Sex God: Exploring the Endless Questions Between Spirituality and Sexuality. Rob Bell
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hold on to them because they point beyond themselves. If we were to ask you about a certain picture and why you have it displayed in such a prominent place in your home or office or why you carry it in your purse or wallet everywhere you go, you’d probably respond by talking about the people in the picture, where it was taken, when it was taken. But that would only be the start. Those relationships and that place and that time are all about something else, something more. If we kept exploring, you’d probably end up using words like trust and love and belonging and commitment and celebration.
So it’s a picture, but it’s more than a picture.
This physical thing—this picture, trophy, artifact, gift—is actually about that relationship, that truth, that reality, that moment in time.
This is actually about that.
Whether it’s what we do with our energies
or how we feel about our bodies
or wanting to have the control in relationships
or trying to recover from heartbreak
or dealing with our ferocious appetites
or the difficulty of communicating clearly with those we love
or longing for something or someone better,
much of life is in some way connected with our sexuality.
And when we begin to sort through all of the issues surrounding our sexuality, we quickly end up in the spiritual,
because this
is always about that.
And so this guy always has a girlfriend, and it has become a joke among his family and friends that the day he loses one girlfriend, he finds another—they actually use the phrase “trade her in” behind his back—which raises the question, Why does he need to have a girl? What is his real need, the one that drives him to need a girl? And if we could get at that, would he not need a girl so much?
And she’s got a coldness in her heart toward her husband, but it’s really about something that happened years before she even met him.
And he’s got this thing he does, and he keeps telling her that all guys are like this, and she wants to trust him, but she’s dying to know if all guys really are like him, because it’s getting a little weird.
And she’s single and fine with it but still has this sense that she’s a sexual being, and she’s trying to figure out how to reconcile this because her married friends keep trying to set her up with a “nice” guy they know, which gives her the feeling that her friends think she is somehow incomplete because she isn’t married.
And they keep having these arguments about things that are so trivial it’s embarrassing. Yesterday they got into it over how the cars should be parked, and the day before it had something to do with the phone bill, and before that it was about whose turn it was to take the dog out, and now it’s happening again—they’re in the kitchen debating how a tomato should be properly sliced. They’ve been living together now for several years, and they would say it’s been great, but they’re at this point in the relationship where issues like trust and commitment and future and kids and marriage are starting to linger in their minds and hearts, and underneath it all they both have this question: Are you the one? But neither of them has ever actually voiced it, and both of them experienced their parents’ divorcing at a young age, so anytime the subject of marriage comes up, things get confusing and tense very quickly, and so they’re just at this moment realizing that this argument really has nothing to do with how to slice a tomato.
Because this is really about that.
It’s always about something else.
Something deeper. Something behind it all. You can’t talk about sexuality without talking about how we were made. And that will inevitably lead you to who made us. At some point you have to talk about God.
Sex. God. They’re connected. And they can’t be separated. Where the one is, you will always find the other. This is a book about how sexuality is the “this” and spirituality is the “that.” To make sense of the one, we have to explore the other.
And that is what this book is about.
CHAPTER ONE God Wears Lipstick
In 1945, a group of British soldiers liberated a German concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen. One of them, Lieutenant Colonel Mercin Willet Gonin DSO, wrote in his diary about what they encountered:
I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them. . . . One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it. One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves . . . [a] dysentery tank in which the remains of a child floated.1
This account is shocking, horrible, and tragic. But why?
Because people shouldn’t eat worms?
Because people shouldn’t make piles of corpses?
We answer yes to these questions because no one should be forced to live in conditions such as those at Bergen-Belsen. And yet we intuitively understand that the wrong being done to these prisoners—these people—was much more significant than just the physical conditions forced upon them. A concentration camp is designed to strip people of their humanity.
It’s anti-human.
And in the scriptures, anything that’s anti-human is anti-God. Genesis begins with God creating the world and then creating people “in his own image.”2 The Hebrew word for image here is tselem, and it has a specific cultural meaning.3 The stories of Genesis originated in ancient Near Eastern culture, where a king was said to rule in the image of a particular god. The famous King Tut is an Egyptian example of this. His full name was Tutankhamen, which is translated “the living image of [the god] Amon.” The king was seen as the embodiment of a particular god on earth. If you wanted to see what that god was like, you looked at that god’s king.
The writer of Genesis makes it clear that in all of creation there is something different about humans.4 They aren’t God, and they aren’t going to become God, but in some distinct, intentional way, something of God has been placed in them. We reflect what God is like and who God is. A divine spark resides in every single human being.5
Everybody, everywhere. Bearers of the divine image.6
Picture a group of high school boys standing by their lockers when a girl walks by. One of the boys asks, “How do you rate that?” They then take turns assigning numerical values to the various parts of her anatomy, discussing in great detail how they evaluate her physical attributes.7
This scenario happens all the time, all over the world, every day. It’s a pastime for some. There are television shows and websites and endless discussions all devoted to deciding who’s hot and who’s not. It’s an industry, a form