Without Excuse

Today's Three-minute Bible Study
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Title: Without Excuse------------------------------ Date: 9/19/2002
Keywords: "excuse" "reason" "Scripture" "world"
Welcome to eXXit, the web site designed to help you stand strong in the face of sexual temptation.

Passage: Romans 1:20*

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Questions

1. What does this verse mean?

 

2. How can its message help us resist temptation?

 

Practical help

Since eXXit relies on the Bible for guidance, consider this a challenge: How would you convince someone to avoid Web porn if you couldn't use Scripture? The answer might sound something like this:

Arguments in favor of pornography depend on a wrongheaded dualism of the person. Smut merchants like Larry Flynt assume that the human body is a tool, separate from the mind controlling it. By this logic, whatever we do with our bodies — whether worshipping God or watching "Debbie Does Dallas" — doesn't affect our core being. So, the argument runs, we're free to do what we wish in the privacy of our own bedrooms.

This is nonsense. We think of ourselves not as minds housed in a body but as body-minds. Try to imagine yourself without a body, and you enter the realm of science fiction. Moreover, where does the body stop and the mind begin? The reasonable view of humanity is an integrated body and mind.

The implication? As integrated beings, we can't expose one portion of ourselves (the body) to corruption without the other (the mind) sharing in degradation. When we view loveless, nonmarital sex portrayed on our monitors, we cheapen and debase our moral imagination.

Romans 1:20 says everybody knows this. Our weakness for pornography stands in stark contrast to God's "divine nature." Smut is a perfect example of how God's two books of revelation — Scripture and the created world — point to the same truth.

No excuses allowed.

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*Scriptures are from The Holy Bible: New International Version © Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved.