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Is Premarital Sex a Sin According to the Bible? The Answer Will Probably Surprise You!
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Is Premarital Sex a Sin According to the Bible? The Answer Will Probably Surprise You! Ask just about anyone if the Bible declares premarital sex to be a sin and they will emphatically uphold the erroneous belief that the scriptures strongly speak out against and prohibit indulging in premarital sex. In reality, when one studies this topic in the Bible for themselves, what they will discover is that it all depends on how the scriptures are interpreted, as well as whether one is reading from the Old Testament or the New Testament. For instance, in the Old Testament, King David was mentioned as having many concubines, who were women living with him solely for the purpose of sex, and yet God called David a man after His own heart. The Old Testament also tells us that King Solomon had up to 1,000 concubines (1 Kings 11:3), yet he was known as the wisest man who ever lived. In both of those examples, a case could certainly be made that sex for pure pleasure was not considered a sin but more of a reward. To take an extreme point of view, it is interesting to note that in the Bible, is not exactly condoned but prostitutes are not condemned either. In fact, there are stories in the Old Testament concerning women who were prostitutes but who were also greatly honored and respected, such as in the story of Rahab the , where the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. Interestingly, she was the only inhabitant of that great walled city whose life was spared during the Hebrew conquest. Even the Apostle James in the New Testament (James 2:25) praised her: In the same way, was not even Rahab the considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? If sex were a sin, how could Rahab be considered righteous? Famous stories such as Samson and Delilah neither condone nor prohibit the act of sex for profit or pleasure, and instead the only sin that was emphasized in that story was the weakness of Samson when it came to him wrongfully revealing the true source of his power, which was supposed to have remained a sacred secret. Furthermore, one of the great warrior heroes of ancient Israel was a man by the name of Jephthah, who was the of a . During a major threat of war, it was Jephthah who led a righteous battle assault, defeated the Ammonites, and delivered Israel to safety. When it comes to the Ten Commandments, they do not even hint that sex might be considered a sin. There is an unspecified prohibition against adultery, and that forms the seventh commandment, but there is absolutely nothing in either the Ten Commandments or anywhere else in the Old Testament that forbids an unmarried man and an unmarried woman from coming together just to enjoy each other. Moreover, when it comes to that seventh commandment, it is vague to the point of leaving much room for some needed questions: Does the commandment apply equally to both men and women, or is it meant for one gender more than the other? Other logical questions concerning this topic would be: Is it adultery if a husband or wife has freely given their married partner permission to indulge their natural passions with another? Is it adultery if it is a threesome or foursome? Is it adultery if one married partner is physcially unable to gratify their husband or wife? Along those lines, would God want a passionate yet neglected husband or wife to suffer when their abstinence is through no fault of their own? There are lots of philosophical questions to ask when one explores any facet of adultery. So yes, even adultery represents a Biblical gray area, despite it being one of the Ten Commandments. To illustrate this point further, King David, who was a devout man, fell in lust and love with a married woman named Bathsheba, which resulted in her becoming pregnant. God punished King David by causing the death of their love , but when one reads the story carefully, his punishment seems to stem more from the betrayal of his friend Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, whom King David had purposely set up to die in battle. Reading that story in 2 Samuel 12, it appears that Uriah had been a righteous man, and therefore God condemned King David to lose his newborn , which is a sentiment that was echoed by the Prophet Nathan, who rebuked King David soundly. If the death of that innocent infant had been the result of adultery, it is unlikely that the second of King David with Bathsheba would have been so very blessed to have become King Solomon, the wisest and arguably one of the richest kings ever. It is also interesting to note that nowhere in the Old Testament was Bathsheba condemned for her part in the affair. Also, though the commandments in the Bible are supposedly equally there for all, there seems to be a major double-standard when it comes to adultery vs. gender. If the act of adultery were a sin no matter what the circumstance, then logically it would be as much of a sin for a man to commit adultery as it would be for a woman, yet that is not the case. There is a famous story in the New Testament, from John 8, where teachers of the Jewish law and Pharisees came up to Jesus with a married woman who had just been caught in the act of adultery. Wanting to set a religious trap for Jesus, they asked him if she should be condemned to death for her sin. Note the absence of the man involved. There was obviously no thought about stoning him, even though, as they say: It takes two to tango. What many scholars believe happened in that story was that when Jesus bent down and began writing with his finger in the dust, he was probably listing the names of her accusers alongside the major sins that they had recently committed. When Jesus stopped writing and looked up, oddly none of her accusers were there anymore. When it comes to the seventh commandment prohibition against adultery, it really seems to come down to it being an act that one probably should not do if it is accomplished in secret and carries the risk of destroying the life of the unsuspecting partner. But, in the case of unhappy marriages, I believe that no person would be required to remain unhappily married to the wrong person when the right person comes along, nor should any unhappy person be denied the opportunity to sexually seek and explore for the right one. Along those lines, something I would ask unhappily married partners is this question: Would you take advice from a about how you should live the rest of your life? Most people would snort incredulously at the thought, but when it comes to marriage, in many cases couples made such a serious life-long decision back when they were teenagers. Who knew they could be wrong? Despite the absurdity of making forever decisions that are good when one is young and unwise, a large number of Christian churches work under the assumption that any marriage, no matter how badly chosen, should last for a lifetime. If adultery fixes the unhappiness of a good person, who is to say that it is not right? There is also another idea to consider when using the Ten Commandments as the Rosetta stone of what is right and what is wrong. While the Ten Commandments provides a pretty good blueprint for life in general, it was never meant to be applied to everybody. The Ten Commandments was meant specifically for the of Israel. Therefore the question arises: Is the entire world under Judaic law? Even in the New Testament there is a lot of room for debate on the topic of premarital sex. There is no doubt that the Apostle Paul thought sex should be avoided outside of marriage. In fact, he wrote on that subject several times, encouraging people to marry rather than to burn with passion. If one thinks about it, his statement is akin to saying that it does not matter how terrible your choice may be in a life partner, it is better to be miserable and to destroy two lives than it is to enjoy the natural inclination to have sex with someone you might not want to grow old with. Another way to literally translate that verse would be to say that it is better to marry anyone, no matter how awful the match, than it is to experience normal desires. It should be asked: What sort of God would exact such a high price from good people just for indulging in the natural desires that He created? That verse from Paul truly qualifies as one of the ten most inane statements made in history. Another question to consider is whether the word of Paul qualifies as the Word of God? That is a topic very much open for debate as well, and there are scholars who would say that Paul may have exhibited more than a little misogynistic tendencies. Who knows? What is known, and it is well to remember, is that Paul the so-called apostle (the only apostle that Jesus did not choose himself) did not start life out as Paul. Instead, he was the fantatical and murderous Saul of Tarsus who would not hesitate to participate in sentencing another to death over religious dogma. When Saul became Paul, he might have become less dangerous, but he merely traded one extreme level of fanatical belief in one religion for another. Certainly the question of what were the motives of Paul for emphasizing abstinence is the guess of anyone. The man remained unmarried until the end of his life, and there is no doubt that the decadence of the Romans, during his time, appalled him thoroughly. It could just be that Paul wanted to place Christians apart by encouraging them to set a different example of living by refusing to take part in Roman feasts and orgies. Obviously, Paul was not much of a party sort of guy. It is also interesting to look at what constitutes the New Testament itself in deciding what is the Word of God and what is not. Major organized Christian religions have emphasized from the beginning that every sentence, every word, every letter, and every punctuation mark in the New Testament emanates from the divine and inspired Word of God, yet it was not God who put the New Testament together. Instead, it was between 202 and 335 A.D. (from Ireneaus to the Origen of Alexandria to the Commission of Constantine to the First Council of Nicaea) before the majority of books that would eventually constitute the New Testament were decided. During that process, many books written during and around the time of Jesus were discarded and hidden or destroyed because they did not fit the narrative that the church wanted to create, such as the now infamous but archaeologically confirmed Book of Judas that was presented to the world by National Geographic. In essence, it is as if the founders of Christianity conspired together to determine what is it that people enjoy most, and what is it that elevates people to Heaven on Earth, and what is it that the average person is least able or least willing to resist (why shoould they?)... and to place a major guilt trip upon it. Declaring sex as sin meant that congretations would regularly sin, which meant that they would continually feel impelled to seek forgiveness and reparation by attending church far more often in order to be forgiven, and in the process pay more tithes to attone for their sins. The fact that the church even made masturbation a sin shows how manipulative their pronouncements were concerning anything associated with pleasure. Not only that but later Calvanistic faiths intimated that even when enjoyed between spouses, sex was meant not for pleasure but only for procreation. Basically, what the early organized church did (and modern churches continue to foster) was to proclaim that all pleasures are inherently wrong, meaning that the greatest pleasure is surely the most wrong of all, and who could deny that the greatest pleasure is sex? To separate the holy (sexless) church members from the unholy, the church to this day emphasizes the virginity of the Virgin Mary when Mary was clearly anything but a virgin. How else would Jesus have had brothers and sisters? As the church has so amply proven over the centuries and millenia: Guilt is persuasion, guilt is power, and guilt is profit. This discussion is not meant to serve as conclusive proof that the Bible does not necessarily say anything about sex being wrong. In the Bible, there are more than a few references to the sin of sexual immorality. Actually, the New Testament mentions it more than two dozen times. The bottom line, however, is that wherever sexual immorality is warned against, neither the Old Testament or the New Testament actually defines what constitutes an act of sexual immorality. Like so many controversial issues of the human condition, the jury is still out on that topic and always will be. One thing is certain, however, which is that wherever a sex-related sin is mentioned, the church manipulates the story out of all proportion for their gain. For instance, Genesis 38 tells the story of Onan, who by tradition married the widow of his older brother when he died prematurely. Onan, not surprisingly, was very unhappy with this arrangement for tradition dictated that any his unwanted new wife might have would not even be considered his but the of his deceased brother Er. Therefore, according to the story, whenever he had sex with her he pulled out at the final moment to prevent her from becoming pregnant. This break in tradition and Jewish law supposedly so angered God, Onan was struck dead. When one reads that story without any knowledge of the great manipulation of the church, it is quite obvious that the issue was about defying tradition. However, what the Church did with that story was to pronounce to the world that God killed Onan for practicing birth control. It is safe to say that there has not been anything written in the Bible about sex which has not been twisted, and manipulated, and blown out of all proportion so that the real story when told by the church is hardly recognizable anymore... except for The Song of Solomon (also known as the Song of Songs). The Song of Solomon is sexy. It is an Old Testament book of the Bible that is all about the joy of sex between what appears to be one of the concubines of the young and virile King Solomon and the king himself. Scholars know that it is a more youthful King Solomon in the story due to the fact that he had only 140 concubines at the time (Song of Solomon chapter 6). Basically, it is bed talk and verbal foreplay, and luscious metaphors of sensuous body parts such as his flowing fountain, and a celebration of the loss of virginity and erotic desire between two people. There is certainly nothing else like it in the Bible, yet somehow The Song of Solomon never seems to make it into sermons, despite the fact that it is in the Bible, where it is found between the books of Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. Of course, the church has manipulated this book of the Bible by claiming it to be a metaphor of the love of God toward humankind, but when any intelligent person reads it, such a purposefully misleading interpretation is obviously nothing more than religious spin. Other religious leaders have claimed that the love-making story in The Song of Solomon is about the beauty of the intimacy between a husband and wife, yet the lover of King Solomon does not appear to be his wife in this song because the female co-star of this story mentions that her skin is so dark from having to work in the vineyards with her parents. It is highly unlikely that a queen or any other wife of the king would be doing manual labor in the vineyards. Perhaps it would be fair to say why I so thoroughly researched and wrote this essay. I grew up staunchly Christian in the Pentecostal Protestant faith, which meant that every natural sexual pleasure and discovery during the early years of my coming of age where wrought with terrible but unfounded guilt. This also meant that I missed out on dozens, if not hundreds, of sexual encounters that could have added greatly to my life and my knowledge and my sexual well-being, as well as my partners. Likewise, it is a fact that hundreds of millions of church-going people, similar to myself, have been made to feel guilty for something that wasn’t against any Biblical commandment, and that knowledge was enough to make me want to help set the record straight for them. Basically, I want to be a monkeywrench in the religious cycle of sexual oppression that has been torturing good souls for more than 2,000 years. Except for the printed pages of the Bible, it is not a book of black and white pronouncements. It is organized Christian religions that make things black and white, not God. Those who actually read the scriptures for themselves quickly see that there are many gray areas in the Bible and sex is certainly one of the most controversial topics amongst those gray areas. So, why do churches make sex as big a guilt trip as possible even though it causes such emotional and psychological harm to their congregations? There are many who believe that the church focuses on sex totally as a means of controlling their congregations through guilt, despite the natural fact that pleasuring others and pleasuring oneself with a consenting partner should never be considered a sin… period. Sex is an act that that starts with the letter of S, but that does not mean it should be associated with the s word of sin, it should be known as the s word of sharing. Granted, there was a time before contraceptives and modern medicine that caution was called for to protect young women, and therefore certain Biblical precautions were somewhat justified, but this is a new era that allows for individuals to determine what is good for themselves and to protect themselves from pregnancy or disease. Safe sex can be a beautiful act, it can be a spiritual act, it can be a giving act, it can be a healthful act, and it can be an act that is enjoyed purely for pleasure, fun, and adventure. After my extensive research of the Bible, concerning the topic of sex, I don’t believe there should ever be any guilt attached to having consensual sex, either during the act or afterward, nor should any future partner have a right to judge another for giving so freely and pleasurably of themselves with those who have come before. I know many churches would argue with me fiercely on this point, but what it all boils down to is that any Biblical discussion on the topic of sex as a sin or not a sin is purely a matter of speculation or opinion. If one wants to view the verses of the Bible as black and white in their life, then I would suggest using Ecclesiastes 9: Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do (New International Version). |
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it is only premarital sex if you eventually marry your partner.... can't be "sex before marriage" without the marriage
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So what are you going to post next?? The one about the University of Pennsylvania study that proves that women that ingest semen at least three times a week have at least a 50% reduction in occurrences of breast cancer - than women who do not ingest semen??
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5/23/2018 6:14 am |
Hello Msmealsonheels, Love the screen name! Interesting study from the Uni of Penn. There are other studies (I'll have to find the source but I believe I read it on LiveStrong) that have found that women who regularly come into contact with semen have lower stress levels than those who always use condoms. Cheers!
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