Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [62]
Perhaps the most damaged among us are prostitutes whose bodies have been sacrificed to the god of sex. The vast majority of young women involved in prostitution were sexually abused as children; estimates range from two-thirds to 95 percent.13
The life of a prostitute is incredibly dark: 62 percent report having been raped in prostitution. In one study, 75 percent of women in escort prostitution had attempted suicide; prostituted women comprised 15 percent of all completed suicides reported by hospitals.14
Please take this as a loving warning. If you, or your spouse, tend to view sex as god, you are in grave danger. You are on a path that leads to death. The further you venture down that path, the darker and more damaging it becomes. Your idol is lying to you. There is no freedom, comfort, joy, pleasure, or life at the end of the path you are traveling on. But it is not too late. You need to be honest, you need to tell the truth, you need to get help, and you need to turn around and run for your life. So be honest with your spouse and get the help you need from a pastor or biblical counselor.
If not, you will end up doing tragic things, as Solomon did. The man richer than Bill Gates, smarter than Albert Einstein, more powerful than an American president, and more influential than the pope amassed a harem rivaled only by men who are porn addicts who collect women in their minds. Despite having sexually sinful parents who conceived him through adultery, he did not learn his lesson. Despite being the wisest man to ever walk the earth other than Jesus Christ, he did not learn his lesson. Despite marrying a beautiful and sexually free woman who loved him, as recorded in the Song of Songs, he did not learn his lesson. Instead, he intermarried with seven hundred godless pagan women and kept three hundred additional sexual concubines from many other nations who helped turn his sinful heart away from God so that he worshipped false gods, even building pagan altars where sexual sin was conducted in worship to demon gods.a This includes his support of Ashtoreth, the Canaanite demon goddess of sex worshipped around male phallices symbolized by poles around which orgies occurred.
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He also funded the worship of Molech, the demon god who demanded children be sacrificed by fire; and of Chemosh, the Moabite god who demanded child sacrifice not unlike abortion. Solomon’s example reveals that the longer we wait to repent, the more damage we do. Solomon himself wrote an entire book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, in part to repent and warn us not to follow his folly.
Sex as Gross
Often in an overreaction to the worship of sex as god, people adopt the position of sex as gross. As such, sex is viewed as a sort of necessary evil for procreation but otherwise a rather vulgar, repulsive, and off-putting act.
The thinking of the Greek philosopher Plato may have had as much influence on Christian thought regarding sexuality as any system of thought. Platonic thought was very dualistic and did not see people as unified wholes, but instead as a divided combination of material body and nonmaterial soul. This led to viewing the material body as an evil prison that housed the more pure soul. Since sexuality was passionate and physical, Christians steeped in Platonic thought began to teach that passion and sexuality were inherently sinful. This also led to a very low view of women, since men viewed them as the cause of their lusts.
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The “sex as gross” view often reduces sex solely to an unfortunate means by which procreation occurs. Thus, for sex not to be sinful, it needs to be done with the possibility of conception occurring. On this