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Chapter-a-Day

The Sex Thing

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The Sex Thing (CaD Lev 18) – Wayfarer

“You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices.”
Leviticus 18:3 (NIV)

Sex is always such a hot topic. It is one of our most basic human appetites, and it is naturally one of the strongest and most pleasurable as it drives the perpetuation of life. Like all human appetites, we sinful human beings love to indulge it to excess.

We indulge our appetite for food into gluttony.
We indulge our appetite for rest into sloth.
We indulge our appetite for pride into vanity.
We indulge our appetite for daily provision into greed.

All of these appetites are natural and God-given. We need them for life. One of the insidious effects of Alzheimer’s Disease that I watched slowly destroy my mother’s body is the loss of appetite for food. She forgot that she was hungry. For the last several years of her life her diet consisted of some blueberry yogurt and chocolate nutritional drink. My dad had to practically force her to eat that, or she wouldn’t have eaten a thing. At one point she weighed under 90 pounds.

Our appetites are good and meant for our physical health and life. This includes our appetite for sex. God even dedicates an entire piece of the Great Story, Song of Solomon (a.k.a Song of Songs), to an ancient poem about the sexual appetites of young lovers. When I attended a fundamentalist Baptist Bible college I remember observing the professors contort themselves to explain all of the human sexuality out of the text, turning it into nothing more than a spiritual allegory. One of the problems I’ve observed with the institutional church is that it picks the things on which it focuses, and the subject of sex (other than prohibiting a few aspects of it) is avoided more than any other.

Of course, what makes our appetite for sex different than the other God-given appetites is that all the other appetites and our indulgence in them affect the people around us. Sex involves direct participation with another person. This adds potent and intense dynamics of human relationship, power, intimacy, and abuse.

Today’s chapter is all about sexual prohibitions that God gave to the ancient Hebrew people. Along my life journey, I’ve observed that only one verse of this chapter (the prohibition of homosexual sex) gets quoted or discussed today. That’s a shame, because the context in which that verse was given is, I think, important.

A couple of observations:

First, the list of sexual prohibitions in today’s chapter is preceded with a preamble. God makes it clear that all of the behaviors he’s about to prohibit are things that the Egyptians and Canaanite people groups indulge in. Sex was indulged in without boundary or restraint, and the bulk of the list of prohibitions have to do with incestuous relationships. The Egyptian royals were infamous for their practice of incest to “keep the bloodline pure.” King Tut was a classic example of the consequences, his body genetically disfigured and his life shortened.

Second, these were all patriarchal, male dominated cultures. Guess who drove the indulgence of sexual appetites out of their sheer power, authority, and domination in family and culture? [cue: looking in the mirror]

Third, the sexual appetite was designed by our Creator God for the perpetuation of life through reproduction. It is a physical appetite and it is pleasurable and intimate, but the ultimate physical result is new life. New life (a.k.a being “born again,” resurrection, redemption) is an overarching core theme of the entire Great Story that can’t be ignored. In the last hundred or so years of human history we’ve developed countless ways to indulge in the pleasure of our sexual appetites and mostly eliminate the possibility of new life. The ancients did not have this luxury. Today’s chapter also addresses the way the ancients dealt with the unwanted consequences of their sexual indulgences. They sacrificed their babies to gods like Molek. An appetite that was intended to perpetuate new life becomes a catalyst for systemic infanticide.

Fourth, while today’s chapter does briefly mention a prohibition of homosexual sex, it also clearly mentions a prohibition of adultery. A fundamentalist standing in protest of homosexuality who has committed or is committing adultery is a hypocrite. As Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin…”

Fifth, as I went through the list of prohibitions today, I wrote in the margin the names of individuals within the Great Story who committed the prohibitions. David committed adultery. Solomon with his hundreds of wives and concubines took adultery to even greater indulgent excesses. David’s son Amnon and daughter Tamar had an incestuous romance going before Amnon raped her (see my second point above). Jacob married rival sisters as prohibited in verse 20. A powerful and natural sexual appetite will naturally lead to sexual indulgence like an appetite for food will lead to gluttony at the church potluck. Spiritually, they are equal in their negative effects, but we tend to focus on one and ignore the other.

Finally, in the quiet this morning, God reminds the Hebrews at the beginning and ending of the chapter that He wants them to be different than all the sexually indulgent people around them. He wants them to exemplify and enjoy pleasurable, loving, intimate, and yes productive fulfillment of sexual appetites, avoiding the negative consequences of indulgence for themselves and those around them.

Enjoy fulfilling the appetite without indulging in excess. That’s a worthwhile endeavor for me as it relates to both my sexual appetite and all the others.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

These chapter-a-day blog posts are also available via podcast on all major podcast platforms including Apple, Google, and Spotify! Simply go to your podcast platform and search for “Wayfarer Tom Vander Well.” If it’s not on your platform, please let me know!
Chapter-a-Day

Explicit Sin, Explicit Message

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At every street corner you built your lofty shrines and degraded your beauty, spreading your legs with increasing promiscuity to anyone who passed by.
Ezekiel 16:25 (NIV)

Jerusalem is a fascinating city. It is a city filled with tensions. And it is amazing to experience. It’s crazy to think that a tiny little Canaanite town thousands of years old became, and remains to this day, the most political and religious hot spot of the entire world.

Today’s long chapter is a prophetic message God gave to Ezekiel specifically about the city of Jerusalem. To make sense of Ezekiel’s message, it helps to know a little about Jerusalem’s history.

Jerusalem began as a Canaanite village. It was David who made it his Capital city. At the time he did so, it was a Jebusite city. Only after David’s reign was it considered Israelite. Its multi-cultural history made it a city of political and religious tension from the beginning.

Ezekiel’s message is a long metaphorical story about a non-Jewish baby girl thrown into a field and left to die. God wills the girl to live, cares for her as she grows, and when she flowers into a woman He marries her. She, however, is unfaithful to God, her husband. She becomes an adulterer and a temple prostitute for pagan worship. She sacrifices her children in pagan rituals. Eventually, she then runs after her clients and freely gives herself to them seeking their protection.

If you read the chapter, and I encourage you to do so, it gets rather graphic in its descriptives of her “spreading her legs” for her neighbors and even describes one of them, Egypt, as having an – ahem – very large penis. I confess my curiosity this morning and, just for fun, I pulled up that verse in Bible Gateway and compared every English translation to see how translators handled the reference. Fascinating, some ignored it completely. Some disguised it in vague euphemisms such as “great of flesh” and “lustful.” Others went with a little more specific “well-endowed,” “large member,” or “large genitals.”

Of course, Ezekiel was pulling no punches and the people of his day would have known exactly what he was talking about. He was accurately describing actual Egyptian fertility idols, common in that day, depicting an Egyptian man with a protruding giant erect penis.

And this is the point. The prophets like Ezekiel get very graphic in their messages because the extreme nature of the sins that they were addressing, including ritualized sexual immorality and ritual child sacrifice.

I have to remember that Ezekiel is living in Babylon and the Babylonians had their own version of sex and fertility cults and rituals. The Ishtar Festival, in particular was known for its sexual and moral debauchery. This may very well have fueled the metaphorical rawness of his message.

The adulterous wife was an apt description of Jerusalem. While it had become the chosen city of God’s people, the city itself remained the hometown of both Jews and pagan Canaanites. The pagan residents may have politically gone along with prevailing wind of Jewish authority, but it would always struggle to be faithful to the God of David.

God’s judgment on Jerusalem is pronounced as the just consequences of her adultery, prostitution, infanticide, and social injustices. What is fascinating, however, is that this judgment is not final. God promises to remain faithful, to restore, and to redeem His bride. Not only that, but God declares that He will personally make atonement for her sins:

So I will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the Lord. Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done…

Fast forward about 500 years and this is exactly what Jesus did when He died on the cross outside the very city of Jerusalem, over which He lovingly laments:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate.”

With Jesus, the metaphor switches from Jerusalem being the bride to Jerusalem being the prodigal child. Jesus moves the bride metaphor and applies it to His followers. Which, for me, means that as the bride I find in Ezekiel’s explicit message to Jerusalem both a warning and a comforting truth. If I stray from Jesus, I can expect to experience the consequences of my thoughts, words, and actions. However, while it’s easy to focus on Jerusalem’s sins, the most amazing and important piece of the message is God’s sacrificial love and faithfulness in spite of those sins. This reminds me that no matter how much I stray or how deeply I may fall into sin, His sacrificial love and infinite grace will always extend further and deeper.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.

Chapter-a-Day

How Little I Can Possibly Fathom

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“They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal….”
Jeremiah 19:5 (NIV)

Let’s be real. There’s a smorgasbord of negativity out there. Media and a 24/7/365 news cycle continually bombards us with sensational cries of things for us to fear or be anxious about. The right cries for us to fear the left. The left cries for us to fear the right. Beyond politics there is a steady stream of anxiety stirring doom we’re told to perpetually fear from nuclear war, global warming, gun violence, terror attacks, product safety, GMOs, cancer, Zika virus, flu, vaccinations, poverty, earthquakes, floods, oil spills, pollution, asteroid hits, and etc, and etc, and etc.

A month or two ago Wendy and I read a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal by a Harvard professor. He attempted to provide some much needed perspective on our current life and times.

A few excerpts:

Globally, the 30-year scorecard also favors the present. In 1988, 23 wars raged, killing people at a rate of 3.4 per 100,000; today it’s 12 wars killing 1.2 per 100,000. The number of nuclear weapons has fallen from 60,780 to 10,325. In 1988, the world had just 45 democracies, embracing two billion people; today it has 103, embracing 4.1 billion. That year saw 46 oil spills; 2016, just five. And 37% of the population lived in extreme poverty, barely able to feed themselves, compared with 9.6% today. True, 2016 was a bad year for terrorism in Western Europe, with 238 deaths. But 1988 was even worse, with 440.

The world is about a hundred times wealthier today than it was two centuries ago, and the prosperity is becoming more evenly distributed across countries and people. Within the lifetimes of most readers, the rate of extreme poverty could approach zero. Catastrophic famine, never far away in the past, has vanished from all but the most remote and war-ravaged regions, and undernourishment is in steady decline.
A century ago, the richest countries devoted 1% of their wealth to children, the poor, the sick and the aged; today they spend almost a quarter of it. Most of their poor today are fed, clothed and sheltered and have luxuries like smartphones and air conditioning that used to be unavailable to anyone, rich or poor. Poverty among racial minorities has fallen, and poverty among the elderly has plunged.
During most of the history of nations and empires, war was the natural state of affairs, and peace a mere interlude between wars. Today war between countries is obsolescent, and war within countries is absent from five-sixths of the world. The proportion of people killed annually in wars is about a quarter of what it was in the mid-1980s, a sixth of what it was in the early 1970s, and a 16th of what it was in the early 1950s.

Please don’t read what I’m not writing. There is still no lack of very real and hard work to be done to make this world a better, more peaceful, and just place. What I increasingly have come to understand, however, is that it has become harder and harder for a person like me, living in the first-world of the 21st century, to understand how absolutely brutal life was in the days of the ancient prophets like Jeremiah. Reading through the writing of the ancient prophets can feel like a long slog. It’s whole lot of doom and gloom from a time and place that is very, very different than my reality.

I struggle with the harsh images and the violence in Jeremiah’s messages. But I also have to remember that I have no clue how harsh and violent daily life was in the middle east in 500 B.C.

Amidst today’s chapter, Jeremiah hints at what was happening, even within the walls of Solomon’s Temple, in his day. The God of Abraham, Moses, and David had been almost completely forgotten. Solomon’s Temple had become an open, free-market for the worship of local gods. In the case of Baal, people would sacrifice their own children and burn them alive as a form of worship. Just let the image of that sink in for a moment.

There’s a reason that God was angry. He commanded his people to love their children, to raise them up well. God commanded his people to teach their children and grandchildren His word, and to teach them to keep His commands about being honest, pure, just, content, and faithful. Now God’s people are worshiping local fertility gods with religious prostitution and drunken sex orgies. They are burning their own children alive as a sacrifice to Baal. And, when God raises up a prophet like Jeremiah to speak out against what is happening they tell him to shut-up and threaten to kill him.

This morning in the quiet I’m mulling these things over in my head. I’m not foolish enough to believe that things are perfect in this day and age, but I also don’t want to be equally foolish by denying the fact that I live in a world that is far better off than when my parents and grandparents were my age. I live in a world in which daily life is infinitely better off than it was for humans who lived centuries and millennia before. I can’t really imagine a day in the life of Jeremiah.

These thoughts lead me to look at Jeremiah’s writing differently. Rather than trying to layer Jeremiah’s poetic prophecies with my 21st century first-world understanding I want to let go of my preconceived notions. I want to cut Jeremiah some slack and try to see his world from his perspective. As a parent I addressed my daughters differently when they were five than I do when they are twenty-five, so it seems reasonable for me to conclude that God addressed humanity differently in the days of the Jeremiah than He does today.

I feel myself increasingly led to embrace the reality of just how little I can possibly fathom. Yet that doesn’t absolve me from responsibility. My job on this spiritual journey is to keep asking, seeking, and knocking on the door of understanding what God has been saying to humanity throughout the Great Story.  Perhaps that sounds hard to do given how different my life is compared to Jeremiah, but I also happen to live in a time and place where I have almost all of the research and resources in the entire world literally at my fingertips.

And that’s a daily reality I daresay Jeremiah couldn’t possibly fathom.

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Chapter-a-Day

“L’chaim”

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“You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you.”
Leviticus 18:3 (NRSV)

This past weekend we were with friends at the lake. It was a wonderful weekend. We lay in the sun and on the water. We took a boat ride in which the hum of the engine and the rocking of the waves lulled our friends to sleep. We watched a good movie together that resonated with profound lessons about the contrast between life and religiosity. We drank a luscious red wine and ate a rich mixture of crackers, cheese, fruits and veggies. We explored new ideas. We shared both joys and heartaches. We spoke into one another’s lives.

Our friend raised his glass multiple times during the weekend in what is an important ritual for him, and offered the Hebrew toast “L’chaim” which means “to life.”

When you look at the Great Story God is telling from Genesis to Revelation, there are a few simple themes woven throughout. One of them is the theme of life and death:

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live….” (Deuteronomy 30:19)

We continue our journey today through the ancient sacrificial system described in the book of Leviticus. If you’ve been following along I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the whole thing gets a bit surreal to our 21st century western sensibilities. In today’s chapter, we encounter a host of rules centered mostly around sex. The key to unlocking the message is in the third verse (pasted at the top of this post).

The Hebrews had just escaped from being slaves in Egypt. They were headed to the land God promised them in Canaan. They have been immersed in Egyptian culture for hundreds of years and they are about to experience Canaanite culture. Neither culture was particularly healthy.

King Tut RenderingIn Egypt, the ruling families were known to practice incest in the belief that they were keeping the royal bloodline pure. The Pharaoh and his family were considered deities and the thinking went that if the royal family only bred from among each other that they wouldn’t be tainted by any non-deified humans. Of course, we know today that his is a really bad idea. Consider the famous King Tut. Extensive research on Tut’s mummy reveals that the boy king behind the famous hoard of golden treasure was far from what we would consider god-like. He had a club foot, probably walked with a cane, and he had abnormally wide, feminine hips for a boy. These are likely genetic issues stemming from the fact that his parents were brother and sister.

By the way, before we get too judgmental on the ancient Egyptians, it should be noted that the whole “pure blood” philosophy among royals carried on in Europe for centuries. J.K. Rowling didn’t just make up the “pure blood” notion for the fictional wizarding world. The royal families in Europe are a dizzying mixture of marriages between relatives.

Intermarriage among Europe's royal Hapsburg family.
Intermarriage among Europe’s royal Hapsburg family.
In ancient Canaan, the local tribal cultures had their own mixture of unhealthy sexual practices which spilled into their local religious practices. Ritual worship of pagan gods such as Molech included strange sexual practices and the sacrifice of human children by burning them.

So, as we read through today’s chapter we have to realize that it was a prescription against cultural and religious practices from Egypt and Canaan that were unhealthy for individuals and society as a whole. It’s back to the theme of life and death. These things don’t promote life and its healthy regeneration. These things bring destructive havoc on people, relationships, and society. Underneath the rules lies the same old theme: life and death. God is once again saying, “I want you to choose life by living in such away as to avoid those things you’ve seen in Egypt and will see in Canaan which are really unhealthy and contribute to destruction and death.”

Which brings me back to last weekend with our friends which was so full of life. Our bodies rested, our souls refreshed, and our relationships were strengthened. We tasted and drank in goodness spiritually, emotionally, relationally as well as in the literal food and drink we enjoyed together. Our activity and our conversations were life giving. And that’s always what God wants us to choose.

L’chaim.

Chapter-a-Day

Chapter-a-Day Numbers 25

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Lies

It started when the women invited the men to their sex-and-religion worship. They ate together and then worshiped their gods. Israel ended up joining in the worship of the Baal of Peor. God was furious, his anger blazing out against Israel. Numbers 25:2-3 (MSG)

I remember many years ago catching my youngest daughter in a lie. It was a small thing but I came down hard on her and she was visibly surprised by my earnestness in the matter. It wasn’t the small, isolated act but the principle that I wanted her to understand. When a child learns that lying is acceptable, then they can easily go down a path which leads to much larger deceptions and falsehoods. Pretty soon, you’ve wandered far off the path of truth.

It’s easy to read today’s chapter and scratch our heads at God’s anger and reaction to the actions of his followers. Baal worship was prevalent in those days. It started as a type of “fertility” worship which was common in ancient cultures. It morphed in a myriad of ways as it spread through middle eastern tribes and regions. What it became was an ongoing, blasphemous sexual free-for-all. And, when the Baal followers sexual “worship” produced babies, they would sacrifice the baby to Baal by burning the baby alive. Unbridled and unrestricted sex with no responsibility for the outcome. (Hmmm, the more things change…..)

Like a loving parent, God knew that Baal worship would lead His children down a tragic path that would be incredibly destructive to the entire nation. I have to believe that in this early confrontation between God and Baal, God wanted his young nation to understand how serious He was about avoiding entanglements with Baal worship.

Today I’m reminded that even when it seems that my Heavenly Father is being unfair or harsh, He knows the plans He has for me. They are plans for life and hope, and I can trust His will.

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