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As Long As Nobody Gets Hurt

As I discuss Jesus Christ with people, I find that some, if not many, do not want to subject themselves to what they feel is a very restrictive lifestyle.  They see Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity as a system that exists to create rules, enforce rules, and punish those who break them.

In seeking to justify their own lifestyle choices, they often depend upon their own sense of logic.  One phrase that is often used to defend sinful behavior is this: “Why is it a problem if I do this or that?  As long as nobody gets hurt, why should anyone care”?

“As long as nobody gets hurt” presumes that those mutually participating in something know the entire future of their own life or another’s life.

A young man pressures a girl into sex before marriage.  She reluctantly agrees, and it is fun for a while.  They then break up, and go their own way, believing that no harm was done, and that no one got hurt.

I submit to you, the reader, that we cannot know the far reaching affects of sin.  A young man learns that he can be sexually satisfied by pressuring a girl for sex.  He doesn’t realize that is creating a pattern within his heart, that allows him to be selfish and pressure women to give him what he wants.  What kind of man will he turn out to be?  How far will he go, as this behavior escalates?  He cannot possibly know what his future holds.  What seemed like “nobody getting hurt”, often turns out that both parties are hurt for many years.

A girl wants to be loved, so she allows herself to be pressured into giving her body to a teen boy that doesn’t really care for her.  Loneliness, the need for acceptance, and peer pressure has caused her to compromise her convictions, so she crosses a moral line within her heart.  It seems that “nobody has gotten hurt”.

Years later, she has crossed many more moral lines that she never imagined she would cross.  She may become an abused/battered woman.  She may go through many pregnancies and abortions.  She may lose her ability to bear children.  She may become infected with an STD.

My point isn’t that all these things always happen.  My point is this:  We cannot logically declare that any kind of present behavior is acceptable, ” as long as nobody gets hurt”, because we don’t have the ability to see the far reaching affects of sin.  We cannot see the future, so we don’t know that “nobody got hurt”.

How many of us have looked backwards in life, and realized that what we previously considered acceptable behavior, we now see as destructive?  Our hindsight proves that we had a lack of foresight.

God warns us against sin because he sees all that it does to a person.  We cannot, nor will we ever see sin the way God sees it.

How can we possibly know the future, and jeopardize it for the moment? We can’t possibly be sure that current actions won’t bring future hurt. Better to trust God than your own logic, IMO.