The pornography epidemic

When I was 12 years old, my father whupped me and my brother and sister for smoking in the barn. He needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t about to make myself dizzy again and have to stagger to the hayfield to lie down until it passed. None of the three of us ever picked up a cigarette after that.

Some people aren’t so lucky. The world abounds in spiritual land mines custom-fitted to inborn sin inclinations. Why does the taste of gin leave one cold, while, for another, a purloined sip as a pre-teen from his father’s glass sets him off and running? Who knows? But it is certain that “whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19).

Ours is the first generation of a pornography epidemic, and the final bill for this social experiment is not yet in the mail. But common experience bears out that the sins of the fathers are visited “on the children, to the third and fourth generation” (Numbers 14:18). This “visiting” is not punishment, but the principle that our kids will likely struggle with our own unconquered struggles, be they alcohol, anger, or immorality.

Porn, of course, has always been with us. A lot of those ancient paintings and statues of nudes and bare-breasted women that we esteem as high art were nothing but the porn of their day. Why wouldn’t it be? After Adam and Eve sinned, and ever since then in the Bible, the rule of God has been to cover up and to be modest, for the sake of fallen nature. Are we wiser than God? (I know, I know, you only buy Playboy for the articles.)

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department had drapes put in front of the Spirit of Justice and its naked bosom that would have appeared behind Ashcroft during his public addresses. This delighted songwriter Tom Paxton, who composed the ditty “John Ashcroft and the Spirit of Justice,” where he mocked the attorney general “who fancies himself a big-time Christian.” Let me stand with the Christian at the risk of being a contemptible philistine.

If ever the self-sabotaging sting of porn were in doubt, the case of the formerly respected U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner has put all argument to rest. When you get actress and former Playboy model Pamela Anderson preaching porn’s dangers, you know we’re in trouble. Even if her alarm is more for sake of the kingdom of man than of God, let us heed the trumpet call.

There have been other unlikely trumpeters. Mass rapist and murderer Ted Bundy, hours before his execution at a Florida prison in 1989, detailed the role of porn in his plunge into depravity as a warning to a world on the brink of disaster:

“In the beginning it fuels this kind of thought process. Then it’s instrumental in what I would say is crystallizing it, making it into something which is almost like a separate entity inside. … It happened in stages. … I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit … material … something which is harder, something which gives you a greater excitement. … You reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it will give you. … It was as if something inside snapped. … I knew that I couldn’t control it anymore, that those barriers I had learned as a child, and had been instilled in me, were not enough to hold me back.”

Don’t count on childhood barriers alone. Today, while it is today, take on the spiritual armor of God for resisting the devil—filling up with Bible truth, walking in it, praying constantly, believing God, staying in step with the Spirit. For spiritual battles are overcome with spiritual weaponry.

A virtual reality store opened up in our town, offering a choice of nine adventures they show clips of in the showcase window. Gee, what could go wrong with this development? Especially when you consider that the earliest films were already carnal: What the Butler Saw (early 1900s peep show), Bedtime for the Bride (1896), and After the Ball (1897), as a few examples.

Man invents and Satan hijacks.

As God observed regarding the goings-on at the tower of Babel:

“This is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Genesis 11:6).