A colleague in ministry recently traveled to a large foreign city. While there she was involved in ministry to young women trapped in the sex-trade. Sex-trafficking has similarities to the drug trade. There are two ends to both of them--the supply and the demand. My friend came home with a sharpened awareness of just how horrible the sex-for-profit business is. That new sensitivity caused her to realize that right in her own region, women--let me be truthful, often these are girls--were being abused for the enrichment and pleasure of others.
Let's be honest at the bottom of the sex trade is a desire that is so strong that it could be called a demand. There are those who have such perverted distorted view of human sexuality, that they are willing to overlook the fact that women in the trade are in essence slaves; the willingly pay big money to the pimps who abuse these women; all to satisfy a desire--a craving. The Devilish irony is they are like dehydrated sailors drinking salt-water. What they are doing doesn't, indeed can't, bring satisfaction.
At this point I suspect that readers of STTA are feeling compassion for the victims of human-trafficking. Maybe some of you are supporters of ministries that reach out to these folk. You are probably thanking the Lord that that is a particular sin that the Lord, in His mercy, has kept you from, maybe delivered you from.
We need to realize, though, that the entrapment and sale of one human  being for the pleasure of another is based on a distortion of one of God's good gifts. That distortion is wide-spread in our culture and can be found at the root of almost every sexual sin. God gave the wonderful gift of human sexuality as a means of procreation, an opportunity to give pleasure and enter a bond like no other within the covenant of marriage, and as a beautiful picture of the relationship of Christ to His Church. As the writer of Hebrews declares, "Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled." (Heb 13:4) That command (some translations translate it as a statement) can be fulfilled because marriage is honorable and sexual intimacy within marriage is pure, and blessed by God. Our culture, though, has taken something about giving, and twisted it into an addiction of getting. It has taken an expression of love, and reduced it to the basest of lusts. It has distorted a relationship that makes one's partner better and made it into a momentary transaction that uses up another and makes of them a disposable commodity.
We might be innocent of the actual acts, but are we guilty of supporting the philosophy that makes the horrors of human/sex-trafficking possible?
It's STTA.
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