“Human nature never changes.”
The professor and I both sighed. We were on a ten minute break at the Broomfield, Colorado, City and County Courthouse.. The lawsuit for wrongful termination against Vail Resorts had been dragging on and on and both of us were getting bored performing our civic duty as jurors. It was becoming clear that the fired architect had been dismissed for good reason and that he was only trying to squeeze whatever he could get from one of Colorado’s renowned ski resorts.
“Yep,” I said. “Human nature never changes.”
I don’t remember much from that case. It’s been several years. But that professor’s observation has echoed in my mind ever since. “Human nature never changes.”
And that brings me to the subject of men’s ministry and the nemesis that our society has been struggling with mightily lately: what to do with a man’s sexual lust and the abuse, guilt, shame, hypocrisy and relational dysfunction that flows from it. If it is true that “human nature never changes,” then how can and should society address these issues?
It seems to me that the way human societies try to solve the problem of lust is with two basic, but very different, responses: indulgence and repression. We see the indulgence response to sexual lust primarily in western societies (symbolized by the bikini), and we see the repression response primarily in Near Eastern societies (symbolized by the burka). So let’s discuss these two responses and compare them to a third response: the Christian response.
The Bikini Response
Ever since Sigmund Freud concluded that his female Viennese patients were coming to him for counseling because they were sexually repressed neurotics, sexual repression has become the unpardonable sin of western civilization. And ever since the recently departed – and presumably now better informed – great high priest of mammary glands, Hugh Hefner, popularized pornography, sexual repression in western civilization has been replaced by sexual expression on a grand scale.
It’s been said that America has lost its ability to blush. Nothing could be more true. But in the process of coming out of the closet in all things sexual, America has also lost its ability to 1) build strong nuclear families; 2) enculturate its men; 3) protect its women from assault and rape; and, 4) quarantine its children from pervasive online pornography. Greater freedom in sexual expression has not resulted in a more enlightened, better adjusted and humane America, but in a more brutish one.
So if indulging human nature isn’t the solution, then maybe repressing it really is the answer. And that brings me to…
The Burqa Response
I have to admit, dressing women in black from head to toe with a small slit over their eyes – sometimes covered with lace – so they can see out, strikes me as beyond bizarre.?But I get it. The problem, these cultures seem to me to be saying, isn’t with men, but with their women. If we can just cover up their sexuality by fiat and remove them as much as possible from everyday public life, then everything will be okay. Take away the temptation and the sin will disappear.
But the problem is, sin doesn’t disappear simply by covering up temptation. Human nature never changes, even when we try to force it to change by cultural mandate. Since I’ve never lived in this kind of repressive culture, I’m going to have to rely on a surrogate to draw the conclusions for me. In his book, The Islamist: Why I became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left, Ed Husain describes life in Saudi Arabia where he became “seriously worried” for his wife’s safety and disillusioned with the spiritual state of the culture. In a chapter entitled, “Saudi Arabia: Where is Islam?”, Husain writes:
Our experiences in Saudi Arabia scotched the myth, widely held among Muslims, that Muslim countries are somehow morally superior to the decadent West. After hearing personal stories from my students about incidents of pedophilia, rape, and abuse in their families I was convinced that the West is no more decadent than the East. The difference is that in the West we are open about these issues and try to handle them as and when they arise. In comparison, in the Muslim world, such matters are swept under the carpet in an attempt to pretend that all is well.
Human nature never changes indeed. What we see with the bikini and burqa responses to unchanging human nature is that both indulging it and repressing it are simply two different forms of slavery: the first a slavery to our unchanging destructive lusts (debauchery), and the second a slavery to trying to change our unchanging destructive lusts (repressive legalism).
The result is that more than one man in history has shouted out in dismay, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” -The Apostle Paul
The Christian Response
In a nutshell, the Christian response to the problem of lust in unchanging human nature is this: ignore it. Don’t indulge your human nature. It will destroy you and everyone around you. Don’t try to change your human nature. You can’t. Instead, ignore it.
But how is that possible? My human nature is who I am? I can’t deny who I am.
Enter God, and his son, Jesus Christ. The Christian message is that God exists and has revealed himself to us in Christ. God is both perfectly holy and perfectly loving. As such, he demands total honesty and transparency from us: that we acknowledge our utter helplessness in dealing with our unchanging, lustful, human nature. In return, because God is also perfectly loving, he offers us forgiveness and new life through faith in his Son.?
It is that experience of coming face to face with God in total honesty and casting ourselves by faith on his mercy that creates in us a new person, a new nature, a new future, and a new hope. The Spirit of God literally enters into us and lives within us. We gain a new sensitivity to spiritual things. Our conscience awakens to God’s presence. We have a new affection for The Good and a new ability to do it.
Sadly, however, our old human nature is not affected by that conversion experience. Human nature never changes, remember? But now that we have been born again to a new life, we now have three choices instead of just two: 1) we can indulge our human nature as before, which is why Christians can still be guilty of the worst of sins; 2) we can think we need to somehow change our human nature – which we can’t do – which is why Christians can fall into legalism; or 3) we can simply ignore our human nature and focus our attention, our affection, our energy, our love and our life on the Spirit who indwells in us, and on The Good he has empowered us to do. We can choose to nourish the Spirit, or we can choose to nourish the flesh with either the bikini or the burqa.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin?but alive to God in Christ Jesus.?Therefore do not let sin reign?in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.?Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness,?but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.?For sin shall no longer be your master,?because you are not under the law,?but under grace. -The Apostle Paul
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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