Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Just imagine! We must do something! So speak up!

Judges 19:30

The Rafflesia arnoldii, commonly called the “corpse flower,” is the largest flower in the world. It can grow to be 3 feet in diameter and weigh up to 15 pounds. It also looks like a vision from a nightmare and smells like its name suggests: rotting flesh. The carnivorous flower attracts pollinators like flies with its smell, and it parasitizes other vines in order to survive. As big and gruesome as this flower can be, it begins from a seed that is roughly the size of a grain of rice.

At the risk of sounding too Freudian for sensible people, I would argue that sexual sin breeds in our normal, day-to-day lives. We know that all sin spawns from the same heirloom strain, and that if left alone the tiny seed will grow wild and unfettered, choking the life and light from everything else. So, too, every person except Jesus was born with the capacity to see depravity to its completion. We are tending the little sprouts that not only have the ability to become vile atrocities but also are even now contributing to the same ecosystem where those atrocities thrive.

The first winter after buying our home, my husband set to work tending our two creekside acres. He chopped down tall grass and underbrush to clear a view down to the water, and then he pulled thick-as-your-fist dead vines off many of our giant oak trees. Little did we know, those vines were poison ivy roots, and though it was winter and they were dry and brown, they were not dead. After causing a debilitating rash, the poison finally entered his bloodstream, and it wasn’t until he got a steroid shot that he found any relief.

Sometimes sin seems to sleep. It lies dormant, hibernating in winter, and we let it rest, thinking we can touch it as we please without being burned. Let us make no mistake: sin is never satisfied and it never takes a day off. As John Owen aptly put, “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.”

Our modern world has much in common with the nation of Israel depicted in the book of Judges. People were quick to forget God, becoming gods unto themselves. Everyone did as he or she saw fit. They served the false gods of the peoples from whom they were called to be set apart. Sexual sin was rampant, the final story in the book telling of a man resisting violent solicitations for sex from perverted men and offering them his own concubine whom they spent the night raping and murdering. We are shocked by this tale, and yet it is happening under our very upturned noses.

My aim is to connect the dots between culturally normalized sexuality and sin’s shocking frontiers. The god of sex reigns both when we use our own bodies for sexual display and when we voyeuristically, if passively, contribute to a culture of sex through the media’s presentation of sexuality, whether true or false. The problem is rampant both when we hide our own sexual sins and when we encourage others to parade their’s.

Just as our forbearers wrote down the tenants of our nation and signed them into law, we each have become a law unto ourselves, deciding what is right and wrong, and judging anyone who would dare judge us, even God. Even God who calls us to a law stricter than the devoutest pharisee would be able to adhere to, to be perfect as He is perfect, to cut off our hand or gouge out our eye if it causes us to sin. How dare He expect of us a higher holiness than our leaders, celebrities, or our locker room friends?

He sent His Son to die, that is how.

It is time to acknowledge that the seed of sexual sin has been left too deep and too dark for too long. It has taken root, and when it sprouted, it didn’t look like the poison we easily identify. It started as an innocuous grain, but at maturity its smell is disgustingly attractive, luring you toward your own death. It grew alongside our established values, tame and unobtrusive. To tear it down would mean damaging the host on which it subsists, our preferences, and maybe even marring the edifice of our reputation. We need to admit that every manifestation of sin germinates from the same original sin, and in the case of the manifold branches of sexual sin, we need to be ruthless in cutting them down, even the ones that appear “good for food, and a delight to the eyes” (Gen 3:6). Otherwise, the wily wending of our own hearts, which are deceitful above all, leads us to stranger and darker parts of the forest where we can’t find the way back and are too entangled to try.

So with open eyes, let us do something. Let us speak up. A message like this is not palatable. It is difficult to peer into the crooked recesses of slave trade and pornography and child abuse. Remember that some must live there through no fault or agency of their own. It is difficult to gaze into the mirror of the glaring truth of God’s Word which exhorts us to lay down our right to dress and speak as we see fit if it causes our brother to stumble. Remember that Jesus did it perfectly, and His Spirit lives in us now, and our reward in heaven will be great.