The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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If you have taken part in this particular ritual, then you know that Apple ships everything in white and silver bags and liners that would make dirt look attractive. We were even passing the power cord around the room, admiring its design.
Were we losing our minds? The power cord?
The designers at Apple understand something significant about what it means to be human: we are hardwired to appreciate sensory experience.5
Texture, shape, color, feel, aroma.
The things God creates in Genesis are “pleasing to the eye.” We have an ingrained sense of appreciation for how things look and feel and smell because God has an appreciation for how things look and feel and smell. We bear the image of our maker.
The problem for Adam and Eve isn’t the food. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the food. The food is good. This is what Eve notices about it, that it’s “good for food.” It’s created by God for the enjoyment of people. The same goes for most of the things and people we lust for. In most cases, there’s nothing wrong with them inherently—
her body,
that product, this food.
The problem for Adam and Eve is what the fruit has come to represent. Rebellion against God. Rejection of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Another way.
This is really about that.
If I Just Had . . .
The appeal to Eve’s senses comes with a promise that the fruit will deliver something it can’t—specifically, a better reality than the one God has made. The problem isn’t the fruit. It’s what is promised through the fruit—that she won’t die if she eats it. The problem is that she’s told, “When you eat of it . . .” and then she’s told things that aren’t true. Promises are made to her that the temptation can’t come through on. It’s a lie.
Lust promises what it can’t deliver.
By giving in to the temptation, Adam and Eve are essentially claiming that God isn’t good. They’re giving in to the deception that good is possible apart from God, the source of all good. The scriptures call this being separated from “the life of God.”6 When these first people eat the fruit, it isn’t about the fruit, it’s about their dissatisfaction with the world God has placed them in.
Creation isn’t good enough for them.
From their perspective, their place in the midst of it isn’t good enough. And so they eat the fruit and everything falls apart. They’re tempted with something that promises what it can’t deliver, and they live with the consequences.
Lust comes from a deep lack of satisfaction with life. This is why we have to slow down and reflect on our lives before we’ll ever begin to sort out the significance of this. Lust often starts with a thought somewhere in our head or heart: “If I had that/him/her/it, then I’d be . . .”
When we’re not at peace, when we aren’t content, when we aren’t in a good place, our radar gets turned on. We’re looking. Searching. And we’re sensory creatures, so it won’t be long before something, or somebody, catches our attention.
And it always revolves around the “if,” doesn’t it?
If I just . . .
The idea creeps into our head and heart that we are lacking, that we are incomplete, that this craving in front of us is the answer.
The “if” means we have become attached to the idea that we are missing something and that we can be satisfied by whatever it is we have in our sights.7 There’s a hole, a space, a gap, and we’re on the search. And we may not even realize it. When we are in the right place, the right space—content and at peace—we aren’t on the search, and our radar gets turned off.
Adam and Eve fixate on this one piece of fruit from this one tree when God has given them endless trees with infinite varieties of fruit to enjoy. Which is often our problem. There’s so much to enjoy, and yet we fixate on something we don’t have.
This is why gratitude is so central to the life God made us for. Until we can center ourselves on what we do have, on what God has given us, on the life we do get to live, we’ll constantly be looking for another life. That is why the word remember occurs again and again in the Bible.8 God commands his people to remember who they are, where they’ve been, what they’ve seen, what’s been done for them. If we stop remembering, we may forget. And that’s when the trouble comes.
Head Space
Lust is always built on a lie. And so for you and me to be free from lust, we have to begin by understanding the lie and where it comes from and why it can be so alluring.
The word lust in the Greek language is the word epithumia. It’s actually two words in Greek: the word epi, which means “in,” and the word thumos, which refers to “the mind.”
In the mind.
Think about the head space we give to things and people we want. It’s easy for our thoughts to be dominated by a craving. We’re in a meeting, we’re taking a walk, we’re studying, we’re doing jobs around the house, and the whole time our brain is miles away, trying to figure out how to get it.
It takes ahold of us.
We are not free. Lust is slavery.
If I want something to the point that I can’t conceive of being content without it, then it owns me.
One writer in the scriptures puts it like this: “ ‘I have the right to do anything’—but I will not be mastered by anything.”9
That last part is great, isn’t it? “I will not be mastered by anything.”
We are free to do anything we want. But because I can doesn’t mean I should. There is a massive distance between “can” and “best.”
We’re addictive creatures. We try things, we experiment, we explore, and certain things hook us. They get their tentacles in us, and we can’t get away from them. What started out as freedom can quickly become slavery. Often freedom is seen as the ability to do whatever you want. But freedom isn’t being able to have whatever we crave. Freedom is going without whatever we crave and being fine with it.
Where It Leads
In the book of Ephesians, the writer claims that we get enslaved to lust because we become “darkened” in our understanding. The passage explains that we’re separated from the life of God because of ignorance due to the hardening of our hearts.10
It isn’t just what lust does, it’s where lust leads. God made us to appreciate aesthetics: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight. Shape, texture, consistency, color. It all flows from the endless creativity at the center of the universe, and we were created to enjoy it. But when lust has us in its grip, one of the first things to suffer is our appreciation for whatever it is we’re fixated on.
The scriptures call this “having lost all sensitivity.”11
The word insensitivity is the Greek word apalgeo. It comes from the root word algeo, which means “to feel pain,” and apo, which means “lacking or going without.” It’s the condition of being void of or past feeling. We could translate the phrase in Ephesians as “having lost the ability to feel things like they used to.”
Addictions often rob people of their appreciation of things.
An alcoholic may have once enjoyed the taste, but now he is using drinking to numb and escape and avoid, and the last thing he’s reflecting on is the quality of the brew or the vintage of the grapes.
And she used to appreciate