Maybe you've heard these objections to the Christian view of sex and marriage: “Why does God care about who a person sleeps with?” Or “If no one is being hurt, what’s the big deal?” And “Love is love, right!?” Many Americans believe that the purpose of sex is simply to connect on an intimate level, or even to connect with another person in an enjoyable way. Although sex ought to be both intimate and enjoyable, it can be twisted into something that does a lot of harm. One writer observed,
If we use sex in a disordered way, it can be one of the most destructive forces on earth. Look around you at the suffering of children brought up without fathers, the scourge of pornography destroying the imagination of millions, the families broken by infidelity and abuse, and on and on.
Our culture boasts of a certain kind of freedom related to sexuality (freedom from the constraints laid upon us by previous prude generations or freedom from repressive religions). What many people are coming to realize, however, is that it isn’t freedom we’ve discovered but a new kind of slavery—one that leaves us feeling empty, lonely, and often used. God stands with the used and abused and promises to avenge them. Paul said,
For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. (1 Thess. 4:3–6)
When Paul spoke of wronging someone through sexual sin, he used the Greek word pleonekteō, which means “to take advantage of someone, usually as the result of a motivation of greed,” or to “exploit, outwit, defraud, cheat.” Think of taking something that doesn’t belong to you for selfish reasons. Through sexual sin, we objectify others and use them as a means for our own gratification. What’s so heinous about this is that when we objectify another person, we dehumanize them in a sense. We’re no longer treating them as individuals but as a means to our pleasure. This is why God cares about who we sleep with.
If you asked any sane person today what they thought about racism, they’d say it is disgusting and a stain on American society. We recognize that the objectification of another person is wrong in things such as the American slave trade and see how it tragically dehumanized people and treated them as property for personal fulfillment. We don’t often see how this same dehumanization and objectification are happening all around us through things such as Internet pornography, sexual promiscuity, and adultery. Sexual sin treats precious image-bearers of God like objects or property and has an enslaving effect on the very ones engaging in it. This is why God stands in defense of the sexually abused; he knows they’ve been exploited and that his image was assaulted in the process.
Footnotes
https://www.barna.com/research/what-americans-believe-about-sex/.
Dreher, The Benedict Option, 196.
J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2019), 757.
W. Arndt, F. W. Danker, and W. Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 824.
