Try this experiment. Fill a cookie jar with homemade cookies. Tell a four-year-old child, "Do not under any conditions touch or look in that cookie jar." Then see how long it takes for the child to climb the cabinet to get into that jar. If you hadn't actually told the child not to touch the cookie jar, he or she would never have desired to find out what was in it. The prohibition inflamed curiosity and ignited the desire to get what was in the jar. We humans often have the feeling that what is prohibited must be desirable merely because it is prohibited. Children are not the only persons to have this experience. No indeed, adults are caught with their hands in the cookie jar too. The prohibitions of the law inflame our depravity, rather than keeping us from doing what is prohibited.

Our head-long career into sin can be accelerated by the prohibitions placed in our path. The congregation I serve is immediately across the street from a medium rise office tower. The buildings on our campus have created a wind tunnel with the office tower across the street so that when a south wind blows, it becomes a howling jet stream between the buildings. The wind is accelerated by being funneled between the buildings. So it is for human depravity when it encounters the stop-loss of the divine law. As our depravity surges between these beacons of the divine will it accelerates so that it becomes a howling jet stream. We hear this howling depravity a great deal in these days at the end of the ages. The divine prohibitions are being toppled into the ever-flowing effluent of wickedness. The decisions of courts across our land that say evil is good, by permitting marriage of persons of the same sex, are some of that wildly-flowing effluent. God said, "You shall not..." We say, "Oh yeah, who is going to stop us?"