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One Flesh: What does it Mean?
…to virtue knowledge… (emphasis added)
The Greek word for knowledge in this verse, gnosis, is different than the word for knowledge in verse 8, epignosis.
For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge (epignosis) of our Lord Jesus Christ. (emphasis added)
Epignosis is a full knowledge, while gnosis (verse 5) is a knowledge that is less in depth. I find that distinction helpful. Though our goal in the end is to know the Lord Jesus Christ with a deep personal knowledge (verse 8), the path to get there involves learning many lessons in a less full way (verse 5). In a sense, in verse 5 we learn facts and skills, while in verse 8 we learn spiritual relationship. We start by taking in information about who God is, what His world is like, and how we should live; then as we put what we have learned into practice, we grow to know Him.
Here is an example: The Bible tells me to work hard with my hands so I can give to those in need (Ephesians 4:28). That is a simple spiritual principle, but in order to put it into practice, I need to learn basic computer programming (the field in which I work with my hands), how to work with people (because I work on teams), time management (those annoying schedules), and other skills. All of these flavors of knowledge are gnosis – a learning that is not all that intimate but which is important if I want to live for Jesus. As I use gnosis to obey Him, He comes and meets me in my attempts to experience His truth (John 14:21), leading to epignosis – a fuller knowledge.
Knowledge is a fourth line of defense. It helps us to experience Jesus in the practical reality of everyday life. It is especially important with sexual issues. They are complex and deceptive. In order to fully deal with them, we need to learn facts related to them (knowledge), the way those facts fit together with all of life (understanding), and how to act (wisdom). All of these play a part in walking in purity:
When wisdom enters your heart,
And knowledge is pleasant to your soul,
Discretion will preserve you;
Understanding will keep you,
…
To deliver you from the immoral woman,
From the seductress who flatters with her words,
Who forsakes the companion of her youth,
And forgets the covenant of her God. (emphasis added)
Unfortunately, sin will sabotage the process of making knowledge a part of our lives. Selfishness will turn insights into opportunities for greed; anger will make us want to use wisdom to grab for control. Because of this, we need to humble ourselves and ask God to transform us. If we don't, we will just become better educated sinners, and our knowledge will equip us for greater evil.
God will often give us opportunities to choose between using knowledge for our benefit or laying it down for His sake. I remember the first time this happened with me. I was a newly saved fourteen-year old, and I needed to choose between going to a church retreat and going to a basketball practice. This wasn't a situation in which there was a clear right or wrong choice, so I planned to go to the basketball practice. At the time, however, my faith was starting to fade. I was drifting back into the philosophy I had grown up with, in which I believed that there were many ways to God (as opposed to only through Jesus).
When I told the friend who had led me to the Lord that I was going to the basketball practice, he told me that it was the wrong choice. He could see me drifting away, and he thought I needed to go to the retreat.
I knew my basketball coach might consider this a lack of commitment, and that could cost me my starting position on the team. I had worked for the past year to gain the knowledge to play basketball well, and I didn't want to lose what I had gained. Still, I decided to listen to my friend and go to the church retreat.
Two things happened: the first was that my faith in the Lord was renewed and has never wavered in the same way again, and the second was that I lost my starting position on the basketball team. It was one of the best tradeoffs I ever made! What a waste it would have been to gain in basketball at the expense of my faith! Through this choice, my gnosis (my knowledge about God, basketball, and life in general), turned into epignosis (deep knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ - 2 Peter 1:8). I had put my basketball career in the Lord's hands, and from that time forward, I more fully lived all of life for Him rather than myself.
God will call for us to make career sacrifices, entertainment sacrifices, and even family sacrifices for the sake of His truth. In each case, He will bring us past what we can do on our own, and this will require us to rely on Him. He never intended for us to live out of our limited human ability to work with knowledge. He wants to transform everything we know by His Spirit so that our lives are an expression of His heart and power.
…to knowledge self-control… (emphasis added)
Self-control is a fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). It comes as God works into us the ability to control ourselves. Many of us (myself included) would like to sit passively and wait for self-control to overwhelm us. We want it to come without studying, making difficult decisions, and sticking to them, but that would be God-control, not self-control. Though God enlightens our mind, empowers our will, and influences our emotions, we must work with Him in that. He doesn't take over our beings as if He were a hand filling a glove. Instead, He works in us to give us the ability to do what He wants.
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. (emphasis added)
Self-control is a fifth line of defense, and it is a huge one for those who struggle with sexual sin. If we control our sexual actions, our one flesh chemistry will not kick in to reshape us based on sinful relationships. We avoid new damage that adds to our existing damage, and we step into a lifestyle in which greater healing can occur.
Nevertheless, self-control can be a difficult process. Many times, we end up falling short, even when we believe we are doing everything we can. I had an example of this when I was in college:
One day during my second year in college, I was reading in Psalm 91 when verse 7 seemed to jump out at me.
A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you.
I said to myself, "This is the promise of God for me concerning my sexual sins. Not only is it in the written word of God (the standard by which I judge everything else), but I feel the Holy Spirit has spoken it to my heart to confirm that He wants to do this for me. God is telling me that He will protect me from falling …."
In order to make sure that the promise would be fulfilled, I did everything I knew of to cooperate with the Lord. I believed the word with my heart and confessed it to others, even telling my Christian friends about my embarrassing sexual orientation. I diligently walked in obedience in everything I could, fully expecting Him to hold me up with His power.
After a few days, I fell and was devastated. I had done absolutely everything I knew of to trust God, and it very much seemed like He had failed me.
It wasn't just that He hadn't answered my prayer; it was that He hadn't answered my prayer to keep me from sin. If I couldn't trust Him to do that, what could I trust Him for?[14]
When we are dealing with emotions that are as strong as death, these sorts of experiences tend to happen, and they will test our faith. For me, it seemed as if God had failed to keep a promise in His written word, and if He hadn't kept that promise, what other promises might He not keep? I was faced with the possibility that everything I had believed about Him was a lie, and I needed to decide whether I was going to remain a Christian. It took a while for me to work through those issues, but by His grace I chose to remain with Him. I didn't understand what had happened, but I trusted Him to keep working in me and eventually set me free (which He did).
In the story I just shared, I didn't realize that my obedience was being sabotaged by strongholds in my mind:
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ…
In military life, a stronghold is a well-protected location that an enemy cannot easily conquer. Our thinking habits are often like that. They subtly deceive us with arguments that cause us to dismiss truth almost before we have considered it. They exalt themselves with thoughts that seem important (a high thing), but contain mistakes that keep us from the knowledge of God. We often miss these mistakes because we have accepted them as unquestionable obvious truth. It takes supernatural power and wisdom from God to show us where we are wrong and how we can change. We may need to endure through years of slow progress before we reach major breakthroughs.
Two key strongholds were blinding me. The first was based on a philosophy called existentialism. In the simple form I practiced, existentialism was a view of life that emphasized that people should be true to themselves. They shouldn't follow cultural rules, religions, or family traditions simply because others did; they should make their own way in the world. When a person lived in this way, they were authentically expressing their inner being and refusing to bow to the pressures of society around them.
There are some obviously good parts to this view, but as I said, strongholds are subtle. They are a mixture of good and bad, and that is what makes their errors so persuasive. While an existentialist emphasis on hanging onto truth against the pressure of society is praiseworthy, when it is combined with a "what I feel is who I am" bent, it can be deadly. It causes us to define truth by our emotions, and this may lead us to view any action that contradicts our deepest inner feelings, even a godly action, as a lie.
Because of my existentialist bent, I expected that if God was going to change me, He would do so by first changing my emotions. If He didn't, I would simply be following rules rather than expressing my true inner self. When this translated into how I dealt with sexual addiction, it meant that in order for me to stop acting like a sex addict, I needed to first stop feeling like one. Otherwise my actions wouldn't be honest.
The irony of this was that every time I acted like a sex addict, my one flesh chemistry was driving my sexual addiction deeper into my personality. It was assuring that I would feel more and more like a sex addict all the time. The stronghold subtly deceived me and exalted itself against the knowledge of God by causing me to misunderstand what was happening. As a result, my addiction continued to spread and grow within me – all in the name of being honest and true to myself.
I don't mean by this that it wasn't important for my emotions to eventually change. God wanted that even more than I did. The lie, however, was that my emotions would lead the way. Instead, God wanted to change my emotions by a process in which I made difficult decisions to follow Jesus even when doing so contradicted what I felt. I needed self-control. An inner transformation came through finding Jesus in the middle of sometimes hard fought obedience, not through a sudden "zap of power" that transformed my feelings.
The second stronghold that affected me was related to the first. In a world where I felt that people needed to live out their deepest inner feelings, a God who judged them strictly didn't make sense. He needed to be more tolerant of our mistakes. Yet when I read the Bible, I found a God who threatened people with hell (Luke 12:4-5), commanded strict penalties for sins in the Old Testament (Leviticus 20:9-16), and required Israel to drive out or kill the people of Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:16-18). He also made it clear that He would severely punish His people, Israel, if they chose to not obey Him (Deuteronomy 28:15-68). He just didn't seem all that loving toward those of us whose hearts didn't match His commandments.
I, of course, didn't allow myself to consciously conclude that God was unloving. After all, the Bible said, "God is love" (1 John 4:8), so I did my best to see Him in that way. I downplayed judgment and emphasized mercy at every turn. I stretched His kindness as far as I could to try to make Him seem more like the person I thought He should be.
Yet my well-meaning attempts to improve God were sadly misled. I didn't realize that I was taking an image I had learned from my culture and trying to make the God of the Bible fit into that image. I call this image the false god of permissive-love. He was first and foremost nonjudgmental. He understood how hard it was to be human, and he had no desire or need to punish us for our weaknesses and little sins. After all, if he didn't "grade on a curve," who could get into heaven? He sent only a few very evil people to hell, like Hitler for example.
A part of me found a God who threw people into eternal torment for sinning to be repugnant. A ruler on earth who judged by that kind of standard would be considered a vile enemy of mankind. What excuse did a ruler in heaven have for acting in a way that violated the basic tolerance and kindness we expect from ourselves and others?
I believed the Bible, however, so in my speech and in my mind, I proclaimed God's word. I spoke of the importance of justice, the need for God's saving grace, and my need to repent. But in my emotions, the false god of permissive-love influenced everything. I couldn't buy into God's vision of wrath toward sin, so I was trying to use mercy as a substitute for what I really thought He should be – more tolerant of our wrong lifestyles.
Existentialism made it tough for me to obey God's standards, because doing so felt as if I was being dishonest with my true inner self. The false god of permissive-love made it tough for me to obey, because it didn't feel like sin should be that big of a deal. Fortunately, God had an answer to my strongholds. As I continued to add to my faith the qualities listed in 2 Peter 1:5-7, my strongholds fell.
…to self-control perseverance… (emphasis added)
As we grapple with the complex issues of our hearts, we need perseverance. Strongholds, and the emotions associated with them, rarely fade in a day. We must stick with pursing God through painful difficulties. Long-term suffering may remain for weeks, months, and years as we find God's answers.
We must day by day choose to believe (faith), take responsibility to live by truth (virtue), gather the information we need to walk out our convictions (knowledge), practice obedience (self-control), and continue in this for as long as it takes. As we do, we are adding perseverance to our lives. It is basically hanging in there with God as He accomplishes His work.
Perseverance is a sixth line of defense. It keeps us moving toward His answers when the going gets tough. It is the trial by fire in which we experience His sustaining grace and unfolding answers. A confidence is gradually birthed within us that He is with us (Romans 8:31-39), and we discover that He is moving in ways we never could have imagined when we started.
…to perseverance godliness… (emphasis added)
The Greek word for godliness, eusebeia, has its roots in two other Greek words, eu and sebmai. Eu means "good" and sebmai means "devout" or "worship." To be godly is to have good worship of God. It is to see and respond to Him for who He truly is rather than who we think He should be. We move past the distortions of our strongholds and accept reality.
We are rarely ready to do this before we persevere. The comfort and familiarity of our own ways feel too safe. We may have learned them from a culture that continues to reinforce them daily. Many times, it is only as we embrace the difficulty of obeying God's word for a period of time that a crisis is created in which we are ready to face up to our mistaken views and see them for what they are. The Holy Spirit uses perseverance to gradually unearth the faulty foundations of our heart.
The strongholds I mentioned, a false philosophy based on existentialism and the false god of permissive-love, were brought to the surface as I struggled to find sexual purity. Perseverance, through a thousand failures, slowly opened my heart to the possibility that something was fundamentally wrong in my unquestioned emotional stance on life. Before those failures, I assumed that the way I saw the world was basically healthy. In fact, I believed others would do well to adopt my views. I couldn't conceive of the idea that God needed to pull the rug out from under me and lead me to adjust everything I thought I knew.
As perseverance broke down the shell around my heart, light was able to reveal Jesus in a new way. I saw that I was wrong at the core of many of my beliefs, and I repented as never before. This is godliness, and it transforms everything. I was like a near-sighted person putting on glasses for the first time. I saw possibilities and pitfalls that had always been there, but which I had been blinded to. It was as if I was living in a whole new world; God, His creation, and human nature were all redefined by Spirit-inspired insight into truth. (I will say more about this in Chapter 11.)
Romans 1 describes ungodliness (the opposite of godliness) with these words:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness …although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man – and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.
(Romans 1:18, 21-23)
In ancient times, people tended to replace God with images of wood and stone, statues that looked like four-footed animals and creeping things. In the western world today, we rarely do that. We do, however, still replace God with images; it is just that they are mental rather than physical. My false god of permissive-love was a perfect example. He was a mental image based on the beliefs of my culture rather than on God's word.
Romans 1 continues its discussion of ungodliness by pointing out what ungodliness does to some of us:
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (emphasis added)
These verses say that a lack of godliness (worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator) leads to sexual sin (dishonoring their bodies among themselves). Ungodliness robs us of the wisdom and power we need to manage our strong sexual desires, and the consequence is that those desires may spin off in unhealthy directions. God gives us up to uncleanness by allowing us to give ourselves over to it:
…who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
Obviously then, godliness is another essential protection against sexual sin. It is a seventh line of defense. We must grow to know and worship our Creator as He truly is rather than as we might want Him to be. That is how we will experience the warmth, wisdom, power, and delight that give us the ability to live our sexual lives as He created them to be lived.[15]
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