If you think I wrote the title, “The Lord Made Orgasms Possible,” to shock you, you are correct. I wrote that the Lord made orgasms possible to shock Christians out of the Satanically-inspired blather that heaven will be a horrible place to spend eternity. I chose the title because most Christians have a blasé indifference toward, dislike of, or even dread of eternity.
One of the Christian’s problems when it comes to God being perfect, or the fact that we are going to be perfect in eternity, is that Satan has succeeded in making perfect look incredibly dour, legalistic, and definitely undesirable. Again, this is Satan’s doing. This is the result of false teachings about what it means to be perfect that give perfection a bad rap. Telling most people that they will one day be perfect is received by them as telling them that one day they will be neutered—perfection sounds sterile.
We tend to associate perfection with a legalistic adherence to a code of conduct, like the Pharisees (who, oddly, were not only imperfect but were completely corrupt). So, we mostly relate perfection either to the utterly unobtainable, or to perfectionists who spend their lives desperately trying to measure up, or to the cold, dispassionate, unfeeling sterility of something like a doctor’s office. Most of us, if asked, would not want to spend time with someone perfect. If Christianity is true, then we would expect Satan to confuse our language, and he has done that with the concept of “perfect.”
I gave a Sunday sermon at a church on the glory of eternal life, in which I said that the Lord made orgasms possible (I wondered if I would ever be invited back—I was). After the service, an early-40-something wife and mom came up to me and said she was recently at The Cheesecake Factory drinking a glass of wine while eating a piece of cheesecake and called her husband and said that what she was doing was so pleasurable “it must be sinful.” Do you see what’s going on here? In the minds of many, the Devil has made pleasure equal to sin.
So let’s set the record straight regarding perfection. Jesus was perfect, yet He got angry with hypocrites, and, contrary to Hollywood’s image of stern or hypocritical preachers, sinners surrounded Him (Luke 15:1). He spent the day with a thief (Luke 19:1-10). A sinful woman washed His feet with her hair (Luke 7:44). He cared for the sick and spent time with children. He cried with Mary and Martha over Lazarus’s death (John 11:33).
Jesus was perfect, but he publicly rejected legalistic, man-made holiness codes that sounded spiritual but were not. Although the Pharisees complained, Jesus allowed His hungry disciples to pick and eat grain on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1-2). When the Pharisees and the scribes complained that Jesus and his disciples didn’t wash their hands before they ate, Jesus rebuked them for “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Mark 7:2). The Pharisees told Jesus it was unlawful to heal on the Sabbath, but He did it anyway and they responded by plotting how to kill Him (Mark 3:1-6). In short, Jesus rejects the moral maxims of men.
Jesus was perfect but He ate and drank so often with sinners that the Pharisees said, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and ‘sinners’” (Matthew 11:19—I’ve often wondered if some of today’s Christians wouldn’t take Jesus aside to counsel Him about His witness). Jesus was perfect but when they ran out of wine at the wedding at Cana, Jesus’s first miracle was to turn water into a lot of wine—somewhere between 120 to 150 gallons. And it was very good wine because the guests exclaimed that the host had saved the best wine for last (verse 10). Jesus could have had his first miracle be to heal the blind or the deaf, thus announcing Himself as the one who would enable people to see or hear. Or He could have raised someone from the dead demonstrating that He came to conquer death. But Jesus made wine.[1]
Now, again, I’m not encouraging anyone to drink wine and Christians need to be careful not to stumble other Christians, but there were drunkards in Jesus’s day and Jesus still drank wine. He didn’t have to, John the Baptist didn’t, but Jesus drank wine. Consider also that in the perfect Law of Moses, Deuteronomy 14:26, the Lord tells the Israelites to take their tithe and “spend the money for whatever you desire—oxen or sheep or wine or strong drink, whatever your appetite craves. And you shall eat there before the Lord your God and rejoice, you and your household.” Also, in Psalm 104:15, David blesses the Lord who gives “wine to gladden the heart of man.”
Now, for the last time, my point isn’t that anyone should start drinking wine—many shouldn’t—or that if someone does drink wine that they shouldn’t be cautious not to stumble others. My point is that we need to be careful not to present Christianity as anti-pleasure. Part of our problem is that Christians have overlooked the fact that the devil’s modus operandi is twofold. We are all aware that Satan tries to make sinful things appear good. But many Christians fail to realize that the devil also wants us to think that good things are bad. As Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 4:1-3: “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.” Jesus created all the pleasures! The Lord does not oppose pleasure; He opposes pleasure’s misuse.
This is perfection and we will have it. Jesus demands perfection: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat. 5:48). But then He supplies what He demands, “Because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Heb. 10:14). And so we read that those in heaven are “the spirits of righteous men made perfect” (Heb. 12:23). I long for the day where I will no longer feel guilty for eating too much, or for saying the wrong thing, for wasting money on something that once seemed smart, ad infinitum, don’t you? Can you imagine no guilt forever?
In just the last couple of weeks people have written to me asking whether this or that favorite thing of theirs will be in heaven. I always reply that I don’t know but if it’s not in heaven, then we should expect better things in their place. I mean, if the Lord created things that we really enjoy on earth, we should absolutely not think there will be fewer things to enjoy in heaven. Now I’m not saying that there will be orgasms in heaven, but the One who made orgasms possible on earth will be there and if we are missing something we enjoy here, we should expect better things, not worse, in the glorious Kingdom to come. As David wrote, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
If you’re interested in not fearing death then you might check out my last post, What Happens to You When Your Body Dies? Much of this post was adapted from my book, Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It.
[1] Keener, The Gospel According to John, 511. I’m not interested in encouraging people to drink wine, but we need to be honest about the fact that even though there were drunkards in Jesus’ day that Jesus did make a huge amount of wine and that Jesus also drank wine. This is important because to forbid drinking wine in moderation (the Bible condemns drunkenness—Ephesians 5:18) is received by many as a statement that Jesus is anti-pleasure, and presenting Jesus as anti-pleasure makes heaven less appealing, which is exactly what the devil wants. What follows are four commentators on the fact that Jesus did make wine to avoid social embarrassment for the one hosting the wedding and, of course, to give the guests more wine to drink. Some have suggested that Jesus actually only had them drink water, that it was sort of a joke, but Leon Morris points out that “such reconstructions founder on verses 9 and 11. In the first place John says the water became wine. He records a miracle. And in the second place it was a miracle which had profound effects on those who had begun to follow Jesus. It is impossible to maintain that ‘his disciples believed on him’, and that He ‘manifested his glory’, on the basis of nothing more than a good joke.” Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 175-176.
D.A. Carson writes: “The ‘wine’ (oinos) that was needed was not mere grape juice, generic ‘fruit of the vine.’ The idea is intrinsically silly as applied to countries whose agricultural tradition is so committed to viticulture. Besides, in v. 10 the head steward expects that at this point in the celebration some of the guests would have had too much to drink: the verb methyskō does not refer to consuming too much liquid, but to inebriation.” D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, PNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 169.
Likewise, Craig Keener comments: “Wine was not merely unfermented ‘grape juice,’ as some popular modern North American apologists for abstinence have contended. Before hermetic sealing and refrigeration, it was difficult to prevent some fermentation, and impossible to do so over long periods of time. Nor was wine drunk only to purify the water, as some have also claimed; much spring water in the Mediterranean is palatable and many Greeks and Romans viewed it as medicinally helpful. At the same time, the alcoholic content of wine was not artificially increased through distillation, and people in the Mediterranean world always mixed water with the wine served with meals, often two or four parts water per every part wine; undiluted wine was considered dangerous.” Craig Keener, The Gospel According to John: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1003), 500.
Similarly, Gerald L. Borchert: “Jesus’ making wine in this case has caused some readers another major problem. One of my sons once returned from a class and informed me that Jesus made nonalcoholic wine in this story. His teacher also had informed him that the Greek word for the drink here meant nonalcoholic grape juice. It serves no purpose for evangelicals to twist the Greek language for the sake of their ethical opinions because such an argument cannot be sustained from Greek.” Gerald L. Borchert, John 1–11, NAC (Nashville, TN: B&H, 1996), WORDsearch database, 2013.
