I will be writing a post on this in the next few months. Here are the thoughts that inspired this (as I was taking a shower).
Is it a coincidence that the first sin happened to be in the first human love story?What can we learn from this? What led to this downfall? What does this say about the state of romance, love, marriage, and sex today?
As I was praying for my meal, I happened to start confessing my sins before God (usually my meal prayers are as short as short can get). But this one was different. As I was praying, I received a sort of a "revelation" for lack of a better word, and this revelation had little to nothing to do with the sin(s) I was confessing but I guess God thought it was important for me to understand the truth.
As I was praying, I realized that we often mislabel, misrepresent, misunderstand, misuse, and mistaken sex in contexts where it clearly is not sex. Let me explain. How often do we call the act of taking someone's property without their authorization simply "taking". We associate the taking of another's property without full prior consent as theft, saying "he/she stole", not "he/she took". We wouldn't misrepresent lying by saying "he/she is telling some of the truth", or call even the smallest twist of the whole truth to be truth. Truth is holistically true. So why do we so stupidly and ignorantly say we are having sex when what we are actually doing is fornicating. Sex is not sex in all contexts. Sex is only sex within the contexts of marriage. Period. Outside of that, call it whatever you want to call it but you are not having sex. We use sex in all the wrong contexts that now we have tried to dichotomize sexual intercourse as sex-while-married vs. sex-outside-of-marriage. Sex outside of its proper context is not sex, just as taking something that doesn't belong to you doesn't have any other proper definitive verb than "stealing". It's not simply taking, or taking-out-side of being given permission to take, but STEALING. Do you get it?
Fornication, adultery, immorality, etc, are the proper terms. Let's not subconsciously sugarcoat sin, and perhaps we'll walk away and flee from the sin more often. Let's not twist scripture either, that's Satan's job. And the twisting of scripture comes via media, pop culture, society, and a worldly viewpoint of knowledge.