Clough Proverbs Lesson 77
DI #3: Principles of Divine Institution Number One and
Two; Sex
Today we come to
the section of the third divine institution, one of the last few areas. This is going to be one of those sessions
where you’re going to have to fasten your seat belts, those of you who are a
little prudish because we’re going to deal with the areas of the Bible that
have to do with sex and how this is the norms and standards of this that should
be taught to children and how the norms and standards carry over into various
details of life. Before we get to that
area we want to make sure we understand the section that we’re dealing with and
the context.
We’re dealing with
the social training in the family and we have dealt with certain principles of
that social training. The first one was
that the individual must contribute character to a group. Generally speaking the only kind of character
that’s ever transmitted from a group to an individual is bad character. This is why the Word of God warns us about
the wrong crowd. But apart from the
wrong crowd, generally speaking, the only character any group has, whether that
group is a national entity, whether that group is a state, whatever that group
is it is given to it by individuals.
Therefore, application to the first principle: the biggest issue in a
child’s life is his spiritual character, more than his intellectual
education. And I emphasize that because
I know there are lot of people who worship the degree. As long as their little darling can have a
degree they’re set up for life. Now that
is absolute human viewpoint. There’s
nothing wrong with having a degree, it’s good to have. But it means nothing without the character
that is given to an individual by the Holy Spirit after they become Christian. And if that character is not there you can
have all the degrees you want and it doesn’t mean a thing.
Some of the people
with the strongest character, some of the people who are more responsible for
making the local church move are people who have never finished high
school. In fact a person that I’ve known
over many, many years is a fellow who never went to college and for many, many
years he was a
The second thing
is the individual’s value and this also must be taught to the child is to watch
group respect, not popularity. The issue
is not popularity. The issue is whether
or not we have the respect of a group of people. This is very hard to tell in some cases but
the Word of God in Proverbs emphasizes the individual’s value is proportional
to the group respect and this is what if it’s lacking causes a lot of mental
problems. Then we dealt with three
areas, the sins of thought, the sins of words, and the sins of deeds. These areas all have to do with the mechanics
of spirituality and today we come to a sixth area of training in the family,
training children in that family for success in life, and that is the training
of the child in the mechanics of the divine institutions. We’re going to take two of these today, the
first and the second.
Now let me say at
the beginning that if a child is taught the mechanics of the divine
institutions, how they work, that these institutions are God’s laws, not men’s,
that you may not like the way the way He set up these institutions, that is not
your prerogative to change them, these institutions have been established by
God in omniscience, and that God does know, in fact, what He is doing. And when He set up these institutions, though
they may cut across your personal grain, that doesn’t matter, these
institutions still stand. And mean can
try to break them, men can try to run them in the most stupid ways and the only
people that wind up getting hurt are the men; God never gets hurt, you never
can hurt God by breaking these institutions.
The only person you hurt is yourself, and that goes for every member of
the human race. You may be here this
morning and you may personally never have received Christ as Savior; you may
not be a Christian, you may care less about being a Christian. It doesn’t make any difference, these
institutions apply to you and they apply to all men. And you may think you can get away with
fiddling around, never can.
In the first
institution responsible labor is the clue; the second, marriage. Before we get to those we want to clarify
certain things that Christians often do about problems in these two
institutions and every time or ever week, not a week goes by that I don’t run
across this as pastor, well, we prayed about it and it seems okay. Or I’ve prayed about it and I think we ought
to do this. Or I’ve prayed about it and
we ought to do something else. These
institutions are laid down in the Word of God and you can pray about it from
now until hell freezes over and it’s not going to change the structure of these
institutions. You do not have to pray
about it; here’s one place where you don’t have to pray. You do not have to pray to God to find out
what He wants you to do in certain areas because He’s already told you. In fact, not going to the Word of God to find
out what to do in the first divine institution and the second one, and sitting
around praying about is actually an act of rebellion because God has clearly
laid out in detail upon minute detail how these institutions function and for
you and for me to thumb our nose at the Word of God and say well, we’ve got to
pray about it, which is just trying to maneuver God into a position where He
might grant us some sort of reprieve from the laws of these institutions, that’s
all it is.
Now in the first
divine institution there are certain principles that we have covered and I am
not going to review all these principles because we have taught them
previously. But I am going to take four
or five and show you areas of the life of the child where this first divine
institution can be taught and its principles.
One of the principles, we’re operating now with training a child in how
the first divine institution works, responsibility. Everything hinges on this; if but the child
does not understand volition and responsibility he really, theoretically can’t
be even won to Christ. Now God in grace
can do many wonderful things but a child has got to learn responsibility. 95% of the problems, the severe problems that
I run into in pastoral counseling come about, not by a violation of the second
divine institution, or the third or the fourth; it comes about by a violation
of the first.
Now the essence of
the first divine institution is volition, responsibility, and one of the first
lessons in a child’s life where you can do a lot to promote the concept of
responsibility is to knock off the excuses.
Now that is where children begin, right there, to undermine the
character of the first divine institution. I don’t care whether you told them
to pick up toys and they haven’t done it, to the point you’ve told them to be
in at a certain time and they haven’t done it.
Somewhere along the line there has to be somewhere in your home an
understanding as to what is and is not a proper reason. And if you start examining it you will find
that nine out of ten excuses are just that, excuses, no reason. Do now allow children to develop the –R
learned behavior pattern of excuse. Now
watch it, it is very easy to develop, always have an excuse why something
wasn’t done, or something that you told them or disobey what you said and
they’ve got a fine excuse. Now it
doesn’t require a genius I.Q. to come up with this nice sounding excuse. Children come into this quite naturally. You never have to teach a child how to make
excuses. Ever notice this? You have to teach them other things but for
some reason this just comes naturally.
Now that is exactly where, if you allow this pattern to develop in your
home you are undermining the first divine institution. And you can see the results all the way up
through marriage, all the way up through family, all the way up through nation,
all the way up into the international sphere when responsibility is denied, I
always have an excuse for something.
So the first thing
about watching, very practically in the life of a child, when you start seeing
a child develop a habit, day in, day out, I’ve got an excuse for this, I’ve got
an excuse for that, this didn’t happen because of so and so, this didn’t happen
because the situation was such and such and all the rest of it. That’s a lot of excuse. I’m sad or I am depressed because of so and
so. No you’re not; you’re sad and you’re
depressed because of the way you’re handling so and so. You’re not sad… nobody is ever made sad and
depressed by somebody else. You’re made
depressed by the way you have handled the situation; not someone else. Nobody else ever makes you depressed, that’s
an excuse, a very subtle one. Well, I’ve
got a tension headache because of so and so.
No you don’t, you have a tension headache because you don’t know how to
deal with so and so biblically. That’s
why. And that’s an excuse. See where excuses lead—medication and
drugs. That’s just the outcome of a
clever pattern of habitual excuses. So
the first place to knock off heresy of human viewpoint is in this business of
excuses, excuses for this, excuses for that.
And it’s very easy to stop this at the child’s level. It is very much more difficult to stop this
at the adult level.
Another area of
the first divine institution which should be emphasized and that is the wages
of sin, or we’ll just say moral cause and effect. God has designed us this way, there’s no
escape from it, this is always going to happen.
You cannot play with fire and not get burned. And you may play with it four or five times
and not get burned just because God is gracious to you and you think because
God is gracious to you four or five times He’s going to be gracious to you five
and six times and it isn’t so, because He may just decide that you’re
misinterpreting grace and He may just withhold His grace so you
understand. So in this area you will
warn children as taught in a very simple illustration of Genesis 4:7 where we
studied how “sin crouches at the door.”
And show a child that he has within himself a fantastic explosive
mechanism that can destroy him called the sin nature and if he continues out of
fellowship and negative volition and he trains that sin nature and he allows
that sin nature to take over, he will face times in his life when he has no
control over it.
It can be
illustrated in many, many ways. Take
some smart aleck teenager or something, he goes out, tries to show off and gets
arrested; the stupid kid never realizes that once he gets arrested that goes on
his record, and then when he goes to try to apply for a job, he goes in the
military, what’s he got? Just because he
was smarting off some place now he’s got this record to follow him around the
rest of his life. That was really
brainy. Then he gets resentful at the
people that keep the record. Well, whose
fault was it? His! You could illustrate it in many other
ways. You can point out the damage to
somebody sexually for playing around; you can show the damage physically from
various forms of addictions to drugs and so on.
All of this, “sin crouches at the door.”
That’s not talking about some ethereal thing way off; it’s talking about
something that’s close, it’s personal and it’s very, very dangerous.
Another area where
the first divine institution can be taught; not just in the area of no excuses
tolerated and this business of I think I can get away with it if I can do it
without the policeman catching me or my parents not knowing I can get away with
it. No you can’t, you’re not built to
get away with it; your central nervous system, you have a central nervous
system in your body that automatically starts programming your body based on
your behavior and it has no connection with the policeman or your parents. That’s just the way God made you; you’re not
going to get away with it. None of us
get away with it; all of us are carrying around and the older we are the more
crud we carry around because the more years we’ve had to develop patterns of
carnality. And time to nip these things
is in the bud, in youth.
All right,
responsibility, wages of sin, ownership of property is another area where you
can very practically teach a child what we mean by the first divine
institution. Now right here if you teach
the child the value of owning property you automatically lay the basis to
attack communism, socialism, and welfarism.
All the forms of welfarism are anti-God.
The greatest welfare system was the Old Testament. If the principles of the Old Testament were
applied socially there would never be anyone starve to death. Never!
And yet it would be done without centralized government
bureaucracy. The perfect welfare system
is done without the welfare state.
Individual ownership of property, it is capitalism, the free market,
that’s what you’re training your child in.
And when you give him something, whether it is a toy or whether it is
something else and that is his property then he is held accountable for how he
uses it. He is held accountable for how
he uses his time. If he fiddles around
and fiddles around and you have told him that something has to be done by 4:00
o’clock and they fiddle around and goof off, then they should be made to pay in
some way for that.
Don’t you help
them out of every little jam that your child gets into. Let him sweat it. It’s far better to let a child sweat it over
a small difficulty and learn what happens gradually than you constantly getting
him out of a jam. Like we have parents
in this city go down to the courthouse and watch how many teenagers get off
from their ticket because daddy or because momma comes trotting down to the
courthouse to talk to the right people and so on. That’s real smart, you’re training your
children real good with that kind of practice.
If the kid gets a ticket let him earn the money to pay for it. That’s making him sweat it. Now it’s not being cruel to do this, of
letting your child sweat the results of violating God’s laws in the small areas
first, even if it’s an hour of time that he’s wasted. All right, so he can’t watch television, he
was going to watch television, he was going to do the chores you told him to do
so he can’t watch television. Be
consistent; make him pay for the results.
That’s the only way they’re ever going to learn to have respect for property,
whether that property is a toy that you have given him and they just proceeded
to go out and smash it, or they proceeded to leave it outside when they should
pick it up, that is just disrespect for property. And if a child never learns respect for his
own property he can’t learn respect for someone else’s property. That’s a general principle. You have got to teach him respect for
property.
Now this is why
it’s so hard being a parent, a good parent, because it just wears you thin
trying to be consistent in all these areas.
It’s impossible; you just have to trust the filling of the Holy Spirit
to do it. But that is what a parent is
called to do in Scripture. Take another
area besides teaching a child the value of the ownership of property. To show him that he is responsible to produce
something, God has commanded man to work.
God has commanded man to bring forth something from the ground, he’s to
subdue things, he is to bring forth something worthwhile. And that can be started out with little
chores and little duties around the house.
What does has he produced, even if it’s helping make the bed or helping
do the dishes or something, what useful is he or she producing? It starts with the body, subduing the body,
subduing the old sin nature internally, subduing the environment externally for
Jesus Christ. Now those are the things
that a child must learn, that he has to be useful. Not be a perpetual bum; he’s got to
contribute something. What’s his
contribution, chaos or order; something fruitful or something destructive,
what’s his contribution? What’s he been
doing? What’s he been producing.
Now all of these
things sound hardnosed, sound very cold, sound very impersonal, no emotion with
it all but you know, the strange thing is, when these principles are followed
you get the warmth and you get the emotion, and you get the strong personal
relationships. Do you know why? Because this child is stable and happy because
he knows he’s right, he knows he’s produced, and he has a sense of his own
character that’s worthwhile. Now that
all comes about not by fooling around; it comes about by simply being trained
from baby on up, that God’s laws are out there and you can snub them, thumb
your nose at them, it doesn’t make any difference, the law still stands. If you drop a pencil it always falls down,
never up. And you may wish it would fall
up, it doesn’t. Try it, it keeps falling
down, whether you like it or whether you don’t, it still falls down. And that’s the same with these
principles. And a child has got to learn
whether he likes it or not you have to conform to the created order because
you’re a creature.
Another one, and
along with this production thing, something that you might point out
practically is to make the child more and more future oriented rather than
present oriented. Now that is a hard
lesson but that is one of the most valuable lessons that any child can
learn. It’s a key, actually, to the whole
Christian life, that is, that you make your decisions based on future pleasure,
not present pleasure. The
Bible-believing Christian who has depth of character will always be a future
oriented man, never a present oriented man.
A Christian never decides what to do solely on the basis of what is
presently the best thing to do. The
Christian always makes a decision on what is eternally fitting to do and that
means future oriented. So the more
biblically thinking your child, the more future oriented he’ll be. That goes from a simple job that I am not
going to give up until I finish this thing, and then in the future I will have
pleasure because I have done it. But you
can’t finish even the simplest thing in life if you’re not future
oriented. If you are perpetually present
oriented you’ll always be perpetually pleasure oriented, in the present sense
of the word, just be (?) in the cesspool of present pleasure that has no future
benefits whatsoever, just future payments is all.
So the Christian
who is biblically sound will always be future oriented. The ramifications of that one mental attitude
that you can teach your child will have fantastic repercussions in many, many
areas of life, in his student life, in his social life, in his business life,
in his economic life, it’s a revolutionary change. And, you today, operating in the human
viewpoint Americana, we have to fight very hard for this. Our whole society is basically present
oriented, so the child is surrounded always by constant pressure, do it now, do
it now, do it now, live now, get the real thing right now. All of that, from the commercials to the
school, instead of training in the old fashioned way of rigorous memorization
and discipline and repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, memory,
discipline and so on, which is a future oriented form of teaching because you
suffer now to reap the benefits later.
Instead of that,
what do we have? We’re going to sit down
in the classroom and share our ignorance.
And so the teachers start (quote) “learning” from the pupils, because
that gives us an immediate thing in the present; it’s beneficial to learn now
in the present, rather than suffering in the present hour in the classroom in
order to in the future benefit. So even
the forms in which your children are taught, the very teaching methods are
anti-biblical because they are present centered instead of being future
centered. No matter where you look
you’re going to see this, so even if you were to subtract everything that we
said in the first divine institution, in the second divine institution and just
came up with this one principle, you would have more than you could possibly
from the human viewpoint ever accomplish in your child as a parent, and that is
to fight off the entire present-centeredness of the environment. That, in it itself, is almost an unconquerable
thing.
So you can see as
we as we go through these things, it sounds very simple to stand up here and
say this but when you actually are passionately concerned for your child, to
raise them in the Word of God, in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, these
things become almost insurmountable hurdles; every one of them.
Now finally, along
with the first divine institution we have certain particular sins that must be
established and pointed out and that is two sins in particular: laziness and theft. Those are two sins that are destructive of
the first divine institution of responsibility.
Both of those sins are sins and ought to be so stated. Wherever the child is acquainted with
laziness, either in his playmates, in himself, you, or someone else, laziness
must be identified in his mind with a sin.
It is a sin. Now it is not called
that; everything from labor unions to somebody else has another word for this
pattern of sin. But it is still sin by
virtue of the Word of God. And so you
have to identify this, over and over.
This means, for example, when a child is given a job to do and he
procrastinates, puts it off, that it be pointed out to him what he is
doing. Teach him, even if he responds
badly to what you’ve done, use that as a teaching lesson.
Oftentimes in
counseling this will happen, you’ll give somebody an assignment and they won’t
do it, that in itself is a teaching experience because it shows you right there
the reason the person has a problem is because they can’t do anything on time,
they probably don’t eat on time; in the classic sense they’ll be late to their
own funeral; be late for the rapture, because these kinds of people are always
putting something off. It’s just the
pattern of their life and that’s why they’re in trouble, that’s why they’re
having problems.
Theft should never
be tolerated, just borrowing some other brat’s toy is a form of theft; it ought
to be severely pointed out. The first
time not so, but if you start seeing this develop as a pattern you should cut
if off immediately. Theft, it occurs in
a thousand different guises but it’s a sin and the Bible keeps referring to it
as a sin. The Bible doesn’t care what is
stolen or the value of what is stolen, the Bible is only concerned that it’s
stolen. Anybody that is involved in the
sin of theft disrespects the first divine institution of private property.
Now we come to
divine institution two, and there are three basic areas of the second divine
institution that must be taught to children at various levels; sex, love and
marriage and the three are not the same.
Today we’ll deal with passages that have to do with sex and then next
time love and marriage. Again, if you
thought you were up against it with trying to get a child to be future oriented
instead of present oriented wait until you start moving into this area. Here you are up against it again. Now this is why I’ve said over and over and
over again: parents, you have to have the divine viewpoint framework. You’ve got to have it. And parents who take a light view of this,
who don’t take advantage of the various training that we have are… I don’t know what they’re thinking of but I
don’t see how they can possibly make it.
No way you can fight off the mess around us and not deal with these
concepts.
Let’s look at sex
starting in Genesis 2:25. As I said
earlier, some of you may come out of churches where you’ve been taught the
Bible has nothing to say about sex. When
we get through this, if you can manage to stay in fellowship for the next 30 minutes
you’re going to see the Bible has a lot to say about it and it says a lot of
things about it in a very explicit way.
It does so with the divine viewpoint framework but nevertheless, sex is
part of what we are and the Bible is not afraid to talk about it. We’re going to look at two verses, Genesis
2:25 and Genesis 3:7; the affect of the fall on the area of sex.
Genesis 2:25, “And
they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.” Genesis 3:7, “And the eyes of both of them
were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves
together, and made themselves aprons.”
The word “apron” means covered their loins; it means cover their sex
organs. Why were clothes used and why ha
sex become such a heated and such an emotional and such a sinful thing, in most
people’s minds, in Scripture, because of the fall? Why is the fall most prominent in the area of
sex?
Now the theology
first in Genesis 2 and 3 that deals with sex, and essentially what you have
here is the denial of nudity; the theology of clothes is not what the human
viewpoint person usually thinks. If you
go to anthropology or sociology classes they’ll probably teach you that
clothing came about as man socially evolved and clothing has to do with various
social distinctions and a lot of things which may by themselves be partially
valid but the Bible says no, there’s only one basic reason for clothing, that’s
the result of the fall. The passion to
cover one’s self is the result of the fact that the fall and guilt… now I want
you to go back here, the guilt.
I want to get
something straight right from the start, there’s nothing wrong with sex in the
Scripture. What has happened is what has
happened to sex. And sex is tied in with
guilt. Take all the areas of a man’s
life, take his area of production, take his area of business, take his area of
family training, and all the rest, if he could compartmentalize, you can’t, but
if you could compartmentalize every area of life the Bible says the one area
where the results of the fall show up quicker and at a deeper psychological
level is the area of sex. In other
words, whatever happened, and we do not know to this day know exactly what has
happened to us fully as a result of this historic incident. Remind you, this is a historic incident;
there was a time when this was not true and there was a time when it became
true. There’s a definite point in
history when the fall occurred, and whatever damage that was done to Adam and
Eve, and remember, Adam and Eve were far better off than you are, or I am; they
were far better off, physically, mentally, and actually when they became
believers spiritually; they were far better off. They were stronger, they were more beautiful
and if you want to deal with the sex life, they had a much better sex life than
anybody has ever had, and the reason is their bodies were not
deteriorated. And yet, in spite of the
closeness to creation, the first place where sin shows up and guilt is in this
area.
Isn’t it
interesting, Genesis 3:7 is the first evidence, the first evidence of the
result of the fall? Now everything else
in chapter 3, the childbearing in verse 16 for example, the thorns and the
thistles of verse 18, all those things are after verse 7, not before verse
7. Isn’t that interesting? In other words, it’s in the area of sex that
man was first deeply aware of his alienation from God. There was something that destroyed him in the
area of sex. So therefore it’s not
surprising when we go to these other passages of Scripture that the Bible
hammers away, over and over and over and over and over again, so much so that
people have misinterpreted the Bible.
I’ve heard many people, and I used to believe them before I studied the
Bible myself, who will tell you the Bible teaches that sex is evil. The Bible doesn’t teach anything of the
sort. The Bible simply says that of all
the possible activities in your life, sex is the most affected by sin, but it’s
not saying that sex itself is sinful.
It’s just saying that the results of the fall show up quicker, faster
and in a deeper level here than any other area of life.
One can comment at
this point too, this is why human viewpoint is always trying to deny the
fall. Movements that tend toward nudity
are not just funny; they are actually deep set satanic attempts to say the
primitive savage is an unfallen creature.
All of these things, back to the primitive savage concept of living, are
all deep satanic moves to deny the fall ever happened.
Let’s look at
another passage of Scripture in this line, Leviticus 15; we’re going to deal
with the parts of the Mosaic Law that are often misunderstood. Remember this law deals with every area of
life so wouldn’t it be obvious that if sex is an area where the fall shows up
the fastest then obviously that would be dealt with. But because it is dealt with in such a severe
way, because it is dealt with in so derogatory terms, people have said that the
Bible downgrades sex.
Now before we go
any further in these passages I want to give you the pagan, human viewpoint of
sex in the time in which the Bible was written.
Then I want to show you what the Bible says and then we’ll apply the two
principles today. Here’s what the human
viewpoint position was on sex in the ancient world. Sex, obviously, was a means of
reproduction. Fine, divine viewpoint
would agree with that. Sex was a means
of enjoyment. Fine, divine viewpoint
agrees with that. But now the ancient
world added things to this little package and here is where we have the violent
disagreement. The first two points,
okay; the first two points the Bible agrees.
But now the Bible stops agreeing and now we have the radical diversion
set in.
In the ancient
world sex was considered an unfallen process through which life and joy could
come. In other words, the process itself
gave happiness; the process itself brought forth life; the process itself was
the means by which man could reach the summum
bonum. Some day when we get into the
prophets and I want to dramatize this point I’ll show you some photographs of
archeological sites that have been dug up in Canaan and you can see what kind
of orgies they must have had by just what they had in the sites. We won’t put it on the overhead projector or
I’ll be arrested but at least we’ll put it where those of you who are
interested can see. And you can see what
the prophets, Jeremiah and Isaiah, were talking about. This business that comes up every time at
Christmas time, Jeremiah says don’t worship trees, and so people always think
that refers to a Christmas tree. They
weren’t talking about a Christmas tree; he was talking about wooden phallic
symbols. What would they do if you had a
wooden phallic symbol hanging in your front yard? Now that’s what was going on and that’s what
Jeremiah was talking about. Now let’s
get real and stop being stupid about Jeremiah and the Christmas tree. Granted, Christmas trees have their pagan
connotations, I’m not denying that, but the passage in Jeremiah that has to do
with worshiping trees has nothing to do with Christmas; Jeremiah wouldn’t have
known a Christmas tree if you told him about it. He never saw Christmas trees. Isaiah never saw Christmas trees. Probably Jesus Christ never saw a Christmas
tree. None of them saw a Christmas tree;
they weren’t talking about Christmas trees.
It would be very embarrassing for them to fully describe to you what
they were talking about.
Now that was the
ancient world and it wasn’t just having a good time as the connotation is. By an unfallen process, which was the source
of life, we need the fertility for the herds on the range; this is why they
would have their pagan sex orgies, there was commercial production associated
with these things. It wasn’t just the
individual’s happiness; it was economic happiness, business happiness,
everything else. In other words, sex had
been deified. The process, instead of
being a created thing, that the creature could enjoy, was ripped out from its
context, exalted and it became the process by which salvation came. Sex became elevated over and above; it became
immune from the sex of the fall. And you
had all sorts of perversities that entered into the sex process because men
were trying to exploit this, they were trying to discover, trying to figure out
different ways to use it and so on. All
of these processes were motivated by the human viewpoint belief that sex was a
sort of divine process of generation of blessing.
For example, the
gods in the ancient worlds all came about how?
By sex; all the gods were procreated.
Well if the deities, if you could bring forth deity by sex, then you
could bring forth anything less than deity by sex; you could bring about
fertility in the herds by sex, you could end the season, the winter season, the
dry season by sex. And so the great
orgies would occur just before the rainy season to bring about the fertility in
nature. Sex was tremendously elevated in
the ancient world; you have no idea how tremendous sex was in the ancient
world, it was in everything. The whole
concept of Baalism in the Old Testament is sex.
Now I’ve given you
all of this because I want you to put yourself back in the setting, if you can,
of the ancient world. Set yourself up,
just in your own imagination, as a farmer, who in order to survive must have
obviously fertile herds; who in order to survive must have grass that grows,
must have some form of (?) to the cattle to eat. You have to have this, everything depends on
this. And your mind the process of sex
is associated; it’s that which man has in common with the animals, in
correlation with the plants because since it’s a process and it appears to be
universal, and by the way, even the gods, you see, had sex. So sex was a process that occurred with the
gods, with man, with animals, with plants.
So can you see why the ancient man thought of sex as that which would
unify everything, tie everything together and elevate it into a divine
process?
Now that’s the
context in which these regulations now descend like a bomb. Leviticus 15:16; “And if any man’s seed of
copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be
unclean until the evening. [17] And
every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be
washed with water, and be unclean until the evening. [18] The woman also with whom man shall lie
with seed of copulation, they shall both bathe themselves in water, and be
unclean until the evening.” Now the
phrase “unclean” is a phase in this context, if you look at Leviticus 15:3,
“This shall be his uncleanness,” this is talking there, I want you get the
context of the word “unclean” because most of you know, if you know enough
medicine to realize that verse 2 and 3 are not talking about sex, it’s just
talking about infection. “This shall be
his uncleanness and his issue: whether his flesh run with his issue, or his
flesh be stopped from his issue, it is his uncleanness.” And it talks about washing and so on.
By the way, here
you have the hygienic laws of the Old Testament, I might just footnote here at
this point, here is one of your proofs of the inspiration of the Bible, because
these hygienic laws made absolute nonsense unless the germ theory is true. Now Louis Pasteur hadn’t come along yet and
so for century after century after century the godly man had to take the Bible
which told him that when you had an infection you had to sterilize the things
it had come in contact with those sores.
Two ways were used to sterilizing in the Old Testament; washing and
setting them out in the sun. We now know
why God told them to set it out in the sun, because ultra violet rays kill
germs. But they didn’t know about ultra
violet rays and they didn’t know about germs.
So obviously Moses just couldn’t have made this up; Moses didn’t say now
let’s see, we’ve got germs so now how are we going to kill germs; oh, I know,
you kill it by ultraviolet radiation.
Now obviously Moses didn’t think of that himself. God gave him that thought because God is the
one who made ultra violet rays and germs.
Knowing that, He communicated the (?) to Moses so the hygienic laws of
the Old Testament are built off of omniscience and hence are the inspired Word
of God.
Now at this point
I want you to see the uncleanness; knowing what we do about medicine and problems
verse 3 is obviously talking about infection or we could say germs. Now why is it, then, that the same word, the
same concept in verses 16-18 is used for sperm?
Why is this so? Why is “the seed
of copulation” considered in the same category in the hygienic laws with
infection? Why is this? The answer is that God here undercuts the
whole sex process as something that is life giving. He is not implying here that sperm is like an
infection in the sense it’s bad; what He is saying is that the sperm itself…
well, to see it clearly, what is a germ?
We have a harmful germ; the harmful germ, if you’re thinking biblically
and consistently and that’s asking a lot for the average person today, but if
you are thinking biblically and consistently you have to say on the basis of a
literal Genesis that harmful viruses and harmful germs are the results of the
fall, so that they are cellular life, at least germs are, that has become
injured in some way by the fall; in other words, germs are some way a distortion
of what originally was there. Even
viruses may be nothing more than primitive cellular life.
So the germs, the
Bible would teach, are simply the resultant biochemically of the fall. Now that’s the parallel with the sperm. What the Bible is then saying is that the
sperm, though it’s not harmful, it’s not the case here of the sperm being
harmful, the case is that the sperm too has been destroyed by the fall. In other words, if you could have seen Adam’s
sperm before the fall and Adam’s sperm after the fall under a microscope, they
would have been tremendously different… tremendously different. And the Bible would even say that the male,
it appears to say in many cases if you read the whole laws in context, is that
the male sex organ has been far more destroyed by the fall than the
female. Now why we don’t know, except
the Bible seems to imply this.
So the sperm is
then picked out as one illustration of the effect physically of the fall. Now what does this do to the Baalism? Here’s what God is saying: look, this sex
process that you’re talking about all the time, we consider it polluted, we
consider it fallen, so here’s where the Jews picked this godly diving process
that had been so lifted up out of the creation, lifted up away from the soul
and the law just pulls it right down and says it too bears the bondage of
corruption from the fall. No life can
come forth from (?). And this is the
Bible’s way of dealing doing this, of cutting sex down to size and saying what
it really is. It’s saying yes, it’s
enjoyable, yes it is vital, but it was not a divine process which in itself is
happiness, life, or anything else. It
is, by itself, just another fallen process, no more significant than germs.
Now you can
imagine how this set with the ancient world.
In Leviticus 15:19, “And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her
flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days; and whosoever touches her
shall be unclean until the evening.”
Here you have menstruation, same theme brought out. Menstruation is the thing also the Bible
indicates due to the fall. Many women
will say “amen” to that, but that is a result of the fall. It is a result of the fall because in Isaiah
64:6 menstruation is used as the model for unrighteousness. It says, “Our righteousnesses have become as
filthy rags,” it’s talking about the clothing that women wore during
menstruation, that is what Isaiah 64:6 is talking about. So it’s always a model of the result of the
fall. So here too, is menstruation
itself bad? No; but under the hygienic
laws of the Old Testament God was putting it in the same category with disease,
because He is trying to say look folks, the thing that you worship, the thing
that you say is the source of life and happiness itself is polluted with the
sentence and the wages of sin. The
process itself is doomed; the process itself is something that creates only
death. And so why think of a process
that creates only death as that which can save anything?
Let’s go further,
Leviticus 12:2, now here is an interesting process that was used after the
birth of a child and sex could only be had during the time of cleanliness. And so there was a time of abstinence after
the birth of a child in Leviticus 12:2-4; we have the time of abstinence of a
woman and her husband after they had a child was a male. “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying,
If a woman have conceived seed, and born a male child,” so everything you read
here has to do with a male, and the baby is a boy, “then she shall be unclean
seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she
be unclean. [3] And in the eighth day
the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.
[4] And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and
thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come to the sanctuary,
until the days of her purification be fulfilled.” So from verses 2-4 the woman was set apart
forty days after the birth of a male child.
Now there were other medical reasons which you can now think of why
Moses had this, is to protect the woman from the harm of sexual intercourse
after she’s had a baby.
But verse 5 talks
about an interesting thing and I have no… maybe someone with a medical
background can explain this, but verse 5 is another reason here, “But if she
bear a female child,” in other words, if the baby is a girl, “then she shall be
unclean two weeks, as in her separation; and she shall continue in the blood of
her purifying three score and six days,” a total of eighty days twice as long
would she be unclean after the birth of a female baby than after a male
child.
Now this again
says something, and the principle of Leviticus 12:2-5 and Leviticus 20:18 bring
out a certain point and I want to take these two together. I want to show you how this beautifully
illustrates our submission to the Word of God in every area. Leviticus 20:18, now at least after we get
through these passages will you understand the Bible does have a few things to
say in these areas. “And if a man shall
lie with a woman having her sickness,” that’s sex during menstruation, “and
shall uncover her nakedness, he has discovered her fountain, and she has
uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from
among their people.” What does that
say? Does that say there’s something
medically wrong? No. What it is saying is that typologically under
the Old Testament law God was trying to show that sex is part of the fall. It has been marred, in other words, the
process itself isn’t a result of the fall but the process has been affected
from end to the other with the fall, throughout.
Therefore, the
whole sum of these points, all these verses in Leviticus, and we could go on
and on but we don’t have time, the whole sum of the matter is this, that God’s
laws direct both partners in the marriage as to the most intimate details of
their sex life too. In other words,
there is no autonomous sphere left to man.
This cut across at two points; first of all, if there was one area where
you’d think you’d be left to yourself it certainly would be in marriage in the
area of sex, and yet isn’t it interesting that God’s Word, so to speak, butts
in right there too. God will not permit
us one area of life free from His Law, free from His Word. Every area, including that area, must be
brought into captivity. That’s what the
Bible teaches here.
So let’s contrast
the divine viewpoint and the human viewpoint shown under the law of sex. The divine viewpoint and human viewpoint
agree it is the means of reproduction; they both agree that it’s a means of
enjoyment. Where they disagree is that
sex is not a source of life; sex is not a source of life and the human
viewpoint paganist is the source of life.
Now to translate that and make it 20th century you can put
the “life” in quotes and just say “happiness.”
In the 20th man it’s quite pagan in his view, that sex itself
is happiness. No it isn’t! It is a channel of happiness, yes, but
there’s no happiness in it. The
happiness that is associated with sex isn’t coming from the sex. That’s what the Bible is saying. The happiness in sex, in marriage, is not
coming from sex itself; it’s coming from something that’s going along with it. That’s the big point the Scriptures are
saying. The process itself carries
nothing sinful itself; whatever fruitfulness is associated with it comes from
outside of the process, in other words.
Now to demonstrate
this we could go through the Bible at various points and point out that this is
why to demonstrate this again, over and over the Bible says when a woman
conceives that it is a gift of God. For
example, Luke 4:1 is another illustration of this; Psalm 139 is an illustration
of this, that conception is a gift.
Nowhere in the Bible is conception looked upon as a mechanical
process. Nowhere. Now you remember that because we think in
terms of scientific processes and we think all you have to do is have an ovum
and a sperm, bang, you’ve got conception.
The Bible says huh-un, when conception takes place that conception is a
gift of God. Now this is the other side
to the abortion problem. It’s true the
Bible does not condemn abortion as sin because it’s murder. The Roman Catholics always say this; the
Bible says no because the unborn fetus is not living technically. But the other side of the coin to balance it
is that the Bible does say the fetus is a result of a direct act of God; it is
not a result of just a process of chance.
And you’ve got argue this way and we have got to, as Christians,
understand this. Either we are saying
that conception is purely a chance process, OR we are saying it is a result of
the sovereignty of God. There can’t be
any other in between.
Now you are face
to face with making a very critical decision, either we worship the god of
chance at this point, we’re orthodox all over the place, oh yeah, God is
sovereign, God is sovereign, God is sovereign, God is sovereign, except when it
comes to conception, then all of a sudden the god of chance comes in from some
place and it’s the result of chance. Now
that’s where we have a lot of human viewpoint still left in our minds and the
Bible says huh-un, conception is the result of the sovereignty of God.
All right, that’s
what we’ll say is the overall view of sex in the Bible as far as one area, and
that is that sex in itself is nothing after the fall; it’s been evacuated, it
has been the most destroyed area of life and if there is to be happiness in sex
it has got to come from some other base.
In other words, sex in order to be happy and to be enjoyable has got to
borrow from some other place; the process itself has nothing in itself. That’s the divine viewpoint.
Now I want to go
to Ezekiel 16 and show you the dangers the Bible points out of introducing
further disaster into the area of sex.
If you think we’ve been explicit so far you’d better tighten your belt
because Ezekiel really gets down to the nitty-gritty. I think this is why most fundamentalists have
never written a commentary on Ezekiel.
It has more sex symbolisms in it than any other book of the Bible except
the Song of Songs. Therefore I know most
of you will go out and read it today.
Ezekiel is using sex to illustrate something.
So far we’ve dealt
with one principle of sex; sex is nothing in itself and the enjoyment of sex
comes from outside of sex. That’s the
biblical divine viewpoint, because sex is the most marred area from the
fall. The second point is going to
follow from this. If sex is where we’re
most vulnerable to the fall, then it also follows that sex is the place that
we’re going to most rapidly deteriorate when we’re on negative volition. If sex in the first place was where man first
became aware of his sin, then sex is obviously the one area in life that is
going to be most quickly destroyed by messing around.
Ezekiel 16:15
picks up the theme. Now he’s talking
about the spiritual manifestations, but his spiritual lesson in Ezekiel 16 is
based on a physical reality. I am not
interested at this point in Ezekiel’s spiritual application; I am only teaching
you the physical thing using his analogy as (?). I’m glad he did it because if I ever used
this as a sermon illustration I’d be fired.
Ezekiel 16:15, “But thou didst trust in thine own beauty,” he says, “and
played the harlot because of thy renown, and poured out thy fornications on
every one that passed by; his it was.”
Now if you remember (??): frustration, hate, human viewpoint, darkness
and negative volition, compound carnality, Ezekiel traces this process in the
area of heterosexual sex. He starts with
negative volition in verse 15, here is where something other than God was
trusted; there’s your mental attitude sin that sets it off. And this is the natural illustration of what
happens when people get out on a sex binge.
They are trusting in the sex process itself for happiness, instead of
God, and it represents a denial of the first principle, that sex is nothing in
itself, and it’s never going to give you happiness in itself. So verse 15 is a negative volition, it’s a
choice to say I believe that sex will give me happiness, that I do not need
something outside of sex to give me happiness, sex inside itself will give me
happiness. And so you “played the whore”
he says.
Now Ezekiel
16:16-22, he goes for the next two steps of darkness and human viewpoint. “And of thy garments thou did take, and deck
thy high places with various colors, and played the whore….” Verse 17, “You’ve taken your fair jewels of
My gold and of My silver,” God says, “which I gave to you, and you have made to
yourself images of men, and did commit whoredom with them.” These are the phallic symbols, as the
priestesses would masturbate on. Verse
18, “You took your embroidered garments, and covered them; and you have set My
oil and My incense before them. [19] My
food also which I gave thee, fine flour, and oil, and honey I fed thee….” Verse 20, “Moreover, thou hast taken thy sons
and thy daughters, whom thou hast borne unto Me, and you sacrificed them to be
devoured….” Verse 21, “Thou hast slain
My children, and delivered them to cause them to pas through the fire,” and
blah blah, it’s just talking about the abominations.
So the children,
which are the results, the only fruit that is tangible from the sex process is
destroyed. Now they gave their children
to fire; the modern result of all the sex that goes on is that you just toss
them in the orphanage, so whether you give them to Moloch or whether you give
them to the orphanage it’s the same process.
So at this point you have the darkness and the human viewpoint pervade
the nation; this is the picture of this woman who plays the prostitute.
Now Ezekiel
16:23-26 deals with the next step of hatred toward God; this is when all hope
of every following God’s will is just dismissed altogether. “And it shall come to pass after all thy
wickedness (Woe, woe unto thee! Saith
the Lord God), [24] That you have built unto thee an eminent place, and you
have made thee an high place in every street.”
In other words, a “high place in every street” means there was sex all
the time, with anybody, with anywhere.
[25] “Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, you have
made thy beauty to be abhorred, and have opened thy feet to every one that
passed by,” it means spread your legs, “to every one that passes by and you
have multiplied your whoredoms.” You
see, Ezekiel is rather explicit. [26]
“And you have committed fornication,” here’s where he gets sarcastic, “with the
Egyptians, thy neighbors,” in other words, the Egyptians are pictured as dirty
old men here, fat slobs, and he says you have deteriorated so in your natural
beauty the only man that wants to go to bed with you now is a fat
Egyptian.
So you see how
Ezekiel is getting down to the nitty-gritty.
He says this is what happens, you ruin yourself this way, you cause
massive deterioration to occur. Then
finally verse 27, starts with the frustration state, verses 27-34, “Behold,
therefore, I have stretched out My hand over thee, and have diminished thine
ordinary food, and delivered you unto the will of them that hate thee,” this is
the abandonment by God to a total frustration, and so we can simply say at this
point, to make a long story short, is that heterosexual sex under the second
principle most quickly destroys both the body and the soul. It is a destructive process, compound
carnality.
And this goes on
and there are various reasons why this happens.
In medical science today they’ve found out several things. For one thing, they found out that there’s no
such thing as sexual incompatibility.
When you’re born you have an ability to respond sexually in many, many,
so to speak, different directions. That
means with different people. Now what
happens is that when you start to have sex you are made to have sex with your
right person and when this happens your ability… suppose your right person is
there, your ability to respond increases toward that person but simultaneously
decreases in the other direction. So
your pattern of response actually changes, physiologically it changes to
accommodate itself to that person and at the same time it begins to get less
over in these areas. As that happens,
then you lose your ability… this is why people who become very promiscuous
often become either completely frigid or they become nymphomaniacs, because
what they’ve done, they’ve tried to seek happiness and they just can’t get it
because these patterns have been destroyed.
Now by God’s grace under proper conditions they can be somewhat
restored, but the point is that the Bible warns us about this kind of damage
that can be done.
Now let’s go to a
third principle by turning back to Deuteronomy 22:5. This is the third principle of sex; the first
principle was that sex is nothing in itself; the second principle was that sex
is the area most quickly affected by sin.
And now Deuteronomy 22:5, there are many perversions the Bible deals
with. The first one is called
transvestitism. “The woman shall not
wear that which pertains unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s
garments; for all that do so are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.”
Now this is a very
strange rule but what it’s talking about as I explained in my Deuteronomy
series is that God really wants to make us more sexy, and man in his sin,
ironically, destroys his own sexuality.
Transvestitism is the marring and the blurring of the sex categories,
where women want to dress like men, they want to act like men, and men want to
dress like women and act like women.
That’s the point and that’s forbidden because the Bible teaches that God
has made male and female in the human realm and He wants us to make the
categories distinct. This is why in 1
Corinthians 11 it’s an attack on long hair by men. Church councils have discovered also in the
past have condemned long hair as effeminate.
Men with abnormally long hair are basically effeminate, according to
God’s viewpoint. They may have a lot of
muscle, they may talk and use four-lettered words but as far as God is
concerned they’re a bunch of women. The
reason is because men with long hair immediately start acting like women. You watch a guy with long hair and what he’s
always doing with his hands; he’s acting just like a girl, always looking into
a mirror, I saw the other day, driving down the street, usually you get behind
a woman at a red light and she’s doing like this in the rear view mirror, and
now the guys are starting to do it. Now
you tell me if that’s not effeminate.
That’s exactly what God is saying.
And this business
about clothes here in verse 5 is talking about… the word clothes can also mean
tools, in other words, anything that’s associated with a woman. This is why in certain military installations
they refuse to permit officers to push baby carriages around the base; actually
that particular law comes out of this, it a prohibitive thing against
transvestitism. And the military is not
trying to be nitpicky, the military is just trying to maintain a dignified
dignity between what men do and what women do, that’s all. So in the law there is the set up between
this.
Now we just point
out by way of application that transvestitism in our society occurs most easy
in the fashion industry. The reason is
that homosexuals are the ones that design most clothing, most women’s clothing. People that design women’s clothing hate
them, can’t you tell, and much of the fashion industry in Paris, New York and
London are actually run by homosexuals, and they can’t stand women and they
design women’s clothing accordingly. And
you’ll find if you look at it carefully you’ll tend to see the same thing
occurring to men’s clothing. And this is
a result, this is where the Christian, the Bible-believing Christian, has
problems even with the clothes that he wears, is that again we’re fighting…. You see what I mean, the more you get into
divine viewpoint the more you see this human viewpoint all around you, every
single place, there’s not only place where this battle doesn’t go on, even in
the area of clothing design.
A second area in
this third point, this third principle, aversion to sex, transvestitism and
homosexuality, Leviticus 18:22, if you have a roast in I’m sorry, I want to tie
this whole thing together.
Homosexuality, the second perversion, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind,
as with womankind; it is an abomination.”
This is also spelled out in Leviticus 20:13; it is spelled out again in
Romans 1:27. And the Romans 1:27 verse
has a verb that’s very interesting, I checked this out the other day, the Greek
verb used in Romans 1:27 means to burn out, and what it’s talking about is it’s
the sex drive itself is burning out in the homosexual. It’s part of a practice of
deterioration. Again, it’s not
unexpected, it affects the first place where the result of the fall showed,
obviously then perversions of it are highly destructive to sex.
And finally, the
third category is Leviticus 20:15, bestiality, that’s intercourse between man
and animals. This was rampant in the
ancient world, again because sex was looked upon as the gods had it, men had
it, the gods could have sex with men, men could have sex with the gods, men
could have sex with the animals and the animals could have sex with the
men. You see, it was just marring all
the categories together because sex, they thought, was the thing that tied everything
together. And so the Bible says no it
isn’t, we create boundaries, the kinds, created kinds.
And so in
Leviticus 20:15, “And if any man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to
death; and you will slay the beast. [16]
And if a woman approaches unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill
the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall
be upon them.” So the Bible condemns
perversions of sex.
So in summary,
three principles of sex in Scripture.
The first one we’ve learned, the divine viewpoint says that sex is
nothing in itself. The second one we’ve
learned is that sex therefore is the first place where the results of sin in
the normal rebellion of life occur; it occurs in (?). And the third area is that all perversions of
sex in the Bible are condemned by God’s Word, not out of a spirit of
frustration, that God is trying simply to protect sex and make it really
worthwhile. If you go back over these
first three principles they all spell happiness in sex; all three of them
because it follows they channel sex in the right area where it can be enjoyed
to the maximum.