Essay #2, Biblical Sexuality
The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak
My first essay looked at the importance of the body. It carries out our desires. Because we sin in our bodies, Jesus paid our debt to God with a body. In his body he was crucified and resurrected. As Paul wrote the Colossians, “Christ has brought you back to God by dying in his physical body.” (Col. 1:22 GW)
In this essay we consider that the body has a mind of its own. It doesn’t always want what’s best. Although it’s a gift from God, it belongs to this world and will remain here when we die. We can’t count on it to guide us. If we have a strong urge to do something; for example, to spend money we don’t have (thanks to eyeing something online) or even to lose our temper (thanks to an insult that left our ears burning), that doesn’t mean the impulse is righteous. Our urges are not reliable. Only Christ, directing our spirits through his word and presence, is reliable. This holds true especially for sexual impulses. A consuming desire to touch someone must be weighed against scripture.
Peter called this conflict “war.” Indeed, it feels like war sometimes—the struggle between what we want to do and what we ought to do. Warfare encompasses many aspects, from all-out assaults, as in the blitzkrieg over London in World War II, to an ambush in a jungle of Vietnam. But all war has the same goal: to crush the opposition and gain control.
I love the way Peter frames our struggle in his first letter—Peter, who knew what it was like to cave in to temptation. This translation from the English Standard Version is poetic: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.” Our time here is short—we are sojourners, exiles. In light of this, he tells us to restrain ourselves from “passions of the flesh,” also translated as “sensual urges” and “the desires of your old nature.” Examples follow later in the letter, such as “deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander” (chapter 2) and orgies, wild parties, and drunkenness (chapter 4). The old nature has plenty of telltale behaviors, which often appear in lists provided by New Testament writers. Thankfully, those writers also provide better lists of who we are in Christ.
Returning to Peter’s sentence in the paragraph above, we find an exceptional insight. He writes that our old nature’s urges have one objective: to war against the soul. Think of the empty eyes of someone whose soul has been nearly snuffed out by addiction. Or the blank look of someone who abandoned empathy long ago and enjoys lording it over others. If a “sensual urge” is given the freedom to rule us, it can disconnect us from our conscience and diminish the soul.
All who follow Jesus face this conflict; we all have an old nature that gives us trouble. There seems to be little teaching in the church today about how to resist the temptations of it or how to exercise self-discipline over it. I suppose we’re too scared of legalism. Maybe we’re scared of our own failures or of exposing our vulnerabilities. But if God’s people ever needed sound teaching on this, it’s now. As I mentioned in the first essay, we’ll be judged by what we did in our bodies.
The Bible clearly teaches that sex is only for a husband and wife. The world presses us to think otherwise. But then, the world has always had a contrary relationship with God. Not only does scripture teach who sex is for, but it explains who it isn’t for. In fact, the Bible strikes preemptively against the imaginative ways humans want to express their sexuality. Adultery is forbidden and so is sex before marriage. There are laws against sex with your father’s wife, with someone of the same sex, and even with animals. Sex with a brother or sister is forbidden, including sex with a step-sibling growing up in a different household. Sex with your father, mother, or grandchildren is wrong. Rape and prostitution are forbidden.
Practical warnings abound. Proverbs 7 says to not walk near the house of a woman who is known for entangling men in affairs while her husband is out of town. Jesus comes down hard on looking at women with lust, equating it with adultery. There are warnings against foolish choices and bad company. God does not leave us guessing about how to live a holy and blessed life.
Outside forces tempt us, but James makes a disturbing assessment of why we cave in: it’s because of our own desires. This is why a temptation to one person is not a temptation to another; our desires arise from different cultures, life experiences, and predispositions. James doesn’t mince words when he writes, “each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed” (1:14 NIV). What a picture! We are dragged away by our own desires! It’s not someone else’s fault; it’s ours. God doesn’t tempt us, James says, which is why we should pray for God’s protection to keep us from being tempted.
We see this stressed by Jesus. It should give us pause that he taught his disciples to wrap up their prayers this way: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6:13 ESV) Other translations say, “do not cause us to be tested” (ICB) or “don’t allow us to be tempted” (GW) or “keep us from being tempted” (CEV). Temptation is a phone call to the sin still residing in us. God, don’t let that phone ring. Protect us from the temptation to do something we’ll regret.
This doesn’t mean that the body should be beaten or subjected to ascetism, a heretical teaching that arose from Gnosticism in the early church. Our bodies are a gift to be loved and cared for. But it does mean we ought to think twice when overwhelmed by a whiff of Krispy Kreme donuts or a Netflix ad for binge-worthy TV. Those things aren’t wrong in and of themselves, of course. But too often we follow our urges without evaluation. Too often the eyes and the emotions outrun spiritual discernment.
Our poor bodies are harassed, distracted, and seduced by temptation on many fronts. As Jesus said to his friends who fell asleep when he asked them to pray for him, “Stay awake, and pray that you won’t be tempted. You want to do what’s right, but you’re weak.” (Mark 14:38 GW) So even fatigue can get take us out of commission. The body can betray us; it can betray our best intentions. If you’ve ever gone on a diet, you know what I’m talking about!
In conclusion, we can’t assume that a strong urge is truth, even a strong urge for something pleasurable. This is an important truth to face about ourselves. If we want to live a life worthy of Christ, we will do well to admit that our body has a mind of its own.
But we aren’t at its mercy, for we have the mind of Christ. More on that to come.