This is a subject that I've been thinking about recently. I think a lot of the beliefs that we have as Christians are based more on tradition than on what the Bible actually says about a certain subject. We tend to believe what our church teaches about a certain subject, or we look to what the so called leaders of "mainstream Christianity" have to say about a certain subject before we form an opinion. But I'm someone who believes that we should look to the Bible alone for guidance on every theological belief. I believe that we should interpret the Bible literally, which includes going back and looking at the context behind a certain passage in the Bible. With that in mind, I'd like to bring up the subject of Matthew 5: 28 and what the church has traditionally taught about lust.
In Matthew 5: 28 Jesus says "but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." The church has traditionally interpreted that verse to basically mean, "anytime you're physically attracted to a member of the opposite sex, you've committed a sin." So if you're a 16 year old male and you walk past a woman and think to yourself, "she has nice breasts," then according to traditional church teachings, you've just committed a sin. But when you look at the context of what Jesus was actually saying in Matthew 5: 28, that's not at all what Jesus was talking about when he made that statement. For one thing, I think we have to understand that Jesus lived in a culture and a time in which virtually everyone was married. (At least everyone who had gone through puberty and had sexual desires) People married very young back then, and virtually everyone married. It wasn't a situation where Jesus was talking to a large group of single people and telling them that if they ever have sexual thoughts about a member of the opposite sex, that they've committed adultery. After all, how can a single person who looks lustfully at another single person commit adultery? The term "adultery" refers to a married person who cheats on their spouse, and that obviously wouldn't be happening in regards to lust between two single people. We live in a society today in which a large number of people are single well past the time that they begin to have sexual desires. What Jesus was saying in Matthew 5: 28 has absolutely nothing to do with a single person who looks lustfully at another single person, in my opinion, when you actually look at the context of the verse. I suppose you could argue that it's still a sin for a single person to look at a married person lustfully, and perhaps it is, but I think that even the term "lust" was defined differently by Jesus than we define it today.
For instance, the context of what was going on at the time was that you had a lot of men who were simply choosing to leave their wives for the sole purpose of marrying and having sexual relations with another woman. This is something Jesus referenced in other passages when he said, "if you get divorced and get remarried, that's no different from committing adultery." He was speaking specifically of men who were leaving their wives and marrying other women for the sole reason of having sexual relations with other women. So Jesus basically said, "if you divorce your wife so that you can get married to and sleep with another woman, that's no different from sleeping with another woman while you're still married to your wife." In the same way, in Matthew 5: 28 Jesus was essentially saying, "I already told you that if you leave your wife for the purpose of having sex with another woman, you've committed adultery. But now I'm also telling you that if you even think about doing that, you've already committed adultery against your wife in your heart." So it doesn't seem to me like Jesus was even saying that it's a sin for a married man to just have impure thoughts about another woman, but that it's a sin for a married man to obsess about another woman to the point that he even contemplates leaving his wife in order to have sexual relations with that woman. (And vice versa, in today's society)
So, my view is that what Jesus was saying in Matthew 5: 28 had absolutely nothing to do with a single person looking lustfully at another single person, and even lust that involves a married person was defined quite a bit differently back in that period of time than it is now. Thoughts?
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Originally Posted by Torchbearer
It's funny because it's sad but true. :/ (btw, the word for "love", noun and "to love", intransitive verb are different words in Greek. And the noun forms mean different things entirely-agape, eros, philia, etc...so it's technically true that love is a noun and a verb.../ramble)
Plenty of people on this forum alone are living proof to the contrary.
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