Christianity, Sexual Morality and the Public Square
by Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch:
There is a lot of confusion about issues of sexuality and ethics. Plenty of atheists and secularists seek to argue that things like chastity, abstinence, faithfulness in marriage, and so on, are just things Christians are into, and there is no other basis for supporting such things.
And clueless Christians – often of the left – also tend to run with these faulty ideas. They claim we are hung up on sexual issues and personal morality, and we should not be pushing our morality onto others anyway. And they insist that pagans don’t have the same moral codes as we do, so why even bother?
Much can be said in response to these warped notions. Let me do this briefly in two ways: one, to point out how some pagan leaders in the Bible saw such things, and two, to look at the concept of universal moral law. As to the former, since I am again reading in Genesis, let me offer three different but similar examples of this.
On various occasions God’s chosen leaders acted deceitfully, and lied about their wives. This could have resulted in adultery or fornication being committed, but in each case God intervened. Of real interest is the fact that the pagan rulers involved knew this to be wrong.
The first one is found in Genesis 12:10-20 where we read about Abram and his wife Sarai in Egypt. While there, out of fear, he told the Egyptians that she was his sister. But as we read in v. 18, “So Pharaoh summoned Abram. ‘What have you done to me?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife?’”
She may in fact have been Abram’s half-sister, or niece, but the point here is that even this pagan ruler knew that such sexual immorality was wrong. He had no Bible or Holy Spirit, but he knew what was right and wrong here.
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