"No Fences: Pharisees, Philosophers, Legalists, and Jesus" Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Local Bible-Thumpers Censor Naughty Parts of the Bible 

Thank you for reading this book. The grace of God continues to be a blessing to me. God is not just some travel agent that has your afterlife squared away. We have eternal life even now, whether we feel like it or not. I began this book by reminding us of what Jesus did for us (He took away all our sins at the Cross and gave us new life by rising from the dead) and who we have become as a result of it, which I will reiterate: We are saints; holy, righteous, and true. We are greatly blessed and deeply loved by our Father. After looking at several issues in light of the totality of Scripture, by now you can see that what the Bible says about a given topic is frequently nuanced. Even with what was written for us and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, believers still have different opinions regarding how to live. This has always been the case. Remember, Paul let the Romans decide their own practices about the meat available to them as long as they didn't threaten church unity by being uncaring or unduly judgmental. I say all this again because we've reached the part of the book that is most likely to be excerpted out of context. This is going to get weird, gross, and specific because the Bible gets weird, gross, and specific through the lens of how I was raised in a country founded by people too uptight for England. Ultimately, that means I have to devote even more space and ink to topics that already get too much attention to try to scrape the “tradition” off that is obscuring the text.   

The available material in Christian bookstores about sexual morality seems to fit in two bins: 

One: The "good old-fashioned family values'' camp dusts off 1 Corinthians 7 (sometimes only 1 Corinthians 7), a smidge of Matthew, and maybe a few verses from the Epistles every year or so when the well-known pastors need to make a buck selling a relationship book. There are any number of people selling believers the notion that God's plan for sexual purity is entirely summed up by “one man with one woman” and that looking at things can be a damnable offense. That approach includes scampering away with shock and outrage if a callipygian maiden (someone's hypothetical future spouse, mind you) happens to wear yoga pants to Wal-Mart. It's no wonder religion isn't more popular with young men. They're told that, despite being new creations in Christ, nearly every thought they have until they're wed or until they develop age-related testosterone deficiency either is or should be sending them to the lake of fire depending on how lightly their pastors take Jesus' promises of eternal security. Pastors nowadays like to add pressure, make life harder, and characterize everything as an "idol". Worldly asceticism and legal puffery are also part of human-invented religions, too. 

Two: The worldly bunch prefer part of 1 Corinthians 6:12 in as many English translations as they can find, like "I have the right to do anything, I am allowed to do anything, All things are lawful for me, Everything is permissible for me, We can do anything we want to" without worrying about the "not everything is beneficial" part. That's if they use Scripture at all. At least one notable published pastor prefaced most of his answers in a relationship book by saying "I am a licensed sexologist" and something about keeping up with the times to keep our religion relevant. There are also smart-alecky books out there written by nonbelievers pointing out that kids and dead people lack specific chapter-and-verse prohibitions as sexual partners. 

Since Paul was instructed in the Torah by Gamaliel, grandson of Hillel, it is easy to see how he would take a more understanding, lenient stance on many human behaviors (even before he was instructed directly by the risen Christ) than the Shammai followers did. We have also seen that for Paul, there was still a line. For example, idols are forbidden, but idolatry must be sincere to be sin. The same applies to sexual immorality. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6:  

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. (1 Corinthians 6:18-20) 

As you recall, the New Testament behavior instructions for Christians could be titled "Believe, Love, Don’t Make Christianity Look Too Bad, and Don't Do the Stuff God Doesn't Like in Acts 15:20, But Paul Uses Pretty Wide Definitions of Those Items". I've been careful not to name names in the interest of Christian harmony and to keep this book "timeless". There are adherents of a popular Christian program in the year that I am writing this that are into (don't look this up if you don't already know about it) "pegging" because they see a loophole for that in Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26-27. They also advocate sending naked pictures of themselves to their spouses to keep things interesting despite acknowledging how easily such things leak out into public view. That is odd, because they still maintain a harsh stance on "fantasy", "ogling", and masturbation.  

Without going into too much detail about my wife's chronic illnesses and my predictable coping strategies, I asked God for some clarity (after asking Him the predictable fix-me-then-kill-me-before-I-sin-again stuff people go through before understanding God’s grace), and He gave it to me.  

I want to give Christians some peace. I am about to make a statement that will be easy to agree with at first, but has many implications that Christian groups on both ends of the political spectrum and that believers through most of the Church’s history have failed to cope with: God’s standard for sexual morality is consistent throughout Scripture. There, that wasn’t so bad, right? The standard of sexual morality required of believers since Acts 15:20 is consistent with God's clear expectations for everyone (even Gentiles) throughout the Bible. The rules and their general applicability are spelled out in Leviticus 18 and 20, and the traditional standard we've been fed is a Pharisee fence (a man-made standard that is sitting between us and God’s standard). Augustine said, "The new is in the old contained; the old is by the new explained." I’ll take Jesus’ version: “Therefore, every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13:52). The things Paul said in the New are explained by the Old, because in his day the “Old” was the “Only”. I suspect that the modern interpretation of Matthew 5:28, the rendering of the phrase “sexual immorality” as “fornication” throughout the New Testament, and translating “inordinate lust” as “lust” throughout the New Testament were warped over the centuries by Christian ascetics. Beyond the natural creep in meaning that happens to words, their understanding of sexual morality also helped to sell indulgences. It still gets paying customers to the Confession booth. Think of the spectacular cathedrals built on that approach, and think of the hundreds of years' worth of accumulated Bible interpretation by Church “fathers”. If you ask grace-teaching preachers (that clearly understand the issues of the Reformation about salvation by grace through faith) a behavior question, sometimes they'll still parrot answers that have been unexamined since Augustine of Hippo. (There were sex-negative Christian ascetics before Augustine, including the people Paul appeased in 1 Corinthians 7:1, but he’s popular among those interested in patristics.) This may be in part because Augustine's work on grace was good enough to encourage the Reformers. However, the Reformation is still young at approximately 500 years old now, and there is still mold we can scrape off the cheese. For example, there are many people obsessing over "nofap" message boards counting the days since they betrayed Christ by masturbating. Since they believe it is wrong and end up doing it anyway, that part is sinful. I feel they have been fed an incomplete meal of Scripture and that their energies would be better utilized radiating love, joy, kindness, the Good News about Jesus, etc,. to the world instead of placing their own works on a pedestal.  

If you asked people living under the Old Covenant what was sexually immoral, they had a list of rules from God about what was allowed for them. Leviticus even differentiates behaviors off-limits to them as Jews and behaviors forbidden to all humanity. Leviticus lists the practices that are to blame for the Canaanites (who were never under the Law of Moses) getting removed from the Promised Land. Saying that they were removed from the land is a euphemism for genocide. Some people get confused by postulating a “holiness code” that only applied to life within the Promised Land, but the Canaanites died for their sins (Genesis 15:16 describes the rising tally) as surely as Er (Genesis 38:7) and the people that drowned in the days of Noah. These were things pagan kings in Genesis knew better than to get involved in, things done by people reduced to ash in Genesis 19 (see Jude 7), etc. 

When the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek, there was a problem. The Greeks lacked a word for the Hebrew concept of sexual immorality back then because their own standards of sexual morality were very different. The word the translators went with was porneia which provides the root word for words like pornographic. It approximately means “things hookers do”, and here’s why: in Greco-Roman culture at the time, men were allowed one wife (which kept the inheritance simple), but the husbands could go out and get access to any orifice from any gender of slave, prostitute, temple prostitute, etc. There was no judgment baked into the word, it just meant “stuff not going on with the respected, noble-born mother of your children”. Now look at 1 Corinthians 5:1. Paul was concerned about the porneia reported among them, specifically that a man in their congregation was shacked up with his father’s wife. Did any of you ever read that verse and think he was paying her? Since it’s not about hookers, where does Paul derive his prohibition of their relationship? Leviticus 18:3,7-8,24-28. This discussion is also at work wherever English translators choose “fornication” to stand for porneia which was chosen as another placeholder word for the Hebrew sexual rules. Fornication is used to refer to sexual activity that occurs out of wedlock; it is a common topic among those who advocate for the one-man-with-one-woman paradigm. The biblical existence of righteous polygamists (Abe, David, etc.), concubines, concubines used for breeding additional slaves (Exodus 21:4), etc., along with a few regulations about prostitution but no outright ban of the practice call into question the utility of the “sex outside wedlock” concept outside of the extra rules humans have imagined.

All Scripture is inspired (2 Timothy 3:16-17), so let’s look at all of Scripture. Some of the broad strokes of the ramifications of a Biblically-based sexual morality we’ll look at will be: There are plenty of righteous polygamists, it can’t be wrong to want what it’s okay to have, and it can’t be wrong to think about what it’s okay to want. If marriage is supposed to be loving and respectful, and copious appropriate sexual activity is encouraged by the apostles, then thinking of someone sexually is not by default degrading. We should let Scripture define what constitutes sexual activity. We should let Scripture define what body parts, if any, require averting our eyes rapidly. We should question modern translations that place “wrong desires” after “passions” if our concept of passions is equivalent to “desire at all”; the apparent redundancy is a clue that something is amiss. We should be able to define lust, inordinate lust, coveting, etc., with regard to what the Bible says. The real rules regarding sex have not changed, and the average lad in a pew on Sunday morning is likely on the right track.

Before I get too deep into explaining this, I'm not telling you to run out and develop addictions to softcore, strippers, and depressing cable shows or to be a leering pervert making people uncomfortable. (Clearly, I'm also not endorsing depictions of sinful copulation or abuse.) If you have a marriage that is working according to the standard Evangelical model, that's a blessing. You probably don't even want any of the water from the mud puddle at the edge of the pasture just past where the Pharisees put up the fence. If your spouse cannot see the merit of this argument, it would be unloving to act against their wishes. Do the loving thing, and have concern for the weaker believer, just like with every other topic we've covered. Can things presently thought to be inappropriate in the Bible Belt be addictive for some people? Yes, just like the alcohol Jesus made in John 2. Can those things mess with the attraction people feel for their spouses? Yes. Has a spouse ever benefited from someone “looking at the menu” while out but bringing their appetite home? Also yes. Does viewing certain materials increase demand for them? No more than eating the meat market products when Paul recommended them. Will knowing that some things people thought were forbidden actually are permissible diminish someone's urge for those things? Yes. Since sinning increases in the presence of Law (Romans 7:5), and Sin's strength is Law (1 Corinthians 15:56), then figuring out that something doesn't even rank as naughty frames it as a lawful-but-not-profitable decision, something easily dismissed as a waste of time and money in most cases. Romans 4:15 says where there is no Law, there is no sin; Romans 7:8 says that apart from the Law, sin is dead. After reading this, Christians can even safely read salacious material like Ezekiel, Song of Solomon, and the frequent mentions of public nudity, public bathing, and public "relations'' throughout the Bible now that they can place Paul's warning of "obscene stories" back into its pagan context.  

Let’s deal with the commonly taught idea that mere lust is equivalent to adultery. A familiar part of Matthew 5 is scarily translated in English:  

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into Hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into Hell. (Matthew 5:27-30) 

Notice that in the plain English translations of the Bible sold in bookstores, you are not even permitted to like your wife. I am not the first to question this translation, but I've never seen my exact argument stated elsewhere. All those pastors with happy families (like Paul endorsed) are already using an interpretation that differs from the plain reading of the common English translations, so it’s not like our discussion is unprecedented. Before we get into it, first remember that Jesus didn’t take out eyes and chop off hands; He healed people wherever He went. Here is why mere desire or liking what you see are not the sins that centuries of preachers would have you think they are: Jesus Christ never sinned. Therefore, everything in the Sermon on the Mount can already be found in the Law of Moses. If that were not the case, Jesus would have violated Deuteronomy 4:2 “Do not add to what I command you...” and Deuteronomy 12:32 “See that you do all I command you; do not add to it...”. The crowd that heard the Sermon on the Mount may have lacked a complete understanding of the Law, so it felt like the bar was raised to “Moses 2: Even Moses-ier”, but the Law is the Law, and every jot and tittle was the same when He preached it that day. “But I say to you” that love for enemies, forgiveness, and generosity can all be found easily in the Old Covenant (Leviticus 19:17-18, Psalm 37:8, Proverbs 25:21-22, Deuteronomy 15:7-8 are a few of the many examples). Again, we Gentiles were never under the Law, and we aren't under the Law now. We aren't being tutored by it (Galatians 3:24-25), anyone trying to keep part of it is cursed for not keeping all of it (Galatians 3:10), we who recognize it as a perfect and impossible standard are the ones to uphold it (Romans 3:31), and we have died to it (Romans 7:4). Christ is the end of the Law for us (Romans 10:4). But even if we were Jews under the Law, we would have trouble finding "lust = adultery" in the Law. We are to avoid sexual immorality, and it may seem convenient to use this verse as a definition since it's placed at the front of the New Testament. If our English Bibles' plain reading of Matthew 5:28 is unparalleled by other verses, we should be careful building doctrines around it. The warnings in Proverbs about lust all seem to have another man's wife lurking in a nearby verse. Job 31:1 seems like a candidate for an exception, but Job was a hero to the Pharisees. He was a fan of the fence. He offered sacrifices on behalf of his children as a preemptive strike before potential sins, and God didn't command that in the Law of Moses. Our chapters and verses are recent inventions (Archbishop Stephen Langton in the 1200s is credited with this); the ancients just had big unnumbered scrolls. Job 31:1 could easily fit with the other woe-is-me stuff at the end of Job 30 (and lines up well with Job 7:7-8,21); it could be about him not replacing the children he lost to spare them future calamity in Job 31:3 and/or not thinking he’d live long enough to support a younger wife. Job 31:9 in more literal translations makes it clear he's speaking of adultery whether initiated by him or by her in that verse. At the end of the book, Job admits that he talked about things that he didn’t understand and that he should have kept his mouth shut. There is an explanation for what Jesus said in Matthew 5:28 coming soon, and I thank you for your patience. 

It's weird to me to hear grace-teaching pastors frequently mention getting “the thoughts” and make jokes about the prevalence of lust being the same among believers and non-believers when they maintain that the Sermon on the Mount isn't for Christian growth but meant to cause despair and awareness of the need for grace. (The lust and divorce material from the Sermon on the Mount is frequently applied by the modern equivalents of Pharisees, but other instructions from the Sermon like giving everything away to anyone who asks or reconciling with your brother before sacrificing an animal on an altar aren’t.) It has been taught that the Law of Moses serves three purposes: first, to control bad behavior in the world; second, to show us our need for God’s grace; and third, to guide believers in how to live. However, there is no “third use of the Law” for believers. Please see Acts 15:10. We are dead to the Law of Moses (2 Corinthians 3, Romans 7). Jesus preached to a Jewish audience before the Cross and the Resurrection about coveting, Paul said we are dead to the coveting law, and Paul said that trying to follow the Law only tempts us harder. Even though shelving “lust = adultery” next to tithing and Sabbath-keeping as matters of Law not applicable to Gentiles is already embraced by some grace-focused believers, let me keep going for our legalistic brethren. 

On the way to the solution, let’s first briefly consider translation issues with Matthew (with the assurance that the real solution is even simpler). My suggestion of an improvement to how a verse is translated is one of many. There was a successful effort to change how the Greek word sarx is translated in the NIV; before it was re-translated it taught that believers still had a “sinful nature” despite Colossians 2:11-12 saying it was cut away at conversion. (An aside: Sarx is just “the flesh”, the way of human effort, the old worldly patterns for making life work apart from Christ that are slowly un-learned in the new life by the renewing of the mind (Romans 12:2); it is in contrast to “the Spirit”. There is good-looking “flesh” to be wrongly proud of, like Paul’s entire spiritual resumé as a Pharisee, and there is bad-looking “flesh” like the sins people run to in order to cope with life instead of leaning on Jesus. Sin likes to encourage anything but looking to Jesus.) Another example of a suggestion about how to better understand a verse is that we have teachers now pointing out that “scourged” in Hebrews 12:6 is more like “inquired” as well (the name of the specific whip used to inquire deeply into people’s backs came into use later than the Proverb that Hebrews refers to), allowing the possibility that the letter to the Hebrews was logically written in Hebrew. Hear me out regarding Matthew, please. In Luke 8 and Mark 5, Jesus is summoned to heal a dying girl that is already dead in Matthew 9. That's not a contradiction, just an awkwardness in translation. Some manuscripts have Jesus riding two animals into Jerusalem in Matthew 21, presumably standing on their backs like a rodeo cowboy. Matthew 5:32 has a man causing his wife to commit adultery by leaving her in several translations. These are merely awkward features in our handling of the Greek manuscripts of Matthew. Might it have been transmitted orally in Hebrew first, or perhaps Matthew's Greek scribe is to blame? Should we base doctrine on a subpar understanding of the translation? Thinking at first that the problem was at this level made the realization of the truth even more surprising and delightful.  

Guess what? Even better, the issue in Matthew 5:28 is in English, not Greek. The Old Testament precedent Jesus referenced for Matthew 5:28 isn’t about lust; it’s about coveting. I’ll elaborate. Even if Matthew wasn't relying on someone else's sermon notes since he was recruited after it was preached (Matthew 9) by his admission, and even without the other awkwardness compared to the rest of the Gospels possibly due to Greek translation, without changing a word in the Greek manuscript we can read in Matthew 5:28 "But I say to you that if you look at a married woman in order to covet her, you have committed adultery in your heart." This makes sense given the Old Testament's consistent treatment of adultery as involving another man's wife (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22). The Greek word for “woman” in Matthew 5:28 also means “wife” and the word for “lust” was the closest approximation to “covet” Greeks could comprehend. The same words are used in Exodus 20:17 in the Septuagint (Again, the Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament. Jesus preferred its rendition of Psalm 8:2 in Matthew 21:16. It was a translation authoritative enough for New Testament writers to quote from repeatedly. Pastors in the early Church quoted from it just like your pastor reads Bible verses now in a language you understand.): “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife...” The only thing making the same words in Matthew 5:28 and Exodus 20:17 seemingly mean different things is the accumulated weight of tradition on the translation teams. By reading both sets of words the same way, we can see that Jesus used the “thoughtcrime” the audience was familiar with from the Ten Commandments (which is even called a ministry of death and condemnation that we are dead to according to 2 Corinthians 3 and Romans 7, along with its derivative works like the Sermon – I know which side of the Cross we’re on, I’m not putting us under the Law of Moses again, I’m just trying to make a point) to show the connection between other thoughts and actions like murder (Exodus 20:13) and extreme out-of-bounds anger (Leviticus 19:17-18). (Regarding that, Paul in Ephesians reiterates Psalms about not letting the sun go down on your anger. There are manuscripts that include “without cause” on Jesus’ warning about anger. This is correct because table-flipping Jesus was still sinless in John 8:46. There is a difference between getting riled up but then choosing to leave it in God’s hands compared to hating someone for no reason, letting things fester, or letting mere lack of opportunity keep your hands free of blood.) Jesus did not introduce a new “lust = adultery” to the already impossible standard of Sinai. Remember, He couldn't raise the bar without violating at least 2 of the 613 rules. According to the Jewish scholars Jesus said to listen to in Matthew 23:2-3, to covet is “to want to the point of seeking to take away and own something that belongs to another person”. I'll revisit this momentarily; thanks again for your patience.  

 FIGURE 1 

Here’s the point, ladies and gentlemen. I’m not asking you to learn Greek, merely to note that “gynika” (variously translated women or wives) and “epithumeo” are in both verses. The ending varies a bit on one word (“covet” vs. “for the purpose of coveting”), but you see it, right?  

The NIV translation team followed the variant readings from the margins of the Masoretic Text instead of the text itself (without indicating it in the notes), they divided the consonants into different words, they checked their work with the Dead Sea Scrolls and (of all things) the Samaritan Pentateuch, they changed the Hebrew text themselves where they thought it might have been corrupted, they read some words using different vowels (without indicating it in the notes), etc. I’m not picking on them; translation teams commonly do things like this to get Bibles that can be understood by modern English readers to market. But, based on all of that, my suggestion that we read the same words in Exodus 20:17 and Matthew 5:28 the same way because it was illegal to add to the Law of Moses is a very mild one in comparison.

I know Matthew 5:28 in English Bibles are scary, red words near scarier red words about amputation. Matthew is placed at the front of the New Testament, and it's hard not to let that “lust = adultery” hermeneutic/interpretation color the rest of the Bible. Please consider the audience of Paul's letters. They were mostly illiterate, and they had a letter or two of the New Testament at best. They didn't have our written Gospels. All New Testament writings were regional at first. Most early believers never heard Matthew 5:28, so the first century Gentile believers obeying Acts 15:20 would have understood sexual immorality in light of what they had heard from the Septuagint. Jesus said in Matthew 13:52 “every teacher of the Law (Old Testament) who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” The sexual immorality in Acts 15:20 can be found in the parts of Leviticus 18 through 20 that applied to Israel and foreigners, things that got the Canaanites vomited from the land. Specifically, the rules for men state that ritual sex for idols, other guys' wives, animals, women too nearly related to the man or to his existing wives or concubines (cousins and nieces were ok to marry, but aunts were not), other dudes, and menstruating women are all off-limits. Romans 1:26 implies male-female anal penetration (for example, to avoid pregnancy in the days before reliable birth control methods) is unnatural, but only “lying with a man as you would with a woman” (Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13) got the Canaanites removed. (The Law of Moses is tailored to the quirks of fallen humanity as Jesus alluded to by bringing up pre-Fall Genesis 2:24 in His discussion of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 divorces in Matthew 19:5.) For women, the Acts 15:20 rules proscribe ritual sex for idols, wives having sex with men other than their husbands, sex with animals, marrying certain kinsmen (cousin and uncle marriage were ok, but other forms of incest were not), or having relations while menstruating (with some interpreters’ readings of Romans 1:26-27 frowning on anal penetration as well). Would defining sexual immorality thusly as the Gentile God-fearers/ger toshav defined it fit the New Testament? John the Baptist's criticism of Herod Antipas taking his brother's wife, the man with his stepmother in 1 Corinthians 5, the adulterers in 1 Thessalonians 4:6, the buggers in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, etc., are all accounted for. [An aside: Some use the term “sodomy” for the male-male anal penetration condemned in Scripture, but since the Sodom story has a few extra elements like communal gang rape and the potential for angel/human “strange flesh” pairings, it confuses some modern people about other cases of male-male penetration. I think the term “buggery” is more clear and see that as what Paul recalls in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 from Leviticus 18 (where the practice is attributed to the Canaanites) and Leviticus 20. (Yes, the residents of Sodom were criticized for buggery in Jude 7, too.)] Even the fathers in the NASB's rendering of 1 Corinthians 7 that were advised to marry their daughters off if they felt inappropriately toward them are covered by this approach as well.  

Paul warned us in Colossians 2:8 "See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition..." Predictably, the Church immediately started snorting big lines of Stoicism and Platonism. Christianity emerged amidst a Jewish culture that had already been steeped in the ideas of Plato for some time; later writers like Aquinas (who had a great affinity for Plato’s student Aristotle) introduced additional doses of philosophy. The Greek philosophical behavioral ideals (not to be confused with the over-the-top Greek behavior toward which the philosophies developed as a reaction) especially became the norm as the early Church distanced itself from its Jewish roots. Even so, Theophilus of Antioch (centuries earlier than Augustine’s anti-lust teachings) reads Matthew 5:28 as a paraphrase of Exodus 20:17. I'm not saying that he's authoritative and that Augustine is not; I'm saying that the understanding that we have of the verse now was not always set in stone, and that we had centuries of interpretation baked into it by the time we got Bibles in English. In addition to adding Gentile philosophical notions, we also forgot some of what we knew about Jesus’ teachings due to lack of contact with the Jews. About a hundred years after Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, a man that some rabbis claimed was the Messiah named Simon bar Kokhba led a failed revolt against the Roman Empire. The Romans banished the Jews from Jerusalem, and the region was renamed for their ancestral enemies the Philistines: “Palestine”. The early Church previously had maintained a closer relationship with the Jews to utilize their exemption from worshiping the emperor, but Christianity started forgetting its roots after the Bar Kokhba revolt; distance from the Judean rebels became politically expedient. While still armed with the Old Testament, the Christian leadership consisted of a bunch of Gentiles sitting around talking to each other for a few hundred years. The halakhic principles of the religious leaders that Jesus endorsed to his Jewish audience in Matthew 23:2-3 (pikuach nefesh, etc.) were forgotten. The intellectual history of Judaism, like the account of the disagreements about Torah interpretation between the schools of Shammai and Hillel, was forgotten for a time, too. Asceticism, which is frowned upon in Colossians 2:23, became a very popular approach toward achieving a self-made righteousness. The celibate desert fathers (ascetics whose separation from the world was more Essene than Christian and would have been criticized by Paul and was criticized by Luther) left an intellectual legacy that stewed along with lingering Greek philosophical ideas right up to the time of Augustine. Before he was a Christian, Augustine was a Manichean, and therefore it is no surprise that the "spirit good/matter bad" Gnostic tendency (that John wrote against in the Bible) lingered. 

There are nuances to Matthew 22:30 (we will become like the angels in Heaven, and the angels in Heaven don’t marry); people have tried to apply a mistaken version of that here on Earth again and again. Angels aren’t asexual, as seen in Genesis 6; their problem there was mating with humans which is the same sort of “strange flesh” boundary crossing seen in bestiality. Marriage is an earthly symbol (Hebrews 10:1, Colossians 2:17, and we just spoke of Jesus saying we won’t marry in Heaven) of Christ’s relationship with believers (Ephesians 5:21-33). The mention of prohibiting marriage altogether in 1 Timothy 4:3 goes beyond what Jesus said in Matthew 19:10-12; Greek philosophers thought they were guided by lesser deities/spirits called daemons (1 Timothy 4:1). The Platonists consider this world an illusion/shadow/lesser version of an unseen spiritual reality, the Realm of the Forms. This pro-spirit-anti-physical idea is enough to explain the proto-Gnostic heresies several of the Epistles address. If our resurrection were only spiritual, then our bodies would have no place in God’s future plan. Logically, that error leads to two more: 1) if the body is not important, then go out sinning all the sins 2) if the body is inherently evil, be ascetic to the point of even denying normal/good physical cravings. A general disdain for the physical led to Gnostics saying that Jesus hadn’t really come in human flesh (1 John 4:3). This is the same sort of philosophical thinking behind what Paul was asked to reply to in 1 Corinthians 7:1 and the popular modern Augustinian (anti-lust) reading of Matthew 5:28.

As time went on, the pagan memories faded too. The vice lists in Galatians 5, 1 Corinthians 6, etc., apparently have public/shameless/orgy-participant/pagan worship connotations when comparing the vocabulary to other literature of the period and the activities of the converts' former faiths. Remember the story I told earlier about the child with the note to clean her room? Christianity basically did that. I don't know where I could attend an orgy in honor of Greco-Roman gods within driving distance of where this book is being written. There might be a girl with a “Do it for Aphrodite!” tattoo at most. The exact scenario matters; remember Paul’s discussion of meat sacrificed to idols and his allowance for basically everything adjacent to but distinct from participation in active idolatry. Our problem is that after a lot of the sexual immorality had been cleaned up, people who didn't remember what most of that even meant read the old instructions and asked themselves how they were going to apply them. Again, why would the devil do this? He has believers thinking that normally functioning physiological drives are wrong and yet giving into them anyway, which is sinful (Romans 14:23) and makes us hypocrites. The goal is to ruin our witness for Christ and turn churches into behavior-improvement country clubs. There are modern Christians that have been brainwashed into thinking normal behaviors celebrated in the Song of Songs/Solomon (which will be covered later in this book) are wrong and use that to promote the acceptance of behaviors expressly forbidden in Scripture by saying, “Everyone has something freaky going on at their house.” Moreover, our enemy knows (2 Peter 2) that since we’re warned to look for false teachers of licentiousness (like the Gnostic heretics promising total no-limits sexual “freedom” and their modern equivalents being “welcoming” to an unbiblical extent), anyone who points out that our standards have crept beyond those of the Bible is easy to call a heretic. Again, even though tax collectors and whores beat Pharisees into the Kingdom (Matthew 21:31), Pharisees still have an audience. We tend to tiptoe past the implications of that, but between a woman selling mouth hugs in a truck stop parking lot and someone feeling superior to a woman selling mouth hugs in a truck stop parking lot, guess who Jesus spent a large portion of His preaching tour reprimanding? One of the types of Pharisee that was a standard joke character in the ancient world was a man that ran into walls to avoid looking at women. Now, his intellectual children want to sell you censorship software and an accountability group. Bragging about not masturbating is from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Worrying about losing the freedom to abstain from harmless habits is Stoicism, straight from Seneca's Moral Letters. The idea that walking behind a woman while walking upstairs is damnable can be found in the Talmud, inherited from the Christ-denying Pharisees. Jesus said that theirs was a heavy yoke and that they weren't helping. His yoke is easy. His burden is light. He is the Truth that sets us free. Life did not get worse under grace than it was under the Old Covenant. The alleged "godly wisdom" that is unbiblical but read back into the Scripture (eisegesis) that the “one man with one woman” people espouse should remind you of the oral teachings of the Pharisees later codified in the Talmud. We already had “obey-and-do-better” with Judaism. As Paul said in Titus 1:14 "pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the merely human commands of those who reject the truth."  

Regarding “fantasy” and "ogling", I humbly suggest that it's not wrong to want what it's not wrong to have. Since identical percentages of believers and nonbelievers "struggle" with lust, might it suggest that, apart from forbidden matters like other dudes and barnyard fun, the Holy Spirit is helping us avoid that to the extent He's pitching in for shellfish avoidance and Saturday yard work? Since “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) we should first evaluate the modern standard in light of all Scripture. When Jesus, our Advocate, cherry-picked the Old Testament to defend his disciples' Sabbath-breaking in Matthew 12:3, he said “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry?” He knew the Pharisees would listen to that because 1 Kings 15:5 says “For David had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord and had not failed to keep any of the Lord’s commands all the days of his life—except in the case of Uriah the Hittite.” The Pharisees were obsessed with rule-keeping, so a verse like that provided someone to emulate. When the prophet Nathan rebuked this exemplar David's sexual choices, God had a perfect chance to set a man with eight wives and ten concubines straight on the whole one-man-one-woman thing, but instead we find in 2 Samuel 12:8 “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more.” God gave David a whole bunch of women, and He said that more could have been on the table, too. God's not stingy: I can point to Psalm 37:4, Romans 8:32, etc. Before the Roman one-wife rule we started to obey (Romans 13) came about, the standard was one man with as many post-pubescent women (Song of Songs/Solomon 8:8-10) as he could financially support. Marriage depicts Christ and the Church; He can always add another believer, but we can't have Him and Baal. Christ's love for me does not diminish his love for you. Polygyny allowed barren women, widows, etc., with no economic involvement to have security and a family. We're in a book club for a very old Book; it says God doesn’t change. Expectations of parity between geese and ganders frequently come from voices that sound a lot like the bossy former Diana cult members that Paul possibly told Timothy how to answer in 1 Timothy 2. Given Genesis 3:16, the desire of most women to be “the one” for some man (and to control his entire earning potential, etc.) is not surprising. There are a ton of romantic movies and songs giving people unrealistic expectations and reasons to make themselves unhappy. No, I haven't become a polygamist, but the possibility means the “yen for concubines” aka concupiscence is not sinful, per se. Go ask Abraham, about whom God says in Genesis 26:5 “obeyed and did everything I required of him, keeping my commands, my decrees and my instructions”, and see if he tells you that God’s expectations are any different given his wife (Sarah) and two concubines (Hagar, Keturah). Anyone teaching biblical inerrancy and preaching about Abraham's "adultery" is contradicting themselves. Augustine had some notions worth keeping, but "mere lust = adultery” seems like an imaginary Yeti atop a mountain of Law-keeping that Christ already skied down for us before giving us the medal and telling us not to try it. God is portrayed as a polygamist in Ezekiel 23; would God depict himself as a sinner in the Bible? In Numbers 31:25-47, the Lord calls dibs on 32 ladies and distributes more to His servants. (Being incorporeal at the moment, He gave his share of 32 ladies to Eleazar. If the modern Evangelical mantra of "one man with one woman" were what He demanded, why would He bestow a whole rap video's worth of women to Eleazar?) 

His ways are not our ways. His blood-based economy isn't the only thing that seems strange to our modern sensibilities. Jesus quoted Genesis 2:24 to describe the ideal indissolubility of marriage; the conversation was about divorce, not exclusivity. It explains how a man is not a whole person, so to speak. He proceeds from (“leaves” or “is a product of “) a mother and a father and goes out to find what’s been missing since God took all women out of all men in the person of Adam in the first recorded surgery. The pair becomes “one flesh”, a functional unit capable of reproducing the Image of God. In the old days, a priest was unnecessary to wed, and a promise was enough. Isaac taking Rebekah into the tent sealed the deal. Our public exchange of vows being thought of as a wedding owes more to pagan Rome than the Bible. All the flowery “one flesh” talk becomes immediately comprehensible to a Western mind when phrased differently: “unprotected vaginal intercourse capable is capable of making a baby and therefore merging bloodlines”, “impregnating a woman makes you related to her relatives through your offspring”, “you should take care of your family, including the mother of your children”, etc. We could keep it biblical and stick with what Paul said in Ephesians 5:29: “No one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church”. However, what if that’s not what’s going on? Many activities that are considered sexual are fundamentally just complicated ways to masturbate. Unwed, un-betrothed, non-temple prostitutes that were not forced into it by parents and were not priests’ daughters are not condemned in the Bible, especially if they were Gentiles, sticking to the Song of Songs/Solomon sex-adjacent warm-up practices, etc. During the Renaissance, the Church considered prostitution something between a necessary evil and a defense of the social order against homosexuality. The girls who worked near the Venetian bridge known as the “Ponte delle Tette” were allowed to display their breasts from balconies and windows to attract business (and even illuminated their breasts with lanterns at night) to divert men away from homosexual behavior; they were even paid by the government of the Republic of Venice to stand in a line across the bridge with their breasts bared. Many modern readers under the influence of Bible Belt culture find history shocking, but it seems that these churchmen’s thinking was somehow closer to biblical than that of our modern Pharisees. Rahab the prostitute is in the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11 along with whoreson Jephthah and service-user Samson; Judah and Tamar’s encounter was not punished, and it is a part of Jesus’ human family tree. The many negative mentions of “whoredom” (like Exodus 34:15-16, the prophets, etc.) in the Bible largely concern Israel’s spiritual adultery against God as Husband. God even pimps out Tyre in Isaiah 23:17-18 and gives “her” earnings to the faithful. To those that discourage looking back to the Old Testament to see how the unchanging God defines terms, you are right that the Law of Moses is not the starting place for grace. Therefore, on this side of the Cross, we don't start out by avoiding pork on the way to avoiding other foods, we don't add even more days of observance to a Saturday Sabbath, and we don't start with refraining from pagan ritual sex, other guys' wives, animals, relatives, and dudes to then become Pharisees who run into walls to avoid seeing women under the New Covenant. Life did not get worse under grace.  

Amidst this discussion, let me emphasize that just because you know where the boundary is does not mean you run around exploring it instead of quietly rereading the Bible over and over and writing Christian books. Look to Jesus, and soon you’ll be walking by the Spirit; someone who thought they knew you will ask, “Who are you?” I’m just saying if the real line in the sand is way over there, you can stop worrying about it to focus on more spiritually productive matters.  

God cares about the mechanism by which His Image is propagated, and God cares about our thoughts. However, saying “fantasy” is wrong is a stretch; unless the fantasy involves driving away cackling about never calling her again, most people are essentially thinking about adding a hypothetical wife to the team. If having frequent relations isn't disrespectful to either party in 1 Corinthians 7, thinking about allowable behaviors isn't disrespectful to anyone, either. The notion that thinking of someone sexually is degrading comes from the Accuser and your HR department. Also, notice that because the Bible was written in a time when men had the agency to obtain spouses and women didn't, the Lord did not constrain what women think about in that Sermon. Yes, He cares about how we treat each other, and impure thoughts are of impure things. Would I rather you read the Bible than “50 Shades or Whatever”? Yes, the Bible is more beneficial, but you are free. If the fictional characters are making your husband less valued by comparison or if he has an issue with it, then it is bad, but if it’s mindless relaxation and he’s benefiting from your increased libido or from quiet time to follow his own godly pursuits, then that’s between the two of you. Furthermore with regard to vulgarity, let’s make sure we’re familiar with our Bibles. David threatened to kill everyone who “pisseth against the wall” in 1 Samuel 15:22 (KJV). Ezekiel’s favorite word for idols can politely be referred to as dung balls. Ezekiel 23:20 is a favorite verse of mischievous people in which the Jews’ infidelity to God (the Husband in this scenario) in international politics is portrayed as them lusting after lovers with genitals like that of donkeys. For readers who grew up in the city, just think of a big restaurant pepper mill; Ezekiel 23 in general is pretty risqué by modern sensibilities. Paul’s warnings about obscene stories must have a pretty high bar since they share a binding with Ezekiel, Song of Songs/Solomon, etc. Other commentators have also suspected “obscene stories” meant tales of false gods (Remember the time Zeus turned himself into a swan and censored Leviticus 18:23 violations, and then Leda the human gave birth to Castor, Pollux, and Helen of Troy?) and/or gossip. James 1:13 says God tempts no one to sin, and God metaphorically strips women naked for public view in Jeremiah 13:26-27 and Hosea 2 (and Ezekiel 16, Isaiah 47, etc.; it’s a pattern), so that can’t be morally injurious to bystanding onlookers. Since most Christians are prudish enough to hypothetically look away from reenactments of Bible scenes, the Accuser has warped our values. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says all Scripture is for our edification, so if Isaiah was told to preach nude for three years (and other prophets like Micah did similar things, too), then whatever real or fictional distraction you run across about soap store employees working naked for a day to highlight the environmental benefits of less packaging shouldn’t cause you any religious anxiety. I am writing this in a time in which an acquaintance of mine who loves cooking makes himself change the channel when Giada de Laurentiis is on because he says her necklines are too low and she “shows too much of the bosom”. Remember that apart from the obedience to the government commanded in Romans 13 that this man could bring Wife #2, Wife #3, and Wife #4 home to meet Wife #1 without her input, so “scouting talent” has to be on this side of what’s legal. David, already married to Michal, brought home six more just like that. Consider the size of Paul's abstraction: If you can eat grocery store meat formerly sacrificed to idols, then merely looking at suggestive material cannot be a problem.

Any lingering confusion is likely due to mistaking lusting for coveting. As promised, here’s a primer on coveting: Covet is frequently part of the phrase “covet and take”, whether explicit (Deuteronomy 7:25, Micah 2:2) or implicit (Exodus 34:24 for example). Imagine that you are an ice cream tycoon, and that you have a bunch of kids that you love. Ignoring health concerns and spoiling dinner, you're willing to give the kiddos whatever frozen treats they request. However, if one of them thumbs their sibling's eye and takes their ice cream, you would be displeased. That's the difference between wanting and coveting. There is a difference between “Something like that could be nice” and “I want that, and I want that guy that has it now not to have it.” If you would settle for a substitute, there is no covetousness; the James 4:2 element has to be there to count in the minds of the Sermon on the Mount's original hearers. Hebrew teachers have used this example: Let's say your neighbor Bob has a nice new car. If you daydream about what it would be like to drive one like it, you still have not considered wronging Bob. If you begrudge Bob for being blessed with it or start formulating a plan to steal it, then you are guilty of coveting it before your plot succeeds or fails. There is a big difference between, in a world where identical twins exist, entertaining the thought (privately) that a slightly better-looking version (this is the imagination, after all, and could a thought in your head even really belong to anyone else?) of a given woman (let's throw in a Proverbs 31 disposition instead of the real one’s tendency toward hemorrhaging money, too, while we're at it) would be a good addition to your family versus finding out when an actual woman's husband will be out of town. Imagining and plotting are distinct activities. If David looked at Bathsheba with the intent of getting it out of his system alone without bothering anyone instead, he would have been seeking to not want Uriah’s wife; that’s the opposite of coveting. There is a difference between wanting her and wanting to masturbate; the real question is whether you’d refuse a real advance from a known married woman, and the Holy Spirit readily tags in to help with that one. Romans 13:14 says not to think about how to gratify the flesh, which involves creativity and planning, like how to orchestrate a liaison. Taking care of things single-handedly doesn’t require you to think about how to accomplish anything. There is a big difference between “Be people of such integrity that your friend's wife is safe around you” and “Don't watch HBO''. If Isaiah can walk around naked (Isaiah 20) for three years to make a point (Micah and Saul also behaved similarly), I have no room to judge any performer who believes in the message of a project enough to wear a similar costume. God never commands sin; He hates sin. Remember mat-carrying (John 5) or marching around Jericho (Joshua 6) on the Sabbath? Doing God's work was never prohibited on that day, as Jesus frequently demonstrated. What about eating unclean food (Ezekiel 4)? That would have only required blood sacrifice if forgotten or death if the Temple were approached (the clean/unclean distinction disappeared for us when the veil ripped at the Crucifixion). Ergo, Isaiah's wardrobe is appropriate. Also, despite all the “uncovering the nakedness” euphemisms we employ in other parts of some of our Bible translations (the connotation of that in Leviticus 18 is exposing an orifice for use since belts/loincloths are adequate clothing in Genesis 3:21), nothing about the invasive and intimate mass physical examinations required for the Israelites to obey Numbers 31:17-18 is presented as morally wrong for any of the people involved. If nudity isn’t bad, then merely seeing or thinking about it isn’t bad. 

As for the Bible's teaching about masturbation, Leviticus 15 addresses ejaculation for any reason prior to the discussion of couples' cleanup (and makes a distinction between seminal emission and sexual relations) in verse 18 because for most boys, that is the natural sequence of things. Since marital intercourse had the same wash-and-wait rule in Leviticus 15, and Paul approves wholeheartedly of marital intercourse, the other wash-and-wait behaviors are not a problem for the Temple of the Holy Spirit, either. The Colossians, whom Paul (1 Corinthians 2:6) implies are capable of more spiritual thought than the carnal Corinthians, are still advised in Colossians 2 to "handle" and "touch" "things that are gone as soon as we use them". That is perhaps the most tactful instruction manual for erections one could hope for. This is logically an accepted mechanism to complete Paul's instruction to put “lust” (Remember, to the original Greek hearers this is coveting: a strong urge, the home-wrecking instinct, a cause of fights and murders, not mere desire) to death in Colossians 3:5; this “lust” is rendered “inordinate lust” (out-of-bounds desire, and that is addressed largely to former orgy participants) throughout the New Testament by the more literal translations (except in instances like Jesus really wanting to eat Passover, which you can see in an interlinear/Greek Luke 22:15). The Bible tends to focus on males, but of interest to the ladies, the Shulammite in Song of Songs/Solomon 5:5 gets out of bed with her fingers dripping. 

And now, some historical context: We have information about masturbation in ancient Greece in their comedies, artwork of satyrs, etc. The ancient Greeks regarded masturbation as vulgar and only suitable for slaves, barbarians, and women (Notably, Greco-Roman culture considered Christianity as only suitable for the same despised groups). The ancient Romans mentioned masturbation less than the Greeks did, but their prevailing opinion of it was similar to the Greeks’ view of it being only fitting for slaves, etc. The comedic playwright Aristophanes mentioned it frequently in ways reflecting those norms. The outnumbered opposition view among Greek philosophers can be seen from Diogenes of Sinope, the fourth-century BC Cynic philosopher, who often masturbated in public, which was considered scandalous. When people confronted him over this, he would say, "If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly." (Cynics said that anything a dog does that a human doesn’t is made-up cultural hogwash; they were known for things like public nudity and begging. Incidentally, some ancient Romans thought early Christians that conspicuously followed Jesus’ instructions from the Sermon on the Mount about not being materialistic or worrying about tomorrow were a form of or influenced by the philosophical Diogenes’ school of Cynicism. For instance, think of Cynic nudists in light of a misunderstood Matthew 5:40. There were Cynic philosophers within a day’s walk of Nazareth, further complicating the public perception of Christianity.) Regarding the prevailing Greek philosophical view, per Haaretz columnist Terry Madenholm:

There is a hint in the terminology as to why the practice was considered indecent. The most commonly used verb for masturbation is "to soften" (dephesthai)...For most Greeks, male sexuality was essentially about power dynamics. In bed, it all came down to active versus passive. Playing with oneself was seen as an act of passivity, good enough for the low-status men and the rest of the miserables lacking enkratia (self-control). A respected member of society, meaning a "real man", could only play an active role in bed, that of the "penetrator"; hence, masturbating (or performing fellatio or cunnilingus) was viewed as an act of self-emasculation.

I brought all that up to demonstrate that the Church’s attitude toward the aforementioned practices since the days of Augustine seems to have been influenced by the Greek philosophers Paul warned against. Modern voices echoing the same sentiments include fascists that want to shape the culture toward keeping the “right” people pregnant. The aforementioned fellatio and cunnilingus is hinted at poetically in the Song of Songs/Solomon as a part of a normal heterosexual relationship (again, this will be explained more thoroughly a little later). Also note that dephesthai is not the malakoi of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 despite modern Greek slang usage. In case anyone reading 1 Corinthians 6 now speaks Greek, modern Greek slang uses malakoi for masturbators, but Bible translation teams familiar with the period say it means the passive participant in a male-male homosexual interlude. This is another example of words being buckets we put meanings into that can shift over time.

Corinth was wilder than a combined Las Vegas Mardi Gras Spring Break at the Hedonism resort. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul gave common-sense advice to a people that couldn’t spell “Leviticus” and were way past "masturbate before you do something stupid". While acknowledging that the celibate Greek philosophical notions that ruined things later did not run afoul of God's expectations in verse 1, Paul then recommended that those Corinthians get married (which would have involved guidance from churchmen making sure the couples weren't too closely related) and get it out of their systems. It's the same sort of godly wisdom particular to their situations he gave them elsewhere in the letters about "don't dress like a whore at church" hairstyles and head coverings, “ask your husbands questions at home instead of interrupting the service”, and "don't hog the Communion". He also wished everyone could be single like him and paradoxically said that the married should act unmarried because “the time is short” in verse 29. Paul was all over the place in the letters to the Corinthians. He went into detail about head coverings but didn’t say “blindfold the kids when they go outside so they don’t see all the porn drawn on the walls”, for example; being available as a witness in the world was encouraged (1 Corinthians 5:10) rather than separatism. We’re not supposed to be changing the world’s behavior (1 Corinthians 5:12) either; we’re dispensers of God’s grace (1 Corinthians 2:2). The only command from the Lord in 1 Corinthians 7 is "don't abandon your spouse", and Paul admits that the rest is just his take on things. If David had applied Leviticus 15 (and the common sense later recorded for us in Colossians 2) when he saw Bathsheba, we wouldn't know anything about it today. God provides a way out (1 Corinthians 10:13), and certain things are within reach for a reason (1 Corinthians 12:18). 

Incidentally, Bathsheba did nothing wrong at the start of her story. Private bathing (really, private anything) is a recent invention and is still a rarity in parts of the world. God's original plan was to hang out with naked humans. We were pronounced excellent as we were in Genesis 1, and God's question of "Who told you that you were naked?" in Genesis 3 can sound like "Who said there was anything wrong with My Image?" You ask why God is clothed in Isaiah? Since the hem of the garment was like a seal for wax on documents in ancient times, the train of God's robe filling the Temple in Isaiah 6 (in a vision) symbolizes God's Name, which the Temple was built to house/honor (2 Chronicles 6). The requirement of priests to wear special underwear to prevent peeping was about maintaining the symbolism of them accepting offerings for the holy God who dressed Adam and Eve after their sin; seeing them wasn’t supposed to remind people of the shame of the first sin, or to identify the priests (God’s waiters) with humanity in the sacrifice transaction. (The first sin was humans, rather than believing what God said about His work being good, opting to try to learn how to be more good and less evil. The first sin was self-improvement and choosing morality and ethics over grace.) The special underwear was also another way to prevent temple prostitution. Their ears, toes, and thumbs were smeared with blood like the horns of the altar; priestly garments are described in the Bible like Temple furniture and also served to keep ashes from transmitting ritual uncleanliness back into the worship space. Isaiah went naked for three years to prove a point, Micah did so as well for an unspecified amount of time. Eve was still topless after God dressed her in a “belt” in Genesis 3:21 in Hebrew. Peter stripped to fish. Revelation 16:15 is about being ready for Jesus’ return (believers are ready) rather than all nudity being shameful. The modern Pharisees are suggesting bringing back mandatory long sleeves for men’s shirts. Things that are exciting in America are like seeing elbows to a native of a tropical island or to a physician with proper clinical detachment. If everything a belt doesn’t cover was as familiar as elbows, people wouldn’t be as sex-crazed. Think of the horrifying stories of rape gangs from the news; those seem to come from the countries where ankles are exciting. As I am writing this, someone in Germany is probably playing volleyball nude in a public park because they have culturally different ideas about when nudity is sexual and when it is not than we do in quasi-Puritan America. Cultures that grow up around wine with dinner seem to have fewer problems with youthful binge drinking. Because it's not a big deal to them, it's less fetishized. We have developed a similar complex about nudity and sex. God dressed Eve with a “belt” made of animal skin after the Fall, so pejorative language that is baked into us culturally like “topless” can be replaced with “fully dressed”. People should be able to feed their children without any fuss. Men without shirts are not legally “indecent” at present where I am writing this, and God did not make women any more “indecent” than men. There were a few marches illustrating this point a few years ago from the time of this writing.

Just to be clear, in the Bible sex is the act by which God’s Image is propagated; it involves penetration with a natural penis (1 Kings 1:4 concerns the inability to do so). Remember all of those instances of someone “knowing” their wife and a kid popping out? The other warm-up stuff we've attached to it is crawling with human rules. An analogy: Other bands open for The Rolling Stones, you can hear them at the Stones' concert, but if you left after the opener, you didn't see the Stones. Unregenerate high schoolers’ notion of what “going all the way” means is accurate, and this is no surprise given Paul’s discussion of the lingering Gentile conscience in Romans 2:14-15. Kissing is a greeting in the cultures in the Bible. Oral stimulation (male-to-female and female-to-male) is spoken of approvingly and poetically in the Song of Songs/Solomon even before the characters get married. In Song of Songs/Solomon 3:4 referencing the “mother’s house” would have been when the characters were not married yet, and Song of Songs/Solomon 3:11 “wedding” is still betrothal because they’re still haggling about the dowry in Song of Songs/Solomon 8:12. In Song of Songs/Solomon 7:1-9 the woman is described from the floor up. The “navel” that is somehow described before the waist can also be translated as “vulva”. Do people think Solomon was talking about tasty bellybutton juice? A lot of guys could be treating their wives a lot better than they do. Song of Songs/Solomon 2:3, 4:16, and 8:2 are a bit subtler; some have pointed out Mark 7 about not being defiled by what enters via the mouth in regard to such matters as well. The camp dancer mentioned in Song of Songs/Solomon 6:13 may refer to a stripper. Since neither dancing nor shirtlessness is sinful, on paper a strip club is a fairly normal environment, but realizing that it’s not even naughty dissuades people from paying large sums of money there; forbidden fruit tends to be more alluring than permissible fruit. God has a few clear expectations, and we have much cultural baggage. 

In Genesis 38, Onan spilled his seed on the ground and was struck dead. This has been used historically to support anti-masturbation and anti-birth control messages. However, in that arrangement Onan was supposed to be providing an heir for his dead brother. This is called "Levirate marriage" and can be read about in detail in Deuteronomy 25:5-10. The prohibition about sleeping with a brother's wife ends at death. In those days, the only "immortality" people understood was being remembered by descendants and the passing on of a name. Also, women had no financial safety net. By refusing to impregnate Tamar, Onan could have kept using her sexually while leaving her destitute as he inherited everything his brother's line would have gotten from Judah. Unsurprisingly, the God who defends widows defended a widow. Genesis 38 seems like a random story inserted into the Joseph tale, but taking a closer look after Onan's death, we see Judah not wanting to lose the youngest treasured son of his dead wife, which was the same situation Judah’s father Jacob faced when he was asked to send Benjamin to Egypt so food could be purchased. Being in Jacob's shoes gave Judah the empathy later to volunteer to be a slave so Benjamin could go free. This redemption of Judah "earns" his spot as an ancestor of Jesus. Also, notice that God slew Er and Onan for wickedness, but Judah and Tamar's non-temple prostitution drew no lightning bolts. The reason Tamar was almost executed when her pregnancy was discovered was that she was still technically betrothed to Shelah; having sex with an engaged woman was the same death penalty offense as adultery. The Hittite version of Levirate marriage involves the father-in-law. As for other non-procreative activities, we covered the actual meanings of the 1 Corinthians 7 passage used to forcibly obtain relations from unwilling spouses back in the discussion about divorce. Righteous David treated plenty of his concubines like royal widows; mandatory sex in marriage is mistaken at best and malevolent at worst. The man, whether as dead below the waist as Abe seemed to be or not, that buys his wife a marital aid to avoid depriving her is just admirably providing for her as a husband does; the dildo metaphor from Ezekiel 16:17 was about misusing the blessings God had given them to make idols. If He had a problem with marital aids for natural non-Romans 1:26-27 urges, He would have mentioned it back in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20.

The Catholic Church somehow arrived at celibate clergy despite Paul’s endorsement of family men as elders (1 Timothy 3), his assertion of the right to take a believing wife on his journey (1 Corinthians 9:5), and the fact that the first “Pope”, Peter, was married (Luke 4:38-39). The Church was partially influenced by Aristotle, especially by way of Aquinas. A particularly Aristotelian trait to look for is an obsession with the telos, the proper end or purpose, of an object or activity. An acorn's telos is an oak tree. Since the highest purpose of sex is bringing the Image of God into the world, there are many rules about its proper use. However, the Aristotelian tendency was to limit the use of something only to its telos. In the Middle Ages, rape was considered less evil than masturbating because the seed at least was planted where a baby might happen. The early Church "fathers" wrote about the patriarchs as if they only ever ejaculated when they fathered biblical characters. Let's consider the Scripture with the common sense that God gave us. We've already discussed the distinction in Leviticus 15 between release of any kind and release with a woman. Some commentators try to limit that to nocturnal emissions, but God made sure to tell the Hebrews to cover their excrement and wash their clothes for ritual reasons, so why would lying there until you soil yourself be a logical plan? The God who foils attempts to summarize Him by issuing commands about boiling young goats in their own mothers' milk designed man to urinate through his member of procreation, defeating attempts to define its "only" purpose. He'll give you a way out of temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13), and sometimes that way out is the convenient design feature of easily reachable genitals (1 Corinthians 12:18). I have even seen some commentators say that you don’t even have to watch porn to be addicted to it, since in its absence, the human brain naturally dreams up its own in order to obtain release. Why would a Teacher worried about "seed waste" tell us The Parable of the Sower, in which the farmer indiscriminately sows seed on footpaths, rocky places, etc.?  

To expect a chronically ill spouse to “meet needs” because people read Paul as if he said that they ought to is unloving, and expecting nothing from that person can be Christlike. I've had allegedly Christian counselors tell me to leave my wife since they think it’s not a marriage if you cannot remember the last time that you had relations. Jesus will never leave or forsake us, and I am staying. My wife was born with a neuromuscular condition. It got worse at puberty, but she was still able with great effort to get a college degree and a job. Then, for no reason the doctors could find, she got worse. Depending on what her condition is doing in a given season, sex is painful and can worsen/prolong episodes of painful involuntary muscular contractions. I am more like a father and a butler to her now, because that is what she needs me to be. Forcing relations on her would be cruel. Kindling the old attraction to her would be an enticement to wrongdoing depending on how her disease is doing. We have prayed about it; her condition is not due to her sins or my sins because Christ took them away. The blind man Jesus healed in John 9 had his condition for similarly mysterious reasons. Paul’s thorn in the flesh was not taken away because Father’s grace was sufficient for him. There is a brother in Christ out there that will probably never read this book. He is a kind man that is more likely to mow a widow's lawn than read. He's taking care of a wife struggling with alcoholism. He's staying with her, like Jesus said to do in the only command in 1 Corinthians 7 among Paul's many suggestions. I've seen the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in his bathroom. I don't know if the mainstream Christian prohibition of such things ever made a dent in his psyche, but I want him to know that the only thing wrong with how he's handling what life has given him would be ever thinking he's doing wrong and doing it anyway. The legalists are more likely to transgress any number of correctly-translated verses about being judgmental and exclusionary regarding his situation than that one thing.  

Viewing Paul the former Pharisee’s marital advice against a first century Roman pagan backdrop, a disgusting grocery store illustration (looking back at our earlier discussion of idol meat) seems to be in order. Men, you can look at a cantaloupe, you can feel a cantaloupe, but if you penetrate the cantaloupe it is yours forever; if you do that in full view of the rest of the shoppers it is illegally obscene and can damage your reputation and your church’s reputation. The same rules apply to women in the non-pagan ancient world. The regular guys in decades past that made strip clubs legal and full-intercourse brothels illegal were thinking like churchmen of past ages. Jesus was invited to many dinners with many sinners. These were Greek symposia that could get you a reputation as a glutton and a drunkard. Dancers like Salome wouldn’t be out of the question at these gatherings (Mark 6:22). I didn’t tell your whole men’s Sunday School class to run out to the strip club. But, if you did celebrate after an afternoon of building a wheelchair ramp for a church member, made sure to tip the less popular workers too since they have kids to feed, and maybe shared with them the Good News that God loves them unconditionally, Jesus already did everything necessary for them to come home, eternal life is free for the asking, and any behavior change He wants will be powered by His indwelling Spirit (Romans 14:4, Philippians 1:6, Philippians 2:13, Hebrews 13:20-21, and Jude 24) if they happened to ask you per 1 Peter 3:15, I think that you would be closer to the spirit of our mission to go into all the world for Jesus than if we just kept putting on our best Sunday outfits to sing “Just As I Am” with the respectable people. The woman who rubbed her hair on Jesus' feet would be judged out of most churches within driving distance of me, and the hypothetical stripper converts probably would be, too. 

There is a certain breed of legalist that winds up focusing entirely on the things of this world rather than Heaven (Colossians 3:1-2). I am not trying to facilitate chasing a bunch of new experiences. I’m in part showing you where the line is way over there, where you in all likelihood will never be led to go. I’m mostly trying to free Christians from human-invented teachings that ultimately encourage sinning anyway or force believers to fight themselves, considering natural impulses as attacks by the Enemy (crediting him as too powerful). I say these things so the average Spirit-filled person can have a sigh of relief and make it to the grocery store and back without re-praying a Sinner’s Prayer for lost salvation after a lifetime of Arminian programming due to seeing a sorority car wash on the corner. Nevertheless, someone will worry that new-hearted believers will hear teaching like this and become perverts. As a preemptive measure, let me address questions seen on similar biblical defenses for those checking the border: “You mean eating ain’t cheating, and sucking ain’t fu…” Let me stop you right there. Yes, that’s right. Song of Songs/Solomon endorses those activities even in a pre-marital context, but your primary concern is still Jesus and the advance of His Kingdom; I’m not saying to chase every experience you are allowed to have with abandon. Kissing is a greeting, and touching/handling/tasting things that go away with use is not a problem per Paul in Colossians 2:20-23. Regarding the marital status of anyone involved, it is hard to characterize something as adultery that doesn’t even fit the definition of sex. Again, don’t do anything your spouse would find to be unloving (or coerce them into doing things they’re not comfortable with) or that will scandalize your fellow Christians. Addressing another concern seen on a similar biblical defense, it can also be proven that “masturbating, lesbians (to be continued), masturbating lesbians, masturbating to lesbians, etc.,” are all within the bounds of what is Scripturally permissible. Instead of mandating one lane like the modern Pharisees with their lazy 1 Corinthians 7 summary, which is a lot like the Marcionites denying much of Scripture, God looks at the totality of our options, plainly states which things are off-limits, and then leaves the rest to us. You are free in Christ. Believe, love, and avoid a few specific minefields for your own good as an always-entirely-forgiven person. 

Like I have said, I wrote this to free people that are under certain man-made teachings or that are stuck in bad situations. I tried it the legalists’ way. They tell you that if you would have just held out a little longer, the Promised Land was around the corner. Headaches, mental fog, bad sleep, stupidity, and being a threat to my patients’ well-being in general were demonic attacks on my “winning streak”? No, the evil one cannot touch us (1 John 5:18). Jesus spoke of the “eagerness for lustful pleasure” in Mark 7, not mere lust. That would mean going for it without regard to your partner’s gender, marital status, species, etc. Colossians 3:5 can be read as “Mortify… sexually immoral acts, impure thoughts, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence… covetousness is idolatry.” The “whatever belongs to your earthly nature” is not taken to refer to normal bodily functions by sane people. “Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the hunger of the belly, nor the urge to defecate?” No. Walking by the Spirit does not diminish desire for food, or for permissible sex, or for restroom visits, so “walking by the flesh” as opposed to the Spirit refers to specific sins enumerated in Scripture rather than mere desire at all. “The Flesh” is your old role, the way of human effort rather than trusting in His grace, the old patterns and ways to get by in life without God, etc. It is not the old self, as that died at the Cross. Jesus fixed our hearts, but we now renew our minds by learning the new way to live from the new heart. A dead flower can bloom in water, but it is still dead. Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:6 further clarifies that desire of evil things is the problem, not mere desire itself. He also said in 1 Thessalonians 4:5 not to lust in the manner that the pagans do, and verse 6 clarifies this as not to take advantage of a believer in this manner, which is understood by some translation teams as having sex with a fellow Christian’s wife. Peter in 1 Peter 1:14 says not to fashion yourself after former lusts, but he clarifies in 1 Peter 4:1-5 that it’s about not doing pagan stuff again. Paul in Galatians 5 contrasts both ways of living. Again, since God was picky about open defecation (Deuteronomy 23:12-14) and keeping clothes washed for ritual reasons, why would natural seminal incontinence (nocturnal emission) be His plan? The high priest wasn’t even permitted to sweat on duty. In Colossians 2: 

Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. (Colossians 2:20-23)   

Paul told them not to fall for don't touch/handle/taste as it does nothing about evil desires. Celibate priests that obey the Pharisee rules that eventually succumb to the lure of altar boys (Leviticus 18:22) provide one example. Hunger can tempt a thief to steal a sandwich, but the hunger and the sandwich are not evil apart from the thief’s involvement. I say what follows out of concern for the world as someone who knows how the Accuser approaches celibate caregivers: get some clarity. Priests, teachers, scoutmasters, anyone: If semen poisoning is making you want to sin, get it out on your own and cast it away. Waiting around white-knuckling it through life Caged Monkey HornyTM  does not historically produce great decisions. I know of guys that allegedly have trouble saying no to the twenty-somethings that ask them to sign off on internship hours that they did not work, and their Venn diagram overlaps with those who have to change channels in a panic whenever the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders appear. I had felt that I had given too much attention to this topic, but later that day a megachurch pastor that could have used this advice made us all look like hypocrites again.

The conscience can be programmed by anything. Much of our society’s moral instruction is provided through talk shows and fictional television plots written by unbelievers. There are plenty of scenarios used for easy drama now that just wouldn’t connect with the audience from back when the Bible was being written down. We are great at finding ways to be unhappy. “Emotional infidelity”, for instance, would be a real puzzle for people in the days of Samuel when a man could generally just add a new wife to the team without the rest of the wives’ input. Righteous David had a lot of wives and concubines, and evil Ahab only had Jezebel as far as we know. Someone will dismiss this line of thinking as “boys will be boys”, but yes, men and women will be as God made them with unique roles and responsibilities. Based on the practical applications of Scripture discussed so far in this book, someone may question how Christians are any different from the rest of the world. The real difference is Christ living in us and the resulting love, joy, peace, etc., more than a distinction in wardrobe or hobbies. Ladies, if your man looks at another woman, it probably doesn’t mean he loves you any less, it’s just how he’s wired. Love trusts (1 Corinthians 13:7). Does he treat you well? Does he exchange his limited time and effort on this planet for *NSYNC tickets and collectible plushies or whatever makes you happy? If you get mad at him, can you go vent to someone and come back home with reasonable certainty that he’s not going to abandon you, beat you, etc.? Men, your wives are people with minds of their own, and they’re not always going to think the same way that you do or look at the world through the same lens that you do. We were made different on purpose. Earthly human lifespans even these days make us mayflies in the eternal sense. God put up with a lot of foolishness from his “wife” (Old Testament Israel) for hundreds of years before “going Old Testament” on “her”; with lives on this planet as short as ours, our default setting should be patience and kindness toward our spouses, and that goes for everyone. 

In summary, 1) real unloving wanna-take-your-stuff-from-you coveting is comparable to adultery in the same way that inappropriate anger is comparable to murder and 2) impure thoughts are of impure things defined specifically in the Bible. Now that the brethren have been edified, maybe my circumstances will change and my wife’s health will improve. If not, I am content. It's about knowing Christ in whatever circumstances you are in. "Father, I ain't got this but I know you do, so thanks!" is a fine prayer. Trust the Indwelling Christ to produce the fruit of the Spirit in any given situation rather than trying doomed fleshly efforts at rule-keeping. Philippians 4:13 is about getting by in any circumstance, but people have turned it into a sports power-up. God has shown His glory by aiding people in amazing feats, but that doesn't mean we all have to walk on water as proof of salvation because Peter got to do that once. Hence, if we see a brother being aided by the Spirit in feats of extreme non-horniness, that doesn't mean that much of what contemporary Christian authors deem sinful actually displeases our Father; that believer might have Paul’s gift of singleness (1 Corinthians 7:7). 

The gift of still reacting kindly to an ill-tempered wife (because she is ill – it’s the disease talking, it’s not her fault) when she's behaving like a bratty narcissist? THAT'S the Holy Spirit.

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