PLEASE NOTE: This e-teaching is not appropriate for children, preadolescents, and many adolescents.

Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilphah, Jacob’s four wives

I hope that, after reading the first two chapters, you are growing a little more comfortable mixing sex and spirituality. Scripture is full of sexual references, and it is interesting that many of us—who believe the Bible is God’s inspired Word—find certain parts embarrassing. When you think about it, it is a little bit of a chuckle that we believe certain things God said in His Word are inappropriate to mention in church, or just about anywhere for that matter. Modern Christian culture tends to be a tad Victorian. In many Christian circles, even the word sex is taboo, so it is softened with the euphemism intimacy.

It is also a little funny that some parts of the Bible that are read publicly in church services have become so familiar to us that we’ve become oblivious to the sexual connotations. May I point out a few of them before we consider four more strange, sexual, scriptural stories?

PLEASE NOTE: This e-teaching is not appropriate for children, preadolescents, and many adolescents.

Abram and Sarai in Egypt

When you think about some of the scandalous stories that are found in the book of Genesis, it is a little bit amusing that Christians carry Bibles with them into churches every Sunday morning without shame. If we weren’t so familiar with those stories, hearing them for the first time would be shocking.

We’ve not only got nudists prancing naked around a garden. We’ve also got men lying about their marital status so that their wives consequently become members of other men’s harems. We’ve got women encouraging their husbands to have sex with younger women. We’ve got a whole town of homosexuals hoping to sodomize some male visitors. We’ve got a lustful married woman ripping the clothes off a good-looking young foreigner. We’ve got one man marrying his half-sister and another man marrying his second cousin. We’ve got men taking multiple wives, and in one case, wives who were sisters. And did I mention that we’ve got one man having sex with his daughter-in-law, another man having sex with his two daughters, and another man who has sex with one of his father’s wives? That’s all contained in the first chapters of the book your pastor reads out loud, without apology, every Sunday. The Bible is not a book for prudes.

One of the New Testament’s most poignant passages has to be 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12:

They did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.

There is no escaping the clear meaning of Paul’s words. There is a time coming when God—not Satan—will cause people to be deceived. It will be a means of His righteous judgment upon them.

It is important to note that God will not arbitrarily—in a Calvinistic sense—send a deluding influence upon people. Rather, He will send a deluding influence upon free moral agents who “did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved” and “who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.”

Most Christians know that God expects us to love our neighbors as ourselves. That expectation is contained in what Jesus said in the second most important commandment. We should all be striving to obey it.

That being said, there is a spectrum of opinion among Christians regarding what loving one’s neighbor as oneself actually looks like in practice. How, specifically, should we be obeying the second greatest commandment in everyday life?

Thankfully, God has not left us in the dark on this. He’s given us an entire Bible, full of helpful insight regarding the specifics of loving our neighbors as ourselves. Beyond that, God Himself became a man who lived without sin His entire earthly life. He always perfectly obeyed the second greatest commandment. We can look at His life for insights regarding what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.