Safe Sex Practises

Actually the heading this comes under in the Scriptures is titled "Laws Concerning Sexual Immorality" so I'm not wrong in labelling this Safe Sex Practises. It's found in Deuteronomy 22. While most influences on children today and while I was growing up, want to teach that safe sex means that one should not have unprotected sex, it may have had more of an impact on my life if I had heard a different message, one geared very similarily to Deuteronomy 22.

Can you imagine sex education classes teaching straight from the Scriptures?
Or can you imagine influencing our church youth leaders to teach this same message? Perhaps we could adopt this standard into our marriage prep classes offer in our churches?

Imagine telling a young couple during their visit to the marriage encounter group "Bob, if you plan on marrying Betsy, make sure your not marrying her for her looks only and don't end up hating her. If you accuse her later of misconduct, claiming she's not a virgin and her parents prove that she is, we'll have to stone you." I'd hate to be the girl who is unjustly accused and then have to stay married to someone jerkish enough to accuse her of unvirginal behaviour. The implications of this particular scenerio seems terrible, and yet if I look closer to what it's saying then I can see how loving our Father is to have given us all these instructions and consequences for not keeping them.

If I take the section as a whole, I can see that Yahweh is saying that He really wants us understand the physical connections that occur in sexual communion.
He's saying don't take this lightly, everyone. Don't marry a girl for her looks, and because you can't wait to have sex with her, only to find out after you don't like her. Then by trying to get rid of her the only way plausible, accusing her of cheating, you can move on with your life. Yahweh is saying that it's going to be a lot harder to do. Slow down and think about who your marrying. Is it possible this girl is not a virgin? What's her family like? Stop letting your hormones decide who your going to marry.

I can only imagine what my life would have been like if I'd been told that when you have sex with someone it means you're as good as married. That's the weight it carried with it.

Assuming of course our society had any morals, and we taught it to all kids that way, would we see the same amount of sexual permiscuity that we see today? I have four boys in my house and we are just entering into the hormone stage. We are going to study this passage together. I mean really. If young men knew that if they had sex with their girlfriends it means that they are to pay the girl's father money (a price for the bride) and then keep the girl as his wife FOREVER. That's assuming the boy is still alive after the father finds out. This passage tells me that the girls were to be virginal at the time of marriage, because the blood cloak was a sign of the consumated marriage covenant. (See Below) I'm thinking boys too, but its the blood from the girls that seals the deal. I'm thinking parents would be a whole lot more involved in the people their children hang out with.

I'm not saying we should stone people anymore, however if we still thought and acted as though it was a possibility, perhaps our young men would consider curbing their sexual activity, rather than satisfying it.

**Blood Cloak- It is my understanding that a part of the marriage ceremony was that the bridegroom would take the bride into the bridal chambers, and while the celebrating wedding attendees, including moms and dads, waited outside, the newly married couple consumated their marriage inside. After the deal was sealed, to put it simply, the blanket/cloak that lay underneath the couple was taken and given to the bride's parents. This was her family's security that she, indeed, had been what the father of the bride had promised.

As a side note, it's interesting how covenants are made by the shedding of blood.