Did Jesus Advocate Castration to Break Sex Addiction?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | Well, when it comes to temptations to sexual sin,
00:00:08.000 | Jesus said, "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off."
00:00:12.000 | He also says that there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs.
00:00:17.000 | In reading these texts together, a listener writes in to ask if Jesus is
00:00:22.000 | commending surgical or chemical castration as a winning strategy for men
00:00:28.000 | in the war against lust. No question is off limits for the Ask Pastor John podcast,
00:00:33.000 | but you all know that by now. Here's the email from an anonymous man.
00:00:36.000 | "Hello Pastor John, I'm a man who struggles greatly with pornography use.
00:00:40.000 | Even though I've come to know God and try to fight these temptations with Scripture,
00:00:43.000 | I cannot seem to win over my sexual immorality."
00:00:46.000 | Jesus said, "For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth,
00:00:50.000 | and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men,
00:00:54.000 | and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
00:01:00.000 | Let the one who is able to receive this, receive it."
00:01:04.000 | Matthew 19, 12.
00:01:06.000 | "I want to glorify God and I'm willing to sacrifice everything I have to be with Him."
00:01:12.000 | Jesus also said, "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
00:01:15.000 | It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands and to go to hell,
00:01:20.000 | to the unquenchable fire." Mark 9, 43.
00:01:23.000 | So my question, Pastor John, for you is this.
00:01:26.000 | Is surgical or chemical castration a viable option for me?
00:01:31.000 | In Matthew 19, 9, Jesus limits remarriage after divorce so narrowly
00:01:39.000 | that in verse 10, the disciples, as it were, throw up their hands and say,
00:01:46.000 | "Well, if such is the case of a man with his wife, then it's better not to marry."
00:01:53.000 | In other words, if there's no back door to marriage, better not to walk through the front door.
00:02:01.000 | And to this, Jesus responds by saying that not everyone can fulfill his radical view of covenant keeping in marriage.
00:02:13.000 | He says in verse 11, "Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given."
00:02:21.000 | In other words, marrying and staying married under these conditions of absolute faithfulness
00:02:27.000 | is a gift of God and not everybody receives it.
00:02:32.000 | And then he describes three situations in which a man may be sexually pure,
00:02:39.000 | sexually continent, while not receiving the gift of marriage.
00:02:44.000 | Verse 12, it says, "One, for there are eunuchs who have been so from birth,
00:02:52.000 | and two, there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men,
00:02:58.000 | and three, there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
00:03:05.000 | Let the one who is able to receive this receive it."
00:03:10.000 | In other words, there are four possible paths of faithfulness.
00:03:14.000 | First, to receive Jesus' radical teachings and live in a marriage according to those teachings.
00:03:20.000 | Second, you can be born with a physical inability that prevents sexual relations.
00:03:26.000 | Three, you may be prevented in some way by other people from having the ability for sexual relations.
00:03:34.000 | And four, you may make a choice that would prevent sexual relations outside of marriage.
00:03:41.000 | Now, the man who sent us this question is asking whether this fourth option,
00:03:48.000 | which Jesus describes as making oneself a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom,
00:03:53.000 | is in fact a legitimizing of physical or chemical castration.
00:03:59.000 | And I think we need to respond at several levels, maybe four.
00:04:04.000 | First, even if Jesus meant this literally, physically literally, castration literally,
00:04:13.000 | there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
00:04:18.000 | Even if he meant that literally, that's not the same as saying you may or you should,
00:04:24.000 | nor is it a prohibition that you can't use physical means to dampen or remove your sexual drive.
00:04:34.000 | So that's the first observation. It's not a mandate, and it's not a prohibition.
00:04:39.000 | Second, Jesus does say in relation to sexual sin, and our questioner pointed this out,
00:04:47.000 | if your right hand causes you to sin, I mean, if your right eye, let's use eye, he does say hand,
00:04:53.000 | if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away,
00:04:58.000 | for it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell, Matthew 5:29.
00:05:05.000 | But isn't it remarkable that he only refers to the right eye,
00:05:11.000 | which would leave the left eye perfectly free to continue with lust?
00:05:16.000 | Now, this has led most interpreters to think, and I agree with them,
00:05:22.000 | that Jesus is not saying that gouging out your right eye is a good remedy for lust.
00:05:30.000 | A literal taking a screwdriver and poking it in your eye is not a good remedy for lust. It isn't.
00:05:36.000 | The left eye will pick up right where the right eye left off.
00:05:40.000 | This is a call to the most serious spiritual battle of mortification, but probably not self-mutilation,
00:05:52.000 | since that, in this case, wouldn't do any good.
00:05:55.000 | But the seriousness is no less, because he says heaven and hell hang in the balance.
00:06:00.000 | That's the second observation.
00:06:02.000 | Third, this suggests to me that probably making oneself a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom
00:06:10.000 | refers to a radical call to chaste celibacy, like Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, rather than physical castration.
00:06:23.000 | Fourth, finally, however, I don't want to rule out the legitimacy of taking physical steps
00:06:34.000 | to dampen one's sexual drive if the aim is spiritual victory over sin.
00:06:43.000 | We do this. All of us do this, at least if we're smart and if we're obedient, we do this.
00:06:50.000 | We do this with other physical temptations.
00:06:54.000 | We get sleep to dampen the bent toward the sin of irritability.
00:07:00.000 | We jog—I jog to dampen my bent toward the sin of despondency.
00:07:07.000 | I take walks in the beautiful October weather in Minnesota,
00:07:13.000 | and look at these gold and yellow trees to replace inward-oriented moroseness with outward-oriented joy.
00:07:25.000 | We drink a cup of coffee in the morning to make us more alert and effective in our working.
00:07:33.000 | So there's a principle here that he's on to that's not wrong,
00:07:39.000 | namely taking physical steps to mute the power of lust or of whatever impulse it is that is leading us into sin.
00:07:51.000 | But I would beware of procedures that have permanent and unknown personal effects.
00:08:02.000 | That's good. And if you've listened to this podcast for some time,
00:08:05.000 | you know this twofold attack on personal sin comes up a lot.
00:08:09.000 | We cultivate the inner heart. We feed the spiritual affections.
00:08:13.000 | And we also battle and resist in the outer context of life with habits and boundaries and accountability.
00:08:21.000 | And this twofold approach emerges all the time in the ethical questions.
00:08:24.000 | It's a very important paradigm to live by,
00:08:27.000 | and you'll hear it come up in this podcast quite a bit because of how important it is.
00:08:30.000 | Well, thanks for listening and supporting this podcast.
00:08:32.000 | Again, you can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our past episodes in our archive
00:08:36.000 | and send us an email of your own, even awkward questions that you want to ask anonymously.
00:08:40.000 | Do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:08:46.000 | Well, in the end times, the Bible tells us that people will be lovers of self,
00:08:51.000 | lovers of selfies, lovers of selfie sticks.
00:08:54.000 | I'm reading into that a little bit, but when and how does our social media manifest our corrupt self-love?
00:09:01.000 | That's the question on Monday.
00:09:03.000 | Until then, I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:09:05.000 | We'll see you on the other side of the weekend.
00:09:08.000 | And I hope you have a great one. See you then.
00:09:10.000 | [ End ]