Did Moses live a life of chastity by refraining from sexual intercourse, and can a married man practice chastity that way?
A viewer (Jason) says he has read that at one point Moses began to refrain from sexual intercourse and live a life of chastity, and asks whether that is true and what chastity means for a married man.
Answer
Where have you been reading that, Jason? I don't read that anywhere in Scripture. If it's in some of the fathers, that could have been a personal opinion of theirs, and how would they know other than what Scripture said? Even if you had a source that claimed to be from Moses, it's not inspired, so we don't know whether the information it's giving is accurate, like this Book of Enoch that everybody talks about. Even the Bible references the Book of Enoch, but it's not an inspired book, so all we can do is sift out what might be true and what's false, and we have to be very careful with things like that. The other thing is that Moses was married, and he was married twice, and you can't practice chastity when you're married. Chastity applies to people, married or unmarried, who have trouble with sexual thoughts or engaging in sexual activity when they shouldn't. Living a life of chastity is avoiding all that sexual temptation. It doesn't mean sex is wrong. Sex is good, it's very good, because without it we wouldn't have any human beings. Sex is good in the right places; that's the key qualifier, in the right places. A married man can't practice chastity in the sense of deciding he won't engage in sex with his wife anymore, because his body is not his; his body belongs to his wife and his wife's body belongs to him, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 7. They better be giving themselves to one another, otherwise they don't have a marriage. It might be on paper, but it's not in practice. Now a married man can practice chastity in the sense that he doesn't look at pornography, doesn't think about some other woman or flirt; that's not living a chaste life. So in case you were thinking chastity is a case where a man decides he's not going to engage in sex with his wife anymore because he's chaste, no, you can't do that. You made a decision to get married, so your body's not yours anymore, it's someone else's.