Jesus and sex

Sir, I think that Colin Bricher’s letter (28 August) was one of the most sensible statements about sex that I have seen in many a day. I thank him for it, and you for publishing it.

The male human sex instinct is, I believe, highly problematic for individuals and society. Jesus, the Word of God through whom all things were made (John 1:1-3), came into the human world and gave the most ruthless condemnation of sexual congress outside marriage that has ever been uttered (Matthew 5:27-30).

He did not call his disciples to a life of sexual satisfaction (how did the apostles satisfy their ‘natural’ urges as they followed him for three years around Galilee and Judea?), and of the 13 secret vices he lists in Mark 7:21-23 three, possibly four, are sins of sex.

His chosen expletive for a revelation-denying, evangelism-opposing population was “this adulterous generation”. He never condoned adultery, although he forgave it (as he did crucifixion, Luke 23:34), withheld, and even bore, its penalty (John 8:2-11, 1 Peter 2:24).

He was explicitly more negative about wayward sex than he was about war; not because such sex was more wicked but because it was more widespread. Every man to whom he spoke was guilty under the seventh commandment as he expounded it in the Sermon on the Mount.

It is more than illegitimate, it is illiterate, to appeal to the public with assurances that Jesus didn’t care much about sex. Read the Gospels if you doubt this. But for any commandment he gave he gave also the promise of power to keep it.

The “light from heaven brighter than the sun” burns rampant sexual desire to dust and ashes. Only then may the Creator’s gift of sex be released as an expression of committed monogamous love for its creative purpose.

Meanwhile we must challenge, however weary we become in doing so, the folly of thinking that every urge in the groin is a word from the Lord.

Richard Wilkins,

Watford