u/Icy_Reference made a good post on a question that has often plagued me - one that I have never definitively answered in my mind. Rather than derailing his post and the feedback he needs to get, I thought it better to create a separate post for you all to weigh in on the more theological nature of the issue. The original post can be found here. My reply is below.

Please reply to the original thread with direct advice to the unique situation OP was in. Comments on the more theological nature of the question should be discussed here.

I'm considering periodic masturbation ... Thoughts?

The Bible doesn't reference masturbation as a sin. It does reference lusting (covetous intent) after someone as a form of adultery. From here, there are two primary camps:

  • You can't commit adultery with your wife, so some people assume that masturbating to thoughts or images of your wife is not adultery, and therefore there's no sin in that form of masturbation. To be absolutely clear, Matthew 5:28 says "that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already sinned," right? NO. Jesus DOES NOT say this. He says, "has already committed adultery with her in his heart." The sin is adultery, not lust. This is a huge distinction. If it's impossible to commit adultery with your wife, then there's no sin in lusting after her.

  • Others argue that you're lusting after your own ideology of your wife - an image of her you've concocted in your head that may or may not be the actual woman you married, and therefore it's like watching hentai. It's not technically "another woman" because the woman you're lusting after doesn't exist, but it's not your wife either. A person trying to draw a technical distinction between people-porn and hentai is looking for a fine-line distinction in the law to justify their behaviors for essentially the same conduct, showing that his heart is disposed toward sin and he's only looking for an excuse. In this sense, even if the law did justify him on this one point, it would condemn him on countless others, making this type of rationalization a futile effort and ultimately resulting in such a person's condemnation. Likewise, trying to justify using artificial imagery of your wife in your head that doesn't accurately reflect her reaches the same conclusion.

Some people will rebut this second point: "But what if I'm masturbating to memories of actual things my wife and I have done together and not an image of what I want her to do to me? Now it's my actual wife, not a made-up girl that simply looks like my wife." And the common response is: "No, because your actual wife won't have sex with you now, and this image in your head will. That alone is proof that she's different. And those memories are not about who your wife is today, but about who she was back then."

That then brings in the conundrum: what if a guy's wife was a stripper or prostitute, like Gomer was when Hosea married her. She turns her life around, finds Jesus and completely changes her demeanor toward sexuality. She gets so engrossed in church culture on the topic that she actually becomes sexually reserved because sex is such a source of guilt and shame for her that she loathes the thought of the things she used to do! Now she denies you sex because of that - you look back on her stripper/prostitute days when you met her (likely when you were a non-Christian too) and use that as fuel for masturbation. It's stuff that she actually did, but it's a gross extreme away from who she is today, and it's certainly not a reflection of who Christ wanted her to be any more than her present withdrawal. How do we handle that situation?

Most people conclude that it wouldn't be godly to take advantage of your memories of her sinful conduct to get off ... and I can't help but agree. So if actual memories of your actual wife can still result in use of such imagery to be sinful when masturbating, then where is the actual line? Why would it be okay to use memories of you and your wife having sex, but not the guy whose wife used to be a prostitute? The only possible explanation is that the question has shifted from its original form into: "Is it wrong to get aroused by and masturbate to thoughts of someone else doing sinful acts?"

That answer is much more obvious than whether it's wrong to get aroused by and masturbate to thoughts of what your wife has done in the past - and this thought experiment does nothing to answer that question because a more obvious superseding sin answers the question for us. It's like asking: "Is it wrong to murder someone because I'm really angry at him?" The focal point of the question is the anger, but it's eclipsed by the fact that the anger was expressed through murder. So in this situation, yes, the anger was definitely sin - but that doesn't do anything to tell us whether or not anger is sinful in other situations.

Back on track, this is all a bloody mess. I don't care much for messes, and there are no clear answers on these types of arguments. So, let's cut straight to the heart of it:

  • In Romans 14:14 Paul says that anything can be done without sin - that it's the disposition of our heart that makes something sinful.

  • In Romans 14:23 Paul swings the pendulum to the other side by saying, in essence, "While everything CAN be done without sin, everything AUTOMATICALLY IS sinful if it's done for any other reason than that your faith prompted the action."

At that point we must ask:

  • Does your faith prompt you to think lustfully about your wife?

Absolutely it does! Otherwise we would have no application for the entire book of Song of Solomon.

  • Does your faith prompt you to masturbate as a result of those thoughts?

That's a much harder question. The fact that "the Bible never calls masturbation sin" doesn't mean that masturbation isn't sinful. Most people would say that preaching the Gospel is inherently good and non-sinful, yet Paul still talks about how people do it in a sinful manner (Philippians 2:20 et seq.). Why? Because they weren't doing it as a product of their faith, but as a product of their own envy, rivalry, selfish ambition, etc. (though it's still better to preach Christ with a wrong motive than not at all).

Similarly, even if the Bible said, "Masturbation is great. Do it all the time!" - that would not mean that every expression of it would be "non-sin," and how much more when the Bible never says this at all.

The only real reference we get to masturbation (outside miscontextualized interpretations of Genesis 38:9-10) is Leviticus 15:16-17. Most people say that this is talking about nocturnal emissions because the first 15 verses clearly address this (although "unusual discharge" does not likely reference the unusual timing of the discharge, but the fact that there's something weird about it that indicates an illness, despite the assumption that it happens in bed). However, verse 16 starts a new series of laws and would be unnecessarily redundant and contradictory to the previous 15 verses if we assumed it was a continuation of the same.

In essence, verse 16-17 says, "If you ejaculate, clean up after yourself." Verse 18 says, "If you have sex, clean up after yourself." Verse 19, "If a woman is on her period, she's unclean until it's over and she can clean up after herself." You can see how this is rattling off different sets - and none of these imply that anyone is actually doing something sinful; just that you have hygiene issues that need to be addressed, just as there's no reference to the nocturnal emission being sinful either - only that everything needs to be cleaned up after we're sure the illness is gone.

Long story short, the Bible doesn't say that masturbation is sin - but that doesn't mean it can't be done in sinful ways. Surely I can masturbate to get myself hard while having sex with my wife, but if I were to do the same thing while having sex with a prostitute, that would be sin.

Back to the real point:

  • 1 Cor. 10:31 - How is masturbating to thoughts of your wife bringing glory to God? Maybe it is. Maybe it is maintaining your sexual integrity so that you don't otherwise have sex with your hot co-worker, which the whole reason to get married in the first place (per 1 Cor. 7). But maybe you're at no risk of other forms of sexual sin and you just feel like pleasuring yourself and feeding your lust - is that to glorify God now? I don't know. I can't see a man's heart - only God can (1 Samuel 16:7).

  • Romans 14:23 - How does masturbating to thoughts of your wife advances the purposes of your faith? How does it reflect the image of God in your life? Jesus is married to the church - does he ever masturbate? That is, does he engage in reproductive acts that will never produce spiritual offspring and without working through the church or any of his people? I can't think of a time when he does that - but maybe he does and I'm just not thinking hard enough. I don't know.

  • Galatians 5:22-23 - Self-control is a fruit of the spirit. Is your masturbation coming from a lack of self-control (in which case it would be less likely to say it's a product of your faith if there's a stronger compulsion - and faith would merely be used as a rationalization for your behavior), or is it coming from a place of a steadfast will that is merely determined that this is what God wants you doing at that time?

These are the things to be thinking about ... but I haven't found any clear answers yet.