Image of God, Part 2 (I’ve Been Traveling)
I’ve been traveling with a campus preacher this week (Tom Short, www.shortreport.com). It is a very interesting experience to speak to college students, most of whom were raised in a pagan, hedonistic worldview, when they get to pick the topics of engagement on their turf. It basically comes down to a five hour dialogue on sex, God, sex, evolution and various aspects of sex. Which means it is a dialogue on their real world and the real spiritual issues of their lives. Most students don’t want to be part of the preacher’s bantering dialogue, but they do want to listen, and will spend far more time listening to Tom than my parishioners will listen to me on a Sunday morning. Many sit for hours, pretending not to care, yet fully focused on this unique opportunity to hear about this preacher man’s message of God’s view of their world.
Sex is such a big topic because they are 18-25, most are involved in sexual relationships and they have both a body and a world that tells them the good life is found when sex with someone is working well. The reality, though, is that it generally doesn’t work well, at least for very long, and there has been a lot of pain from abandonment, date rape, disease, abortion, and simply feeling trapped and used. Sex and sexuality is the topic that touches the problem they think they need to solve and there is a fascination with a preacher who says this magical energy of life – sex – is in most of their cases, a sin that will hurt them. They listen with a tenuous fascination. The preacher is clearly outside the bounds of politically correct postmodernism, making him a little frightening. But he is kept safe by a group-think that agrees to label him “crazy”. And there is nowhere else most of them can go to hear someone acknowledge both God and sex as real and relevant and talk about their connection to one another.
Fortunately, Tom is one of the most gracious, engaging and respectful people I know. His preaching really is a gift to the places he goes, because he shares God’s word and God’s truth with humility, clarity and power. There is also humor and respect. Unfortunately, one only has to look at campus preachers on Youtube to know these qualities are all too rare.
Even more unfortunately, these young (and old) people are lost in the labyrinth of what may be our culture’s greatest lie – that “male and female” are little more than one of the options for experiencing sex.
I must say “one of the options” because the progression described in Romans 1 is already far advanced in western culture. When the creative role and purposes of the God of the Bible are barred from a worldview, an inevitable process begins. Without the divine truth regarding gender identity to orient our understanding, the power of sexual drive and experience begins to be definitive over more and more of life. This inevitably erases every competing concept, until finally sexual experience itself, in any form, becomes the measure of value. However, since we are beings created in God’s image and sex has been designed as a very powerful aspect of our humanity meant to accomplish a purpose very different from recreation, this wayward cultural value doesn’t work. It brings a great deal of harm, pain and inevitably the destruction of our relationships and our humanity itself. Sex outside of God’s designed purposes becomes central and destroys our humanity. Instead of becoming an expression of male and female it replaces what those are and then erases them.
To be continued in Image of God Part 2
