The first two clues to a godly marriage, parental counsel and the commitment of the will with its flip side of kindness, draw upon our human and cultural wisdom in making the right decision for marriage. Yet with all of our knowledge, we can only know with limited certainty. The Scriptures remind us that as thorough as we might be, we often make our judgments based on outward appearances. So now we enter the stage where God puts His seal on the very character of the person, with particular reference to that which makes the marriage bed sacred.
As Eliezer continues his mission to search for the right person, the emphasis is now on the purity of Rebekah’s life. The Scriptures say that she was “a virgin; no man had ever lain with her” (Genesis 24:16). At first sight, the description appears redundant. But the reason for that wording is that the Hebrew word translated here as “virgin” does not necessarily mean biological virginity. It can also be translated “young maiden.” So the writer emphasizes the qualification of her youth by the addition that she was also chaste, clearly describing her as a woman who had not taken sexual matters lightly, nor been caught up in some cultural mix of promiscuity. She had treated her body as the temple of the living God.
In giving oneself in marriage, there are few gifts a single, unwedded person can give his or her partner that are more sacred than the gift of purity. I am keenly aware that with the way our cultures have moved globally and the liberties we now take in sexual relations, many appreciate this lesson only after mistakes have already been made. Not only that, there is a growing tendency to see sexual purity as some kind of archaic imposition thrust upon consciences by religion to manipulate people’s guilt feelings and, hence, control individual morality through organized religion.
Recently, I read an article entitled “The No Mourning After Pill.” A new medication has been developed that chemically affects the brain to relieve posttraumatic stress syndrome—to take away the “mourning” after a heinous act or experience. It is especially helpful in treating soldiers returning from the battlefield, unable to deal with memories of the horrible atrocities they have witnessed. The writer concedes there are legitimate uses of this medication but then presents another fearsome problem that arises. “What use will we put it to,” he asks, “if the feeling of guilt haunts a rapist or a murderer? Are we going to eradicate that which nature has intended?”1
Fascinating, isn’t it? We do not know what to do with feelings of shame and guilt that are legitimate, so we just put them down to “nature.” Our philosophical sophistication today has administered ideas that numb the soul and then cavalierly dismisses those who wish to remind us that the feeling of wrong may have been a corrective against the mitigation of the profane. Notions of abstinence or purity are now the subject of academic mockery and are implicitly ridiculed by icons of entertainment. First we dismiss sin with a verbal anesthetic, then we develop drugs to suppress any sense of responsibility. The truth is that even philosophically we ought to be able to see the hypocrisy we are dealing with.
On one occasion a press reporter challenged me by charging that Christians hold to a double standard when they say they are against racism but at the same time are prejudiced against homosexuality. “Is that not somewhat duplicitous?” she chided. I knew she was genuine in her concern, so I said, “Race is a very sacred thing. It is the gift of God to each individual. It is something in which we had no choice or say.We were born with our ethnicity; it is not a culturally assigned quality. Therefore, it should never be violated. In the same way, sex is a gift of God, to be treated with sanctity.We protect sexuality from being violated as much as we protect race from being violated. It is you who have to explain to me why you treat race as sacred and at the same time desacralize sexuality. That is where the duplicity really lies.”
There was an ominous silence on her part and then she said, “I have never thought of it that way.”
Isn’t it amazing that we can go through life holding passionately to our views, yet never pausing to ask ourselves why that view is inviolable? Life and sex are gifts, and marriage shares them to the fullest.
Sometimes we wonder what it is about sex that makes it at once one of the most desired and yet mistake-ridden experiences. What is it about the way that we are fashioned that gives us this “good-news-bad-news” combination? It is good news in that sex is pleasurable, bad news in that the parameters seem so stringent. We must go back to the created order to find the answer.
Sex is not something that happened just by accident, nor is it some kind of pragmatic human invention. It is not something that we just came upon and experimented with. Sex was created and planned by God for specific purposes.We have already discussed the first glimpses of Adam’s life and made note that God made woman in such a way that she would meet a need for intimacy that was uniquely her privilege and disposition toward man and vice versa. He did not make them identically. If God had merely wanted companionship for Adam, He Himself could have provided it. If He had wanted fraternity, He could have made another man. Instead, He fashioned a woman— equality with a difference and a distinction, psychologically and biologically. These distinctions were undergirded spiritually. This is a point often missed by the average person who argues with tension on matters of gender.
Think for a moment. Are all races equal? Yes. But are there differences? Absolutely. Do those differences make it one’s right to dominate the other? No.
Is every member of a family equal in essential value? Yes. Does that mean they are all equal in capacity? No. Does that give one member a right to subordinate the other in terms of worth? No.
Why, then, from the macrocosmic picture of races and the microcosmic picture of families are we not able to lift the lesson for gender relations? The design of God for the first man and woman was to give them unique distinction with purpose and primacy. It was a relationship He designed in such a way that it would take flesh to fulfill—I dare say—in keeping with the spirit.
Even God did not enter into that kind of relationship in that fashion. The reason He made man and woman was that in our physical makeup, physical intimacy bound by the spiritual is something unique to the human relationship. There are indications of what this means in the spiritual realm that must be carried over to the physical.We will get to that.
THE DIFFERENCE IS MORE THAN IMAGINARY
Recently, I was in a country that is battling the scourge of prostitution on a massive scale. So much money has now become involved that no one dares try to bring it to a halt. In the newspaper articles about all that is going on to perpetuate the financial side of prostitution, I read a most heartbreaking story. Young men, seeing the great profit in prostitution, are having their bodies surgically altered so that they can market themselves to men who desire a female prostitute for the night. The result is now that scores of men who have paid for the services of a prostitute think that they have been with a woman, when all the while they have been with a man who has been surgically altered into a woman for the sheer purpose of making money.
I cannot fathom the extent of this tragedy. In stark terms, it is the sheer folly of the imagination unhinged from reality. It is the physical disfigurement of the body that cheats the pleasure seeker. It is the double-edged sword of each demeaning the other while satisfying the baser instincts at the cost of the other. What is real has been masked, and the result is distortion for one and deception for the other. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” they say, but I ask you, Is this not the desecration of what is real? With the incredible strides that science and technology are making, it is more and more difficult to know what is real and what is counterfeit. God reminds us that there is a reality.He has fashioned us for a specific purpose. Gender does make a real difference that is not imagined or engineered.
Having established the basis of the difference between man and woman, we see now that God gives a common ground and purpose that bring the diversities between a man and a woman into unity, a unity that is greater than love. The diversity is not cultural or conditioned by inclination; it is normative. Take a look at this narrative in the Book of Exodus, beginning in chapter 25, to see what we mean here.
Moses went to the top of Mount Sinai in order to meet with God and receive God’s instructions for their worship as a people. In that encounter, he was given detailed directions on how to build the tabernacle. One might wonder at such specificity. It was to be so long and no longer, so wide and no wider, so high and no higher. It was to be such and such a color. It was to have a specific number of curtain rods and curtain rings. It was to be a certain shape and have certain dimensions. No one was to touch such and such except so and so. Everything was meticulously presented in a detailed way, and just in case Moses missed it, the design was repeated later in the book with the same precision.We have every right to ask,What is going on here?
We see the answer in some very profound words that we might easily miss at a cursory reading. God says, “Moses, when you have finished building this tabernacle, exactly as I have told you, there I will meet with you. There I will dwell with you” (see Exodus 25:8; 29:44–46). There is a twofold emphasis here—the tabernacle is to be a place of meeting God and a place of communion with Him.
Bring this detail into our modern-day setting. We have local churches where we meet together as believers.We no longer go to Mount Sinai to meet God.Why not? Because the place of the tabernacle and the temple is now replaced by the body—your body and mine—in which God meets with us and God dwells with us, and where we have communion with Him. When we come to the church now, we don’t come to the sanctuary; we bring our sanctuaries with us. This individual entity is the locus of appointment between God and me. There He meets. There He dwells. Will the God who went to such pains to physically decorate the tabernacle and the temple not also take great care in physically designing the human body?
During a recent visit to Oxford, England, a local minister took me for a long walk to the chapel at Keble College. It is one of those grand schools with a history as fascinating as its buildings. We walked into the chapel and stood there for just a few moments, saying nothing. Any sound would have seemed invasive. The craftsmanship from centuries earlier brought the realization that for some, this work was that of a lifetime.
We then proceeded to the front, turned to the right and, through a small door, entered a private chapel. There, at the altar, hung one of the most famous paintings in the world, Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World.Many have seen it, but few study it. The full figure of Jesus, with a lantern in His hand, is standing by a door with no latch on the outside, the path to it overgrown by weeds. It is based on Revelation 3:20: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” As Jesus is knocking on the door, the expression on His face leaves you with the uncanny impression that He knows exactly who is inside and longs to have fellowship, if only He would be let in. The lantern symbolizes the conscience; the gently lit face of the Lord radiates a light that is so hard to describe. There is a brilliance that seems to come from within His very being. The conscience is the point of contact; His presence is the indwelling light that reveals what is good and what is evil.
The Lord who made us and knows our struggles comes knocking. He knows the frailties that limit us in the battle and comes to offer a different glimpse, a different strength, and a different path by which to live. That path places a noble value on sexual purity. Is it any wonder that a generation that has become profane of speech and violent in entertainment scoffs and belittles those who wish to treat a person’s body as sacred? Sexual promiscuity is condemned in the Ten Commandments for the same reason murder is condemned in the Ten Commandments—it is the marring of the image of God.
If God has reminded us that His desire is to dwell with us and to meet with us in the sanctity of the human body, the violation of that locus destroys its purpose. In an article some years ago, Dr. James Dobson quoted a letter he had received that sums up the ache of a mistake better than I can say it:
It was as if I physically felt a loss. Throughout our years together, he had taken my self-respect, my self-esteem, my pride, my womanhood, my virginity, my capacity for love, and my future and discarded it as “unwanted.” Looking back I didn’t realize it then, but when I begged him to come back to me, I lost the last drop of myself. After our final break up, I went on to a Christian college and he went his own way. . . . Two years later, I met and married my husband. My husband is the world to me. He is everything I thought my former boyfriend was or was going to be. He is wonderful to me.We have a lovely home, stable income and beautiful young son who is our joy. However, there is a part of me I cannot share with him, because I gave it to my boyfriend back in high school . . . to me, that is the very private, very painful, very tormenting consequence I cannot change. So the point is—there is a price. You may or may not pay with pregnancy or VD, but you will certainly pay. . . . I know God’s forgiveness, and I continually pray that He will restore the years the locusts have eaten. . . . Writing this letter has been on my heart for a long time. Please convey the message to teens and college students. . . . The consequences you pay most severely and most personally are paid emotionally.2
That is as realistically stated as I have ever read. “The consequences you pay most . . . are paid emotionally.” The thing that spurred you on to act is the very thing you injure—your emotions. Guarding the act preserves the emotions. Spending in the act bankrupts the emotions. That is the way God has made us. If you are someone whom the errors of the past or present still haunt, it is not my intention to pour oil on the flames of guilt. The realization is painful enough. And that is what I wish to emphasize for those struggling with this matter while still on the right side of temptation.
Unfortunately, this seduction has felled kings and robbed them of kingdoms. It has plundered marriages and broken homes. It has cost many tears and much heartache. The Scriptures give us some grim reminders. I borrow first of all from an all-too-familiar story that is often read so quickly that we miss what is being said in the fine print of the background.
The story of King David and his tragic alliance with Bathsheba must be read in tandem with a simple incident in David’s life years later that speaks volumes of his memory and his recognition of what that relationship had cost him. While the story of his adultery with Bathsheba is given to us in 2 Samuel 11, the incident to which I refer comes to us from 2 Samuel 23. It is one of the last scenes of David’s life. In the incident with Bathsheba the nation was at war, while David was at home. In chapter 23 David was again at war and away from home. The Philistines had surrounded the city of Bethlehem and David, separated from his beloved hometown, voiced his longing that he could once more have a drink of water from the well in Bethlehem.
Overhearing him, some of his most fearless men who loved David decided that they would take the risk to bring him water from Bethlehem. In a cloak-and-dagger operation they succeeded in creeping behind the Philistine lines, drawing the water, and getting out again.When they presented David with a container filled with water from the well in Bethlehem, he was surprised and deeply touched. This was when he made a very surprising decision.
As he raised the cup to his lips to drink, he stopped. Suddenly, he realized what an extremely selfish act it was to jeopardize even inadvertently the lives of these brave and loyal men just so that he could get momentary pleasure from that hometown taste. He gradually lowered the cup and then poured the water onto the ground, saying, “‘Far be it from me, O LORD, to do this! . . . Is it not the blood of men who went at the risk of their lives?’ And David would not drink it” (2 Samuel 23:17).
I bring that little incident before you to ask a question.Why do you think he said that? More to the point, had he said the same thing when he saw Bathsheba while her husband was risking his life to secure David’s kingdom, would not all of Old Testament history have been different? In taking Bathsheba, he took what did not belong to him and the result was a trail of death and destruction. That one hour of delight brought the entire nation under the specter of the sword and judgment. One has only to read of the antics of Solomon, son of David and Bathsheba, to notice that the family had caused the entire nation to witness one seduction after another, so that rapacity became commonplace.
Then came that pivotal moment when God denied David’s desire and prayer to build a temple for the Lord because of the blood on his hands. He had minimized the sanctity of the human body, and building the temple was not to be his privilege. Reluctantly, God granted Solomon the privilege, but history reminds us of what happened there. Indeed, Solomon built the temple. But soon the temple reflected the people’s lives and became a place of spiritual harlotry.
As goes a person’s life of sexual honor or dishonor, so goes the possibility of one’s worship being true or adulterous.While I am writing these words the well-known basketball star Kobe Bryant finds himself in court, facing the charge of sexual assault. The sad truth about Kobe Bryant’s case is that he is known publicly for being a decent, fad-resisting individual. He is one of very few “clean-cut” public figures.Now his fans must wonder if his public persona was a masquerade, hiding an indulgent private life. One newspaper writer had this to say: “People tend to make their deposits into the moral bank accounts in the light of day. But they slink up to the ATM under cover of darkness. How are we supposed to know in the end, whether they’re overdrawn or not?”3
The answer was given in the article itself. Sooner or later, for most, the moral cost is exacted internally and the external ramifications are only a short distance away.
I cannot reiterate this warning enough. And I must speak especially to young men, and please forgive me for being so blunt. Over the years as I have spoken both on scores of secular university campuses and at Christian institutions, I have found that the differences in actual practice are not very great. That is an alarming fact. Some go to a theological institution thinking they will be in a “temptation-free” zone with halos around their heads. They soon find out that lives are wrecked there, too, in the area of sexual temptation.
A memory of one such college stands out in my mind. I spoke there for five days. I had taken my wife because I had assumed that since my speaking engagements were in the morning and evening, we would be free to have some time together through the day.
I could not have made a more incorrect judgment. As the meetings unfolded and God began to move in the hearts of the students, sign-up sheets for personal appointments were filled every day. I remember two things well. By the week’s end I had only one meal with my wife as the rest of the time was spent nursing students through their wounds of regret. The second thing I recall was that of all the students who signed up to talk with me, only one came to talk about something other than sexual failure. That is an indication of what is happening on a typical campus, and the signals are terrifying for the future of the home and the family.
You see, marital vows incorporate a very special commit-ment—“ to have and to hold” cannot apply with the same connotation to any other relationship.
The Lord gives us very good insight on how temptation works. In James 1 we see the sequence set forth. Observing how the enemy of our souls sets up the temptation will really clarify how the sequence works.
His first step is to make temptation appear as a natural desire. It is something unequivocally physical and human. Satan came to the Lord Jesus in the wilderness in the first instance to tempt Him with a natural hunger—the need for bread. As Jesus continued to rebuff him, the devil finally got to the core of temptation. He showed Jesus “the kingdoms of this world” and said, “All this will I give to you, if you will bow down and worship me” (see Matthew 4:1–11).
The key to understanding what is going on here is that “the kingdoms of this world”were ultimately neither his nor his to give. What was he offering, then? It was the enchantment of the eye to go for the shell of existence while losing the essence of one’s being. You cannot really have the world and hold on to it. It is all too temporary and the more you try to hold on to it, the more it actually holds you. By contrast, the more you hold on to the true and the good, the more you are free to really live. Where then, does the appeal of temptation lie? It lies in the eyes and in the imagination. One sees without perceiving; the other enjoys without realizing.
The eye is often called the window of the soul. This means, I believe, that not only is it a window through which one may look in, but it is also a window through which one may look out. The best advice I can give a young man is to train the eye. Where the eye is focused, there the imagination finds its raw material. The right focus must be won at immense cost and discipline. Train the eye to see the good, and the imagination will follow suit. It is not at all a surprise that with the invention of television and now the Internet, lives are in serious trouble at younger and younger ages. The imagination is taken captive by handcuffing the eyes.
I remember Billy Graham once being interviewed by English television personality Sir David Frost.At one point Frost asked Dr. Graham if temptation and lust were as much an issue for one in so high a calling, one who walks the straight and narrow so well. Billy Graham looked obviously uncomfortable because it is such a personal subject. He answered it in a very memorable way.
He said that one of his associates was having a campaign in Paris years ago, and on the way back from the meeting, the offerings of the night were hard to ignore. When he got back to his room, he felt such inordinate pressure from the sights he had seen that he was afraid he would make a choice that night that could spell his ruin. It was one of those older hotels that require a large key to lock or unlock the door regardless of which side of the door you are standing. So he locked the door from the inside, walked to the narrow window, and threw the key outside to land in the dirt below.He later told Billy Graham this story and said, “I had to do something that drastic if I was to keep my commitment to God and to my wife.” David Frost was obviously quite moved by that story. It was evident that a good man had done the only thing he could think of to do when he knew the situation demanded the absence of choice.
This little illustration has two edges. First is the power of the eye to seduce. Second is the choice to remove the temptation from before the eye. This is the closest metaphorical application I know from the Sermon on the Mount.His eye was offending him, so in effect, he “cut it off.” It could no longer see or have access to what was enticing it. The morning would come and the bright light of the sun would expose the deceit of the neon lights from the night before and the clean heart within—I can assure you he felt great in the morning.
This leads to the second step in temptation, the touch. Unfortunately, the one area in which the West has taken a public lead is in the area of touch. Once again, the strength of a relationship is tested when we make it something casual and then profane it. How one touches a member of the opposite sex is a key component of how a situation may develop and where it could lead. This is something we ought not to trifle with.
As a young teenager I learned to dance, and I loved it. It was all in innocent fun, I thought. But it did not take long to realize how easy it is to flirt with danger, for much can be lost when touch and rhythm combine. Around that time I read an author who said something that at the time I thought unrealistic. But with each reading and observation I think he was right. Granted the language is a bit dated, but there is merit to what he said.
The tendency of the modern dance is to take the fine edge off the modesty of both young men and young women. A blacksmith can no more handle the tools of his trade without hardening his hands than a girl can be clasped in the embrace of promiscuous men and still keep her sensitiveness to the questionable and to the unclean.When we consider, therefore, the thousands that are engaging night after night in the modern dances, our wonder is not that so many go wrong, but rather that so many hold their footing upon such slippery places.4
He buttresses this point in another context:
Take, for example, our stage folk. They are neither better nor worse to begin with than the average. They are just ordinary human beings. But they play at love-making so much that it loses all its sacredness. Caresses become cheap and common things to be dispensed to almost any passer-by. Such a girl, to use a figure from James Lane Allan, becomes like a bunch of grapes above a common path where everybody that passes takes a grape. He who takes does so without reverence and to his own impoverishment. In the golden coin of real and abiding affection such spendthrifts soon become utter bankrupts.5
Where does it all begin? It begins by playing at touch without the real commitment of love. I challenge you to abide by a principle (and only you can seek the mind of God in this) that would be my desire for my children. Be careful, especially in those moments you spend together alone. One principle Margie and I followed in our dating was that we would never be alone together without being accessible to somebody in either a public or a home setting. If we were in her home,we’d be talking in the living room, and when we were in my home, my parents always had access to us. Such precautions aren’t absolutely foolproof, but they help reduce the margin of error. The apostle Paul says in Romans 13:14, “Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” In other words, do not put yourself in a place where you can fall.
There remains just one more thing that I would like to say about purity. We are given to think of these qualities as the absence of something—no illicit relationship, no lustful inclination. If we only see purity on those terms, we miss the true nature of what is pure. I want to lift you to see one of the most glorious revelations revealed to any of the apostles, and that was to John the Revelator, in the Book of Revelation, chapter 21.
As John was transported in a vision to heaven, he was utterly surprised by something he did not see. He remarked with utter consternation that there was no temple in heaven. But his consternation turned to joy when he realized that there is no need for a temple in heaven because the Lord Himself is present with His people. There is no need for an intermediary through which to commune with God.
Ultimate purity is a positive state, not a negative state. It is a matter of presence rather than of absence. The immediate presence of God transcends the intermediateness of the temple. In that sense, even the body will one day be shed because God will be all in all. In anticipation of that day, let the temple of the body be pure so that it points beyond itself to the very presence of God in marital commitment. That is why the Lord reminds us that as physical as the sexual act is, the marriage bed remains undefiled because His presence sanctifies the act. That is the privilege of a man and woman coming together in consummating the physicality of love, representing the spiritual bond between the two. For Isaac and Rebekah, that was a covenant worth defending.