"Let Marriage Be Had in Honor among All"(Heb. 13:4)
Ray F. Dively
Baden, Pennsylvania 15005
We are now living in a mixed-up-world that has lost its way. Today there is no respect for authority, morals, sex, or marriage. God created male and female. Marriage is ordained of God. God made sex to be pure, clean, and a wonderful blessing. The Bible gives adequate instruction, which if obeyed and followed, bestows upon the happily married pure and joyous delight beyond description. The world has overlooked, ignored, and rejected the sole authority for morals, who is God. Sinning man has dirtied that which God made to be kept clean.
Today bookstore shelves contain many books disseminating sex knowledge. But not only that, a veritable avalanche of sex literature floods the newsstands. Almost every issue of every magazine of popular circulation contains an eye-catching article on sex. Sex is the major appeal in the motion pictures, in television, and in popular songs. From every source and direction, it seems, sex consciousness and sex knowledge are being hurled at the public. Because these modern "authorities" producing this new flood of sex literature are themselves ignorant of tile true meaning and purposes of sex, they have built a superstructure of "knowledge" without a foundation. The foundation of knowledge is the word of God!
Today divorces are on the rapid increase. About every fourth home over the United States becomes a divorce victim today. Premarital experiences are becoming accepted and are literally shattering young lives. God designed sex for use only between a husband and wife whom God has joined in holy wedlock. He designed sex for righteous uses--and one of them is to bind husband and wife together in a loving relationship unshared with any other. The very privacy of this marriage relationship makes it sacred, makes husband and wife dear to each other in a special way never shared with any other. This entire loving, sacred, precious relationship is greatly impaired, or destroyed, when shared with any other. This is why fornication and adultery are so harmful to their participants, and therefore sins. Do not cheapen your marriage by boasting and telling of your sexual relationship with your mate to those with whom you work.
Sex knowledge has increased. But this avalanche of sex knowledge recently released is only half true, because only half complete. It does not reveal God's purpose and laws of sex. Therefore it is deceptive, soul-damaging, and is leading this world to the brink of destruction.
Tile new morality is wrecking lives, breaking up homes, threatening the destruction of civilization. The Creator designed sex to bring blessings and happiness--to bind together husband and wife in love--to protect and preserve the institution of tile home and family. But look at the mountain of woe and anguish piled up by a society that has rebelled against its true God, rejected the divine maker's knowledge, lost its way and blundered on in the misleading paths of human devising.
The husband is to be the head of the family, not the wife. For the Bible says, "Wives; be in subjection unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, being himself the Saviour of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives also be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church, and gave himself up for it; that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. Even so ought husbands also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his own wife loveth himself; for no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourished and cherisheth it, even as Christ also the church; because we are members of his body. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church. Nevertheless do ye also severally love each one his own wife even as himself; and let the wife see that she fear her husband" (Ephesians 5: 22-33). There is no such thing as fifty-fifty marriage. One or the other, husband or wife, is the boss. It must be the husband.
Sex was created, not only as the means of reproduction and bringing about a family but, in humans, as a means of expressing love in marriage. A man might get a momentary sensual thrill and gratification out of an act of fornication. But how much greater would be the satisfaction of waiting to share that act with the one sweetest, dearest, loveliest girl in all the world, as a matter of love with clean conscience. With a harlot or a girl loose and immoral enough to permit fornication, it could not be real love, and besides, it involved a guilty conscience, and it could involve premarital pregnancy or venereal disease. Even in carnality, we realize it was better for us to wait for marriage.
Sex was created to stimulate pure romantic love between a young man and a young woman properly mated for marriage; to inspire them with desire to share their lives, their problems, their trials and troubles, their hopes and successes together; to enjoy the planning and building together of a happy home, and to rear a happy family.
God designed sex to produce pure, righteous, clean, holy and rich blessings! He made it to be the loving bond which not only would inspire a properly mated couple to marry, but which would preserve that marriage in love. Sex should be the energizing magnet to draw constantly closer and closer together with increasing love a husband and wife, to heal over those little irritations, disturbances, or misunderstandings which do occur.
Yet, this very bond which should bind the marriage tightly together is also the cord which, when misused and perverted, severs more marriages than all other causes combined, ten times over! Misused, it can bring nightmarish divorces, wreck homes and lives, leave children without parents, spawn juvenile delinquents!
Sex wasnt designed neither as something evil, filthy, nor degrading nor, on the other hand, w be used in premarital, extramarital, homosexual or other manners of perversion. Let's save sex for marriage. Let's turn to the way of all the blissful joys and blessings God made possible, and intended!
To avoid fornication the Bible teaches, "Now concerning the things where 'of ye wrote: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. But, because of fornications, let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband" (I Corinthians 7: 1, 2). This passage teaches that men and women should marry to avoid fornication. It says nothing here about the purpose of sex being reproduction.
"Let the husband render unto the wife her due; and likewise also the wife unto the husband. Tile wife hath not power over her own body, but file husband: and likewise also tile husband hath not power over his own body, but the wife" (I Corinthians 7:3,4). Here God gives the right and power of the husband's body over to the wife; and the right and file authority over the wife's body to tile husband. Yet, the teaching of God denies selfish taking, and demands considerate giving.
One of file greatest tragedies of this world's society is file sin of omission, the neglect of parents to teach their children. Not only about sex and marriage, but most parents neglect to teach their children period.
God has given each of us a marvelous human body to use as He has directed in His instruction book, the Bible. The possession of such a body imposes on each individual a sacred responsibility! It is something you may use to God's honor and glory and to your own great happiness; or you may misuse and abuse it to dishonor the Creator, and bring degradation, shame, and curses on yourself.
TRUTH MAGAZINE XIV; 31, pp. 8-10
June 11, 1970
