By: Shane James O’Neill
Deuteronomy 7:3-4
Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods …
Loving My Lust
Many times in the past I told myself that pornography and promiscuous interaction was ok because the action only affected me. If I didn’t see my actions hurting anyone else then I could justify that my actions were permissible. That logic allowed me to hide away and watch pornography and pursue one night stands because, after all, no one was getting hurt. And really, if something I did in private was the biggest sin in my life then I thought I was doing pretty ok.
I was sold on the lie that living loose with my sexuality was an isolated sin and that it didn’t impact other areas of my life.
Loving the Forbidden
In Deuteronomy 7 God commands the Israelites not to intermarry with people from other nations. Why? Because those people served other gods and every area of an Israelite’s life would be influenced by that single forbidden relationship. A man attaching himself to a woman comes with implications. By being intimate in one area of their lives then every area of their lives would be impacted.
Long before science could bear witness, God knew the influential power of sexual intimacy. In 1 Kings 11, we find out why Israel was torn apart as God’s chosen nation. It was because Solomon took wives from other nations. What happened in Solomon’s bedchambers washed over the entirety of Israel and changed their worship of God, their families, their view of human value, and their understanding of covenant and intimacy.
By sexually embracing the forbidden woman, the person was endangered, their family was compromised, and the nation was rent apart.
A Cancerous lOve
I say this next part with trepidation because I’ve seen this play out in my life, in my own soul:
What you do late at night, when no one can see, when no one else is involved, is changing you. Slowly, like stage 1 cancer that has taken root in the soul, your sexual justification is developing into a stage 2 and stage 3 disease, as it spreads not just to other areas of your heart, but into other areas of your life. It has already started with embracing a lie and teaching your mind to believe lies. As you practice using others for your own satisfaction you can’t help but see people differently. You proclaim a morality that you don’t live, you believe in the light yet live in the dark. Marriage won’t save you, having kids won’t save you, growing up won’t save you, learning more won’t save you. Already your sin is becoming terminal.
At Proven Men, we weep with men who are twice our age, men at the end of their lives, looking back and seeing a mountain of ash. Like Solomon, and like me and you, they allowed a foreign woman into their life. A typographical, digital, or actual mistress who promised private satisfaction but she consumed minds, affections, hours, days, and years, longings, relationships, families, and souls. She is never satisfied. She uses the sacred as fuel and burns it all to ash.
Lust doesn’t just affect you. Why? Because you don’t just affect you. There are people you love, hopes that you have, communities that you are a part of. And just as Israel was undone by bringing a foreign love into their nation so we are undone by chasing the foreign love of lust. The foreign women of lust meets you in secret, and in secret, she will leave you empty and hollow. She hates the people you love, she hates the people who love you, she hates when you’re not with her. She hates you.
A Burning Love
I need a God who knows how ugly my cancer ridden soul is. The cross is by far the ugliest scene in human history. The most dignified and beautiful Being in all of creation, the Truth of life, is lied to, shamed, brutalized, and hung naked on a cross-wooden pike for all of the world to see. He was made ugly so that He could know your damaged, ugly soul. He stepped into the light, humiliated so that He could show you how to step into the light with your humiliation. Jesus’ soul cried out in dark, hollow, lonely, exhaustion so that He could intimately know you in your dark, lonely, hollow, exhaustion.
We don’t need to bow to the powers of lust and shame anymore. Jesus has used His own blood to carve out a path through your sin. He was killed by the thing that is killing your soul. Then, three days later, He resurrected over the darkest forces of this world. He resurrected over the powers of loneliness, over shame, humiliation, lust, and death.
He is Lord.
Wouldn’t you rather know that now rather than when the cancer has eaten away your life? There is resurrection hope, but the way is through the burning crucible of the cross.
Follow Jesus and crucify your shame, your despair, your loneliness, your pride, and lust. Brother, it is so much better than watching your world burn away.
Stop giving yourself to the foreign woman who hates you and start giving yourself to the God who loves you and gave up His life to save you.
Deuteronomy 7:5
“This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.”
It’s time to burn pornography to the ground in the burning love of the cross.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for ProvenMen Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.