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What is so sacred about sex? – Part 2

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This continues from part 1…..

In part one of this article, we discussed the sexual mood of our present culture and whether or not as human beings, we are the owners of our own bodies and minds. We ended on the note that if it is the case that we have been made or created by someone else for his own purposes, then surely we would have a lot more obligations than we would have if we only belonged to ourselves. But we also noted that, this is a big “IF” because some people do not believe (or at least they live as if they don’t believe) that there is any Being higher than ourselves, to whom we must be responsible. Is it reasonable to believe that an actual Being exists who is responsible for our existence and to whom we might be accountable to, regarding our sexual lives? If there is the possibility for such a Being to exist, why would he be interested in what we do with our bodies sexually?

For starters, let us be brutally honest with ourselves: everything in this world – from ourselves to the flowers to the stars to sea to animals etc – points to the fact that some sort of careful designing has gone into the creation of our world and of ourselves, doesn’t it? We often take it for granted that this physical world of ours is structured the way it is. But mathematically speaking, the probability of this world happening by a mindless random or unordered process is incredibly small. According to Astrophysicist Hugh Ross’ conservative calculation, the chance of a planet like ours existing in the universe is about 1 in a trillion billion billion (i.e. 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 in 10 raised to the power 30).

 Scientists are discovering that had even a single feature of our universe been just a little bit different, the stars, galaxies and human life would not exist. Let us briefly look at a few amazing scientific discoveries before we go on. The distance from the earth to the sun is just right. Why? Even a small change of around 2% and all life would cease. If the earth was too near the sun, water would evaporate. If it was too far from the sun, its coldness level would not support life. In fact, even the rotation speed of the earth is just right; if it was too slow, the temperature differences between day and night would be too extreme, and if it was too fast the wind speeds would be catastrophic. Furthermore, if the ratio of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces had differed by about one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion (i.e. 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000), then stars such as the Sun, which are capable of supporting life, could not exist. Do you see any picture emerging?

The delicate balance of the elements in our universe, to use the illustration of the theoretical physicist Paul Davies, is like the accuracy level that a marksman needs in order to hit a coin twenty billion light years away on the other side of the observable universe. [A light year is the speed travelled by light in one year. And light, by the way, has the fastest travelling speed in our universe]. In fact it has been noted by some researchers that the earth is placed precisely in a part of the universe that is congenial to scientific studies in cosmology, galactic astronomy, stellar astrophysics and geophysics. That is, if our earth had been positioned in a part of the universe with too much starlight, we could not have been able to see into deep space. There are more than 3000 galaxies in the observable universe, each containing millions to trillions of stars – many being bigger than the earth.

Further, Oxford mathematician John Lennox in his book, ‘God’s undertaker: has Science buried God?’, notes that the distinguished mathematician and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, admitted that his atheism was shaken profoundly when he discovered the degree of fine-tuning needed between the nuclear ground state energy levels in order for carbon to be formed either by a combination of three helium nuclei, or by a combination of nuclei of helium and beryllium. (And for the record, life cannot exist on earth without an abundant supply of carbon). Sir Hoyle’s discovery, according to Lennox, led him to remark that, “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology,” and that “there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about.” Interesting isn’t it? And let us not forget the issue of the human DNA – the molecule containing coded instructions for the cells in the body. A group of scientists have recently estimated that the adult body contains about 37.2 trillion cells, each containing DNA. Each person’s complete DNA is unique; the exception being identical twins. The instructions are in what is called Genetic language and they are detailed, complex and specific. These instructions include for example, which cells should grow and when, which cells should die and when, which cells should make hair and what colour it should be.  If all this sounds too technical, then let me make it simple: the scientific discoveries are pointing in the direction where it is highly unlikely that an intelligent Being did not plan and execute the creation of this whole skilfully crafted universe, including human beings like us.

What is my point with all this information? It is this: if conditions in this universe, and the nature of our human bodies, are the way they are – so delicately precision-tuned – and if human beings like us posses the kind of intelligence we posses, even to study them, then it is very reasonable to (and unreasonable not to) suppose that a more intelligent Being, (1) is out there, (2) is the cause of our beings and (3) is interested in our lives. Now if we relate this thought to Mr. Lewis’ thoughts about moral duties (discussed in part one of this article), we can say with a fair degree of confidence that the whole of mankind must have a Landlord. Our bodies, strictly speaking, are not ours. Our Landlord is this Intelligent Being who created this world and everything in it. Religious folks simply call him, God. Since this God is the cause of our intricately designed bodies and existence, it is not mind-boggling that any “Dos and Don’ts” on how we use our bodies should come from him.

 

A Curious Worldview

 In his speech to the members of the city council of Athens, Paul the apostle of Christ tried to give them a new view of God, saying, “God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands.” (Acts 17:24 GNB) In a city so used to building alters and shrines for every imaginable god, this news was however unimaginable. But to the people in the city of Corinth (a city well-known for its immorality), who became believers in Jesus Christ, Paul wrote them a letter in which he explained to them the sacredness of their bodies: “…the body is not to be used for sexual immorality, but to serve the Lord, and the Lord provides for the body. God raised the Lord [i.e. Jesus] from death and will also raise us by his power. … Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and who was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourselves but to God; he bought you for a price. So use your bodies for God’s glory.” (1 Cor. 6: 13,14, 19,20 GNB). Dr Ravi Zacharias, a Christian philosopher, appropriately explains that, “the Christian walks with God, not to God. We no longer go to the temple to worship. Rather we go with our temples to worship.” The body of a believer in Christ, rather than a church building, is the holy dwelling place of God and must be treated as “holy grounds.” Thus what this person wears, or touches, or says, or looks at or reads or listens to must uphold God’s holiness.

So much for the Christian “bodies”! What bearing does this worldview have on those who do not subscribe to it? The non-Christian is a prospective temple of God. God wants to live in this person. The Christian explanation for human existence in general is that God made us and not only that, but also that he made us all for himself (Col. 1:16) and he made us in such a way that only in union with him can our greatest good be had (John 10:10). Sin does not allow this to happen. But God became man in Jesus Christ, lived uprightly among us, identified with our human weaknesses, paid for our sins in his death and rose up and wants to live in us to empower us to live as we ought to. Like C. S. Lewis once observed, God invented us in a certain sense like how a man invents an engine. And when a car is made to run of gasoline, it would not run properly on anything else. In this same sense God made the “human machine,” as Lewis puts it, to run on himself.

The fuel we need in order to function the way he designed us is God himself and the food we need to keep our souls spiritually alive is God himself. We cannot expect to function properly on our own terms. Sexual fulfillment (a major hunger of our generation) with its proper joy, peace and security does not come through the pulling down of God’s boundaries. Without God at the centre of a sexual relationship, our much desired real and secure intimacy which we often believe can be found in sexual intercourse will prove elusive. Any person, Christian or not, who tries to outsmart God on this front will soon find that the last laugh is always God’s, not ours; restlessness, emptiness, meaninglessness, broken trust, guilt and shame will ultimately come resting at our door steps. There is definitely pleasure in sin but it is fleeting. Kenyan Christian Apologist, John Njoroge, insightfully says that, “Trying to meet our real needs without God is like trying to satisfy our thirst with salty water: the more we drink, the thirstier we become.  This is a sure path to various sorts of addictions.”

Even in our limited wisdom, we realize that playing our cherished game of football without any rules does not make it really enjoyable. So we have created rules, in all their imperfections. Even with the rules in place, some people hurt others and get hurt themselves; they offend and get offended during the course of the game. Can you imagine the unbridled chaos that would exist if there were no clear rules? In the same way, we are living in an increasing sexually chaotic culture today because we are desperately throwing off God’s moral restraints: husbands and wives are sleeping with people other than their spouses, young unmarried boys and girls are “training” themselves in the act of sex yet ironically the idea of marriage is appearing uncomfortable to them because of its widely acknowledged moral limitations. God has provided a framework within which sex can be properly enjoyed physically, emotionally and spiritually, and it is not outside marriage.

 In God’s scheme of things, according to Christian teachings, you do not need to be experienced in sex before marriage. This is because you have the whole of your married life to get to know your spouse’s body (God’s gift to you) as your bodies lock and your spirits mesh in sexual intercourse before God. With each encounter you get to know the body of your spouse even better to the glory of God. And here is the rich wisdom of the Christian faith (which may seem foolish on the face of it): Any person who genuinely relies on Jesus Christ before his marriage and also during his marriage will be given the grace and spiritual strength to stay the course of marriage should he find out that he has ended up with a sexually defective spouse. Tough to take in, I know, but I cannot make this truth any more appealing than it sounds right now in a time like ours. Marriage is not a selfish enterprise, where if you are not having a sexually exciting life everything else must come crushing down for everyone in it. Rather it is essentially a self-giving worship of God as you commit yourself exclusively to that one person, to love, to cherish and to seek the good of this person always.

 The Christian scriptures teach that all who trust in God will not be disappointed, ultimately. But break God’s precepts on sex (or on any other issue of life) and you can be sure that you will not only separate yourself from God and into a dark loneliness of the soul but you will also hurt yourself and others. Let us be clear: the idea that God is an unloving and unfeeling Judge up there who is simply watching down to see who has gone even slightly wrong so that he may swiftly punish him, is wrong. God wants to reconcile us back to himself. This is the Christian message to the world. God’s precepts in the Bible are intended to facilitate our happiness and not to stifle it. A parent sternly warns her child to steer clear of fire not because she wants to make the child miserable but because she wants to prevent the child from getting hurt or even dying. How can a child enjoy life when he is hurt or dead? If we separate ourselves spiritually from God (a spiritual death), through sin, how can we expect to receive God’s best? God knows the limits within which our best can be had. Stolen waters are not as sweet as we want to believe. Many people may look happy on the outside but on the inside they may be empty, restless, bitter and troubled because they have violated God in this area of sex.

Conclusion

We were made for God and if we spend ourselves in illegitimate pleasures, we will only come away broken and impoverished in our souls (and perhaps with physical scars too). No one enriches his soul by being sexually immoral. Rather we bankrupt ourselves spiritually; we feel the emptiness, restlessness of the soul, the guilt and shame of sin because we have divorced ourselves from God, who is our ultimate good. A more serious side to sexual immorality is that in the end, we must give account of our lives to the God. Some people realize this quicker than others but the important thing is that we are willing to take the necessary steps back to God through the path he has provided – faith in his Son, Jesus Christ. And to be clear, faith in Jesus Christ is not mere intellectual belief in Jesus as Lord but includes a willful commitment to live the whole of one’s life in reverence of him and his teachings. Christ offers forgiveness and rebirth even to the one who has wrecked himself or herself sexually yet is willing to repent. Are you a mess, sexually? Jesus gives hope and strength to those seeking to please God in their sexual lives.

The Human Condition: Are We Good by Nature?

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“Man is essentially good but it is society that corrupts him.” This idea for many is inarguable but still for many others it evokes irony, confusion and doubt. We look around and see so much evil – from little lies to murders – yet there is also no denying that men at one time or another do acts of goodness to their fellows. But are these good deeds enough to warrant our thinking that we are good people through and through? In the ninth stanza of Steve Turner’s satirical poem, Creed,  concerning the modern mindset in the West, he says this:

 We believe that man is essentially good.

It’s only his behaviour that lets him down.

This is the fault of society.

Society is the fault of conditions.

Conditions are the fault of society.

Question: Who makes up society? Man. Who proposes those evil ideas of ethnic cleansing, lying about company profits, racial superiority and suchlike? Man. And I am immediately called to attention by the following profound statement which has been attributed to a research done many years ago by the Minnesota Crime Commission:

“Every child starts life as a little savage. He is completely selfish and self-centred. He wants what he wants when he wants it – his feeding bottle, his mother’s attention, his playmate’s toy, his uncle’s watch. Deny him these once and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness which would be murderous were he not so helpless. He is in fact dirty. He has no morals, no knowledge, no skills. Every child then is born delinquent. And if permitted to continue in this self-centred world of his infancy, given free reign over his impulsive actions, every child then would grow up a criminal; a thief, a rapist or a killer.”

The Christian scripture is even more to the point when it says that the human heart is wicked and only God can understand it (Jeremiah 17:9). One author, describing his visit to the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland, where Adolf Hitler sought to exterminate the Jews, recalls seeing Hitler’s words that hung on a wall saying: “I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality … We will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence – imperious, relentless and cruel.” Quite ruthless!

Admittedly for many of us, Hitler is an exceptionally evil man. But we are also reminded of the tragedies in Kosovo and Rwanda, Sierra Leone (where even babies’ arms were chopped off) and Liberia; in these places the world witnessed unimaginable human cruelty – mass killings mingled with rape cases. But let us come home to Ghana and to less gruesome pictures of evil, albeit still symptoms of human depravity. Recent atmosphere in the political arena has given most Ghanaians reason to protest against the coarse verbiage that politicians use against each other. Most of these politicians are educated and they also know our culture’s sense of right and wrong but this has not stopped them from being insulting to each other. Further, let us look at some of the things which we consider normal in our society today: In business circles, a promise is not enough we need a contract. (We may argue that this is necessary because of forgetfulness but it is also often the case that we want to insure against any sneaky behaviour from the other party). We build houses and make doors but they are not enough, we need to lock and bolt them, and sometimes even employ security men in addition. When travelling on long journey buses and aeroplanes, we buy tickets but this is not enough, the tickets must be inspected and collected before we board. Making laws is not enough, we need the police to enforce them (and in some cases even the police need to be policed). All these things, although so familiar to us, are due to our sinful nature. We cannot trust each other. We need protection from one another. So going back to my initial observation that society consist of man, the following question becomes vital: if man makes up society and society corrupts man then where are we getting this idea that man is by nature good?

There is sometimes the idea that, “Oh if only we educate people and give them employable skills and also educate them in ethics and moral values, our social vices will be curbed.” But this misses the point! D. L. Moody, the famed American preacher (1837 – 1899) is credited with the humorous observation that if a man is stealing nuts and bolts from a railway track and you send him to school for formal education, at the end of his education he will steal the whole railway track. The point is this: man’s fundamental problem is not a lack of information or education on how to be ethical or moral. The problem is that our hearts are diseased, if not twisted. Thus, giving a man the best education that money can buy while his sick heart, with all its twisted desires, has not been healed is at best a joke. Fundamentally, we lack the power to do what we know to be right and to do this consistently.

Admittedly we sometimes do good deeds and also find others doing good in our society. Thus there is the question: how is this possible if we indeed are not good people by nature? Since man is the creature of an infinitely good and holy God, there are times when his ways and culture may mirror the beautiful and good attributes of God – such as mercy, charity, honesty, unity etc. But because man is fallen (resulting from the sin in the garden of Eden), all of our ways are tainted with sin. The Bible tells us that man was created in God’s image. Think of man’s condition as a mirror that has fallen and been cracked all over. The image you would see of yourself in such a mirror will be a distorted one. God’s image in man‘s current state is a distorted one . So yes, men do good deeds but this is not because they are naturally pure at heart.  We are like clocks that do not work. Yet even a clock that is not working will show the correct time twice a day, won’t it? But this does not mean it is keeping time. Thus our doing good deeds is not evidence that we are good (i.e. our clocks are functioning well). Rather we are dead spiritually. In theological verbiage, we are fallen – we are separated from God. It is often the case that even what seems like a pure gesture of goodness has some selfish goals – self validation, or emotional satisfaction – rather than for the sake of pure goodness. We often lack that sense of transcendent goodness (the goodness from God’s own person and character) – that something is good, whether or not I or those around me approve of it.

Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, who described to himself as the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15) also explained our human struggle of knowing what is good and yet not being able to do it in these words:

“I know that good does not live in me – that is in my human nature. For even though the desire to do good is in me, I am not able to do it. I don’t do the good I want to do; instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do. … My inner being delights in the law of God. But I see a different law at work in my body – a law that fights against the law which my mind approves of. It makes me a prisoner to the law of sin which is at work in my body. What an unhappy man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death? Thanks be to God who does this through our Lord Jesus Christ!” Romans 7: 18-19, 22-25

In a day when the prevailing mindset says that man is good at heart but society is to blame for his flaws, the words of Jesus Christ come echoing through the centuries in sharp contrast: “… from your heart”, says Jesus Christ, “come the evil ideas which lead you to kill, commit adultery, and do other immoral things; to rob, lie, and slander others…” Matthew 15:19. But Jesus comes to us not just with wise teachings and profound observations about human nature; he also gives us new hearts – hearts that beat after God’s own heart –  a new view of God, the world and ourselves and also through his Holy Spirit he gives us the enabling power to do what we know to be right. This is where Jesus Christ stands unrivalled among the founders of all the world religions. Rather than only pointing you to some enlightening teachings and deep truths, He, by his power transforms selfish lives into selfless ones. This is what Christians call the new birth (i.e. born again) – our natural desires and inclinations begin on a journey of transformation: Our desire for power turns into a love for humility and service. We begin to exalt commitment over feelings, forgiveness over anger, patience over shortcuts, confession over cover-up and sacrifice over comfort. And a powerful example is given us in the life of the one who called himself ‘the chief of sinners’; he once persecuted Jesus’ followers, but after having bowed to the Lordship of Jesus, Paul declares to the Church in Philipi that, “All I want is to know Christ and to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings and become like him in his death, in the hope that I myself will be raised from death to life.” Philippians 3:10-11. Not only did he confess it, he lived it and it ultimately led to his execution.

In the Christian worldview being good or doing all the good things is not what will earn you a place in God’s eternal Kingdom. It is your acting faith in the finished work of Jesus on the Cross – that his death pays for your sins and where your life into the future manifests this belief. Indeed, when a Jew once came to Jesus saying “Good Teacher, what must I do to receive eternal life?” Jesus responds saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” – Mark 10:17-18. So, if no one is good except God and the situation is such that only good people will be going to heaven then who really is qualified for heaven? No one! But thanks be to God who makes entry into heaven possible for us by means of our faith in Jesus Christ . This is why all the religions and belief systems where one has to do good things to earn a place in heaven miss the real issue. Man cannot be transcendently good on his own to please God. At best a man may be able to abide by his own definitions of goodness (and ofcourse these definitions often change to suit him) but this is not the goodness God seems interested in. Without Jesus Christ, there is really no hope for mankind in having our hearts changed and in pleasing God.

** All Bible quotations have been taken from the Good News Bible – Second edition © 1994.