This is Part 2 of my series on the Terrain of the Seven Deadly Sins. My last post covered the terrain on which the battle between Pride and Humility take place. This post will cover the terrain on which the battle between Lust and Intimacy will take place. To remind you, everything I describe is meant to be a metaphor of how it actually takes place and what I describe in this post is far from being complete. This is just to get some creative juices flowing so either someone could run with it or I could return later and run with it.
The first thing to remember is that the land is a metaphor of the body. The land is us and how we act, how we live our lives, is determined by who rules it. So like the region where Pride or Humility would fight, so it is with Lust vs Intimacy and who rules it will determine how the land appears. Lust and Intimacy is a very unique situation because of the nature of the two. It is well known that when we sin, we sin against God, but when we sin sexually, we sin against ourselves. And nothing illustrates this better than a cave-like system. If you have a forest and it burns down, it will regrow. However, if you mine into the earth, it leaves a permanent scar. Even if you fill it back in, it will not be the same again, ever. So this gives us the best metaphorical picture of how Lust and Intimacy fight in our lives.
Lust is rather easy to picture. It is often a strong desire for sexual pleasure and rarely is it in an appropriate manner. Intimacy is a little harder to picture. So let me describe it this way. You have a natural cave in the land, and the further you go into the cave, the safer you feel. Think of being in a public place, verses being in your home, verses being in your bedroom. In public, you tend to have a higher guard and you are watchful of people that you do not know or trust. In your home, you don't bring people in that you do not already trust. But the deepest place of that intimacy is the bedroom. You could be stark naked in your bedroom and you won't care. And the only ones you would allow to see you in that position are the ones you share the deepest intimacy with. There should only be two people who hold this position: God himself and your married spouse (emphasis on waiting until the marriage is consummated rather than before the alter). Intimacy is being in a safe place where you can share your deepest secrets, your deepest desires. It is where you can vent and you don't have to fear about it being made public. Everyone has a place of intimacy, the deepest part of your cave where you feel the most secure.
As you go further into your cave, you have a security system that sets off bells and whistles if someone goes too far in with you. A wise person will have such a system set up and will know when someone is treading on ground without permission. But a foolish person will either ignore this system or disable it. Some friends can only go part way into the cave. The closer friends can get deeper into the cave but not into the inner most chambers. Your family can get to certain layers depending on the relationship. But your spouse should be the only one into the deepest part of the cave where you are able to experience the deepest level of intimacy. Here, is where your deepest part of the cave joins with your spouse's deepest part of the cave. And this is the metaphor of "two becoming one flesh".
However, that is Intimacy. Lust is a corruption of this. It is easily confused with love. Lust has two ways in. One is by forcing or seeking to obtain the deepest part of the cave of another. It also allows others into that deepest part of the cave when said person(s) should not be there. Men tend to do the former and women tend to do the latter, but it is not uncommon to see it reversed today. Typically, what happens is when we seek the intimacy of those we should not be intimate with, we will dig ourselves a new part of the cave to make space for that person.
And here is the killer. Proverbs warns of the prostitute who lures in the young man to rob him of his innocence. This is the Lust that seeks to rule over us. Lust will use another person's innermost cave to join with yours. However, the King designed your caves to be only joined by the spouse he had in mind for you. Lust cannot have access to that part of the cave. So what Lust will do is dig a new tunnel to connect to you. But you have the choice of whether to allow such tunneling to take place in your cave. When such digging takes place, you get warnings and you have the ability to stop it right then and there. But if you allow the digging to continue, your cave will be joined with another's cave that should not be joined. And this will leave a permanent scar in your land. But it gets worse, Lust doesn't stop there. Lust seeks to pull you into it's inner most cave and chain you to it. It will give you a leash and it will allow you to return to your inner most chambers with your spouse (if you are married) but it will pull at that chain at will and drag you back. And while you are chained to Lust's chambers, Lust will go into your cave and make its home there. It will strive to violate your inner most chamber so that your spouse will one day never return. It will invite its buddies of Pride, Envy, Gluttony, and Wrath to also rule over you. Lust will dig deeper and deeper, never being satisfied like Gluttony and it will hit the fires of Wrath until your intimate cave is demolished. Those terrains will be described in more detail later. And while your cave is being destroyed, you remain bound to Lust's control as it seeks to dig deeper and deeper until the weight of the earth above can no longer support itself and sends it crashing down.
But when Intimacy rules your caves, you can force Lust out. However, even if Lust did rule your life and now Intimacy does now, the damage that Lust did will not revert back to its original state. It will always be scared. Even if you drive Lust back into its own cave and fill the tunnel Lust carved in with dirt, it will not be as solid as it was before Lust started digging. And once Lust gets in the first time, it will strive to keep coming back. But our King is ever grateful and he can restore what Lust has stolen from us. The metaphor to describe Lust is actually describing another metaphor of a bigger picture. This cave describes how Lust or Intimacy will rule our lives. But Lust/Intimacy with others/our spouse, is itself another picture or a metaphor of the relationship we have with Jesus Christ. Sin is the Lust that imprisons us and seek to destroy our cave that was meant to only be occupied by ourselves and Christ. But Christ came to restore us. And we will carry the scars that Lust delivers to us until the day we die and Christ resurrects us anew. But his patches that will carry us through until that time will suffice and as long as we rely on his security system and only open ourselves to HIM and his desires, we will never answer the door when Lust comes knocking.
Next post, I will cover the Terrain on which Slothfulness vs Rest will take place.
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