The Slippery Slope Of Untamed Passions

March 2010

Lust is in vogue. Exposure to the sexual avalanche of the media has legalized and legitimized lust for many. Can you buy a car, chew gum, shampoo your hair, and drink a diet Coke, without first having to endure the avalanche of lust? Can you whiten your teeth or Listerine your mouth without anticipating a sexual encounter? Is this how Freud and Darwin would have us be?

The old order: first comes love (pure and noble) then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage. The new order: first comes lust, then comes porn, then comes sex, then comes living together (and oh, marriage is optional either before or after children are born)!

How did we get here? What do we do about it, as the church, the love guardians we are called to be in God’s Kingdom? No, playing ostrich is not a good game plan for concerned followers of the Pure One. Laissez faire or que sera sera attitudes do not honor the prophetic traditions we inherited from our forefathers in the faith from the Old Testament on. Tolerance (usually meaning forced acceptance and inclusion without reserve) of society’s sexual mores should not be a fait accompli in the church.

However, the church has a mandate from Christ himself to lovingly enfold the worst offenders of lust into the true fold of love in Christ. Did not Jesus himself model for us the power of pure love toward purveyors of lust as we might call the woman caught in adultery? Drop that stone! Eliminating lust was not on top of the agenda for Jesus. That besmirched distinction goes to pride, greed, and hypocrisy, the deadliest of the sins. In Matthew 21:30 we are told that the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before the Pharisees!

What then is lust? Why is it bad? What to do about it?

The people of God then and now have long recognized that misplaced sexual urges wreak havoc in the church and in society.

The sons of the gods (whatever these creature are) of Genesis 6 were full of lust. The result of their lust was the taking of as many of the daughters of men as they pleased. Unbridled lust! The slippery slope of their untamed passions, of doing what was right in their own eyes, brought the destruction of the world.

A lustful woman then plagued Joseph. She kept pestering him to give in to her lust and to unbridled natural sexual urges until his refusal landed him in jail. But God was with Joseph. Jail is better than lust for the man who is determined to walk with God.

Then comes David. O David, what an enigma you are? You lust, you contrive wicked plans, and you cause cold-blooded death. Yet your legacy of brokenness over your lust, multiplied a thousand times, earns you the tile of a man after God’s own heart! Of course it would have been better all around had you not lingered with your gaze upon the naked bather.

And your son Ammon, what legacy did you leave this chip off the old block? The old old block, Judah! How Judah used his daughter-in-law, Tamar, when he lusted, so did Ammon, his descendant through David, did to his own sister, also named Tamar, when he lusted for her (Study Genesis 38 and 2 Samuel 13-14). The sins of the fathers have a dogged destructive tenacity to them. Don’t they? But thanks be to God who will deliver by his grace.

Then there is our Pure Lord who saw lust as leading into the garbage heap that is Gehenna (Matthew 5:27-30). An enigmatic passage to be sure! It is better to live maimed from body parts than to burn in hell? These are the only words of Jesus about having a healthy sexuality!

There is a story behind Jesus’ strong warning. Follow along. Israel often lusted after Baal, the pagans’ god of fertility. For a century, the force of Baal grabbed their imagination under the rules of Ahaz and Manasseh, his grandson. They sexualized their worship by sleeping with temple prostitutes. They sacrificed their children as the pagan did by burning their bodies in the trash heaps of Jerusalem, called the Valley of Ben Hinnom, which later was called Gehenna, the word Jesus uses for hell in Matthew 5:30). When Babylon conquered Israel, shed their blood, they threw their bodies in the Valley of Ben Hinnom (the Valley of Slaughter) the same garbage dump where they previously sacrificed their children. They took the king’s child and slaughtered him before his eyes in this hell pit.

So Gehenna for Jesus was the place where bodies burned and waste smoldered when God’s people luge down the slippery slope of lust. This brings clarity to Jesus’ warning about our sexual lives (for background study see 2 kings 16:10-18; 21:4-9; Jeremiah 7:29-33; 19; 32; 2 Kings 23; 2 Chronicles 28; 33).

Jesus warns that there are real consequences to lust. He peels off a scab from Israel’s past to illustrate them. Jesus was saying that when we lust, “we are throwing our whole lives into a valley of burning waste—a place of death and idolatry and rejectedness and smoldering trash” (Jeff Cook in the book Seven).

How many of our comrades in the faith have eaten the poisoned meat of lust rather than starve their sexual urges and drink from their own cisterns? They deserve our mercy. They need our grace for there we might also go lest we bridle our legitimate God-given sexual desires. Those who desire to walk with the Master are diligent in their watchful tenacity for the sin that crouches at the door. Next week, some ways of dealing with lust will be explored.

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