With prevailing cultural narratives that define pleasure as the highest good, sexual activity as essential to identity and the self as the center of authority, it is not surprising that we find people in our local church ministries and other Christian contexts who are confused about what good sexual desires and acts are. In premarital and marriage counseling contexts, questions about sexuality and the permissiveness of various sexual acts are recurrent.
Perhaps the issue that causes the most confusion, both for singles and for married people, centers on the permissibility or inadmissibility of masturbation, understood as a personal sexual act for the purpose of one’s own pleasure or what is sometimes called self-stimulation.
God’s purpose for sex
The biblical-ethical framework of sex begins with the triune God who, in His goodness, creates the good physical world. Human beings, by God’s design, are sexual beings entrusted to use their sexuality for the glory of God.
But human beings are not merely sexual beings, and their identity is not centered on their sexual expression. Furthermore, his sexual desires on this side of Genesis 3 are not inherently ordered correctly. The Christian of the new creation lives joyfully in the freedom of Christ, guided by the Spirit, in pursuit of the goodness of God’s design. This freedom and being led by the Spirit involves the passionate pursuit of God’s physical gifts and the restrictions that preserve joy against deviations from His created goodness.
When considering the Biblical evidence, we argue that masturbation is never a God-honoring act.
Christians experience constant pressure from prevailing cultural narratives that all sexual expression, as long as it does not harm another, is inherently good and that sexual expression is the foundation of our identity. Christians, reflecting on the ethics of sexual acts like masturbation, sometimes get confused when cultural narratives clash with biblical ethics.
essential category
Our intent is to provide a compelling biblical and pastoral argument that the best rubric for Christian ethical decisions about sex is not simply “Does the Bible forbid it?” but rather “Does the act fulfill the explicit purposes for which God created sex?” When considering the Biblical evidence, we argue that masturbation is never a God-honoring act.
Unlike those who assess the morality of masturbation in the context of psychology and human development, we approach this issue within the framework of how God, in His wisdom, designed sex.
Consider three diagnostic questions and their answers.
1. How does masturbation fit into the nature of the marriage covenant?
God created sex as a means for married couples to relate to each other. Masturbation, by contrast, is an overtly non-relational sexual act. Furthermore, while sex within the marital relationship is altruistic and other-centered, masturbation by nature is self-centered. Scripture repeatedly warns against having a selfish heart. Paul orders believers to “do nothing out of selfishness or vainglory” (Phil 2:3), while James warns that the presence of selfishness in the heart leads to “confusion and all evil things” (James 3:16 ).
With such a negative view of selfishly motivated acts presented in Scripture, it’s impossible to imagine how masturbation doesn’t stray from God’s design for marriage. Because masturbation focuses sexual desire for one’s own benefit, rather than one’s spouse, one could rightly argue that it is a form of adultery: giving to another what should only be given to the spouse. For these reasons, masturbation cannot fit into God’s design for the marriage covenant.
2. How does masturbation fulfill the purposes for which God created sex?
Furthermore, masturbation does not accomplish any of the three main goals of sex. First of all, masturbation is obviously not an act of procreation. The inclination to legitimize masturbation is part of a broader cultural denial of the purpose of sex. Todd Wilson comments: “Our culture has separated the sexual act from the purpose of sex. We have severed the connection between sex and its power to unite lives and create life, so that now, virtually everywhere we look, sex is cut off from its unifying and procreative purposes.”
Likewise, masturbation is not unifying because it privatizes sexual activity that is designed to be shared. Matthew Anderson points out the inability of masturbation to fulfill God’s good design: “Human sexuality is inherently social, and masturbation is not. In that sense, it represents a failure to fulfill the nature of Christian sexuality as God designed it.”
Finally, while it is true that self-stimulation can provide intense physical pleasure, it does not achieve moral sexual pleasure. Sexual stimulation practiced in isolation from the spouse was never God’s design.
3. How does masturbation relate to God’s command to be holy as He is holy?
Finally, masturbation does not conform to God’s call to believers to “be holy, because holy” (Lev 19:2; 1 Pet 1:16). God calls believers to be a certain type of person: individuals conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. By becoming new creations in Christ by the work of the Spirit, we reorder our disordered loves. However, before our loves are completely reordered, we discover that sometimes our flesh directs our behavior.
Paul captures this idea in his letter to the Philippian church when he describes some who are “enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite” (Phil 3:18-19). Without Christ and without the power of the gospel, people are controlled by physical desires. On the contrary, Christians are repeatedly exhorted to be characterized by self-control, regardless of their marital status: single, married or widowed. Similarly, Paul exhorts his readers to be imitators of God (Eph. 5:1).
It is impossible to imitate the nature of God who gives Himself while one is focused solely on himself.
Those who attempt to make “Christian” arguments for the permissibility of masturbation do so on the grounds that masturbation can be separated from activities that are clearly prohibited, such as lust and pornography. But even if the activities are divisible, masturbation is still categorically inadmissible because it goes against the moral purity of the person. God’s holy nature.
It is impossible to imitate the nature of God who gives Himself while one is focused solely on himself. In the vast majority of cases, masturbation involves lustful thoughts. Furthermore, masturbation creates ungodly sexual tendencies and expectations in which a person assumes that sexual gratification must be on demand to satisfy his own immediate needs. Consequently, masturbation is also far from the character and holiness in which God calls everyone to walk.
For these reasons, it cannot accomplish any of God’s purposes for sex or for marriage and is contrary to God’s moral character, so we conclude that masturbation can never be God-honoring behavior.
Originally posted on The . Translated by Team Coalition.