Sex is good…and I know that because God created it. Not only did he create us and create an ability to procreate…he created us with an ability to enjoy the act of procreating. Heck, expand beyond that to all that’s around us…God gave us an ability to enjoy fresh strawberries, good music, a nice massage, even laugher. If God created all these things, and created ability for us to respond in a way that reveals our pleasure of those things then perhaps I can also conclude that God is the author of pleasure. Hmmm…In essence saying that God created pleasure…and God created the pleasure we find in sex. In His eyes and in His initial creation, sex was good and is something to be enjoyed by his creation.
I think this may be one of the one of the foundations for the point John Piper was driving home in the first chapter of the book Sex and The Supremacy of Christ. Perhaps this was the foundation I couldn’t exactly get my heart around…the one that led to the tension I described in an earlier post, Finding God in Sex. My hang up is one that I wish I could embrace - the fact that God created sex, and really know that sex is good. On the surface and in a worldly sense, I might say that sex is good. It’s on that deeper, spiritual plane that I truly long for my understanding and beliefs to align with God’s – knowing sex is good and believe 100% that sex is a means of worshiping and knowing God more fully. I would love to believe that…I think God would like for all of us to believe that, but honestly I don’t know if I’m there…at least not yet (perhaps a step or two closer). I don’t think I can say it with the same faith and certainty that is found in Piper’s essay as he first introduced the idea.
I find tension in looking in the world around me as well as in my own life, I see so much that is disturbing and hurtful and sinful…how could any of that be something that allows us to know God? I have a hard time getting past the bad to see the good that God initially intended for us. Sure it feels good, but even in attaining that I’m sure we can uncover the roots of selfishness, self doubt, or even confusion and pain). How can that reveal to us anything about God.
I want to believe, but I have a hard time…
Believing…
Knowing…
Understanding…
Especially with this…Especially when I move beyond head knowledge and allow it to penetrate and transform my heart and beliefs from the inside out.
We have heard that we should not have sex until we are married. We have heard that this is because God intended sex for marriage. But, I wonder, with all that we do anyways, if we need something more…something concrete…we need something more than a “thou shall not…” We need something that will really stand up against those feelings of selfishness, the longings, that craving for attention or love, the insecurity, the hormones, and even the complacency. I doubt I’m alone…I think there are several of us wanting to understand, but just not getting it all in, for whatever reason there may be.
God is SO good though! As we are in this process of sanctification and in this process of being renewed into His image (Col 3:10) I really believe that He allows our minds and desires and view of the world to be conformed to His. I think (and hope/pray) this is a view God is starting to restore in me. This is a little bit of the glimpse of what God is opening my eyes to:
In his book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis alludes to the ideas of pleasure and the distortion of pleasure well. In the book, the Devil, Screwtape, explains through one of his letters that one of the worst things about God is that he is out to make his people happy. He goes on to say this about God,
“He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like a foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His Sea, there is pleasure and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are pleasures forever more…He’s vulgar, Wormwood [that's the nephew he's writing to]. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled the world full of pleasures.” (p.112)
The Devil, Screwtape, suggests this as their duty in response,
“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in it’s healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s [remember the perspective...'enemy' refers to God here] ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures; all our research has not enabled us to produce even one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures [God] has produced, at times or in ways, or in degrees which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker and really least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula” (p.49)
For whatever reason, C.S. Lewis’ description made a lot of sense. God has created sex, and he made it good…and pleasurable. The distortions of sexual activity that we see in society today (and the very ones that cause me to cringe when I think of sex as a means of better knowing God) are not what God had intended. The sexual norms, the “not so taboo anymore” acts, and even the radical and illegal are all a distortion or perversion of what God intended. If Satan is unable to create new pleasures that lure us away from God… his next best attack is to take that which God intended to be pure and good and get us to crave them in ways that are less than ideal…ways that are perverted or distorted. We gain some sense of the pleasure (or in some cases we don’t) and we accept that. Surprisingly, we even crave more. That ever increasing craving in an ever diminishing pleasure that Screwtape writes about. I wonder if that too leads us father away from the pleasure God intended for those things. In speaking of sex, the farther we move from God’s intention and “plan” for sex, I wonder if we also move farther and farther away from the pleasure and intimacy he planned for us to experience in that very act…not only with our spouse (because I’m told that’s how he intended it *smile*), but also in relation to Him.
In thinking about sex from this perspective, it helps me to see a little better that perhaps those things that made me uncomfortable in the last post, are not at all what God was hoping we would do (or where we would take) the sex that he created. Somehow (by Grace, I suppose) I’m starting to believe that SEX IS GOOD. Not because of what I can make of sex, not because of what I have or have not experienced with sex. SEX IS GOOD because God created it that way. This perspective has helped me to feel a little more empowered to fight to move that pleasure back towards God’s intention…to fight what Satan may try to sway or tempt me with…and instead, I want a little more to fight for what God intended for my life…more specifically how he intended it to be part of my life…and hopefully by that, I might come one step closer to tasting the pleasure He initially intended for us prior to the fall… one step closer to knowing why He intended it the way He did…and just how good that actually makes it.
