5 The Highest Pleasure
The multilayered beauty of a sunset.
The sweet song of a bird.
The biting herbaceousness of cilantro.
The tender delicacy of a human kiss.
The whistle of the breeze through leaves of a giant oak.
The cacophony of sound that is the animal kingdom.
The shimmer of a glassy, still pond.
The variegated beauty of the human form.
The gorgeous aroma of a rose.
The seemingly endless catalog of herbs and spices.
The emotional power of music.
The communicative power of visual art.
The gift of eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and hands to take it all in.
The existence of the desire for pleasure.
The ability to recognize and enjoy beauty.
The capacity to create beauty.
The endless sights, sounds, shapes, colors, light, and textures of the created world.
The sedentary pleasure of sleep.
The fact that all this and more is available to us every day.
The pleasures of life are everywhere you turn. They greet you every day and all throughout the day. You couldn’t escape pleasure if you tried. Do you know why? There is only one answer: because God wanted it that way. With wisdom and purpose, he created a world stuffed to overflowing with pleasures of every kind. There are pleasures of sight, sound, taste, and touch. There are pleasures of thought and emotion. There are pleasures of location, situation, and relationship. Pleasure exists because it fits with God’s purpose for his creation. It is one of his chief gifts to us. But you and I need to understand the role of pleasure in God’s creation and how we are to respond to the pleasures that greet us every day.
Let me start by noting this: you simply cannot write a book about sex and avoid the larger topic of pleasure. Maybe the best way to say it is this: if you get pleasure wrong, you tend to misuse sex. So before we begin to look at sex more specifically and in much greater detail, it is vital that we address the core issue—pleasure.
The Birth of Pleasure
It is not an overstatement of a distant theological platitude to say that pleasure and its birth are in the mind of God. Legitimate pleasure of any type is God’s creation, and our ability to recognize and enjoy pleasure is the result of his design. There is no better place to see this and to trace its implications than to go back to the beginning, to the garden of Eden. I want to introduce you to the Eden hermeneutic. Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation. You and I live life based not on the facts of our existence but on our unique and personal interpretation of the facts. Here’s how it works for our topic: if God created pleasure, then pleasure is not the problem. The problem comes when we understand pleasure in the wrong way and then involve ourselves in pleasure in ways that directly result from the wrong interpretations we have made.
So like everything else, when it comes to pleasure, we need some kind of interpretive guide, and God’s creation of the garden of Eden and the placing of Adam and Eve in it provide the perfect interpretive tool for us. Let me suggest five critical perspectives on pleasure that emerge as we look at it through the interpretive window of the garden.
1. The ascetics have it wrong.
Asceticism (from the Greek word for “training” or “exercise”) has been around for a long time and still exists in various forms in evangelical Christianity. The chief worldview of the ascetic is that by renouncing worldly pleasures, one can achieve a higher spiritual state. The problem with asceticism is that it misunderstands the nature of God’s creation and of human beings and, in so doing, makes pleasure the problem. The existence of the garden of Eden in a world of perfection simply blows asceticism away.
God didn’t cruelly place Adam and Eve in an environment of dangerous and evil pleasure and then require them to avoid it in fear of their destruction and his judgment. He didn’t require abstinence as a true test of the loyalty and godliness of their hearts; the opposite is true. He placed them in an environment of delicious pleasures and set them free to enjoy. The garden was full of the pleasures of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. The garden introduced them to the pleasures of emotional and sexual love. It was a gloriously pleasurable place to live, and there was simply nothing inherently evil or dangerous in any of it. Being what God created Adam and Eve to be did not demand avoidance; it required participation. Asceticism is wrong because it curses creation and assesses holiness by the degree of one’s separation from creation. This doesn’t put God in his rightful place. It does just the opposite. It views him as either cruel or unwise or both. It presents him not as one you want to run to but as one to protect yourself from.
Asceticism also misunderstands the nature of human beings. It gets to the heart of what I have given myself to write about. Human beings are inside-out beings. That is, we do what we do not so much because of what is outside us but because of what is inside us. If God had created people whose choices and behavior were hopelessly determined by what lies outside, he surely wouldn’t have placed them in an environment of such gorgeous delights. They would have been quickly overwhelmed and soon addicted, unable to control themselves because of the powerful determinants everywhere around them.
Adam and Eve weren’t made like that. They were given hearts that could think, imagine, consider, weigh, choose, feel, regret, and worship. And God knew that as long as their hearts were not controlled by pleasure but ruled by him, they would be able to engage in pleasure in a God-glorifying way and not lose their way.
The creation of the garden of delights and the tragedy of the rebellion of Genesis 3 come together to tell us this one vital thing: pleasure isn’t your problem; you are. It sounds unkind, doesn’t it? But it’s true. It bears repeating that all pleasure problems are heart problems. We haven’t gone sex insane because sex exists. Rather, our sex insanity reveals the disloyalty and rebellion of our hearts. So we don’t deal with sex problems by naming sex as something evil to be avoided. It is not worldly to really enjoy sex (in its God-ordained context). Celibate people aren’t spiritual nobility.
The garden says it all. Separating yourself from the very pleasures that point to God’s glory and were given to you to enjoy doesn’t solve the pleasure problem. Rather, it blames the pleasureable thing and calls into question the wisdom and love of the One who created it.
2. Pleasure is God-glorifying.
God’s creative intention was to bring glory to himself by the pleasures he created. Each pleasurable thing was perfectly created and designed to reflect and point to the greater glory of the One who created it. These things were designed to be pleasure inducing but also for a deeply spiritual purpose. They were meant to remind you of him. They were meant to amaze you not just with their existence but with the wisdom, power, and glory of the One who made them. They were put on earth to be one of God’s means of getting your attention and capturing your heart.
You see, you will never understand pleasure if you think it is an end in itself. Pleasure is pleasurable, and you should never feel guilty for enjoying it or for wanting more. Your enjoyment of pleasure is all according to God’s design. But you and I must understand that pleasure has a purpose beyond the momentary enjoyment it gives us. Pleasure exists as a sign of the One in whose arms I will enjoy the only pleasure that can satisfy and give rest to my heart. Pleasure exists to put God in my face and remind me that I was made by him and for him. Pleasure, like every other created thing, was designed to put God at the center, not just of my physical joy but of the deepest thoughts and motives of my heart. Pleasure exists to stimulate worship, not of the thing but of the One who created the thing. The glory of every form of pleasure is meant to point me to the glory of God.
The pleasure of sex is meant to remind me of the glory of my intimate union with Christ, which only grace could produce. The pleasure of food is meant to motivate me to seek the heart-satisfying sustenance of the bread and wine that is Christ. The pleasure of all things beautiful is designed to cause me to gaze upon the Lord, who is perfect in beauty in every way. The pleasure of sound is meant to cause me to listen to the sounds of the One whose every utterance is a thing of beauty. The pleasure of touch was created to remind me of the glory of One whose touch alone has the power to comfort, heal, and transform. The pleasure of human affection is meant to induce me to celebrate the glory of God’s eternal, undeserved, self-sacrificing love. The pleasure of rest is meant to draw my heart toward the One who in his life, death, and resurrection purchased for me an eternal sabbath of rest.
Pleasure doesn’t detract from God’s glory. It doesn’t necessarily deaden your heart. Rather, it is one of God’s means of reminding you of the satisfying glories that can be found only in him. Pleasure back in Eden and now, like every other created thing, was created to lead you and me to worship.
3. Pleasure demands boundaries.
It is important to recognize that the pleasures of the garden weren’t boundless. God set boundaries for Adam and Eve. He gifted them with glorious pleasures to be enjoyed but within the limits he set. They were not to have a self-centered, anytime-anyway relationship to pleasure. They were designed and called to live inside the purpose God had in mind when he made them. Their lives did not belong to them, and neither did their pleasures. They were free to enjoy, but their enjoyment was to be done in an attitude of submission and obedience. The boundaries were a protection. The rules themselves let Adam and Eve know that they weren’t in charge. The rules reminded them that they were created for the purposes of another.
The rules weren’t pleasure destroying or enjoyment inhibiting. The rules were there to protect the hearts of Adam and Eve so they would be free to liberally enjoy the pleasures of the created world without being dominated, addicted, or controlled by them. The rules were there so they would give themselves not to pleasure but to God, as they enjoyed the beautiful things he had provided. Isn’t this a key place where our culture simply gets it wrong? There is an overarching philosophy in Western culture that tells us that authority destroys freedom and rules wreck pleasure. The “pleasure isn’t really pleasurable when there are rules attached to it” worldview has been a key ingredient in the insanity that this book is written to address. This view says that eating is no fun if you’re being told what to eat. Sex is not enjoyable if you’re being told how, when, and with whom you can have it. Creating things of beauty is not satisfying and pleasurable if you have to think about the message communicated by what you create. Eden was the most beautiful place that ever existed, filled with perfect pleasures of every kind, yet its continuance depended on Adam and Eve staying inside God’s protective boundaries. It’s the horror of the human existence that they decided not to. Boundless pleasure is a deception. By God’s design it doesn’t exist, and if it did, it could never work.
4. Your life of pleasure is protected only by pleasure.
Your heart and mine are controlled by some kind of pleasure. When your heart is ruled by the desire for a particular kind of pleasure, you can’t stop thinking about it, you can’t shut off your desire for it, so you will do anything you can to get it. This is a dangerous place to be, and it is a destructive way to live. So if a man’s heart is ruled by sexual pleasure, he will put wonderful things in his life at risk in pursuit of this thing he is convinced he cannot live without. Or if someone’s heart is ruled by the pleasure of food, he will eat the wrong things way too often and in much too great a quantity. Meanwhile he will ignore the empirical evidence of weight gain, hypertension, and diabetes that are God-given warning signs that he is serving the wrong master.
Only when your heart is mastered by the One who created all the pleasures that so easily addict can your world of pleasure be protected so that you live in balance. Only when your heart is controlled by a higher pleasure, the pleasure of God, can you handle pleasure without being addicted to it. Only when the greatest pleasure in your life is the knowledge that God is pleased by the way you are living can you handle pleasure properly. If the only thing in life that motivates you is your experience of pleasure, you are in pleasure trouble, although you may not yet see the evidence of it. If your principal motive is that God would be pleased, then you can liberally enjoy the variegated pleasures of the created world without rendering yourself fat, addicted, and in debt. When the hearts of Adam and Eve began to be ruled by a pleasurable created thing and not by the One who created it, they quit caring about what pleased God, inserted themselves into the center of the world, wrote their own rules, and created the ultimate human disaster—the fall. We are still among the twisted remains of that horrible choice.
5. When it comes to pleasure, what seems good is often not good.
At some point in the conversation with the Serpent, Eve began to look at a very bad thing and saw it as a very good thing. But the fruit of the forbidden tree with its temporary pleasure was not a good thing to consume. It opened a floodgate of destruction, judgment, and death. Pleasure can be incredibly seductive. Pleasure is often deceptive. Be warned: your pleasures will tell you lies. Your pleasures will make promises they cannot fulfill. Your pleasures will offer you life when in fact they will deliver to you the opposite.
When you are committing an act of gluttony, at that moment you don’t see the idolatrous destructiveness of what you’re doing. No, you see good—the smells, sights, textures, and flavors of the food. Your problem is that what looks good isn’t in fact good. When you’re looking at a sexual website you have no business viewing, you don’t see the selfish destructiveness of what you’re doing. You are too taken with the erotic beauty of the human form to see that what looks like a good thing is really a very dangerous and destructive thing. When it comes to pleasure, what looks like a good thing may not be a good thing.
So as you’re dealing with the basic pleasures that greet you in everyday life, carry the Eden hermeneutic with you. Look at pleasure through the interpretive and protective lens of the garden. Understand pleasure, be reminded of its purpose, celebrate its joys, be warned of its danger, and most of all guard your heart.
So Where Do We Go from Here?
Well, there is one final, intensely practical question that needs to be asked. It gets at the heart of how good pleasures become dangerous things. It also gets at the heart of who you are and how you were designed by God to function. Here’s the question: What are you asking of your pleasure? You have been designed by God for pleasure. You have been placed by God in a pleasure-saturated world. You have been hardwired with the senses to take in and enjoy the pleasures around you. In short, you are a pleasure seeker. The issue is what kind of pleasures will you give your heart to, and what will you ask of those pleasures?
The good pleasures that God created for our enjoyment and for his glory become bad and dangerous when we ask those pleasures to do for us what they were not intended by God to do. For example, if sex becomes a way by which you establish power, you will do sexual things you should not do, you will use others as objects of your power, and you will leave behind a trail of destruction while you do damage to your own heart. God didn’t give you the gift of sexual pleasure so that you could establish personal power and control. I worked in an institution for troubled boys where that was exactly how sex was used. Same-sex rape was a way that older boys established dominance over younger, weaker boys. It was a dark and violent distortion of the pleasurable gift of human sexuality.
If you use wine, which is not in itself an evil thing, as a means of escape from the pressures of life, you are asking wine to do for you what it was not created to do. If wine is your spiritual refuge, you will drink more than you should and, in so doing, compound your problems, while finding neither solutions nor rest for your heart.
There are two observations that flow out of the questions we are considering. The first is that in each instance people are asking the wrong thing of pleasure. They are asking it to do the one thing it can never do—satisfy their hearts. The pleasures that God created and embedded in the world he made for us were never intended to be where you and I look for identity, inner rest, contentment, or the stability of well-being that every human seeks. Pleasure will never be your savior. There is a loving, capable, and willing Savior who offers you in his grace everything you need. Pleasure can offer you momentary joy. It can remind you of the greater glory of God, but it must never become your functional God-replacement.
The second observation is that in each instance people are asking in the wrong way. The basic approach of people to sex, food, and alcohol puts them in the center of their world. It’s a “what I want and what I think I need” approach to life. It doesn’t submit to the reality that all pleasure belongs to the Lord. It fails to remember that pleasure had its beginning in the mind of God. It ignores the fact that, like everything else God created, he has a specific purpose for pleasure. So this approach fails to live willingly and joyfully inside God’s boundaries.
This way of living descends to the level of “I have a right to be happy and the right to pursue the pleasures that deliver it to me.” No matter the confessional theology of the moment, this God-ignoring way of living inserts me in the center of my world, makes my personal definition of happiness paramount, gives me the right to write my own rules, and completely forgets the eternally satisfying pleasures of the love of God that only grace can deliver. And it denies the reality that asking pleasure to do what it was not intended to do never goes anywhere good. When I live for the short-term buzz of any pleasure, because it cannot give me lasting satisfaction I go back again and again, each time wanting more and better, so finding myself controlled by what I once could control. I look around one day, and I’m addicted and enslaved, and pleasure is not what brought me into bondage. No, sadly I did it to myself when I decided to ask something that was designed to remind me of my Savior to be my savior.
While You’re Celebrating Pleasure, Celebrate the Cross
It’s right to celebrate the goodness of God in giving you sweet pleasures to enjoy, and you should never feel guilty enjoying them as long as you do it within his boundaries and for his glory. It’s wonderful to celebrate the tasty pleasures of food, the stunning beauty of a fine piece of art, the sweet intimacy of sex, or the sound drama of a well-written piece of music. But as you’re celebrating pleasure, don’t forget to celebrate grace.
God’s grace has the power to protect you from asking of pleasure what you should not ask. God’s grace gives you the power to say no to the seductive call of pleasure when it is vital to say no. God’s grace offers you forgiveness when you have failed to do both these things. And God’s grace ushers you into the presence of the One who alone can give you the lasting satisfaction and joy that your heart seeks. So as you’re celebrating the physical pleasures of the created world, take time to celebrate the eternal pleasures of redemption. And remember to celebrate the fact that as God’s child you are heading to a place where pleasure will no longer have any danger attached to it and where your restful heart will not seek what it should not seek.
So when you’ve had a good meal, your bank account has grown, or you’ve enjoyed mutual sexual love with your spouse, don’t feel guilty. God created pleasure for his glory and your joy. He surrounded you with pleasurable things. He gave you the capacity to enjoy them. You shouldn’t feel guilty, but you must remember the tendency of your heart to wander, to replace the Creator with his creation. And remember that a desire for even a good thing becomes a bad thing when it becomes a ruling thing. Be faithful to remind yourself, again and again, that to resist being ruled by what you’ve been welcomed to enjoy, you’ve been given forgiving, empowering, transforming, and delivering grace for the battle. Few things argue more strongly for your need of that grace than your struggle to keep God-given pleasures in their proper place.
Review and Reflect
1. How would you summarize the Eden hermeneutic? How can understanding its meaning aid you in day-to-day life?
2. What is asceticism, and why is it ineffective in keeping us from sexual sin? How do the following passages serve as a corrective?
Ecclesiastes 2:24
1 Timothy 6:17
Hebrews 11:25–26
James 1:17
3. How is pleasure linked to the glory of God, and how can we participate in showcasing this link?
4. How do boundaries enhance rather than diminish pleasure?
5. In what area or areas of life are you prone to addiction, and how can you avoid such enslavement?
Heart Reset
Genesis 2:15–3:24