Drunk on sex

“Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?”
-Proverbs 5:20

It’s interesting that this passage contrasts two feelings of intoxication. In the previous verse, we are urged to be intoxicated on the love of a spouse. In this one, to avoid the intoxication of extramarital sex. The first intoxication is seen as something really wonderful; the second something not so great.

What strikes me immediately is the source of the intoxication. With your spouse, that intoxication should be because of the fullness of sex, which includes love, the joining of two into one, the spiritual and physical, the caring and compassion. It is an intoxication from the full expression of what God created for our satisfaction. It is not just a roll in the hay, but something so deeply spiritual that it takes two people and makes them one.

The world urges us to do something else with sex. It wants us to remove it from the context that God intended and turn it into something cheap. It wants us to remove all the things that make sex special and turn it into something quite ordinary. We’ve become drunk on it – but not in that way of being intoxicated with God’s provision and love, but in the sort of way where we act like idiots, throw up, and don’t remember any of it in the morning.

So many of the sins we commit are committed because we have a small view of something. Our pride comes from a small view of the world – we think we’re actually worthy of something. When you begin to understand the power and majesty of the Father, it is hard to have pride anymore. Greed comes about when we have a small view of wealth. If we had an inkling of the power of the love of God, a love that last forever, money would begin to seem like a very small matter.

C. S. Lewis once used an analogy of a boy playing in the dirt. His father told him that they would go to the beach. The boy was not excited. He had never been to the beach, but he enjoyed his dirt pile very much. At last the father had to tell him, “Son, you must trust me. The beach is much, much better.”

So it is with God. We are so content with money, pride, casual sex, lust, etc., when He intends so much greater. Our problem is that our desires are too weak, not that they are too strong.

Ultimately, the greatest joy, the greatest provision, the greatest awe we can experience is in Christ, and in Him we have all of these things eternally. So great is His gift to us that it is not something we could earn or ever pay back. His is a love so great that He died for us, even while we were distracted with so many small matters. When we were willing to trade His love for a little sex, He still died on our behalf.

He does not tell us to work harder or do better to gain His forgiveness. Instead He bids us repent and have faith in Him. By Grace we are saved.

We have all betrayed Him in sexual sin. Even those who have not had sex outside of marriage have still betrayed Him with lust, which Jesus said was adultery of the heart. None of us deserve the life He offers. Yet He gives it. Don’t trade it away for something so small as sin.