Desire, if not under arrest, even in its earliest stage, can disfigure the complexion of a perfect moment. Some contacts are too flawless to risk their marring. While attempting to drive away from a church I had visited for the first and, I think, only time, I discovered that I had parked my front tire into a rut. Then this pretty young woman—just a few years younger than I was at the time—upon seeing that I was not able to rock my car out of it, came over and easily pushed me out. She was so happy to have done it; I was pleasantly taken aback. We both smiled; I drove away; and we never saw each other again. Nine out of ten single men, maybe, and some married ones too, would have taken advantage to ask her out for coffee ‘to repay her for her kindness.’ How convenient would that have been? But how pathetic? Any more contact than we had had, I knew, would have dashed the scene to pieces. Some things remain perfect because they are never touched. There is an element in desire that desires to dirty its hands. Desire dirties its hands when it touches the untouchable.
Even for the Christian man, libidinous desire is not wholly subdued until death or the redemption of the body (if alive) at the second coming of Christ Jesus. But under the Lordship of Jesus today, a new power is available to control this desire: to suppress it, smother it, redirect it, or transform it. Without this grace from God, man has little with which to fight desire; and if his desire is for women, he will seek them out, or seek them out afresh, and, like a Benjamite up from the vineyards, attempt to catch what he can (Judges 21.21.) He will go back to his women, to his Woman Substitute—to the only image of God that he has an appetite for and feels comfortable with. He will turn to a frail alternative to Divine Eternality, and try to be satisfied with that.
