Pleasure Gluttons

Hebrews 10-12

Two days ago I asked, “how do you make men moral?” and declared through scripture that only God through Christ can do this.  This is true but after salvation we are still left housed in this body whose only desire is for pleasure.  Even as a redeemed human it is lunacy to believe that humans will naturally choose right.  We will choose pleasure.

“All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” 12:11

In a world that now shuns all forms of corporal punishment it might be good to take to heart the following verses;

“It’s a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God…For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” 10:31; 11:6

Bacchus
by Caravaggio
One of my favorite artists but this images has troubled me since I first encountered it in
under-graduate school.  It is an image of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and is associated
with ecstasy, frenzy and liberating oneself from restraint.  It is troubling because I have
a strong sensitivity to the artists intent.  Caravaggio had two sides.  If you look at his work
he was one of the greatest painters of Christian content and yet he lived a life trapped in the
body of addicted drunkard.  Such ecstasy and excess in one human being.  Only
an artist can can bear the passions and furies of such contradictions of the soul.