What does the Bible say about self-satisfaction?

Christians in modern, western countries have a weird, back-and-forth relationship to pleasure. There’s often this vague sense that Christianity is against pleasure, or at least suspicious of it, and this is especially true for sexual pleasure and all the issues related to sexual morality. How do we navigate this?

Some people try to mediate this conversation by looking for Bible verses to give some direction, but this is often not very helpful. What does that Bible say about self-satisfaction? It says a mix of things, both verses that seem to condone but also to condemn, and the context is difficult to understand. It seems that it’s not sinful to experience pleasure – in and of itself – but it’s also not okay to simply experience pleasure however and whenever you want. Why?

A common answer people give is that our relationship to pleasure is a matter of will. There’s God’s will and there’s our will, and the major issue is the question of whether you’re submitting to God’s will like a good person or pursuing your own will like a selfish person. This is a very common way of thinking about this, but there are several problems with it. One problem is that it’s kind of an infantile way to think about the gospel. This is how you treat very young children, not people who – according to Christianity – are being called to become not only “sons of God” but heirs in his kingdom. In other words, people who are spiritually mature – not just children who follow rules because “dad said so”. And this gets at the deeper problem: this kind of answer doesn’t address the question of “why?” – in other words, the moral nature of the universe.

The place of pleasure

In getting to the real answers, let’s start with the basics. Feelings of pleasure are a part of nature, so they’re intrinsic to your biology. There’s nothing wrong with biological impulses by themselves, because God made people as biological organisms. Like a goat or a fish, God made man like all creatures that need food and rest. These impulses and instincts are a big part of what you are.

That said, since humans are made in God’s image, this means you are not only a biological organism. Unlike animals, you also have a moral nature. Ancient theologians early in the church’s history said that man had both a biological nature that he shares with the animals, but man also has something more. They called man the “rational animal” as distinct from the “irrational beasts”. A central part of this rational nature is man’s awareness of morality. Cats, for example, have no real sense of morality, because they are only biological organisms. Cats feel impulses and then do things because of those impulses. The only thing that matters is their survival and their ability to pass on their DNA. Cats, in other words, don’t have anything to guide them outside of their biological impulses. But because the human is a rational animal, he’s in a position to step outside of his impulses and evaluate whether they’re correct or not at any given time.

The famous Christian writer CS Lewis explained this by analogy to a piano. He observed that a piano doesn’t have two kinds of keys, “right” keys and “wrong” keys. Any of the piano keys can be right at the right time and wrong at the wrong time. Our biological impulses are like this: they’re not right or wrong in themselves, but they need to be played at the right times. Morality is what tells us which keys are right at which times, and to what degree.

This helps us start to understand the place of pleasure. Pleasure is how your body gives you feedback about what’s good and bad in terms of your biological survival. You get pleasure from eating, drinking, sex, and so forth, because – generally speaking – those things are good for you as a biological organism. You know this from your daily experiences. When you are very thirsty, water tastes even better than when you aren’t thirsty because your body is trying to tell you that you’re dehydrated. You also notice that pleasure and biological impulses tend to diminish when you’ve given your body what it needs. Pleasure – in this strictly biological sense – is not really the point, it’s just a way your body gets you to do the right things to take care of it.

When self-gratification becomes a sin

The issues start to arise when humans want to repeat pleasures – not because they’re needed – but simply because they feel good. For most people, it isn’t immediately clear that there’s anything wrong with this. Most people would ask, “if what I’m doing isn’t hurting anyone, what’s wrong with it?” There are two important issues here.

First, you can always hurt yourself by overindulging in pleasures. Overeating leads to obesity and disease, as does eating only high-pleasure foods like cookies. Too much of this can quickly lead to chronic diseases. Drinking too much alcohol can lead to severe organ damage. Even too much (or the wrong kind of) sexual activity can have health consequences. If you want to stay up all night playing video games or partying, and you don’t get enough sleep, you can damage your brain and body. Some people believe that it’s their choice to hurt themselves if they want to, especially if they value short-term pleasure over long-term health, but that’s an immature way of thinking about it. Damaging your body will always have consequences for other people in your life. For example, if you become sick, then other people have to take care of you. Even if you don’t trouble your friends and family with it, if you need a lot of extra medical attention, that will take resources out of your society that other people will have to pay for through taxation. We all live together and affect each other, so not taking care of yourself will inevitably affect others.

But there’s a more profound way that we can hurt ourselves through mismanagement of our pursuit of pleasure, and that’s spiritually. If you make it your policy to pursue pleasure at the expense of your own self-control, you’ll soon resemble an animal more than a human being because – like an animal – you’ll be reduced to only your instincts. A lot of people joke about their relationship to pleasure in this way. They’ll say things like, “I can’t help myself”, “I’m addicted”, or “that’s just how I am”, but these are weird things to say. It’s like saying, “I’m not in control of myself and I’m okay with that”. It’s like admitting that you’re a slave but laughing about it. Living a life where you indulge in pleasure whenever you feel like it may seem freeing at first, but the reality is, if you aren’t in control of yourself, you become – in the long run – a slave to your impulses and resemble an animal more than a human.

The second issue is that we need to understand the nature of pleasure better. When we’re talking about pleasure, we’re just talking about impulses in the brain; chemicals like dopamine or hormones like endorphines. If all you wanted was pleasure because it felt good, you could simply take chemical stimulants to experience these sensations in a raw form. In the science fiction book series Ringworld, there was this idea of a brain implant called “the droud” that simply sent an electrical signal to the pleasure-center of the brain. This stimulation put the user in a constant state of euphoria. The person with a droud implant just sat there all day smiling because he was getting a raw dopamine stimulation. Most people on the droud, in that universe, would eventually starve to death.

If that strikes you as somehow empty, then you’re on the right track for understanding the role and purpose of pleasure. We have a sense that it isn’t the chemical reactions that we want, but something more. Many thinkers throughout history have distinguished between mere chemical pleasure and something higher – satisfaction or contentment or ”true” happiness. CS Lewis called it “joy”.

The difference between mere pleasure and something higher like joy is, simply put, meaning. Chemical reactions in the brain aren’t ultimately able to give your life meaning. If all you did was sit around, do drugs, watch pornography, and eat sugar, you might have a high amount of dopamine in your brain, but ultimately you would have a very small and meaningless life. This is why people who relentlessly pursue pleasure in their lives tend to be discontent or outright miserable. But to have joy requires more than dopamine: it requires meaning.

How do you have meaning? The answer that all religions throughout history have given is that you have to be connected with the deep moral nature of reality. For Christians that means being totally and completely connected to God. Not because God is some sort of rules enforcer whose approval you want to get. It’s because – according to Christianity – God is goodness itself. It’s not that God does good things or that God somehow enforces goodness, but that goodness itself – and truth itself and beauty itself – is a person. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

What does the Bible say about "touching yourself"?

Putting this all together, we can say a few things about sexuality, specifically masturbation. Most people are prepared to accept everything we’ve discussed so far when it comes to food, drug use, alcohol, and so forth. But modern, Western people are more defensive when it comes to sex (in large part because we’ve been trained to think that sexual pleasure is some kind of sacred right, but that’s another story).

What does the Bible say about "touching yourself", or masturbation? In actual fact, nothing. That is, nothing specific. There are plenty of passages in the Bible that condemn “sexual immorality”, but masturbation isn’t specifically listed in any of them. (There is a passage in Genesis 38:9 where a man named Onan is condemned for spilling his seed on the ground during intercourse instead of impregnating his wife, but this passage isn’t an example of masturbation; it’s more directly about his refusal to continue his tribe’s lineage.)

However, Christianity isn’t a religion that’s only about following rules for the sake of following rules; which is why the Bible isn’t really a comprehensive legal document that lists everything you should and shouldn’t do on every issue. So referring to the Bible to answer questions about masturbation isn’t going to go anywhere. Much more clearly is the wittness of the early Christians, church fathers, and traditional Christian morality, all of which are very clear in condemning masturbation. There are two main reasons why they do so.

Pleasure or joy?

First is the argument about purposes. The purpose of sexual pleasure, like all biological pleasure, is not – as we discussed above – for the purpose of your own satisfaction. The role of biological pleasures (and pains) is to guide you toward understanding what to do with your body. The reason we get such an intense burst of chemical pleasure from sex is because – at some level – our deepest biological drive is to reproduce. These pleasures aren’t ends in and of themselves, they’re a means for guiding us towards what we need to do with our bodies. To masturbate, therefore, is something like tricking your body into thinking it’s doing something for its survival, but instead doing something that’s only for pleasure.

Imagine if you chewed your food to get the pleasure, but then spat it out right before you swallowed it. Or imagine you ate a meal but later forced yourself to vomit it out so you could eat more. Masturbating is basically the same kind of thing but for sex. You could condemn both on purely biological, health bases. I know there are a lot of people who want to say that masturbation is healthy, because that’s a popular thing to say, but there are issues with these studies, and there are a lot of other reports that suggest that there are health benefits for not masturbating. However, this part of the conversation really isn’t the central issue, because – as we discussed – humans are more than their biological natures.

What is the spiritual damage that masturbation does? To understand this question, we must understand the spiritual nature of sexuality on a Christian worldview. The Christian understanding of the human person is that we are not isolated individuals but that we are all intrinsically a part of each other. This is easy to see in our biology, as all people come from inside other people (i.e., your body is something that your mother makes for you out of her own body). But notice also that it takes two people (a man and a woman) coming together out of passionate desire for each other that creates another human. In other words, love literally makes people. This is a clue to our nature, that we are all a part of one another. While things like dopamine and endorphins explain the merely pleasurable part of sex, the part of sexuality that has meaning – the joy – is tied up with the fact that human sexuality is a fundamental part of the way in which we are all connected. To have real meaning, therefore, sexual pleasure needs to be practiced in this context of our relational nature. This is why the early church fathers called masturbation a kind of self-worship – because you’re taking all the meaning out of sex that comes from our relational nature and reducing it merely to self-satisfaction.

If you do this kind of thing, therefore, you hurt your own nature. Whenever we take the meaning out of something and reduce it to mere pleasure, we move farther away from our transcendent, spiritual nature and become closer to being animals. In other words, the more you disconnect yourself from meaning and just fixate on pleasure, the more you’re just becoming all biology – an animal with no self-control. Here’s a simple proof: if you have a habit of masturbating, how easy is it for you to stop?