Continuing from * Why Chastity . . . . the kingdom’s reasons for keeping the seventh commandment include, but go far beyond, these three concerns, real as these concerns are.
The primary reason for obedience to all the laws of chastity is to keep commandments of God. Joseph understood that reason clearly when he resisted the entreaties of Potiphar’s predatory wife. Joseph, who clearly noted his loyalty to his employer, Potiphar, concluded, “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:8-9.) Joseph’s obedience was an act of many-splendored loyalty—to God, to himself, to his future family, to Potiphar, and, yes, even to Potiphar’s wife, who lacked understanding.
Another major reason for complying is that breaking the seventh commandment costs us the companionship of the Holy Ghost, because He cannot abide in a sinful soul. This is an awful price that could be described only by those who have paid it. And without the Holy Ghost’s help, we become less useful, less perceptive, less functional, and less loving human beings. In a sense, we are then on the sick roll in the army of the Lord—and at that very time when we are so much needed at the front.
Sexual immorality is also dangerous because it is so desensitizing. Lasciviousness can, ironically, take people who wrongly celebrate their capacity to feel to a point where they lose their capacity to feel. They become, in the words of three different prophets, in three different dispensations, “past feeling.” (See 1 Nephi 17:45; Ephesians 4:19; Moroni 9:20.)
Norman Cousins warned: “People who insist on seeing everything and doing anything run the risk of feeling nothing. . . .Our highest responses are being blunted without our knowing it.” (“See Everything, Do Everything, Feel Nothing,” Saturday Review, January 23, 1971, p. 31.)
When we leave the light of each commandment, our perception of the real problem is blurred and our prescriptions are bound to be flawed. In no instance is the blurring more evident than with regard to the seventh commandment. For instance, there is a great concern, with justified cause, about the abuse of prostitutes and the terrible problems of child prostitution, and child pornography. One scarcely hears, however, any mention of keeping the seventh commandment in order to solve these dreadful problems—though it is the ultimate solution. The immediate retort is that since there are so many who do not hold with divine prescriptions or who are too weak to comply, other remedies are needed. Religious restraints are viewed as impractical! The keeping of the seventh commandment, however, would at once erase all the problems associated with prostitution, child prostitution, and pornography. Yet, the more distance societies place between themselves and keeping the seventh commandment, the larger and less manageable these problems become. ~Neal A. Maxwell, Not Withstanding My Weakness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981), 94-96
continued see Why Chastity III. . .
