Humankind in its fallen state does not love God. Some of us respond to God’s love in the course of our lives, but it is still a struggle to maintain our love for Him or our neighbor, because we are so busy loving ourselves. And this consuming self-love moves us to seek out pleasure to deaden the pain of life either rationally according to God’s truth or irrationally according to our own desires.
One of our God-given desires is for intimacy. Genesis 2 tells us that man was created to be intimate with other human beings as well as with God. We feel emotional pain when that desire for intimacy is not met, and self-love drives us to alleviate that pain in some way. But instead of finding God’s solution, we often look to our physical senses for relief. It is irrational to attempt to eliminate emotional pain through the physical senses. It’s like taking pain medication to fix a broken bone instead of going to the hospital to get the bone set. The pills will block the pain for a while, but when they wear off, your arm is still broken because pills don’t mend broken bones.
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