The Seventh Deadly Sin

I have seen our future, and it's not pretty, it's not Al Qaeda or any other gang of thugs. The danger is much more subtle and far more deadly. My revelation comes from an article in USA Today by Paul Wiseman. It was about "Sex in Japan", or rather about non-sex in Japan.

"To an astonishing degree," Wiseman reports, "The sexes are going their opposite ways in Japan. Young women are revolting against the traditional role of obedient housewife opting instead to live at home and shop and socialize with girlfriends. Startled men are retreating into solitary ways. Check-ins at the country's famed love hotels are even falling. As birthrates slip a social crisis looms."

What on Earth has gone wrong in Japan? Something is really broken there. Japan is headed for a social and economic crisis of enormous proportions.

Wiseman illustrates, "A woman was nervously looking forward to a romantic getaway with a man she had been seeing. When they arrived at a seaside hotel last fall, her beau requested separate rooms. Stunned, she nonetheless anticipated a late-night knock on the door. It never came. Nothing happened," The Tokyo writer says.

Nothing is happening with decreasing regularity between Japanese men and women these days, Wiseman reported. Marriages, births and hanky-panky are all spiraling downward with troubling implications for the nation's future. A sagging birth rate means that fewer working age people will be around to support a growing population of elderly. A social crisis looms.

This sort of sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? "Only in Japan , he continued "Would a popular weekly news magazine deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence. Young people, they pleaded: Don't hate sex."

It is an astonishing idea, isn't it, that people might come to hate sex, and a newspaper would be exhorting them to go out and have sex.

A remarkable television program several months ago, titled: "The Lost Children of Rockdale County" on PBS, were interviewing this beautiful young girl about sex and her reply was "Sex sucks." That was her considered opinion, "Sex is for the guys, the girls put up it because the guys want it."

So really, teenagers are beginning to think that sex is not a good thing.

Now why should anyone care if sex falls off in a country. A lot of people believe that we would be better off here, if sex fell off at least a little.

Well, here's the problem in Japan. It is a three prong problem: One, marriage, Japanese are postponing marriage or avoiding it altogether. Second, Births. Births have declined in Japan for a second year in a row. Japan's population will peak in the next two years and then start going down. Sex is the Third thing. Sex in a 2001 survey, condom maker Terex found that in Japan ranked dead last among 28 countries in the frequency of sex.

Japan has a terrible problem, it is what they call parasite singles. Wiseman reports that "Young men and women live at home so that they can spend all their money are parasites on their own families. Their mother does all the cooking, cleaning and house work so they can go and play with their friends." Now mind you, we're talking about people in their 20s and 30s. We're not talking about kids, eight, nine or ten.

Wiseman asked "What happens to the parasite singles when their parents become infirmed or die. Their future is grim."

He cites one case study that he fears will be a model for the future. "A woman lived with her parents until they died, inherited the family home, but found that her job didn't pay enough now that her parents were not around to foot the bill for groceries and other necessities. She ended up bankrupt after borrowing heavy in a futile effort to maintain her lifestyle."

She had no idea of what the real world was really about, because she had year after year sponged off of her parents and learned nothing.

"The phenomenon of parasite singles," Wiseman says, "is also creating a demographic nightmare. Japan now has about four working age people to contribute to pension plans to support one of today's retirees. Four to one. By the middle of the century, there'll be two workers for each retiree, which will create huge financial problems for the country."

Now, we already in this country know what that problem is like, because we face huge problems with social security due to the baby boomers, followed by a baby bust, which means that birth rates have dropped off so far that we are not producing enough workers to pay the pensions for the old folks.

The Japanese disease is coming here, as well as the economic consequences and they are not pretty.

There is a lot of moaning and groaning here about abortion, but hardly anyone discusses the economic consequences of abortion. We are going to have a shortfall of about 30 to 40 million people working and paying into Social Security, due to abortion alone. Just look at the numbers. Find your almanac or get on the Internet and look up and find out how many abortions there have been since Roe Vs Wade, then start adding up the cost in years to come in terms of people who are not paying taxes, or not paying Social Security, and consequently are not there to support the older generation.

I have decided that we need an abortion tax. Women who have had abortion and families who've had abortions to pay extra to Social Security to make up the deficit for their kids, who would have paid for them.

But the truth is, abortion is only a symptom of the disease, it is not the disease itself. The disease is one of the seven deadly sins

In the old days the seven deadly sins were seen as deadly to the individual. In other words, they would tick off the seven deadly sins and talk about how if you lived your life and follow these sins they would destroy your personal individual life.

We are about to see that they can be deadly to a society as well, and we should have known that. If an entire nation adopts a set of values or abandons a set of values, there will be consequences. The problem is, that the consequences are often not apparent until it's too late to turn back.

Sir Patrick Devlin, an eminent British jurist of the mid 20th. century, that was about 50 years ago, said this, "If men and women tried to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail. If having based it upon a common set of core values, they then surrender those values it will disintegrate. For society is not something that can be kept together physically, it is held by invisible but fragile bonds of common beliefs and values. Common morality is part of the bondage of a good society, and that bondage is part of the price of society which mankind must pay" (End of quotation).

Now I can't say what happened in Japan, because I've made no study of the social development of that country. But I can see what is happening right here in our own country, and I can see what the cure might be for individuals.

I don't have a lot of hope for the country. My hope is for you and your family and I want to talk to you about the disease and about inoculation for the disease for you and your family.

So what is this disease that has afflicted Japan, and is now afflicting our society? Can we put a name on it? In a word, yes, the word is lust. The seventh of the seven deadly sins.

Is there a cure for lust? The first problem that we face in this is that we’re not willing to call it what it is. We have become so delicate about matters like this that we can't even call it or name it. If you call it lust then you are seen as backward. a religious bigot, a throwback to another time. We've come to the place, says Dorothy Sayers, and I quote her, "A man may be greedy and selfish, spiteful, cruel, jealous, unjust, violent and brutal, grasping, unscrupulous and a liar, stubborn and arrogant, stupid, morose and dead to every noble instinct and still we are ready to say of him that he is not an immoral man."

Dorothy said that some years ago, and it is very true of our society today, a man can be a rake, a womanizer, pornographer and still be quite welcome in our society, even deemed worthy of high office and circulating in the best of cocktail parties.

We can't possibly understand what's wrong with lust until we consider what Oz Guinness calls the counter point to lust, 'Purity of Heart.'.

Now I don't disagree with Oz Guinnis, but I can't help wonder how to teach a kid 'purity of heart.' I can visualize standing in front of a group of teenagers because I've done this before and trying to explain to them the importance of 'purity of heart,' especially in the face of so much inpurity assaulting these kids from every side.

The government now wants to teach kids abstinence in schools and that's a good idea. The abstinence programs, I am supportive of them. But what they're doing is teaching the kids to maintain a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. You can't just have the kids abstain from something so attractive as sex. You can't leave them empty, swept and garnished and not expect something to fill the void.

Somewhere, somehow, in our world, and not just in our American world, but in the greater Western world, we have replaced love with sex.

No, a thousand times no, sex and love are not the same thing, and one does not follow the other, nor substitute for the other.

So what is the difference between love and sex. Here's an answer from Henry Fairly and his book on "The Seven Deadly Sins." He says and I quote, "Love has meaning only insofar as it includes the idea of it's continuance, but lust dies at next dawn and when it returns in the evening to search where it may, it is with his own past erased. Love wants to enjoy in other ways the human being whom it has enjoyed in bed. It looks forward to having breakfast. But in the morning, Lust is always furtive. It dresses as mechanically as it undressed and heads straight for the door to return to its own solitude" (end of quotation).

And I might add, to leave the object of his lust alone, empty, solitary. For the relationship between men and women, between girls and boys, sex, not love has become the objective.

Our whole society has become preoccupied with sex and there's a certain hypocrisy in the outcry about the bare bosom in the halftime show at the Super Bowl. In despite of all their protestations, Janet Jackson and her partner did not do that by accident. It was premeditated. It was intended to shock, but only a little. They thought that we would really like it because after all, don't we like being scandalized just a little bit, and when the outcry arose, they scuttled for cover like roaches when you turn on the lights, but they're only guilty of getting a little ahead of the pack.

Oz Guinness in his book, ‘Steering Through Chaos' describes 'Purity of Heart' in terms that I would use to describe love. For example, he says, and I quote "Whereas lust is unethical and unrestrained, 'Purity of Heart' is the ethical and disciplined devotion of the heart." Just change one word and here's the way I would put it, "Whereas lust is unethical and unrestrained, love is the ethical and disciplined devotion of the heart."

Continuing, Oz Guinness says,"Whereas lust blinds and dissipates our strength, Purity of Heart is both clear-sighted and concentrated focusing of strength." Now just change one word, "Whereas lust blinds and dissipates our strength, love is both clear-sighted and a concentrated focusing of strength."

Now one more sentence. He said that, "The word Pure means true, authentic, simple, holy itself and therefore, cleansed." Just change one word, "The word love means true, authentic, simple, holy itself, and therefore, cleansed."

Can you teach your children to love? Can you teach them about romance? I don't know? My parents didn't have to teach me. I don't know that they made any conscious effort to teach me about love, or about romance, except by example. They loved one another. They romanced one another.

But really, it was Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, and the whole gang of Hollywood stars of another generation taught even the boys what love and romance were all about.

All the music that we heard was about love and romance, about the yearning of one person for another person, a yearning for the whole person, not just for their body and not just the sex act that we have as entertainment and then go away. We didn't speak of recreational sex in those days. Love and marriage went together, and that was really euphemistic at that time for sex and marriage, I guess. But it really isn't.

Love and marriage.

The Bible taught us as well in a curious sort of way. As boys many of us read the Song of Solomon for titillation, but we got more than that from it.

I hope you can teach your children about love and romance, because if you don't, no one else will. Possibly no one else can. Society, the arts, movies, music, even the schools only teach kids about sex. No love, no romance, just sex.

In fact, there's a move afoot to insist that schools teach only, (quote) "Medically accurate" (end quote) information about sex. What they say about that is that it is a move to try to defeat abstinence training and abstinence teaching in school.

You know, you almost get the impression, reading the news, watching television, that there is a gang of people out there who desperately want our teenage kids to have as much sex as they possibly can.

How do you medically examine love? How can you statistically quantify romance? Now you have to understand this, there are people who believe that whatever it is, if you can't demonstrate it scientifically, if you can't measure it, if you can't put it on scales, if you can't show statistics to actually demonstrate what's going on, then you can't teach it in school. You can't teach love and you can't teach romance in school.

Do you want to know what's at stake, well there is good news and there is bad news.

Maggie Gallagher wrote something not long ago, concerning same sex marriage and I thought it kind of bore on what were talking about. She said and I quote, "Same sex marriage is not the future. The set of ideas that lead a culture, a religion, a court, to endure same-sex marriage are simply unsustainable over the long haul. Europe, which gave us the idea of same-sex marriage is a dying society with birthrates 50% below replacement. Every mainstream Protestant sect that has endured sexual liberation, including homosexuality is also dwindling away." And it's true.

You know, one of the frightening things that is developing in Europe, as the European population declines, it is being replaced from the East, primarily by Muslims.

Maggie Gallagher continued, she said, "The sign of the times. The method has just voted to oppose same-sex marriage. The victory reflects the growing strength of the Orthodox Christians among Methodists versus the progressives who once thought the future would inevitably be their's as ancient irrational sex taboos faded away. The reason is quite simple, cultures, communities, religions, sects and societies that lose the marriage idea die out. They are replaced by cultures, communities, sex and societies that prioritize, celebrate and embrace the idea of bringing men and women together to make the future happen. That's what marriage means." End of quotation by Maggie Gallagher.

She is saying that some will survive and some will not. The question that you and I have to answer is, do we want be survivors? Do we want our children to survive? Well, then we need to teach them what love and romance are all about. We need to replace sex with love in their lives. They need to learn that love is not about sex. That sex will follow all in good time. Sex will serve to strengthen and underline love when it comes. But sex without love makes love impossible. It doesn't work that way.

It can be taught from the Bible. The Song of Solomon is a fascinating illustration of that and how it celebrates physical love and the physical aspects of love but it goes way beyond that. You can see it in the Song of Solomon, the deep and profound learning of one lover for the object of his love.

In the Song of Songs chapter 8 verse six.: "Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm: for love is as strong as death; its jealousy unyielding as the grave: it burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame. {7} Many waters cannot quench love, rivers can not wash it away, if one were go give all the wealth of his house for love it would be utterly scorned."

The substitution of sex for love is killing our children. What we have done is the biblical equivalent of idolatry. Lust is a form of idolatry, it sets up sex as the object of our worship. We have made an idol of sex. Oh I know, idolatry is a religious idea, it has to do with God and things like that. I will tell you this much, it is a religious idea with profound consequences.

In ancient Israel, the people sacrificed their children to idols. Yes, they really did, they actually practiced infant sacrifice and God came down to them with the prophets and said, "You who have burned your children in the fire to Moloch and you condemned them for it." These were stupid people.

We asked ourselves how in the world could anyone ever sacrifice their children in the fire or cause their children to pass through the fire to a leering pagan idol. Well, we have in many cases taken unborn children and sent them up in smoke from a hospital incinerator. Nowadays we're being much more enlightened about things. They want to take these little unborn infants and use them for spare parts, or to create stem cells or to do the research to cure diseases. Who knows what they are really trying to do?

But the truth is, while we aren’t necessarily bowing down before some leering piece of stone, we are sacrificing our children on the altar of sex.

I'm not telling you that God is going to get you if you worship an idol. What I'm telling you is that the idol itself will kill you and it will destroy the society that created it.

The solution to the problem that I have been talking about is simple enough, but it is going to be terribly, terribly hard to implement. Every force in society from entertainment to the schools will fight you to protect the idol. There's no other way of understanding this and no other way of explaining it, because the whole situation in society seems almost insane to the religious mind, to the Christian mind, to the mind of the person who understands and knows God.

Where do you start? You start with yourself and your own love for God and your own love for your family and you start by teaching your children to love God.

We would like to help you do just that. If you would like to have some information on this then please write to us and request a booklet that we have to offer about "Teaching Your Children the Bible at Home." Write to us at P.O. Box 560, White House, TX 75791 or call us at (1) 888-Bible 44.

Until next time, I am Ronald L. Dart.

This article was transcribed with minor editing from a Born to Win Radio Program given by

CD #SC41-1CD

Transcribed by: bb 1-8-2012