BROKEN: Body & Soul (recap)

[Read Genesis 3:1-16]

Last week we spent the entire sermon recapping some of the important aspects of creation that we need to consider when talking about human sexuality. It’s always important to begin with creation because that’s the way God designed things to work and God called them good. So, those creational realities need to function as guides for us as we try to understand our sexuality in this world.

It’s also really important to remember that living according to God’s creational design means living according to reality. And trying to live in ways that are contrary to reality and God’s design always end up leading to death and destruction. It never works out well in the end. 

I was teaching this to a group of teenagers at this past Winter Retreat. At some point during the weekend, one of the teenagers asked if they could borrow a pen from me. Not thinking much about it, I gave them a pen from my backpack. A few minutes later they came back to me with a destroyed pen. When I asked what they did to my pen, they ashamedly confessed that they tried to use it as a drumstick to play the drums. I asked, “How’d that work out for you?” Not well…because you were trying to use the pen for something that it wasn’t designed for and that doesn’t work out well. The same thing applies to every aspect of our life—which includes our sexuality. 

So, last week we recapped three aspects of how God created us to live in this world. God created us Body and Soul and we need to make sure we don’t try to disconnect these or emphasize one over the other. God created us to be in relationship with Him and other people and we need to make sure we have these relationships in the right places and priorities. Finally, we talked about how God has created us with desire and how desire is not necessarily a bad thing—it’s actually good and beautiful when our desires are in the right places. 

Today, I have the opportunity to show you how sin has caused damage to every single one of those creational realities. Fun, eh? When Sin entered the world, it infected and broke every aspect of creation. Sin caused problems with our bodies and souls. Sin caused problems with our relationship between God and others. Sin causes problems with our desires. Everything is messed up because of sin. 

Yet, sin messes things up in a unique way. Sin doesn’t come into our lives like a Disney villain—looking dark, moody, and evil. That’s not how it works. It’s much more subtle than that. Sin comes into our lives and turns good things into bad things. Often sin does this by amplification. 

Let me give a couple brief examples of this. Last week I mentioned how God created food so that it tasted and looked good because he wanted us to desire food. However, sin comes in and corrupts those desires. It causes us to desire food beyond its creational design. We begin to desire food as a way to prevent boredom or comfort sadness. But guess what? It wasn’t created for those purposes, so it doesn’t provide for those needs. Then what happens? Things amplify. Since we’re not receiving the comfort we need through the food, we try harder and eat more. And this death spiral happens because sin took something that was good—a desire for food—and turned it into something that was bad. That’s the essence of sin and it’s corrupting every part of our creational existence. 

We see right away how sin has affected our Bodies and Souls. God warned Adam in the Garden, “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”” (Genesis 2:16–17, ESV). Pay attention to that very last line. You shall surely die. Now, of course, people have wondered from the beginning why Adam and Eve didn’t drop dead on the spot when they ate from the tree. 

Some have speculated that they died spiritually in that moment—which isn’t necessarily wrong—however, I think there’s a couple things going on. I think they died spiritually in that moment, but I also think God is showing grace and mercy to Adam and Eve in that moment. However, that grace and mercy doesn’t mean they will never physically die. It only means their death wasn’t immediate. There still were consequences to their sinful actions. They would still die. And, as we read through the rest of Genesis, what’s the most commonly repeated line? Every genealogy throughout Genesis repeatedly says, “…and he DIED.” It’s a repeated reminder to God’s people of the consequences of their sin. They die. That’s also why we read this passage in Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death…” (Romans 6:23, ESV). That’s what God told Adam in the garden. If you sin, you will earn death. That’s how sin works. 

So, that’s an obvious impact of sin on our bodies and souls. But, we also see how sin affects other parts of our body and soul. Listen to what God tells Adam and Eve after their sin: “To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing”…And to Adam he said, “…cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”” (Genesis 3:16–19, ESV). Pain entered the world through sin as well. And, if you think about it, pain is just a smaller form of death. Pain will impact every part of our existence. It will impact our child birth and work and eventually will result in death. 

All of this reminds us of a basic truth that sin has affected our bodies. Because of sin, our bodies don’t work the way they were designed. They break down, as some of you are painfully aware. Our muscles get tight and sore. We break bones. Our digestive systems don’t always work. Our hormones can get out of whack. All of this is because sin has infected our bodies and caused a bunch of problems. 

We also see how sin has caused a bunch of problems in our relationships. Look at the way Adam and Eve respond in the garden: “And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” (Genesis 3:8, ESV). So, last week I talked about how we’ve been created to have this fundamental relationship with God, but now that sin has entered the world, that fundamental relationship has been disrupted. Adam and Eve are hiding from him because there’s a separation between them and God. 

We also see that sin causes a bunch of problems in our relationships with other people. The obvious picture of this is the story of Cain and Abel—the very next story after Adam and Eve’s sin. What happens? Cain doesn’t like the way God treated him, so he kills his brother, Abel. That’s a pretty clear picture of relationships being messed up because of sin in the world. 

But we also see this relational tension between Adam and Eve. When God tells them the consequences of their sinful actions, he says this to Eve: “To the woman he said, “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16, ESV). There’s going to be tension in this fundamental relationship between husband and wife. 

I once heard someone unhelpfully describe the relationship between husband and wife as being “all about power.” They said that each person in the relationship was always trying to position themselves in a position of power over the other one. That’s not the way God designed it to work. This power-struggle and the power-plays between husband and wife are only there because sin has infected our relationships and caused a big mess. 

So, sin has caused a mess in our bodies and our souls, and sin has caused a big mess in our relationship with God and with other people. Sin has also caused a big mess with our desires. And—pun intended—this really gets to the heart of the matter. All sin—at its core—is about wrong desires. Our sinful actions are only symptoms of a deeper illness—our sinful desires. 

We even get a glimpse of this in the garden, when Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Remember what I said about the way God created the trees pleasant to the eyes and good for food? Look at what Eve desires from the tree: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” (Genesis 3:6, ESV). Notice that little addition in there? She desired the fruit because it looked good and tasted good—which is what it was created for—but she also desired the fruit because she thought it would make her wise—which is not what it was designed for. She desired something beyond what it was created for and it led to sin. That’s really the root of all sin—desiring something beyond its creational design—and those desires are at work in every one of our hearts. 

These types of desires are what the Bible calls “lust.” I know that most people only attribute the word “lust” to sexual desires, but the Bible actually uses it to describe any desire that goes beyond God’s creational design. Or, to say it another way, desires that are disordered. So, yes, you can lust after a man or women sexually, but you can also lust after money and power and food and beauty and relationships. 

Notice how that connects to what I said at the beginning of this sermon. Sin takes good things and turns them into bad things. All of those things I just mentioned were good things: money, power, food, beauty, sex, relationships. They are good things—things we should desire in their proper place. 

However, here’s what often happens. Our desire for these things becomes idolatrous. They become gods in their own way. I’ve heard another pastor describe idolatry as good things, that became god things, which turned them into bad things. So, when we desire money in ways beyond its creational design, it becomes idolatrous—a god thing that will destroy us. The same goes with food and beauty. When we desire these things beyond their creational design, they become idolatrous—god things that will destroy us. The same is true for every good thing. 

That’s why the Bible connects lust and covetousness and idolatry. Notice this chain of logic: “Put to death therefore what is earthly [sinful] in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” (Colossians 3:5, ESV). He makes the direct connection between covetousness and idolatry—which shows how good things become god things—but it’s all in the context of disordered desires. They’re all connected. 

Scripture repeatedly tells us about the destructiveness of idolatry. People seem to think idolatry isn’t a big deal, but scripture tells us that idolatry will destroy us. Here’s one passage that says it explicitly: “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear, nor is there any breath in their mouths. Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.” (Psalm 135:15–18, ESV). Notice the principle that his passage teaches: We become what we worship. The idols we worship can’t speak, can’t hear, can’t see, can’t breathe. They’re dead. And those who worship them become like them—unable to speak, hear, see, breath. They die. They slowly become less human and die. Those are the wages of sin: Death and destruction. 

I had one example this past week that illustrated this truth extremely well. It’s a quote from Archibald Heart: “We have taken the pursuit of pleasure too far, and in so doing we have lost the ability to experience the very pleasure we are pursuing…Consistent overuse of the brain’s pleasure circuits causes us to lose our capacity to experience pleasure.” Here’s another way to say the same thing: We become what we worship. If we worship idols that can’t feel pleasure, we slowly lose our ability to feel pleasure. We become less human. We move further down the path of death and destruction. We get the wages of our sinful actions: death. 

I said this last time, but any addict can tell you what this experience feels like. They begin by seeking pleasure through various substances. Then those substances don’t provide the same level of pleasure anymore—because the pleasure circuits in their brain have been broken. So, they use more of the substance or find a stronger substance. And the death spiral begins—all the while they are continually losing their ability to feel pleasure and becoming less human, more like the idol they are chasing.

And, let’s be very clear, this is the story for every one of us. Some of us have fallen into this death spiral with relationships—always looking for someone to fulfill a need in our life that they weren’t created to fill. That will result in the same death spiral. Some of us have fallen into this addictive cycle around food or work—always looking for them to fill a need in your life they weren’t created to fill, and when they don’t fill it, you try harder and harder and harder. And the entire time you’re slowly becoming more and more like the idol you’re chasing and less and less like the human you’ve been created to be. 

I realize this may seem extreme, but this is the reality. We must not try to pretend like sin and idolatry and messed up desires are not a big deal. They are destroying you, eating you away from the inside out, slowly transforming you into the unhuman idol you’re chasing. That’s a sobering reality that needs to affect us at the core of our being. 

That’s also why the gospel is such a powerful reality. Can you imagine the hopelessness that comes when you're stuck in this death spiral and can’t get out? The way that sin and shame and guilt pile upon you? The way that destructive habits and tendencies pile up? It’s crushing. 

Then, the gospel comes in and reminds you that you can be set free in Jesus Christ. Yes, you’ve been wasting your time and energy in foolish, destructive pursuits, but you don’t have to dwell there anymore. Turn to Jesus Christ in faith and he will forgive all of the foolishness and destructiveness of your past—all of the stupid mistakes, all of the stupid idols, all of the messed up relationships—forgiven. 

Then, as I keep on reminding us, he promises to restore us into the image of God—restore us back to our creational design. He will begin to reorder our relationships and reorder our desires. As he does that, he is continually making us more fully human—more in the image of God. 

This is why we should never be satisfied with only living the “forgiven” life and continuing on in our sin. That’s ridiculous. Who wants to continue living a life that is not fully human? Who wants to live a life that is destructive and deadly? Rather, we can rejoice in the power of Christ’s salvation, and then strive—through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit—to live the life we’ve been created and called to live—the life that Christ is restoring in us.