Lust
Desire detached from love, treating a person as something to be used.
- LuxuriaIn Latin
- ChastityIts opposite
- Terrace 7Dante’s Purgatory
Picture: Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife, Rembrandt, 1655. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.
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- Lust
A short bar is a pull your answers barely found. That is a description of your answers, not a certificate.
What is lust, as one of the seven deadly sins?
Lust is desire detached from love: wanting a person as something to be used rather than someone to be known. It is not attraction, and it is not marriage, both of which the Bible blesses. It is the look that lingers where it should not, and what the mind does with it afterwards.
Why it matters
Jesus moved this one from the act to the look, which is why the questions ask about attention rather than behavior: where you let your eyes rest, and what you do with it afterward. Nobody else can answer those for you, which is what makes them worth answering honestly.
Where does the Bible name it?
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But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Matthew 5:28
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For it is God’s will that you should be holy: You must abstain from sexual immorality; each of you must know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in lustful passion like the Gentiles who do not know God; and no one should ever violate or exploit his brother in this regard, because the Lord will avenge all such acts, as we have already told you and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us to impurity, but to holiness.
1 Thessalonians 4:3-7
Berean Standard Bible
Did you know?
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Of the seven, Dante judged lust the least grave: it is the first circle of his hell after limbo, where the lustful are blown about by a storm that never rests, and Paolo and Francesca tell their story. The old word is the Latin luxuria, which meant excess of every kind before it narrowed to this one.
Dante, Inferno, canto V
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As a young man Augustine prayed: give me chastity and self-control, but not yet. He was afraid, he wrote, that God would answer him too soon.
Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII
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Joseph’s answer to Potiphar’s wife is the Bible’s shortest guard against it. When she caught hold of his cloak, he left it in her hand and ran.
Genesis 39:7-12