Let us begin again by reminding ourselves of the purpose of this catechism, which is expressed in question 1, to point us toward the great comfort that is to be found in our new identity in Jesus Christ. Question 2 gives us the roadmap for walking in that comfort by telling us the four things we must know to live in that comfort. The remainder of the catechism seeks to explain those four items. Part one rightly addressed God’s good design for humanity and for our sexuality. In Part Two, we move into the explanation of the second item: “how great my unholy desires and sexual sins are.” Since all of these questions are closely bound together and build upon one another, we will cover them together in this lesson.

QUESTION 16

With what lie did Satan tempt our first parents in the garden?

Satan lied about the goodness of God’s creation order. He presented God as restrictive and oppressive, and our first parents chose to sin through the desire to become their own gods and define their own way.

We should recall that Question 1 told us that Christ has delivered us “from the lie of Satan in the Garden.” Now that lie is explained to us. Gordon fittingly refers to this as a lie, singular rather than plural. In the actual account, we find a number of Satan’s lies. He first questions why God would forbid the woman from eating from any of the trees. Then he directly contradicted God, accusing God of lying. Lastly, he told the half-truth about becoming like God through knowing good and evil.

Yet for all of these stages in seducing Eve, there was truly but one lie. Satan lied about the goodness of God and of His design. Although they were already blessed by God with being made in His image and likeness, the eating of the forbidden fruit was their attempt to become gods themselves, to accomplish their own will rather than the will of their Creator. We rightly call this the Fall because this is source for why the world is no longer in the Edenic state and for why we ourselves are no longer without sin.

QUESTION 17

What happened to our desires in the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in paradise?

All the desires of the human heart, even though they may be unchosen, have become distorted and fallen in the sin of our first parents. These desires cannot be trusted, since we have a natural tendency to be led away by various passions.

With this question, Gordon sets our sights upon the primary subject for the following questions: our natural desires. From that first sin, all of humanity (indeed, all of creation) has come under the corrupting impact of sin. Whether we like it or not, Jeremiah 17:9 is our present, painful reality: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

Of course, the world tells us the exact opposite, encouraging everyone to follow their own heart. We may rightly call that message the Disney Catechism. It is wholly against the plain teaching of Scripture. Indeed, we can see the destructiveness of our natural desires whenever we look at children, who if given complete freedom to do whatever they wish would utterly destroy themselves and who need no one to instruct them in sinfulness. Every loving parent knows that discipline, while painful, is for the child’s ultimate benefit because godly discipline teaches them to distrust their natural passions to pursue godliness instead. And I use the word pursue very consciously, for godliness runs contrary to the natural inclination of the human heart. And godly behavior is so difficult because godly desires do not come naturally to us.

QUESTION 18

This question raises and answers an important rebuttal to question 17:

But didn’t God create us to be happy in following the desires of our hearts?

God made us holy and happy; we, however, accepting the lie of the devil, have robbed ourselves of this happiness by obeying sinful desires.

We were, indeed, created to delight in all the works that God made, but the Adam and Eve’s fall into sin changed things. When our first parents sinned, they represented all of humanity. When God made His original covenant with Adam, He made with Adam as the father of us all, and when Adam broke that covenant, he broke it on behalf of us all as well. While that may go against every autonomous individual streak that we have within us, we see the necessity of representatives all throughout our republic. For example, if congress declares war, many men who took no part in that decision will die on the battlefield because of that decision. The cold hard reality is that our actions always impact others, for good or evil. Paul affirms this saying, in Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—”

Notice that last phrase: “so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Adam and Eve brought corruption into the world, but you and I each make more than enough of our own contribution. We each build upon that original sin and accept the same lie that our first parents accepted. In so doing, as Gordon, notes, we have robbed ourselves of the happiness that God intended for us, for true happiness is bound to holiness. Only at God’s right hand are there pleasures forevermore, so to reject obedience to Him in favor of our own sinful desires also means rejecting the happiness that He created for us.

QUESTION 19

Here again is another potential rebuttal:

But isn’t there a difference between temptation and the practice of evil desires?

God requires that we avoid entering into all forms of temptation. Temptation is not sin when it originates outside of us. Temptation becomes sin when we entertain and welcome the sinful desires of our hearts and act of them.

Can we really call our desires sinful, or is only the committed act of sinning sinful? The distinction made between in the second and third sentences is an important one. If temptation comes from outside of us, then it is only sinful if we succumb to it. This has to be true because the only temptation that Christ could have faced was external, and He overcame each one, remaining entirely sinless. However, temptation itself can be sinful whenever it originates from within us. That is precisely what James warns against in 1:13-15:

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

The word peirazo can mean either to be tempted or to be tried, but we know that James is speaking of temptation because God does certainly put His people through trials and tests. Yet we can rest assured that God does not tempt anyone into sinning; rather, we do that to ourselves. Owen Strachan gives a great explanation of what James is saying that is worth quoting at length:

This is a dark picture of how desire eventuates in sin, which brings on death. Before the fallen instinct is fully manifested, before it comes to full fruition, a toxic process occurs in the human will. We should take note here: what James describes is not only unfortunate or disordered. It is sinful.

The language James uses to describe the workings of desire leads us to this conclusion. We allowed ourselves to be “lured and enticed” by our own fleshly desire. This is a chilling metaphor. We are not drawn out-of-bounds by someone else when we allow ourselves to be tempted. Instead, we are “dragged away” in a
violent sense,” as one commentator puts it. The focus in Jas. 1:14 is resolutely, even stubbornly, on our own actions. We are not hauled away by someone else’s volition. We are the agent here… Our sinful wills, fallen because of Adam’s unrighteous act, entrap us. Another exegete suggests that the latter term referenced above, deleazomenos, harkens to the enticing call of the prostitute, a call presented (and critiqued) in Prov 7:6-23. This makes sense: when we sin, the text suggests, we effectively play the role of the prostitute to ourselves… Yes, we must do battle with evil elements who would undo us, but in James’s hamartiology, we ourselves rank as the first problem in committing sin.

With such a vivid textual portrait, the takeaway seems obvious: we regularly act as our own worst enemies. We are the problem, not someone else. We have an inborn hunger for evil. We search for it. Outside of the working of God’s grace, we possess a gnawing eagerness to tempt ourselves toward it. So when we sin, it is because we want to do so.

Reenchanting Humanity, 195-196.

Gordon references the final petition of the Lord’s Prayer as the Scripture for the first sentence of this answer. Indeed, we should actively avoid all temptation, and we should actively pray for the Lord to lead us away from temptation, especially those that rise up within our own hearts.

QUESTION 20

Are we able to make a distinction between entertaining a sinful desire and choosing to live in that desire?

God condemns desires that are contrary to his law, as well as our actual sins. These contrary desires are sinful even if they are unchosen, since they proceed from a corrupt heart. All impure thoughts and desires, prior to the conscious act of the will, are considered sin in God’s eyes.

I believe that James 1:13-15 soundly erases any supposed distinction between simply entertaining a sinful desire and actually choosing to live in that desire. Indeed, the very inclusion of the Tenth Commandment displays that it is not simply words and deeds that constitute sin, for coveting is fundamentally a sin of desire. It very often leads to further sins, yet it is itself a sin of the heart. Indeed, the word that James uses for desire (epithumia) is the noun form of the verb used for coveting in the Septuagint (epithumeo), and like the Hebrew chamad, it can mean both righteous and sinful desires. For example, whenever David says in Psalm 19:10 that God’s Word is more to be desired than gold, he is using the same word as the Tenth Commandment. Our desires can either be righteous and holy or lustful and covetous. We can either be enraptured by God and His Scriptures or ensnared by our own passions. But this leads us to the next question.

QUESTION 21

What kinds of sinful desires and deeds does God’s law condemn?

Christ teaches us this in Matthew 15:18-20: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.”

In the context of Matthew 15, Jesus was questioned by the Pharisees and scribes about why His disciples broke from the tradition of the elders by not ritually washing their hands when they eat. After a sound rebuke, Jesus called the crowds to Him and began to teach them, saying, “Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles the person” (Matthew 15:10-11).

This is a terrifying reality. Corruption is easier to manage if it plays by the rules of the scribes and Pharisees. Sure, it might be a pain to observe each letter of tradition without fail, but they presumed the basic premise that corruption is an external element, that we are essentially good as long as we avoid corrupting behaviors. Jesus, however, shoots down that notion, tracing the source of corruption down to each and every person’s heart. Sin and defilement come from within. Evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness are all products of the heart.

We like to assume that we are good people who occasionally do bad things, and even then, we convince ourselves that our intensions are generally pure. Sin, therefore, is simply a problem of behavior. Indeed, the world around us is not far removed from the scribes and Pharisees, for they too believe in defilement by outward actions. But Jesus shatters this thought by stating that we do bad things because we have bad hearts, and if our heart is bad, we are bad. Sin is fundamentally not a behavioral issue; it is a being issue. We are not righteous people who occasionally sin. We sin because we are sinners. Our heart is corrupt, and since the heart is the core of our being, there is no aspect of ourselves that escapes corruption, behavior included. This problem of defilement, therefore, requires a solution far greater than behavior modification. We cannot simply make sure that we wash our hands before eating and rest assured that we have avoided corruption before the face of God Almighty.

QUESTION 22

Will God permit our sinful desires to go unpunished?

Certainly not. He is terribly angry with our sinful desires, as well as our actual sins, God will punish every idle thought, careless word, or wicked action by a just judgment both now and in eternity. As the Bible declares, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.”

This is a hard but necessary question to consider. God has every right to be terribly angry with both out committed sins and inwardly devised sins. And every sinful thought, word, and deed will be punished, and He will do so with just judgment. Because His judgments are just, we never need to fear an ounce of punishment beyond what we deserve; however, we should rightly fear that He will also not let a drop of that deserved punishment be spared.

Often judgment comes within this life through circumstances or earthly authorities that God has providentially established. Yet since all sin is against the Eternal One, all sin requires an eternal punishment, which is the resurrection that the wicked will receive. All people will receive undying resurrected bodies on the day of judgment, yet some will go to eternal life while others will be cast into eternal death.

Those who receive eternal life do not do so because God ignores their sins. God cannot pass over sins and still remain just and righteous. No, all sin must be punished, but those who are resurrected to eternal life do so because their eternal punishment has been taken by a Redeemer. If the punishment of our sin is not laid upon Christ, it will eternally be laid upon us. Those are the only two options available. Of course, this sobering reality makes the gospel all the more beautiful and radiant, especially what we will read in Question 23: “in Christ, by the gospel, God has freely granted—not only to others but to me also—the forgiveness of all my sexual trespasses, canceling all my guilt and meriting for me eternal righteousness and salvation.”

As we will note in the remainder of the study, our redemption in Christ does not eliminate our sinning in this life entirely. However, we ought to greatly look forward to the day when, whether through our death or Christ’s return, we are set free from our wrestling with sin once and for all.

There is a great moment at the end of The Silver Chair, where Caspian tells Aslan that he has always wanted to see the world of the children who have come to Narnia and asks if that desire is wrong. Aslan responds, “You cannot want wrong things any more, now that you have died, my son.” Although we wrestle against our own desires now, one day that will be true for all who are in Christ. When we are finally and fully in the eternal presence of our Lord, we will no longer be able to want wrong things.