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By Root 788 0

any way holy or helpful. God does not give us a standard of beauty—God gives us spouses. Unlike other standards of beauty, a spouse changes over time. This means if your spouse is tall, you are into tall. If your spouse is skinny, you are into skinny. If your spouse is twenty, you are into twenty. When your spouse is sixty, you are no longer into twenty, but rather into sixty. And if your spouse used to be skinny, you were into skinny, but now you are into formerly skinny. We are to pour all our passion and pursuit of sexual pleasure into our spouses alone, without comparing them to anyone else in a lustful way.

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But the Bible does not end after Genesis 2 with our joyful, naked, and unashamed first parents. In the next chapter God’s Enemy, and ours, shows up to tempt them. He twists God’s words. Our mother Eve’s sin of commission was, in a proud effort to become like God, partaking of that which God had forbidden. Our father Adam’s sin of omission was failing to intervene as he sat by quietly, idly, and timidly watching the Enemy deceive his wife as so many of his cowardly, passive, silent sons have done ever since.

Rather than living as one, they separated as two sinners. Rather than welcoming God, they hid from Him in the garden. Rather than being naked without shame, they covered their nakedness, making clothes for themselves. Rather than repenting of their sin, they blamed everyone else. And every wedding since has happened outside Eden, even those hosted in gardens as if to pretend that things were not so.

This fall of humanity into sin has infected, polluted, and corrupted literally every aspect of life on the earth. This includes sex, concerning which—perhaps more clearly than any other aspect of life—we have become utterly confused. The result is that people tend to think that sex is god or gross to varying degrees, rather than a gift.

Sex as God

He had a beautiful wife but was never sexually satisfied. His mind was filled with sinful fantasies from pornography he had viewed, as well as sexual experiences he had enjoyed, before marriage. Some would have been sinful to do even with his wife, others were not sinful, but she was opposed to them because they violated her conscience. Over the course of some years in their marriage, rather than killing these sinful desires, he occasionally nurtured them by daydreaming about what it would be like to make his fantasies realities. One day he did—with another woman.

He decided to never tell his wife because, in his flawed mind, it was better for her not to know the truth and be devastated. He actually considered his lying somewhat loving. But she could tell something was different, so she pressed him for answers. Eventually he confessed. As we met during their counseling session, while his wife wept continually, he tried to downplay what had happened by saying it was only one day of their life, he did not love the other woman, and similar inane efforts to make his sin seem less sinful.

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Nothing seemed to get through to him until I (Mark) simply told him he was not only an adulterer, but had become an adulterer because he was first an idolater. The first commandments are that we are to worship God alone. If we obey, we then do not worship other people and things as functional gods. When we disobey, we then continue to worship but do so as idolaters treating people and things as gods. His sin was not just sleeping with a different woman, but sleeping with another woman as a worship act to another god. Sex was his god, a bed was his altar, their bodies were their living sacrifices, and he was a pagan priest committing idolatry.

The worship of anyone or anything other than the God of the Bible is by definition idolatry. Idolatry happens when a good thing (like sex) becomes a god thing (like adultery), which is a bad thing.

Idolatry begins in the heart before it reaches our hands, the prophet Ezekiel told us.a Someone or something becomes the center of our lives, the pursuit of our desires, the ground of our identities, and the source of our hopes. We must have