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Masturbation:

Non-Sexual Masturbation?

The M word, playing with yourself, releasing sexual tension, obtaining sexual relief, autoeroticism, solitary sex, self abuse – call it what you will, we cannot squirm away from the fact that masturbation is sexual. No matter how successfully one reduces masturbation to a clinical and mechanical act, it significantly impacts our sexuality.

Irrespective of what extremes one goes to in modifying one’s technique and one’s thought life to drain the act of sexual overtones, masturbation is still the stimulation of sexually responsive parts of the body. It is not like waste elimination or satisfying hunger, because it meets no bodily need. Moreover, it results in sensual feelings and bodily reactions virtually indistinguishable from those resulting from heterosexual relations. In fact, unlike light petting, it usually involves the very pinnacle of sexual pleasure, even beyond what many a woman experiences during intercourse. As is also the case for sexual intercourse, self-stimulation need not involve sexual thoughts or sights but it usually does, because it falls naturally into the same behavioural patterns as other sexual activities.

Little children might discover masturbation before they have any awareness of sexual relations, but if left entirely to their own devices, (would it be off the mark to say vices?) as they grow and begin to experience sexual attraction, masturbation and sexual thoughts instinctively come together. There is no need to teach them a connection between masturbation and sexual fantasy, any more than they need to be taught to perspire on a hot day. Masturbation might not carry any possibility of pregnancy, but neither does homosexuality. It might not involve another person, but neither does bestiality. When allowed to become a habit, masturbation conditions our sexual response and modifies our sexual expectations; consciously or unconsciously affecting marital relations for years afterwards.

Is masturbation a neutral activity rendered sexual or non-sexual according to what our thoughts focus on? Only if sexual intercourse is rendered non-sexual with no moral implications by thinking of mathematics while having intercourse. Neither does illicit intercourse cease to be sexually damaging if engaged in by little children.

Masturbation is so undeniably sexual that non-Christians would wonder why I’ve bothered to emphasize the obvious. As Christians, however, we are tempted to live in denial because we know the stakes soar skywards if self-stimulation is sexual. Suddenly we are no longer talking about something of the order of nose picking, nor even something seemingly important like purchasing a house. We have only to flip open the Bible to quickly discover that our sexuality is vitally important to the God who is intimately concerned about our well-being. “Flee from sexual immorality,” says 1 Corinthians 6:18. “All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.” Scripture saying that sexual sin impacts the body like no other sin is a startling statement, given the obvious results of gluttony and the bodily damage caused by alcoholism. Whatever the full implications of this Scripture, it seems the all-knowing Creator of sex is declaring that the mystery of sex affects us more profoundly than most of us dare contemplate. If masturbation is of this order, we dare not leave it in the “too hard” basket. Decisions impacting one’s sexuality are decisions we must get right.

The book of Romans begins with the revelation that a wrong view of God causes people to disintegrate sexually. One would therefore expect that the secular world – which in a thousand insidious ways shapes our thinking – is dangerously deceived in its understanding of sex, and that it is only as we begin to build our relationship with our Creator that the restoration of our sexuality can begin.

Into the Unknown

It would be outrageously arrogant of me to attempt a pronouncement on the morality of something the Bible does not clearly spell out. Humanity has a Judge, and last time I checked, it isn’t me. Ultimately, the matter is between you and your God and anyone affected by your sexual choices. The goal of this web series, however, is to move you closer to an answer by helping to clarify the issues involved.

Once we concede that Onan’s sin was not solitary sex, nor does this common practice even rate a mention in the Bible, nor does it cause obvious psychological or physical injury, it might seem we can give it the green light. But such a conclusion would be dangerously premature. To demonstrate that neither apparent harmlessness nor the Bible’s silence are sufficient to suggest God views something as morally neutral, we will briefly consider two sexual acts that clearly have divine disapproval: sex outside marriage and lesbianism. We will then proceed to other considerations.

Some Christians, when teaching against sex outside marriage, used to emphasize so strongly the possibility of disease and unwanted pregnancy, that many people wrongly concluded that it must be these dangers that make sex outside marriage immoral. The Bible does not say this, it is just a human attempt at logic. When medical advances lowered the physical risks, some people therefore assumed that sexual looseness must now be morally acceptable. They thought anyone thinking otherwise must be adhering to a morality that applied only to less technologically advanced eras. Christian morality, however, has never been based on a crude and selfish analysis of the physical dangers to the offender. The Lord Jesus emphasized the sinfulness of lust, even though mere lust carries no possibility of disease or pregnancy, nor even the possibility of the victim being emotionally hurt. Similarly, the relatively modern rediscovery that auto-eroticism does not cause obvious physical harm, has led people to leap too soon to the assumption that it must therefore be morally acceptable.

Neither does the Bible’s silence about a matter automatically make it acceptable. In contrast to same-gender sex among men, the entire Old Testament is without specific mention of the female equivalent – lesbianism. The same is true for the Gospels and almost all the New Testament. Romans 1:24-28, however, affirms that God regards lesbianism as a serious perversion. So the Old Testament’s silence – God choosing for thousands of years not to put it in black and white – in no way implied God’s acceptance of this particular abuse of sex. That’s scary. God left it up to his people to read between the lines, and anyone getting it wrong would be guilty of gross perversion.

It is staggering to realize that throughout the Bible even the sin of sexual intercourse between unmarried people is not spoken against as forthrightly as we might expect. Scripture definitely pronounces it to be a serious sin, but to find this clearly spelt out, one must search the Bible carefully and prayerfully(Explanation). For the most part, Scripture is content merely to condemn ‘sexual immorality’ without specifying exactly which sexual acts fall under this black umbrella. In the original language, the broad term used is porneia. The word is found 25 times in the Greek New Testament. It could be that when speaking so strongly against porneia, the range of sexual sins God had in mind includes masturbation. But if we have to seek long and hard to be sure that in God’s eyes porneia includes premarital sex (and it certainly does), we have to go even further into the heart and mind of God to know whether it includes auto-eroticism.

As we saw with lesbianism, even under the Law, the only way to truly know right from wrong was through fellowship with God. Devout Jews, however, typically poured enormous effort into knowing the Book of God, but little into knowing the God of the Book. They ended up knowing Scripture so well and understanding it so little that they could ‘prove’ emphatically that the Son of God was guilty of blasphemy and that it was their holy duty to murder their Messiah.

How vital it is to pray with the psalmist that God reveal to us his understanding of his Word (Psalm 119:18)! The frightening thing is that most of us imagine we could never make the same mistake as the clean-living, Bible-revering, Christ-killing First Century theologians. Tragically, those devout people were equally certain they would never make the same mistake of their forefathers who murdered the prophets.

Everyday we walk though a spiritual minefield, foolishly unaware that at any moment just one false step could be disastrous. The entire Christian life must be lived in total dependence upon our Lord. We either cling to Christ, trusting him alone – not our intellect, knowledge and experience – or the consequences are unthinkable.

Outline

If, as we shall see, the God of the Bible, the Creator of sex, declares that even a one night stand makes two people one, it is hard not to suspect that the context in which we experience deep sexual feelings would, by divine design, have a profound affect on our personality. Psychologists know that regularly pairing anything with pleasurable sensations will powerfully shape one’s response to whatever those sensations are paired with. When we masturbate we are unavoidably conditioning our sexual response. We are bonding the unique and intense pleasure of sexual feelings with whatever we are thinking of at that critical time. The sexual and spiritual implications of self-stimulation can therefore be expected to vary according to what one thinks of when sexually arousing oneself. There are many possibilities. Whilst sexually pleasuring or satisfying yourself you could focus your thoughts on:

  • A real person you are not married to
  • An imaginary person
  • Spiritual things
  • Neutral things
  • Your own body
  • (If you are married) your real marriage partner.

Let’s work our way through this range of possibilities, exploring the moral and sexual implications and see if any of the things we could focus our minds on seem to have the potential to be spiritually safe. We will then try other angles from which to view this subject, all the time looking for clues and trying to see possible flaws in my logic and seeking to find not human speculation but the heart of God.

Food for Thought

Although the Bible might say little directly about solo sex, the practice is commonly intertwined with sexual fantasies and/or pornography, and this is something Scripture has much to say about. Masturbation raises other moral challenges which we will tackle later, but let’s for a moment consider this one.

The Ten Commandments say we must not covet someone else’s wife (Exodus 20:17). Job said he had resolved never to look sexually at anyone other than his wife (Job 31:1). Jesus taught:

Matthew 5:27 You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ (28) But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart

In other words, deliberately cultivating yearnings for anything that, if acted out, would be immoral, is as depraved as physically committing that act. For example, the thought might keep coming to you about relating sexually with someone you are not married to. Keep pushing that thought aside and your purity remains intact. To intentionally develop the thought for your sensual enjoyment, however, is no less sinful than acting out your fantasy.

To understand this moral principle, consider Jesus’ teaching that hate is as bad as murder. Suppose a person is trying his hardest to shoot someone dead. He takes careful aim but to his great disappointment he misses and the person escapes unharmed. Does that make him more righteous than if he were a better shot and the bullet killed the man? The consequences for the victim would be vastly different but in both scenarios the sinfulness of the offender would be identical. Let’s take this a step further.

Suppose Phil and Sam hate Barry with equal venom. They both wish he were dead. If Phil could push a button, terminating Barry’s existence and be certain that no one would ever know who did it, he’d do it. The one thing keeping Phil from murder is that he is too scared about the possible personal consequences (public humiliation and imprisonment) if he were caught. But Sam is braver and so kills Barry. Should we regard Phil as more moral, simply because he is the bigger coward? Obviously, Barry would be exceedingly better off if both men were cowards. Morally, however, both haters are equally corrupt, since both wanted him dead.

If you deliberately savor the thought, you want the sin as much as an impulsive person who acts out your daydreams. For anyone mentally engaging in immorality, the spiritual consequences are therefore as serious to the offender as if he had committed the physical act, even though the consequences to the victim are much less.

When the Son of God declared that lusting after someone you are not married to is equivalent to adultery, we must not forget how grievous a sin he was pronouncing these thoughts to be. Under the Old Covenant, adultery carried the death penalty and the New Testament over and over says that unless genuinely repented of, adultery sentences one to hell (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19; 1 Timothy 1:9-10; Hebrews 13:4; Revelation 21:8). (If an unmarried person lusts after another unmarried person, the sin is technically fornication, which is equally grave.)

Because “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” (Jeremiah 17:9) we are geniuses at finding loopholes that convince ourselves so utterly that we rarely realize we have not convinced the One who matters. Here’s a common attempt: “Although in reality we are not married, in my fantasy we are married, so my fantasy is pure.” I’ll respond with one simple question: Would you be impressed if I said, sex outside marriage is wrong, unless while you are doing it you pretend you are married?

Mental immorality is serious, but combining it with masturbation is like throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire. To masturbate while ogling at erotic images, or while fantasizing about someone – real or imaginary – that you are not married to, is to deliberately inflame sexual feelings towards, and derive sexual pleasure from, a person you have no right to have sex with.

Even without self-stimulation, it is sinful, but pairing it with masturbation greatly magnifies the pleasure one derives from this sin, making the sin frighteningly more addictive. Moreover, sexual pleasure is divinely designed to bond you with a person. This is so powerfully the case that the Bible says that in God’s sight even sex with a prostitute makes a person one flesh with that prostitute (1 Corinthians 6:16). That’s a most astounding revelation. Most of us would have thought that only marriage could have such a profound effect and yet the Word of God applies the truth of two becoming one to the most casual of sexual encounters. Since solo-sex intensifies the sexual pleasure associated with mental adultery, the act deepens the sinful bond with that person.

Sex with Demons?

An intelligent, talented and dedicated Christian woman involved in full time Christian work responded to my WebPages and we began e-mailing each other. She had never married and we grew quite close. After a while she confided that in the past she used to masturbate whilst imagining doing romantic or sexual things with a real or imaginary man. Presumably for reasons similar to those I have outlined above, she gradually began to feel uneasy about this type of fantasy. Rather than give up her self-indulgence, however, she decided to masturbate in a more “Christian” way. Instead of fantasizing about a normal man, she aroused herself while visualizing Christ, thus developing sexual cravings for the Son of God and even fantasizing about having sex with him.

Horrified, that she was mentally fornicating with the Holy One, I tried desperately to get my dear friend to see the gravity of her sin. Tragically, her conscience had become so jaded that, though I tried desperately on many occasions, nothing I could say was able to convince her that she should stop defiling the Son of God in her mind. There are fearful dangers for those who want to hold on both to their sin and their Lord.

Not wishing to distort any of the following accounts, I point out that in at least some of them, masturbation was not involved. Their value to our spiritual examination of solo sex is in suggesting that deceptive spirits can exploit sexual feelings. After citing a few examples, we will attempt to see if there are any implications for those who seek to combine masturbation with spiritual fantasies.

A woman I counselled confided the following: Demons would stand next to my bed. One looked like Christ in a white robe and I felt safe. It then got in bed with me and I felt it holding me. I felt safe. Then it put its hand where it shouldn’t, and I knew it wasn’t God. It turned black.

Another woman, a committed Christian, told of sexual visions of “Jesus.” For both of these women, solitary sex played a role, but their vulnerability to temptation was such that I did not probe to satisfy my curiosity as to how strong was the connection between solitary sex and their evil spiritual experience.

In an e-mail yet another woman wrote of demonic attacks she has suffered: It has paralyzed me, nearly suffocated me, and, worse, has raped me. I have never ever told anyone this, but I feel that out there, there are those who understand and I thank God for them.

Roxanne, a Christian of just a few months, had renounced her former Mormonism except for what Mormons call the “witness of the holy ghost” or “bosom burning.” This is a feeling that Mormons emphasize as confirmation of God’s approval and leading. Having been brought up as a Mormon, Roxanne had unquestioningly accepted this as being of God, although she puzzled as to why Mormons experience it as confirmation that the heretical Book of Mormon is of God. One day, Roxanne privately sought this experience to confirm God’s guidance. She shared the following with me:

The spirit came: the bosom-burning, loving, beautiful feeling, beyond any explanation. Pure love.

After I praised and welcomed it, this very real person/spirit purposely and forcefully sexually aroused me, followed by unearthly sexual pleasure. The sexual stimulation continued for hours.

It repeatedly claimed to be God, seeking my love and worship and praise. It would grow warmer and stronger when I praised it. While it was inside me it felt like the deepest love, affection and comfort that I’d ever felt.

For four days I bounced between praising it and demanding it leave in Jesus’ name. Although it was very convincing that it had to be God, it blurred my eyesight when I tried to read my Bible and as I persisted with reading it kept giving sexual connotations to innocent things in the Bible. At one point, when it was moving through me sexually in an almost tangible way, I glanced in the mirror and the evil I saw in my eyes was bone chilling.

Based mainly on how it affected my Bible reading and what I’d seen in the mirror I made a clear decision to reject it. When I finally decided to do this and focus my thoughts solely on Jesus, it left in a dramatic way, causing me to cough violently. As it left, I felt light (it had made me feel slow and heavy) and scriptural knowledge was poured into me quickly. I heard spoken into my spirit the words, “Of course that was not me, but the God of the Book of Mormon, who you asked for. It is gone and has no legal right to return to you. I am with you. Do not seek signs or feelings because they are deceiving. My love for you is confirmed in the Scriptures and my Word is sufficient. Testify of this devil to the Mormons that you know.”

I know my experience will puzzle many Christians, but it happened. My Lord never abandoned me. I had invited this deceptive angel of light. In fact, I had to welcome it constantly or it would stop; clearly still with me but not able to force anything on me.

God, in his glory, allowed this awful, experience to show me the true nature of Mormonism. Without it, I would never have believed that the church I had felt safe in for all my childhood, filled with people who love me, praised God and taught about moral, kind, selfless, charitable, conservative living, could be of the devil.

A few weeks later Roxanne told her parents of her experience, hoping it would help them understand why she was no longer a Mormon. Afterwards she went to her bedroom and again encountered this spirit, but this time the spirit: felt so completely dark and evil, the total opposite of how it felt when it was inside of me. It sent me such a strong message that it was extremely angry with me. This was frightening but at the same time gave me hope that my parents would awaken spiritually, because obviously sharing my testimony was a threat to the devil.

The person who sins, pointed out Jesus, is a slave of sin. Evil is a drug that creates addicts by offering a degree of pleasure. In general, every form of evil offers its own unique pleasure and every time one repeats the evil, the bondage intensifies. Even if the pleasure is experienced just once and then fully repented of, a person is typically plagued for the rest of his or her life with the occasional craving for that feeling. We end up like the Israelites in Moses’ time. God had delivered them from slavery yet for the rest of their lives they occasionally found themselves craving for the pleasures of Egypt, even though they knew it meant slavery. This is a powerful practical reason for shunning all experimentation with anything that could turn out to be evil. Even when genuinely repented of, dabbling with evil, whether it is sexual sin, heroin or whatever, usually leaves its victims with cravings and a new source of temptation that hounds them for the rest of their lives. Roxanne says:

To be honest, even clinging to my Lord with all my might after it was gone, and despite being so spooked over the realization that this beast was pure evil, I had to struggle against the desire to invite it back. As is the risk of all sexual experimentation, Roxanne confesses:

I pray that the memory of the pleasure will fade because I find myself praying that my husband will be able to do what it did and I know it’s unfair to compare. Unfortunately I have a strong memory of this aspect.

A friend of mine was born into a cult. “Jesus” would regularly appear to them. He had an innocent face, a white robe – and ready for sex. He regularly raped female cult members. Another friend of mine had suffered the horror of being present while a woman she knew was being painfully raped by someone neither of them could see.

For me to have heard so many accounts first hand, despite my very limited experience, indicates that deceptive spirits associating themselves with sexual experiences must be disturbingly common. This suggests that deliberately combining sexual feelings with spiritual fantasy might not be the safe option one might otherwise suppose. Could this practice attract unwanted attention from the dark side of the spirit world? I am not into scare tactics. We must, however, be at least alert to the possibility of this leading to spiritual deception.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines two disturbing words:

Incubus: an evil spirit that lies on persons in their sleep; especially one that has sexual intercourse with women while they are sleeping

Succubus: a demon assuming female form to have sexual intercourse with men in their sleep It would seem that anyone seeking sexual excitement when no human is present must be on guard about opening oneself up to demons. I am not saying that auto-eroticism will inevitably lead to demonic activity, nor that those suffering demonic sexual experiences have necessarily engaged in self-stimulation, but if one lets one’s sexual fantasies stray to the spiritual, an opening to the demonic might possibly be created. Christians so desperate for sexual gratification that they are unwilling to wait for a human partner, might decide to seek God’s help in sexually stimulating themselves. If so, the “god” who responds might not be the God they want.

A married man wrote to me, greatly disturbed because he had reluctantly concluded that he had been a victim of sexual demons. For years he had been sure it was spiritual. For him the only question was the nature of that spirit. It had all started when he was single and craving sex. He said two very strong, widely-admired Christians from a respected church had told him that God wants to have sex with us. I do not know if this was what they meant or if he was hearing what he wanted to hear.

This dear man was flabbergasted that he could have ended up in the mess that he now believed he was in, since he had earlier sincerely believed the spirit giving him sexual sensations was the Lord lovingly meeting his needs. “I desired sex so bad,” he wrote, “and how many times have we heard that God can satisfy every need? Well is it every need or not? Is it God or is it another who will satisfy it?”

I replied: Will God satisfy the “need” of an addict for heroin? Will he satisfy the “need” of a hate-filled person for revenge? Will he satisfy a rapist’s “need” for a victim? When Jesus was hungry in the wildness, it was Satan who offered a way to satisfy his need.

In stark contrast to a God who meets our every lust and craving, we have a God who repeatedly told us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow our crucified Lord. We have a God who says:

Colossians 3:5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Romans 13:14 Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

Galatians 5:16-17 So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, Ephesians 4:22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;

2 Timothy 2:22 Flee also youthful lusts

2 Timothy 4:3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth And on and on we could go.

In bewilderment, he replied that until they turned into anal sexual sensations he had accepted these sexual sensations as being from God because they would come to him while speaking in tongues or reading the Bible or when he could feel the Lord’s presence. He had assumed that these things would have protected him from evil.

When our desire for selfish pleasure exceeds our willingness to deny ourselves for the glory of Christ, we are spiritually in grave danger. If we passionately yearn both for illegitimate pleasure and a clean conscience, our wish can come true. We can reach the point of sinning with a clean conscience. And it’s the scariest thing in the universe. It’s called delusion. We all know that our spiritual enemy is the Deceiver who masquerades as an angel of light.

It is most rare for God to lead anyone to research – even academically – incubus and succubus spirits. And anyone daring to attempt such research without the Lord’s specific leading is foolish. Nevertheless, a young man clearly felt such a leading from God. Since he would prefer to remain nameless, I’ll call him Tim.

To his horror, Tim read of occultists citing not weird rituals, unusual practices, or calling upon demons, as the key to encountering sexual spirits, but simply the use of masturbation coupled with fantasizing about the partner of one’s choice. The expectation was that a spirit would appear in dreams or whatever, not as a hideous creature, but in the form of the imagined person. What alarmed Tim was the realization that although attracting demons was the furthest from his mind, the prescribed occult practice for enticing sexual spirits was essentially identical to what he – along with vast numbers of other masturbators who have no occult interest – had done. He had broken that habit years ago but although he was no longer indulging in this practice, the fact remained that he had engaged in it in the past.

Before proceeding, I had better insert a quick note about wet dreams, lest someone reading this become unnecessarily concerned. There is no question that nocturnal emissions can be perfectly natural and harmless. This does not mean, however, that they must be associated with lust-filled dreams. Dreams are largely beyond our control, but they tend to reflect what we think about, and expose ourselves to, in our waking hours. If we do what we can to curb our conscious thoughts and commit our sleeps to the Lord, we can expect unwanted dreams to decline.

Despite never having experienced any obvious manifestations of sexual demons, Tim wondered whether there might be a link between demonic activity and his wet dreams. He chose to renounce as sin his past sexual fantasies and masturbation, acknowledged that it could have opened him up to demonic interference, and exercised the authority over demonic activity that Jesus has bestowed upon all believers. The result was a dramatic change in his dreams. First, he suffered a full-on attack in which he had lurid sexual dreams like nothing he had ever experienced. After a week of intense spiritual warfare, however, the power broke and the dreams completely vanished. In short, there has been a pronounced change in the sexual activity he is subjected to in the time all of us are most vulnerable to attack – when asleep. (For details, see How one Christian found relief.)

Scare tactics are not on my agenda. I simply suggest you check with the Lord about Tim’s experience to see if it could have any relevance to you. Our Lord, not the claims of occultists, nor someone’s personal experience, is our highest spiritual authority. We need to keep looking to the Lord for spiritual discernment, however. Unclean spirits are usually too devious to appear with horns and tails.


© Copyright 2002, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged; if used in a webpage, the new page is significantly different to this one. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.net Freely you have received, freely give.

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