Sex: Back to Basics

If I were Screwtape, I had one shot at bringing humanity down in the area of sexuality, what would I do? Screwtape Of course, for those of you don’t know, is a fictional demon, depicted in CS Lewis’s great book, The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape is a senior demon who is teaching his nephew Wormwood the ways of a great demon. And the book is an account of the fictional account of screw tapes, series of letters to his nephew, trying to destroy his nephew subject, a human being who he’s trying to take down. And so I’m thinking in the area of sexuality, if I was Screwtape, or maybe more pointedly, if I was a demon, trying to take down human sexuality, what’s the shot I take? Now, before I answer that question for you, I want you to think for a moment about ecosystems. Now, I’m, I’m not a great biologist. So I don’t know a ton about ecosystems, but I know enough to know they are incredibly complex. And they are incredibly interconnected. So you mess with one part of an ecosystem, just one part. And the ripple effects down the line can be huge, just devastating. I think the same thing can be true in the area of human sexuality, you mess with just one small part. And the implications down the line can be likewise devastating. So that’s what I mean by if, if you were a demon, or if I was a demon, and I had one shot, to mess with human sexuality, what’s the shot that you take? So what about you? What’s the one place that you would attack? Here, here’s what I think the one place I would attack would be humanity’s kind of collective consciousness around the link between sex and procreation, sex and pregnancy, I would do all I could, if I just had one shot, I would do all I could to disconnect people’s collective consciousness, to the reality that sex and pregnancy go together. So let me pause there for a minute and just state the obvious. It is God’s design, that sex and pregnancy go together. Now, we live in a fallen world. And we are not in a perfect paradise anymore. And so we know that sex and pregnancy don’t always go together. We know that there are things like infertility, we know that other other factors play into the mix for us, but by God’s design, pregnancy, the creation of new babies is actually connected always has been. And it’s always meant to connect with sex. That the the traditional understanding is marriage than sex than baby’s marriage than sex than babies. This is God’s design. This is God’s heart. And it actually does us well to remember it because we live in a culture that doesn’t follow that anymore. That doesn’t make those connections anymore. But I think we have to ask, if God designed it this way, if God’s heart is marriage, sex babies, why? Why did you design it that way? He didn’t have to. He did not have to. There didn’t have to be a link between marriage and sex. There didn’t have to be a link between sex and babies. Why did God design it that way? He could, he could have made it so that if you want a new baby, to create a new baby, you just you plant a little seed in the ground and you wait nine months, and then up pops a baby. He could have had it so that people have a conversation and a baby comes about could help people you know, connect their their pinkies he could have had people snap their fingers and the baby comes about. It wasn’t like he was trying to figure out how to I got to okay, like I figure out how to make new people. Okay, so I guess I guess I could just put it with sex. I guess that’s really the only way to do it. He wasn’t limited like that he could he could have made it any way you wanted. And he chose to connect sex and pregnancy, marriage, sex and pregnancy. Okay, Nuff said there. So let’s then now talk about kind of the ecosystem of human sexuality. What happens if you disconnect those what happens if our human or kind of collective consciousness no longer connects sex and pregnancy? Well, first, then people begin to not anticipate pregnancy with sex they, there’s no longer an expectation that sex is going to bring about pregnancy. I was reading about some, I think was a reality show contestant who said something recently like why I couldn’t be pregnant with so and so’s baby because we only had sex once. Which is just evidence of this kind of concept that there is there has been this disconnect now. Sex or pregnancy after sex is a surprise. So we start with surprise, right which is Maybe even can even have a positive connotation to it like, you know, surprise birthday party. But then then it begins to move into unplanned so not just surprise but unplanned, which is maybe more neutral. And then eventually we move from unplanned to unwanted. So now we have unwanted pregnancies. And so because we have disconnected sex from pregnancy, when we get pregnant, it’s unwanted. Now, this might sound innocuous to you to some degree, because we’ve lived with this for so long. But just notice here the difference between God’s designed for pregnancy and our current cultural concept or heart, about pregnancy. Now Pregnancy is a risk, even a threat, even a danger, right? I mean, we view it that way, this is a risky thing. As opposed to this is just a natural thing. And that word unwanted is a powerful word. I mean, what happens to a cultural psyche, when we think of children as unwanted, or even some children as unwanted, what happens to to a cultural psyche about what it means to be to exist to have been created when when we have a sense that some of us are unwanted. Just muse on that for a little bit. But I would suggest to you that that actually is the fruit of a demonic move against humanity, that we would believe that anybody is unwanted. I bet that is just has demonic all over it. On an anecdotal level, I can tell you, I’ve walked with at least one person in my years in ministry, who was actually aware that their, their parents did not want them. Not just that they were unexpected pregnancy, but they were unwanted. And they went through and had the child anyway, praise God. But the wait for that specific person of knowing that he had not been wanted was very painful for him. His parents told him not because they wanted to hurt him, but just it was kind of a matter of fact thing again, because of the cultural consciousness. But for him, it was very personal, it was very personal. So that’s one branch, right? One branch of the ecosystem, it’s impacted the other branches as people lose kind of their cultural consciousness to the reality that, that marriage and sex and pregnancy all go together, that sex and pregnancy go together specifically, then we also begin to lose our collective consciousness of the male female difference. You follow? If, if pregnancy does not come about, as a result of sex, if we don’t kind of connect those things, then then the male female difference begins to lose its its clarity in our culture as well, in our collective consciousness,