premarital what?

Having been doing a lot of reading in the Bible lately and comparing what is said to the ideals I’ve taught myself over the past 26 years and things that happen to be quite a point of contention amongst communities and cultures today, I’ve uncovered a wealth of information. First of all, it’s amazing how twisted people are. People from all walks of life will twist words and come to conclusions only to prove what they already believe. Heck, I may be doing the exact same thing, you tell me. What I do want to say is that everything that is said needs to be read with common sense. If you don’t think you possess common sense or the ability to NOT twist my words into something that they are not intended, then stop now, there is no point for your eyes to graze this text any longer. Now, let’s set the stage.

Let’s put some things in context. I’m a huge fan of context for two reasons. It’s helps us realize where we come from and it helps us understand where we are currently. There are multiple books in the Bible that discuss marriage, sex, prostitution, incest and the like – most notably Corinthians, Leviticus, Mark, Matthew, Romans, etc… However, none of these, yes, you read correctly, none of them mention pre-marital sex in the context of two consenting loving adults. All the examples set a stage of quite the opposite. A stage where the reader is automatically assuming the intentions of the two people involved are not pure, but solely lustful.

From one of my previous posts I talked about how God gave us free will, and for him to condemn us for using that gift (that gift which does not intentionally hurt others) is hypocritical. Without free will, humans are slaves to a higher power, and in my opinion that defeats the purpose of life. We’d be like those little Army figures we used to play with growing up – jumping off ledges and blowing up the enemy troops with no real idea of what we’re doing or why we’re doing it.

The main subject I want to talk about is pre-marital sex. Most of us will agree that things such as pre-meditated murder without cause in completely unjustifiable (I’m totes ok with the state ending the lives of serial killers and mass murders so they don’t even have the free will to do more harm). But, out of all the contentious matters we face in our daily lives, I believe pre-marital sex is one that has the least agreeability and is most prevalent in the lives of young adults today. I also believe that homosexuality is another, but I’ll save that for another post.

It's interesting to think how different the Bible would be if it were written today instead of thousands of years ago. Back then there were arranged marriages, there was no dating or courtship; girls were betrothed shortly after puberty.... I mean, we do exactly the opposite nowadays. We choose our own lifelong partners, we try before we buy and heck, I don't exactly know what betrothed means but I'm guessing it doesn't happen at the age of 12 anymore. In biblical times there just wasn't a whole lot of sex taking place before marriage, since people married at such young ages, and there just wasn't much time between reaching the age of sexual maturity and marriage. Most of the sex taking place was after marriage, either with your spouse, which was good, or not with your spouse, which was bad, and that's why there's more talk about adultery than pre-marital sex. We wrestle with this issue more now because the time span between reaching the age of sexual maturity and marriage has bumped up a decade or two since biblical times. If you really want to live your life in sync with the Bible, then ask your parents to arrange a marriage for you, make sure the boy brings gifts to the girls parent’s and start having babies around the age of 15. So I ask you, when we discuss premarital sex today, are we really comparing apples to apples or are we changing the game but keeping the same rules?

Furthermore, the scriptures were not written in English, so not all scholars agree on the best way to interpret the Bible. If you look in a Greek dictionary to find the meanings of the original koline Greek words for "fornication" or "sexual immorality" ("porneia") you will find that premarital sex is sometimes included in the definitions for those Greek words and sometimes not. In the Bible, "sexual immorality", or porneia, encompasses adultery, prostitution, idolatry, rape, pedophilia, and other practices as well. Essentially from what I’ve read, there was no word for “premarital sex” (because the actual act wasn’t prevalent in society), so the scholars just used a one-for-all word and moved on thinking it wasn’t a big deal. So now, the koline Greek word porneia has been mistranslated as fornication all the while there is no biblical basis whatsoever to translate porneia into fornication (singles sex). So it’s really unfair, not to mention inaccurate, to cite places in the Bible where fornication is condemned and then say fornication = premarital sex.