NUMBER THREE - EZEKIEL 23:20
There she lusted after hers lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Although this verse seems to be about some prostitute lusting some guy's balls, in reality, the prostitute is a metaphor for God's people who lusted after the sexual organs of other gods.The metaphor is extremely graphic - suggesting that a large penis with lots of sperm was very attractive to women of ill repute in the ancient world.
Today this kind of talk is limited to some work places, groups of friends, some television and many movies.Talking about private parts is not acceptable in Western churches, bible studies, or in public or political discourse.
I have been to hundreds of churches in dozens of cities and four countries. I have heard thousands of sermons in my lifetime., but only one that spoke directly to or about the penis. When I lived in the Congo I heard an African preacher give a message about the consequences of alcohol reminding the congregation that alcohol gets people into fights - and fights can get some poor drunk kicked in the balls - and getting kicked in the nuts gets the gonads to swell up.
People in the ancient world as well as in the Congo see the penis and its functions as just another part of the body. Although we would never preach about a man's penis, the ancients had no problem with the subject.
NUMBER TWO - SONG OF SONGS 7:7-8
Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. I said, "I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit."
The Song of Songs made it into the Bible because it was believed to be a metaphor for our love of God. However, any close reading of the book clearly shows it is about the erotic love between a man and a woman. Because this is so obvious, many Christians today see that the Song of Songs is a set of poems about a young married couple. But even that is an attempt to tame the book down to modern and Western religious values. If Song of Songs is a series of poems, while some of those poems suggest a young married couple, others are obviously about an unmarried couple.
In the verse above, a young man writes about the pleasures of feeling up his girlfriend.
Anyway we look at it, the Song of Songs celebrates the early onset of romance between a man and a woman. Even as movies and books of today focus so much erotic pleasure in falling in love, the Bible shows us that the early stages of romance and falling in love are a gift from God.
NUMBER ONE - GALATIANS 5:12
I wish those who are disturbing you might also get themselves castrated!
Circumcision was a procedure whereby the foreskin of a man's penis was removed by a Rabbi usually when a child was 8 days old. Paul was wishing that his opponents would be castrated / cut off / removed from the people they they preached to.
As the Apostle Paul created one church after another around the Mediterranean Sea, Jewish scholars of his day who were already Christian went behind him trying to help new Gentile Christians to get in touch with God's covenant that He made with Moses in the desert. These Jewish Christian theologians, who were called Judaisers,were convinced that the new Gentile Christians needed to be circumcised because circumcision was the sign that one belonged to God, circumcision was a commandment by God, and circumcision was the human response to God's covenant that He made with His people.
Paul did not think Gentiles needed to be circumcised, so he argued against the Judaisers writing a letter to his churches telling them to avoid them. Toward the end of his letter, his frustration with the Judaisers became very clear when he briefly utilized a pun suggesting that those who want you to cut off the tip should go ahead and cut off their own entire penis. This pun is also a metaphor - "I wish they would just go ahead and cut themselves off entirely."
CONCLUSION
Different cultures deal with the human body in different ways. We don't like talking about the private parts in our culture and in our time. In their world, it was acceptable.
No comments:
Post a Comment