Lust and Limits

I have said before that lust — not the hearty, Anglo Saxon kind — is inherently idolatrous. Lust is that which seeks to get from a finite thing what only the infinite can provide. That being the case, the natural enemy of lust would be finite limits.

The limits may vary, but limits are always the enemy. The limit may be found in the number of partners, the sex of the partner, the persona of the partner, the willingness of the partner, or the mere fact of a partner, but when the natural world, or God’s Word, says “thus far, and no farther,” lust will always respond in some kind of revolt. That is what lust does because that is what lust is.

“Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied” (Prov. 27:20).

This is the very nature of the beast.

Now when Christians have failed to learn the lesson that Paul enjoins with regard to sexual pleasure in marriage, the end result is that we find ourselves in an oxymoronic position. Paul says that we are supposed to learn how to possess our vessel in sanctification and honor, and not in passionate lust like the heathen (1 Thess. 4:5). But if we have accepted the logic of “no limits” within the confines of the marriage bed, which is obviously a limit, then it is just a matter of time before the thing is going to come apart under the strain.

At the very least, it is going to leave us in a place where we have difficulty answering the jibes of homosexual marriage advocates, who want to know what the key difference between their kind of fellatio and ours might be. They want to say that we have drawn the lines in arbitrary places, and if we have bought into a smaller version of the same reigning logic of “personal passion that justifies itself,” the argument appears to us to be valid. It isn’t, but it appears that way because we have surreptitiously adopted one of their premises.

So the real issue is our need to learn a glad acceptance of natural limits. As we consider what sins we should be confessing in the evangelical world, the sins that brought us to our culture’s current impasse in the public understanding of sexuality, one place to start might be the whee! approach to sexuality that was mainstreamed in the evangelical world three or four decades ago. Please note that I am not talking about sane and responsible teaching about sex, or instruction that embraces sexual pleasure as a gift from God, or anything like that. There have been healthy and responsible teachers, but there have also been more than a few who have acted like junior high boys put in charge of a sex ed class. So I am talking about attitude and demeanor, revealed by their attitude towards limits. I am thinking of the smirk that hides behind such responsible teaching, and which pushes (no surprise) the limits.

But limits are glorious. They are . . . they are . . . oh, let Chesterton say it.

“I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion’s) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.”

So a man who wants the pleasures that a harem of 23rd century sexbots could give him is a man who aspires to the high office of dolt. He wants what cannot be, and when he has finally toppled the last limit in front of him, he discovers that it was a protective rail that was keeping him from pitching headlong into the outer darkness — a place with no edge, no shore, no boundary, no end . . . no limits.