In the final analysis, however, even running is not the solution. For although it will help for the moment, it will not do so permanently. Real and lasting victory requires a more powerful and more vigorous philosophy to defeat it. Is there such a philosophy? Certainly there is—only we should say "theology" for it is tied up, as it must be, with the nature and the purposes of God.
The second thing we must recognize is that in this world, if we are to live as God's children, there are times when we shall simply have to run away from the temptation. I do not believe that this is the whole answer, as you will see in a minute, for the answer to any evil is never entirely a negation but always a more powerful good. Yet it is a partial answer and, at times, the only one.
Given the pervasiveness of the world’s perversion of sex, what are we to do in this situation? We cannot escape. That is monasticism, and it is unbiblical. We cannot retreat into celibacy, for God created sex and gave marriage. And we certainly cannot give vent to promiscuity or even genteel experimentation. The only answer is that we must fight a debased and perverted morality with a pure one. And we must live and teach what Christ taught as the true way to happiness.
If sex itself were the cause of the problem, then Hugh Hefner's multi-million dollar empire could be judged as a prime factor in the moral decline of our time and judged accordingly. As it is, the playboy world has merely capitalized on a pleasure-first philosophy rampant in our time and has contributed (albeit greatly) to a weakening of the status of married love and the marriage relationship.
The positive side of the Lord Jesus Christ's second great example of Christian conduct is marriage—Christian marriage—and the perversion that is opposed to it is lust. Jesus said, "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old, Thou shalt not commit adultery; but I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart" (Matt. 5:27-28). According to Jesus, lust is the equivalent of adultery, just as anger is the equivalent of murder. The standard for His followers is to be, quite simply, chastity before marriage and fidelity afterwards. In this, Jesus reinforces the whole of the biblical teaching.
