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What's the Big
Deal About Sex, Part 2
by
Art Hobba
(an
excerpt for
Called to War)
It's All About Worship
For Jesus, He was at an all time acme of suffering...and He
was near death. Denying His body of food for forty days, His
body had exhausted its resources of body fat, beginning days
earlier to digest the protein of muscle tissue. Medical science
tells us that the return of hunger at this time in the
starvation cycle is ravaging...overpowering all other emotions,
including the highest peaks of any other kind of human or desire
passion. In addition, Jesus had been exposed to the searing heat
of the desert sun and chill of the desert night to further sap
his strength.
This is when the devil came and tempted him, seeking to
systematically wear him down even further. Look at his strategy.
First, he waited until Jesus was at the end of His physical
strength...at an all-time low. The enemy of our souls has
learned about how you and I are wired pretty well over thousands
of years of practice. And he is as smart a coward as there ever
was. Here, he waited until Jesus' desire for food had increased
to an almost unbearable level and then, attempting to engage
Jesus' imagination, crafted for Him the fantasy of the stones
around him becoming fresh loaves of warm bread, maybe drawn from
his mother's hearth and spread upon the table. This was an easy
way to satisfy His deepest need right at His fingertips! Using
the spoken Word of God as his defense, the would-be killing blow
was parried back into the Tempter's face as He refused to take
the bait.
Next, in Christ's state of near delirium came the words
designed to get Jesus to tempt His Father by casting himself
down from the pinnacle of the temple. After all, the serpents
voice may have gone on, God owed him one. Had He not said "No"
to sin many times...and remember, it was the Holy Spirit's fault
(the devil might whisper) He was out there dying all alone! If
Jesus cast himself down, He could force God's hand to rescue him
from this excruciatingly horrible trial. My Father, God, was
supposed to be a good God, right? He was supposed to take care
of me...especially me, His only Son. Satan may have
brought these thoughts to Jesus as well; "If you die in the
fall, you would at least be out of your misery and, probably,
translated back into your Fathers presence...maybe back to the
good old days when you (I?) enjoyed complete jurisdiction over
all of creation and had the applause and adoration of Angels.
Again, Jesus the man...the Living Word of God employed the Word
of God to parry the cattle prod of Satan. "It is also
written...Do not put the Lord God to the test." The Devil
must have felt the shock of that blow all the way down to his
bones!
But now our Enemy reveals his ultimate plan. Questions
one and two were just primers to wear down the Son of Man. "If
you will worship me, I will give you all of these kingdoms of
the earth." The ultimate goal here of Satan was to
receive worship from the Son of God. He sought worship in
the heavens eons ago and he sought it from our Lord there in the
desert.
No temptation has seized you except what is common to man.
And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what
you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a
way out so that you can stand up under it.
In Judges 6, God instructed Gideon to violently chop down the
Asherah pole. Asherah was the primary female deity of the
Canaanite pantheon and was worshipped alongside of Baal (her
male consort) with rites that included a combination of child
sacrifice and orgiastic assemblies. Gideon was instructed to
"cut down" the Asherah totem and then use it as kindling and
fuel for a new altar of worship to the true God, Yahweh.
Today, as adopted, sons of God, Satan targets Christian men
by seeking to leverage our smut filled entertainment and
marketing milieu with sensuality...and he has the same ultimate
goal for you and me as he did with Jesus...to destroy everything
good in your life and take away the possibility for you to find
your created for purpose as a disciple of Christ. If he can
bring us to that hiding place, where no one else can see, where
we are alone with our fantasies, and watch us bow our souls in
worship to Asherah, then he has won the day. Demonic evil
spirits triumph when we masturbate while lustful images play in
our minds, or give over to even more outward expressions of
harmful sexual behavior. The devil delights as he can bring
Christian men to embrace the burning coals of illicit lust into
our breasts,' searing our consciences and relegating us to hours
or days of remorse and the feeling of alienation from our loving
Creator and Savior.
If Jesus would have turned the stones to bread in His
intensified and ravenous appetite for food...if He would have
taken it into His own hands and satisfied His hunger, He would
have been disqualified to go to the cross as our substitute. The
"game saving" verse written above, where Jesus was tempted as we
are correlates to us Christian men today. His struggle with
hunger in the desert of self-denial exceeds any sensual
temptation imaginable by any man and now He is able to succor us
and help us "stand up" under it.
Sinning through sexual impurity, whether you worship as a
catholic man, evangelical man or charismatic man, is the most
powerful strategy the enemy has because it uniquely accomplishes
five things other sins do not:
1. It causes a decline in our desire for our wives, or even
over time to have children with them. If you are single, there
your will experience a decreased desire to wait for the partner
of your dreams. Our visceral sense of loneliness, which we may
have been partly trying to diminish by pornography or
fornication, is increased not decreased.
2. It burns us. We feel an immediate separation
from our relationship with the Father after we give place to
sin. How could he want to be with me now? God is robbed of true
open worship for a season...or longer, and we are robbed of the
strengthening joy and communion of the Lord, with the beauty of
His holiness. The secondary effect of this burning is that our
conscience can become ?seared as with a hot iron.? With frequent
enough cycles of sin, we can actually lose our sense of touch in
that part of our soul that yearns for God. After a too-long
season of habitual sin, the once pure, precious soul before God
can become defiled, shipwrecked and even condemned to the
lostness of having once been in sweet fellowship with the Holy
Spirit...now an outcast, disengaged and disinherited from
experiencing life in the Kingdom of God. Where does one cross
the line? We must fear God and treasure His mercy enough to
never have to tread that dark boundary.
"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot
kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both
soul and body in hell." --Jesus to the Twelve in Matthew
10:28
3. As transparent men before God, we are living temples
of His Holy Spirit. Sexual impurity pollutes His temple (and
thus His property). Plus, as living members of one body, the
church, it links our participation in Asherah's rites to those
to whom we relate to in the church, to defilement. Paul makes it
clear when he writes in 1 Corinthians 6:12:20:
Freedom, therefore, is a decision for men and women alike. Do
we, by faith, leverage the authority conveyed to us in
Christ...earned when He exchanged His perfection for our
pollution and then rose from the dead and conquered sin in the
flesh? Or, are we summarily swept downstream into the secret
practices of much of what became the practices in the villages
of ancient Israel?
Art Hobba is the Founder of
Core 300 a 501c3 men's
ministry dedicated to the freedom of Christian men, and the
author of the new book,
Called to War: Out of the Stands...Into the Arena.
Respond to this and other articles at
Art's blog. |
