God and Sex: Bonus Laws

[If you didn’t read the previous article (Does God Hate Sex?) do that first, as it establishes the baseline for sexual rules in relation to the Lord.]

 

Let’s talk about sex, baby.  More specifically, the Holy Spirit wants to call our attention to a few specific sexual laws and talk more about them.

 

[Homosexuality]

Bam, let’s start with the biggest elephant in the room.  The Bible says, “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable.  They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads” (Leviticus 20:13).  People have dissected this and other related commands and Scriptures to either prove that homosexuality as a whole is an abomination or is not so bad.  What they usually don’t consider though is the idea behind the Law in the first place.  As we established last time, sexual laws are largely a symbol of our worship of God.

In laws against homosexual activity, the Lord is trying to tell us who to (and not to) copulate with.  But wait, in our modern era gay marriage is totally ok from a legal standpoint!  That it is, but the Bible says we’re only supposed to use interlocking parts in bed- not get it on with similar-genitaled people.  Why?  Because the Lord wants us to do marriage in a specific way.  The reason is again to remind us that he also wants worship in a specific way.  Check out Deuteronomy 12:1-7,

These are the decrees and laws you must be careful to follow in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess – as long as you live in the land.  Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains and on the hills and under every spreading tree where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods.  Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out the names from those places.

     You must not worship the Lord your God in their way.  But you are to seek the place the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his Name there for his dwelling.  To that place you must go; there bring your burnt offerings and sacrifices, your tithes and special gifts, what you have vowed to give and your freewill offerings, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks.  There, in the presence of the Lord your God, you and your families shall eat and shall rejoice in everything you have put your hand to, because the Lord your God has blessed you.

We are called to worship the Lord in a specific way and follow his style as outlined in the Bible.  What we did before God gets a pass; for he wrote of worship, “You are not to do as we do here today, everyone as he sees fit, since you have not yet reached the resting place and the inheritance the Lord your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 12:8-9).  But after you accept the Lord as your savior, you should worship in the prescribed way.  Even the New Testament advises we follow established religious conventions, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).  God takes this stuff seriously.  The very first priests tried to worship the wrong way and it didn’t go well for them:

Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense, and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command.  So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord (Leviticus 10:1-2).

And just like that they were killed.  God is not screwing around.  So as a Christian inclined in one direction or another; keep in mind that the Lord has instituted forms of worship and he’d like us to follow them.

 

[Incest]

The topic of incest is a sticky situation for the Bible.  On one hand it spends almost an entire chapter specifically banning getting it on with close relatives.  Here’s a taste:

No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations.  I am the Lord.

     Do not dishonor your father by having sexual relations with your mother.  She is your mother; do not have relations with her.

     Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonor your father.

     Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere (Leviticus 18:6-9).

…and so on (seriously).  But….when we think about early Biblical families (especially in Genesis), there’s a lot of incest being had.  It starts right at the beginning, “Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch.  Cain was then building a city and he named it after his son Enoch” (Genesis 4:17).  Cain was a second generation human; the first generation was Adam and Eve.  Who was Cain’s wife?  Almost certainly she was also his sister (or another close relative).  Abraham’s beloved wife Sarah was absolutely his half-sister because he freely admitted it.  We read,

Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife.  And when God had me wander from my father’s household, I said to her, “This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, ‘He is my brother’” (Genesis 20:12-13).

And, if you really want to think about it, humanity bottle-necked at Noah’s family too; so his grandkids were at best marrying cousins.

So why all the sudden and strong banning of incest in Leviticus?  Check out the way the bans are written, “Do not have sexual relations with your son’s daughter or your daughter’s daughter; that would dishonor you” (Leviticus 18:10).  Although the verses of Leviticus 18 try to hide the laws behind honor and dishonor as though it’s a “how one looks to outsiders” issue; other people groups at that time didn’t have a problem with incest and neither did the Israelites- since apparently God felt the need to make a law about it.  So let’s make a couple of holy assumptions.  First, much like with unholy worship we can assume that pre-Exodus incest got a pass.  The second assumption has to do with how the people responded to Christ.  History records, “For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).  By saying he was related to God, the people felt Christ was committing blasphemy; since being directly related to the Lord would theoretically give us some standing as gods as well.  This suggests that direct relation to God (like through family) is a form of idolatry.  And we read in the last article that the Lord uses marriage as a stand-in for our relationship to him.  Adultery is idolatry and incest is likewise a kind of representative of blasphemy (claiming to be God).  You can even see how saying scumbags like us are related to God might affect his overall standing among others.  Hence, the Lord bans physical incest as a symbol for the ban of blasphemy- spiritual incest.

 

[Bestiality]

We’re already here, so we might as well get it out of the way.  In Leviticus 18:23 we are told, “Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it.  A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion.”  Aside from safety and cleanliness issues, there is actually a spiritual reason for not giving a dog a bone- so to speak.  When discussing the natural tendency towards idolatry that humanity has, Paul wrote,

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles (Romans 1:21-23).

One of the easiest forms of idolatry was the worship of literal idols: stand-ins for God (often) in the form of a little statue.  Or, like in some people groups, the worship of a specific animal.  Therefore, since our sexual relations are a symbol of our relationship to the Lord; having sex with an animal is like the worship of animal idols.  So it is understandable that God isn’t cool with it.

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Leviticus 18, the sex chapter, begins its ending with an important note: “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled” (Leviticus 18:24).  Did the “unclean” lands do such things as we’ve discussed today?  I have no doubt about it, because the godless do so today as well.  But so did Israel; that’s why God made the rules.  This line though could also be applied to how outsiders worship their gods, something detestable in the Lord’s sight.  We who follow the Lord are to be different.  And part of that difference is to be in who (or what) we have sex with.  We only have one God and we know what he asks of us.  That makes us special in this world.

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