Intimacy

There is no doubt that God has been teaching me a lot over the last month. He has been teaching me some incredible stuff, some really deep stuff, and stuff that has revolutionized my world. I felt everything was connected though, that all these lessons were leading to a bigger lesson that He was slowly unfolding, and something that would forever change me.

Ever since I was first interested in girls I have been looking to settle down, that may seem odd, but I have always been extremely family oriented, and everything that I have done in my life has been to support my dream of being a husband and a father. I have never felt complete, and it has always been a belief of mine that I will not be complete until i find my 'better half'. Nothing in this world could bother me, not famine, disease, or poverty. As long as I had God, my wife, and enough food to barely survive I would be content. I could do anything as long as i had God and my wife. There is only one thing in this world that I have ever truly cared about, and that is finding the one person who completes me, and also the one thing that I have kept with me for as long as i can remember, and the one thing that I have not given over to God.

I began to wonder why this was, why it was so hard for me to give this over to God, and i realized that it was intimacy. I needed intimacy, I could live my entire life and deal with anything that would come along as long as I had intimacy, and i thought that could only be found in my wife. What i failed to realize was that the purest form of intimacy, the most incredible and powerful and full form of intimacy we could ever want is not found on this earth.

In the garden was the truest form of intimacy, complete and open communion with God, with nothing to get in the way of our oneness with Him. This is what we were made for, this is what our heart so longs for, and what we lost when we sinned and were forced out of God's presence. In the old testament God had his people create the Tabernacle which means 'dwelling place', but the hebrew word for it is 'Mishkan' which means 'to dwell in the presence of God.' God was giving his people a way to get back their intimacy with Him that He so desperately missed in some small part, but even then he could only be with them in a small space. It wasn't until He sent his Son to eradicate sin's effect that He could fully dwell with us again and regain the intimacy we both desire so much.

God created us for intimacy, and as such we have a desire that can only be fully satisfied by Him, but He does give us something in this life that can give us an inkling of what He has created us for and it can be found in genesis starting with chapter 1:

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

God creates man AND women in his image, meaning the true image of God is displayed in both of us so that in genesis 2:

24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

We become one flesh and unite the two halves of God's image, and share an intimacy that is so intense and so powerful it could only have come from God. This is, however, only a fraction of the true intimacy we were created for, this is merely a whisper, a fleeting glance at the true unity of spirit that we were created for and we long for. We must be careful that we do not try to fill our need for intimacy with only this. It is not enough to simply have this intimacy with your other half, you are missing the truer part, the real part, the part God made you for, and that is for the real intimacy that we lost in the garden and that we have again in communion with His spirit. You will never be satisfied with anything this life has to offer because what you truly seek cannot be found here.

Sex is so powerful and so attractive because it is the closest thing we have on earth to what our souls long for, but it is still a far cry from what we need. Satan knows this, and he knows what God truly desires, and he hates God. So he does whatever he needs to do to lure us away from our one hope at fulfillment by promising to give us the intimacy we so desire, but in a much easier way than what God offers. It works. We somehow believe that our need for intimacy can only be filled by something in this world, by our wife, by sex, but that will never be enough. The true intimacy our souls long for can only be found in one place, and that is the place we were created for. You need no other love, nothing else this world has to offer. This world is full of lies - an assault on your heart by the one who wants nothing more than to break God's heart by leading His soul-mates away from Him.