Faith & Sex Pt. 3 Sex with Divine Purpose: A Celebration of Whole-Life Oneness
Sex is everywhere in our culture and there are so many views floating around concerning sex. Unfortunately, the church doesn’t seem to talk much about sex in a healthy manner besides deriding people who the church deems to be wrongfully engaging in sexual acts. When I think about my own church education growing up, I can’t remember many life-giving conversations concerning sex. We were just told that it was bad to have sex outside of marriage. No one really took the time to address what the Bible actually teaches about the purpose of sex. No one taught me that sex is powerful, beautiful, and created by God for His purpose as a means to and celebration of radical oneness.
As an adult, I’m still disappointed with the way that many churches neglect to have healthy conversations around sex besides telling people what not to do. So the purpose of this post is to try and have that conversation, to examine popular perspectives about sex, misconceptions about the Bible’s teachings on sex and sensuality, and to explain why the Bible, believed by Christians to be Divinely inspired by God, emphasizes and celebrates sex specifically within the marital context. Just a warning that even though this post is long, there is still so much more that can be said about the Bible and sex, so this post is not at all about having the final word, it’s about being part of the conversation.
“Three Popular Perspectives on Sex”
Theologian Tim Keller and his wife Kathy devote the last chapter of their book, The Meaning of Marriage, to an in depth conversation on the Biblical view of Sex and Marriage. He also shares many of these teachings in his sermon Sexuality and Christian Hope (which is definitely worth listening to for anyone interested in thinking more deeply about this matter). In this chapter, they outline three popular views regarding sex:
1 - Sex as an appetite.
2 - Sex as dirty or bad.
3 - And sex as a means of self-expression.
Sex as an appetite views sex as a physiological need that, similar to eating, you feed when you get hungry.
Sex as dirty or bad is the belief that the flesh and sensuality are bad and that sex is a degrading act that comes from our “lower, physical nature, distinct from our higher, rational, more ‘spiritual’ nature and exists as a necessary evil for the sake of procreation.”
And finally in the third view, sex is a “critical form of self-expression, a way to ‘be yourself’ and ‘find yourself.’ In this view, the individual may wish to use sex within marriage and to build a family, but that is up to the individual. Sex is primarily for an individual’s fulfillment and self-realization, however he or she wishes to pursue it” (Keller, 220).
If you tried to guess which view the Biblical understanding of sex falls into, many people would assume that the Bible preaches the second view: the body and sex are dirty or bad. These people would be wrong.
The Bible teaches none of these views.
“Is Sex Merely an Appetite?”
The view that sex is merely a physiological appetite that you feed when the desire arises in the same way that you eat when you feel hungry is a popular view that has existed throughout history in various forms. In 1 Corinthians 6:13, Paul quotes a popular saying “food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” In reading this passage, you may have asked yourself, why is Paul talking about food for the stomach in the midst of a passage about sexual immorality? Well, Paul isn’t just talking about hunger that is addressed in eating food. In 1 Corinthians 6:13, Paul is actually referencing a popular Roman view that likened sex to a physical appetite that you feed whenever the need arises.
Contemporarily, many proponents of sex positivity, which argues that all forms of sex, as long as it is consensual, would likely fall into this category of those who view sex as a means of satisfying this physiological appetite. But there’s nothing new under the sun. It may surprise many people to know that some members of the early church in Corinth adopted this view, that it did not matter how you treated your physical body when it came to sex because God would eventually destroy them both, but rather what mattered was how you treated your soul. This is partially why Paul is writing the church in Corinth, to rebuke members who held this belief. Paul rejects this view in the very next line when he states that “the body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13).
And yet, Paul’s rejection of the view that sex is merely an appetite does not necessarily mean that he believes, or that the Biblical worldview argues, that the body and sex are dirty. In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul goes on to address why this view was problematic and the purpose of sex. Before we discuss Paul’s conception of the purpose of sex, let’s address why the second view, that sex and the body are dirty, may frequently be believed to be the Biblical worldview.
“The Bible’s Rebuke of the Flesh is not equivalent to the Demonization of the Body and Sex”
Oftentimes, teachings about the Christian worldview misrepresent the Biblical understanding of sex and the body. Christianity is commonly thought to demonize sex and condemn the body and sensuality all together—this is not true. This popular misconception may have come from misinterpretations of the apostle Paul’s teachings that Christians are to live by the Spirit and not to gratify the desires of the flesh. This teaching has been misconstrued to mean that the flesh itself is bad. However, Paul is not saying that the flesh or the body is bad, he is explaining that there is a spiritual mentality and a carnal-fleshy mentality that are at odds with one another.
The fleshly mindset is that which influences us to live for carnal desires which includes sexual immorality, but also addresses all forms of “20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like” (Galatians 5:19). This carnal mindset is a byproduct of living in a world so thoroughly tainted by sin to the point where our very human nature has also been corrupted by sin.
Contrary to the mindset of the flesh is the spiritual mindset. Anyone who chooses to give their life to God in accepting the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is to submit their flesh to the Spirit and to be transformed by the renewing of their minds (Romans 12:2). According to the Apostle Paul, contrary to the works of the flesh, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:22-23). Paul goes on to say that “24 those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Galatians 5:24). So it is clear that Paul is not saying that the body itself is bad but rather Christ calls his followers out of a carnal mindset to submit their will to a godly or spiritual mindset. In submitting their will to the Spirit, a believer’s actions should be righteous in flowing from this spiritual mentality.
“The Bible’s has a High Regard for the Body and Sex”
Contrary to these false teachings that Christianity views the body or sex as bad or dirty, the Bible actually has a very high regard for the body and sex and views both of them as sacred. Paul rebukes the church at Corinth for sexual sin because the body is so sacred:
19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. 1 Corinthians 6:19
For Paul, the very problem with sexual immorality is that it is a violation against your own body. When you decide to join your life with Christ, the very essence of God through His Holy Spirit comes to inhabit you and make your body His temple and your heart His home—and He pays the ultimate price to do so. This is how precious you are to God: not only does He give His life to redeem you, He also comes down to dwell inside of you and to be with you wherever you go. If God did not value the body, why would He be so eager to pour His spirit out on all flesh literally giving Himself over to us to empower us to live for Him?
So no, the body is not bad or dirty, it is extremely valuable and precious in God’s sight because He claims it for Himself and makes it His own home. In fact, Christianity teaches that we will one day have resurrected bodies in heaven.
“Eroticism and Sex in the Bible”
The Biblical view on sex and sensuality is also commonly misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, the Bible is not afraid of sex. Have you ever read the poetry about lovers in the Song of Solomon right in the Biblical canon? Or have you ever read what Paul has to say about sex in Corinthians?
The Song of Solomon is written as the poetry of two lovers with verses that read as follows:
She says:
16 Awake, north wind, and come, south wind! Blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread everywhere. Let my beloved come into his garden and taste its choice fruits. (Song of Solomon 4:16).
He Responds:
5 I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey; I have drunk my wine and my milk.
A Chorus Sings:
Eat, friends, and drink; drink your fill of love. (Song of Solomon 5:1).
In the 16th verse, the woman is inviting her lover into her garden. Please make no mistake about it; she is definitely talking about her body. But by the end of the verse, she says that her garden has also become his garden. In the 1st verse of the 5th chapter, he accepts her invitation and also calls her body his garden.
The Harper Collins Study Bible has the following commentary about the aforementioned verses:
“4.16 The maiden invites the beloved into her garden, her own fresh and fragrant body, which now is his garden too, to taste the fruits of love. 5.1. I come to my garden. He accepts the invitation and enters the garden, which he now calls his. Then a chorus—the daughters of Jerusalem?—encourages the couple to taste their full love. Be drunk with love (Hebrew dodim, “lovemaking”) means to give oneself over to sexual ecstasy, as in Prob. 5.15; 7.18”
In the 5th chapter of the Song of Solomon, the woman lover goes on to say:
She
2 I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking: “Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my flawless one. My head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night.” 3 I have taken off my robe— must I put it on again? I have washed my feet— must I soil them again? 4 My beloved thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him.
Again, please make no mistake about it; these lyrics are about sex. Some of the verses of the Song of Solomon are so sensual and erotic that there was opposition to canonizing the book into such a holy text. The presence of the poetry in the Biblical canon demonstrates that the Bible is not afraid of sensuality or sex. In these passages, sex between lovers is celebrated. And if God created sex, for a purpose, why would He fear sensuality?
The New Testament affirms the importance of sex within marriage. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul writes to the church in Corinth that when a man and woman become husband and wife, their bodies belong to one another:
3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. 5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer (1 Corinthians 2:2-5).
In this passage, Paul affirms the view of sex adopted by the lovers in the Song of Solomon where the woman invites her lover to share in her body calling her body his body, except Paul says that the same is true of men—a husband’s body also belongs to his wife. For Paul to write so boldly about a man’s body belonging to his wife in the same way that a woman’s body belongs to her husband would have been radical at the time. Here, Paul presents a view of equality in which both a husband and his wife give their bodies over to one another.
During this time period, there was a false teaching going around the church that married couples should pursue asceticism in abstaining from sex, but Paul is explicitly rejecting this view. In this passage, Paul encourages a husband and wife to have as much sex with each other as they would like and to only stop when there is mutual consent, and only for a short period, to devote themselves to prayer. It is obvious here that to the apostle Paul, sex has a very important role in marriage.
All of this to say, no, the Bible does not deem sensuality or sex as dirty or bad as many people would like to think. Biblical teachings do not at all have a problem with sex, but rather the Bible takes issue with sex outside of its proper context—that being marriage. According to scripture, God created sex to be an extremely beautiful and sacred gift. God says sex is good and that He created it to be powerful and a vehicle for His glory in its proper context.
“Sex as Sexual Expression & Identity”
An Important Side Note: Before talking about Sex in Marriage, I would like to acknowledge that in the beginning of this post, I cited 3 popular understandings of sex and sexuality. While I have taken more time to discuss the first two views regarding sex as appetite and sex as dirty, I have not addressed the third view, sex as a means of self-realization and individual fulfillment. However, in moving forward to speak about the Biblical conception of sex’s role in marriage, I hope that it will be evident to readers why the Bible does not deem sex to be a means of individual fulfillment but rather a deeply bonding act between a husband and wife.
At the same time, while the Bible does not view sex as a means of self-expression, I think that in our culture it is of the utmost important for the church to create space to have these very important conversations regarding sexuality as a means of self-expression and what that means for our relationship with Christ. Too often are people denied relationship with Christ because of their sexual expression and identification. Too often does the church delegitimize the experience of LGBTQ Christians who are seeking to understand what it means to be in relationship with God and that relationship to their sexuality. And too often, as I said in the first post of this series, do we make the LGBTQ community a scapegoat for sexual sin. This has got to stop. We need to have space to have healthy conversations about sexuality, sexual expression, and Christianity. We need to create spaces in our communities for all persons from heterosexuals to LGBTQ members to engage with difficult questions about faith and sexuality, to come before God to hear what He has to say about these things and to speak life into an area that has brought so much hurt and isolation for so many people.
As a result of Biblical teachings on homosexuality as sin, there are many people who have been stigmatized, pushed away from the church, and made to feel as if God does not love or care about them-this is unacceptable. Homophobia in the church in unacceptable and needs to stop. The center of the gospel is Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected for the forgiveness of sins that we may be redeemed and reconciled to God and all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. So let's please do not ostracize an entire community out of an air of superiority or self-righteousness--this is ungodly. Let's please humble ourselves and create spaces to have these hard conversations and give all people room to come before God with their questions, hurt, and pain, that we may all know His healing and restoration.
“Sex in Marriage”
So why does the Bible emphasize that sex is meant to be reserved for marriage? I would argue it is out of the Bible’s very high regard for sex that Biblical teachings emphasize sex in the marital context. For the apostle Paul, sex is very powerful and deeply spiritual as well as physical.
In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes:
“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But whoever is united with the Lord is one with Him in spirit.” 1 Corinthians 6:15-17 (New International Version)
I am going to quote the same exact text in “The Message Bible” because the modern language of The Message Bible may prove to be a lot more accessible for contemporary readers:
“God honored the Master’s body by raising it from the grave. He’ll treat yours with the same resurrection power. Until that time, remember that your bodies are created with the same dignity as the Master’s body. You wouldn’t take the Master’s body off to a whorehouse would you? I should hope not.
There’s more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture, “The two become one.” Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoid commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever—the kind of sex that can never “become one.” There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for ‘becoming one’ with another. Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Sprit. Don’t you see that you can’t live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body.” 1 Corinthians 6:14-20 (The Message Bible)
In these passages, Paul is saying that sex is more than merely a physical act and is so much more than orgasms and physical pleasure. According to this text, sex is deeply spiritual. In verse 16 when Paul writes “Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” While it may seem as though Paul is talking about just what physically takes place during sex when he talks about becoming “one with her in body,” we know that this is not the case because it would be redundant to say “Do you now know that he who becomes physically united with a prostitute is physically united with her.” To say so would be to state the obvious. We know that Paul is talking about something more than physical because at the end of the verse, Paul quotes the creation story from Genesis 2:24 after Eve is taken from Adams rib. Genesis 2:24 in its entirety states, “that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” This passage in Genesis is not talking about becoming one physical flesh; it presents an image of marriage in which a husband and wife are coming together to be one in every sense of the word.
Here, physical oneness is a powerful reflection and enactment of spiritual oneness and whole-life oneness. This teaching is reminiscent of Adam’s declaration when God grants him his partner and divine helper Eve. When Adam sees Eve, he declared her to be the “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Adam isn’t just spitting ill poetry at seeing his wife. Not only is Eve literally the bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, Adam is ratifying a covenant before God that he will treat her as his very bone and his very flesh. He is saying that he will treat her as his own body because they are one. In this way, marriage is about whole-life-oneness. In other words, marriage is about sharing your entire life and being exclusively with the one called to be your divine helper in living out your life purpose.
I’ll quote Tim and Kathy Keller’s Book “The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God” on the topic of marriage and sex because I really like their language and interpretation and I think that the point is worth rehashing again:
“In other words, marriage is a union between two people so profound that they virtually become a new, single person. The word ‘united’ (in older translations, ‘to cleave’) means ‘to make a binding covenant or contract.” This covenant brings every aspect of two persons’ lives together. They essentially merge into a single legal, social, economic unit. They lose much of their independence. In love they donate themselves, wholly, to the other.
To call the marriage ‘one flesh,’ then, means that sex is understood as both a sign of that personal, legal union and a means to accomplish it. The Bible says don’t unite with someone physically unless you are also willing to unite with the person emotionally, personally, socially, economically, and legally. Don’t become physically naked and vulnerable to the other person without becoming vulnerable in every other way, because you have given up your freedom and bound yourself in marriage.
Then, once you have given yourself in marriage, sex is a way of maintaining and deepening that union as the years go by. In the Old Testament, there were often ‘covenant renewal ceremonies.’ When God entered into a covenant relationship with his people, he directed that periodically there by an opportunity to have them remember the terms of the covenant by first reading it together, and then recommitting themselves to it. This was crucial if the people were to sustain a life of faithfulness.
It is the same with the marriage covenant. When you get married, you make a solemn covenant with your spouse—the Bible calls your spouse your ‘covenant partner’ (Proverbs 2:17). That day is a great day, and your hearts are full. But as time goes on, there is a need to rekindle the heart and renew the commitment. There must be an opportunity to recall all that the other person means to you and to give yourself anew. Sex between a husband and a wife is the unique way to do that. (Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God)
Thus sex is a way of revisiting, remembering, and honoring this covenant to be completely united with your husband or wife. In this view, sex is a way of acknowledging that you’ve committed your whole life before God to a husband or wife—it is deeply sacred and spiritual and intentionally powerful and pleasurable in that you are actively taking joy in the person who you’ve committed your life to before God and honoring Him in the process. In the Biblical view, to give your body to anyone who has not fully committed themself to loving and honoring you in every sense of the word before God is to cheapen an act that He created to be sacred, devalue your temples, and ultimately dishonor Him.
According to scripture, in the eyes of God, someone who is not willing to love you and care for you deeply, someone who is not fully invested in you, and isn’t willing to commit before God to wholly loving you and sacrificially giving themselves over to caring for you through thick and thin does not deserve your body or your heart and if you are not committed to doing the same thing for them then you do not deserve their body or their heart. This is the sin of fornication, giving yourself over to someone who ultimately isn’t willing to honor you enough to pay a price for you, but instead sees you as a temporary means to your and his or her sensual pleasure.
I honestly wonder how much emotional baggage and hurt could be avoided in our lives and our culture if we trusted God and waited on His timing for whole-life intimacy with the person that He chooses for us.
In contemporary culture, while sex is often perceived of as merely an appetite and it may not be that important who you give your body to or while it may not even be that important to you, it is to God. You may be thinking, it’s really not that deep or it doesn’t take all that, but to God, it is.
“Intimacy as Reflecting the Love of and Oneness with the Divine”
As powerful, beautiful, and sacred as sex God created sex, God does not intend for it to fulfill us. In this same chapter where Paul teaches about the power of sex and a man and wife devoting their bodies to one another, he teaches that it is perfectly fine for brothers or sisters in the faith to remain single. Imagine God creating this powerful gift for marriage but saying that those who want to be single are perfectly fine in doing so—something that would have been completely taboo in a culture where people often find their worth or take pride in whom they are married to, particularly for women who would have been looked down upon for being single.
How is God able to create sex so beautifully and say people are free to live without it? The only way is if He truly believes that you can know joy, ecstasy, and the fullness of life without sex. This teaching that you can be a whole person apart from sex often feels foreign and may even be considered absurd in our culture. However, Paul, as a single man, is able to write in approval of single-womanhood and single-manhood because he is convinced that the fullness of joy and life are not most deeply rooted in physical or erotic love but agape (unconditional love)—this is the love that God offers us.
If the power of sex is physical oneness with another human being, how much greater is God’s invitation to intimacy in His coming to make our very hearts His home in sending His Holy Spirit to abide in us before finally becoming one with Him for eternity? We hear it so much that it’s so easy for us to take for granted that God loves us so much that He desires for our bodies to be His temples and our hearts to be His home as a sign of His calling us to be one with Him in the same way that the Son is one with the Father.
In our entitlement, we may take for granted how ridiculous this is—we are in no way worthy to become one with the Divine but in His grace He chooses to make us worthy. In His grace, He chooses to call us to know oneness in Him and complete fulfillment in Him. These are the living waters that Jesus is offering us in John 4. Maybe this is why the Bible teaches that there is no marriage in heaven. In heaven, we’ll be in the consuming presence of our eternal bridegroom who is completely zealous for us and gives Himself over to us completely.
Ultimately, God created sex to be a beautiful and powerful gift and in the same way that God has a purpose for your life, your education, your gifts, your single woman or manhood, and your marriage, God has a purpose for sex. And in the Biblical worldview, to remove sex from its purpose in creating radical oneness between a husband and wife drawing them nearer to one another in the depths of love for each other and love for God is to lessen the purpose and God’s vision for sex.
If you're interested in thinking more about Sex and Christianity I've found the sermon Sexuality and Christian Hope by Tim Keller to be very insightful.
