Male and Female He Created Them (for Marriage or Celibacy)

My 22-year-old daughter has become a fan of Dancing with the Stars, which just wrapped its 34th season. It’s only been airing for 20 years but has found a way to cram multiple seasons into a single trip around the sun. Why hasn’t the NFL thought of that?! A few episodes in, my daughter invited me to join her. Since it’s not every day that she asks me to do something, I was happy to oblige. And so Tuesday nights were set aside for our weekly father/daughter watch party. The basic premise of DWTS is the pairing of professional dancers with B- or C-list celebrities who are eliminated couple-by-couple as the show progresses. Since the judges give out perfect scores like candy, viewers are allowed to vote too—which means that sometimes the worst dancers get voted through and the best dancers get voted out. There are complicated reasons for this phenomenon which my daughter has wearied of trying to explain.

The reason I bring any of this up is because I noticed something a few episodes into Dancing with the Stars that struck me as rather revealing. In addition to their outfits, that is. As you may imagine on a show populated by professional dancers and pseudo celebrities, DWTS has no qualms about being gay. One of their three judges is flamboyantly so. Ditto for at least one of the “celebrity” contestants. But there’s one thing you won’t see on Dancing with the Stars. You won’t see two men or two women paired up on the dance floor. And the more I thought about that, the more significant it became. Because in a world like ours, on a network like ABC, what is the explanation? Why would a wildly gay-affirming show like DWTS not trot out any same-sex couples? They’re certainly not doing it on moral grounds.

If you were to press the producers for an explanation, they might try claiming that America isn’t ready for same-sex couples on the dance floor, but that would be a cop out. That argument hasn’t stopped the relentless promotion of homosexuality in any other context. Gay pride is forced down our throats at nearly every turn. No, the real explanation is a much simpler one—no matter how loathe they’d be to admit it. Namely, dancing doesn’t work when it’s two men or two women. It’s grotesque, incongruous, and brutal. Dancing is about the yin and the yang. The balance and interplay of opposites. The pairing of the male and the female.

So far as I can tell, none of the professional dancers on Dancing with the Stars are gay. That surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe dancers, more than anyone else, are able to value “the union of opposites that characterizes the dynamic between male and female.” That’s how Jordan Peterson puts it in We Who Wrestle with God. He calls the interactions between the sexes “a contest of dance or play.” The powers that be have managed to excise traditional gender roles from every other realm, but not from this one. The judges even blithely accept the age-old notion that the man must lead—which is why it’s so much harder for the male contestants. Outrageous, right? Whatever happened to Down with the Patriarchy?!

We’ve arrived at this bizarre point in history where we understand on the dance floor what we fail to understand in the marriage bed. We’ll accept the nonsensical pretense that two men or two women can be spouses even as we hold the line at dancing. The dance floor, it seems, is the last place where society is still sane enough to recognize that men and women are not interchangeable. My brethren, this should not be so. Unlike in marriage, there are no strictly pragmatic reasons why two men or two women can’t dance together. Our repugnance to it is strictly visceral. Which is to say, if we can understand the inherent degradation of placing same-sex couples on the dance floor, why can we not understand it in the context of marriage? Men and women are complementary halves that make up a single whole. Men and men are not. The distinction between male and female is what Jordan Peterson calls the most fundamental in the universe. Male and female he created them.

Last month I made the assertion that God prescribes only two options when it comes to sex: marriage or celibacy. I stand by that, but I’m also leery of casually asserting anything on God’s behalf (and leery of sounding like a smug fundamentalist). If I could have provided quick scriptural corroboration, I would have done so, but demonstrating the immorality of premarital sex is more complicated than most evangelicals realize. And I didn’t want to get bogged down on a massive aside. But now I’ve given myself free rein to get bogged down, because this is a question I’ve wanted to run to ground for a while now. I do believe that God is opposed to sex outside of marriage, but how does one demonstrate that from Scripture? Which passage would you point to? Because while the Ten Commandments certainly prohibit adultery, they say nothing of fornication. And neither does the ESV.

The English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible is the one I have read the most over the last 20 years. I probably owe that to the influence of John Piper (and to its being the easiest to access via web or device). I grew up with the NAS, switched to New King James with the release of the MacArthur Study Bible, and eventually landed on the ESV. But the ESV does not contain the word “fornication.” Neither does the NAS. They use instead phrases like “sexual immorality” or “whoredom,” which have the disadvantage of being much less precise. But even in the New King James, the word “fornication” doesn’t show up until the book of Isaiah, and its first usage is entirely metaphorical. In the New Testament, the greek word (porneia) that is sometimes translated “fornication” is apparently a broad one. Strong’s says it encompasses “any [and every] distortion of God’s design for sexuality.” And while that suggests that “sexual immorality” may be a more accurate English translation than “fornication,” it also means we must put in the work to chase down what God’s revealed design for sexuality actually is.

One of the difficulties in studying Scripture is that it strenuously resists easy encapsulation. It alternates between providing way too much detail and not providing nearly enough—at least to our limited sensibilities. The Bible will devote page after painful page to the building of the tabernacle, the proper way to perform ritual sacrifices, and seemingly obscure genealogies while offering up precious few paragraphs on little things like the creation of the universe. There is so much left unsaid in the first few chapters of Genesis, and we don’t even learn who the serpent was until the book of Revelation. But since nature, and Bible readers, abhor a vacuum, we stuff those gaps full of clever theories and speculations until the line between what the Bible says and what we think the Bible says becomes indistinguishable. As such, we run the risk of honoring God with our lips but teaching as doctrine the traditions of men, which is why I decided to go back to the beginning—Genesis 1:1—in an effort to chronicle and better understand the explicit instructions God gave to mankind. Here goes... something.

When you read through Genesis in search of divine marching orders, you’ll soon discover that specific directives are shockingly sparse. You’ll read of polygamy, incest, prostitution, slavery, rape, and drunkenness without anything in the way of endorsement or condemnation. You’ll also discover that there are essentially two creation accounts. The first runs from Genesis 1:1-2:3. The second goes from 2:4 through the end of the chapter. In the first account, only one command is given. Be fruitful and multiply. God gives it to the birds of the air, to the fish of the sea, and to us who bear his image. For whatever reason, he does not extend this charge to the beasts of the earth—or at least there’s no record of it. Make of that what you will. To mankind, God adds the following addendum: “Fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth”—all of which is anathema to the godless globalists who consider the masses of humanity little more than a plague upon the land. Be fruitful and multiply is God’s command. Be sterile and die is the devil’s.

Surprisingly, there are no explicit prohibitions in the first creation account. Every piece of fruit was on the menu. And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.” To “everything that has the breath of life,” God continued, “I have given every green plant for food.” We might infer a prohibition against the shedding of blood—since plants are the only named food source, but that is as far as God’s instructions go in the first chapter of Genesis. Make love; have children; subdue the earth. That’s it. The greatest commandment is to love God and love your neighbor, but the first commandment is to bear children. That, I believe, is worth remembering whenever your pastor suggests that we shouldn’t get distracted by cultural sins like abortion.

It is not until the second creation account that Adam is named and the prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is delivered. The reason I call this a second creation account rather than a continuation of the first is because the tone and timelines don’t match. Genesis 1, with its parallel structure and repetition, has a poetic feel; Genesis 2 reads more like straight prose. Genesis 1 says “And God...” 24 times. Genesis 2 doesn’t use this pairing at all. Rather, it says “Lord God” 11 times, which is entirely absent from Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis uses the designation “male (zā·ḵār) and female (ū·nə·qê·ḇāh);” The second chapter opts for “man (’ā·ḏām) and woman (’iš·šāh).” Genesis 1 says “beasts of the earth;” Genesis 2 says “beast(s) of the field.”

The first creation account famously speaks of six days. The second speaks of only one. Vegetation precedes the creation of animals and man in the first account. Man comes first in the second. God spoke man into existence in the first. God formed him from the dust in the second. Male and female were created in conjunction in the first account. Man precedes woman in the second, and she is made from man. All of these discrepancies are difficult (I would say impossible) to reconcile if you try to make these two accounts out to be one and the same. In the absence of explicit attribution, Moses gets credit for authoring the Pentateuch, but the stylistic differences and timeline anomalies make it unlikely that Genesis 1 and 2 were written by the same person. So perhaps Moses acted more like an editor than an outright author. Again, we just don’t know how these accounts were first communicated or passed down (Scripture’s first reference to the existence of a written language doesn’t come until Exodus 17).

The Genesis 1 account highlights man’s central place in the created order by placing him last in the timeline. The Genesis 2 account highlights his centrality by placing him first. Movie credits use this same convention. The essential takeaway from both accounts is that God is the creator and what he created was good. The explicit takeaway from the Genesis 2 account is that a man should leave his parents and cling to his wife. That’s how the chapter ends. And though Christ’s own life was an exception, this appears to be the rule. God’s design is not for us to leave our parents and enter an extended season of singleness. It’s to leave our parents so as to live with our spouse. One of the things that makes this diversion from the narrative so significant is the fact that at this point in history, mother and father don’t yet exist. Nor do we exactly know what a wife is.

Eve (who isn’t named until chapter three) is called Adam’s wife in the absence of any marriage ceremony. The same Hebrew word for “his wife” in Genesis 2:25 (wə·’iš·tōw) is rendered “his female” in Genesis 7, referring to the female half of the animal pairs included on Noah’s Ark. At the most basic level, then, a wife is a man’s woman. Specifically, his sexual partner for the bearing and raising of children. Sorry, feminists, that’s what these verses indicate and is why “man and wife” is such a common linguistic pairing while “woman and husband” is not. You might even say that it is not marrying a woman that makes her your wife. It is intercourse itself. So, in this context, fornication is something of a foreign concept. But that begins to change as the generations stack up.

The Bible’s first reference to marriage occurs in Genesis 19, when Lot warned the men who were to marry his daughters that Sodom was about to be destroyed. And we know from Lot’s monstrous offer to the mob of men trying to break down his door that his daughters were still virgins—reinforcing the idea that sex is what initiates a marriage. But the next reference to marriage comes in Genesis 34, after Jacob’s daughter Dinah is violated by a foreign prince. This prince, who “loved (Dinah) and spoke tenderly to her” asked his father to “get me this girl for my wife.” So, even though he’d already slept with her, there was an understanding that they were not in fact married.

There is no explicit condemnation of fornication or rape in Genesis, but Dinah’s brothers were furious when they learned what had happened. They were “indignant and very angry, because [Shechem] had done an outrageous thing in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter, for such a thing must not be done.” To say that something “must not be done” is to reveal the existence of an established moral code, whether that was verbally communicated by God or simply written on their hearts. Shechem’s father tried to make amends by asking that Dinah be allowed to marry his son and promised to pay whatever bride-price was demanded. “Make marriages with us,” he proposed, “Give your daughters to us, and take our daughters for yourselves… and the land shall be open to you.”

Jacob, who had a long history of fleeing conflict, apparently left the negotiations up to his sons. They accepted Hamor’s proposal on the condition that every man in his city be circumcised, which was shockingly agreed to. But after the circumcisions took place, “on the third day, when they were sore,” Simeon and Levi attacked the city, killed every male and took back their sister. The other brothers captured and plundered the rest of the city, taking their flocks, their herds, their wives, and their children. Jacob, who was more concerned about his own safety than any code of ethics, rebuked Simeon and Levi for “[bringing] trouble on me” and potentially inviting the retribution of other kingdoms, but the brothers answered, “Should he treat our sister like a prostitute?”

This is one of those stories where nobody comes out looking very good. And no divine commentary is offered as to what should have happened following the violation of Dinah. But if we fast forward to the giving of the law in Exodus, we do find what seems to be a suitable comp. “If a man seduces a virgin,” we read in Exodus 22:16, “who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride-price for virgins.” The complication, of course, relates to Dinah’s culpability in the affair. Was she raped or seduced? It’s not clear from the text. The word “seize” implies rape, but the fact that he “loved her” and “spoke tenderly to her” implies seduction. About one third of English translations explicitly accuse Shechem of rape. The rest hedge their bet. The King James says “he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.” The ESV says “he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her.” The NAS says “he took her and lay with her and raped her.” Once again, more details would be helpful, but we don’t have them. We run up against the same dilemma in Deuteronomy 22:28:

If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.

This text matches that found in Exodus 22 almost exactly, but instead of saying “seduces and lies with her,” it reads “seizes and lies with her.” So the question becomes, is this a depiction of fornication in general or rape in particular? Roughly 20% of English translations say rape, but why would the penalty for rape be identical to the penalty for fornication, as such an interpretation would require? And how could a father allow his daughter to marry a rapist? On the other hand, what were the prospects for a raped woman in that day and age to marry another? We read in 2 Samuel that David’s daughter Tamar was raped by her half-brother Amnon. The text, in this case, leaves no room for doubt but also reveals that she lived out the rest of her days a desolate woman. Further along in the same chapter of Deuteronomy (22:23), the punishment for sleeping with a betrothed woman is as follows:

If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

According to the law given in Deuteronomy 22, the penalty for fornicating with a woman betrothed to another was death—for both participants—while the “penalty” for fornicating with a non-betrothed woman was marriage. The first sentence may seem overly harsh and the second overly lenient (depending on your perspective), but both reinforce the notion that the physical act of becoming one flesh initiates a bond that is sacred and permanent. This is why fornication that leads to marriage is treated with less severity than fornication that supplantsmarriage. And though the Bible makes some allowance for spontaneous moral failure, it dries up quickly when the marriage option is forsaken. The notion that you could continue in fornication, even with someone you intend to marry, is entirely foreign to Scripture. Then there’s this, if a woman was discovered by her husband to have slept with another man before they were married, the penalty (for “whoring in her father’s house”) was death (Deut. 22:21). The modern notion that it’s no big deal to sleep with someone before you’re married is one I would call biblically precarious. I’m getting ahead of myself though, so let’s back up.

By my count, there are only two universal commandments given in the book of Genesis: Be fruitful and multiply and Do not shed innocent blood. The first also entails leaving your parents, clinging to your spouse, and subduing the earth. It was given to all of humanity in Genesis 1, repeated to Noah in Genesis 9, and finally directed to Jacob in Genesis 35. The second commandment comes after God told Noah that “every moving thing that lives shall (now) be food for you.” It was delivered not as a direct edict but as a warning: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Male and female he created them. Both commandments, you may have noticed, have tremendous implications for anyone wishing to wash their hands of abortion or claim that it is only of secondary importance. But even though these are the only explicit directives we find in Genesis, that doesn’t mean they were the only laws in operation. Evidence for an existing moral code abounds.

When Cain killed Abel in Genesis 4, he tried to hide his sin—just as his parents had done in the garden. So, he clearly knew it was wrong to kill his brother, and he even knew that his own life was forfeit. You’ll remember from God’s warning to Noah that Cain deserved to die. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God declared, but as is so often the case, God deferred Cain’s punishment and showed him mercy instead. He placed a hedge of protection around him which allowed Cain to marry and multiply. Five generations later, his descendent Lamech took two wives. It’s the first recorded instance of polygamy, and though there is no recorded prohibition, it seems reasonable to infer that “holding fast” to your wife precludes the taking of another. Lamech was six generations removed from Adam. Noah was nine, and by the time Noah arrived on the scene, God was ready to burn the whole project to the ground:

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

Whatever specific behavior triggered the anger of God, the Bible doesn’t say. “Violence” is the overarching culprit named in Genesis 6:11. In addition to the bizarre aside that directly precedes this declaration—in which the daughters of men were apparently intermarrying with angels or demons, and bearing children—the only specific events we have to go on are Cain’s murder of Abel, Lamech’s polygamy with Adah and Zillah, and his boasting of having killed a man who opposed him. Ten generations later, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Genesis 18:20 declares that their sin was “very grave,” but it does not specify what their wickedness entailed. Because of the scene that would soon play out, where the men of Sodom sought to force themselves upon angels who had taken the form of men, the sin of Sodom has been understood to be the sin of homosexuality. Jude called it the indulgence of sexual immorality and unnatural desire. That sin would be formally codified in Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the law of God being written on the hearts of all people comes in the person of King Abimelech, whose land Abraham and Sarah journeyed through. Abraham, you’ll remember, was an unscrupulous fellow who did for the second time in Genesis 20 what he had already been chastised for in Genesis 12. In the first instance, Abraham (then Abram) made his wife tell the Egyptians that she was his sister because he was afraid they would kill him and claim her as their own. That’s how beautiful she was. Because of his lie, Pharaoh lavished Abram with wealth but also brought Sarai into his house and “took her for [his] wife.” I believe that is biblical shorthand for and slept with her. Because Pharaoh had taken Abram’s wife as his own, the Lord afflicted his entire house “with great plagues.” When Pharaoh learned Sarai was Abram’s wife, he rebuked Abram for his deception and returned Sarai to him.

Not having learned his lesson, or perhaps valuing his newly increased wealth more than the virtue it cost his wife, Abraham deceived King Abimelech in the exact same way. And his excuse was the claim that “there is no fear of God at all in this place.” But as it would turn out, the behavior of King Abimelech was far more exemplary than Abraham’s own. Having been warned in a dream that Sarah was Abraham’s wife, Abimelech pleaded with God for his life. And God granted it. “I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart,” God answered the king, “and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her.” Abimelech’s argument wasn’t, I didn’t know it was wrong to take another man’s wife. It was, I didn’t know she was his wife. The next day Abimelech rebuked Abraham for “[bringing] on me and my kingdom (such) a great sin.” The Bible doesn’t declare adultery to be a capital offense until Leviticus 20:10 (& Deuteronomy 22:22), but even among pagan kings, this was already understood to be true.

The conclusion to Abraham’s encounter with Abimelech reads as follows: “Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. For the LORD had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.” We learn something about Abimelech here that he shared in common with most other ancient rulers. He was a slave-owning polygamist, just like Abraham. And while a continued reading of Scripture will eventually uncover the explicit condemnation of prostitution, incest, homosexuality, bestiality, fornication, and adultery, you won’t find a similar condemnation of these two.

It’s difficult to reconcile the allowances God made for both polygamy and slavery, though you’ll notice that the biblical laws governing the two, like those found in Exodus 21, were written with the protection of the more vulnerable party in mind. It would not be unreasonable to conclude that polygamy and slavery were temporary concessions in a brutal, sin-cursed world. They were allowed, perhaps, because so many men and women simply didn’t have the resources to survive on their own. To be housed and provided for, even in the absence of freedom, was better than the alternative.

God’s original design was one man and one woman, living in near perfect freedom. They were beholden to no one but God and each other. But with the entrance of sin and the curse it brought upon creation, the land would no longer yield its fruit willingly. Scarcity became a real problem. And while slavery and polygamy may have been introduced as necessary provisions, they would devolve into practices that caused far more problems than they solved. That which can be corrupted will be corrupted. In Abraham’s case, the consequences of his bringing a slave woman into his house, and then making her a wife are with us to this very day. “But God said to Abraham, ‘Be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman.. for through Isaac shall your offspring be named. And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.” Those offspring, it turns out, have been warring against each other ever since.

Genesis 38 offers numerous insights regarding sex and the law of God. The chapter opens by revealing that Judah—one of Dinah’s brothers—obtained a wife in much the same way as Shechem had attempted to do with Dinah. Judah saw a foreign woman, then promptly “took her and went in to her.” But whereas Shechem was killed by the woman’s brothers; Judah was left with a son. Is this a double standard, or do we assume that there were details in the taking and consummating that separate one from the other? I’m not sure. But after Judah’s son grew up and took a wife, God killed him for unspecified wickedness. So Judah told his second son to “go in to [his] brother’s wife, Tamar, and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for [his] brother.”

What’s interesting about Judah’s instruction to his surviving son is that it predates God’s giving of the same law (found in Deuteronomy 25:5) by a wide berth. There’s no record of this command having been given to Noah or Abraham, but Judah somehow knew it. And it’s so singular in nature, that it seems unlikely to have been the kind of thing merely written on the human heart. The implication is that somewhere along the line, there was a giving of the law that we are not privy to. Judah’s son Onan followed Judah’s instructions up to a point, but notoriously pulled out so as to prevent conception. He didn’t want to raise up offspring for his brother, so God killed him too. Then things really went off the rails.

After promising Tamar that she would marry his third son when he came of age, Judah quietly reneged on his promise, leaving Tamar still in his house and still childless. So she took matters into her own hands by disguising herself as a prostitute. She intentionally put herself in Judah’s path—knowing, it seems, that he was the kind of man who would always avail himself of a harlot. Sure enough, this is precisely what he did. When Tamar asked, “what will you give me, that you may come in to me?” Judah promised to send her a goat. When she demanded a pledge be left in the meantime, he acquiesced by leaving her his signet, his cord, and his staff. “So [Judah] gave them to her and went in to her, and she conceived by him.”

The pledge Tamar demanded of Judah strikes me as a high one, but he paid it without balking. Such was his eagerness to proceed with the transaction. When he sent the promised goat back, however, Tamar and his pledged items had vanished. And all his inquiries failed. No one knew of the prostitute he sought. Three months later, Judah was told, “Tamar your daughter-in-law has been immoral. Moreover, she is pregnant by immorality.” Judah, being the fine upstanding man that he was, ordered that Tamar be burned at the stake.

I cannot account for someone who would so publicly and shamelessly visit a prostitute. Or so casually condemn a pregnant woman to execution. How do you trust the moral judgment of such a man? But Judah’s initial reaction to the discovery of Tamar’s immorality does indicate that fornication was deemed a capital offense. It certainly would be in time. But there’s no indication that killing a pregnant woman was in accord with God’s will. I say that because, unlike his other sons, the child Judah conceived with Tamar was not killed by God. In fact, you’ll find that child amidst the genealogy of God’s own Son. Which is to say, God has more patience for sexual sin than many of his proxies on earth. Just because someone canbe executed doesn’t mean they should be.

We sometimes like to imagine that Jesus is less rigid in his moral expectations than the God revealed to us in the Old Testament, and lots of people point out that Jesus didn’t stone the woman caught in adultery. This is gloriously true, but Jesus also said that exceedingly inconvenient thing about lust in which he equates the imagining of sexual sin with its actual consummation. Though the story of Christ’s interaction with the adulterous woman was a late addition to the Bible—it isn’t included in the earliest manuscripts, the reason it rings so true is because mercy to those caught in sexual sin has been God’s M.O. from the beginning. Lot and his daughters were not killed for engaging in incest. Judah and Tamar were not killed for engaging in prostitution, and King David and Bathsheba were not killed for engaging in adultery. So far as I can tell, there isn’t a single instance in the Bible of a woman being executed for sexual sin, or any sin for that matter. The burning of Samson’s wife by the Philistines was something else entirely. That’s not to say these executions never happened; they were certainly on the books, but there’s no record I can find of them actually taking place.

Jesus said it is not what goes into a person that defiles them. It’s what comes out. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts,” Christ says in Matthew 15, “murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, (and) slander.“ These are what defile a person. Everything on that list is pretty straightforward, except one. Sexual immorality. And perhaps the most compelling indication that this does include good old-fashioned fornication comes from an interaction Jesus had with his most faithful adversaries. After Jesus graciously told the Pharisees in John 8 that they were children of the devil, they answered that at least they were not “born of sexual immorality”—as Jesus was clearly believed to be. How it became generally known that Jesus’ conception was suspect is not revealed. Perhaps they simply did the math and realized that Mary’s pregnancy had to have preceded her marriage. However they arrived at this conclusion, they’re assumption was that Jesus was conceived in sin, and Joseph was the father (Matt 13:55) The Pharisees may have been duplicitous scoundrels, but they did know the law. Do as they say, not as they do, is what Christ admonishes. The point is this. Their use of the term “sexual immorality” demonstrates that it doesn’t just apply to prostitutes, homosexuals, and libertines. It applies even to good Jewish carpenters sleeping with their betrothed. And it applies to good American Christians sleeping with their boyfriend or girlfriend.

If you cannot control your sexual appetites, Jesus warned, you would be better off maiming yourself and entering heaven than leaving your sexual immorality unchecked and entering hell. That’s what’s at stake, apparently, in the sexual choices we make. We don’t know what happened to the woman caught in adultery after Jesus let her go, but if she didn’t follow his admonition to “go and sin no more,” we do know where she likely ended up. Which is why I feel justified in saying that when it comes to sex, our Creator sanctions only two mutually-exclusive options: marriage or celibacy. If you’re not married, you should not be having sex. And if you are married, you should not be celibate.

I do not envy the husbands and wives who must watch their spouses compete on Dancing with the Stars—as they spend weeks on end hanging all over another (usually an extremely desirable another). It feels like a recipe for adulterous disaster. Because God created us male and female, and he created us to copulate. That’s actually very good news, so long as you cling to your spouse. But when we cling to another, or lots of others, that which was meant to secure life becomes a vehicle for death. Both literally and figuratively. In a country where close to 90% of abortions are performed on unmarried women—and some unknown percentage more are performed on wives who’ve been impregnated by someone besides their husband, reserving sex for the marriage bed would all but eliminate abortion—without the passage of a single law.