"Looking for God at the Brothel"

By Jon Hagen

 

“Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”

 

(Some grief cuts deeper than others. Such is the nature of love: take the risk of caring for someone and getting hurt is bound to happen. But what’s the alternative? To not love? To not care? Is pulling back into the malaise of ambivalence a satisfying alternative? No, we must care. Love is commanded—even when it’s hard or we don’t feel like it.)

 

When a friend called and asked if we could get together, “Of course,” I said. His marriage was crumbling, and it was going to take a lot more than simply sticking a thick finger in a leaky dike; the foundation of the whole marriage relationship was being rocked by the convulsive force of his ongoing infidelity. On one occasion I sat between him and his beautiful wife as she wept and pleaded and begged for him to stop his treachery. But he would not. “I can’t,” he later told me. With that kind of commitment, what do you think will happen?

 

(When my two sons were little tikes, we worked at memorizing the Ten Commandments, along with a brief explanation of each. We stayed on the sixth longer than the others while I tried to think of an explanation I could give them for the seventh. What would I tell a four or five year-old what it meant to not commit adultery? I finally settled on, “Daddies and Mommies stay together.” It must have stuck because, earlier this year, they both came running wide-eyed into my home office with a stunning discovery: as they were reading through their one-year Bible they uncovered King Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines! They couldn’t believe it, and they wanted confirmation from me that what they just read was not a typo. In all of his God-given wisdom, what in the world was Solomon thinking? But then, what person wouldn’t be tempted to think that having a thousand different beautiful things at his or her disposal would truly satisfy? Think again.)

 

The Bible extols beauty and encourages us to seek pleasure. But it’s choosing the wrong fork in the road to think that beauty and pleasure are to be found ultimately in the created order. Yes, there are beautiful people and elegant houses and exquisite pieces of art and furniture. And yes, we all would take pleasure in an exotic vacation or a classy car or a piece of sublime music. And what about those simple pleasures like that sumptuous cup of morning coffee or the satisfaction derived from a job well done or the relaxing comfort caught in a fall zephyr touching our face as we sit in a backyard lawn chair? All of these things, God says, are His gracious gifts for us to enjoy (see, for example, Ecclesiastes 3:13; 9:8-9). It’s when the gift becomes the thing itself, becomes an end in itself, that the fork we choose to go down turns out, sooner or later, to be feeding us nothing more than Melba toast.

 

One of the things I had a difficult time conveying to my friend was that the girl he had on the side was real but also false. She really was beautiful (which is why he wouldn’t let go of her), but she was also a lie (which is why he needed to terminate the relationship). He wasn’t convinced. The power of immediate beauty and pleasure were simply too great for him to resist. Stunning, isn’t it, that an unbelievably strong man like Samson can be completely tethered by the hair of a lady’s eyelashes (Proverbs 6:25 ESV).

 

So what did G. K. Chesterton mean when he wrote, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God”? Let me try to answer that with a quote from a man Chesterton influenced with his writing, C. S. Lewis. In his sermon turned essay, The Weight of Glory, Lewis said, “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.”

 

What Lewis is saying is that there is a beauty that is real in the things we observe from day to day, yet that beauty is there as a fragment to serve as a pointer to the Eternal Beauty, God Himself. The mistake we make is when we disconnect the temporal beauty from the Eternal Beauty. Perhaps one reason for doing so is that we couldn’t stand being in the presence of Absolute Beauty without being indelibly awed—we would be speechless and humbled in the face of such Perfection. Which is precisely what happens to creatures who get a glimpse of God (consider what happened in Isaiah 6:1-5 and Revelation 1:12-18).

 

Not understanding that the cross of Christ allows us to draw near to Perfection in order that we might benefit from and share in His beauty, we instead “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18) in order to manage beauty and our longings for it. So we can “exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).

 

Take some time to meditate on this: “Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him” (Colossians 1:15-17, 19-22).

 

On the one hand, we are undone in the presence of God’s beautiful holiness; on the other hand, like David, we should say with Him, “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in His temple” (Psalm 27:4). To the extent we pursue God like David, God will satisfy our desire (Psalm 145:18-19); to the extent we are captivated by His gifts, we’ll keep knocking at the doors of a thousand different beauties and never find what we’re looking for.