Lights in the World - PH49-01

Advanced Bible Doctrine - Philippians 2:14-15

The seventh moral principle forbids all sexual relations outside of one's own marriage, and all perversions of sex as well. Sexual immorality is an attack upon one of the divine institutions, the divine institution of marriage, and it is destructive of soul and body. This is for the preservation of the human race. This kind of sexual breakdown leads to personal and to national weakness and destruction. Great civilizations, as a matter of fact, have been demonstrated to be the result of societies which exercise a disciplined control of sexual pleasures by restricting sex to marriage. When societies break down and begin to have an abandonment of the exercise of sex only within marriage, that civilization, inevitably, without exception, historically has gone to destruction. There has never been a great civilization that did not come into being as the result of restraints upon sexual expression within marriage. There has never been a great civilization that, once it eased that restraint, did not come to destruction and go out of existence.

William Barclay, in a book entitled The Ten Commandments for Today makes this observation in quoting another writer: "John H. Court says that the historian J.D. Unwin studied 88 different civilizations, and from the study discerned the following pattern: Every civilization is established and consolidated by observing a strict moral code; is maintained while this strict code is kept; and, decays when spiritual license is allowed. Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom. The evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation. It may well be that the lesson of history is that the loosening of sexual standards threatens the welfare of not only the individual, but also of the nation."

That is exactly the case. As a matter of fact, this very concept, if you have ever studied psychology, you will have discovered was a principle established by Freud himself--that where there is sexual license, a society cannot be created. It cannot build a great civilization.

Consequently, the communist world has seized upon this principle, and the last several years has seen a debasing of moral standards in the United States, as well as all over the world, that the world has probably never experienced before. Certainly our nation has never experienced this before. Behind it is the communist encouragement and promotion of the concept of sexual freedoms beyond the confines of marriage. The reason for this is because communism realizes that the way to bring weakness to a nation that it wants to destroy is by applying this factor to that nation: break down its morality, and there will come a weakness in the moral fiber of that nation that will begin to show itself by the fact that that society has a lack of will to resist aggression.

So we're talking about something which is very critical to us in this nation today. Since the early 60s, we have been seeing changes on the moral sexual level that have been unthinkable in the history of this country. The Jewish people, we have found, were surrounded by this sort of thing when they came into the Promised Land. As a matter of fact, sexual immorality was used as an expression of worship to the gods of Baal. The same conditions were true of the Greek and Roman cultures, into which New Testament Christianity came. Christianity returned to the seventh moral principle. It demanded uncompromising sexual purity outside of marriage, and fidelity within.

Marriage is a Commitment–Not a Contract

Thus, it is a seeming justification for divorce, which is also condemned by the seventh moral principle. But marriage is a commitment, and it is a commitment where two people agree before God and make a formal statement of their intention to form a lifelong sexual partnership. This is consummated by the sex act; these people are forever bound to one another; and, there is no power on earth that can dissolve it. But that's what the Bible means when it says, "What God has joined together, let not man cast asunder," for the simple reason that man cannot break it. All he can do is to go ahead and enter another marriage relationship, which the Bible clearly says is an adulterous act. Because marriage is a commitment, there is no way out. Because it is a commitment, the results of the marriage are irrelevant. That's divine viewpoint.

All of human viewpoint rises up against this. Because marriage is a commitment, it is therefore irrevocable. The seventh moral principle is a commitment of two people before God, and therefore it is irrevocable. It can't be undone. No black-robed judge can sit in a court of law and bring his gavel down and say, "Divorce granted." He didn't grant you anything. All he severed was a legal contract that the state has established, but that's meaningless before God. That's an extraneous thing. Nobody went through anything of that sort in ancient days. You cannot separate what God has put together. God puts together not just the sexual act, but God puts together: when two people intend that their commitment is to marriage; they make this declaration before witnesses; and, they consummate with the sex act. Now you've got a marriage. Otherwise, all you've got is an act of immorality and a sin to be exited from and to be confessed.

So Christianity, very definitely, in an immoral climate, returned wholeheartedly to the biblical principle and the rule of commitment. For this reason, because it is a commitment, sex is not promiscuous. And for this reason, the expression of sex was restricted to marriage.

Factors that Contribute to Sexual Immorality

So let's look at a few of the factors, and I can't begin to cover this. I even hate to bring these up that I'm going to bring up because I don't want you to get the impression that we have in any way covered the ground. We're just going to touch upon it, because there's so much involved in this principle that we can't get bogged down too much in one area. But I think this will give you an idea and a direction that you can fill out for yourself.

Physical Factors

Denying Sex to Your Spouse

Women's Dress

They never argue, "Why can't we wear our shorts longer? Why can't we wear shorts almost maybe down to our knees? Why can't we wear dresses a little over our knees so we can sit there and relax when we do?" They never argue to make their dresses long enough so they can be comfortable when they move around.

It is amazing that this is not only true of little girls. It is true of big girls and of grown women, because the little girls learned it from the women. We have to be making speeches to grown women to wear dresses that cover up adequately. It is fantastic. You would think that this would be the normal inclination of a Christian woman's thinking: "I want to be sure that my clothing is, as per scriptural requirement, modest, as well as stylish." Do not equate modesty with being a lack of style. The Scriptures require that a woman be modest in her dress, and stylish to the hilt. Immodesty in dress is part of the last few decades of breakdown in the violation of the seventh moral principle.

So we find, and it's always sad to see, sometimes that we even see Christian women who run around with a low cut dress in front so they can expose their cleavage, and think that they are in the highest style and the highest beauty. Instead you look at them and you're sad for the fact that they have cheapened themselves. You wish that somehow they had caught the vision of who they are. They are the princesses of the living God, and they want to dress and look like the tramps of the streets. This is no small thing. I know that if you wanted to go out and buy a pair of modest shorts for your daughter, you'd be hard pressed to do it. You almost have to go out and buy her a beautiful pair of jeans and then cut them off, and go to the expense. Or you have to start doing your own sewing.

The people who are oriented to Satan's world are oriented to the styles that expose. If you think it's cute to dress your little girl up so that everybody can see her anatomy, you're sadly mistaken. You are vulgarizing her, and you may yet live to regret the day that you started dressing her like that, when she discovers that dressing like that opens interesting little doors to her with boys. So let's get it straight with the short and tight clothing; the low-cut dresses; and, the brief swimsuits.

Somebody said, "Have you seen the swimsuits for this season?" I haven't seen them. I said, "No, I didn't. Are they showing them someplace–some style show?" And they said, "You won't believe it. It is absolutely nothing more than what used to be known in the burlesque theater as paste-ons. That's it. It's just the briefest kind of paste-on so that maximum nudity can be created."

Do you know what's going to happen to the little girls? They're going to be just as nervous as they can be at the beach if they don't have enough of themselves showing. "And you say, "Isn't that strange?" You'd think a little girl would say, "I want to be sure that I've got enough of me covered up, not enough of me exposed." When we get to summer camp, we have to put out our annual edict. Two-pieced bathing suits for girls are out. Well, the girls find it harder and harder to buy one-piece bathing suits, so they have to buy two-pieced and then put a shirt over it. And they end up with three-pieced bathing suits.

Public Nudity in Entertainment

Sensitivity Training

Kissing was not Meant to Stop with Kissing

Now smarten up, and stop pretending that we have something here that can be started at one end and not go all the way to the other end. Sooner or later, if you play with that, you will be burned, because you will not stop someplace along the line. You will find yourself on a runaway train. The Bible says, "Do not defraud." That means that you are not to bestir desires in somebody else of a physical nature that you do not have the right to fulfill and satisfy. Yet, as much as we shout and scream and yell and tell parents, "Be aware of this. Don't allow your son or your daughter, until they're out of high school, to find themselves in socially isolated situations one-on-one, because they do not have the controls to keep this chain reaction from being triggered at one end and going to the other."

Lack of Spiritual Rapport

Body Contact

Social Factors

Pornography

A Weak Spiritual Maturity Structure

Music

Emotions

The Old Sin Nature

An article in The National Observer entitled "Social Suicides" by Daniel Henninger says, "A recent article in The Washington Post said that the suicide rate among young people in this country was increasing at an alarming rate. Among the various reasons given for the young suicides, the most interesting was that offered by Dr. Jerome Motto, formerly president of the American Association of Suicidology, and now professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. Dr. Motto suggested that a lot of kids felt they didn't quite fit into the love generation–the new, open, unfettered lifestyle made popular by rock music; Charles Reich's The Greening of America; youth movies; and, advertising directed at the young.

"In Dr. Motto's view, some of the most sensitive and intelligent of the young detected a false note in all of this; weren't mature enough to assert their doubts; became depressed; and, killed themselves. Two liberal administrations proposed and passed new social policies, calling them "The New Frontier" and "The Great Society." Concurrent with this extraordinary upheaval of public policy, there occurred a radical transformation of personal values.

"With young people leading the way, a lot of us concluded that how we lived and looked was somehow inadequate. We decided to create new lifestyles for ourselves by doing our own thing, and letting it all hang out. Those phrases seem trite now, but they describe precisely what we did. A lot of what we did was harmless enough: longer hair; louder clothes; and, all that. Other changes were more substantial: freer; more guiltless sex; widespread use of drugs; communal living; guiltless divorce; an assortment of psychological therapies; and, a new female consciousness.

"All these things were full-blown frequently overlapping movements, each having its own elaborately articulated philosophy. To commit oneself to the sexual, drug, group therapy, or feminist movement, one had to be pretty well-prepared to toss overboard a lifetime's accumulation of personal values, prejudices, and hangups. The astonishing thing is how willingly many of us threw ourselves into the new consciousness without a moment's thought for the consequences of our commitment. If we did consider the consequences, we concluded that whatever they were, they would make us feel better.

"I think the returns are coming in now, and what we're getting is a large population of social suicides. People who made the long psychic swim out to those islands of personal happiness found they'd been oversold, and are now too emotionally wrung out to make their way back. These people are still among us, but they're drowning. But it seems to me that what the recent past should have taught us is that it's plain stupid to think a personal paradise awaits anyone willing to have his or her sex freed; consciousness raised; marriage opened; tea grouped; mind blown; or (imagined it) willing to become one's own best friend. Perhaps the rest of us ought to take another look at the various brands of personal happiness we bought recently. Rather than kill ourselves, just wise up."

Homosexuality and Lesbianism

The practice was widespread among the heathen people who surrounded the Jewish people in Israel. This was actually the purpose of the male prostitutes in the heathen temple when they came for worship. These male prostitutes were there for the practice of homosexuality. This evil in God's viewpoint was the reason for the condemnation and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Genesis 19:1-11 tell us the horrid story of the men who came to visit Lot. The men of the city came; surrounded his house; and, assaulted the house for the explicit purpose of having Lot turn over these men who were his guests to be used in homosexual relationships.

Both male and female prostitutes were provided for the worship of the god of Baal in the temples. You can read about this in Deuteronomy 23:17: "There shall be no harlot of the daughters of Israel (a female prostitute), nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel (a homosexual prostitute). Thou shalt not bring the hire of an harlot (the payment to the female prostitute), or the price of a dog into the house of the Lord your God for any vow. For even both these are abominations of the Lord your God."

These were viewed as offerings. This is how you brought an offering. I'm not just talking, friends, about the heathen. I'm talking about the Jewish people. The Jewish people picked up this practice from the pagans around them. When they brought a money offering to God, the way they brought the money offering was that they brought this offering as a payment to the prostitute, male or female. This was an act of worship. It was bringing a money offering to God. Now, that's what this Scripture here in Deuteronomy, is talking about.

Israel frequently fell into imitating this worship. You can read about this in 1 Kings 14:24, 1 Kings 15:12, 1 Kings 22:46, and 2 Kings 23:7. It is unsparingly condemning a practice which is absolutely forbidden in the Old Testament. Leviticus 18:22 states the principle: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind. It is abomination." Where it was practiced, it was viewed as a capital crime punishable by death. Leviticus 20:13: "If a man also lies with mankind as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them."

The New Testament world was shot through with the practice of homosexuality. In the society of Greece, it was not just a practice, but it was a way of life. It was a thing that everybody did. It is unbelievable as you go back and you read through the history books and the accounts of Greek culture and practice, how consistently this was practiced. The more intellectual level you were on, and the more cultured level you were on, the more homosexuality was involved as a way of life. It permeated from the bottom to the very top. As a matter of fact, Greece has been described as a pervert's paradise. This perversion was prevalent among intellectuals and aristocrats. It was prevalent among the philosophers. As a matter of fact, philosophical schools were passed on by the teachers, such as Aristotle, who was a homosexual, to his student, Hermias, who was his lover. Throughout the Greek world, teachers of these philosophical schools, who gave us these great Greek thoughts, passed their schools on to their male lovers.

Greek education was shot through with homosexuality. That's where the boys learned it. They learned it when they went to school. There was no way to avoid it. This theme runs throughout Greek literature. One of the outstanding pieces of literature concerning love is one written by Plato called Symposium. It is viewed as an epitome of a piece of literature on love. But most people don't realize that its homosexual love that it's talking about. It's an epitome of a perversion expression.

As a matter of fact, it was so widespread that even the Greek army was infected by it, if you can believe it. The army itself was shot through with this practice. Yet, never was homosexuality viewed as normal by the Greeks, and never was it legalized. We can't even say that about ourselves today. It was always illegal. Whatever enforcement was made of it, it was always illegal, and it was always viewed as a perversion. It was never viewed in any other light, though widely practiced. Even Plato was a homosexual when he wrote his book on envisioning the ideal country, the ideal state, rejected this practice in his concept of the ideal state. The Greeks knew they were enslaved, and they knew that only a madman would legalize this.

Well, if you thought the Greeks were bad, the Romans were worse. Roman society had inherited all the perversions of the Greeks, and they went on from there. They were indeed the fitting recipients of Romans 1:18-32. When you realize how homosexuality controlled Roman society from top to bottom, you'll appreciate Paul's reference and his condemnation of that (an explanation of that practice) in that opening chapter of Romans. It was naked, crude, course, and filthy in the deepest sense of those words. The victims were, of course, feminized. They were dressed in female attire and mannerisms.

There was a time when you could not see this in the United States. Men who go around as feminine homosexuals are called "queens" in the trades. The male homosexuals are called "butches." You never saw this, but now you do. As some of you know, I was in San Diego a couple summers ago, sitting in one of the great hotels in downtown San Diego. There was a great convention going on. There were these well-dressed men, and these very impressively attired women walking back and forth. I'm sitting there with my friend Paul Dirks, and we're talking, and Mrs. Danish and Mrs. Dirks were close by. And it was really funny. We're sitting and watching this crowd going back and forth, and all this hubbub of noise and overtone. And these women would say, "Oh, darling, where have you been. I haven't seen you in so long." And they were greeting one another, and we thought this was a big homecoming.

Then all of a sudden, four people woke up. I wish I'd have had my movie camera on us as the four of us looked at each other, and we said, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Yes. Do you realize that those women are men?" It just hit me. They fooled me for a while, which was kind of humiliating. But those women were men. ... This was the Gay Liberation Convention and they were nominating the king and queen of the movement.

There was a time when the police would have stormed in there and broken that thing up, and they'd have been hauled off to jail like nobody's business. Even in Rome, friends, they never legalized it. Of the first 15 Roman emperors, 14 of them were homosexuals. Only Claudius was straight.

It began with Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was notoriously known as the lover of King Nicomedes of Bithynia. He was succeeded by Augustus whom he had adopted. Augustus agreed to be adopted as Julius Caesar's son, to succeed him as emperor on the basis that Augustus would be Caesar's lover. The Emperor Tiberius was such a pervert that this is one thing we can't read publicly. You get the records of the descriptions by a historian likes Suetonius concerning the activities of Tiberius, and the translations. When you get it translated, the perversions are so gross that a lot of people don't even want to translate it. The Emperor Hadrian had Antinous as his lover. When Antinous died, he wept like a woman, and he had Antinous declared a god. The lowest pervert of all, however, was Nero. He was the lowest homosexual of the bunch. This is because he was so open and brazen that he publicly married his lover in an imperial wedding (a "White House wedding" they had). Then he led his male lover through the streets of Rome to the cheers of the crowds back to the palace.

Is it any wonder that Rome, the greatest empire on the face of the earth, unbelievably went to destruction? The national leadership of Rome brought the moral cancer of homosexuality to the lowest levels of Roman society. Yet Rome never legalized homosexuality. It never viewed it as anything but a bad thing. And yet it was worse in Rome than it was in Greece.

Well, when Christianity arrived, this was the scene. This practice is clearly forbidden by the New Testament Scriptures (as it is in the Old Testament Scriptures) in 1 Corinthians 6:9. Whatever a person's reason may be for being inclined to this perversion does not change the fact that God condemns it. A nation which persists in it; tolerates it; and, legalizes it is a nation which is certain to come under divine destruction. No nation has ever existed very long once it tolerated; legalized; and, widely practiced homosexuality.

In the United States, it is no longer illegal. It is dignified. It's called by such cute names as the gay liberation. It's no longer called a perversion. It's now called a deviation. The homosexual and the lesbian are viewed as mistreated; misunderstood; but, very sensitive souls. The Bible says that's human viewpoint; it violates the moral principle; it's an abnormal expression of sex; and, a society seals its own doom when it's tolerates it; when it promotes it; when it practices it; and, worst of all, when it legalizes it. The old sin nature has many tendencies to sin. This is one of them. None of these tendencies are justification for tolerating it. Homosexuality is at war with God, and it is hostile to the authority of the Bible.

There are a couple of other things that are major practices in this country, and we will get to that next time. If you've been shocked by what you've heard today, I can guarantee you that the worst is yet to come.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1973

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