This is one of those Bible lessons where you must think of the message of the Word as a whole.
Reviewing what we have seen in Leviticus, we get an image. In the Covenant of Moses, there is no distinction between incest for sheer animal pleasure and incest as a pagan magic ritual. It doesn’t matter why you did it; this was a capital offense. This requires that we go back into the depths of the Old Testament to understand that people naturally avoided such things by instinct. It’s a taboo that goes back before human laws. In other words, the only way people would have considered such a thing in the first place was because the Watchers and Nephilim taught them to do it.
The Watchers and Nephilim knew this was a boundary God had established in Creation itself, and they were rebelling against God in the sense of persuading humans to do things that would defile them and lock them away from redemption from the Fall. They want us in Hell before we die.
After the Fall, mortality required procreation to keep human society going. Sex is an urge built into the flesh. God granted it to humans as a means of breaching the alienation and isolation that came from the Fall. Edenic communion in spirit was lost; we are mortals now. A measure of redemption is sexual union to create families that can stand united together against a world over which we no longer have divine authority. If all you notice is the physical thrill, your sex life is really poor. We don’t even have what the animals have, because they aren’t fallen. The Fall didn’t change animal existence, but we don’t fit into that because we were designed as eternals. We are strangers in this world.
Having a family that can rally to your support and keep you alive is a real blessing, but it has boundaries. If we transgress those boundaries, it’s not simply that we mess up a good thing God gave us by having sex that confuses roles and boundaries. Incest crossed a line that made folks ineligible for redemption in this life. The blessings God has for people who call on Him and obey Him are rejected by following the advice of the Watchers and Nephilim.
Following their teaching locks us into the hands of Satan. We are born mortals and that puts us in his domain. The only escape is to live by God’s revelation, the Covenant boundaries that alienate us from Satan’s mastery. The Covenant places us in a sort of sacred space where his claim on us is weakened. We still have to deal with temptations, but we have clear boundaries so that we can loosen that grip.
It’s acknowledged in Scripture that if you are determined to treat God as your Father and Lord, He will change your heart and give you strength to resist the siren call of Satan to come outside the household of God and taste his goodies. All of those goodies will lock us under his control; they will defile us. That defilement includes numbing and eventually silencing our inner moral consciences. It severs the conscience from the heart. We gain so much scar tissue that the conscience no longer works. We no longer hear in our souls the voice of Creation itself crying out against sin.
For Israel, it was not merely that they were to be a different kind of nation, but that they were supposed to be His family, the supporters He could count on to take His side in the ongoing debate with Lucifer. A part of that debate was Lucifer’s claims in Job about how shallow humans are, how unworthy we are of redemption.
What an unspeakable gift from God that He gave to His nation that they could sharpen their sensitivity so that they could start to recognize sin anywhere it was found. They grew beyond mere boundaries for the flesh and began to escape this world, little by little, gaining distance from the mortal fallen nature. This was how the Covenant of Moses was supposed to work. It was supposed to alienate them from the fleshly view of existence. It was intended to build a solid fortress of moral awareness in the hearts of the people as a whole. It was intended to turn them into a lighthouse to the nations, to send out the signal that it was possible to leave that grubby mortal life behind, that God had provided a path back to Eden.
Every slip at God’s boundary lines was damage, and some of it was permanent. Losing one’s virginity cannot be undone. Human science knows this; it’s called “sexual imprinting”. But science cannot tell you of the way illicit sex defiles everyone around you, how it threatens human existence as a whole. This is what the Old Covenant implied by using the language of defilement, or pollution of the land. It gave Satan and his allies a permit to own people, leverage confirming his bogus claim over them.
You are part of a tribe and nation. That’s built into Creation. Your sin harms the other members of the tribe, even if nobody in the whole tribe recognizes their connection. Creation itself is tribal. A default tribal identity in the flesh is part of the damage done in the Fall made worse by the rebellion of the Watchers and the one at Babel. Those other two rebellions were designed to lock us into the worst consequences of the Fall.
Christ on the Cross ended the limitations of the Old Covenant. By our submission to Christ as Lord, by embracing His Covenant, at one stroke we gain the power of a renewed conscience and a tribal identity rooted in Eternity. While this does not wipe away all the natural consequences of defilement in the flesh, it does awaken a purified moral awareness by the power of the Holy Spirit. We no longer have to work for His Presence as they did under Moses. It’s a free gift from Christ. We still need to do the work of building a strong connection between the Spirit and our fallen human conscience, but there’s no doubt about an inborn ability to discern sin in our daily existence.
Submission to the bondage of Christ is the ultimate freedom from the Devil.
