Marriage is Not the Solution to Untamed Lust

Some claim that "better to marry than to burn" in 1 Corinthians 7:9 means that people who find abstinence challenging are automatically called to marriage.

That's a common misinterpretation that has particularly hurt mothers and children.

Pastors have used 1 Cor 7:9 to encourage people (particularly men) struggling with sexual purity to get married as a way to contain their sexual temptations.

But instead of fixing the problem, using "marriage as a remedy for weakness" just multiplies the number of people impacted by the lack of self-control, leading to infidelity, divorce, and destroyed lives.

To put it bluntly, if you continue to struggle mightily with sexual immorality after months of genuine effort, then you need sex addiction recovery, not marriage.

Every Christian, regardless of calling, can and must learn to discipline their sexual desires. Fiancés should not settle for less.

If "marriage as a remedy for weakness" wasn't Paul's intended message in 1 Cor 7:9, then what was?

Rigorous scholarship reveals that Paul was instead narrowly addressing a group of Corinthian Christians who had adopted strange Gnostic beliefs that their bodies didn't matter, so they were claiming to be "celibate in spirit" while engaging in unrestrained sexual immorality.

Paul was chastising people who claimed to be celibate but weren't earnestly trying to be celibate.

Regardless, we are right to read 1 Cor 7:9 as a caution against publicly committing to vocational singleness unless we have the gift from God to do it well.

But Jesus said the same about Christian marriage in Matthew 19:11: don't commit to Christian marriage unless you have the gift from God to do it well.

To thrive in either vocation, we must receive the gift from God to do that vocation well.

How do we figure out whether God wants to give us the gift of vocational singleness or Christian marriage? How do we put ourselves in a place where we can step into and receive that gift?

Discernment!

Read the rest at https://www.pieterlvalk.com/blog/is-it-really-better-to-marry-than-burn-with-desire