Singleness: Is Online Dating for Creepers?

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Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

Listen and enjoy this latest episode as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions. Here's Pastor Tim.

On this episode of Bible Bashed, we'll be answering the question, Is online dating for creepers? Now, as you read through the

Bible, one of the things you're going to find is you're going to find that many of the heroes of the faith sought spouses in ways that we today would consider to be somewhat scandalous.

I'm thinking in particular of the example of Abraham sending his servant to find a wife for his son

Isaac. The servant meets Rebecca, and the first time he meets her, he asks her to be the wife of Isaac.

He brings her back to Isaac. They immediately consummate the marriage in the tent, and Rebecca comforts

Isaac in his bereavement of his mother, Sarah.

So examples like that of arranged marriages are things that we have little to no tolerance, which in some ways is somewhat strange, considering that we've watched so many

Disney movies, and Disney movies teach us to believe in things like love at first sight.

But then the thought of actually practicing that sort of thing is somewhat off -putting to most of us, and so we have to think through some of these things as well.

But then also if you consider the example of Ruth being instructed by Naomi to essentially put herself in Boaz's field and become a hard worker in order to gain his attention, there's plenty of things about this which would set off the

Me Too movement. But when you think about that, and then you think about her plot to get

Ruth to get herself all dressed up and go meet Boaz in the threshing floor, certainly there's elements of this that we would look at and we would think probably rightly that are a bit unwise, but at the same time, it seems to me that as you read through the

Bible, one of the things you're going to find is you find that biblical people seem to place a much greater priority on marriage, and there wasn't so much emphasis placed on finding this one magical perfect person who is going to make your life effortlessly easy.

There seem to be much different kinds of priorities that were at work there in that kind of society as far as that's concerned.

And so as we're thinking about something like online dating, one of the things to realize is that most people, I think, have an instinctive kind of recoiling at the thought of online dating.

It seems to be somewhat of a desperate move. It seems to be, at best, a last resort, and at worst, something that really is kind of shameful and kind of scandalous, and we should probably avoid it, and it's probably dangerous and everything else.

But when you think about online dating, there are some things that would commend us to online dating, and there are some things that we should be cautious to, as we consider the subject of online dating, and then there might be some things that we need to exercise unique wisdom in approaching something along these lines.

Now, when you think about the nature of the Christian life and you think about the nature of the way the world actually works, if you have somewhat of a realistic perspective of the way that the world actually works, then one of the things that you're going to realize is that Proverbs 31 tells us that an excellent wife who can find one, and it seems to me that the world has always been filled with a great many people, but then the thought of finding an excellent marriage partner, that's always been something that's been somewhat difficult.

And when you think about the world that we live in today or the country that we live in, in America in particular, one of the things that you're going to find is that you look around the world, you look around the church, and it doesn't seem like there is a prevalence of people who are available, single people who are available who are very serious about their faith.

So the vast majority of people in the vast majority of churches, very rarely if ever read the Bible, the vast majority of people know little to nothing about theology or the

Bible or the scriptures or doctrine. When you look around the world that we're living in right now, we have a lot of churches.

We have church on every corner it seems in America, but doctrinal ignorance is a pervasive problem, and not only is doctrinal ignorance a pervasive problem, it seems to me that the vast majority of people seem to treat their faith in a pretty callous and superficial way.

The vast majority of people who attend the vast majority of churches seem to be addicted to entertainment, seem to rarely if ever read the

Bible, and rarely if ever pray. So if you're an individual who's looking for a spouse in America, one of the things that you might find is if you have any kind of standards as it relates to physical attractiveness, and then if you have any kind of standards as it relates to spiritual attractiveness, you might try to put those two pieces together into one particular person.

It might be incredibly hard, and then if you add to that any preference kind of issues at all, you might be facing a daunting task.

Now for many people finding a suitable marriage partner is compounded by the fact that we as a people have a bit of unrealistic standards as it relates to what physical attractiveness actually should be and the kind of spouse that we're looking for.

Many people spend all day long looking at celebrities on television. And when you spend all day long looking at celebrities on television, one of the things that you'll notice is that the standard celebrity is significantly better looking than the vast majority of people alive.

And if you want to know what people actually look like in the real world, you might just go take a stroll down Walmart, the aisles at Walmart, and you'll see that most of those people don't look like the dream person that you have imagined that's going to look like your favorite celebrity.

And so part of what's happened in the world is that we are increasingly superficial as it relates to looking for spouses.

And so we are putting off the idea of marriage because we're looking for someone who looks like our favorite celebrity crush.

Sadly, I wish that Christians didn't fall prey to this kind of thing, but the truth is that they actually do.

But then if you add, as I'm saying, any kind of spiritual qualifications to this at all, even if you scrape the bare minimum, it's very difficult.

If you're a man looking for a woman who has any kind of clear doctrinal commitments, as far as that goes, and if you're a woman who's looking for a man who has just the basic qualifications of being a committed

Christian and who seems to have any kind of leadership potential at all whatsoever and just is willing to ask you on a date, simple things like that, is willing to ask you on a date and doesn't just try to Facebook stalk you or something along those lines, then it may be significantly hard to find an individual.

And the longer you're single, the harder and harder it gets. And so individuals do have to think about the subject of online dating.

Is this something that they should pursue? Is this something that they should think about? Is this something that they should consider?

Now certainly there are great advantages in meeting a person in real life.

There are great advantages along those lines in that when you meet a person in the real context with which they live, they have a much less capacity to deceive you.

So there's many people who paint themselves in a certain way online. Viewing people from a distance, you can make a great many assumptions about who they are and about their character.

And a lot of those assumptions are based on just the way they present themselves online. It may be that they present themselves with a picture of them.

For instance, just to talk about something silly, many people will put on their profile pictures, pictures of them when they are significantly, at times in their life when they were significantly in better shape or something along those lines.

And then when you meet them, you might find that they've let themselves go significantly. But not only that, the online world does seem to paint an unrealistic picture of people in general.

If you follow the standard person's Facebook feed or Instagram or whatever kind of social media

I look at, you'll find that people can paint pictures of themselves based on their posts that are somewhat unrealistic.

My brother and my sister -in -law recently went to Disney and they had been posting to us pictures of them at Disney World.

And basically over the past few days they've been posting these pictures.

And then my sister -in -law at the end of it said that as nice as this all looked, what you don't see in any of his pictures was the hours and hours that we waited in the hot sun and these obscenely long lines and the fussing and the crying kids and everything else.

So you might look at these pictures and gain a certain perspective of how the vacation went that was somewhat inaccurate as far as that kind of thing is concerned.

But then as you look at the standard Christian on their post, typically they're going to post pictures of their life that are in the best possible light with the best possible camera views and the best possible moments.

And you may realize that the day -to -day life is remarkably different than what is being presented online.

So there's things like that, but then not only is this online paint people in a bit of an unrealistic way, one of the safeguards of meeting a person in real life is that there are a lot of people in real life that you can talk to and you can interact with who know this person and you can see them in the normal context of their life.

You can see simple things like how they interact with traffic. Are they an angry maniac when they're driving down the road where they're constantly engaging in the traffic talk and significantly frustrated and provoked to anger on a regular basis?

Are they the kind of individual who basically just sits around all day long in a house that's absolutely filled with trash and a mess?

Are they a hoarder? How do they treat people who – the kind of people that really do not benefit them in any way?

So are they other -centered kind of person? Does their life reflect an other -centered kind of life?

Or is their life predominantly a self -absorbed kind of life? But then one of the things to keep in mind as it relates to dating in general is that we can all have a bit of unrealistic rose -colored glasses when we're looking at someone and then if you have loved ones, you have family members, you have wise people in your life, you have pastors, you have parents, you have other individuals who are looking on, they may have a much greater capacity to view these individuals with more of a realistic perspective.

And so if you were to consider something like online dating, there are certainly limitations of what you can discover over the course of interactions through social media or the cell phone or that sort of thing.

Now, there are also, I would say, advantages to something like online dating in normal day -to -day romantic kind of interactions that you're going to find.

There seems to be a lot of pressure that is put on you as it relates to physical kind of temptations that wise people are going to mitigate a wide variety of ways.

But then when you think about there are certain advantages to online dating in that with online dating, you do have opportunities to learn to communicate.

And certainly the foundation of any good relationship is going to be built on the ability to talk and the ability to discuss and the ability to communicate.

And so certainly online dating does take a lot of pressure away from you in terms of that raw, physical, attractive element of it and the situations that can happen with that.

And so online dating does have the capacity to allow you to see how well you communicate with each other.

But then as I've said, there does seem to be limitations to it in that you really don't have a great opportunity to see this person in terms of how they live their life, how they observe their walk in an up -close, personal way with a whole lot of help.

And so there's a great many people that I've known who have engaged in online dating only to basically paint the individual in question with the best possible light, only to find that there are significant and somewhat sometimes earth -shattering kind of surprises to be found once they actually inserted themselves into their real life routine.

There are things that were remarkably shocking that you just didn't discover from a distance.

So I think the best way to engage with online dating would be to attempt to meet someone locally through online dating.

And that way the online dating is simply just a mechanism of basically a popular friend who knows more people than you that can get you an introduction.

And then the more that you can have family involved in that kind of process, I'm not really commenting on dating in general or courting or the difference between those kind of subjects in general as much as I'm just talking about what might be described as meeting an individual online in order to incorporate, in order to pursue them for marriage with whatever other involvement, family involvement that you have at that point.

So without commenting necessarily on all the particulars of that, I'm just trying to say that the best possible situation and scenario would be to enlist help from sane people in your life, authority figures in your life, individuals that you trust that are going to help you to be sane and accountable and to use it more as a means of meeting people local.

But then the problem with that kind of thing is that you're limiting your pool of individuals in a significant kind of way.

And so I would say that if you're going to do online long distance kind of interactions,

I think that there's plenty of – there are helpful ways to do that and there are harmful ways to do that.

And I would just say that the safest way to do that kind of thing is just to use that as an entry point in order to pursue a person.

And assuming that goes well, I would encourage individuals to make significant changes in their life in order to prioritize a spouse.

I would encourage them to make significant kind of life -altering changes, particularly if a man finds a woman who he's interested in long term.

In terms of online dating, he's finding no options that are local. I would encourage him to be the kind of guy who'd be willing to pack up and move and give it some time in a new location and really see who this person is that he's pursuing online in a realistic way and give her parents and her family an opportunity to interact with him in real life.

I would encourage him to be the one to make that kind of move. And I would say that typically when people –

I'm not saying it can't work, but if people ignore that kind of step, then often one of the things that happens is that there might be significant kind of surprises that individuals really wish they would have known ahead of time.

So that's not just – that's not a biblical command. It's not a biblical imperative. It's just something to say that if you are going to be pursuing someone from a distance, you are introducing significantly more risk into the equation and going slower and giving people time to adjust and giving all the loved ones time to get to know you and to sign off on this and to realize that you're not just some kind of creepy

Muslim terrorist who's going – kidnapping kind of person might mean that you gain a bunch of allies in the process.

And if you really aren't willing to make significant kind of changes along those lines, then that does say maybe something about who you are.

But I don't think that online dating should be dismissed. I just think that people should treat it with caution.

And it may be that now that we do have a tool in the internet to help us to encourage marriages that God commands us to pursue.

He commands us to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth and subdue it. And if you want to make a good and a godly marriage choice, this may be a way to help, provided that you take some of the safeguards and do some of the things

I'm talking about. This has been another episode of Bible Bashed. We hope you have been encouraged and blessed through our discussion.

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