(This post continues from where we left off last week.)
We’re talking about sexual purity and we believe it is always good to go back to the basics to learn something from the word of God well. Missing basic truths makes us vulnerable for all kinds of the devil’s schemes. Satan is a deceiver but he finds it easy to deceive those who are ignorant of the truth of God.
The word of God in Hosea 4:6a says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”.
So we started last week going through Genesis 1, 2 & 3 and saw how man was created in the image of God but in Genesis 3, we read the sad story of the fall of man. After Adam and Eve sinned against God, we all died as the Bible says,
“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” Romans 5:12 ESV.
This tells us that we all, without exception, are on death row waiting for our turn to die. No way out of this life without dying. This fact by itself can push a person in total hopelessness. Think about it: You live, run, work, go to school, get married, have kids and die or even before you get a chance to do any of those things, you drop and die. We all know someone who died at their prime age. Whether prime age or old age, the fact is we all die.
Who wants to think about death? No one! One American Christian author of a beautiful book said, “I wanted to write a book about death, how people need to be mentally, emotionally and spiritually ready for death before it surprises them but my publishers rejected my manuscript saying, “Nobody these days wants to read about death.”
Wow! Why?
Most of us, if not all of us, want to forget about it and prefer to do something else that makes us forget all about it, the fact of this life. And entertainment industries try their best to come up with another new idea so their customers will be able to forget about the realities of death, God, heaven, hell, sin, illness, saying one last good-bye to loved ones. So, their alluring message says, “Come and delight your soul beyond your imagination.”
Hmm! Very attractive!
Just think about it. We already saw that we all who came from Adam and Eve are dead in our sin (Ephesians 2:1, 5) and we are here now but soon we all die in our turn. So, while this life lasts, what’s wrong with being entertained, right?
Wrong!
All worldly entertainment industries can only offer us nothing but that brings more death to our deadness.
The one major tool they use, in addition to alcohol and substance, is sexual stuff which has been and always been effective for them to make lots of money, promoting sex in and through everything, promising how one dead person can get pleasure and satisfaction from another dead person.
Is it even possible to draw any pleasure from the dead unless we want to worship demons with corpus!
Yes, pornography and all kinds of sexual activities which do not honor God and honor human beings created in the image and likeness of God are nothing but worship with demons and corpus. And when Christians are attracted to this filthy stuff and give lots of excuses and reasons how this is their “small area of life’s struggle” but “other than that, they still love and worship God,” we want to stop and ask them right there, “Which God?”
For us Christians, before we address this topic head on, we need to ask basic questions like, where did this sexual nature of us come from? And the word of God is not silent but gives detailed answers. Knowing this basic truth of God will be our weapons to fight against the devil’s lies. Do we need any more than the truth of God to fight and win these battles? No! “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” – 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 ESV
Before the fall of Adam and Eve, God made Adam and He then took Eve out of Adam as we read in Genesis 2. After God took a rib out of Adam, as the Bible tells us, God didn’t replace the rib He took with another rib but God “closed up its place with flesh.” Genesis 2:21b
“And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman” Genesis 2:22a
And what happened next?
God “brought her [the woman] to the man.” Genesis 2:22b
Why? She shall be back to where she came from:
“Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”” Genesis 2:23 ESV
Because what? “- – – because she was taken out of man.”
Once the woman was taken out of the man, gender came into the picture, male and female. Before this what were they? They were just “Adam.”
“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” Genesis 5:1 KJV
Because the woman was taken out of the man, both the man and the woman came to know a new desire, “the urge to merge” (coined phrase from John Piper), the desire to be back to their original creation. This is called “sexual desire.”
Once God made them two, He created an institution for Adam and Eve to be back to where they were and become one:
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24 ESV
What is the meaning of this “Therefore?”
To answer that question, we need to read at least the end of verse 23:
“- – – because she was taken out of man.”
God put them back to their original place, through an institution, God created for one man and one woman to be one-flesh, called marriage. Marriage is a rightful place for their consummation to happen, consummation through sexual intimacy, their newly created desire, “the urge to merge,” would be met and they become one-flesh again.
What a perfect world it was!
But as we read in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve fell into sin and died.
Some people argue saying, “Marriage is not really between one man and one woman but like Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon, a man can have multiple wives and we don’t read God rebuking these men for doing that.”
From the surface, this argument looks strong but as we read and study the Bible, we don’t read anywhere in the Bible where God ordains or decrees marriage outside of one man and one woman as He did in Genesis 2.
In His earthly life, Jesus was asked about this very issue by men who were enjoying marrying a woman and sending her out the next day for any reason by giving her a certificate of divorce and marrying another woman (doing this as many times as they wanted to):
“And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”” Matthew 19:3-6 ESV – – – cont’d.