The blood is still dripping from his sword, and he gasps for air looking around at the carnage. In their terror the people had fought bravely, but had been completely overwhelmed. In his mind are still the images of the men, women and children he had slashed to their deaths. Soldiers are now stumbling over dead bodies as they make their way through the ruined, burning remains of a city of God’s enemies.
In an instant it happens. Through the massacre and smoke he sees something that arrests him on the spot. The screaming and wailing retreats into the distance while his mind is consumed by the form before his eyes. No-one else has noticed, in fact, she is being herded with the other captives. He suddenly realises that he can’t let this one slip away! She is exquisitely beautiful. Her beauty has attracted him like a magnet and he is unable to let go (consider carefully Deuteronomy 21:11 which I have attempted to portray here). He has seen something in her that has escaped everyone else, and all he sees is beauty, in spite of all of the ugliness around him.
Isn’t that what sin is like in your experience? It has an arresting kind of beauty in your eyes. Although many people may say they are not attracted to the particular kind of sin you struggle with, for some unknown reason, your personal sin has this engaging attraction for you. Regardless of the misery you may be in, regardless of the consequences of your sin, regardless of what anyone else thinks of you, you are drawn toward your sin like this soldier to this beautiful woman.
When you are struggling with this attraction to the beauty of your sin, it is the worst scourge imaginable. It is the thing that causes you so much agony in your heart—you find in your heart a love for things you should hate! You find in your heart a love for things that God hates! You wish that craving wasn’t there but it is! You fall into the trap of thinking that if God would only remove your craving for that particular sin, you would be able to conquer it. You would have freedom from it. You would be able to walk tall and clean in the Christian faith. Yes, we all fall into this trap.
God’s plan for your holiness is however far greater than simply snuffing your desire for sin. You may struggle to understand why it is that God doesn’t permit you to pursue what you consider beauty. He does! The beauty He permits you to pursue however is a true beauty. It is a beauty of inestimably higher quality, a beauty of immeasurable value, a beauty that attracts, a beauty that in engaging. Every sinner who has struggled with the attractiveness of personal sin should be able to thrill in the fact that God’s design for Christian faith is also the pursuit of beauty. More on this next time.
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