Our very body was created by God in His image [Gen1:26] and He breathed the very life into us [Gen 2:7]
The most sacred relationship established by God outside of our covenant with Him was our relationship to our wife or husband [Gen 2:24] states we become one flesh with our mate.
But the very flesh we have is influenced by
- the world, fruit was good for food and delight to the eyes [Gen3:6] and
- the devil, the crafty serpent which deceived Eve [Gen3:1] which was the result of our fall.
Since the fall,
- we have tried to think of and model God after our own heart
- replaced God as our center with every other thing possible
- resulting in idolatory starting with early accounts of man disobeying God [Gen6:5] to forming a golden calf [Ex32:4]
Hence the main challenge we have been fighting since (and even before) the fall is around coveting things that is not ours or what God has deemed as not right for us. The word, covet has some positive connotation in the Greek word zello [1Co12:31, 1Co14:39] but mostly in the Grek word epithymeo [Ro7:7, Ro13:9]. This word extends to also indicate lust in [Mat5:28, 1Co10:6] and a new word I learnt, concupiscence [Ro7:8,Col3:5] which is to yearn, to long. Lust is actually to have heart setupon something which God has forbidden.
Coveting can be of land, possession, good looking woman/lover, god who fits my mold, money, giving vent to our feelings instead of what God has provided for us. It also indicates a lack of faith in God or His word. Since the provisions are not there right now, let us pray to the gods of Canaan or Egypt to live prosperously like them.
Once you make something else take the place of God, we sin and more than that we hurt God. To see the hurt we cause God, we should read Ezekial or Jeremiah where the entire book depicts idolatory of Israel in terms of whoring, adultery, fornication and sexual sin.
The reason one could surmise God uses an sexual sin language for idolatory is multi fold:
- sexual union, becoming one flesh is sacred as we saw earlier, hence a gift was soiled
- most of the societies that were there in middle east and outside had orgies, temple prostitute and debased sex as means of workshipping their gods
- sexual lust is a very strong feeling in man that drives him to do some crazy things, which otherwise he might think of as mad pursuits
So the worldly desires and our flesh drives us to make and select gods of our own choosing. This is coveting, which turns our heart unclean as we are corrupted in our desires and impure in thoughts, which then further drives us to go beyond the initial sin of coveting and commit the sin.
[Ps119:36] prays to include my heart unto thy testimonies and not to covetousness.
This is one of the reasons, our Lord Jesus Christ, gave us a much stronger command around sexual sin - to not even look at a woman lustfully which makes us adulterers even if the body doesnt follow suit.
The other reason sexual immorality (porneia) is so much more worse for a believer is that Holy Spirit is resident in us and if we defile our body by the sexual acts, instead of treating it as the temple [1Cor6:13] of God, we are defiling the very presence of God. We are to treat our bodies as vessels in sanctification and honor it [1Th4:3]
My lechery, porn, lustful eye casting, loose talk with woman not my wife and other habits have disappeared after becoming a believer but I see my other idols more blatantly than ever before. Most of this around acceptance, pride and sense of personal value. All of this is basically worldy influence on me which came in full force by reading various self-help literature. I have to often fight to not cast God in my own mold or to make a golden calf because its easier for me to recognize Him in how I fashion Him to be, instead of how He is really portrayed through His own Words in The Bible.
My prayer off late has been around this -
Heavenly Father & Holy God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, burn yourself through me as you take possession of my heart to be Your own and use me in anyway that is pleasing to you, even if it means that I will be reduced to cinder as I submit myself to You! Protect me O Lord, my Shepherd, from my own wants, so I only desire You!