3 The Dangerous Dichotomy
Words are important. They give shape and meaning to things. Much of what you think, desire, know, and choose has been shaped by words. Words have been given special importance to human beings if for no other reason than the fact that God chose to reveal himself in words. We know God for his works (general revelation), but we primarily and specifically know him because of his words (special revelation). If you are a believer, the entire way you think about yourself, life, and the world around you has been shaped by the words of God found on the pages of your Bible. In all things, your calling is to live inside the boundaries of what God has said. But you must begin by understanding the importance, the life-shaping significance, of the first four words of the Bible. You could argue that there are no more important words than these, that everything else the Bible says is built on the foundation of the thunderous implication of these four words. You can’t understand yourself, you can’t understand life, and you surely can’t have a balanced view of the world of sex without understanding the worldview of these four words.
Your Bible begins with these four words: “In the beginning, God” (Gen. 1:1), and with those words everything in life is given its shape, purpose, and meaning. But for the purpose of our topic, these words do something important. They destroy the validity of dividing life into spiritual and secular. This division has opened to us doors of danger as we think about sex. It’s allowed us to live with a distance and dissonance between our world of sex and the principles and promises of Scripture. It’s caused us to fail to look at this inescapable area of human life from the vantage point of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s caused us to devalue the practical wisdom of Scripture and to shop for help elsewhere. It’s caused us to not avail ourselves of the rescue that can be found only in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it’s allowed us to minimize the degree to which every sexual act is deeply and inescapably spiritual. The way in which you participate in sex always reveals the true spirituality of your heart.
So I want to take time to unpack the implications of those four words in Genesis 1:1 and apply them to the world of sex. Here’s the summary of the implications to follow: A gospel-centered approach to sex that avoids the insanity of the surrounding culture must begin with looking at life through the window of the doctrine of creation. The four words that kick off the biblical story of creation, “In the beginning, God,” drive us to the following five implications.
1. God exists and is the center of all things.
It is humbling and significant to realize that the biblical story doesn’t begin with us. It begins with God. It’s important to recognize that the story that unfolds on the pages of your Bible is God’s story. He stands on center stage. He has the most important lines. The following spotlight is always on him. The story moves according to his will and by his plan. It’s all for him, from him, through him, and about him. He zealously holds on to his position at the center of all things. He will not forsake his position of authority or give his control to another. He is the center, the important one, and the Lord of glory. Your understanding of everything in your life must begin here.
Your life is not about you; it is about him. It’s vital to know that you were born into a universe that by its very nature is a celebration of him. It’s only when he is in his proper place in your heart, that is, at the center, that everything else in your life will be in its appropriate place and balance. What this means practically is that everything exists for his pleasure and glory and not for yours. So you and I must approach everything in a way that gives God the glory that belongs to him. If you forget him and his glory, you’ll use things for no higher purpose than your own glory, and in so doing you’ll misuse them in some way. Again, the recognition of God’s centrality in all things, and the existence of all things for his glory, is not so much about being superspiritual. It’s about recapturing the full meaning of your humanity. This is the way all human beings were made to live. To insert yourself into the center of your world is to violate the very nature of the world, and that isn’t the fundamental way that all things were designed to operate. To violate basic creation order and design never goes anywhere good, no matter what dimension of our lives we’re talking about.
Practical, everyday “me-ism,” where the world is reduced to the small confines of your comfort, your pleasure, your control, your happiness, and your ease, never works. It doesn’t work because it runs cross-grain against the way you and the world you live in were meant to operate. You see, it’s simply not about you, and when you make it about you, nothing good results. God-forgetting self-sovereignty is dangerous to you and destructive to your heart and will cause you to use things in a way they were not intended to be used. Because of this, “me-ism” never results in long-term peace, rest, satisfaction, and joy.
When you put yourself and your particular definition of pleasure at the center of your world, not only are you rejecting God’s wisdom and rebelling against his authority, but you’re also questing for his position. But God, in his zeal for his own glory and for your good, won’t exit his position and give it to you. You just can’t properly understand and participate in the world of sex without this perspective. Think about this.
Our problem with sex doesn’t begin with lust, with bad choices, or with sexual misbehavior. Our problem with sex begins when we forget that God must be at the center of this part of our lives as he must be with any other. When you have no greater motivation in sex than your own satisfaction, you are already in sexual trouble, even if you don’t know it yet. How have you tended to put yourself in the center of your world of sexuality?
Whether or not you functionally recognize it, at the epicenter of your sexual world exists a God of awesome power, glory, and grace. Sex in its rightful place in your heart and life always begins by recognizing that he is at the center.
2. God is the creator and owner of all that exists.
My words here, “God is the creator and owner of all that exists,” have been chosen carefully. You cannot have the first word (creator) without the other (owner). The concept of creation always carries with it the resulting concepts of design and ownership. Perhaps two of the most important questions you could ask about anything in your life are, What was the Creator’s purpose for this thing when it was made? And, What does it look like for me to recognize the Creator’s ownership over this thing as I use it in my daily living? Because you and I are creatures and not the Creator, it isn’t our prerogative to relate to our lives and the things in our lives as if we are the owners and designers. When you act as though every function of your body belongs to you, you’re forgetting the Creator and heading for trouble.
Here’s what’s important to understand: human beings were designed to be resident managers of the created world that God owns. God made and owned the beautiful garden of Eden, placed Adam and Eve in it, and then commissioned them to live in and care for the garden he made and owned. They didn’t own what they’d been given. They didn’t make the rules. They didn’t get a vote when it came to the purpose for their own lives and for everything else. They were there to recognize God’s ownership by fulfilling his purpose.
I find these perspectives to be very convicting. When I’m thinking about physical intimacy with Luella, am I conscious at that moment that my body and my sexuality belong to the Lord? Let’s be honest—it’s counterintuitive to think this way. It’s natural to be propelled by sexual desire, forgetting that there is One who owns every aspect of our sexuality.
I’m afraid that we don’t think in helpful ways in these areas because we’ve reduced our relationship with sex to a set of rules. But God’s rules aren’t arbitrary. They’re not just a set of disconnected moral abstractions. They don’t make any sense when viewed or presented that way. God’s rules are rooted in relationship. It is here alone that they get their rationality and beauty. You see, we were designed for relationship with God, a relationship in which we would daily recognize his position as our Creator and our position as his creatures. All of God’s rules are an outgrowth, an expression of, or an application of the thing for which we were made—relationship with him. This relationship was to be shaped by worshipful love and joyful obedience. Celebrating God’s existence, wisdom, power, and glory means that we have no complaint about staying inside his boundaries.
This means that you cannot have a sensible discussion of the sexual dysfunction of human culture by just discussing the evidences of its sexual insanity. You can recognize and critique dysfunction only when you’re examining it from the perspective of ownership, purpose, and design. Any principle you would apply to sex, as wise as it may be, makes sense only in the face of the reality that there was a purpose for all of creation that resided in the mind of the Creator. To know God’s mind is to know his purpose, and to know his purpose is to understand how sex is meant to be used, and to know how sex is meant to be used allows you to then recognize and critique its misuse.
One other thing needs to be emphasized here. It’s important to understand that ownership living, where you live as if your life and everything in it belongs to you, never results in the lasting rest, joy, peace, happiness, and fulfillment that every human being seeks. We need only the shocking and sad story of the disobedience in the garden to tell us where ownership living leads. You cannot have the peace of heart that’s the quest of everyone and violate the core principle of the universe, that is, the centrality of God in all things.
3. Because God is a spirit, and we are made in his image and for relationship with him, all of life is spiritual.
Human beings tend to make sense out of life by dividing it into meaningful categories. Political, work, economic, education, gender, social, familial, age, and entertainment categories function as a conceptual tool kit for us. You hear the category, and you know in some general way what you’re dealing with. This is all well and good as long as your order-giving categories are good ones. Bad categories can lead to sloppy, nonsensical thinking but more importantly to bad living. I’m afraid that this is what’s happened with the age-old categories of spiritual and secular. You cannot take the first four words of the Bible seriously and be comfortable with dividing your world into the secular and the spiritual. Now, I know there are endeavors in life that are self-consciously religious, and there are activities that are decidedly not. But that isn’t what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about dividing your life into things that have to do with God and things that don’t or, even more dangerously, things in life that belong to God and things that belong to you. So God gets the religious, devotional, churchistic part of your existence, and everything else is secular—that is, not necessarily connected to the spiritual part of your life—as long as in those areas you keep the Ten Commandments.
The first four words of the Bible immediately alert you to the fact that you cannot divide life this way. It cannot be sectored into the spiritual and the secular: God and mine, religious and nonreligious, faith and facts, or whatever other categories you would use to separate things that are Godward and those that are not. You end up with a dangerous schizophrenia of heart that creates havoc at the street level. Since all of life was made by God, it exists through him, is there for him, and is designed to operate according to his plan. There is no purely secular domain of your life. Your very existence as a human being made in God’s image connects you to him all the time. Everywhere you go and in everything you do, you encounter things that were made by him, connecting you to him once again. He reveals himself in powerful ways in his creation. God is inescapable. He is literally the environment in which you live. As I have said many, many times, you can’t get up in the morning without bumping into God.
So sex is not an a-religious thing. Sex is deeply spiritual. Your relationship to your own sexuality and the sexuality of others always reveals your heart. Your sexual life is always an expression of what you truly worship. Sex is deeply religious. In sex you are either self-consciously submitting to God or setting yourself up as God. In other words, sex is never simply a horizontal thing. Sex always connects you to the God who created your body, gave you eyes to see and a heart that desires, and tells you how you are to steward this aspect of your personhood.
I’m afraid that there’s more of this spiritual versus secular dichotomy hanging around in our thinking and the way we approach life than we may think. And when we’ve divided our world this way, we’ve little defense against the insanity of the surrounding culture. We see this clearly in an example I gave in the last chapter—the way in which most Christian parents talk to their children about sex. They tend to have a single talk about how the bodies of men and women are made and how they sexually function, and then they give their children a set of do’s and don’ts. Such an approach simply doesn’t prepare young people to defend themselves against the constant stream of sexual insanity that they’ll be exposed to almost everywhere they look. These parents mean well, but they’ve not rooted the whole topic of sexuality in the reality of the existence of God, in the glory of his love, wisdom, power, and grace and in the peace, fulfillment, and security of living the way we were designed to live—for him. Armed with little more than an “I’m not supposed to” approach to sexuality, their children have little protection from the seductive voices that will constantly whisper in their ears.
It’s only an “everything is spiritual because everything is worship” view of life that builds for us a defense against the insanity that’s both inside and outside us.
4. Since God is the creator and controller of all things, he alone is worthy of our worship.
I’ve said it already, but I want to expand on what it means here. Your sexual world is a world of worship. Now, I’m sure, for many readers, this needs explanation. For many of us, worship is a tricky word. We tend to think of worship in restricted, formal worship ways. But it’s important to understand that worship is your identity as a human being. You were designed for worship. This means that you’re always attaching the hopes, dreams, peace, motivations, joy, and security of your heart to something. So you don’t worship just on Sunday; you worship your way through every day of your life. A worshiper is who you are; worship is what you do. So sex is an act of worship in some way. When you think of worship, don’t think just of a weekend religious activity; think of a lifestyle. Let me explain further.
Scripture lays out four aspects of the lifestyle of worship. First, to worship means to bow down. This is the devotional, affective part of worship. The posture connoted by these words is important. In bowing down, I kneel before God and offer him the affections of my heart. I give him the honor he is due. I bring to him the deepest of offerings, the love of my heart. I bow to his majesty, his authority, his centrality, and his holiness. I recognize that he exists and that I was made by and for him. Remember that as you use sex, you’re always bowing down to someone or something. You cannot escape the “bowing down” aspect of this significant area of your life.
Second, to worship means to obey. Here I recognize God’s wisdom and his rule. In obedience I am stating that I know my life doesn’t belong to me, that I wasn’t created to write my own rules. Obedience is worship at the most mundane of levels. Here I’m submitting the detailed choices and actions of my life to God’s greater wisdom and authority. So in sex you are either worshiping God by willingly submitting to his wise and good rules or writing your own rules, and in so doing, telling yourself that you’re smarter than God.
Also, to worship means to trust. To trust means to willingly place your life, your welfare, your future, and your inner sense of well-being in God’s hands. It’s not only to assent to the fact that he is good and his way is always right but also to think, desire, speak, and act as though you really do. Your sexual activity always expresses trust in someone or something.
Finally, to worship means to serve. Here I submit the agenda, the hopes and dreams, or the plan of my life to the greater plans of God. In worship I walk away from my little self-satisfied kingdom of one where I reign as a self-appointed sovereign, and I give the time, energy, and resources of my life to the plans, purposes, and work of the kingdom of God. It’s inescapably true that you always have sex in service of one of these two kingdoms. In sex you will remember that God didn’t give you his grace to make your little kingdom successful but to welcome you to a much bigger and much better kingdom.
Your sexual world is a world of worship. The big question is not, “Are you in or out of trouble?” but, “In sex, what in the world are you worshiping?”
5. The purpose of the cross is to reconcile us to God and restore God to his rightful place in our hearts.
The first four words of the Bible explain to us the rest of the story of the Bible. It’s only in the face of the reality that we were made for God and that everything exists for him that the necessity of Jesus’s coming and the cross make sense. Since sin separates us from God and causes us to live for ourselves, and since there’s nothing we can do to earn our way back into God’s favor, a savior had to come. The Savior would have to live the life we should have lived and die the death that was our due and rise again, defeating sin and death. All this was necessary so that we would not only be guaranteed eternal life but also be reconciled to God.
You see, it’s only when we’re in right relationship with God, when we’re living for him and not for ourselves, when we’re entrusting ourselves to his good purpose and following his wise rule, that everything in our lives is in its proper place. Hope for sexual sanity is found only in one place: at the foot of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Sanity in this area will never be found in trying harder and doing better, because it’s what lives inside rather than outside of you that you most need to defend yourself against. It’s humbling but vital to admit that the greatest sex dangers are those you carry around inside you, and you take them with you wherever you go and to whomever you’re with.
So the first four words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God,” drive me to one conclusion: I need a savior of glorious and transforming grace, because I need to be saved from me. Without the grace of this Savior, I’ll join the company of the insane and use my body in ways it was never meant to be used. But there’s hope for me, because this Savior has come, and he’s poured out his grace. He gives me much more than a set of rules; he gives me himself. Not only does he forgive me, but he comes and lives inside me and, in so doing, begins to transform me at the causal core of my personhood, my heart. By grace he daily fights on my behalf. By grace he causes me to love wisdom and to hate foolishness. By grace he leads me to love his kingdom more than I love my own. By grace he convicts me when I’m wrong and restores me with his forgiveness. By grace he invites me to run to him and not from him when I’ve failed to measure up. And someday by grace he’ll take me to a place where the insanity is no more.
If all of life is spiritual, then the deepest sex need of every human being who’s ever taken a breath is a Savior. He has come. There is hope!
Review and Reflect
1. What happens when we divide our world into two distinct categories, sacred and secular? Why do we know that such a division is actually unnatural?
2. Why does a self-centered lifestyle breed misery rather than happiness?
3. How does acknowledging God’s ownership of everything in creation—including our bodies—foster sexual sanity?
4. Explain what Paul Tripp means when he writes, “Your sexual world is a world of worship” (p. 49). Scripture lays out four aspects of a worshiping lifestyle. How has each aspect shaped your sex life?
5. How do the first four words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God” (Gen. 1:1), drive us to see our need of a Savior?
Heart Reset
Genesis 1:1
Proverbs 8:22–36