1 Thessalonians 4:3-5 – For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God…
Christianity started out largely as a Jewish movement with a handful of non-Jews (Gentiles) who adopted the Jewish language, customs, and cultures. There was little debate about what was right and wrong behavior because the Old Testament was the center of life for everything from personal morality to family systems, the legal system, entertainment, and even government.
All that changed when Gentiles started worshipping the Jewish Jesus and wanting to learn the Bible. The Gentiles brought a flood of new questions to be answered, ones that had been long settled among the Jewish people.
This is the backdrop for this section of Paul’s letter to the church at Thessalonica as he says, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God…” (4:3-5).
The New Testament was written in the language of Greek, and that culture predominated the Roman Empire. The sexual anarchy in that day was very much like our own. Older men were encouraged to groom young boys for sex. The cities in which Christianity spread were filled with perverted sexuality married to demonic spirituality.
This included temples in cities like Corinth where the demonic fertility goddess Aphrodite had over a thousand male and female prostitutes waiting to have sex without limits. This explains why Paul’s letter to the Corinthians instructs them that Christians cannot have sex with a close relative, person of the same sex, engage in orgies, fornicate by living and sleeping together before marriage, commit adulterous sex outside of marriage, abandon their God-given sex and gender by cross-dressing, or return to having sex at the pagan temples.
These new Christians in Paul’s day were used to the same kind of gender spectrum tolerance and diversity sex ed curriculum in the name of pride that inundates people in our own day.
What similarities do you see in today’s world vs the world in the time that 1 Thessalonians was written?
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