[Note: This post continues our two-month-long series through the month of July on the topic of “desire” and “longing” in concert with my recent book on the topic. As mentioned, I’m riffing on some of the broader themes and ideas that have percolated since its publication—with some cool stuff from the biblical text. Thanks for reading. Enjoy!]
Many students making their way into my office to discuss their vexing struggle with some element of sexual desire express a degree of difficulty living in an environment where their phone has the ability to provide for them whatever their dark desires wish. One of the greatest problems of a digital age, they will say, is that the human heart has at its fingertips the capacity to actually get what it so desires. One young man once described to me that he misses the days when getting such things was much harder. The phone, he lamented, has made it too easy to get what we want when we want.
This is one of the dangers of an environment like our own. We can actually get what we want. Which could be a good thing—if our hearts were formed around the things of Christ, like virtue, love, character, and self-restraint. But the combination of a culture that is increasingly separated from Christian virtues and the technology of the iPhone means we are left with one of our greatest enemies in our pocket.
Desire needs boundaries.
In Eden, God puts a tree in the garden that has fruit that is ‘off limits.’ This was called the ‘Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ This was not an evil tree. But it was a dangerous tree—one that should not be eaten from, or it would bring death. The tree is even described as being ‘desirable.’ (Gen 3.6) When the serpent comes into the garden, he invites the humans to cast off restraint and take from that tree. The trick of the serpent, I’m convinced, is that he wanted the humans to reject God’s boundaries and take what they wanted. Whatever they wanted.
His deception was trying to get the humans to believe nothing was off-limits. Live without boundaries, limitations, and restraint.
But humans can only flourish when they have boundaries and limitations. Some of the most important boundaries the biblical tradition erects in our lives are boundaries around our desires. Not just boundaries around what we do. But boundaries around what we want. This was brought to my attention once again as I lectured this week in a graduate course on systematic theology. I walked the class through the Decalogue (or, the “Ten Commandments”) in Exodus 20. As we slowly read the nuanced language and ethical framework of these commandments, I was struck (as I have been many times) by what seems to be an odd tension in the commandments. In the second commandment, God expressly forbids his people from the worship or making of an idol. God says:
You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.
The second commandment has two features. Part one: God is the only being to be worshiped. Part two: God is jealous of his people. But something odd transpires as one reads the final commandment. The tenth commandment reads,
You shall not be jealous of your neighbor’s house. You shall not be jealous of your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Here, God’s covenant people are told that we must resist being jealous or envious of the people, relationships, or material possessions around us. As I do when I teach through these commandments, I ask the students to sit in the tension between these two commandments. When they do, for many, they are struck for the first time that God declares himself to be a ‘jealous God’ and that his people should ‘not be jealous.’
Why does God get to be jealous? But we humans don't?
Underneath this—as I consider in The Gift of Thorns—is an assumption about the difference between God’s desire and our desire. One of the differences between God’s desire and our desire is that God never desires out of lack. That is to say, his desire is never the result of not having something. God has everything. God’s desire is always a desire that is birthed out of love for something God already claims possession of. We, on the other hand, desire that which is not ours. We desire out of lack. As James would write, “We desire...but do not have...” (Jas 4.2)
And so when we see God’s commandment against jealousy and then see him declare himself as a jealous God, we are coming face-to-face with two beings that have wildly different relationships to that which they are jealous. In short, humans always get jealous of things that are not theirs. And God always gets jealous of the things that are already his. The difference is derived from the fact that God is the Lord over everything and the sovereign king over everything. We have no claim to jealousy because nothing is ours. But, God does have such claims.
Because everything is owned by God.
Which, if I’m honest, helps me. I find it incredibly liberating to be told that I do not have permission to want everything. Our desires desperately need boundaries. Without such boundaries, I will seek anything and everything as though it is mine to take. Years ago, the French philosopher Rene Girard famously argued in his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning that while (it is true) the last commandment is a commandment against jealousy, it is ultimately the commandment that speaks to why we break the rest of them.1 The central motif of jealousy in the Ten Commandments is incredibly important for our discussion about desire because jealousy often represents the place where our desires and our idols have become one. Contentment, we must remember, is not the absence of desire. Rather, it is a desire rightly ordered to that which we are given by God.
This is why contentment is challenging to attain—but unmistakably critical to the Christian. Contentment is not the absence of desire. Rather, it is the taming of desire. “Contentment is not freedom from desire,” writes John Eldredge, “but freedom of desire. Being content is not pretending that everything is the way you wish it would be; it is not acting as though you have no wishes. Rather, it is no longer being ruled by your desires.”2 Dallas Willard said something almost identical in his book Renovation of the Heart:
Those who continue to be mastered by their feelings—whether it is anger, fear, sexual attraction, desire for food or for “looking good,” the residues of woundedness, or whatever—are typically persons who in their heart of hearts believe that their feelings must be satisfied. They have long chosen the strategy of selectively resisting their feelings instead of that of not having them—of simply changing or replacing them.3
Their point is that the true transformative power of the gospel is not that it eradicates of human desire. Rather, it helps us to be the kind of people who are not ruled by our desires. The journey of walking with the Holy Spirit over a lifetime is that we are shaped into the kinds of people who do not bend our knees to everything our hearts desire. In short, the Spirit is given more and more power while our desires learn to live under him.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on that idea of God’s jealousy for me. It isn’t jealousy in the way we get jealous. It is a love of passion, hunger, and an insatiable desire for intimacy. To understand that God has that emotional effect on me reframes the entire Christian story. I wake up every single morning, put on my shoes, brush my teeth, and eat a bowl of cereal, knowing that today—yes, every day—God is pursuing me. How does that not change one’s psychology? I would say it is the birth of true freedom. Is it not?
As I lecture, one of my students asked me what the story of the entire Bible is from a theological perspective. And I said that the story of the whole Bible is the story of Forrest Gump—of a man who spends the entire narrative chasing the love of his life, Jenny; a love that keeps running away for other, more destructive, things. He never forces his love on her. He gives her space to run. Yet still pursues her. That is the entire narrative. And it’s what makes it the best story ever told. Because you can’t have a good story without a chase scene.
And that’s what the whole story is.
Thanks for reading my work. As always, you can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can listen to my podcast, Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore what the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 7–18.
John Eldredge, The Journey of Desire: Searching for the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of, Expanded Edition (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2016), 192.
Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2021), 120.
A lot to think on here. Thank you for writing this. Growing up at the intersection of Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism, I learned that wanting was bad--because of certain teachings about the human heart being completely corrupt (and thus, incapable of desiring anything good). As an adult, I learned that I should want good things and that God has created so much for us to enjoy along with Him. But the past ghosts of over-restraint can come back and extinguish good desire with guilt. So while I agree with you, I do wonder if there is a subset of Christianity that also needs to learn just to want period, and with that be introduced to healthy boundaries derived from Scripture.
You make a compelling case for understanding the apparent tension set up between the two commandments and I like that you invite your students to sit in that tension, which leads to contemplation on the character and nature of God. Other teachers take a different approach, wanting to translate the word differently to avoid the negative connotations with jealousy, presumably because of their own dogmatic convictions. The conclusion that all human jealousy is bad is appealing to me; take for example the case of a jealous husband in Num 5:11-31, we should consider this jealousy as bad and the law given a gracious protection for the wife. This sounds like a better interpretation than considering the wife as "belonging" to the husband, in the words of the 10th commandment, and therefore a "good" kind of jealousy. I also liked your Forrest Gump illustration, in particular it reminded me of the scene when Gump beat up Jenny's boyfriend; whilst that may have felt good to watch, perhaps the violence was counterproductive to Forrest's overall aim. Personally, I still remain cautious attributing jealousy to God if it can be utilised to justify unspeakable human violence; I suspect this is at least an aspect of what the Phinehas story in Num 25 teaches us.