Sex and the War Against the Human Soul
What we see taking place in our culture today is the prolonged scream of a humanity that is losing its soul
by Alfonse Mucha, 1899
What if there was a good and wholesome pleasure that, if allowed to dominate you, slowly destroyed the essential aspect of your humanity?
The Rosetta Stone: In 1799 a landmark discovery was made in Egypt that unlocked the secret of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. The black granite stone, now known as the Rosetta Stone, had been inscribed in 196 BC and recorded the accomplishments of Ptolemy Epiphanes in three different writing forms — Greek, Demotic script, and hieroglyphics. Up to this point, the meaning of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was largely a mystery but the scholars were able to use the known languages on the Rosetta Stone to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphics. (1)
There are certain verses in the Bible that I refer to as 'Rosetta Stone’ verses. These are short statements that unlock a deeper understanding of a large number of other passages in the Bible or that answer a major question arising out of other statements in the Bible. One of the major questions is this – why is there so much emphasis in the Bible on staying away from sexually immoral practices?
A few years ago, I discovered a 'Rosetta Stone' verse that answers this question and gives us a whole new level of understanding as to why sexual morality is so crucial for humanity.
This 'Rosetta Stone' is embedded in the following statement,
“Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.” (2)
The ‘Rosetta Stone’ phrase is easy to miss – I missed it for decades. It is the last phrase “which wage war against the soul.” To grasp the implications of this phrase, there are two things we need to understand – first, what is “lust” and, second, what is the soul?
What is lust?
We have natural, physical drives that include the desire for food, sex, and even the rush we feel from adrenaline. These natural desires are not good or bad of themselves, but when they gain a hold on us where they inordinately compel us to gratify those desires in inappropriate ways, they morph from being merely natural drives to ‘lusts’. Sex was designed to be a wholesome and intimate experience within the context of marriage. But when the desire for sexual gratification begins to compel us to satisfy that appetite in any number of inappropriate ways, it becomes lust.
For example, we occasionally hear of someone accused of “thinking with their genitals.” Men and women have destroyed their marriages, family, career, reputations, and even debased their humanity when sexual lust won the war against their soul, which brings us to the next question.
What is your soul?
The Greek word for ‘soul’, as it is used in the Bible when applied to a person, is psyche and is defined as the “seat and center of the inner human life in its many and varied aspects.” (3) It is what makes you, ‘you’ and distinguishes you as a unique person from all other human beings. You, as a living soul, continue to exist after the death of your body.
The implications of just how serious the war against the soul is cannot be fully grasped until one understands the importance of the soul. The secular academic world today does not believe in the existence of an actual soul. To make matters worse, our material culture today lives as if we are just a body – a sack of meat and bone that, when it dies, is recycled into the soil and that is the end.
Still, in countless conversations over the years, most people seem uncomfortable with the idea that all they are is a bag of meat; we feel there is more to us. Even in our 21st-century culture, we tend to refer to our body as something we possess, using terms like "your" body – but who is the ‘you’ to whom the body belongs? (4)
To be clear, this is not a case of our body vs our soul. Our body is an essential part of us, and is to be regarded as holy even if it is aging, has health problems, and is not exactly beautiful or handsome. Rather, it is a case of fleshly lusts vs the soul.
Our body is often described by God as something within which we live, including words such as “house,” “tent,” “vessel,” and “earthly dwelling.” There is, therefore, a major difference between what our culture thinks, and spiritual reality. Our culture is very much body-focused as if that is all we are. In reality, however, we are living souls who dwell within our body.
The attributes of the soul include self-awareness, the ability to perform moral deliberation, make well-thought-through decisions, and think rationally using axioms of logic and mathematics. We, as living souls, are not limited to just the five physical senses; we also have senses of the soul that enable us to perceive beauty, art, music, justice, to love in its highest form, and to have a powerful relationship with God. The soul is the home of the non-physical mind which interfaces with the physical brain. It is the 'I' we use to speak of ourselves and who can say, “this is my body and my brain.”
Implications: If the soul is 'you,’ then to lose the war against the soul is to dehumanize yourself or, as God puts it, to become like "an unreasoning animal" that is governed by its physical wants, drives, and lusts.
It is human nature to consistently go for short-term, physical pleasure without due consideration of possible long-term consequences. Our bodies are designed to experience a variety of pleasures that range from enjoying the smell of a rose, savoring the taste of a gourmet dish, the physical experience of sex with our life-long marriage partner, and the adrenalin rush of screaming high over a Swiss mountain valley in a wingsuit flying at 160 km/hr. We are immersed in a culture that is driven by the pursuit of short-term pleasure and does not think deeply of possible long-term consequences.
Food is good in healthy quantities, sex is pure and good within the context of marriage between a man and a woman, and adrenalin can sometimes save a person's life. But lust can pervert and twist the very drives that have been designed by God, and can control and dominate us as living souls. It is for this reason that God says that lusts "wage war against the soul.”
If the essence of a person is a unique, living soul, then when the body dominates the soul, that person starts to debase their humanity. What does a soul look like when it has been defeated and ruled by bodily wants and drives? Animals are governed by their physical instincts and drives and that is fine; it is the way they were designed. But living souls were designed for something vastly greater than merely this physical world (5) – but all that is forfeit if the soul is dominated by the body.
Our culture has lost this war. Nowhere is this more obvious than in how totally sex has been perverted and twisted in a thousand ways in our porn-soaked, hyper-sexualized culture. Some say, "God made me this way!" but the sheer number of warnings in the Bible against sexual immorality indicates that something has gone terribly wrong with human sexuality. Something beautiful and good has morphed into something that has diverted so far from what God created, that it can be difficult to even imagine what pure and glorious sexuality even looks like.
Finding your true identity
There appears to be a crisis of identity in our culture today and the sexual revolution appears to be at the heart of it. (6) One of the major areas of focus in the search for identity today centers on sexual orientation and gender. Five seconds after death, however, you will be stripped of your body, including your sexuality. Continuing after the death of your body will be the real ‘you.’ That is when you will find out just how devastating it was to lose the war against the soul, a war that seeks to destroy who the real ‘you’ is as a living soul. So how can this war be won?
Winning the war
If God is the creator of both our body and our soul, then apart from him we probably do not even know what winning the war looks like. If we do not even know how to have the kind of relationship between the body and the soul that we were created to have, then we will need divine intervention and help. There is a golden passage that describes how the war against the soul can be won on a daily basis. It reads,
I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (7)
There is a lot in there. It talks about the body, the mind, and how our culture naturally and relentlessly conforms our way of thinking to comply with our culture. But the mind can be renewed by God so that we can test for ourselves how pleasing and perfect it is to live a life as God intended us to live.
Notice that it says “living” sacrifice. The original Greek tenses of “offer your bodies” and “be transformed” are in the ongoing and present tense – it is a daily need to give ourselves, body and soul, to God. Furthermore, since we are designed to be in a relationship with the Creator of “every good thing and every perfect gift” (8) each day, totally given to him, then it follows that we will experience ultimate fulfillment and identity as a result, something that is “good, pleasing, and perfect.”
In that state, our true identity can thrive and grow and our value can be summed up in a single phrase … ‘loved by God.’
There is a silent war going on right now, raging within the bodies and souls of each individual in our civilization. At stake is the central core of your humanity – your soul.
For further thought:
The first step is to put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our own sin, and for eternal life. If you would like to discuss this anonymously with an online mentor, then follow this link.
If you are interested in another article I have written that discusses how you have vastly more potential than you have ever dreamed of, then here it is.
If you would like to talk to someone online, confidentially and anonymously, follow this link.
References:
More about the Rosetta Stone.
Psyche: Arndt, W., Danker, F. W., Bauer, W., & Gingrich, F. W. (2000). A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature (3rd ed., p. 1099). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
What Does it Mean to be Human?: Part 1 - Implications of Thinking You Own Your Body.
What Does it Mean to be Human?: Part 2 - Vastly More than You can Imagine.
Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, 2019.
