There is some majesty in righteousness. This may be illustrated in various ways related to human conduct and thought. We here use the matter of sexual perceptions and conduct. If kept within a boundary of righteousness, sexual activity is rightly perceived as having high objective for both the purposes of reproduction and the fulfillment of inherent physical drives. This last is often referred to as recreational sex. It is more than that, but it is also that. Following biblical ethics, we presume that practice of any sexual behavior, related to orgasmic response, even prevailing thoughts of it, relate in some way to spiritual values and touch in various ways on practical human conduct. There is a right and wrong context for sexual involvement. For devout persons this is expounded in specific statements about sexual morality and illustrations of favorable and unfavorable conduct related to standards. Scripture tends to treat the issue in a rather matter-of-fact way. For example, sexual activity is seen as: within the bonds of marriage (moral and contextual); consensual (of mutual agreement and value); not violent (no rape or distortion); not promiscuous (reserved to husband and wife); private (intimate to the partners); and, a mystery (in some way related to mankind and God in creative gesture and ecstasy). As a substitute for this standard, persons may adopt a biological (animal) approach to sexual activity that removes the spiritual (moral) factors in the context. In the brute animal approach, sex has become a public matter that violates its meaning of privacy and intimacy of marriage bonds. It leads to a loss of the sense of devotion, a feature of human privacy.
The enemy of the grand context (which includes other personal/social factors than sexual activity) takes various forms: the temptation to immorality (out of context with God’s exclusiveness for each person); divorce or abandonment (setting aside the meaning of the bond of marital love); distortion (failure of oaths to serve); and, release of negative motivations (selfish interests, hatred, neglect, evasion of duty, distortion of family, the loss of the meaning of God’s analogy to marriage/family meaning). (Ephesians 5, and The Song of Solomon) There is more. Intimacy between a husband and wife was made, in the words of the creator, in the fulfillment of intimacy in an exclusive pattern, a major pattern in nature reflecting the values of God.
Interference with the pattern becomes contradictory to mankind. For example, the science effort to generate children separate from the gift of creation’s intercourse is: 1)- to tell God he did not give the better gift; 2)- to practice abortion tells God he made a mistake in giving life as a part of his gift, denied to the aborted fetus; 3)- to imply that men and women are not perceived equal though separate, as the burden of breaking the love oath then rests most commonly on the female, both physically and emotionally; and, 4)- to declare that society has no discipline that is morally defensible for all, in the applications of codes for the individual, family, and society. Standards for students in educational institutions, for colleagues in the workplace, for interpersonal relations in nearly any context are so conflicting that it is commonly believed that judgments of scandals and applications of institutional policies would not hold up in court cases determining justice for persons. Sex, related to thought and activity, seems to have become scatological in much of society and culture. At this writing the analysts are noting the hook up of singles in college as destructive to them. Society has diluted the moral and personal meaning of virtuous marriage.
The Christian ought to respond to the current gossipy-puberty-immature-lurid-distorted-shallow sex context by presenting the loving and moral ideal that God installed marriage between a man and woman, demonstrating its uniqueness in the sexual relationship of a husband and wife that makes a reality in the twain becoming one flesh. Historically this is perceived the spiritual point at which one is married to another – or the marriage can be annulled (as though the ceremony of marriage never occurred). All this idealism is partly demonstrated in the similarities of parents in their children. The spiritual meaning of human intimacy, love and family is related to God’s intimacy, love, and the building of the family of God. It is a primary feature of Scripture not to be denied. Many millions of persons have lived well the ideals of Christian context. Severity of sexual temptation does not set aside spiritual ideals. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020