(6) And such were some of you”
1 Corinthians 6:9-11
You may know that The Corinthian Church was the most immoral of all the New Testament Churches. And Paul was trying to sort them out in his letters.
9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous[b] will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality,[c] 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor reviles, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.[2]
Then look in verse 11. I love this verse
11 And such were some of you
That’s a fantastic verse: it means that no matter what you’ve done wrong you can be forgiven, and your life transformed. Some of the in Corinth were no doubt still struggling with their issues. I think we all do this side of resurrection bodies. But (v11) They had been washed clean, sanctified, set apart for God, justified, just in the sight of God.
This verse gives me hope that human beings can change and live a life of purity before God.
There is a sense that we can’t choose the sexual dysfunctionalities that arise in our fallen bodies but when we find our true identity in Christ as sons and daughters of the Father, we can choose our sexual actions.
“And such were some of you”. You can have a new life. You can begin again. By His grace you can live again.
In the end the message that we have for the world is that freedom comes from having the power to be what we should be before God and not from doing whatever we want to do. There is no happiness outside of that. I heard about one lady recently who said that she’d came out of a lesbian lifestyle when she realised that she wanted to be what God created her to be.
I know that this is a big claim, but I believe it. The struggles that people face in the realm of sexuality are like knots that we can untie with the Bible in our hands, with the Holy Spirit in our hearts and with the church family within our reach. Paul you see, understood the gospel of grace, that God takes men and women where they are in all their pain and sin and he washes them and calls them to holiness. How do we know that he understood that? Well, he himself was a forgiven murderer. The Church in Corinth was full of people made new. That’s the message of the Gospel.
If you’re struggling with any sexual issue, please get help. Today there are lots of wonderful people who stand ready to pray, advise and support.
Recommended Reading:
(1) David Bennett, A War of Loves.
(2) Sam Allberry, Is God anti-gay?
(3) Sam Allberry, 7 Myths About Singleness.
(4) Tim Chester, Captured by a Better Vision.
(5) Vaughan Roberts, Transgender: Christian compassion, convictions and wisdom for today’s big questions.
(6) Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time.
[1] In what follows I am indebted to Dick Keyes of the L’Abri Fellowship.
[2] English Standard Version.
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2019-08-20. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.