HUMANS BEHAVING BADLY

The Worst Sin You've Ever Committed

"Turn to the person next to you and confess the worst sin you've ever committed." I thought, "You're kidding, right?" The conference speaker seemed to read my mind, responding verbally to my unspoken question: "I'm serious. Worst sin ever. Go."

I was a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried InterVarsity staff worker, and on my immediate left was an eighteen-year-old first-year female student. I was at the end of the row; there was no one on my right I could turn to for escape. I didn't normally sit next to freshmen women (and never would again), since I didn't want to do anything that could be construed as flirting (sharing deep sexual sins might be construed as flirtatious), but I had come late to the meeting, and there had been only a few open seats. We didn't normally begin meetings in this manner, and if I had known what the speaker was going to do, I would have gone to a different section of the room and stood. For most people there, the first sin that came to mind was probably in the sexual realm, and I was in the majority. It was an extraordinarily awkward moment for all of us, so much so for me personally that twenty-four years later I still have a vivid memory of how I felt and what I was thinking.

But we shouldn't have been shocked by the fact that people sin, since most of the people present were Christians, and therefore, we had already declared that we sin. The Bible gives us no excuse for being reluctant to talk about sexual sins, since it has no problem sharing the worst sins ever committed by some of the holiest people who have ever lived, and many of those sins are of a sexual nature. I was uncomfortable sharing my worst sin with one other person, but that's nothing compared with having my worst sin published in the bestselling book of all time. Why is talking about sin, and sexual sins in particular, so uncomfortable? For many of us, our discomfort talking about sex begins at a young age in our families.

Love, American Style

"You may freely watch of every program in the early evening, but of the program of the knowledge of love and sex, you shall not watch, for in the day you watch of it, you'll be grounded."

This was the prohibition spoken by the Lamb parents to the Lamb children in 1972. (I may have paraphrased their actual words.) Before computers, Blu-ray, DVRs, DVDs, Netflix, live streaming, and YouTube, visual home entertainment was just television. No cable, just NBC, CBS, and ABC. A family VCR was still a decade in the future. On Friday nights starting at 7:00 p.m. (Central Time in Ames, Iowa), we three boys typically watched ABC's The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Room 222, and The Odd Couple. Then the TV was turned off, and I headed to bed shortly afterward. (I was ten.)

The forbidden program? Love, American Style. It came on at 9:00. Each episode included unconnected stories of love, sex, and romance that our parents deemed unworthy for our young eyes.

Strangely, the parental prohibition just made the desire to watch it stronger. We thought it would be good to watch and a delight to the eyes. On those rare occasions when we figured out a way to see it, our eyes were opened. We realized the show wasn't all that good, only occasionally funny, often lousy, always silly. Silly, because love, American style, was quirky. But as quirky as love is in the US, in the Old Testament, it was even quirkier.

Love, Old Testament Style

Love, Old Testament style, was weird, bizarre, and often unholy. The book of Genesis makes it clear what the ideal was — one man, one woman, together, forever — but often for the people of God, the ideal was not the reality. The Old Testament doesn't just talk about sex but includes many incidents of what would now be considered deviant sexual behavior. Love may be "a many splendored thing," but in the Old Testament, it went beyond splendored to bizarre. And strangely, the authors didn't have any qualms about reporting these weird sexual practices in a book that was meant to be read to children (Deut. 4:9–10; 6:7, 20; 11:19; 32:46; Josh. 8:35). For most readers, the "love" stories of the Old Testament raise a lot of questions.

Judah praised his daughter-in-law Tamar for being righteous after he realized she tricked him into having sex with her for money. In Judah's day was it considered a good thing to have a daughter-in-law as a prostitute?

Jacob, who gave his new name, Israel, to the nation, had several wives. Solomon, who was considered the wisest man ever to live, had several hundred. Was it considered wise back then to be a polygamist?

While visiting the city of Gibeah, a Levite's concubine was forced to have sex with the men of the town throughout the night until she was dead (Judges 19). What were the biblical authors thinking when they decided to include this horrific story? "Hey, the Bible needs a few more gruesome stories of gang rape"?

The book of 1 Kings seems to have forgotten that David had sex with Uriah's wife Bathsheba — and then killed Uriah to cover it up — when it declared that David kept God's commandments completely and did only what was right (1 Kings 14:8). Since when is it righteous to commit murder and adultery?

"Did Cain really marry his sister?" If you haven't asked that question, you were probably embarrassed the first time a clever junior higher in the Sunday school class you were teaching did. Incest isn't just for modern royal families; ancient biblical families also engaged in it.

In terms of sexual deviancy, the Old Testament is worse than an episode of Arrested Development. Why does the Bible talk so much about polygamy, prostitution, rape, adultery, and incest? Because the Bible talks about real humans, and often humans behave badly. The Bible doesn't ignore bizarre sexual behavior, but parents and churches often do.

"What's a Foreskin?"

My mother passed away in August 2012, so now I can write a book on sex. Seriously, I really miss my mom and have committed to tell stories about her as much as possible as I continue to grieve her death. But it would have been awkward for her to read a book I wrote about sex, even sex in the Bible. Not only were my parents uncomfortable with my brothers and I watching shows that talk about sex, but they were also uncomfortable talking to us about sex, which was fine with us.

We were not alone. When it comes to sex, parents and children have one thing in common: they desperately want to avoid the topic. My teenage sons are not excited that I'm working on this book right now. My friend Sharon posted this message on Facebook recently: "Well, my six-year-old came back from a long time of reading the Bible (the Lego Bible) in her room and said, 'Mom, first of all, what's a foreskin? And what does it mean to lay with someone?'" Awkward, yes, but clever of Sharon's daughter to realize that Mom was the person she...