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One Flesh: What does it Mean?
<page 23>What happens to our one flesh chemistry when we have sexual experiences with pornography? Many believe that if there is no physical contact with an actual person, there is no harm. The simple truth, however, is that our one flesh chemistry does its work whether we are with a person or not. It is a part of our physical makeup, and it kicks in any time we make our way to orgasm. Jesus implies this in the following verses:
"You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.
For those unfamiliar with pornography, please bear with me while I take you, perhaps, a little past your first line of defense. In order to make full sense of the above scripture, I need to point out that when someone views pornography, they generally do more than look. Jesus speaks of the eye and the hand being involved in lusting, and the crude truth is that pornography viewing generally starts with the eye and ends with the hand. Though these details aren't generally stated in public, Jesus felt free to speak words that, with a little imagination, brought them to mind.
I should also mention that I believe Jesus is using hyperbole (exaggeration to make a point) in these verses. When he tells us to pluck out our eye and cut off our hand, He does not want us to amputate body parts. If we pluck out one eye, we can still sin with the other, and if we cut off one hand, we still have one more that can get us into trouble. I suppose we could dismember ourselves to the point where sin would be tough to do, but that wouldn't change the real source of our problems: our hearts (Matthew 15:19).
What then is Jesus commanding in these verses? It is that we should treat even sex with ourselves extremely seriously. It is a misuse of our one flesh chemistry. Our body is affected by sex whether another person is present or not, and that makes this sort of lust a form of adultery. It doesn't directly damage another person in the same way that relational sex outside of marriage does, but it still damages the individual doing it. Our sexuality doesn't sit inside of us and say: "If I am with a person, then I will bind myself to her, but if I am only thinking about a person no internal changes will occur." Instead, it binds us to the object of our excitement, even if that object is imaginary. It produces changes according the nature of the relationship.
I should also point out that even though Jesus ties an eternity in hell to this act, the answer to hell is His grace through faith, not perfect obedience. Only grace, given through His work on the cross, can save us from judgment; we can never get to heaven by our works. So although these verses should make us fear, the answer to that fear isn't a panic stricken attempt to prove ourselves to God. It is to humbly come to Him for mercy and grace.
I also need to make one more observation before I look at what sort of changes occur through solo-sex. If I don't, people could worry unnecessarily about activities that are common in <page 24>puberty. What I am describing in this chapter is what happens when we act out repeatedly. It doesn't apply to the occasional non-pornography-related solo-sex acting out that just about every young man (and many young women) will do in their youth. That occasional acting out can be thought of as largely a matter of learning how their sexual plumbing works. With the amount of exposure to sexualized images that young people face and the long wait before marriage, a young person is likely to sometimes get carried away with their feelings, and many will end up experimenting with their sexuality by themselves.
This is far from the end of the world for them. If they dedicate themselves to follow God's ways, they will learn from this experience and set some boundaries to insure it doesn't become a habit. In that case, they will grow in wisdom as they prepare for their future marriage. If, on the other hand, they combine this activity with pornography and practice it to the point that it becomes an addictive habit, their one flesh chemistry will tend to create a strong illusion within them. It may grow to have such a hold on their emotions that they will develop powerful unrealistic expectations for a future spouse. Without repentance and God's help, it may set the stage for a future marriage to be damaged or destroyed.
What sort of changes take place when we repeatedly view pornography and act out with ourselves? Look at the nature of the relationship. First, it is entirely self-serving. There is no commitment to care for another. There is no interest in the desires or good of a spouse. There isn't even an exchange of funds like there is in the relationship with a harlot. The sex is entirely about self-pleasure.
Second, there is not even a hint of exclusiveness in the relationship. A man viewing pornography may look at many different women in one sitting. In a sense, he is forming a bond with an endless variety of different faces and bodies – and that is part of the appeal of pornography. This "virtual harem" supplies enough excitement for incredible frequency and physical performance for years. It changes sex from a celebration of a relationship to a daily staple of excitement.
Third, there is no limit to what can happen in pornography. Through acting and editing, pornography is able to create beauty and scenarios that are impossible with a wife. Once again, the end result is the ability to experience abnormally large amounts of sex.
In time, the person viewing pornography can develop an emotional and physical addiction to it. They find it difficult to function in life without frequent orgasms. In addition, when they see someone who attracts them, they can't seem to stop their thoughts and emotions from casting that person as a star in an erotic imagination. Even when they resist, images seem to force themselves into their minds with seemingly irresistible power. When they refrain from sex for a time, they feel like a drug addict deprived of drugs. Their heart has become a prisoner to a drive that drags them toward their next "fix."
The pornography addict's one flesh chemistry has reshaped him according to the nature of his relationship with pornography. It is as if his body is "married" to a virtual harem that has hundreds of faces and bodies. The women always want him, never have a headache, calm his every fear, and chase away his every boredom. They make him feel like a king even if his life is falling apart. They don't require him to understand their hearts; they don't care if he cares about them; they don't ask him to grow up and learn to act responsibly; there is no need to provide a <page 25>home, raise children, or mow the lawn. They call for nothing but his willingness to be overwhelmed by more beauty and variety than King Solomon experienced with a thousand wives. The natural result of this is a bond like no other – one in which the power of both sex and addiction are intertwined like honey coated barbed wire through his heart.
Is it any wonder that even married Christian men continue to look at pornography? What real life woman could compete with that!?
One time I heard some recovering sex addicts say that that it is wrong to look at pornography because doing so supports the exploitation of the actresses involved in making it. Their words made me think back to a time when I wanted to stop my own acting out, but I couldn't seem to make myself feel that what I was doing was all that wrong. These men were confronting the same sort of lack of conviction, and they had come up with something that helped. I could relate to their search for motivation.
What is perhaps a little sad about their statements, however, is that they missed the motivation Paul spelled out in 1 Corinthians 6. Sex addicts do tremendous damage to themselves and those close to them. They fall short of being the people God had created them to be: servants, husbands, fathers, and friends who could bring tremendous blessing into the world. The harm in that, and the motivation that should come from it, is much closer to home than anything done to actresses by lusting after their pictures.
Here is an analogy: It is as if a heroin addict tells himself to give up heroin because his habit is bad for drug dealers. On the one hand, it is true that his habit is bad for drug dealers – there are all sorts of evils involved in the drug trade. And as with pornography, those involved in the trade are sometimes trapped in it by circumstances and cruel people. But I think we can see that the heroin addict is missing the nearer tragedy: the damage he is inflicting on himself and those closest to him.
Sex addicts often don't really believe that they have an assignment on this planet that is incredibly important to God. In the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), one of the servants was judged for not using the gift his master had given him. Interestingly, he was the servant who had only received one talent (as opposed to the servant who had received five talents or the one who had received two). The servant with the one talent was the one most likely to underestimate his value.
In reality, however, even one talent was a great deal of money in the ancient world (some calculate a talent to be worth twenty years of a common worker's wages).[7] The servant's job of investing was important, and his master's estate suffered a significant loss from his negligence. In the same way, each of us has a great deal to share in God's world. If we feel it isn't a big deal for us to waste our lives, we greatly underestimate the power that is released by anyone who walks in the Spirit. Even the seemingly most insignificant believer in Christ is greater than any person in the Old Testament:
Assuredly, I say to you, among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist; but he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
<page 26>This scripture tells us that a Christian who has no visible ministry, but who simply walks with God day after day, has experienced a greater reality than John the Baptist. The work of Jesus in any of us is that important! A sex addict who simply finds God's grace to overcome sin has displayed something greater than Moses, David, or Isaiah did.
When the same person decides to continue in sin, we all suffer:
And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; …
The above scripture brings us to the tragedy of our day. Over half the men in our churches are looking at pornography. They suffer; their families suffer; we all suffer. Only God knows how much of His goodness has been withheld, how many people have been lost, and how much we have been impoverished by this. Pornography is not a victimless sin; we are all its victims.
I don't write this to bring shame. I am trying to help us understand that we are all important. What any of us does affects the entire body of Christ, even if it is done in secret. My hope is that this will motivate us to cry out to God for His forgiveness and solutions. He will take our heartfelt concern and reply with amazing grace.
Before ending this chapter, I need to describe one other flavor of damage that can result from misusing one flesh chemistry: orientation problems. These include issues like homosexuality and other sorts of off-center sexual attractions. In these situations, something has gone wrong in a person's sexual development, and their one flesh chemistry points them in the wrong direction.
This is the area of my difficulties. I had emotional problems when I entered puberty, and they affected my sexual development. When my sexuality came to the surface, it was centered around an activity that should be unrelated to sex. No one led me in that direction; it developed spontaneously out of the angst of my heart. I wasn't drawn toward anything illegal or especially dangerous to others, but it was still a huge problem for me.
(I realize that some would limit the word 'orientation' to refer only to whether someone is attracted to the same sex or the opposite sex. I use an expanded definition that includes those who are attracted to specific groups of people, objects, or activities. I know from experience that those attractions can feel just as unchangeable as an attraction to one gender or the other.)
I knew that my attraction was strange, but it felt natural to me. I wasn't trying to be different; I was just going along with a flow of emotions that powerfully reshaped me. It wasn't until decades later that I understood what had gone wrong. My personality had become fused with off-center sexual activity that formed an addiction so powerful that it threatened everything I had. Apart from God's grace, any hope for me to find a future healthy marriage was over by the time I was in my late teenage years.
Fortunately, in my mid-teenage years I recognized God's call for me to surrender my misled sexuality to Him. Doing so sometimes felt as if I was giving up who I was, but His Spirit helped me to find a new identity. He helped me to desire the incredible reality of knowing Jesus, which made it so my recovery was never really about giving up sexual sin; it was about finding Him.
<page 27>Through a string of divine appointments that has lasted over forty years, He showed me His path to freedom. Even though it was often painful and difficult, it was exciting to grow to know Him. It was worth giving up a life that only seemed precious to gain a life that truly is priceless. I feel humbled and honored to have seen what I have.
I write about the power of our one flesh chemistry because I have experienced both sides of it. As a young man, I experienced it in a sin twisted form; as an adult, I experienced it in my marriage. The pleasure and power of sex were the same in both cases; it is just that the nature of my relationship changed. God took my one flesh chemistry that had been misused for evil and used it for good.
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