Lust And Discernment, or Living By Wishing Upon Stars

There is a well-known tendency in humans to alter their perception of reality when faced with an overwhelming desire for something they cannot have, or when faced with a painful problem that cannot be escaped. This tendency can range from daydreaming to paranoia and other dysfunctional “coping mechanisms,” going even as far as living in a constant wish-fulfillment fantasy whose most severe manifestation is psychosis. Those who live in a fantasy consisting of things as they'd like them to be have renounced their ability to discern things as they really are.

Life is difficult. This is not just a quote of M. Scott Peck, a famous American psychiatrist. Actually, the Bible stated this very truth long before Peck was born. Job 5:7 says, “...but man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” Trouble and difficulty are an especial part of the life of the righteous while they are on earth. Psalm 34:19 says, “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.” Matthew 7:13-14 says, “Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter in by it. How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way that leads to life! Few are those who find it.” Acts 14:22 says “...that through many afflictions we must enter into the Kingdom of God.” Romans 5 talks about how trials produce character in those who are receptive to the formation of that character.

This view of life has been the historical view of the Church in all times and all places until recently. It is seen in the writings of people such as Dante Alighieri, thirteenth-century author of the Divine Comedy, and John Bunyan, seventeenth-century author of the Pilgrim's Progress. Such people as these recognized that life is difficult for everyone, and that it is especially difficult for the righteous as they seek to grow into the character of Christ while living in a fallen world. But from the time of the Industrial Revolution and onward, there have been people who have unwisely tried to remove some of the difficulty which the righteous must face on their journey from earth to Heaven. Nathaniel Hawthorne provided a biting commentary on such people in his short story, The Celestial Railroad (Twice-Told Tales collection, published in 1843).

This attempt to smooth the way and widen the road to Heaven really kicked into high gear during the 20^th century – especially during the latter half of that century. Jesus Christ said hard things to His followers and commanded His followers to do hard things. But within the last few decades “scholars” have arisen who have sought to explain away all the hardness and difficulty of the hard sayings of Jesus, in order to make the faith more appealing to a larger audience (or, as some of them would now say, “to reach the unchurched” by allowing them to keep more of their pre-salvation baggage).

One example I saw in my church-finding explorations of the last few years is the proliferation of “Christian” martial-arts clubs and martial-arts “outreaches.” One particular group, the “Smith Family Martial Arts Outreach,” proclaims that “Jesus is our Master.” Their leader is a “Grand Master/Governor of the Eastern U.S. for the Koreja Do Christian Martial Arts Association.” From their website you can learn the plan of salvation, while from their classes you can learn how to kick someone's groin out or collapse their windpipe.

I'm not a professional theologian, so perhaps I can be excused if I find this hard to swallow. All I know is that Matthew 5:38-39, along with other passages, teach Christians to be non-retaliatory. This is why I don't own a gun. Why invest in something if you believe you are prohibited from using it? This applies to learning or teaching martial arts in my opinion. Or maybe there's more to the Sermon on the Mount than I read, and I missed the part that was written in invisible ink? Somebody help me here.

Another thing I have been seeing for a long time is the changing evangelical stance on divorce and re-marriage. Matthew 19 is quite restrictive, especially the part where Jesus says, “I tell you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries her when she is divorced commits adultery.” But through “creative” interpretations of passages in other parts of the Bible, modern-day pastors, teachers and theologians have relaxed restrictions on divorce and re-marriage to such an extent that a greater percentage of evangelicals than non-Christians are opting for divorce (27 percent Christians versus 25 percent non-Christians according to a 2007 study by the Barna Group). Fourteen percent of clergy have been divorced, and most of them have re-married, according to a 2005 Ellison Research study. One pastor teaches that something as intangible as “emotional neglect” is sufficient grounds for divorce! (“What God Has Joined,” David Instone-Brewer, Christianity Today, 5 October 2007).

Someone reading this post may say of me, “Oh, you're just a fundamentalist conservative, and that's why you are criticizing these things.” But I want to remind you that lust always involves a violation of others. In my first post on Lust, I stated that those who indulge in lust always violate someone else, whether it's a violation of God's rights or a violation of their fellow human beings. Those restrictions which have been placed on Christians by the mercy of God are being rationalized away by people who are bent on distorting reality in order to silence their consciences. Lust is not a victimless crime.

Take divorce, for instance. Here I am not just speaking as an “amateur theologian” when I say that lust involves violating others. On the contrary, I actually have “skin in the game,” because I grew up in a broken home. It was no fun witnessing the verbal and physical confrontations between my parents while I and my siblings were little kids. It didn't get any easier when I entered adolescence. In fact, there were nights when the tension hung in the air like cigarette smoke, because I had learned to read the signs of coming trouble. It was no fun not having a dad around during high school. My relationship with my dad is still strained, decades later.

But my parents had an excuse, in that they were not “saved,” though they were churchgoers. What excuse do people have for this kind of behavior when they say that they have come to know Christ and that they believe that their marriage is a picture of the bond between Christ and His Church (Ephesians 5)? I wonder especially how anyone can listen to a so-called pastor or elder or other religious head honcho who has been divorced and remarried.

The problems cited above are examples of the distortion of reality by evangelicals in order to silence their consciences. There is another distortion, which is somewhat related to this first distortion, although it has somewhat different manifestations. This distortion consists of the teaching that God is some giant ATM machine in the sky, and that if we only have the right PIN number, we can have anything we want. Examples of this teaching abound, from the Rev. Creflo Dollar to Joel Osteen to T.D. Jakes. I saw how well that teaching worked when I was growing up and knew a relative who religiously watched Rev. Ike (“You can't lose with the stuff I use!) on Saturday night television. She also sent away for a “prayer cloth” from some “Brother Al.” But to this day she hasn't gotten rich like she wanted to.

This teaching is also to be seen in the peculiar wedding of religion and patriotism promoted by the Religious Right. In their view, America is God's chosen nation, and we can do no wrong. Our material prosperity is an undeniable sign of God's blessing and choosing of this nation. The back-story of that prosperity is ignored – the fact that our standard of living depends on the exploitation of the resources of many poor nations under terms which are not fair to those nations. If this back-story is mentioned at all, it is explained away by what I call a “cultural Calvinism”: the teaching that just as God has chosen some to be saved and some to be damned (at least, according to Calvin), God has also chosen certain nations and races to be prosperous, and He has consigned the rest to be servants of the blessed nations. In their view, any crisis large enough to threaten the United States with serious suffering would automatically mean that the Rapture and the end of the world were not far off, because God would never let us suffer deeply.

But as I have so often said, the world in general, and America in particular, are facing functional, structural limits to growth, material prosperity and increased consumption. America is in a precarious position, with an economy that runs largely on oil at a time when oil supplies are tightening. We also have a debt of over 9 trillion dollars, and this debt is owned by foreign countries. Our financial system is going into shock due to bad government policies and the pillage of this country by the rich. We have made a mess of the environment. I think we'd better start facing our impending suffering as adults, rather than hiding under the pillows like children.

Regarding the end of the world, the Good Book itself says that “no man knows the day or hour.” I am a Christian; therefore, my prayer is Maranatha! But I know that the adult thing to do is to continue to live my life day to day with the expectation that on the next day I'll have to do it all again. God has not promised to rescue this nation from all difficulty. After all, just in the last century we went through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and the Cold War, and the world didn't end. God has not promised to rescue us from taking responsibility for our actions.

I have no interest in returning to a strict, legalistic church. But if I am going to be part of a church, it must at least not water down the Faith. It must not try to sweep me off of the straight and narrow into a seat on some “celestial railroad” which doesn't actually quite get to Heaven after all. We need to live in this world with the understanding that a thing isn't true or right just because we lust for it.

Note: All Scriptures are quoted from the World English Bible (http://www.ebible.org/web/), a public domain translation. No royalties are owed to anyone for its use, and it may be freely quoted in all settings, both public and private.