I don’t even know where to begin with this. This “objectify” talk which modern Christians engage in isn’t even biblical, and sounds more like feminism tbh.
When you use a woman to fuel your sexual fantasies, you are objectifying her, making a sexual object of her, rather than treating her as a person with thoughts, feelings, goals, personality and so on. This is the simple fact of the matter, whether it sounds biblical to you or not.
Do you dismiss the facts of modern chemistry because they aren't "biblical"? The Bible says nothing about the periodic table, after all - just as it says nothing about objectifying woman (not in so many words, at least). It makes no more sense to dismiss the latter because it is not found in the Bible than to dismiss the former for the same reason.
You are so hung up on this “selfish” thing when it comes to sexual desire, but don’t seem to think about the fact that “eating” or “drinking” (or the “whatever you do”) also brings pleasure to the person partaking - and guess what, we are to give glory to God for it.
Does eating or drinking typically involve another person in the way sexual stuff does? Obviously not. Trying to make comparisons or parallels of the sort you do here, then, fall flat. It is glaringly evident that eating a piece of apple pie, or drinking a milkshake, are not the same as the "becoming one flesh" of the sexual act. Clearly, there are different kinds of pleasure, varying in nature with the sort of thing that induces the pleasure. Some kinds of pleasure are pretty harmless - like smelling a rose, or enjoying a cup of coffee - and others are very damaging - like shooting heroin, or looking at inappropriate content.
It sounds like you're suggesting that the mere fact that we take pleasure in something glorifies God. Are you? The serial killer who takes pleasure in destroying people is glorifying God? The pedophile who takes pleasure in molesting children is glorifying God? I'm sure you'd say not. But the reasoning you've laid out above is the sort of reasoning that leads to such obscene conclusions.
Is Paul occupied with our merely being grateful to God for the pleasure we derive from various things in his comment in
1 Corinthians 10:31? No, he's not. In context, Paul is concerned with believers giving cause to others to stumble in their faith by their behaviour:
1 Corinthians 10:32-33
32 Give no offense either to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God;
33 just as I also please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit but the profit of the many, so that they may be saved.
Glorifying God, in Paul's mind, in part involved restraining himself - not seeking his own profit - for the sake of others. Using a woman to fuel sexual fantasizing does just the opposite, seeking to gratify oneself by objectifying another. This is not the self-sacrificing attitude Paul commands of believers in
1 Corinthians 10 by which they glorify God.
And, by the way, I am not "hung up on the selfish thing" but am simply being
biblical. If you don't see the call of God to selflessness in Scripture, you clearly aren't reading it. All throughout the NT, this call is declared, starting with Christ (
Matthew 16:24-25; John 12:24-25) and continuing with Paul (
Philippians 2:3-8), James (
James 3:13-18), Peter (
1 Peter 5:5-6) and John (
1 John 4:7-11).
Because as the verse above says, we are to glorify God in all that we do, whether it be eat, drink, etc. God invented sexual desire and the male imagination; we glorify God by enjoying how He made us. Sexual fantasies are no more a result of the Fall than desiring good food or drink is a result of the Fall.
This is so staggeringly false it is hard to know where to begin in responding to it! Yikes!
To start: The selfishness in this sort of thinking is astonishing. It is proposing that I elevate God, honor and worship
Him, by serving
myself! What an entirely human, sin-cursed idea! Surely, it is obvious that when one is selfishly imagining sexual events with a woman, one is not lifting
God up and glorifying Him. One's attention is entirely
self-focused in the imaginings you're trying to defend. You are, essentially, trying to make your selfishness an act of worship of God! Wow.
Sexual interest is God-given and perfectly all right. No man should feel guilty about finding a woman sexually interesting. But exercising that interest by selfishly fantasizing sexually about women is most definitely a product of Man's fallenness. And so is gluttony and drunkenness - and any other distorted, exaggerated preoccupation with physical, fleshly impulses.
First, why is it “selfish” for me to imagine sexual interactions with women, but it’s not selfish for me to think of music I like, or food I like, or anything else? I spend a LOT more time listening to music on a daily/weekly basis, than I do thinking about sexual things. I’d wager you do too: Are you selfish for it?
Thinking of eating a steak or a slice of pizza does not involve a living, breathing person, made in the image of God, precious and deserving of respect. Listening to tunes does not require that you use a woman, a human being for whom Christ died, without her consent, to fuel your sexual fantasies. Do I really have to explain this to you? Are you so far gone in your thinking?
And fantasies about fornication? A relational context isn’t even needed in order to fantasize… I’m not sitting there thinking “I’m fantasizing about having sex outside of marriage”; if I did, that would be sinful.
"Straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel," here, I think. It is enough to make sexual fantasizing evil that you use a woman, a fellow human being that Christ loves and died for, to satisfy sexual urges, never mind if you do so within or without marriage.
But if it’s just me imagining a beautiful woman God created, that is not sinful.
Are you imagining her with respect? Are you treating her as a fellow image bearer of God? Or have you stripped her down to her skivvies (or worse) in your mind's eye and selfishly feast that eye upon her like a dog would a bowl full of beef stew?
Recalling a woman's physical beauty is perfectly okay, of course, but doing as I just described above is a foul use of your God-given imagination.
Well, firstly the Bible doesn’t say they are immoral or impure, and regarding “sensual”: the Greek word is aselgeia, which in its original sense at the time referred to partaking in uncontrolled indulgence of physical pleasure. Also, contrary to the assumption one makes by reading “sensual” in our modern Bibles, aselgeia didn’t just refer to sexuality, but also gluttony, drunkenness, etc. So this is referring to people who live “the party life,” engage in “hook-up culture,” etc.
It's just a matter of degree, here. You don't go so far as to partake of the party life or hook-up culture, but you will use a woman for sexual gratification in your thought-life. Same basic selfish attitude, different expression.
And I have never said that "sensual" only meant "sexual." It refers to all sensory stimuli and more broadly to a desire to live in a way that is preoccupied with the stimulation of one's senses by whatever means. This sort of living is the "fleshly-minded" living Paul refers to in
Romans 8 which is fundamentally at odds with spiritual living as I already showed you from Scripture in my last post.
Obviously because if I didn’t control the desires of my flesh, I would be going out committing the sexual sins the Bible mentions, just as the rest of the world does…
No one who commits sexual sins does so apart from first considering and imagining doing so in their mind. It is always in one's mind where the sins we enact are first formed and yielded to. It is not enough to say, "I don't go out and hook-up with women" when in your mind you have debased them for your sexual pleasure. You have by no means exercised control over your sexual desire by fostering sexual fantasies to gratify it.
I genuinely don’t get it: People like you will sit here and flip out that it’s a sin if someone imagines sex for a few minutes, but if someone imagines/desires virtually anything else they’d like, it’s no big deal…? Huh? It truly makes no sense. I mean, by your logic, Christ’s disciples (let alone Christ himself) never deliberately prepared a specific meal to eat that they would enjoy - because after all, that would be selfish, right? Come on.
No.
You come on. If there is a deep fault in thinking it is on
your part, placing a favorite album, or steak, or green tea latte on par with a human being! This is obscene. A woman is not on par with a hamburger! Why do I even have to say this? Again, wow.
But sexual sin is nothing new under the sun. Sexual fantasizing has been around since the dawn of man, and the Bible does not condemn it.
Yes, it does. As you have been amply shown. And the duration of time over which humanity has been guilty of a particular sin has no bearing whatever upon its acceptability or its moral character.
Neither does it condemn masturbation. In fact, Song of Solomon is full of fantasizing - and the couple aren’t even married till the end of the book! (And it appears to even describe the woman masturbating while fantasizing, earlier in the book!)
"To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure." You see what you want to see in Scripture - just as the pro-homosexual folk do with Jonathan and David or Jesus and John. At no point in the Song of Solomon does the content degenerate into raw, sexual fantasizing. And it is an exchange
between a married couple, what's more (
Song of Songs 4:12; 5:1), not some over-sexed single guy taking sexual advantage of the women around him in his imagination.
Christ himself “lusted” for the Passover meal. Do you really think Christ never enjoyed eating food, hearing music, anything? Was he “selfish” for doing so? Give me a break.
See above.
What you are preaching is asceticism.
Feel free to show me where the verses and passages I cited I used to draw a false conclusion. A life of self-denial, of self-crucifixion, in fact, Jesus says is NECESSARY to following him. Call it asceticism if you want, but Christ sets the character of Christian living, not you and
he says:
Matthew 16:24-25
24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.
25 "For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.
John 12:24-25
24 "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
25 "He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.
What are you talking about? We do deny ourselves! We deny ourselves from committing actual, stated sins: such as fornication, adultery, inappropriate behavior with animals, etc.
Proverbs 23:6-7
6 Do not eat the bread of a selfish man, Or desire his delicacies;
7 For as he thinks within himself, so he is. He says to you, "Eat and drink!" But his heart is not with you.
1 Samuel 16:7
7 But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."
Matthew 15:19-20
19 "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders.
20 "These are the things which defile the man...
Again, asceticism. You would act like we are not supposed to find any enjoyment while on this Earth, whatsoever.
Strawman. And specious reasoning. See above.
