The former four-star U.S. Army General Colin Powell once said, “There is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers.” That is true of the first question asked in the Bible, the first question encountered in human history: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The serpent gave a stupid answer to a reasonable question—and we’ve been following his lead ever since.

“From Genesis to Revelation,” Alex Duke says, “sexual sin rears its head as a consistent expression of human fallenness, of humanity’s tendency to answer the serpent’s Did God really say? with No, I suppose he didn’t.” As Duke writes in “How Sex Became King,” a brilliant new essay, “sex became king when Satan became the prince of the power of the air, the purveyor of the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience. Even though his is a lame-duck regime, its effects are everywhere, its seed still growing (Eph. 2:1–4).”

Sexual sin, though, is not new. And yet it has become the de facto ruler over our culture. Duke outlines four faulty notions that help to answer the question, “How did sex become this kind of king, with this large a kingdom?”