"Veiled in Flesh the Godhead See"
Advent and BDSM
This is likely the strangest Advent devotional ever printed or posted. But I guess you’ve come to expect that from Tsunami Surfing!
Advent is a season of anticipation. We not only await the holy day of Christmas, but we anticipate the Second Coming of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Some find the Virgin Birth too hard to believe. “It just doesn’t work that way! Virgins can’t give birth!” And yet even more difficult to fully comprehend is the Incarnation itself. The God who created all things, who determined the number of stars and gave them names, the very One who created human beings . . . entered a womb. He became helpless and dependent on a teenager. That’s what is truly amazing! Plumbing the depths of that miracle makes the Virgin Birth a walk in the park!
God has me studying the strange practice of BDSM. Gruesome and twisted stuff. To put it innocently, it is two people taking on different roles: one pretending to be the Dominant who inflicts pain, and the other the Submissive who receives it. Few people get deeply ensnared in this demonic practice, but its popularity is growing.
I have found that the stark contrast between these depraved pagan practices illuminates ever more clearly God’s profoundly redemptive story.
Adam and Eve were created in God’s image. Just as ancient emperors had statues or coins with their image in conquered lands to signal ownership and authority, so the image of God in humanity was to send a signal to the created world that God is sovereign over all. For the unseen forces, that message came through loud and clear!
And yet, as Romans 1 makes plain, our bent toward suppressing God’s revealed truth, exchanging it for a lie, and then worshiping creation became the essence of idolatry. Even today we look toward the created world as our source for meeting needs rather than the resource God intended it to be.
As I’ve said in Into the Light: Healing Sexuality in Today’s Church, sexual sin plays out in one of two ways: grasping or submitting. Sometimes we grasp for what we want when we want it instead of following God’s ways and his timing. Or we often lean idolatrously into sexual behaviors to have needs met.
The further you travel into the territory of BDSM, the more evident these two ways of rebellion become.
One book I’ve been reading describes various levels of participation in BDSM. Some simply play the roles of Dom and Sub at occasional events. In enacting those scenes, Subs are sometimes tied to a St. Andrew’s Cross and whipped. In some ways, it seems like the Dom is grasping for and exacting his/her own atonement. And it conveys a mockery of the cross of Christ. At day’s end, they clean up, pack up, and go back home.
There are those, however, who go to the extreme of living 24/7 in a master/slave relationship. In the description of the roles, it is so clearly the master who is grasping and controlling for his own pleasure and fulfilment. The slave leans idolatrously into the master for her sense of security and wellbeing. The person who wrote the book is, in fact, a 24/7 slave to her master. She claims to love it.
In addition to all of the deplorable sexual scenes demanded of the slave, she is called to worship her master’s body. The specifics described are demeaning, demonic, and utterly pagan. It is flesh worshiping flesh in denial of our Creator—no doubt delighting the unseen hosts who seek to deceive.
We as image bearers are to be living our lives in the flesh, worshiping the One who made us, and proclaiming to the unseen realm that Jesus Christ, the One who came in the flesh, is Lord.
So it was into this darkness that the Light of the world descended. As Paul so clearly writes in Philippians 2, the Word of God did not consider the glories and privileges of heaven as something to be grasped. Instead, he emptied himself, took on flesh, and became a servant—a slave, if you will—even to the point of death on the cross.
As Paul writes in Colossians, he himself was the image of the invisible God:
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. Colossians 1:19-20 NRSVue
We who are in Christ, therefore, have come to fullness in him (Col. 2:10). We are not to indulge the passions of the sinful nature, especially in grasping sexual fulfillment outside of his boundaries, nor in bowing down to sexual practices to meet unmet needs.
Rather as man and woman, both image bearers, become intimately one flesh in marriage, learning to love, respect, and serve one another, we signal to a waiting world how Jesus loves his bride the Church. Our very union, blessed by God’s grace, symbolizes to unseen hosts what is soon to arrive at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Whether married or single, those created in the image of God are to proclaim in word and deed that Jesus Christ is Lord over all. The One who came forth from the womb of a virgin is coming again on clouds of glory.
In this Advent as we anticipate both a holy day and a victorious Second Coming, may we stand firm in the faith, giving ourselves fully to whatever ministry God has entrusted to us.
For those of you in the midst of Tsunami rescue work, may God sustain and strengthen you as you worship our Creator and bring his healing touch to the broken.
Thank you to all for being readers and supporters of Tsunami Surfing!
Merry Christmas!
Mark
An insightful read , as usual, Mark. However from what I understand of this lifestyle, the dominance and submission isn't always "gruesome" as you have suggested, nor is it even necessarily about the application of pain on one person toward the other (like S&M), but rather it's about one person accepting a powerless submissive position under another who is considered, and accepted, as their superior. It can be about a complete transfer of power and not about any pain. The submissive finds "freedom" in the abandonment of all her rights and privileges as she accepts the unquestioned rule of her superior (and there are of course male submissives with female dominants, as well). Clearly this is not a Godly perspective since none of us are superior in the eyes of our omnipotent God, who sees us as equally sinful, yet equally loved and forgiven. So for what it's worth, this is just another wave in this rather raucous Tsunami that we're all surfing!