Identifying the Addiction ‘Chain’
Porn is a lie cast in a drama by actors. The lie is that mankind is not broken by sin in all his faculties and relations. An idealized ‘Eve’ is subjugated by an idealized ‘Adam’ in porn films. Because men have a gender-specific curse, a ‘broken scepter’ inherited from Adam’s fall, our deeply wounded adequacy cries for power and potency. Therefore, porn is the most ingenious trap ever invented to capture and bind the male temperament. As a consequence, porn is not only a deadly habit, but also a symptom. It is symptomatic of a masculine crisis.
Why a crisis you say? The answer is that porn ‘offers’ a way to minister to our brokenness, to feed our hunger for security, significance, love, satisfaction, and meaning. As such, porn is a false integration point (Francis Schaeffer’s term for an idol). Sin has radically fragmented the faculties of our soul: mind, affections, will, conscience are at odds with one another—that is the human condition by original sin. In our fragmentation we hunger for unity in our souls. An idol is a ‘false integration point’ because it is something in the creation we look to for integration of these faculties of soul (soul here is closely tied to the expression of its loyalties by the members of our physical body).
Porn is such a clever device, it blindsides a man by means of vicarious pleasure and fulfillment—it promises the thrills of potent sexual activity, without participation. But, voyeurism makes a man a weak, and sick drooling creep—a peeping tom on the NET. For, in porn use, there is no giving of oneself, no energy to maintain emotional intimacy, no courage and interpersonal risk, no personal celebration of masculine uniqueness. The vicarious element in porn draws the viewer to experience a sexual fantasy through others. As a result, it is killingly effective at numbing a man’s heart. For it is anti-love; a tutorial in selfishness.
It is a worldview about the body-soul unity which desacralizes God’s greatest earthly gift, holy matrimony. When a man feeds upon porn, he is doing something more dangerous than using cocaine. He is storing up illicit images of enticement that the mind can boot up and download at any time. Like an alien creature laying its parasitic eggs in its host, porn deposits its ‘DNA’—these countless smut images gestate over time, and ‘hatch to form a walled idolatrous stronghold inside a man from which lust can operate without restriction (James 1:13-18).
If that were not enough in describing the dangers of its addictive nature, porn use also grabs a man’s emotions—adrenaline and endorphins are released in porn use. But, because there is no one there relationally, and the man is alone, the emotions generated curve back on the man in autoerotic activity. This self-love is satanic, self-directed—but, the rush experienced in viewing porn is reinforced as new pathways in the brain are formed, like burning circuitry in a computer chip. This new structuring of pathways in the brain ‘wants’ its adrenaline—and feels deprived when it does not receive it. These neural pathways are fraught with emotional cell memory—creating an extremely powerful pull to return to the illicit activity.
My friends, we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps 139:14), but when we use this wonderfully made vessel of ours for forbidden purposes that are sold out to lust, terrifying things happen (1 Thess 4:1-8). What a disturbing prospect it is that it is possible for a sensual man to be ‘trained in greed’ (2 Peter 2). You may say to me, “Aren’t you just using scare tactics to make us behave?” No, not at all, that response flies in the face of countless warnings in Scripture, for the fear of God is inseparable from the fact that He, as Ruler, Lawgiver, and Creator, enforces the very consequences of moral cause and effect (Ps 34). We fear Him as both Judge and Redeemer (Heb 10:26-39).
An additional, life-altering consequence of porn use is this: you cannot trash God’s invention and design of covenant sex in marriage without doing great damage to yourself. The act of marriage (sexual intercourse) is spiritual as well as emotional and physical (1 Cor 6:15-20). God created the act of marriage to generate, strengthen, and celebrate the bond between one man and one woman. Therefore, when this incredibly powerful and holy ‘cosmic glue’ (the act of marriage) is taken out of marriage and offered as entertainment, disaster results. A man viewing porn is watching a very private activity meant by God to form and celebrate covenant oneness. But as the man watches, he is stimulated. His arousal cannot possibly make him one flesh with the actress in the video (nor should he seek it).
This misuse of sex (the act of marriage degraded as porn) is damaging beyond words, for the aroused man who is using porn cannot possibly become ‘one flesh’ with the pixelized image of the cyber-whore he is watching.
Sex was created to produce oneness in marriage, but without oneness, it produces shame like a plutonium bomb produces fallout. It just keeps kicking out that fallout, day after day. So also, the porn user, by his misuse of sexual desire, feels increasingly like a beast, rather than the very image and likeness of God Almighty. Porn use ‘guts a man’s soul’—it hollows him out and makes God seem distant, like a mere detached concept. What is the answer? How can we cultivate holy desires?
A Glorious Positive must replace the sinful Negative
No man ever truly broke his porn habit by focusing solely on what to avoid. As Scottish preacher, Thomas Chalmers preached several generations ago, only a new affection has the power to expel an inferior affection. In addition, we are also indebted to John Piper for writing so clearly on the power of the glory of Christ to instill sexual purity in a man (see Sex and the Supremacy of Christ. This is also a video/audio series.)
At one point in the series, Pastor Piper says, “If one beholds the glory of Christ, it is almost impossible to view porn.” What he means is this: so fully is God’s redemptive plot revealed in the glory of the Son, that every counterfeit offer of fulfillment and meaning becomes disgusting and offensive and distasteful.
The glory of Christ runs right through the center of ‘God’s redemptive plot’—a plot to reclaim His very own image and likeness in those He redeems. When God saves a person, He brings that individual into His glorious plot. That man or woman receives ‘eyes of the heart’ in order to behold, and treasure, the remarkable things freely given to us in Christ (1 Cor 2:12; Eph 1:18). Your perceived treasure controls said Jesus: your heart will assuredly follow your treasure just as a little puppy dog will follow you around (Mt 6:21).
Yes, the good news for tempted men is that beholding the glory of Christ will keep you from sexual impurity because in the Son and His work we see not only the judgment of the ‘earthy’ Adamic man, but also the destiny of the ‘heavenly man’ (1 Cor 15:45-49). The earthy, Adamic man is ‘earthy’ because he is preoccupied with things below. By contrast, the heavenly man (whose image every truly redeemed individual will bear—1 Cor. 15:49), sets his mind on things above (Col. 3:1), and aspires to answer the upward call of Christ (Phil 3:7-16).
Christ is the first ‘heavenly man’—He bears the virtues of holiness in human form—He was raised from the grave incorruptible. We behold His glory and in the process, we are able to contemplate what we shall be someday (Rom 8:29; 1 Jn 3:1-3). The Word of God promises us that in the repeated act of beholding Christ’s glory, we shall not only long to be like Him, but also be incrementally transformed into His image (2 Cor 3:18).
This conformity to Christ certainly includes conformity to His purity. Wonder of wonders, God’s gift of the Son comes with the gift of ultimately being made like the Son. If that is your hope, you will, in no uncertain terms, pursue purity according to the book of First John (1 Jn 3:3)
As we further consider Christ’s glory, we receive hints about how the fullness of the Godhead shall be witnessed by us, and continually communicated to us by the Son of God throughout eternity. The more precious these truths are to us, and the more clearly we see them (as the eye of faith beholds them in the Word), the more we will treasure them and be diligent in our determination to run the race before us with endurance (1 Cor 9:24-27; Heb 12:1-3).
My friends, God is the highest pleasure conceivable (Ps 16), but we have to be made like Christ to fully experience the pleasure of God. There is an uncontainable joy and a boundless bliss in being face to face with God in heaven once you are perfectly conformed to Christ in holiness. This is the ‘Bride of Christ’ in her nuptial chamber with her Lord. It is as Dr. Peter Jones says, “Cosmological Holiness”—that is, every created thing and every creature is in its proper place and order, all to the glory of the One who created them. This is the destiny of the saints in Christ. All earthly love stories shall be a distant memory as the love of God for His own fills the theme of His eternal Kingdom (Eph 3:14-21).
May I close by issuing you a warning and an encouragement. First a warning, if you take your hunger for intimacy to sexual sin, you will discover that these truths associated with the glory of Christ will seem to be distant, mythical, ‘pie in the sky’ sort of stuff which has no substance. That mindset is the result of worshipping the material.
In fact, this issue we are discussing represents an inverse proportion: the more the glory of Christ has sway in your thoughts and affections, the more you will grasp it as reality, and the more you will see what a charade porn actually is. And, conversely, the more you turn to porn for intimacy and comfort and excitement, the less real things above will appear to you. That is the self-deception which fills every lustful act of sin according to Ephesians 4:22.
As Ezra and Nehemiah sternly warned the returning exiles in Jerusalem, put away your foreign women! Why call down the Lord’s fierce anger upon you? And, to us in this gospel age, believing men, be done with your cyber-harlots featured in porn videos. Make a clean break from them.
24 Now therefore, my sons, listen to me,
And pay attention to the words of my mouth.
25 Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways,
Do not stray into her paths.
26 For many are the victims she has cast down,
And numerous are all her slain.
27 Her house is the way to Sheol,
Descending to the chambers of death (Prov 7:24-27).
16 Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said,
“I will dwell in them and walk among them;
And I will be their God, and they shall be My people.
17 “Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate,” says the Lord.
“And do not touch what is unclean;
And I will welcome you.
18 “And I will be a father to you,
And you shall be sons and daughters to Me,”
Says the Lord Almighty (2 Cor 6:16-18).