Sin looks beautiful. Were it not so, I don’t imagine that it would possess the force of temptation that it can lay upon our hearts.
“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” –Genesis 3:6
“One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful…” – 2 Samuel 11:2
Phuket, Thailand is definitely a very beautiful place. The food is good, the sunsets are overwhelmingly pleasing to the eye, and I’ve heard that it is one of the most desirable vacation spots in the world. At first glance, you might see nothing more than a diverse mix of tourists and locals mingling on the beach or between bars, bound together in the camaraderie that forms between those seeking to escape the daily monotony for a week or two.
On further inspection, a few strange details may begin to appear. Perhaps a weird conversation topic reaches your ears. Many establishments are named in a curiously provocative fashion. Young Thai women walk by holding the hands of old men, sitting in their lap, and making slightly obscene gestures of P.D.A. Eventually, night falls, and Patong Beach shows itself for the beast it really is: one of the most lucrative hot-spots for sex-trafficking and sex-tourism in the world.
The disparity between the attractiveness of the beach during the day with the repulsiveness of the town at night overwhelms me. Our team had been warned of the spiritual fog that we were journeying into, but I had no idea how to react to the hedonism of Bangla Road. No pictures which could accurately describe it can be shared on this blog.
Sin is beautiful. But it’s beauty is deceptive, hollow, and ultimately corruptive. We are fallen creatures, incapable of discerning between the pleasure that fills and the pleasure that kills, without leaning on the wisdom given to us through the Holy Spirit. Our flesh fails us to truly see beauty in its purest form.
“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” – Isaiah 53:2b
Jesus, in whom no human eye could recognize the splendor of galaxies, the hope of nations, the light of the world, is so much more beautiful than sin. His beauty shuns deception, for He is reality personified. His beauty is not hollow nor is it full, it is overflowing. His beauty is ultimate restoration to the hearts that so easily wander astray. Many people in this world are sitting at the end of pleasurable pursuits, wondering why on earth they drink and still thirst; why they eat and still hunger; why they chase and grow more distant from the object of their desires.
Our mission this month has been to earnestly share this truth with as many people as possible. The women on our team evangelize to the prostitutes, while the men have been getting creative with presenting the Gospel to the unlikeliest of people like Burmese tattoo artists, Welsh retirees, and Russian volleyball players. We fight daily to keep ourselves from letting the beauty of this place numb our hearts. It has been a personal struggle to see the brokenness behind all the abundance. The fight to challenge conceptions of beauty and desire is radically different from the fight to eliminate hunger from communities or the fight to re-build homes. I thought that going on the World Race would look more like fighting for the Kingdom in the African bush than in a Starbucks down the street from a mall. This fight is different.
But it’s a good fight, and it’s forcing me to see that without His eyes, I won’t be truly able to see real beauty or help those who seek it in all the wrong ways.
