The Bible Sex and You: What the Bible REALLY says about: Marriage, Sex, Birth Control, Abortion, Divorce, Homosexuality, Fornication, Adultery, Masturbation and much more!
SEX! The one word that never fails to get everybody's attention: either positively or negatively. But the fact is, regardless into which category you fall, we are all sexual beings. Please indulge me a few lines of background information to set the stage for the material to follow.I have always been interested in human history and early man. As a young man in my teens, I can remember roaming ancient Indian campsites in Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas, collecting Indian artifacts of one kind or another. Today, I still have a large collection of artifacts that I have gathered over the years.Recently - and read this paragraph carefully - there have been several new books that have appeared in the marketplace written by religionists on the subject of sex. In many cases, they were written by religious leaders who were largely uneducated and uncredentialed in either the field of human sexuality or biblical studies. In most instances, the author attempted to inform the general public about what is and what is not acceptable insofar as what the Bible has to say on the subject of sex. They were written only from a Christian perspective and reflect simply the author's own peculiar or particular view on the subject. Because it was written from a Christian perspective exclusively, much of the information was, simply stated, wrong! Not just wrong, but destructive because the information, if followed, could lead the individual or couple involved into error, misinformation and misunderstanding.I certainly believe their intentions were good. They were trying to instruct their constituency on the biblical position relating to sex and marriage. But, there was one basic problem: in order to understand what the biblical position is on any subject and, particularly on the subject of sex, one has to do it from a Hebrew perspective.One tends to overlook the fact that the Bible in its entirety is a Hebrew document. To learn what the biblical position is on this subject, one has to examine it from a Hebrew point of view. To do that, we have to look at it over a period of over 3,000 years and from a historical and cultural perspective. Two thousand years ago, the perspective on a given subject may have been one thing. During the first century of the present era it may have been something else again. During the Middle Ages it may have been something quite different.Today, our perspective on sex is something essentially rational and objective. Perhaps the biggest problem of all is that one has about 1700 years of Christian thought on the subject to try to overcome - Christian thought that goes all the way back to the Stoics and Cynics of Greek philosophy and incorporates many of their ideas into the theology of the Church. Things could only go from bad to worse!And, so, you have my inspiration for writing The Bible Sex and You.