Innocence In God’s Garden
BRITISH novelist and essayist C. S. Lewis once described the problem of runaway sexual appetites in his uniquely witty style:
Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate onto the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?
And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
When God created Adam and Eve, he lavished special care on human sexuality.
Sex was to be the means by which humans reproduced—just as in the animal kingdom. But with humans, whom God created uniquely in his own image, there was more to sex than breeding.
In the divine drama, God designed sex as a means for a man and a woman to experience deeper intimacy with each other than would be possible in any other way. That’s why Adam and Eve were naked but unashamed.
Shame came later. By C. S. Lewis’s day, sex had become popular in stage shows, magazines, and movies.
Today, sexually explicit material is available on video, DVD, and the Internet, where people need only a computer, a modem, and a phone line to view images that would have been illegal or not readily available only a decade or two ago.
Are we better today in our so-called sexually liberated age than earlier generations of men and women? Lewis wouldn’t think so. Though God gave us our appetites, we must control them.
Without control, we become enslaved by our appetites. People enslaved by food are guilty of the biblical sin of gluttony and reap the consequences of obesity and health problems.
Those who are enslaved by sex are guilty of lust and find themselves among a growing number of sex addicts.
Lewis said: There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was “the sort of person who is always snooping round to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.”2
That’s not it at all. God’s no heavenly killjoy. He wants us to know the innocence and intimacy Adam and Eve knew in the Garden of Eden. He desires for us to know what it means to be naked and unashamed.
Father, thank you for the gift of sex. Help me to use it wisely.