Who Needs Marriage?

In what has now been described as, and openly admitted to be, an all-out cultural war, the idea of monogamy—marriage and faithfulness to one person—is under attack as never before. When star athletes, as did one famous basketball player, openly brag of having had sex with 20,000 women, much is desperately, desperately wrong.

USA Today carried an article (Dec. 16, 2004) explaining how Scandinavian families are forming with one or more children, and with both parents perfectly happy to live an entire life together without ever getting married. It describes an authority there declaring, “The traditional marriage in our society is more and more unusual,” and that, “in Scandinavia, there is no ‘family values’ debate, no soul searching to reverse the upward trend in divorces and separations.”

In other words, the article is declaring that the battle has been lost and that there is no point discussing it further. If people do not know the purpose of marriage, neither do they—nor could they—know the true purposes of sex within marriage.

Consider the declining percentages of those getting married. In 1970, 72 percent of American adults were married; by 1980, it was 66 percent; by 1990, 62 percent; with 60 percent in 2000 and only 59 percent in 2002.

Over time, many laws have been passed defining various kinds of illegal sexual activity, such as cohabitation outside of marriage, but they do little good. For instance, in one southern state, there are now 144,000 couples living together, and thus breaking an 1805 state law forbidding it. But that law goes unenforced. So do many others that could be cited here.

Such is today’s world.

According to what is acceptable in society today, the God-ordained institution of marriage and the family has taken a beating that has left it practically unrecognizable. No longer do most families (it was never all) have a father and a mother, raising healthy, happy children to live the way God intended, or even close. In fact, any concept of God has been pushed completely out of most people’s lives. Though many would claim otherwise, as we saw from Romans 1:21-22, most human beings do not want the Creator of all things—the Originator of human existence—to be in their lives, homes, schools, governments—or even their churches!

When understood, this is the true origin of and problem within the abortion debate—the governments and institutions of men have thrown out God’s instructions in His Holy Word, the Bible! Little surprise then that so have the masses.

Homosexual Marriage

Homosexual marriage has become an explosive topic in the United States and Europe. Yet, it has been legal in the Netherlands since 2000. The process there began in 1989 with “official sanction” to such marriages, and this opened up a host of different related issues that eventually found their way to courtrooms. Whatever the moral issue, it is the misuse of man’s adversarial legal system that invariably leads to the collapse of existing barriers.

Of course, entertainment today thinks nothing of homosexual conduct and routinely depicts it in movies, comedies and various television serials and sitcoms.

In another example of how technology has been coupled with illicit sex, homosexuals have been able, for some time, to carry an electronic battery-powered device that allows them to either give or receive a signal so that others nearby will know that they are present and “available.” Also, lesbians and homosexual men are seeking the legal right to adopt children in various countries, while other lesbians are willing to have a homosexual man impregnate them so that they can enjoy children along with the rest of society.

As this issue also takes its place in the cultural war, governments are being forced to address it. Politicians are being forced to choose between traditional Christian values and “giving the people what they want” in the name of “human rights.” The result has been nation after nation, particularly in the West, legalizing homosexual marriage. Some individual states are following suit in America.

Related to this issue are politicians who are even being pressured to create legislation regarding cross-dressing and transgender restrooms in high schools so that “gender neutral” children and teens can enjoy a “gender neutral” restroom. Truly astonishing!

Societies that have no concept of biblical values are doomed to face such perverse choices, and with an endless, ever-worsening array of issues confronting them, they are forced to devise “answers” to ever worse and more complex questions.

Pornography

Already mentioned, the plague of pornography has come to be a booming industry raking in billions of dollars across the world. The sexual appetite of people for this pursuit seems to be without limit, as are the magazines, movies, and hundreds of thousands of websites that make it available. Studies show that 70 percent of all movies viewed in hotel rooms are pornographic, meaning that all other categories combined represent the other 30 percent.

People spend countless hours sitting in hotel rooms and lusting after women (and men) to which they are not married—and who are involved in every form of lewd conduct. How many today give a single thought to—or have any awareness of—Christ’s command in Matthew 5:28 regarding lust, let alone act on it?

Pornography is a powerful addiction for many. Much like alcohol, nicotine and drugs, it holds in its clutches ever-growing numbers who cannot find a way—the strength—to stop. Heartrending letters sent to our headquarters describe marriages and families torn apart by this destructive social plague.

But supposed experts and others are actually only beginning to learn the effects that this problem has on society as a whole, and on the individual minds of countless millions who spend much of their free time involved in pornography. The jury is still out on what just this single sin of indulgence will mean in the years to come for a generation that has wallowed in it as practically a way of life.

Ancients Worshipped Sex

While today’s civilization is more sex-permeated than ever in history, through the ages, sex has been an object of worship in many forms, with many kinds of religious rites and ceremonies attached to it. The religions of the world simultaneously turned sex and the sex organs into both objects of shame and objects of adoration, which carried supposed divine inspiration or insight into the “holy.”

Ancient religion almost invariably involved rites that were directly associated with fertility and certain symbols of fertility—for instance, rabbits and eggs have always been associated with Easter, because both have long been symbols of fertility, and because Easter (Ishtar) was another name for the goddess Astarte or Venus, who was the goddess of sex and love.

Virtually every religion of the world offers some kind of meaning or explanation for sex that elevates its different forms to a level connected with worship in some fashion. For instance, how many have any idea that steeples on churches are relics directly connected to phallic worship—worship of the male sex organ? Or how many know the true origin of the cross?

While not the subject of this book, the matter of sex and its involvement in worship through history is raised so that the reader will have just a little bit more comprehension of the colossal importance of having a right understanding of sex as God intended. Religion should have been the place where people could go to learn this critical understanding, but it became the source of greatest confusion and error—all through history!