Transcript: Episode 0074

“Love: Marriage & Sex”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:37 – 00:00:39:	Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.

00:00:39 – 00:00:40:	I am Corey J.

00:00:40 – 00:00:41:	Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:43:	And I'm still, whoa.

00:00:45 – 00:00:50:	On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be concluding our three-part series on the topic of love in scripture.

00:00:51 – 00:00:55:	As we mentioned the last couple weeks, this episode is not going to be for kids.

00:00:55 – 00:01:03:	There will be some things that are going to be explicit, so parents definitely listen first and maybe save this for some future day for your kids.

00:01:04 – 00:01:06:	I apologize for last week for not having the episode.

00:01:07 – 00:01:09:	We had a couple of things come up and weren't able to record in time.

00:01:10 – 00:01:14:	Just to let you all know, the next two weeks we're going to be taking off.

00:01:14 – 00:01:17:	We have a couple of things to take care of personally, so we won't be around for that.

00:01:18 – 00:01:20:	So we'll be back three weeks from this week.

00:01:21 – 00:01:23:	No updates yet on the coins.

00:01:23 – 00:01:26:	I apologize that that is not moving faster than we had hoped.

00:01:27 – 00:01:29:	The vendor is a little backed up.

00:01:29 – 00:01:36:	Corey was saying that there's actually some hand painting that they have to do on each of them, and that's probably slowing it down a little bit, but they're going to be gorgeous.

00:01:36 – 00:01:48:	We will get a notice out to everyone as soon as those things are available on Telegram, on Twitter and on Gab, and hopefully, you know, it'd be nice if we had some news before we get back next week, but we'll keep you posted.

00:01:48 – 00:01:50:	Thank you to everyone for your patience on that.

00:01:51 – 00:01:57:	On the subject of marriage, up front, Corey and I need to acknowledge something that's obvious.

00:01:57 – 00:01:58:	Neither one of us is married.

00:01:58 – 00:02:03:	So, if you get really angry that two unmarried guys would be talking about marriage, that's fine.

00:02:03 – 00:02:04:	Just turn it off.

00:02:04 – 00:02:07:	In addition to me not being married, I am also divorced.

00:02:07 – 00:02:09:	I was married for 10 years and I'm not married anymore.

00:02:10 – 00:02:12:	So that's, you know, a double strike.

00:02:12 – 00:02:15:	If you want to say this guy's an idiot, shouldn't be talking about marriage, that's fine.

00:02:15 – 00:02:16:	I'm not going to try to change your mind.

00:02:16 – 00:02:20:	I can tell you this, this episode is not going to be giving marriage advice.

00:02:21 – 00:02:23:	We're not going to be talking about here's how to have a happy marriage.

00:02:24 – 00:02:26:	I can tell you how to have a marriage wither and die.

00:02:26 – 00:02:27:	I'm an expert in that.

00:02:28 – 00:02:36:	We're not going to get into that today, but you know, we do know things, but we're not going to be the guys who are giving advice out of our lane because there's no point.

00:02:36 – 00:02:42:	There's plenty to talk about from scripture and from what's in the world for us to address today.

00:02:43 – 00:02:49:	As I said, the last couple of weeks, there's also going to be some things that we say today that some women are going to be uncomfortable with.

00:02:49 – 00:02:52:	That's the third apology in this preamble.

00:02:53 – 00:03:01:	We're going to be graphic in some places about some of the things that we say in a way that I know for a fact is going to make some girls uncomfortable.

00:03:02 – 00:03:09:	The intention is not to either be prurient or to be edgy or to say something that's like weird sex stuff.

00:03:09 – 00:03:10:	Not remotely the point.

00:03:11 – 00:03:17:	The reason that we're going to go into some of those places is it is inherent to the very subject of marriage itself.

00:03:18 – 00:03:27:	And so we're going to talk about the specifics because as we go through some of the passages and go through some of these subjects today, a lot of euphemisms are present in Scripture.

00:03:27 – 00:03:29:	Some are not very euphemistic, frankly.

00:03:29 – 00:03:36:	We kind of gloss over some of the language that God uses and pretends that it's flowery when it's actually very graphic.

00:03:37 – 00:03:41:	But it's in a specific way that girls in particular are very uncomfortable with.

00:03:41 – 00:03:46:	I know that from experience that it just makes some girls uncomfortable, guys like, well, yeah, that's how it works.

00:03:46 – 00:03:48:	So we're not trying to be weird.

00:03:48 – 00:03:51:	We're not trying to do anything transgressive.

00:03:51 – 00:03:54:	We're just trying to be frank about the subject.

00:03:55 – 00:03:57:	And a key part of it is sexual nature.

00:03:58 – 00:04:05:	And so we're going to talk about that in terms that don't bypass the reality, the frank reality.

00:04:05 – 00:04:13:	Because one of the things that's happened historically in theology, you know, obviously, you want to be able to talk about scripture without getting gross or getting prurient.

00:04:13 – 00:04:17:	You want to be able to talk about God's things in a way that's godly.

00:04:18 – 00:04:20:	And we certainly seek to do that as well.

00:04:20 – 00:04:24:	And so things like euphemisms and metaphors are very valuable.

00:04:24 – 00:04:27:	It's important to be able to talk about the subject without going there.

00:04:28 – 00:04:33:	And when someone says going there knowingly, you know exactly what they're talking about when no one has to say it.

00:04:33 – 00:04:36:	So you can allude to something without it getting weird.

00:04:38 – 00:04:54:	The problem is that in our modern society where nobody lives on a farm anymore, no one's around animals, really apart from being exposed to something grotesque like pornography, you're not going to see the intercourse unless you're a participant.

00:04:55 – 00:04:59:	And that's the way it's supposed to be except for we've been separated from nature.

00:05:00 – 00:05:03:	In nature, you know, some of the examples we're going to give are of shepherds.

00:05:04 – 00:05:07:	They were frank about these things because they were around livestock.

00:05:07 – 00:05:12:	Everyone understood that when a male couples with a female, certain things happen.

00:05:12 – 00:05:16:	And you can say certain things happen knowingly, everyone knows what you mean.

00:05:16 – 00:05:31:	The problem is that the fact that the conversation around marriage proper has been so far divorced euphemistically from some of the key elements is that today a lot of people have really reverted back to the Gnosticism of the first century.

00:05:31 – 00:05:39:	When we did the Gnosticism episode, we deliberately avoided a lot of the weird sex stuff because we don't want to have a bunch of weird sex episodes.

00:05:40 – 00:05:42:	Unfortunately, this is going to have to be the kind of weird sex episode.

00:05:43 – 00:05:44:	It's not us doing weird stuff.

00:05:44 – 00:05:49:	It's just when you talk about these things, there are certain things that are on the table.

00:05:50 – 00:06:04:	So in the early Gnostic cults, one of the things that you'll see Paul and some of the other authors arguing against is very clearly that there were anti-sex cults and there were rabid sex cults simultaneously at the same time as early Christianity.

00:06:05 – 00:06:06:	And the problem was twofold.

00:06:06 – 00:06:12:	On one hand, you had those who were not behaving in remotely Christian manners related to sexuality.

00:06:13 – 00:06:23:	On the other hand, you had those who were going down the Gnostic path of denying the flesh entirely, saying that the body is nothing and so either you can do whatever you want with it or you shouldn't do anything, complete denial.

00:06:24 – 00:06:27:	And one of the things that happened in some of the Gnostic cults was that they denied sex.

00:06:28 – 00:06:35:	As part of the reason they went away is that they weren't having kids and spreading their Gnostic beliefs to newer generations.

00:06:35 – 00:06:37:	It kind of petered out for that reason.

00:06:37 – 00:06:41:	But in scripture itself, we see arguments against people.

00:06:41 – 00:06:45:	Paul himself argues against people are saying, well, you shouldn't have sex at all.

00:06:45 – 00:06:46:	He's like, no, you should.

00:06:46 – 00:06:48:	And he talks about celibacy proper.

00:06:49 – 00:07:19:	But one of the problems that we see again today is that, especially online with a lot of younger guys that are trying to be trad, trying to be faithful, trying to be good Christians, a lot of what influences our thought around marriage and sexuality is frankly either Gnostic or monastic in its roots, not necessarily in its form, but there's the, you know, some of the early church fathers were kind of anti-sex.

00:07:19 – 00:07:25:	They basically saw it as a necessary evil and not as a blessing from God.

00:07:25 – 00:07:32:	And so when some of the younger guys today look back to see what was said early on in the church, some of what said was bad.

00:07:32 – 00:07:41:	Some of what said is what bore out its fruit as the monastic system, which turned into homosexual brothels for both men and women.

00:07:41 – 00:07:45:	By 1000 AD, within Rome itself, you had men like St.

00:07:45 – 00:07:54:	Peter Damian cursing all the sodomites everywhere inside the church because the convents and the monasteries were filled with homosexuals, overwhelmingly.

00:07:55 – 00:07:56:	This was 1000 years ago.

00:07:56 – 00:07:58:	Procentism didn't do that.

00:07:58 – 00:08:04:	It was the monastic vows, it was the so-called vows of celibacy, which are at odds with our created nature.

00:08:05 – 00:08:11:	And so as today we're trying to look at how do we behave in a Christian manner with these things, it's difficult.

00:08:11 – 00:08:15:	You're not going to find a consistent voice from inside the church about these things.

00:08:15 – 00:08:22:	And so what we talk about today is going to point back to scripture and talk about here's how we divide one thing from another.

00:08:23 – 00:08:28:	But one of the things that's going to come up over and over in this episode is imagine you have a couple things on the table.

00:08:28 – 00:08:31:	And you want to put them in the same bucket on the table.

00:08:31 – 00:08:34:	And we're going to say actually these belong in two separate buckets.

00:08:34 – 00:08:40:	They look like they're the same, but when you clearly distinguish one part from another, they're clearly different.

00:08:40 – 00:08:43:	And there are other things that maybe you would divide in two separate buckets.

00:08:43 – 00:08:49:	And we're going to point out and say actually there's a common thread between them where they should be in the same bucket.

00:08:50 – 00:08:59:	So a lot of what's happened, whenever we have conversations around things that are unusual and what people have heard before, it's really just making those kinds of distinctions.

00:09:00 – 00:09:08:	One thing looks like a certain category, and when you look at it with the proper definition, in our case the scriptural definition, it actually needs to go in a different bucket.

00:09:08 – 00:09:17:	And so what we're going to say today about marriage and about sexuality and these various passages you were treating is not anything weird, it's not anything novel.

00:09:17 – 00:09:40:	It's just showing that there's actually complete harmony in all the different places where we're talking about how we are to be married, how we are married, what the assaults of Satan's world are on marriage itself, and then what it looks like when we either obey or disobey God as it relates to what this blessing is that we've been given, because it's ultimately a blessing from God.

00:09:41 – 00:09:46:	The marriage, the love of marriage, eros, lust in some forms.

00:09:46 – 00:09:53:	You know, there's a properly ordered lust and a disordered lust, and we'll talk about that, because generally that something has a very negative connotation.

00:09:53 – 00:09:55:	That's another thing that goes back to the very early Church.

00:09:55 – 00:10:05:	There's some, not all, but there are some who are very much in sort of the semi-Gnostic view that anything physical was gross and carnal and that was inherently bad.

00:10:06 – 00:10:10:	We have the opposite view, but at the same time it has to be properly ordered.

00:10:10 – 00:10:20:	There's a lot of these seemingly fiddly distinctions, but when you get them all sort of sorted out neatly and put them arranged correctly on the table, it's all going to make sense.

00:10:20 – 00:10:32:	So by the time we get to the end of this, hopefully you'll see that all the various passages we're going to highlight in Scripture, all they're talking about different aspects of the same thing, they're all actually unified by the same underlying premise.

00:10:33 – 00:10:38:	So this episode is the third one in our series on love.

00:10:39 – 00:10:50:	And specifically, there is one term, one form, one kind of love that is distinct, that is unique to this episode, because in effect, it is marriage.

00:10:51 – 00:10:53:	And that is eros, that is sexual love.

00:10:53 – 00:10:55:	Now marriage, of course, is more than that.

00:10:55 – 00:10:57:	It's a more, it's that emotional love.

00:10:57 – 00:11:00:	It can turn into delectio, the intellectual love.

00:11:01 – 00:11:04:	It is shtorghe, because obviously there's familial love involved.

00:11:04 – 00:11:07:	And it is agape, because there is that self-sacrificing love.

00:11:08 – 00:11:15:	But what distinguishes from all other relationships, the marriage relationship with regard to love, is eros.

00:11:16 – 00:11:21:	Because that is the only relationship in which that can properly be present.

00:11:22 – 00:11:26:	If you have eros present in any other relationship, that is disordered.

00:11:26 – 00:11:31:	You should not have that anywhere else, except within the bounds of marriage.

00:11:34 – 00:11:43:	And to focus on that term for a minute, we'll focus on it more throughout the episode, of course, but I want to distinguish that term from a number of other terms.

00:11:44 – 00:11:58:	Because one of the ways that we deal in euphemism in modern discussions and historically as well, is that we conflate things that are not really the same, or we use a portion of something to refer to the whole.

00:12:00 – 00:12:04:	Marriage and wedding are not the same term.

00:12:05 – 00:12:07:	The wedding is the ceremony.

00:12:07 – 00:12:09:	The wedding is what you do in church.

00:12:09 – 00:12:10:	You should do it in church anyway.

00:12:11 – 00:12:13:	Most modern couples don't, but you should.

00:12:14 – 00:12:21:	Marriage does not happen in church, unless you are a Satanist who has broken into the church at night in order to desecrate it.

00:12:22 – 00:12:24:	Marriage happens in the marriage bed.

00:12:26 – 00:12:42:	We were a little more frank about this historically to some degree, because in some cultures, and this actually probably happened to Martin Luther himself when he married his wife, they used to literally throw you into bed after the wedding ceremony was done, because you weren't married yet.

00:12:43 – 00:12:50:	So they threw you into bed so you could be married, so you could actually do what was necessary to be married to your wife.

00:12:52 – 00:12:55:	Because again, the marriage does not happen in the church.

00:12:56 – 00:12:58:	The wedding, the ceremony happens in the church.

00:12:59 – 00:13:11:	But we tend to conflate these things when we're discussing them, because we don't want to discuss the actual physical process of marrying a woman, partly because of modesty and partly because it makes people uncomfortable.

00:13:11 – 00:13:24:	And as Woe said in his introduction, there's nothing wrong with using euphemism, but it does become a problem when you lose the ability to understand what you are referencing, what you are implying by the use of that euphemism.

00:13:25 – 00:13:30:	If you take the euphemism to be the thing itself, then the euphemism is destructive.

00:13:30 – 00:13:31:	It is no longer helpful.

00:13:31 – 00:13:40:	And so it's important to understand the underlying nature of marriage, and not just think when you think marriage, the ceremony in a church.

00:13:41 – 00:13:44:	That is a marriage ceremony, you could call it, but it is a wedding.

00:13:44 – 00:13:47:	It's important to distinguish these terms.

00:13:47 – 00:13:50:	So I would recommend saying, wedding for the ceremony, marriage for the actual thing.

00:13:50 – 00:13:56:	Now, of course, the marriage relationship is more than the act of sex.

00:13:57 – 00:13:58:	But it's not less than that.

00:13:59 – 00:14:16:	Because what distinguishes your wife from other women out in the world, if you have a friendship with a woman, she's not your wife because you have a friendship with her, you may have a long-standing friendship with a woman, and you may have these other elements, these other kinds of love may be present there.

00:14:17 – 00:14:20:	Now, you have to be careful not to let that edge into something that's inappropriate.

00:14:21 – 00:14:26:	But what distinguishes that relationship from a wife is eros.

00:14:26 – 00:14:27:	It's sex.

00:14:28 – 00:14:30:	Because your wife is the woman with whom you have sex.

00:14:31 – 00:14:37:	And it is the sexual act itself that creates the marriage, because it is the marriage.

00:14:38 – 00:14:43:	That is the one flesh union, to use the term that is so often used in Scripture.

00:14:44 – 00:15:00:	And we have to recognize this, because if we keep using the euphemisms and just slowly lose an understanding of what is actually going on and what the actual thing is, we wind up with all these various perversions that we see in modern society.

00:15:00 – 00:15:09:	And so, for instance, you have those who will argue for homosexual marriage or sodomite marriage, whatever term you want to use for that particular form of degeneracy.

00:15:09 – 00:15:10:	It's not marriage.

00:15:11 – 00:15:12:	It cannot be marriage.

00:15:13 – 00:15:18:	Because the nature of marriage is a man having sex with a woman.

00:15:19 – 00:15:20:	That is what marriage is.

00:15:21 – 00:15:22:	And we'll get more into that later.

00:15:22 – 00:15:30:	For those who find that uncomfortable, who don't like that definition because of some of the things that it implies, well, that's spoken to in Scripture.

00:15:30 – 00:15:31:	We will get to those verses.

00:15:32 – 00:15:35:	But that is the fundamental nature of the thing.

00:15:35 – 00:15:37:	It is the core of the thing.

00:15:37 – 00:15:39:	Yes, again, there are other parts to it.

00:15:40 – 00:15:42:	Because, of course, you start a family with this person.

00:15:43 – 00:15:44:	Obviously, only way you can start a family.

00:15:45 – 00:15:47:	But you keep a home with this person.

00:15:47 – 00:15:48:	You love this person.

00:15:49 – 00:15:50:	There's more to the relationship.

00:15:51 – 00:15:56:	But you can't remove this central part of it without destroying the nature of the thing.

00:15:57 – 00:16:01:	The same as we discussed with other forms of love.

00:16:01 – 00:16:10:	If something about it becomes degenerate to the point where it is no longer that love, it isn't even right to call it by the name anymore.

00:16:10 – 00:16:17:	You can't remove the essence of a thing and still call it that thing without, of course, being subversive.

00:16:17 – 00:16:20:	You can be subversive and do that, but you're wrong.

00:16:20 – 00:16:22:	A Christian should not do that.

00:16:22 – 00:16:26:	The essence of the thing must remain for it to remain that thing.

00:16:27 – 00:16:32:	And so the sexual relationship between a husband and a wife is a necessary part of the marriage.

00:16:33 – 00:16:34:	It must remain.

00:16:35 – 00:16:42:	And for some, that will make them uncomfortable because they may think that there's something dirty about sex or something untoward.

00:16:42 – 00:16:44:	Scripture does not speak of it in those terms.

00:16:45 – 00:16:48:	You can point to the fact that the Song of Solomon exists in Scripture.

00:16:48 – 00:16:54:	We won't go over that particular book in this episode, to the surprise, perhaps, of some, but that isn't the focus of the episode.

00:16:55 – 00:16:56:	But go ahead and read through it.

00:16:58 – 00:17:02:	What is said in that book is not said by a God who hates sex.

00:17:04 – 00:17:20:	And the modern focus on celibacy, as Woe was mentioning, from some of those who want to appear as if they are trad, is just fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons, but one of the flaws flows from a hatred of pleasure.

00:17:22 – 00:17:33:	Some of those who have decided they want to be a particularly traditional or trad Christian think that Stoicism is the way to go, even if they don't call it by that name.

00:17:33 – 00:17:40:	They are really adopting those beliefs, sort of an indifference to the reality, to the tangible things of life.

00:17:41 – 00:17:49:	God didn't create us to be removed from nature, to stand back and above it, to ignore the physical reality.

00:17:51 – 00:17:54:	Look at what is praised in Scripture as part of the good life.

00:17:55 – 00:18:04:	The daily readings just finished up the book of Ecclesiastes, and one of the things in Ecclesiastes, repeated in more than one place, is basically eat, drink and be merry.

00:18:05 – 00:18:06:	That's physical pleasure.

00:18:07 – 00:18:08:	And so is sex.

00:18:08 – 00:18:12:	God created these things for men to enjoy.

00:18:13 – 00:18:16:	He didn't create them as a temptation for you.

00:18:16 – 00:18:19:	He didn't create them in order to see if you could resist them.

00:18:20 – 00:18:24:	Yes, they are supposed to be enjoyed in an ordered and proper fashion.

00:18:24 – 00:18:26:	You aren't supposed to drink to excess.

00:18:26 – 00:18:28:	You aren't supposed to eat to excess.

00:18:28 – 00:18:31:	You aren't supposed to have sex with women who are not your wife.

00:18:31 – 00:18:43:	However, these things, in their proper place, at their proper time, are to be enjoyed, and that is part of the Christian life, because you are supposed to enjoy the good things of God.

00:18:43 – 00:18:46:	He has given these things to humanity.

00:18:47 – 00:18:48:	You are not a good Christian.

00:18:48 – 00:18:54:	You are not better than everyone else if you decide you are not going to enjoy the good things of God.

00:18:54 – 00:19:05:	If God gives you a blessing and you say, no, God, I couldn't possibly enjoy that, you are actually insulting your Creator by telling Him the things that He created for good, that He created for your enjoyment.

00:19:05 – 00:19:06:	Well, those aren't good.

00:19:06 – 00:19:08:	I couldn't possibly do that.

00:19:09 – 00:19:15:	You are attempting to be holier than God, and anytime you try to do that, you are sinning.

00:19:15 – 00:19:20:	You are not going to succeed, because obviously you can't be more holy than God, but you are also sinning in the attempt.

00:19:21 – 00:19:26:	So, avoiding pleasure, avoiding the good things in life, does not make you a better Christian.

00:19:27 – 00:19:43:	Exercising self-control, recognizing these things have limitations, they have a proper time and place and form and all of that, recognizing the nature of the thing is important, but completely eschewing the thing does not make you a better Christian.

00:19:44 – 00:19:47:	It makes you perhaps a Stoic, and the Stoics were certainly not Christian.

00:19:48 – 00:19:54:	And so this modern tendency to think that you have to be a celibate to be a good Christian is wrong.

00:19:55 – 00:20:02:	And I want to take the opportunity to reiterate what we have said elsewhere and at other times, Twitter and other places.

00:20:03 – 00:20:08:	Celibacy is a particular gift that is given to very few men.

00:20:09 – 00:20:12:	If you have it, you have no doubt that you have it.

00:20:12 – 00:20:15:	It is not a gift that you can acquire.

00:20:15 – 00:20:18:	It is not a gift that you can exercise if you don't have it.

00:20:18 – 00:20:28:	It is not something that you can simply exert enough self-control and pretend that you have this gift and act as if you actually have it.

00:20:29 – 00:20:30:	That's what the monks try to do.

00:20:31 – 00:20:32:	That's what the nuns try to do.

00:20:32 – 00:20:39:	And we historically see what happens when you have particular organizations, when you have individuals who pursue that path.

00:20:41 – 00:20:52:	Horrible sins, horrible disgusting things, of which those who wrote the Book of Concord, for instance, didn't even want to list them or be explicit about them.

00:20:52 – 00:20:53:	They heavily implied them.

00:20:54 – 00:20:58:	But you have, as we'll mention, men like Peter Damian condemning the rampant sodomy.

00:20:58 – 00:21:03:	That is what happens when you try to ignore the reality of how you were created by God.

00:21:05 – 00:21:13:	If you are celibate, you will have zero temptation with regard to the opposite sex, with regard to sex whatsoever.

00:21:14 – 00:21:16:	That will simply not exist for you.

00:21:16 – 00:21:18:	That is what it means to be celibate.

00:21:18 – 00:21:23:	If God gives you the gift of celibacy, it means that you are actually asexual.

00:21:24 – 00:21:29:	Those are the only asexuals in all of human history, those to whom God has given the gift of celibacy.

00:21:31 – 00:21:35:	If you see a naked woman and you enjoy that, you're not celibate.

00:21:36 – 00:21:36:	Period.

00:21:37 – 00:21:44:	You cannot acquire the gift by exercising self-control, denying yourself or whatever it happens to be.

00:21:44 – 00:21:48:	Instead, you should pursue the things that God has given you.

00:21:49 – 00:21:50:	Scripture is very clear.

00:21:50 – 00:21:56:	Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife and each wife her own husband.

00:21:56 – 00:21:58:	That is the solution to the problem.

00:21:58 – 00:22:02:	In our fallen state, we have a disordered eros.

00:22:02 – 00:22:04:	It is not expressed solely toward the spouse.

00:22:06 – 00:22:16:	In our pre-fallen state, so Adam and Eve, and also once we are restored in the new creation, you will not have that temptation.

00:22:16 – 00:22:21:	You won't be tempted to think about another man's wife in a sexual way.

00:22:22 – 00:22:24:	You will have no temptation with regard to that.

00:22:25 – 00:22:28:	In our fallen state, the temptations exist.

00:22:29 – 00:22:32:	And so marriage is part of the cure for that.

00:22:32 – 00:22:34:	In fact, marriage is the only cure for that.

00:22:34 – 00:22:36:	Yes, you still have to have self-control.

00:22:37 – 00:22:41:	But the libido is supposed to be exercised within the bonds of marriage.

00:22:42 – 00:22:43:	And nowhere else.

00:22:44 – 00:22:46:	That is the only solution for that temptation.

00:22:46 – 00:22:49:	God gave the medicine for the sickness.

00:22:52 – 00:22:56:	Looking for some other solution, looking for some other cure is wicked.

00:22:57 – 00:23:05:	Because you are telling God, this thing that you created to solve this problem, and then explicitly told us in Scripture that it's the solution for the problem, that's not good enough for me.

00:23:05 – 00:23:06:	I'll find my own.

00:23:06 – 00:23:07:	I'll find a better one.

00:23:08 – 00:23:10:	That is a sinful disposition.

00:23:10 – 00:23:13:	And that is exactly what we see among monks and nuns.

00:23:13 – 00:23:19:	And that is why they are so strongly condemned by basically every Christian tradition with a couple of exceptions.

00:23:19 – 00:23:26:	And I know that some who are listening and are Roman Catholic or perhaps Eastern Orthodox are going to hear that and think that we're insane.

00:23:26 – 00:23:50:	I'm just saying, read through scripture, look at the verses that deal with marriage, that deal with sexual morality, that deal with temptation, and look at what they actually say and see if anywhere in those verses you can find a justification for hiding yourself away and simply trying to will those desires away, simply trying to ignore it.

00:23:50 – 00:23:56:	It isn't there, because what God says is marriage is the solution.

00:23:56 – 00:24:00:	Marriage is the medicine for that temptation.

00:24:00 – 00:24:04:	In fact, locking yourself away is probably one of the worst things you can do.

00:24:04 – 00:24:10:	And quite frankly, we see historically what happens when men do that, when women do that.

00:24:11 – 00:24:13:	Far worse sins than they would be committing otherwise.

00:24:15 – 00:24:29:	But you have to understand the fundamental nature of the thing, the reason for the thing, why God created the thing, how it interacts with these other relationships, with human life, quite frankly.

00:24:32 – 00:24:50:	And if you don't do that, if you don't understand the nature of the thing, you wind up with these crazy ideas with regard to, well, no, marriage is just a contract, or I can avoid sexual temptation by locking myself in a monastery, or any of these other perverted solutions that aren't solutions at all.

00:24:51 – 00:24:56:	They are a degenerate, a perverse, a subversive form of the thing itself.

00:24:57 – 00:25:00:	And so by destroying the essence, they cease to be the thing.

00:25:01 – 00:25:11:	And so at foundation, the baseline, the fundamental thing that you have to understand with regard to marriage, it does not take place in the church.

00:25:11 – 00:25:12:	That's the wedding.

00:25:12 – 00:25:14:	The marriage takes place afterward.

00:25:15 – 00:25:18:	The language we used to use for this made it somewhat more obvious.

00:25:18 – 00:25:20:	A man takes a wife.

00:25:21 – 00:25:22:	A woman is given away.

00:25:23 – 00:25:27:	That's a euphemism, but it's pretty clear what it means.

00:25:27 – 00:25:33:	Because marriage is when a man penetrates a woman and then ejaculates inside her, to be entirely blunt.

00:25:34 – 00:25:35:	That is the marriage.

00:25:36 – 00:25:41:	You are married to your wife after you take her on the wedding night, not after you say I do at the altar.

00:25:43 – 00:25:52:	And when we use terms like medicine and temptation, it is not with the view that sexual desire itself is perverted.

00:25:52 – 00:25:55:	The entire point is that sexual desire is from God.

00:25:56 – 00:25:58:	And then our sinful nature has done damage to it.

00:26:00 – 00:26:03:	So let's take a look in Genesis 2 at how God created us.

00:26:04 – 00:26:15:	Because the marriage, the union of man and woman as one flesh, is the only relationship in the universe, the only relationship in civilization that predates the fall.

00:26:16 – 00:26:19:	We don't have any example of government or anything else inside the garden.

00:26:20 – 00:26:28:	The only interrelationship that we have between one human being and another human being is between Adam and Eve as a married couple.

00:26:29 – 00:26:30:	So how did that happen?

00:26:30 – 00:26:36:	You know, one of the things that you'll sometimes hear people ask is, well, who married Adam and Eve?

00:26:36 – 00:26:38:	Because obviously there was no pastor there.

00:26:38 – 00:26:39:	There was no church.

00:26:39 – 00:26:40:	So how did that happen?

00:26:40 – 00:26:41:	Was it a real marriage?

00:26:41 – 00:26:45:	Like did God officiate a wedding ceremony and then that made them married?

00:26:45 – 00:26:48:	So we're going to read now from Genesis 2.

00:26:49 – 00:26:52:	Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.

00:26:53 – 00:26:54:	I will make him a helper fit for him.

00:26:55 – 00:27:02:	Now out of the ground, the Lord had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

00:27:03 – 00:27:05:	And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

00:27:06 – 00:27:10:	The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

00:27:11 – 00:27:14:	But for Adam, there was not found to help her fit for him.

00:27:14 – 00:27:21:	So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

00:27:21 – 00:27:26:	And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

00:27:27 – 00:27:31:	Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

00:27:31 – 00:27:34:	She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.

00:27:35 – 00:27:42:	Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

00:27:43 – 00:27:46:	And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

00:27:47 – 00:27:53:	This passage at the end where it says that a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife.

00:27:54 – 00:27:59:	In the King James, it says cleave unto his wife, which is probably the only reason that that word sticks around.

00:27:59 – 00:28:02:	I think somebody on Twitter said that earlier today and they're exactly right.

00:28:03 – 00:28:04:	The word cleave is interesting.

00:28:04 – 00:28:07:	It means two completely opposite things depending on context.

00:28:08 – 00:28:10:	One of those weird English things.

00:28:11 – 00:28:15:	What we see here is an allusion to them being married.

00:28:16 – 00:28:17:	Because, look, Adam spends all day.

00:28:17 – 00:28:19:	This is the last day of creation.

00:28:19 – 00:28:21:	He spends all day naming all the animals.

00:28:21 – 00:28:22:	He's kind of tired.

00:28:22 – 00:28:24:	None of them are fit to be his helper.

00:28:25 – 00:28:30:	And so God puts him to sleep, performs surgery on him, creates woman from man.

00:28:30 – 00:28:34:	He wakes up and he says at last, this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

00:28:34 – 00:28:35:	I think it was funny.

00:28:35 – 00:28:40:	Like after the end of one day of work, just doing what God said, he seemed kind of tired.

00:28:40 – 00:28:41:	He's like at last, here she is.

00:28:42 – 00:28:43:	And he was happy to see her.

00:28:43 – 00:28:50:	And then it expressly says the one flesh union and then says, and the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

00:28:50 – 00:28:54:	Now scripture doesn't explicitly say that they had sex in the garden.

00:28:55 – 00:29:02:	Personally, I think that they did because I think that it's the only natural consequence of the situation.

00:29:03 – 00:29:03:	We don't know for sure.

00:29:03 – 00:29:04:	Maybe I'm wrong.

00:29:04 – 00:29:06:	There's no timeline given.

00:29:06 – 00:29:08:	We don't know how long they were hanging out.

00:29:08 – 00:29:14:	They were at least hanging out together long enough that Eve had been catechized by Adam.

00:29:15 – 00:29:26:	Because if you look at how Eve interacts with a serpent, when Eve says that God told us not to even look at it, not to touch it, it wasn't exactly what God had said to Adam.

00:29:26 – 00:29:30:	God gave the command related to that to Adam before Eve was created.

00:29:30 – 00:29:32:	So Adam was the first priest.

00:29:33 – 00:29:36:	He was the first leader of the church who catechized Eve and told her.

00:29:37 – 00:29:41:	And we're not told if he went beyond what we're told that God said or whatever.

00:29:41 – 00:29:42:	It's not important.

00:29:42 – 00:29:45:	God gave the command to Adam, then he created Eve.

00:29:45 – 00:29:47:	Adam catechized Eve.

00:29:48 – 00:29:49:	So a period of time passed.

00:29:49 – 00:29:51:	What we do know is that this is Chapter 2.

00:29:52 – 00:30:00:	After the fall, in Chapter 4, the very first verse says, Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.

00:30:01 – 00:30:06:	So there's sex, there's an and conjunction, and then there's conception.

00:30:07 – 00:30:10:	So we know that the first man was not conceived in the garden.

00:30:11 – 00:30:12:	But that doesn't mean that they didn't have sex.

00:30:13 – 00:30:23:	The whole reason for this talk and focusing on specifically the physical act is that it will answer the question, how were they married?

00:30:23 – 00:30:33:	Because if there's no pastor in the garden, or no judge in the garden to pronounce the man and wife according to our notion of a modern wedding ceremony, how do we know if they're married?

00:30:34 – 00:30:37:	When you look at how scripture talks about it, it never talks about those things.

00:30:37 – 00:30:41:	It talks about public recognition, which as Corey said is vital.

00:30:41 – 00:30:51:	It is absolutely vital that there is a public recognition ahead of time for the sake of good order, that this man and this woman are to be married, they're to be husband and wife.

00:30:52 – 00:31:07:	And so when in the future you see them holding hands or kissing, you know, girls are very good at picking up on signs about which two people have what we call sexual tension or sexual chemistry and which two people are actually doing it.

00:31:07 – 00:31:16:	Girls are really good at picking up on that stuff in subtle physical cues, facial expressions, little things that most guys are generally oblivious to.

00:31:16 – 00:31:17:	But you can tell.

00:31:18 – 00:31:27:	The important thing is that Adam was given Eve as his helper and part of being his helper was conceiving.

00:31:28 – 00:31:35:	The fact that the gift of sex is tied to the gift of procreation is how God has filled the entire world.

00:31:35 – 00:31:42:	When he said, be fruitful and multiply, it didn't need to be a stick sort of command.

00:31:42 – 00:31:44:	It wasn't like, oh, this is going to be miserable.

00:31:44 – 00:31:45:	You got to do it anyway.

00:31:45 – 00:32:01:	The way that God designed our bodies and designed our desire for each other was such that even if and when man forgot about God, wanted to disobey God, the natural activity related to how we are created was going to continue to produce people.

00:32:02 – 00:32:06:	Even where God had been forgotten, the command is still baked into us.

00:32:06 – 00:32:07:	It's natural.

00:32:08 – 00:32:10:	The desire itself is not sinful per se.

00:32:10 – 00:32:20:	It is only the disordered desire made manifest in adultery, in fornication, in desires outside of the union that it becomes bad.

00:32:21 – 00:32:30:	And then you have the things that are contrary to nature, we'll get into later, that are an open assault on the procreative nature of the gift of marriage itself.

00:32:31 – 00:32:36:	But right from the beginning, we have God saying there's one flesh union, and that is the essence of marriage.

00:32:37 – 00:32:39:	As Corey said, there's a tremendous amount to it.

00:32:39 – 00:32:44:	We are not, not trying to be reductive about marriage and turn it just into a sex thing.

00:32:44 – 00:32:45:	We don't believe that.

00:32:45 – 00:32:46:	Scripture doesn't say that.

00:32:46 – 00:32:51:	There's a tremendous amount about the married life that has nothing to do with sex.

00:32:52 – 00:32:53:	We're not trying to reframe it.

00:32:53 – 00:32:57:	I know some will want to hear that and get mad at it, not remotely what's happening.

00:32:58 – 00:33:05:	We're making this specific point because it's a point that's not usually made, that's essential in the scriptural treatment of the subject itself.

00:33:07 – 00:33:15:	When you look at the word that's used in the original Greek there in Genesis, it says he will hold fast to his wife.

00:33:16 – 00:33:20:	And the word in Greek is proskolaou or kolaou.

00:33:20 – 00:33:22:	It's two different forms of the same thing.

00:33:22 – 00:33:26:	It basically means to glue to, to cleave to, to join or unite.

00:33:27 – 00:33:35:	And I think this is an interesting word that's used because it gives us a few different senses of what's going on.

00:33:35 – 00:33:40:	You know, when you say to cling to, well, today in English, clingy sounds needy.

00:33:40 – 00:33:40:	It sounds negative.

00:33:41 – 00:33:42:	You say that a man is clingy.

00:33:42 – 00:33:43:	That's gross.

00:33:43 – 00:33:44:	Like it's just, that's a bad thing.

00:33:44 – 00:33:45:	You don't want that.

00:33:45 – 00:33:46:	A girl can be clingy.

00:33:46 – 00:33:50:	It's more to her nature, but it's still kind of off-putting.

00:33:50 – 00:33:52:	If a guy is clingy, it's a death knell.

00:33:52 – 00:33:53:	He's blown out of the water.

00:33:54 – 00:33:59:	But the desire to hold to, to hold fast to one's wife is completely natural.

00:33:59 – 00:34:05:	And so, to say that a man will hold fast to his wife is quite literal.

00:34:05 – 00:34:10:	It's a quite direct description of part of the marital relationship.

00:34:11 – 00:34:22:	It's also metaphorical, because to say hold fast to or to cleave unto, we know that that's also a euphemism for they shall become one flesh, which is the other half of the sentence.

00:34:23 – 00:34:31:	To hold fast to a woman, particularly Adam, holding fast to his naked wife Eve, the most beautiful woman ever in history, because she was completely perfect.

00:34:32 – 00:34:33:	She had no genetic decay.

00:34:33 – 00:34:40:	All the things that make us weird and slightly ugly by comparison are because our genes have become distorted over time.

00:34:40 – 00:34:42:	So you get things like asymmetry.

00:34:43 – 00:34:47:	Those deviations from perfection are the result of the fall.

00:34:47 – 00:34:48:	She had none of that.

00:34:48 – 00:34:50:	She was perfect, and they didn't know they were naked.

00:34:50 – 00:34:51:	They were just, they were happy.

00:34:51 – 00:34:52:	They were completely innocent.

00:34:53 – 00:35:07:	It was a sort of blissful innocence that has been robbed of us by their sin and by our sin and by the sinful world that we're in, that to even talk about these things, in a sense, it almost becomes dirty just in the speaking.

00:35:08 – 00:35:13:	And that's why we're sensitive to the fact that we're tackling this subject, because we're not trying to talk dirty about this stuff.

00:35:13 – 00:35:14:	We're really not.

00:35:15 – 00:35:17:	But we have to talk the way Scripture talks.

00:35:18 – 00:35:24:	And so there's stuff in there that is very clearly and directly about this physical union.

00:35:24 – 00:35:28:	And as we said, there's a great deal more to marriage.

00:35:28 – 00:35:29:	We're going to get to some of those things.

00:35:29 – 00:35:47:	But the key misconceptions, and the key misconceptions, not only in people's minds, but the things that Satan is exploiting in the world today as an attack against those misconceptions, are reorienting the one flesh union that is a good and godly desire.

00:35:48 – 00:35:52:	A man should look at his wife with what can be called lust.

00:35:52 – 00:35:57:	There may be other ways to phrase that, but some lust is certainly absolutely evil.

00:35:57 – 00:36:01:	I think typically when that term is used, it's usually in a negative context.

00:36:01 – 00:36:04:	But a man should look at his wife with desire.

00:36:04 – 00:36:05:	He's supposed to.

00:36:06 – 00:36:09:	For a man, that is the basis for physical arousal.

00:36:09 – 00:36:14:	If a man doesn't look at his wife and be filled with desire, they can't have sex.

00:36:14 – 00:36:15:	That's how God made us.

00:36:16 – 00:36:20:	So there's no sin in the context of marriage for all those things to take place.

00:36:21 – 00:36:23:	And we don't normally talk about it because it's not polite.

00:36:23 – 00:36:24:	But it's just there.

00:36:25 – 00:36:26:	It's just part of creation.

00:36:26 – 00:36:33:	It's something that I think maybe most people don't know this, but humans are one of the few mammals that don't have a penis bone.

00:36:34 – 00:36:40:	In most of the mammal kingdom, the act of getting an erection is more mechanical.

00:36:40 – 00:36:48:	There's literally a bone that moves into the sheath, and then the penis enlarges and gorges in part from blood.

00:36:48 – 00:36:49:	But the bone is doing most of the work.

00:36:50 – 00:36:51:	Humans don't have that.

00:36:51 – 00:36:55:	All of our manifest desire is internal.

00:36:55 – 00:36:57:	It's spiritual and it's mental.

00:36:57 – 00:37:00:	In many cases, it's visual as well as physical.

00:37:01 – 00:37:02:	It's a reaction.

00:37:02 – 00:37:08:	And so that's one of the problems when you try to say that, well, desire is always bad, and this is all terrible.

00:37:08 – 00:37:09:	Well, that's not how God made us.

00:37:10 – 00:37:15:	God didn't make us to resist physical desire for the other.

00:37:15 – 00:37:22:	He made it to be complete in the marital union, where no one would ever be talking about these things in terms outside of marriage.

00:37:22 – 00:37:33:	I think that's one of the things that's, unfortunately, everyone is burdened with today is that there's so much conversation in the world that has absolutely no respect for scripture, just open rebellion against God.

00:37:33 – 00:38:03:	We'll discuss these things in ways that are entirely oriented around what's basically self-idolatry, around gratifying personal desires for personal pleasure without any notion that this is how God made us in the marital bond and ultimately for the purpose of procreation, not exclusively, because obviously in any normal married relationship, you're going to have sex many more times than you're going to have kids.

00:38:03 – 00:38:05:	That doesn't mean that you've had sex too many times.

00:38:06 – 00:38:07:	It doesn't mean that it's failed.

00:38:07 – 00:38:08:	This means that that's just how it works.

00:38:09 – 00:38:11:	And there's some people who don't have the gift of fertility.

00:38:12 – 00:38:13:	It's, again, due to the fall.

00:38:14 – 00:38:16:	It's simply not possible for them to have kids.

00:38:16 – 00:38:19:	But that's a deviation from the created order.

00:38:20 – 00:38:24:	For everyone else, you're going to have sex many times in your married life.

00:38:24 – 00:38:27:	And you're going to have as many kids as God blesses you with.

00:38:27 – 00:38:28:	Maybe it's going to be one or two.

00:38:29 – 00:38:29:	Maybe it's going to be 15.

00:38:29 – 00:38:31:	It's up to God.

00:38:31 – 00:38:34:	And as long as we don't interfere with that, that's what we get.

00:38:34 – 00:38:43:	But the math simply bears out that the pleasure of the union is part of the blessing of marriage unto itself.

00:38:43 – 00:39:02:	And when Paul talks about the necessity and the blessing of man and woman being united in marriage for the sake of satisfying these desires so that they don't end up in sexual disorder desire, it's not in terms of procreation.

00:39:03 – 00:39:14:	It's also, that's always there, because apart from modern science breaking the connection between intercourse and conception, you get it when God gives it to you.

00:39:14 – 00:39:16:	Today, we completely disconnected the two.

00:39:16 – 00:39:21:	You can have all of the pleasure you want and have none of the kids have none of the burden if that's what you want.

00:39:21 – 00:39:24:	That's a complete breakage of creation.

00:39:24 – 00:39:26:	It's something that was not envisioned in creation.

00:39:26 – 00:39:30:	It's an attack on what was done in the garden.

00:39:31 – 00:39:33:	It's an attack on how God created us.

00:39:34 – 00:39:40:	And it's one of the first steps to the sort of idolatry that we see playing out in some of the other parts of Scripture.

00:39:40 – 00:39:50:	We'll get to particularly in Romans 1 where the idolatry of the flesh of treating these sexual desires as the end unto themselves always leads to absolute evil.

00:39:50 – 00:39:53:	And so that's why we're kind of repeating over and over again.

00:39:53 – 00:39:55:	We're not trying to be that because that's evil.

00:39:55 – 00:39:59:	Scripture makes clear that the idolatry of sex is evil.

00:39:59 – 00:40:07:	What we're saying is that there's a very specific narrow location where sex is the genesis of the marriage and everything else that comes from it.

00:40:08 – 00:40:26:	It's often the case that, as we said, I think it was on the episode on the clockwork universe, we talked about microchimerism and how when a girl has multiple partners, it is deleterious because there's an accumulation of the other men inside her body in a way that can permanently change her.

00:40:27 – 00:40:29:	The flip side is true in a properly ordered marriage.

00:40:30 – 00:40:35:	So microchimerism is ultimately a blessing from God, but it has to be in a properly ordered marriage.

00:40:36 – 00:40:46:	If you come together as a wife with your husband and he's the only man you've ever known, every time there's that accumulation of his foreign DNA, you become more a part of him.

00:40:46 – 00:40:47:	He becomes more a part of you.

00:40:48 – 00:40:58:	You become the one flesh physically, not only mechanically, not only spiritually, but actually biologically, the one flesh is actually occurring.

00:40:58 – 00:41:01:	It's an amazing and beautiful thing that God has created.

00:41:01 – 00:41:07:	And it's only when we start sinning and breaking all the rules that we damage these things often beyond repair.

00:41:08 – 00:41:25:	I think the term cleave is actually one of the better words in English, if only for this specific usage, because you can sort of see both aspects, or at least two of the aspects, of marriage in that one term.

00:41:27 – 00:41:32:	Because it kind of implies both in different ways with the two opposed meanings of the term.

00:41:32 – 00:41:37:	And so, for instance, you have to cleave something in two, obviously, is to split it in two.

00:41:37 – 00:41:47:	You go from one piece of whatever to two pieces, which is the inverse of what you have with marriage, where you're taking two and making once.

00:41:47 – 00:41:50:	You have that implication of two.

00:41:50 – 00:41:59:	And then for marriage, it is the two coming together to become one, which is to cleave to, to stick to, to hold to your wife.

00:42:00 – 00:42:04:	So I kind of like the term with regard to how it can be used here.

00:42:04 – 00:42:07:	But yes, it is one of those weird quirks of English where you have an autoantonym.

00:42:09 – 00:42:26:	But to add a third term to the earlier list of terms that I want to carefully distinguish in this episode, and we've used it a number of times already, the term lust in English has largely lost its positive sense over however many centuries that took.

00:42:27 – 00:42:30:	Because the word just comes straight from German lust.

00:42:30 – 00:42:31:	It's the same word.

00:42:31 – 00:42:32:	It's spelled the same.

00:42:32 – 00:42:35:	It's just the L is capital because that's what German does with nouns.

00:42:36 – 00:42:47:	But in German, lust does not mean lust as we have it in English, the negative connotation of some sort of overzealous, really it's the wrong term there.

00:42:48 – 00:42:51:	But an improper sort of sexual desire is what we mean by lust.

00:42:51 – 00:42:56:	Typically in English, it has been reduced to that negative sense, which is wrong.

00:42:56 – 00:42:57:	It shouldn't be.

00:42:57 – 00:43:00:	In German, it has a more expansive meaning.

00:43:00 – 00:43:04:	It can mean delight or desire or appetite.

00:43:04 – 00:43:06:	So it can be good.

00:43:06 – 00:43:07:	It could be negative as well.

00:43:07 – 00:43:10:	Usually it's made into a compound for that.

00:43:10 – 00:43:12:	But it can mean good things.

00:43:12 – 00:43:17:	You can have a lust for life, which that one, incidentally, we maintain in English.

00:43:17 – 00:43:21:	To have a lust for life, a lebenslust, is still positive.

00:43:22 – 00:43:25:	We didn't attach the negative sense to that in English.

00:43:26 – 00:43:36:	And so the term is not wholly negative because lust for one's wife is sexual desire for one's wife, which you should have.

00:43:37 – 00:43:38:	That's a good thing.

00:43:39 – 00:43:43:	This is one of those terms where we should not use it exclusively in one sense or the other.

00:43:43 – 00:43:50:	In some other episodes, we recommended dropping a sense of a term because it conflates things and causes problems.

00:43:50 – 00:43:56:	But this is one of those terms where we really need the fullness of the spectrum, the scope of the meaning.

00:43:58 – 00:44:03:	Because you can have a disordered lust, or you can have an ordered lust.

00:44:03 – 00:44:05:	You can have that sexual desire for your wife.

00:44:05 – 00:44:06:	That is a good thing.

00:44:06 – 00:44:10:	So it's not wrongful if it is rightly ordered.

00:44:10 – 00:44:15:	So much of this is about rightly ordered, about doing things correctly.

00:44:16 – 00:44:22:	And so, yes, you can marry your high school girlfriend.

00:44:23 – 00:44:26:	If you do that in bed, that's disordered.

00:44:26 – 00:44:32:	If you wait and you do that in a church, and then you marry her in bed, well, that's ordered.

00:44:34 – 00:44:42:	The order matters, not just in the sense of the order of operations, as it were, but also in the sense of doing things properly.

00:44:43 – 00:44:48:	And so, as we've mentioned a number of times, marriage is more than the sexual act.

00:44:49 – 00:44:54:	An illustration for this to help some understand, to grasp exactly what we're saying.

00:44:55 – 00:45:00:	The fundamental essence of camping is going out in the woods and staying there a while.

00:45:02 – 00:45:02:	That's it.

00:45:02 – 00:45:04:	That's the nature of camping.

00:45:04 – 00:45:05:	There's more to it than that, though.

00:45:05 – 00:45:06:	The same with marriage.

00:45:08 – 00:45:14:	The fundamental nature, the core essence of it, is that sexual relationship, but there's more to it.

00:45:14 – 00:45:27:	So, for instance, with camping, if you just went out and sat in the woods for a while and stared at the trees, you've got most of the essence down of camping, but you are really missing some things.

00:45:27 – 00:45:28:	You don't have the fullness of the experience.

00:45:29 – 00:45:34:	You didn't bring a tent or a hammock, or if you're not particularly bright, you didn't bring any food or water.

00:45:35 – 00:45:36:	You're missing some things.

00:45:37 – 00:45:41:	There are things you have to do to have the fullness of the thing.

00:45:41 – 00:45:55:	So, you put on the clothing for hiking, you put on your hiking boots, you take the things you need to set up camp, you take whatever you need to have enough water or to boil or to somehow purify water, this long list of things.

00:45:56 – 00:46:00:	All of those together create the totality that is camping.

00:46:02 – 00:46:12:	But, if you don't have that central part, the central essence of the thing, which is going out in the woods and staying there a while, you don't have camping even if you have all the other pieces.

00:46:13 – 00:46:23:	So, if you have all of your camping gear, you're wearing all the clothing, you have the food and the water, everything set up, and you just go and stand in your driveway, you're not camping.

00:46:23 – 00:46:25:	No one would say that you're camping.

00:46:26 – 00:46:27:	The same is true with marriage.

00:46:28 – 00:46:33:	You can't remove that core of the sexual relationship and still have marriage.

00:46:34 – 00:46:42:	If you remove that, you may have friendship still, but it's not a marriage, at least assuming things are rightly ordered according to the other forms of love.

00:46:43 – 00:46:47:	There are many other relationships you can have, but it will not be marriage.

00:46:48 – 00:46:51:	The same is the camping example though, if all you have is the sex.

00:46:52 – 00:46:57:	You don't have the fullness of what marriage is supposed to be, because it's disordered.

00:46:57 – 00:46:58:	You're doing it wrong.

00:46:58 – 00:47:03:	It is possible to do these things incorrectly, improperly, in a disordered fashion.

00:47:04 – 00:47:15:	And so just because we're emphasizing the core nature of marriage in this episode doesn't mean we're denying any of the other components, all of the other things that make for a good and proper marriage.

00:47:15 – 00:47:27:	The reason we're focusing on the core essence, the sexual aspect of marriage, is because our modern society has basically thrown that out the window.

00:47:28 – 00:47:31:	Sex is just something you do, and marriage is a contract.

00:47:32 – 00:47:40:	And you even hear Christians arguing, at least the latter one, hopefully not arguing the former statement, but you hear them arguing, oh no, you get married in church.

00:47:41 – 00:47:42:	I certainly hope you don't.

00:47:43 – 00:47:44:	You shouldn't do that in church.

00:47:45 – 00:47:46:	That's not how you get married.

00:47:47 – 00:47:48:	That is the wedding, as I mentioned earlier.

00:47:49 – 00:47:50:	The marriage is something different.

00:47:50 – 00:47:56:	And you have to understand the actual nature of the thing or it winds up being subverted.

00:47:57 – 00:48:01:	This is one of those areas that has to be defended to the utmost.

00:48:01 – 00:48:06:	There is no piece of this that we can get wrong or we can allow other men to get wrong.

00:48:07 – 00:48:17:	And the reason for that is because this is so central to the nature of humanity and not just our nature, but also obeying God.

00:48:17 – 00:48:19:	I'll get back to that in a minute here.

00:48:20 – 00:48:31:	But it is so central to our nature, so essential to who and what we are, that if we allow any bit of it to be subverted or taught incorrectly, that is an enormous opening for Satan.

00:48:31 – 00:48:34:	And Satan is always seeking to attack this.

00:48:34 – 00:48:39:	This is something where he has attacked it from the very beginning and he has not let up since.

00:48:40 – 00:48:41:	That alone should tell us something.

00:48:42 – 00:48:45:	Satan attacks where one of two things is true.

00:48:46 – 00:48:50:	He believes there's an opening or it is something of vital importance.

00:48:52 – 00:48:52:	This is both.

00:48:53 – 00:48:56:	It is of vital importance because again it is central to our nature.

00:48:58 – 00:49:00:	And he believes there's an opening because we leave openings all the time.

00:49:01 – 00:49:10:	We leave openings as Christians because we do not teach correctly with regard to not just the essence of the thing biologically and naturally, but Scripture.

00:49:11 – 00:49:13:	Scripture is very clear about this in some places.

00:49:13 – 00:49:15:	We will read a passage from Genesis 29 in a minute here.

00:49:16 – 00:49:17:	More than a minute, but shortly.

00:49:19 – 00:49:24:	Scripture is not very subtle or even euphemistic in a number of places.

00:49:24 – 00:49:27:	And we just gloss over it, we glide by it, we don't pay any attention to the words.

00:49:29 – 00:49:33:	As we so often advocate, slow down and actually understand what you are reading.

00:49:33 – 00:49:34:	Pay attention to the words.

00:49:35 – 00:49:37:	Scripture is divinely inspired.

00:49:38 – 00:49:39:	God picked these words.

00:49:40 – 00:49:40:	They are important.

00:49:41 – 00:49:43:	Read what Scripture actually says.

00:49:45 – 00:49:54:	But to return to the issue that I mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, there is some irony perhaps.

00:49:54 – 00:49:56:	It's a sardonic, a dark sort of irony.

00:49:57 – 00:50:05:	But monks and nuns and most modern couples sort of commit the same sin in a different way.

00:50:07 – 00:50:22:	Because they are both violating essentially the only command God ever gave us that until modern times, not particularly modern in the case of monks and nuns, but relatively modern, until modern times, we all obeyed.

00:50:23 – 00:50:35:	The only reason we obeyed it is because it is natural for us to do so, but go forth and multiply, is basically the one command God gave us that we have historically obeyed.

00:50:36 – 00:50:37:	Now we obeyed it because sex is fun.

00:50:39 – 00:50:40:	That's a large part of the reason.

00:50:40 – 00:50:51:	There were men who obeyed it because they were faithful and they were doing so deliberately, but there's also the aspect that God built pleasure into the equation, and so it comes naturally.

00:50:53 – 00:50:54:	Monks and nuns don't do that.

00:50:55 – 00:50:56:	They don't go forth and multiply.

00:50:57 – 00:50:59:	They are not faithful to God's command.

00:50:59 – 00:51:03:	The same is true of modern couples who practice so-called birth control.

00:51:04 – 00:51:10:	It's the same kind of sin achieved in a different way and sometimes toward different ends.

00:51:11 – 00:51:20:	But there's a sort of dark irony there, in that we've created almost a modern, particularly perverse form of monasticism with birth control.

00:51:21 – 00:51:23:	There are many other problems with birth control.

00:51:23 – 00:51:25:	It's not the point of this episode.

00:51:25 – 00:51:30:	There are many negative consequences, societally, biologically for women.

00:51:30 – 00:51:31:	It is a horrible thing.

00:51:31 – 00:51:39:	If any of the women, we've mentioned this before, but if any of the women in your life are on hormonal birth control, get them to stop.

00:51:40 – 00:51:41:	Do whatever you can to get them to stop.

00:51:41 – 00:51:43:	It is a wicked invention.

00:51:43 – 00:51:45:	It is something that should be absolutely destroyed.

00:51:47 – 00:51:59:	One of the passages that Cory just mentioned in Genesis 29 is one that, as he said, we gloss over, but it has the same sort of inherent question that is asked of Genesis 2.

00:51:59 – 00:52:03:	When people ask, well, how did Adam and Eve get married?

00:52:03 – 00:52:07:	No one asks how did Jacob marry Leah.

00:52:08 – 00:52:21:	And the reason that we are going to talk about Genesis 29 here is that this is explicit contrast between the modern notions of the wedding marriage and how Scripture treats God's marriage.

00:52:22 – 00:52:29:	So Genesis reads, Then Jacob said to Laban, Give me my wife, that I may go into her, for my time is completed.

00:52:30 – 00:52:33:	So Laban gathered together all the people of the place and made a feast.

00:52:33 – 00:52:38:	But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went into her.

00:52:39 – 00:52:41:	And in the morning, behold, it was Leah.

00:52:41 – 00:52:44:	And Jacob said to Laban, What is this you have done to me?

00:52:44 – 00:52:46:	Did I not serve with you for Rachel?

00:52:46 – 00:52:48:	Why then have you deceived me?

00:52:48 – 00:52:53:	Laban said it is not so done in our country to give the younger before the firstborn.

00:52:53 – 00:52:59:	Complete the week of this one, and then we will give you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.

00:52:59 – 00:53:01:	Jacob did so and completed her week.

00:53:02 – 00:53:05:	Then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel to be his wife.

00:53:05 – 00:53:07:	So Jacob went into Rachel also.

00:53:08 – 00:53:12:	And he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years.

00:53:15 – 00:53:23:	So on paper when you read what happened with Jacob and Leah, no one would say that Jacob was married to Leah.

00:53:24 – 00:53:26:	By all modern accounts, Jacob married Rachel.

00:53:26 – 00:53:27:	What do you have?

00:53:27 – 00:53:28:	You have a betrothal.

00:53:29 – 00:53:38:	Jacob said to Laban even before the night of the wedding, give me my wife that I may go into her, which incidentally is not euphemistic, is very direct.

00:53:38 – 00:53:39:	He says, give me my wife.

00:53:40 – 00:53:44:	She had not yet been made his wife, but she had been betrothed to him for seven years.

00:53:44 – 00:53:45:	That was the deal.

00:53:45 – 00:53:49:	Work for Laban for seven years, you get the pretty daughter, the younger daughter.

00:53:50 – 00:53:53:	So Laban agrees, says, okay, seven years have passed.

00:53:53 – 00:53:55:	We're going to have the wedding feast.

00:53:55 – 00:53:57:	Gets everybody together.

00:53:57 – 00:54:00:	Everyone's there for a big party for Jacob and Rachel.

00:54:01 – 00:54:07:	Every single person who showed up to that feast was there celebrating the wedding of Jacob and Rachel.

00:54:07 – 00:54:13:	And then in the dark, in secret, Laban and Leia conspire against Jacob.

00:54:13 – 00:54:14:	And what happens?

00:54:14 – 00:54:16:	Leia ends up in his bed.

00:54:16 – 00:54:17:	We're not told what happened to Rachel.

00:54:18 – 00:54:23:	You would think that she would wonder why she wasn't in her own husband's bed on the night of their wedding.

00:54:23 – 00:54:24:	But what happens?

00:54:24 – 00:54:28:	He wakes up in the morning next to, we would say, his wife's sister.

00:54:28 – 00:54:29:	And it's not what he says at all.

00:54:30 – 00:54:31:	I've said this before.

00:54:31 – 00:54:36:	Jacob does not wake up next to Leia and say, Oh no, I slept with my wife's sister.

00:54:37 – 00:54:41:	Every modern reader would say, of course, Leia was not the one he married.

00:54:41 – 00:54:42:	He had the ceremony.

00:54:42 – 00:54:43:	He had the betrothal.

00:54:43 – 00:54:46:	Everything except for the sex was about Rachel.

00:54:46 – 00:54:54:	The only thing that was about Leia was the sex, which was not even consensual, you know, to forgive me for using that term.

00:54:55 – 00:54:58:	But Jacob had no intention of having sex with Leia.

00:54:59 – 00:54:59:	And yet he did.

00:55:00 – 00:55:01:	He was deceived in the dark.

00:55:02 – 00:55:04:	He had no idea it was coming until he woke up.

00:55:04 – 00:55:12:	Once the deed was done, the euphemism, he wakes up and he doesn't say, Why did you trick me into sleeping with my wife's sister?

00:55:13 – 00:55:16:	He says, in effect, Why did you trick me into marrying the wrong woman?

00:55:17 – 00:55:20:	Now, the modern reader has no possible explanation of what's going on.

00:55:20 – 00:55:25:	Genesis 29 makes no sense whatsoever if you disagree with what we're saying here today.

00:55:26 – 00:55:27:	Which is precisely why we're saying it.

00:55:27 – 00:55:33:	Because this is entirely consistent with the one flesh union described in Genesis 2.

00:55:33 – 00:55:35:	God says the two will become one flesh.

00:55:35 – 00:55:37:	That's exactly what happened.

00:55:38 – 00:55:41:	And later on, we'll get into some New Testament passages that point back to the very same thing.

00:55:42 – 00:55:45:	The one flesh union is the essence of the marriage.

00:55:45 – 00:55:47:	It's the genesis of the marriage.

00:55:47 – 00:55:49:	It's not the whole thing, but it's the beginning of it.

00:55:50 – 00:55:51:	In its absence, there's no marriage.

00:55:52 – 00:55:55:	He was not married to Rachel for another week.

00:55:55 – 00:56:01:	He had one exclusive week where he had to have sex with the ugly sister, which he did because he was obligated to.

00:56:01 – 00:56:04:	And then he also married Rachel.

00:56:04 – 00:56:05:	Incidentally, polygyny.

00:56:05 – 00:56:12:	I'm not going to really deal with that today, but in no point has it ever said that Jacob sinned in this arrangement.

00:56:13 – 00:56:15:	He married both of them because he had sex with both of them.

00:56:16 – 00:56:18:	And he didn't even agree to marry the first one, but there's no out.

00:56:19 – 00:56:21:	We point to this because it's so stark.

00:56:21 – 00:56:28:	Like if you're just reading it and not paying attention, you would naturally think, wow, Laban is a complete scumbag to do this to his own blood.

00:56:29 – 00:56:33:	Someone he'd welked him, someone he's exploited for tremendous personal profit.

00:56:33 – 00:56:37:	And then he marries off his ugly daughter and then he marries off the pretty one.

00:56:37 – 00:56:38:	So he's off the hook.

00:56:38 – 00:56:39:	His fatherly duties are done.

00:56:39 – 00:56:41:	He got rid of both his daughters.

00:56:41 – 00:56:44:	He got 14 years of labor from an incredibly gifted worker.

00:56:45 – 00:56:46:	Like what a deal for him.

00:56:46 – 00:56:47:	He was a scumbag.

00:56:48 – 00:56:57:	Jacob, unfortunately for him and unfortunately for Leah going on to read it, it made me very sad to read how much Jacob hated Leah because he'd been tricked.

00:56:57 – 00:57:01:	And she repeatedly, God blessed her with sons.

00:57:01 – 00:57:05:	And each time she was given a son, she thought maybe this time he'll love me.

00:57:05 – 00:57:08:	Like it's a horrible story for everyone involved.

00:57:09 – 00:57:16:	But it was still a marriage because of the sex, because they slept together, because they had the one flesh union.

00:57:18 – 00:57:24:	Just as an important side note here, what Woe just said is worth emphasizing.

00:57:25 – 00:57:27:	The week here is a literal week.

00:57:27 – 00:57:29:	It is not representing the seven years.

00:57:30 – 00:57:36:	I have read and heard some exegetes try to say he had to work another seven years and then got Rachel.

00:57:36 – 00:57:37:	That's not what happened.

00:57:38 – 00:57:42:	The wedding feasting and celebrating lasted for a week.

00:57:43 – 00:57:46:	And then he received Rachel and then worked another seven years.

00:57:47 – 00:57:49:	But he didn't have to wait seven years for her.

00:57:49 – 00:57:57:	Just a side note to correct some exegetes who get that one wrong, try to take week as being a metaphor representing the seven years.

00:57:58 – 00:57:59:	It is not in this case.

00:58:01 – 00:58:12:	Related to this example here, where we see the fact that Jacob married Leah, despite not having the intent to do so, the physical act was sufficient.

00:58:13 – 00:58:15:	There's an ex operi operato in play here.

00:58:17 – 00:58:23:	There's a similar example given in the New Testament with regard to prostitutes.

00:58:24 – 00:58:28:	Paul says, do not become one flesh with a prostitute.

00:58:30 – 00:58:35:	No one who visits a prostitute thinks that he is marrying the prostitute.

00:58:36 – 00:58:38:	But that's what Scripture says.

00:58:39 – 00:58:42:	Because Scripture says that he becomes one flesh.

00:58:42 – 00:58:48:	And everywhere else we read of the one flesh union, the one flesh union is marriage.

00:58:49 – 00:58:57:	And the reason for that is, as we have been saying repeatedly in this episode, having sex with a woman is marrying her.

00:58:58 – 00:59:02:	And so the only thing that you do with a prostitute is have sex with her.

00:59:03 – 00:59:04:	You are marrying her.

00:59:06 – 00:59:11:	That is one of the reasons that fornication is so heinous.

00:59:14 – 00:59:24:	This is difficult, of course, for many modern ears to hear, because undoubtedly even many listening to this episode have engaged in fornication, have engaged in sexual immorality.

00:59:25 – 00:59:32:	And you have to deal with the fact that you were married after a fashion to every woman with whom you had sex.

00:59:34 – 00:59:37:	That may be deeply uncomfortable, but it is the reality.

00:59:38 – 00:59:43:	Part of the reason that is uncomfortable because this is one of those instances where there is no fix.

00:59:45 – 00:59:53:	If you have sex with a woman who is not your wife and then you do not marry her, compounding your sin, there is no fix.

00:59:53 – 00:59:55:	What you have done defiled her.

00:59:56 – 00:59:57:	Scripture is very clear about that.

00:59:57 – 00:59:59:	It speaks of that in a number of places.

01:00:00 – 01:00:11:	Incidentally, Scripture says that it's worse to have sex with a woman than she goes to another man and then to take her back, although obviously marriage and adultery play into that differently.

01:00:11 – 01:00:12:	It's a little more complicated.

01:00:13 – 01:00:17:	But Scripture speaks of a woman who has done that as being a defiled field.

01:00:18 – 01:00:25:	If you are a man and you have fornicated with women, you have defiled the wives of other men.

01:00:26 – 01:00:27:	That is what you've actually done.

01:00:27 – 01:00:29:	You've actually committed adultery.

01:00:30 – 01:00:31:	It's not fornication.

01:00:31 – 01:00:36:	We call it fornication because we're distinguishing different kinds of sexual morality.

01:00:37 – 01:00:47:	Ultimately, they are all adultery because what you are doing is having sex with another man's wife, or at least a woman who should be another man's wife.

01:00:47 – 01:01:00:	It may be that she has been wife to many men, but the reality is that anytime you have sex with a woman, you are forming that one flesh union.

01:01:00 – 01:01:10:	Now, in the case of a prostitute or any other woman to whom you are not married, it is disordered in a fundamental fashion and it is sinful, and you should not be doing that.

01:01:12 – 01:01:14:	But it doesn't change the nature of the act.

01:01:14 – 01:01:17:	It doesn't change the essence of the thing.

01:01:17 – 01:01:27:	And again, that is the reason that these sins are so heinous, because the consequences of these sins cannot be undone in this life.

01:01:29 – 01:01:36:	A woman cannot go back and undo having sex with however many men she had sex with before she married her husband.

01:01:37 – 01:01:44:	You as a man cannot go back and undefile the women with whom you had sex who were not yours.

01:01:46 – 01:01:55:	There are sins that have very real temporal consequences that cannot be addressed, cannot be solved in this life.

01:01:55 – 01:01:57:	You cannot make them better.

01:01:57 – 01:02:09:	Now, in the case of, say, it's your high school girlfriend and you sleep with her, if you marry her, you are doing the best thing that you can do with regard to your past sin, which is what you should do.

01:02:09 – 01:02:11:	That's what Scripture recommends, in fact.

01:02:13 – 01:02:22:	But if that woman has moved on to her next boyfriend or another man, whatever it happens to be, that window is closed.

01:02:22 – 01:02:23:	There is no fixing it.

01:02:24 – 01:02:25:	Your sin is your sin.

01:02:25 – 01:02:28:	Yes, it is a forgiven sin.

01:02:28 – 01:02:33:	Yes, Christ's blood covers it, but the consequences cannot be undone in this life.

01:02:34 – 01:02:58:	It is one of the reasons that Satan so focuses on sexual sin and why Satan wants society to tell young people, no, no, no, you need to spend your formative years and for women your most fertile years at college, and you need to be free and experiment, because Satan knows that if you just engage in that lifestyle, all that damage accumulates and cannot be undone.

01:02:59 – 01:03:02:	And for many, that damage is going to lead them away from God.

01:03:04 – 01:03:25:	Even if they aren't saying, oh, my sin is so bad that I can't possibly be forgiven, even if they aren't making that theological error, because many of them aren't, they are going to be so entrenched in that sinful lifestyle that they will just continue to get worse and worse and worse, because sexual sin is one of those sins that compounds.

01:03:27 – 01:03:28:	It doesn't get better over time.

01:03:29 – 01:03:39:	If you are engaging in sexual degeneracy, what you do tomorrow is going to be worse than what you did yesterday, because it just keeps getting worse.

01:03:39 – 01:03:50:	It is one of those sins where every time you engage in it, you're basically desensitizing yourself to what you did previously, and that's no longer enough.

01:03:51 – 01:03:56:	Of course, there's a lot of biology and psychology and neuroscience here, but we don't need to get into that for this episode.

01:03:57 – 01:03:59:	Those technical aspects are not the point.

01:04:00 – 01:04:03:	The point is that the sin is searing your conscience.

01:04:04 – 01:04:10:	And so as you continue to engage in those sins, you will engage in worse sins.

01:04:10 – 01:04:14:	You will start to engage in things, say, 10, 20 years down the line, however long it takes.

01:04:14 – 01:04:18:	Perhaps it's faster in some cases or slower in others.

01:04:19 – 01:04:26:	You'll get to the point where you are doing things that you would have never even thought of doing when you started down that road.

01:04:27 – 01:04:28:	And Satan knows that.

01:04:29 – 01:04:30:	Satan has been doing this a long time.

01:04:31 – 01:04:41:	He knows that if he can just get you to engage in this relatively minor sin, this thing that seems totally harmless, having sex with your high school girlfriend, everyone else is, why shouldn't you?

01:04:42 – 01:04:43:	Small matter.

01:04:43 – 01:04:57:	He knows that ultimately his goal is to have that woman so destroyed after she's slept with a string of two, three, four dozen men over the course of high school, college, graduate school, however many years.

01:04:58 – 01:05:03:	His goal is to destroy her utterly and to have you participate in it.

01:05:03 – 01:05:07:	And I'm, of course, speaking directly to the men on this specific issue.

01:05:11 – 01:05:12:	Satan is not dumb.

01:05:13 – 01:05:17:	He knows what he can achieve and how he can achieve it.

01:05:17 – 01:05:22:	That is the reason we want to get these issues, to get these matters absolutely correct.

01:05:23 – 01:05:29:	Not to leave them at euphemism or to leave them implied or just to say, well, you know.

01:05:31 – 01:05:33:	No, we don't get to ignore the details on this.

01:05:34 – 01:05:35:	Because every little thing matters.

01:05:35 – 01:05:39:	Because if we leave an opening for Satan, he will take full advantage.

01:05:40 – 01:05:44:	And scripture speaks about these things in the strongest of terms.

01:05:45 – 01:05:50:	This is not an area where God whispers, as some like to try to say about certain sins.

01:05:52 – 01:05:53:	God is blunt about this.

01:05:55 – 01:06:00:	God condemns sexual sin from the beginning of scripture all the way to the end of scripture.

01:06:01 – 01:06:04:	And he condemns it in extremely harsh terms.

01:06:04 – 01:06:09:	God calls sexual sin, certain kinds at least, an abomination.

01:06:10 – 01:06:15:	Not an abomination for you, not an abomination for the ancient Israelites, an abomination unto God.

01:06:16 – 01:06:22:	Something that he hates to the point that he will see it utterly wiped out from the earth.

01:06:22 – 01:06:27:	He will destroy all of those who participate in it and all of those who tolerate it.

01:06:28 – 01:06:30:	These are not minor matters.

01:06:30 – 01:06:38:	You have to get the nature of the thing correct and you have to get the perversions of the thing correct because you have to understand what you have to avoid.

01:06:39 – 01:06:48:	And so when it comes to sexual sin, there is only one acceptable form of the expression of human eros.

01:06:49 – 01:06:52:	And that is sex between a man and his wife.

01:06:53 – 01:06:53:	Period.

01:06:54 – 01:06:58:	Nothing else is acceptable under that category.

01:06:59 – 01:07:03:	Everything else is degenerate to the point where it is no longer eros.

01:07:04 – 01:07:08:	There is only one possible tiny exception here.

01:07:09 – 01:07:17:	And that is if you have sex with a woman before you are married to her, that may very well still be eros if you follow it up by doing what is right.

01:07:18 – 01:07:21:	It is still a perverse example.

01:07:21 – 01:07:24:	You have still degraded the institution.

01:07:24 – 01:07:25:	You have done it wrong.

01:07:25 – 01:07:26:	It was disordered.

01:07:27 – 01:07:31:	But you can make it good, as it were, because there is that opportunity there.

01:07:34 – 01:07:41:	But that's a limited window, because of course we know what happens if you move on to your next girlfriend and she moves on to her next boyfriend.

01:07:42 – 01:07:43:	The sin compounds.

01:07:43 – 01:07:44:	The sin gets worse.

01:07:44 – 01:07:48:	The things in which you engage get more and more perverse over time.

01:07:51 – 01:08:08:	So as we are working through this downward spiral, beginning in Genesis 2, where the original marriage was given to us as an example, and then we see a marriage in Genesis 29 with Jacob and Leah that was not, it wasn't even really disordered.

01:08:09 – 01:08:11:	It was simply, it was trickery.

01:08:12 – 01:08:13:	Leah was a willing participant.

01:08:13 – 01:08:16:	The father was a willing participant, which is important.

01:08:16 – 01:08:20:	A father, to be explicit, is a participant in every marriage.

01:08:20 – 01:08:29:	Just as God the father was a participant in the first marriage by giving Eve to Adam, Laban gave Leah to Jacob.

01:08:30 – 01:08:33:	The problem is that Jacob was the victim there because he didn't know.

01:08:33 – 01:08:35:	He inadvertently slept with the ugly sister.

01:08:35 – 01:08:39:	It cost him another seven years of work to get the pretty one.

01:08:40 – 01:08:49:	And then what we see in 1 Corinthians 6 with the prostitute, I want to read this again because it's so crucial, because it ties directly to those previous two examples quite literally.

01:08:51 – 01:08:55:	Paul writes, Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?

01:08:55 – 01:08:59:	Shall I then take the member of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

01:09:00 – 01:09:00:	Never.

01:09:00 – 01:09:05:	Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her?

01:09:06 – 01:09:09:	For as it is written, the two will become one flesh.

01:09:10 – 01:09:13:	But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

01:09:15 – 01:09:23:	So as Corey said, you have the one flesh union with a prostitute that's disordered by its very nature.

01:09:24 – 01:09:26:	It's not disordered in that it's contrary to nature.

01:09:26 – 01:09:28:	It was a man and a woman.

01:09:28 – 01:09:29:	He was aroused.

01:09:29 – 01:09:30:	He was attracted to her.

01:09:30 – 01:09:33:	He went to her and paid her for her sex.

01:09:34 – 01:09:41:	That's degenerate in the sense that it's completely unacceptable structurally, but it wasn't per se contrary to nature.

01:09:41 – 01:09:47:	But it's a far greater departure than what we have with Jacob and Leah, where he was simply tricked.

01:09:48 – 01:09:51:	Here the man is going to a prostitute, knowing exactly what he's doing.

01:09:52 – 01:09:54:	He's defiling her, as Corey laid out very well.

01:09:56 – 01:10:01:	The problem is that we get further and further away from the original one-flesh union of the garden.

01:10:01 – 01:10:03:	As Corey said, it becomes unfixable.

01:10:03 – 01:10:05:	There's no way to put this back together.

01:10:06 – 01:10:11:	There's no way if you've had sex with a prostitute to make that a legitimate marriage.

01:10:11 – 01:10:15:	So when we say that that is a marriage, it's in horror.

01:10:16 – 01:10:18:	It's in absolute despair and agony.

01:10:18 – 01:10:24:	It's a sort of rending of clothing type situation that you see in the Middle Eastern cultures of the Bible.

01:10:25 – 01:10:28:	You're looking at something that's an abomination.

01:10:28 – 01:10:29:	You can't fix it.

01:10:29 – 01:10:30:	You can be forgiven for it.

01:10:30 – 01:10:31:	You can't fix it.

01:10:32 – 01:10:34:	And so I want to be clear about that.

01:10:34 – 01:10:38:	We're not saying that, oh, well, you're married to someone who didn't even know it.

01:10:39 – 01:10:43:	We're saying that you've done something horrible and you've broken something that can't be fixed.

01:10:43 – 01:10:44:	Stop breaking things.

01:10:45 – 01:10:46:	Stop defiling.

01:10:46 – 01:10:48:	That's the fundamental message here.

01:10:48 – 01:10:56:	Again, by pointing explicitly to these things in the terms of the one flesh union is to illustrate the horror that we've all left in our wakes.

01:10:57 – 01:10:59:	Sexual sin is one of the most common sins in the world.

01:10:59 – 01:11:02:	It's probably nearly as common as the slander episode.

01:11:03 – 01:11:06:	Virtually everyone listening is physically guilty.

01:11:06 – 01:11:11:	And those who are not physically guilty mostly would have if you've been able to.

01:11:11 – 01:11:12:	That's one of the problems with this.

01:11:13 – 01:11:21:	In Matthew 5 and 6, when Jesus is giving the sermon, He talks about how these are sins that begin in the heart and then they manifest in the flesh.

01:11:22 – 01:11:35:	The distinction here is that we're only talking about the flesh because it is the one flesh union that makes or breaks whether or not you have a godly marriage or you have some abomination of a false union.

01:11:35 – 01:11:36:	They can't be fixed.

01:11:36 – 01:11:37:	They can't be repaired.

01:11:37 – 01:11:42:	And it's a shameful thing that will continue to bear damage in this life.

01:11:42 – 01:11:47:	Which is, again, as Corey said, we always reiterate, doesn't mean you're not forgiven.

01:11:48 – 01:11:52:	Jesus went up on the cross knowing we were going to do all this crap.

01:11:53 – 01:11:55:	He died for it, knowing that we were going to do it.

01:11:55 – 01:11:56:	That's why He died.

01:11:56 – 01:11:58:	He was crucified for these sins.

01:11:58 – 01:12:00:	They're forgiven on the cross.

01:12:01 – 01:12:02:	So why do we keep doing them?

01:12:03 – 01:12:09:	Why do we keep nailing Christ to the cross with these wicked counter appetites that are at odds with what God says?

01:12:11 – 01:12:30:	As we move on to Romans 1, the beginning of this epistle is just a litany of the examples of the complete departure of the sexual desires to the very negative form of lust, the typical form today, where frankly, it's not even really sexual anymore.

01:12:31 – 01:12:48:	In the episode, I think it was on A Young Man's Life, we talked about, at some length, about ordered versus disordered desires, talking about what is today called heterosexual, where if a man desires a woman and she's not his wife, that is disordered according to their relationship, but it's not disordered according to nature.

01:12:49 – 01:12:55:	Much of what's in Romans 1 is talking about things that are fundamentally disordered according to nature.

01:12:55 – 01:12:56:	They're contrary to nature.

01:12:57 – 01:13:07:	And the thing that I realized I said in that episode, I think again, I think it was A Young Man's Life, we called that sexual as well, because that's really the way it's framed today.

01:13:07 – 01:13:14:	I think honestly, it's probably better not to call those sexual sins at all for this one specific distinctive reason.

01:13:14 – 01:13:16:	As I said earlier, we're talking about things on a table.

01:13:17 – 01:13:20:	We're trying to separate them into the right buckets so they don't get confused.

01:13:22 – 01:13:36:	When you talk about sins of a sexual nature that are contrary to nature itself, to even call them sexual is in a way a denial of the root and the essence of sex.

01:13:36 – 01:13:45:	Because properly ordered, the sexual desire between a man and a woman in marriage is fundamentally procreative.

01:13:45 – 01:13:48:	Even as we said earlier, not every act is going to result in children.

01:13:48 – 01:13:49:	That's up to God.

01:13:50 – 01:13:52:	It's not intended to bind consciousness.

01:13:52 – 01:13:54:	Oh, we did something and didn't create a baby.

01:13:54 – 01:13:54:	Did we sin?

01:13:55 – 01:13:56:	Absolutely not.

01:13:56 – 01:14:07:	What a man and a woman will do together naturally without any external wicked forces is going to be part of the blessing of sexuality as proper human godly sexuality.

01:14:08 – 01:14:13:	When we get into Romans 1, we're looking at the things that we're seeing on TV and online today.

01:14:14 – 01:14:19:	Things that are so utterly contrary to nature that I think it's frankly an affront to call them sexual.

01:14:20 – 01:14:22:	Yes, it does involve genitalia.

01:14:22 – 01:14:26:	Yes, it does in some cases involve some type of sexual gratification.

01:14:27 – 01:14:45:	But frankly, as soon as someone goes down this path where they have separated what is being called sexual from the proper godly garden union of one flesh, man and woman, it very quickly ceases to even have anything remotely resembling it.

01:14:46 – 01:15:05:	There's something that we saw last year when the LCMS published the wicked large catechism with the bastardizations from Matt Harrison where they put raping children and orgies and sodomy in the same breath as fornication as though those were all sexual preferences.

01:15:06 – 01:15:20:	That's why I'm speaking against it today because I think it's actually an error to say that a disordered desire for someone who's not your wife, if you're a man, or not for your husband, if you're a woman, is disordered according to good order, but it's not disordered according to nature.

01:15:20 – 01:15:21:	That's a point we made before.

01:15:22 – 01:15:29:	I think it's really important to say that if it's in contradiction to nature, I think we should probably stop calling us sexual.

01:15:29 – 01:15:38:	I think when you look at the so-called fake six-color rainbow flag, Satan's flag, the bastardization of the rainbow, none of that's sexual.

01:15:39 – 01:15:42:	All of those things are deviations that are contrary to nature.

01:15:42 – 01:15:44:	They're contrary to everything that God's given us.

01:15:45 – 01:15:58:	And so in Romans 1, as those are delineated, just note that in this passage, it begins and ends with idolatry, which is fundamentally what's going on with everything that we're seeing today that's contrary to natural sex.

01:16:00 – 01:16:07:	We've said before, and it's a crucial point, every sin that you or I will ever commit is at its root idolatry.

01:16:08 – 01:16:21:	In order for me to sin against God, I first have to either ignore what I should have known God was going to desire through ignorance or malice, or I know anyway and I do it because I want to make myself God.

01:16:22 – 01:16:23:	That is idolatry.

01:16:23 – 01:16:25:	That is a violation of the first commandment.

01:16:25 – 01:16:31:	That's the root of every single sin I've ever committed or you've ever committed, either ignorance or malice.

01:16:31 – 01:16:32:	I don't care what God said.

01:16:32 – 01:16:33:	I'm going to do my own thing.

01:16:34 – 01:16:39:	It's important because it's the reason that God put the first commandment first.

01:16:40 – 01:16:47:	The only way to sin is to violate the first commandment, and then you're going to violate some or more of the rest along the way down the path.

01:16:47 – 01:16:54:	And it's only God continuously reeling us back in through forgiveness and sanctification that we're not lost again.

01:16:56 – 01:17:18:	When we look at Romans 1 and we look at how it begins in idolatry and then ends in idolatry, what we see is that the sexual sins, the so-called sexual sins that we see today in the rainbow parades as we're recording this, this is the obscenely named Pride Month, an entire month of this garbage filling the airwaves, propagandizing everyone.

01:17:18 – 01:17:20:	It's all fundamentally rebellion against God.

01:17:20 – 01:17:27:	And although there's a sexual tenor to it, as we see in Romans 1 in this passage, it's really self-worship.

01:17:27 – 01:17:31:	Everything that you see all these people doing, it is self-worship.

01:17:31 – 01:17:33:	And not simply for gratification.

01:17:34 – 01:17:43:	It's open rebellion against God in that sort of way that we saw 2,000 years ago in Rome and Greece, that we saw 4,000 or 5,000 years ago before the flood.

01:17:44 – 01:17:51:	Open, abject rebellion against everything that God has ever commanded, saying, I'm going to do whatever I want, just giving God the finger.

01:17:51 – 01:17:52:	What's he going to do?

01:17:53 – 01:17:57:	Well, Romans 1 talks a little bit about some of the things he does in this life.

01:17:57 – 01:18:01:	And we certainly know what's coming in the life to come for those who engage in these sins.

01:18:03 – 01:18:09:	And so to read the passage from Romans 1 that lists many of these sins.

01:18:11 – 01:18:19:	For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

01:18:19 – 01:18:24:	For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

01:18:24 – 01:18:34:	For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

01:18:34 – 01:18:36:	So they are without excuse.

01:18:36 – 01:18:45:	For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God, or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

01:18:46 – 01:18:56:	Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, and birds and animals and creeping things.

01:18:56 – 01:19:11:	Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.

01:19:11 – 01:19:11:	Amen.

01:19:12 – 01:19:16:	For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions.

01:19:17 – 01:19:33:	For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women, and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men, and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

01:19:34 – 01:19:41:	And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind, to do what ought not to be done.

01:19:41 – 01:20:06:	They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, they are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless, though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die.

01:20:07 – 01:20:10:	They not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them.

01:20:11 – 01:20:31:	This list is essentially things that are contrary to nature when it comes to, if we use the umbrella term, sexual sin, if we don't use the umbrella term, that's actually part of the problem in this when dealing, not just in English, but really in any language of which I'm aware.

01:20:32 – 01:20:39:	We use sex or sexual as an umbrella term basically for anything that even tangentially involves the genitalia.

01:20:41 – 01:20:42:	But it's not really.

01:20:43 – 01:20:55:	As Wo was saying, sex is a specific thing and these perversions of it are perverted and degenerate to the point where they are no longer the thing because they have lost the essence of the thing, as we keep saying.

01:20:55 – 01:21:03:	If you lose the essence of the thing, you no longer have the thing, even if you keep some of the miscellaneous, tangential stuff.

01:21:04 – 01:21:11:	And so there's a distinction between a sort of sin that would be in agreement with nature.

01:21:11 – 01:21:17:	We've used in pactum cum natura, or you could use secundum naturum in Latin.

01:21:18 – 01:21:20:	And then there is sin that is contra naturum.

01:21:20 – 01:21:22:	There's sin that is contrary to nature.

01:21:23 – 01:21:24:	Those are worse sins.

01:21:24 – 01:21:31:	Those are the sorts of sins that are celebrated by our wicked culture in the month of June.

01:21:33 – 01:21:42:	Men engaging in what are wrongly called sexual acts with other men are engaging in sins that are contrary to nature.

01:21:43 – 01:21:47:	They are above and beyond mere fornication.

01:21:47 – 01:21:50:	Because fornication is sinful, very obviously.

01:21:50 – 01:21:51:	We've been very clear about that.

01:21:52 – 01:21:54:	But it is a sin that is in agreement with nature.

01:21:55 – 01:22:01:	It is not contrary to nature, because it is not contrary to the nature of a man to desire a beautiful woman.

01:22:02 – 01:22:04:	That is in agreement with his nature.

01:22:05 – 01:22:06:	You are acting in accord with nature.

01:22:06 – 01:22:12:	Yes, it is your fallen nature, because the object of that desire is the wrong object.

01:22:13 – 01:22:14:	So it is disordered.

01:22:15 – 01:22:20:	There is no sort of thing that would be ordered homosexual desire.

01:22:21 – 01:22:23:	It is inherently disordered.

01:22:23 – 01:22:24:	It is inherently wicked.

01:22:25 – 01:22:27:	It cannot be sanctified.

01:22:27 – 01:22:28:	It cannot be rightly ordered.

01:22:29 – 01:22:31:	And so it is contrary to nature.

01:22:31 – 01:22:32:	It is a worse sort of sin.

01:22:33 – 01:22:38:	And that is what our culture celebrates, not just in the month of June, but day in and day out.

01:22:38 – 01:22:42:	We just happen to be inundated with it in the month of June.

01:22:43 – 01:22:52:	But you can see here this progression, this downward spiral, this degeneration that comes along with sexual sin.

01:22:53 – 01:22:55:	It gets worse over time.

01:22:55 – 01:23:11:	A culture that tolerates sodomy will eventually wind up tolerating pederasty, pedophilia, bestiality, everything else on down the line, because there is no floor when it comes to sexual so-called sin.

01:23:12 – 01:23:13:	It can always get worse.

01:23:15 – 01:23:17:	That is the case with a number of different sins.

01:23:17 – 01:23:19:	Not all sins, but many sins.

01:23:19 – 01:23:20:	They get worse over time.

01:23:20 – 01:23:21:	There is no floor.

01:23:21 – 01:23:37:	It is particularly true in this case, because the only thing that stops those who engage in these wicked acts, short of repentance, which is very rare in these so-called communities, but short of repentance, the only thing that stops them is death.

01:23:38 – 01:23:43:	Now God says the proper punishment for this is capital punishment, is death.

01:23:43 – 01:23:53:	And it's not just temporal death that is meant here, because of course a godly prince would deal with these individuals to stop this sin taking place in his realm.

01:23:54 – 01:24:02:	But this also speaks of eternal death, because God is going to cast those who participate in these things and do not repent into eternal fire.

01:24:03 – 01:24:14:	The punishment for being a sodomite, the punishment for being a pedophile, the punishment for being any of these other forms of degenerate wickedness, is eternal death.

01:24:15 – 01:24:18:	It is the fires of hell that are not quenched.

01:24:19 – 01:24:26:	It is eternal suffering, and that is what awaits those who fall into any of these categories enumerated here in Romans 1.

01:24:27 – 01:24:36:	God is not being subtle with regard to these sins, and God is not whispering with regard to the punishment that awaits those who engage in this wickedness.

01:24:37 – 01:24:41:	And as Christians, we should speak the truth, as God speaks it.

01:24:41 – 01:24:43:	We shouldn't dance around the subject.

01:24:43 – 01:24:45:	We shouldn't refuse to speak of these things.

01:24:45 – 01:24:47:	We're not saying that you have to be immodest.

01:24:47 – 01:24:55:	We're not saying you have to be as blunt as we are being in this episode, because that's not always necessary for what you're attempting to achieve.

01:24:55 – 01:24:57:	You have to employ wisdom, as we keep saying.

01:24:57 – 01:25:00:	Wisdom is unavoidable.

01:25:00 – 01:25:02:	It's part of being alive.

01:25:02 – 01:25:03:	It is certainly part of the Christian life.

01:25:05 – 01:25:07:	But we have to speak the truth on these matters.

01:25:07 – 01:25:09:	We can't sweep them under the rug.

01:25:09 – 01:25:13:	We can't just use euphemisms to the point where we deny that any of this is sin.

01:25:13 – 01:25:16:	And so it's just, it's your choice.

01:25:16 – 01:25:19:	They live that way, I'll live this way, as long as it doesn't affect me.

01:25:19 – 01:25:22:	What they do in their bedroom is no business of mine.

01:25:22 – 01:25:23:	Those are all lies.

01:25:23 – 01:25:25:	Those are all direct from the mouth of hell.

01:25:25 – 01:25:27:	Those are from Satan.

01:25:28 – 01:25:31:	Because what your neighbor does, does affect you.

01:25:32 – 01:25:36:	And not only that, but God punishes wicked nations.

01:25:37 – 01:25:39:	God does not just punish wicked individuals.

01:25:40 – 01:25:44:	A nation that tolerates these sins will eventually be punished by God.

01:25:45 – 01:25:50:	Now, in some cases, the punishment is inherent, as is very clear from this passage.

01:25:50 – 01:25:54:	Sodomites are punished by the behavior itself.

01:25:56 – 01:25:59:	Homosexual men do not tend to live very long.

01:26:00 – 01:26:15:	The only reason that we have homosexual men today who are in their 50s or 60s, still relatively rare, you will note, is because of the heroic and extremely expensive medical interventions that keep them alive.

01:26:16 – 01:26:21:	Because the consequences of that so-called lifestyle are disease and early death.

01:26:22 – 01:26:31:	And that's not even to say anything about the drug abuse and the alcohol abuse and the despair and the psychological problems and suicide and all of the other things.

01:26:31 – 01:26:44:	Even if you leave those aside, the purely biological, mechanical consequences of that behavior are destructive to the point where men who engage in it die young.

01:26:45 – 01:26:53:	Because the consequences, as God says, are found in the bodies of those men who engage in this wickedness.

01:26:54 – 01:26:57:	Sometimes the punishment comes along naturally with the sin.

01:26:58 – 01:26:59:	Another case of that would be birth control.

01:27:00 – 01:27:02:	Well, you can engage in birth control.

01:27:02 – 01:27:03:	That's sinful.

01:27:03 – 01:27:04:	God doesn't give you children.

01:27:06 – 01:27:07:	That's the punishment.

01:27:07 – 01:27:10:	The punishment comes along with the sin in some cases.

01:27:11 – 01:27:25:	And one of the most wicked things that came from Harrison's Large Cataclysm last year was the explicit claim that even if someone were a so-called repentant Christian, they would still be burdened with these wicked appetites.

01:27:26 – 01:27:27:	That's absolutely false.

01:27:28 – 01:27:35:	The naturally ordered appetite has, as Corey said at the beginning, the medicine of marriage.

01:27:35 – 01:27:44:	The resolution for the properly ordered appetite is to constrain it to the proper order, to constrain it to marriage, which is between a man and a woman.

01:27:45 – 01:27:50:	Any other sort of desire is inherently wicked.

01:27:50 – 01:27:52:	It's inherently an attack against God himself.

01:27:53 – 01:27:55:	That cannot be sanctified.

01:27:55 – 01:27:56:	That can only be removed.

01:27:56 – 01:27:59:	And God does promise to remove all such things.

01:28:00 – 01:28:17:	When you go through the list at the end of Romans 1, and you have unrighteousness, evil, covetous, malice, gossip, slander, the notion that exclusive of all that list, only sexual desires would be incurable, is itself blasphemous.

01:28:17 – 01:28:25:	To say, well, I want to disobey my parents, I want to be a gossip, I want to be malicious, but I'm not going to act on it, so it's okay.

01:28:25 – 01:28:28:	Seriously, no Christians ever talk that way.

01:28:29 – 01:28:37:	When we are in Christ and we have a sanctified heart, God is continuously removing this evil from our hearts and taking it away from us.

01:28:37 – 01:28:38:	And it does get better.

01:28:39 – 01:28:49:	It's entirely possible for someone to have engaged or to have desired these things that are profoundly wicked and disordered to come to Christ to repent.

01:28:49 – 01:28:59:	But their repentance will involve sanctification, which contrary to what the LCMS now teaches, does involve the removal of those desires, because they are against God.

01:28:59 – 01:29:04:	You cannot be in God and have a desire that is contrary to nature itself.

01:29:06 – 01:29:07:	I hope we are making this clear.

01:29:07 – 01:29:23:	The narrow confines of marriage, of the one flesh union, even for those who are outside of it because they do not have a husband or wife, only those desires which are properly ordered according to creation are even licit, and then they are limited to the marriage bed.

01:29:24 – 01:29:28:	Everything else is rebellion against God, heterosexual or anything else.

01:29:29 – 01:29:32:	The whole spectrum of things that we have just said, there is not really sexualities at all.

01:29:33 – 01:29:41:	The idea of sexuality is a modern term to basically, in the world, sanctify things that are open rebellion against God.

01:29:42 – 01:29:51:	I think it's very interesting that Romans 1, this is the very most important book in some ways, and the entire New Testament, in the sense that it lays everything out.

01:29:51 – 01:29:54:	It covers virtually everything that we've ever talked about on Stone Choir.

01:29:55 – 01:29:57:	The very first chapter is Paul dealing with this.

01:29:58 – 01:30:04:	He has some very nice greetings, and then he lays into them, talks about end of the world types of debauchery.

01:30:05 – 01:30:25:	And when we look on TV and we look online today, we see that sort of debauchery, and we see it accelerating, and we see churches and pastors doing what God says deserves the death penalty to give approval to those who practice them, and make known mistake, even condemning it morally while saying, well, that's really sad, and Jesus doesn't want you to do that.

01:30:26 – 01:30:32:	When you categorize things like raping children, along with looking at a girl in a bikini, that is approval.

01:30:32 – 01:30:36:	That is saying the thing that you are doing is one of the most wicked things that shouldn't even be imaginable.

01:30:37 – 01:30:45:	To put that in the same category as something that is according to nature, it's simply disordered because it's not confined, is approval.

01:30:46 – 01:30:49:	It's closing a window that should never include both of those things.

01:30:49 – 01:30:51:	They go in two separate buckets.

01:30:52 – 01:30:52:	Both are sin.

01:30:53 – 01:30:54:	Both are damnable.

01:30:55 – 01:30:59:	But the distinction, if someone doesn't get it, they're just flat out evil.

01:31:01 – 01:31:04:	Next thing that we want to cover is the subject of divorce.

01:31:05 – 01:31:10:	This is something that the Pharisees repeatedly went after Jesus for, trying to trip him up.

01:31:11 – 01:31:17:	I want to read from Matthew 19, because once again, Jesus points back to Genesis 2.

01:31:17 – 01:31:23:	The Pharisees came up to him and tested him by saying, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?

01:31:23 – 01:31:36:	Jesus answered, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?

01:31:37 – 01:31:40:	So they are no longer two but one flesh.

01:31:40 – 01:31:42:	Therefore God has joined together.

01:31:42 – 01:31:43:	Let not man separate.

01:31:44 – 01:31:50:	They said to him, Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?

01:31:50 – 01:31:57:	He said to them, Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

01:31:58 – 01:32:06:	And I say to you, Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.

01:32:07 – 01:32:12:	Now, when a lot of people read this, they think that Jesus is being set in opposition to Moses.

01:32:13 – 01:32:18:	And I think the fundamental error is, one, again, not correctly identifying what marriage is.

01:32:19 – 01:32:23:	Because when you understand what marriage is, you then understand what divorce is.

01:32:24 – 01:32:36:	To misread Matthew 19 and to think that Jesus is disagreeing with Moses requires that you believe the modern belief that marriages occur in church, that a marriage and a wedding are the same thing.

01:32:36 – 01:32:37:	That's not the case.

01:32:37 – 01:32:43:	A wedding is a formal public acknowledgement of what occurs in the marriage bed.

01:32:44 – 01:32:51:	Therefore, a divorce is a formal public acknowledgement of what has happened in the bed.

01:32:52 – 01:32:57:	In other words, a marriage always occurs in bed, a divorce always occurs in bed.

01:32:57 – 01:32:59:	And that's exactly what Jesus is saying here.

01:32:59 – 01:33:05:	Whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery.

01:33:06 – 01:33:13:	Now, if a man is married to a woman and she commits adultery, and then he marries another woman, why is he not committing adultery?

01:33:14 – 01:33:15:	Is it because he has paperwork?

01:33:16 – 01:33:21:	Is it because of some legal technicality that he has a form that says, well, it's not adultery now?

01:33:21 – 01:33:21:	No.

01:33:22 – 01:33:25:	His wife broke the one flesh union.

01:33:25 – 01:33:30:	When the man's wife committed adultery, she became another man's wife.

01:33:30 – 01:33:32:	He ceased to be married.

01:33:32 – 01:33:36:	The one flesh union ends the same way it begins, in bed.

01:33:37 – 01:33:42:	And this is why what Jesus says here is exactly the same thing that Moses said in principle.

01:33:42 – 01:33:43:	Moses went further.

01:33:44 – 01:33:48:	The Jews of that day were asking to divorce wives for bad cooking and stuff.

01:33:49 – 01:33:49:	It was crap.

01:33:50 – 01:33:52:	And as Jesus said, it was because of their hardness of heart.

01:33:52 – 01:33:53:	It's because they were unbelievers.

01:33:55 – 01:34:06:	But the distinction of where is adultery, Jesus is clear that the line for adultery is the same in Genesis 2 as it is in Genesis 29, as is Matthew 19.

01:34:08 – 01:34:12:	The only way that you get divorced is when there's unfaithfulness physically.

01:34:12 – 01:34:32:	And again, this is a clear distinction that needs to be made because I've heard some folks say that they have in their churches seen people claim and get divorced, and they believe that they got divorced on Biblical grounds based on the consumption of pornography or something, where there was no physical adultery, there was no fornication.

01:34:32 – 01:34:37:	In other words, it's usually going to be the husband anymore, not necessarily.

01:34:38 – 01:34:44:	For the sake of argument, in the examples that were given, it was a husband who was sinning with pornography in his own home.

01:34:45 – 01:34:46:	His wife found out.

01:34:46 – 01:34:47:	She said, hey, that's adultery.

01:34:48 – 01:34:49:	Adultery is in the Bible.

01:34:49 – 01:34:51:	We're not married anymore, and she divorced him.

01:34:51 – 01:34:53:	That was an act of wickedness.

01:34:53 – 01:35:00:	Because when you look at what Jesus is talking about in the Sermon on the Mount, yes, it's absolutely adulterous in the heart.

01:35:00 – 01:35:02:	Pornography is wicked, flat out.

01:35:02 – 01:35:03:	It should be illegal.

01:35:04 – 01:35:06:	Pornographers should be executed by the state.

01:35:06 – 01:35:08:	That was the right and just thing.

01:35:09 – 01:35:10:	It should never have been made legal.

01:35:10 – 01:35:16:	The fact that Leelon just made it permissible on X is going to be a complete disaster.

01:35:16 – 01:35:18:	It's fundamentally wicked.

01:35:19 – 01:35:22:	It is not the same as breaking the one flesh union.

01:35:22 – 01:35:24:	The one flesh union is physical.

01:35:24 – 01:35:27:	As Corey said earlier, the union is a mystical union.

01:35:28 – 01:35:32:	There's an ex operi operato act that we don't even understand.

01:35:32 – 01:35:33:	We know it's true.

01:35:34 – 01:35:35:	God says it's true.

01:35:35 – 01:35:36:	We can observe it in the world.

01:35:36 – 01:35:40:	We can observe two people getting closer together when they have sex.

01:35:41 – 01:35:51:	Even if they don't have a proper marriage, it's typical for couples to fall in love when they're having sex, even when they're fornicating, especially for girls, more so for girls than for men.

01:35:51 – 01:35:53:	But it is the natural consequence.

01:35:54 – 01:35:56:	The disordered thing is that they should be married first.

01:35:56 – 01:35:59:	They should be married, they should have a wedding ceremony, and then get married.

01:36:00 – 01:36:05:	But if you get married and then you have a wedding ceremony to legitimize it, it's going to play out almost the same way.

01:36:05 – 01:36:12:	It doesn't make it right, but at least it puts it back in the box as best you can.

01:36:14 – 01:36:17:	When Jesus talks about adultery breaking marriage, this is what he means.

01:36:18 – 01:36:24:	It's only the one flesh union, the physical union, that is actual adultery.

01:36:25 – 01:36:27:	Now, I'm not trying to play games with actual.

01:36:27 – 01:36:31:	It's evil for someone in a marriage to look at someone outside of the marriage sexually.

01:36:31 – 01:36:34:	You shouldn't be desiring anyone other than your spouse.

01:36:35 – 01:36:37:	But that's not by itself grounds for divorce.

01:36:38 – 01:36:41:	It's a problem that everyone is dealing with today.

01:36:41 – 01:36:42:	It's rampant.

01:36:42 – 01:36:44:	Even among pastors, it's rampant.

01:36:44 – 01:36:45:	It's everywhere.

01:36:45 – 01:36:49:	Because as Corey said, what better way for Satan to get all of us?

01:36:49 – 01:37:00:	He gets everybody on the hook with the sort of appetite that we have naturally, and then takes it off in some 90-degree angle until it ceases to be anything that could remotely be considered from God.

01:37:01 – 01:37:06:	It begins evil, and it ends up evil and going perpendicular to nature itself.

01:37:07 – 01:37:09:	That's the contours of Satan's behavior.

01:37:10 – 01:37:13:	But the one flesh union is in bed.

01:37:14 – 01:37:15:	It is a physical act.

01:37:16 – 01:37:29:	So when Jesus says, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality and marries another, commits adultery, it's because if you are in a marriage and your spouse has sex with someone else, the marriage itself has ended.

01:37:30 – 01:37:31:	Now, we need to be explicit here.

01:37:32 – 01:37:36:	That's not a get out of jail free card for you to say, oh great, I can get rid of her.

01:37:36 – 01:37:38:	I want to trade up for a newer model anyway.

01:37:39 – 01:37:49:	That's evil too, because in the circumstance where your spouse has committed adultery and has broken the one flesh union, it is always your option.

01:37:49 – 01:37:51:	It should be the preferable option.

01:37:51 – 01:38:00:	You should consider it, at least at the beginning, to be an obligation as a Christian, is to remedy that marriage.

01:38:01 – 01:38:12:	If one spouse has stepped outside of the marriage and has broken it by having sex with another, you can reform your marriage by getting back in bed together and remarrying.

01:38:13 – 01:38:14:	It doesn't fix it.

01:38:14 – 01:38:16:	It doesn't fix the adultery.

01:38:16 – 01:38:21:	You can never fix that adultery, but you can reunify as a married couple.

01:38:23 – 01:38:44:	So just because Jesus says it's permissible and it's acknowledging that it's happened, there may be a case where, in particular circumstances, if you find out that someone, that your spouse has committed adultery physically with someone else, there may be permissible circumstances where you say this is over, never again.

01:38:44 – 01:38:45:	We're divorced.

01:38:45 – 01:38:46:	It's finished.

01:38:46 – 01:38:50:	And then you get a legal acknowledgement for what has already occurred spiritually.

01:38:50 – 01:38:51:	But it's not automatic.

01:38:51 – 01:38:52:	It shouldn't be automatic.

01:38:52 – 01:38:57:	You should seek reconciliation because God did join you together.

01:38:58 – 01:39:02:	And to break that apart on a lark is evil.

01:39:02 – 01:39:16:	For you to have spent whatever portion of your lifetime together as man and wife and then just throw it away because of one wicked act or a series of wicked acts by itself, hopefully isn't enough.

01:39:17 – 01:39:20:	Again, there's no possible way to analyze a given situation.

01:39:21 – 01:39:30:	I just make clear the fact that in the circumstance of adultery, you have the option to divorce, does not make it automatic, and it's wicked for us to use that as license.

01:39:31 – 01:39:36:	Nevertheless, when it is permissible and when it is a Christian divorce, this is the only case.

01:39:36 – 01:39:40:	It's where the marriage already ended because the divorce occurred in bed.

01:39:42 – 01:39:47:	The next passage we'll be dealing with in this episode is from Ephesians 5.

01:39:49 – 01:39:59:	Wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Savior.

01:40:00 – 01:40:05:	Now as the Church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

01:40:06 – 01:40:24:	Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church, and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the Church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

01:40:25 – 01:40:28:	In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

01:40:29 – 01:40:40:	He who loves his wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the Church, because we are members of his body.

01:40:40 – 01:40:47:	Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

01:40:47 – 01:40:52:	This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ in the Church.

01:40:53 – 01:40:59:	However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

01:41:01 – 01:41:09:	This is one of those passages that, to most modern ears, it is going to be abrasive, to say the least.

01:41:10 – 01:41:25:	Because it says bluntly that wives should submit in everything to their husbands, and everything about the modern world tells wives, tells women, that they are independent, that they can do whatever they want, that they don't have to listen to any man.

01:41:26 – 01:41:28:	And that is simply not what Scripture says.

01:41:28 – 01:41:30:	It is not what Christians believe.

01:41:32 – 01:41:41:	Girls submit to their fathers first, and then when they are transferred from their fathers to their husbands, they submit to their husbands.

01:41:42 – 01:41:44:	Because the husband is the head of his wife.

01:41:45 – 01:41:47:	The same as Christ is the head of the church.

01:41:47 – 01:41:51:	The church does not get to make rules or do whatever she pleases.

01:41:51 – 01:41:54:	The church submits to Christ in all things.

01:41:54 – 01:41:57:	Which is why the word matters, because it is the word of God.

01:41:59 – 01:42:05:	So everything in the word must be obeyed by the church, must be obeyed by all Christians.

01:42:05 – 01:42:07:	The church does not get to make new doctrine.

01:42:08 – 01:42:10:	The church does not get to make new theology.

01:42:11 – 01:42:14:	Wives do not get to go out and do whatever they please.

01:42:14 – 01:42:16:	They are to submit to their husbands.

01:42:17 – 01:42:21:	Now the husband is head of his wife, but that comes with certain duties.

01:42:22 – 01:42:24:	One of those is to love your wife.

01:42:24 – 01:42:29:	Husbands are explicitly commanded to love their wives as Christ loved the church.

01:42:30 – 01:42:39:	That is not in the sense of servant leadership, so called, that has become so popular in some modern evangelical circles.

01:42:39 – 01:42:42:	It is not the husband doing whatever the wife pleases.

01:42:43 – 01:42:44:	Because that isn't what Christ does.

01:42:45 – 01:42:47:	Christ doesn't do whatever the church pleases.

01:42:48 – 01:42:50:	Christ commands the church to do certain things.

01:42:51 – 01:42:52:	Christ teaches the church.

01:42:53 – 01:42:54:	Christ cares for the church.

01:42:55 – 01:43:00:	That is how a husband is supposed to show love for his wife and for his children.

01:43:00 – 01:43:02:	He does so by being the head.

01:43:03 – 01:43:08:	You are not the head if you are being led around by the nose by your wife or by your children.

01:43:09 – 01:43:12:	Weak husbands are an abomination.

01:43:12 – 01:43:23:	They are a major part of the problem we have in the modern world because it is weak husbands who allow their wives to run rough shot over them and do whatever they please.

01:43:23 – 01:43:26:	And then they become problems for other men as well.

01:43:27 – 01:43:29:	Because their husbands are not dealing with them as they should.

01:43:29 – 01:43:31:	The same thing is true of unruly children.

01:43:32 – 01:43:35:	There are duties up and down the hierarchy in this.

01:43:36 – 01:43:37:	Husbands have a duty to lead.

01:43:37 – 01:43:39:	Wives have a duty to submit.

01:43:39 – 01:43:41:	No one is off the hook as it were.

01:43:41 – 01:43:43:	No one is a tyrant in this.

01:43:44 – 01:43:45:	But the husband is in control.

01:43:46 – 01:43:47:	And he will give account for that.

01:43:48 – 01:43:58:	As a husband, one day, you will stand before God, and you will give account for what you did with your wife, what you did with your children, and what you failed to do.

01:43:59 – 01:44:04:	Because you have a position of authority given you by God, and that comes with certain duties.

01:44:05 – 01:44:09:	It is up to you to faithfully pursue and to faithfully fulfill that office.

01:44:10 – 01:44:13:	If you don't, you will answer to God for it.

01:44:14 – 01:44:19:	Every man should be very, very deeply concerned about that.

01:44:20 – 01:44:23:	That is one of the reasons that you should spend time in scripture.

01:44:23 – 01:44:26:	It's one of the reasons many of you listen to this podcast.

01:44:27 – 01:44:39:	Because you want to be a good Christian man, and part of being a good Christian man is how you interact with your wife and children, not just how you interact with other men and your society and your church and everything else outside the home.

01:44:40 – 01:44:42:	All of this starts in the home.

01:44:42 – 01:44:56:	You have to be a good husband and father first, because you cannot have a Christian country, you cannot have a Christian civilization or nation without Christian homes, and you cannot have a Christian home without Christian husbands.

01:44:57 – 01:45:04:	Another part of this passage is verse 32, which makes many exegetes uncomfortable.

01:45:04 – 01:45:10:	Some will simply ignore it, pass by it, which is what most Christians do when reading.

01:45:10 – 01:45:14:	But it says, This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ in the Church.

01:45:16 – 01:45:21:	We can exegete this partially, not fully, because this is a mystery.

01:45:22 – 01:45:24:	It says it explicitly, this is a mystery.

01:45:24 – 01:45:29:	Anytime scripture speaks of a mystery, it is something that we cannot understand fully.

01:45:29 – 01:45:31:	We cannot understand absolutely.

01:45:31 – 01:45:35:	We can't pick it apart into little pieces and analyze it and understand it top to bottom.

01:45:36 – 01:45:38:	The sacraments, that's what sacrament means.

01:45:38 – 01:45:39:	It's a mystery.

01:45:39 – 01:45:41:	We cannot fully understand them.

01:45:42 – 01:45:49:	This is well we cannot fully understand, but we can understand it to some degree, because there's some typology here.

01:45:50 – 01:45:53:	The husband and the wife become one flesh.

01:45:54 – 01:45:55:	That is the one flesh union.

01:45:56 – 01:45:58:	There's no longer two, but one flesh.

01:45:59 – 01:46:11:	The same thing is true after a fashion, is true typologically of the church and Christ, because the church is called the mystical body of Christ, and every Christian is part of the body of Christ.

01:46:12 – 01:46:18:	So you see that same sort of union of the church and Christ, of the Christian and Christ.

01:46:18 – 01:46:20:	There's a typology there.

01:46:20 – 01:46:21:	We can understand that.

01:46:21 – 01:46:29:	We can recognize it for what it is, but we don't want to go too far with regard to mysteries.

01:46:30 – 01:46:36:	That is where you end up with Gnostic cults and various other theological and doctrinal problems.

01:46:38 – 01:46:49:	When you want to take the things that God says, this is a mystery, and analyze them and think that you know I'm above mysteries, I personally can stare at this long enough that I'll understand it fully.

01:46:50 – 01:47:00:	When you work yourself into that position, when you yield to that sort of pride, you inevitably wind up with beliefs that are contrary to God, that are contrary to Scripture.

01:47:00 – 01:47:04:	If God says something is a mystery, believe him that it's a mystery.

01:47:05 – 01:47:08:	To say it is a mystery means that you cannot fully understand it.

01:47:09 – 01:47:17:	So read it, believe it, understand it to the extent that God has given you to understand it, but be content with that.

01:47:19 – 01:47:34:	One of the other things that's important about this passage and the particular part that Corey just highlighted, the immediately previous verse is one that quotes Genesis, where again, Jesus, Paul, God, Moses, everyone says the same thing.

01:47:34 – 01:47:44:	Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, with Paul says it's a mystery, referring to Christ in his church.

01:47:45 – 01:47:51:	One other place that the same phrase shows up is in Deuteronomy 10, 20, specifically on God.

01:47:51 – 01:47:53:	You shall fear the Lord your God.

01:47:53 – 01:47:58:	You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear.

01:47:58 – 01:48:04:	The exact same word in Greek is used, hold fast to God, as a husband holding fast to his wife.

01:48:05 – 01:48:07:	And as Paul says, it's a mystery.

01:48:07 – 01:48:11:	There's a typology of marriage that is not explained.

01:48:12 – 01:48:15:	And we have a duty as Christian men to do two things.

01:48:15 – 01:48:18:	As Corey said, we shouldn't go beyond what's in Scripture.

01:48:18 – 01:48:30:	There are certain things that when you read what is in Scripture, and it says very plainly, this is a mystery, to try to reason it out is almost invariably going to lead to the worst sort of heresies.

01:48:31 – 01:48:32:	It's not revealed to us.

01:48:33 – 01:48:37:	Until such time as these mysteries are revealed, all we can do is take God at His word.

01:48:39 – 01:48:44:	It's doubly dangerous because what we're dealing with here specifically is sexual in nature.

01:48:44 – 01:48:54:	And going back to the very beginning of cults and false beliefs where Satan is messing with people's souls, he wants to do weird sex stuff to the church.

01:48:55 – 01:49:01:	And so there's this bait that's just sitting there for someone to say, oh, sex has something to do with our relationship with God.

01:49:02 – 01:49:03:	What do you do with that?

01:49:04 – 01:49:09:	All we can do is confess that it's there, not ignore it, and frankly, probably just leave it alone.

01:49:09 – 01:49:15:	Because for 2,000 years, no one has put forward an explanation beyond what's in scripture.

01:49:15 – 01:49:17:	It should remain that way.

01:49:18 – 01:49:22:	The one reason I want to highlight this is that there's something we're not going to get into today.

01:49:22 – 01:49:34:	But particularly when you're looking in the Old Testament, very, very, very frequently, you will find that when God describes idolatry, he will describe it explicitly in terms of whoring.

01:49:34 – 01:49:38:	He will describe Israel as whoring after foreign gods.

01:49:38 – 01:49:40:	He describes it in sexual terms.

01:49:40 – 01:49:46:	God describes idolatry and unbelief in terms that are sexual in nature.

01:49:47 – 01:49:49:	It's the same thing that's going on.

01:49:49 – 01:49:53:	And again, we don't have an explanation beyond that, except for what Corey said earlier.

01:49:54 – 01:49:55:	Satan loves this.

01:49:55 – 01:49:58:	Satan will very frequently intermingle the two.

01:49:59 – 01:50:07:	In fact, some of the most wicked and depraved, explicitly satanic acts were active worshipers of Satan.

01:50:07 – 01:50:11:	They will incorporate that sort of debauchery into their practices.

01:50:12 – 01:50:13:	They know what they're doing.

01:50:14 – 01:50:21:	They know that they're serving hell by doing this sort of profanation of religion and body at the same time.

01:50:22 – 01:50:26:	Christians can't go anywhere near it, but we also can't ignore that this is how God talks.

01:50:27 – 01:50:40:	So just understand that when we have the Christian relationship from God to us, from God to the Church, there is a typological nature that involves the union of man and woman that is beyond understanding.

01:50:40 – 01:50:43:	When we die, God is going to explain this stuff to us.

01:50:43 – 01:50:45:	It's something to look forward to.

01:50:46 – 01:50:48:	The crucial thing is that idolatry works the same way.

01:50:49 – 01:50:54:	When God says you're whoring after foreign gods, you're whoring after idols, take that seriously.

01:50:55 – 01:51:10:	That sort of desire for disobeying God, for doing things that are contrary to him, for believing and worshiping, fearing, loving and trusting in things above God, he calls that fornication, spiritual fornication.

01:51:10 – 01:51:13:	It's the same thing, and we don't understand how.

01:51:13 – 01:51:16:	So there's nothing more for us to say about it beyond that.

01:51:16 – 01:51:25:	Just acknowledge and understand that you will, once you recognize that pattern, you're going to find it in places that you probably glossed over before, because you thought it was some sort of metaphor.

01:51:26 – 01:51:33:	It is a metaphor, and it's a euphemism, sort of, but it's also revealing a spiritual truth that God doesn't explain further.

01:51:33 – 01:51:34:	That's fine.

01:51:35 – 01:51:36:	I don't want to make anyone curious.

01:51:36 – 01:51:37:	I'm not curious.

01:51:38 – 01:51:46:	If I were celibate, truly, I might want to delve into this, because it seems profound, but I think it's a bad impulse.

01:51:47 – 01:51:56:	And even if I did it, even if I did somehow figure it out, I would never ever tell anyone, because the nature of this sort of thing is such that it's inherently going to be abused.

01:51:57 – 01:52:04:	We have fallen sinful human natures that take God's good gifts in these matters and turn them to the worst possible effects.

01:52:05 – 01:52:19:	So we've tried to treat this sensitively, but at the same time treating it directly, because the essence of marriage, the essence of Eros, along with all the other things, I want to commend you for reading after this.

01:52:19 – 01:52:28:	Go read all of Ephesians 5, because it kind of summarizes a lot of things that we covered, and it gives a very positive emphasis on the married relationship.

01:52:28 – 01:52:31:	As we set the outset, this was not to be in a marital advice episode.

01:52:32 – 01:52:36:	We're not the guys to give you that, but we can tell you what Scripture says about it.

01:52:36 – 01:52:39:	Any man who's reading Scripture faithfully can do that.

01:52:40 – 01:52:47:	There's stuff that, if the church were emphasizing it correctly, no one would be confused about things like so-called gay marriage.

01:52:48 – 01:52:49:	It's an ontological impossibility.

01:52:50 – 01:52:52:	It's quite literally an oxymoron.

01:52:52 – 01:52:55:	It's one and then a contrary thing to the first.

01:52:56 – 01:52:57:	There's no such thing.

01:52:57 – 01:53:02:	And yet even in the church today, it is common for people to say, yeah, they support that.

01:53:02 – 01:53:06:	They support something that's an open attack on heaven itself inside the church.

01:53:07 – 01:53:07:	Never mind the world.

01:53:08 – 01:53:10:	People who say they're Christians say, oh, yeah, that's fine.

01:53:10 – 01:53:19:	The only way to get there is by centuries of us refusing to talk like this about the way that God revealed the true nature of marriage.

01:53:19 – 01:53:21:	It is the foundation of civilization.

01:53:21 – 01:53:23:	It is the foundation of the family.

01:53:23 – 01:53:25:	It's the foundation of the church.

01:53:25 – 01:53:32:	Everything begins with the father and the mother together producing offspring as God commanded and promised.

01:53:32 – 01:53:34:	Everything is downstream from that.

01:53:34 – 01:53:41:	And so when we fail to treat this with the love and respect that God commands, we get the world that we see today.

01:53:43 – 01:53:52:	As we've already said a couple of times in this episode, marriage is the foundation of human civilization.

01:53:53 – 01:53:55:	Marriage is the beginning of our species.

01:53:55 – 01:53:57:	We see that in the Garden with Adam and Eve.

01:53:58 – 01:54:02:	Without marriage, there is no future for humanity.

01:54:03 – 01:54:04:	Without marriage, there is no family.

01:54:04 – 01:54:06:	Without families, there is no nation.

01:54:08 – 01:54:12:	These matters are fundamental, and so we have to get them right as Christians.

01:54:12 – 01:54:18:	And that is why we have reiterated things a number of times in this episode.

01:54:20 – 01:54:25:	As I said earlier, you cannot get these things wrong, because if you get them wrong, you leave an opening for Satan.

01:54:26 – 01:54:35:	And you wind up where we are today and where we will be if we do not turn things around in the not too distant future, because it can always get worse.

01:54:35 – 01:54:37:	And we see that day after day.

01:54:37 – 01:54:40:	Our civilization is getting more and more degenerate.

01:54:42 – 01:54:52:	As Christian men specifically, we have to speak truthfully and at least for the foreseeable future, to some degree bluntly about these matters.

01:54:53 – 01:55:03:	Because even Christians, who may be good Christians otherwise, get these things wrong, because they were never taught simply to read and believe what Scripture says about these matters.

01:55:04 – 01:55:08:	Or even just to think about the basic biology of it.

01:55:08 – 01:55:12:	Because these things are obvious both in Scripture and in nature, both of God's books.

01:55:13 – 01:55:15:	God was not subtle about this matter.

01:55:16 – 01:55:38:	It is only centuries of euphemism and avoiding the matter and then intense decades of satanic corruption of our culture that has led to the outcome, led to the reality we see on the ground today, where men deny basic facts about this most fundamental aspect of human civilization and of simply being human.

01:55:41 – 01:55:58:	But to end on perhaps a more positive note than some of the heavier content in this episode, I want to read from Proverbs 31 about an excellent wife, about a good wife, because here at the end of the episode, I want to be very clear.

01:55:59 – 01:56:03:	We are praising marriage as highly as we possibly can.

01:56:03 – 01:56:11:	We are not denigrating marriage by speaking about it in blunt terms and focusing on the physical, because that is what marriage is.

01:56:11 – 01:56:12:	But again, it's more than that.

01:56:13 – 01:56:15:	You just can't remove the essence and still have the thing.

01:56:16 – 01:56:21:	But from Proverbs, he who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.

01:56:22 – 01:56:28:	Marriage is praised very highly from the beginning of Scripture to the end of Scripture.

01:56:28 – 01:56:30:	It is one of the greatest gifts of God.

01:56:31 – 01:56:34:	And I've mentioned this before, but I want to reiterate it here.

01:56:36 – 01:56:43:	We sort of just pass idly by the narrative of the creation of woman in Scripture.

01:56:43 – 01:56:45:	We just read it and we keep going.

01:56:47 – 01:56:50:	I would recommend you go and read the first three chapters of Genesis.

01:56:52 – 01:56:57:	Adam walked with God in the garden, and yet God said it is not good for man to be alone.

01:56:59 – 01:57:10:	A man who walked with God spoke to God face to face, and yet God still said it was not good for him not to have a wife.

01:57:11 – 01:57:14:	That is how important that relationship is to God.

01:57:14 – 01:57:18:	That is how fundamental that relationship is to being a human being.

01:57:19 – 01:57:22:	I'm not saying that some people don't have the gift of celibacy.

01:57:22 – 01:57:24:	Some tiny handful of men do.

01:57:24 – 01:57:29:	But for everyone else, this is of the utmost importance.

01:57:29 – 01:57:36:	It is something that should be a focus not just of Christians, not just of the Church, but of society as a whole.

01:57:37 – 01:57:48:	The goal should be the establishing, the maintaining and the shoring up of strong marriages, because without them we cannot have a civilization that is worthy of the name.

01:57:50 – 01:57:53:	And so to end the episode, a reading from Proverbs 31.

01:57:55 – 01:57:59:	An excellent wife who can find, she is far more precious than jewels.

01:58:00 – 01:58:04:	The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain.

01:58:05 – 01:58:08:	She does him good and not harm, all the days of her life.

01:58:09 – 01:58:12:	She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands.

01:58:13 – 01:58:16:	She is like the ships of the merchant, she brings her food from afar.

01:58:17 – 01:58:23:	She rises while it is yet night, and provides food for her household, and portions for her maidens.

01:58:24 – 01:58:28:	She considers a field and buys it, with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.

01:58:29 – 01:58:32:	She dresses herself with strength, and makes her arm strong.

01:58:33 – 01:58:38:	She perceives that her merchandise is profitable, her lamp does not go out at night.

01:58:38 – 01:58:42:	She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle.

01:58:42 – 01:58:46:	She opens her hand to the poor, and reaches out her hands to the needy.

01:58:47 – 01:58:52:	She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet.

01:58:52 – 01:58:57:	She makes bed coverings for herself, her clothing is fine linen and purple.

01:58:57 – 01:59:01:	Her husband is known in the gates, when he sits among the elders of the land.

01:59:02 – 01:59:04:	She makes linen garments and sells them.

01:59:04 – 01:59:06:	She delivers sashes to the merchant.

01:59:06 – 01:59:10:	Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come.

01:59:11 – 01:59:15:	She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

01:59:16 – 01:59:20:	She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness.

01:59:20 – 01:59:23:	Her children rise up and call her blessed.

01:59:23 – 01:59:25:	Her husband also, and he praises her.

01:59:26 – 01:59:29:	Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.

01:59:30 – 01:59:36:	Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.

01:59:37 – 01:59:41:	Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.