God Drive vs Sex Drive

The God-Drive vs the Sex-Drive

Our desire to worship and know God is what I call the God-drive. The God-drive is that inner pull, an invisible longing to understand who made us, why we are here, and whether we are alone in this vast universe. Every religion and spiritual tradition teaches, in one form or another, that humanity was created by God to serve and worship Him. From Sunday school lessons to sacred scriptures, the story repeats: we exist to glorify our Creator.

But if worship and devotion were the central purpose of human existence, why didn’t God wire us with an instinct to seek Him as powerfully as we seek pleasure? Why isn’t our God-drive stronger than our sex-drive? Why is it that the desire for union with a mortal body feels more natural, more urgent, and more exciting than our desire for union with the divine?

It seems, at first, almost paradoxical — if God wanted us close, wouldn’t He have built that desire into our biology? Instead, what governs most of our motives, choices, and societies is the sex-drive: the biological compulsion to reproduce and spread our genes. Even some evolutionary scientists reduce all life’s purpose to this — the mating and multiplication of species. Fishes, birds, animals — all were commanded in Genesis to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the world. Their purpose was clear and singular: reproduce.

But humanity’s case appears more layered. The first humans, according to the same text, were blessed not only with the command to multiply but also to have dominion — to manage, name, subdue, and rule. This dual directive — to reproduce and to have dominion — defines the strange tension within human life. To “mate and reproduce” is to align with our animal nature; to “have dominion” may symbolize our divine side — the consciousness that seeks meaning, moral order, and connection to the transcendent. We live suspended between the two: body and spirit, instinct and intelligence, desire and worship.

Yet in this duality, one force clearly dominates. The sex-drive leads, directs, motivates — while the God-drive whispers faintly in comparison. Men work, build, and battle often under the banner of ambition, but beneath it, much of that striving is anchored in attracting a partner or ensuring survival through reproduction. Women refine beauty, adapt, and choose mates through processes driven by the same law. The economy, fashion, entertainment, even war — much of it disguises, in complex form, this singular drive. The mating principle powers civilization as electricity powers machines.

So why didn’t God make the God-drive stronger? Perhaps because a stronger God-drive would make free will impossible. If the urge to worship were as automatic and hormonal as the urge to mate, worship would no longer be love — it would be reflex. God, if conscious of granting freedom, might have wanted beings who could choose Him, not programmatically serve Him. Our weak God-drive may then be the price of freedom, and our strong sex-drive, the mechanism of survival.

Still, this does not resolve the discomfort. For a being supposedly made in God’s image, it seems strange that we find more exhilaration in reproduction than in revelation. This could mean that the sex-drive, in its deeper sense, mirrors the God-drive. The ecstasy of union, the thrill of merging with another, may be a symbolic echo of the soul’s deeper longing to merge with its Source. In that sense, sex becomes not a distraction from the divine, but a distorted reflection of it — a biological metaphor for spiritual yearning.

The tragedy is that most of humanity stops at the symbol and misses the meaning. The body experiences what the soul craves, but we mistake one for the other. We seek temporary fusion through the flesh because the eternal fusion of the spirit feels abstract, distant, and unattainable. Thus, the sex-drive dominates not because God failed to give us a stronger God-drive, but because we fail to transcend the lower reflection to reach for the higher one.

Maybe that’s the human condition: trapped between animal instinct and divine intuition, forever torn between body and spirit. The sex-drive ensures the survival of our species; the God-drive hints at the survival of our souls. Both are necessary, but one is urgent and physical, while the other is patient and invisible. And perhaps life itself — with all its confusion and tension — is the balancing act between the two.

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By Jesse E.Agbe