The goal of male sexuality is Biblically defined, joy-filled, fully-satisfying, covenantally faithful, kingdom building enjoyment of one woman, for a lifetime, to the glory of God. That is what it is. And before you exclaim, “Oh wow! Now the Puritanical fun police are back in town to limit all of our freedom”, you must remember that all freedom is limited. You will either live according to the limits God has given in His Word, or you will live within the debased limits of a debauched human society. You will either align yourself with how the creator made you, or give yourself over to a carnal human imagination.

If masculinity were an island, and men its citizens, then attacks would be coming in all directions. Multiple invading armies would be closing in, countless bombs and bullets would be expended, cities would be leveled, leading to the choice of whether or not the men would surrender. This is exactly what happened to Japan in 1945.
In 1945 the US and her allies had all but won the most devastating war ever conducted. Millions of bullets, grenades, tanks, bombers, and blood had been spent trying to defeat the three pronged axis of evil which was comprised of Nazi Germany, Facist Italy, and Imperial Japan.
By 1945 the Allied troops had defeated both Italy and Germany. The autocrat Benito Mussolini had been captured and hanged in the Italian streets on April the 28th. Two days later Adolph Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin. And this signaled the end of the war in Europe. But, while the writing on the wall was certainly clear, the island of Japan persisted and refused to surrender. They would fight with valor, glory, and honor even if all of them would perish.
By May, B-52 bombers were torching Japanese cities like Tokyo and others with devastating fire bombs. Maries were capturing various Japanese strongholds, like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, in the pacific theater with massive Japanese casualties. And the United States, who had been secretly developing the weapon to end the war, was moments away from dropping it should the Japanese persist in their opposition.  This is exactly what happened.
On August the 6th of 1945, a new era of warfare was unleashed upon the world when one “Little boy” atomic bomb liquified Hiroshima in seconds. Between the initial blast and the nuclear fall out it is estimated that as many as 135 thousand people were killed with a single blast.  Three days later, with similar devastation, another atomic bomb vaporized Nagasaki, effectively ending World War 2, the bloodiest war in human history. With the Russians closing in on the Western front, and the US able to level entire cities and mass populations with a single bomb, the Japanese had to surrender in order to survive.
While all metaphors break down, and while there is no direct comparison between World War 2 and the attack on men, my point in bringing up this story is to show how some weapons can end wars instantly. They can vaporize your ability to fight. They can poison the population. And they can render the nation morally paralyzed to continue. This is what pornography and abberant sexuality has done to masculinity, and if we have any hope of rebuilding, and creating a healthy culture of men, we need to know full well what the Bible says about male sexuality. We need this so that we can avoid future attacks, raise up faithful and healthy future men, and also so that we can win the war that is being waged and see Christ’s Kingdom advance.
To do that, we will lean on what we have seen in the previous weeks, and will build towards a Biblical sexual ethic. We will look at the God-ordained goal of male sexuality and the God-ordained result of male sexuality. In the end, we will know what the Bible says, so that we can effectively wage war in this generation and beyond. Let’s begin.
Disclaimer, I will speak frankly from this point onward.
The God-Ordained Goal of Male Sexuality
The goal of masculine sexuality is not an a-sexual midnight masturbation session in front of a 4k OLED screen. The goal is not playing hopscotch on the calendar so you do not impregnate the girlfriend you have no intention to marry. The goal is not an endless reel of lustful fantasies about the women you know and work with that you will either indulge in private seedy delight or will carry on with pulverizing shame. The goal of male sexuality is Biblically defined, joy-filled, fully-satisfying, covenantally faithful, kingdom building enjoyment of one woman, for a lifetime, to the glory of God. That is what it is.
And before you exclaim, “Oh wow! Now the Puritanical fun police are back in town to limit all of our freedom”, you must remember that all freedom is limited. You will either live according to the limits God has given in His Word, or you will live within the debased limits of a debauched human society. You will either align yourself with how the creator made you, or give yourself over to a carnal human imagination. One of these limits brings life, the other brings nothing but vulgarity, vexation, and venereal diseases.
True freedom is experienced in limitation, not in unbridled hedonism. Think about it this way, the freest and most joy filled people who will ever exist are the future redeemed people who cannot sin in New Jerusalem. They are the people who are finally free to worship God, without the constant drive and pull to sin. And while they are substantially more limited than we, having no further ability to explore fallen lusts, yet they are infinitely more joyful and free than we.
The mere fact that we are limited does not stifle our ability to experience joy and freedom. What stifles these things is being bound to the wrong standard. As a fish cannot survive in canola oil, so the masculine sexual drive was not designed to live in sexual perversion.
So, what does the Bible say we were designed for? First, we were made to endure a profitable period of abstinence.
A Profitable Abstinence
Before marriage, we were not designed to gratify any sexual desire in any way, with any person, or any thing, at any time lest we invite judgment from God. We see this standard all over the Scripture. For instance, Job tells us in chapter 31:1

I have made a covenant with my eyes; Why then should I look upon a young woman?

Job is admitting that visual stimulation is a particular struggle for the man, who was designed to be aroused by the naked body of a female. And yet, while this is a God-given design feature that will cause a marriage to flourish, we are not allowed to enjoy this kind of stimulation before marriage. Job argues that we must protect the covenant of marriage and our covenant with God by making a covenant with our own eyes not to lust after a woman. He is saying that the old adage, I can look but not touch, is entirely wrong! It is an egregious sin, and if you indulge it, it will ruin your relationships with women, with your wife or future wife, and with your God.
He is telling us that, before marriage, every woman’s body is off limits to us. Her figure must not even dilate the eyes of our desire. After marriage, that desire is opened to a single woman who will delight our eyes exclusively for a lifetime.
That means, practically speaking, we do not turn our eyes toward the uncovered woman on the television and make excuses that we are only watching for the story. It also means we do not turn our eyes to the covered women at our workplace and think it is innocent because it is just looking. We do not gawk at the women who dress provocatively in public and we do not visualize what is under the clothing of those who adorn themselves with modesty. We do not linger over lingerie ads, stare at the woman on the beach, or navigate 3 clicks past holiness on that website. If we are unmarried, we fight lust, we subdue it, we kill it, and fight so that it would not be awakened until its proper time  (Proverbs 8:4), that being covenant marriage.
If you will fight that fight, in faith, by the power of the Spirit, for the glory of God, for your own benefit, then you will reap bountiful blessings in your future marriage that will contribute to a lifetime of unfettered pleasure. If you heed your sin, and drown your eyes with oceans full of lustful images, you willingly invite dysfunction upon your own head and sinful decay into your bed.
Paul says in Colossians 3:5

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. – Colossians 3:5

Before we move on, I think it is important to point something out in this passage. Paul does not command mortal combat upon our sexual sin as a way to impress God with our purity. We do not grind out beleaguered holiness, or begrudgingly guard our eyes, minds, and hearts, just to lay at His feet our best, which is filthy, soiled, and polluted rags anyway. If that were the goal, we may as well eat, drink, and give ourselves over to whatever lusts we want because our best would never be pure enough to please Him.
We do not wage war to prove to God who we are, we wage war because we are enamored by who He is.
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The King’s Speech won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Picture. It is the story of the future King George VI of England, who reluctantly ascended to the throne after his brother abdicated. The king had a significant struggle with a stuttering condition he had developed as a child. A successful speech therapist, Lionel Logue, helps the king overcome his problem. The king is enabled to address the nation via radio at the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939. This was a speech given in a great historical moment—thus the movie’s title.
In many ways, the film—which I can’t wholeheartedly endorse due to some strong language—is not so much about a king giving a speech as it is about an unlikely friendship that served two men and a nation. It was a friendship developed between the king and Lionel. At one point in the movie, the king and Lionel are talking, and for perhaps the first time George VI shares painful memories of his childhood. He thanks Lionel for his listening ear, and Lionel replies, “What are friends for?” The king sadly replies, “I wouldn’t know.”
I’m afraid the king’s response is one many of us would give. We have lost the gift and glory of friendship. This is due to a number of factors. We’ve traded talking for texting. We’ve abandoned fellowship for Facebook. Social media has, in reality, become anything but. The season of COVID-19 has pushed many people further away from each other, and we’ve lost our grip on the gracious blessing of friends. Men, in particular it seems, have lost the gift of friendship.
The Scriptures have a lot to say about friends and friendship. First and foremost, we are struck by Jesus’ words in John 15:15: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” Jesus calls His disciples His friends. This is powerful. This gives great weight to the entire concept of friendship. Jesus says we are His friends so that we can understand a little better what it means to be in fellowship with Him. He shares with us the truth of the kingdom. To be Jesus’ friend is to be let into the eternal relationship of love within the triune Godhead. Ultimately, we are brought into this relationship by virtue of the fact that Jesus, our King, laid down His life for His friends. He died in the place of His people on the cross to be raised again on the third day.
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People who suffer for righteousness’ sake are poor in spirit—they are living with a humble awareness of their spiritual bankruptcy; they are mournful—they are repenting quickly and forgiving freely; they are meek—they are living before God and man with a gentle and quiet spirit; they are, righteous—they long to obey God’s every word and are laboring to see his justice extend throughout society; they are merciful—because they have received mercy they are gladly and deliberately extending it to others.

Jesus tells us to expect persecution. This is something I attempted to prove in an article a couple of days ago when I showed that at both the beginning and the ending of his ministry he warned that there would be a cost to following him. Yet Jesus knows that not everything that may look like persecution is actually persecution. And so he tells us that, when we come to times of suffering, we need to evaluate it to see if we are truly being persecuted.
There are times when Christians are put in prison because they refuse to follow the unjust dictates of an unjust government; but there are also times when Christians are put in prison because they break good and necessary laws that the rightful authorities have put in place. Sometimes Christians are shunned by family members because they refuse to bow down to the family’s idols; but sometimes Christians are shunned because they fail to honor their parents, or because they treat family members badly, or because they act like sanctimonious, entitled brats.
In the opening sentences of his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says his people are blessed when they are persecuted “on my account.” And immediately before that he says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” And so Jesus tells us that we need to evaluate our suffering to ensure it is actually persecution and not just the consequence of our own sinfulness.
Peter, a man who knew a thing or two about suffering, offers some helpful guidance here in 1 Peter 4:12. Like Jesus, he says that we should expect to face persecution. Here’s what he says: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.”
It’s clear: persecution is the normal course of the Christian faith. It’s not strange and should not be unexpected.
I know many people who have suffered for their faith. Some have been disowned by their families because they have rejected the family’s religion; some have fallen out with friends because they couldn’t participate in activities they invited them to; some have had troubles at school or at work because they wouldn’t take pride in what others deem worthy of celebration; some have been imprisoned for their religious convictions.
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