God and sense

During some of the Streams classes a while back I remember them talking about how to restrain your spirit. Often times proptetic people will have three types of temptations, the three G's: 1) guys/girls 2) gold and 3) glory. Folks with the guys/girls temptation will be guilty of reading people's mail and gaining unpermitted knowledge or pleasure from using their spirit on others. As I thought about this I considered that, in this culture, in this worldly culture, touching is taboo, but, looking is okay. To me, as a follower of Christ, I don't necessarily see why this works, based on the Bible.

I recall a dialog Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves had in the Devil's Advocate that went like this, "Look but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow." Now, in context, this was a pretty dangerous dialog, but, I think it so perfectly embodied what I am trying to point out I had to use it. If you accept one of these things, then, the next is so easy to justify, so, slippery a slope it is. And, that's the whole danger, one thing so easily leads to another.

In our over-sexed culture, people, both young and old, are constantly exposed to the visual bombardment of flesh and lust. There is a constant paradox. We are told to neither look nor touch, but, we are constantly in an environment where our eyes are given basically no choice but to see. So, here we have one sense, sight, that is forced to be exposed to horrible things and another, touch, that is supposed to be held sacred. It's such a paradox. Why is it okay for one sense to be immersed in lustful forces, and, another which is not?

Biblically, it's not. Culturally, they are permissive, so, who cares?...as the logic would go. Job made a covenant with his eyes to stare on no young women. Christ said even thinking lustfully is sinful. With these kind of examples, I have to contend with our culture: it's not okay to make such an arbitrary distinction. No one sense is any more "permitted" to be emersed in lustful forces than any other. Heck, our world suggests empiricism, as the most basic form of logic by which to test things, relies solely on the senses. If we rest solely on the senses, all we know of the world comes through what see, feel, taste, etc. So, again, using such a simplistic view of the world, why allow one sense to be okay with sin, but, not others?

The whole thrust of this post was to point out that sight is really no different from touch when it comes to immorality and abusing spiritual gifts. Whether we "touch" or "look" lustfully on another, it's still lust. The effects are still the same on the spirit. Our age needs to know that our spirit is not restricted to these "boundaries" the world deems as being okay. Likewise, how our spirit behaves must operate by God's rules, not the world's since we don't have a clue what we're doing when it comes to try to substitute our concepts of right and wrong for God's.