“It’s my body so it’s my choice! Who do you think you are to tell me how I should experience or express my sexuality?” This is the battle-cry of much of the modern world, and such a desire for autonomy explains a great deal of the unbelieving culture’s growing opposition to the Church. Many unbelievers are simply outraged that Christians would dare to criticize something that is so personal and meaningful for them – “What right do you have to impose your idea of morality on me! How dare you insist that I follow the dictates of a religion I don’t believe in?”

Of course, the short answer is that, in passages like Leviticus 18, it isn’t Christians that are setting the rules for human sexuality – it’s God. And given that Genesis 1 and 2 make it clear that God is the One Who created human beings in His image, and given that God is the One Who came up with the idea of sexual reproduction, it makes sense that God should have some say in how it should work. After all, God established marriage as a lifelong commitment between one man and one woman (Genesis 2:21-25), and no less an authority than Jesus appealed to this same passage when He upheld this same universal standard (Mark 10:2-12)

But today’s passage also makes clear that God’s rules for human sexuality apply to everyone, whether they worship Him or not. For notice that Leviticus 18 begins and ends with a clear condemnation not of God’s own people, but of the other nations around them. God says that His people not to follow the sexual practices of the Egyptians and the Canaanites, thus making it clear that the sexual ethics prescribed in the Scriptures apply to everyone for all time.

But why is that? Why should the biblical idea of marriage apply to all nations, regardless of their faith? Because all nations, regardless of their faith, have children. In fact, God told all humanity in the days of Noah to have lots of children (Genesis 9:1). And even many non-Christian scholars have become willing to admit that the lifelong marriage of a man and a woman is the optimal context for the rearing of children. And after half a century of the wildest sort of sexual experimentation, it is increasingly obvious that children are indeed the ones that suffer the most when a society turns away from the biblical ideal of marriage – after all, the best predictor of child poverty, academic failure, and delinquency is not income or ethnicity but family structure.

So perhaps we Americans should pay attention to what God told Moses so long ago: nations like the ancient Egyptians and Canaanites that reject God’s plan for sexuality and marriage defile their land, making it unlivable. So could it be that the road we are on – the road of sexual anarchy, the road of growing social dysfunction spawned by the breakdown of the family – is actually the road to cultural suicide?

Leviticus 18:1-5, 24-30 (NASB)

Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
2 “Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘I am the LORD your God.
3 ‘You shall not do what is done in the land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you; you shall not walk in their statutes.
4 ‘You are to perform My judgments and keep My statutes, to live in accord with them; I am the LORD your God.
5 ‘So you shall keep My statutes and My judgments, by which a man may live if he does them; I am the LORD.

24 ‘Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled.
25 ‘For the land has become defiled, therefore I have visited its punishment upon it, so the land has spewed out its inhabitants.
26 ‘But as for you, you are to keep My statutes and My judgments, and shall not do any of these abominations, neither the native, nor the alien who sojourns among you
27 (for the men of the land who have been before you have done all these abominations, and the land has become defiled);
28 so that the land may not spew you out, should you defile it, as it has spewed out the nation which has been before you.
29 ‘For whoever does any of these abominations, those persons who do so shall be cut off from among their people.
30 ‘Thus you are to keep My charge, that you do not practice any of the abominable customs which have been practiced before you, so as not to defile yourselves with them; I am the LORD your God.'”