Both Genders Equally Responsible

All other considerations aside, for a man to do anything that would result in a person’s death (in this case, involving a woman in premarital sex) must be a grave offence. Moreover, under Old Testament law, what applies to one gender can be assumed to apply with equal force to the other gender. For an example in the opposite direction, the Ten Commandments says “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” and makes no mention of it being wrong for a woman to covet her neighbor’s husband (Exodus 20:17). On the surface, this might seem a double standard favoring women. In reality, the opposite gender equivalent must be assumed to be equally wrong.

For another example, Leviticus 20:13 says, “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” Nowhere in the Old Testament is lesbianism specifically forbidden but the fact that the prohibition applies equally to women is confirmed by the New Testament, which specifically includes women:

    Romans 1:21-27 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. . . . Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. . . . Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
    (Emphasis mine.)

The Bible does not attempt an exhaustive list of every possibility. It frequently gives just a few examples of sin and of righteousness, expecting us, under God’s guidance, to appropriately apply and adapt these guidelines to different scenarios.

Anyone coming to the Bible with a view to find loopholes to excuse their sin, is not worthy of Jesus. Unless we “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:6) we are leaving ourselves wide open to spiritual deception.

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