Porn is a Liar

Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.

Hebrews 13:4

Porn twists sex into something ugly. By the very acts it depicts it says that sex requires no promise, no covenant, and no self-sacrificial love.

Porn is not a joke. It is not normal. It is not healthy. It is deadly serious, aberrant, and toxic. It tries to make something that is beautiful, beautiful in its oneness and in its desire for the other’s good and in its procreation, into an an ugly and self-serving exercise.

God made sex. In its one-fleshness and its love, and by its very nature and characteristics, sex is intended to image the beautiful love of God, the desire to have the beloved’s good at heart, and the beauty of the creation of human life. Loving someone and being bonded to him or her for life and having children with him or her through sex is characteristically Imago Dei. It is a wonderful whisper of the character of the Creator pictured in His creation.

Put another way, sex and sexual desire within sweet, promise-held marriage between a man and his wife is a glimpse of fundamentally good humanity. It is, like a father lovingly teaching his children or a man compassionately helping his neighbor or a woman graciously and gratefully tending a garden, a glimmer of humanity as God intends it. Sex between a man and his wife is a wonderful gift that puts flesh and bone and pleasure and pregnancy and emotion to the reality of love.

And porn is terrified of such a sex. It finds its own pungent allure, its morbid attraction, in the lack of a promise, the lack of a relationship continually kept by 2 and only 2 for life. It wants sex to be more like a handshake, good between acquaintances and strangers and even enemies, and of course visible by all. Porn’s lie is that this thing called sex is not special, but please be excited and thrilled by it anyway.

The truth is that sex is special, unimaginably special, and its excitement is heightened and deepened by love and promise, and cheapened and made shallow by making it a marketplace transaction or a casual exchange of pleasure. Sex is for something. And porn, in addition to killing souls and marriages, robs sex of that meaning. Its true meaning.

Porn is a liar. And like most liars, it starts by killing what it lies about.

Then it moves on to the person it has lied to.