Scripture’s Silences
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We all have a tendency to read Scripture’s words in a way that least threatens our comfort or our presumptions. How much more, then, are we likely to twist Scripture’s silences, reading into them wrong conclusions. 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 a matter as morally neutral, we will briefly consider two acts that clearly have divine disapproval: sex outside marriage and lesbianism.
Especially in the past, some Christians’ teaching against sex outside marriage used to strongly emphasize the possibility of disease and unwanted pregnancy. Many people hearing this wrongly concluded that it must be these dangers that make sex outside marriage immoral. This is not what the Bible says. It is a human attempt to second-guess God’s reasoning. That’s dangerous because the next move down the slippery slide is to start regarding our speculations as fact.
In the era just before AIDS, when medical advances had lowered the physical risks, those who believed they had figured God out 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 self stimulation does not cause obvious physical harm, has led people to leap too soon to the assumption that it must therefore be morally acceptable.
To understand that the Bible’s silence about a matter does not automatically make it acceptable, consider lesbianism. In contrast to same-gender sex among men, the entire Old Testament is without specific mention of the female equivalent. 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. 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 solitary sex.
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 Word of God, but little into knowing the heart of God. 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.
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 murderers were equally certain they would never make the same mistake of their forefathers who murdered the prophets.
Every day, 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.
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