A Broken Image

God's design and plan is always good.  Our bodies are inherently good and valuable because we are created in the image of God, and we are the Temples of the Holy Spirit.  Our bodies are sacred objects worthy of dignity and respect.  We have been developing these ideas over the last couple of weeks, but there is more to the story.

Adam, Eve, and all of creation was called "very good" (Genesis 1:32) but then Adam and Eve sinned and all of that was shattered, destroyed their selfish choices.  As much as we need to realize that our bodies are created in the image of God and are meant to be the temple of the Holy Ghost, these images are marred, and these temples are damaged.  No one is the perfect image of God, or the ideal temple.

The sad reality is that we live in a post-Genesis 3 world - a world broken by sin.  Our bodies, brains, minds, and spirits have all been stained by its ugly curse.  The Chemistry in our brains is out of balance, our neurons do not fire properly, and we become bipolar, depressed, and addicted.  Cancer, diabetes, and viruses ravage our bodies.  Even our souls are touched with sin's insidious venom.

We are born into sin, and this sin touches our hearts, our attitudes, and desires.  We want things that we should not want, we make wrong choices even when we are presented with all the necessary information to make the right choice.  We eat what we know we should not eat, we drink what we know we should not drink, say what we do not mean to say and do things we live to regret.

David reflected on this in Psalm 51, "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me." (v. 5) David was not saying that his mother had committed adultery and his conception was the result.  What he is saying, is that sin is bred into his very flesh and bones.  Sin was in the blood of his mother, and she passed that same sinful blood on to him.  David wrote this after his infamous adultery with Bathsheba and conspiracy to kill her husband to cover up the resulting pregnancy.  He realized that something was wrong with his heart and mind that he would even want to do such things.  In other places, David is called a man after God's own heart, but in those moments his heart betrayed him.

The prophet Jeremiah backs David up on this, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9) Each of us can examine our hearts and see good there.  We love our friends, our family, our nation, we care for people, perhaps even help those less fortunate than ourselves.  But if we are honest, we can see evil there as well, we are angry and vengeful, filled with lust and covetousness.  We know full well, that if we could get away with it, if there were no consequences, we would be capable of some despicable things.  "For out of the heart,” Jesus said, "proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnesses, blasphemies:" (Matthew 15:19) We are not born with pure hearts.  We are born with our hearts broken.  They do not function properly like they should.

One of the standard arguments people in the LGBTQ community will give is that "God made me this way!" or "I was born this way!"  I certainly believe that humans are the special creation of God, but the only people God specifically created were Adam and Eve.  Everything about Adam and Eve was good.  They had no flaw or blemish, at least not until they sinned.  The rest of us are born with sin, flaws, and deformities.

I had a good friend years ago, Jorge, who was born with severe defects, his arms and legs were deformed, and he was not able to use them like a normal person and had to use a wheelchair to get around.  I certainly believe that Jorge is created in the image of God and his deformities are a part of God's sovereign, good plan for his life, but ultimately, those deformities themselves are not good, any more than any other disease or birth defect is good.  Birth defects and disease are always bad, and a mark of the curse of sin on this world.

If someone were to say that those birth defects were good, that is, good in and of themselves, I would have to say that person is delusional.  God has and will use those deformities to do good things in Jorge's life an in the life of others, but those defects by themselves are not a good thing.

We may not be born with physical deformities, but we are all born with spiritual and emotional deformities.  Our hearts and minds are born bent, our minds do not work 100% right and we think the wrong things.  Our hearts are fractured, and we do not want the things that we should.

For many years, I have had strong cravings for porn that I was not able to control and led to me being incarcerated.  I have no problem with saying that I was born a porn addict.  My brain chemistry and the desires of my flesh led me into porn addiction.  Certainly, there were environmental issues at play as well, but the point I want to make is that from the time I emerged from the womb, I was plagued with defects.  I was not born perfect.  I was born a sinner.

It would be easy for me to say, "I was born with this desire for porn; therefore, it is a good thing, and I should be allowed to indulge in it as much as I want.  After all, God made me this way!"  Like so many in our culture say to excuse their lawlessness and immorality, but that statement is not a true reflection of reality, or at least it is not a complete picture of reality.  I believe God was in control of my conception and development in the womb, he could see that my brain wiring was messed up, but he still allowed me to be born as an imperfect person.  While it is tempting to say, "God made me this way!" and continue in my sin, I know that my sinful desires and choices are not God's responsibility, they are my own.

James, the Lord's brother, offers this insight, "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:  But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.  Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." (James 1:13-15) When we say things like, "God made me this way," essentially what we are saying is that God is tempting us to commit evil, which is something God never does.  We are tempted by our own lusts that bubble up from our own wicked heart.

I can see that I was born with defects, but I have never said that those defects were a good thing.  We need to understand that what so many in our culture are calling good, homosexuality and transgenderism notably, is in reality a defect, a deformation, it is unhealthy and unnatural, and ultimately leads to destruction.  It is the height of absurdity to call such things a good thing.

I do not mean to say that having homosexual or transgender desires or tendencies is in itself wrong. Having unclean desires is part of the sin nature that we inherit from our parents, and ultimately from Adam and Eve.  We are born with misguided desires, being born with sinful desires is not wrong, what is wrong, is when we pursue those desires in defiance of the will of God and the natural order and then have the audacity to call those behaviors a good thing.

The image of God in our bodies and souls is broken.  The temple of God in our bodies is damaged, but God wants to fix it and repair it, and this is done through the redemptive work that Christ accomplished on the Cross.  He died and rose again to heal those wounds and fix our hearts and minds.  We are born damaged.  In Christ we are born again, and our brokenness is healed.