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SEX GOD

Exploring the Endless Connections

Between Spirituality and Sexuality

ROB BELL

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction: This Is Really about That

Chapter One: God Wears Lipstick

Chapter Two: Sexy on the Inside

Chapter Three: Angels and Animals

Chapter Four: Leather, Whips, and Fruit

Chapter Five: She Ran into the Girls’ Bathroom

Chapter Six: Worth Dying For

Chapter Seven: Under the Chuppah

Chapter Eight: Johnny and June

Chapter Nine: Whoopee Forever

Epilogue: More Balloons, Please

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Endnotes

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION This is Really About That

Once there were two brothers.

Jacob had smooth skin. But his older brother, Esau, was “a hairy man.”

And not only was Esau follicly well-endowed, he loved to be outdoors. He was a skillful hunter—picture Ted Nugent in sandals. His smooth-skinned brother? Jacob stayed inside and cooked and hung out with their mother.

You can smell the conflict coming.

Which it does. Their father, Isaac, was dying, and the custom in the ancient Near East at that time was for the father to give his blessing to his firstborn son before he passed away. This was a symbolic gesture loaded with significance. Isaac sends Esau out to kill an animal they can eat as part of the blessing ceremony. But Jacob, at his mother’s prodding, covers himself in goat skins and goes to his ailing blind father, pretending to be Esau. When Isaac hears him, he asks who it is, and Jacob responds, “I am Esau your firstborn.”1

Jacob insists he’s someone else.

Isaac falls for the deception and gives Jacob the blessing he intended to give Esau. Jacob’s lie is a serious offense against the family, against Isaac, and ultimately against Esau. And when Esau finds out, he’s furious and makes it clear that when their father dies, he is going to kill Jacob.

Which Jacob takes as a subtle hint that it’s time to leave town.

So Jacob is on the move, running for his life, when he stops to sleep for the night. The Bible describes the spot where he rests as “a certain place.”2 This detail is significant because this is not a religious site; it isn’t the top of a mountain or the edge of the sea, there isn’t a temple nearby. Jacob falls asleep in a random place by the side of the road. That night, he has a dream. An intense dream in which God speaks to him and says, among other things, “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”3

What God does here is astounding. People at that time believed the gods resided in religious places, places where gods are expected to be—temples and holy sites and shrines and altars.4 But this God is different.

This God appears at rest areas.

This God speaks to people at “certain places” along the way.

This God doesn’t need temples and holy sites and rituals.

This God will speak to anybody, anywhere, anytime.

Jacob then takes a stone and sets it up as a pillar to mark the spot, making a vow: “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s household, then the Lord will be my God.”5

Years pass. Jacob marries, starts a family, and eventually reconciles with Esau. He stops pretending to be someone he’s not. And then one day he returns to the spot where he made his vow to God. The book of Genesis says, “He built an altar, and he called the place El Bethel, because it was there that God revealed himself to him when he was fleeing from his brother.”6

Bet is the Hebrew word for house. El is one of the names for God. Bethel, the “House of God.”

Imagine you’re one of Jacob’s kids: you have just arrived in this new land, and there’s a stone pillar there that your dad can’t stop talking about. He’s telling anyone who will listen this story about something that happened to him years ago, and he’s stacking rocks on top of rocks. He’s stacking them so high, he turns the whole thing into an altar. And he keeps talking about a vow he made to God, and you have no idea what the point of this is. It seems a bit much. And then he starts calling this pile of rocks the House of God.

What if you asked, “Dad, what’s the big deal? They’re just rocks.”7

I imagine Jacob would respond, “Yes, you’re right, they’re rocks, but they’re more than rocks. You have to understand, I was on the run and thought my brother was going to kill me. My life was over. And God saved me. And God brought me to a new home. And I had food to eat and a place to sleep and eventually God gave me a family. These aren’t just rocks. These are a symbol of life for me. God came through for me.”

They’re rocks, but they’re more than rocks.

We do this all the time.

If we were to go through your garage or storage shelves or sock drawer, I guarantee we would find the strangest things. I have a trophy from when I was fourteen. The little man on the top fell off sometime in the ’90s, the lettering that says what it’s for has faded, and the years have revealed that, shockingly, that isn’t real marble. But I’ve kept it. I haven’t thrown it away because it’s more than a trophy to me. That trophy is the first time I actually won something on my own. It represents a certain period of my life and the struggles of being fourteen and finding my identity and wondering if I’d ever be good at anything.

It’s a trophy, but it’s more than a trophy.

Jewelry, pictures, sculptures made by children, antiques that have been in the family for years, art projects, souvenirs, velvet paintings—we 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 of entertainment, a culture.

And it’s everywhere.

The problem is that “that” is actually a “she.” A person. A woman. With a name, a history, with feelings. It seems harmless until you’re that girl—and then it hurts. It’s degrading. It’s violating. It does something to a person’s soul.

When a “She” Becomes a “That”

Jesus had much to say about what happens when a woman, an image-bearer, a carrier of the divine spark, becomes a “that.” In the book of Matthew, Jesus teaches that “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”8 He connects our eyes and our intentions and our thoughts with the state of our hearts.9

Jesus then takes it farther. He says, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.”

Which is a bit violent. Not to mention painful. And if taken literally, renders half of the human race blind in a matter of moments. Not to mention that blind people are fully capable of lusting. Our only conclusion is that Jesus is using the “it’s merely a flesh wound” picture here to point us to something else.10 Some truth beyond the removing of body parts. If we’re not supposed to take it literally, then how, or where, are we supposed to take it?

Jesus explains by saying, “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”

How did we get from lust, which is so common and doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, to having your body thrown into hell in just a couple of sentences?

And to avoid this fate you should cut off your hand? Poke out your eye? That would be better?

He’s stretching it a bit, isn’t he?

Or did we miss something?

To understand how Jesus makes these connections, we have to explore the first-century Jewish understanding of heaven.

In the book of Psalms, it’s written: “The Lord has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all.”11 To the Jewish mind, heaven is not a fixed, unchanging geographical location somewhere other than this world. Heaven is the realm where things are as God intends them to be. The place where things are under the rule and reign of God. And that place can be anywhere, anytime, with anybody.

It’s also written in the Psalms that “the highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humankind.”12 So there is this realm, heaven, where things are as God wants them, under the rule and reign of God. But the earth is different. God has allowed for the temporary existence of other kingdoms. Other realms of authority. The earth “he has given to humankind.” Which means we can do whatever we want. We can live however we want. We can choose to live under the rule and reign of God, or we can choose to rebel against God and live some other way.

Now if there’s a realm where things are as God wants them to be, then there must be a realm where things are not as God wants them to be. Where things aren’t according to God’s will. Where people aren’t treated as fully human.

It’s called hell.

Think about the expression “for the hell of it.” When someone says “for the hell of it,” what they mean is that whatever is being discussed was done or said for no apparent reason. It was, in essence, pointless. Random. And God is for purpose and beauty and meaning.

When we say something was a “living hell,” we mean that it was void of any love or peace or beauty or meaning. It was absent of the will and desire of God.

We hear about war zones being like hell, working conditions being hellish, a divorce being emotional hell, a famine feeling like hell on earth.13

Concentration camps are hells on earth.

And that’s Jesus’s point with the “gouge out your eye” teaching. His point isn’t that you should mutilate your body if you find yourself lusting after someone. His point is that something serious—sometimes hellish—happens when people are treated as objects, and we should resist it at all costs.14