This is also available in Danish.
This is the first in a planned series of three articles. Read the second article here.
As parents of a 2-year-old, we read a surprising number of books about construction sites. It’s educational, both for our son and us two academics, although there’s still a long way to go before Bob the Builder wants us on his crew. One of the things we have learned, however, is that when you build a house, you start with the foundation. You don’t start with the bookshelves or the coffee machine (which are important elements!). You start by laying a foundation. It’s poured in concrete within carefully defined measuring lines so that the house doesn’t become crooked and so that it stands firmly.
When we talk about sex—even as Christians—we can easily start in the wrong place. Namely with me or us. Can I do this? Why do we have this challenge? What does the Bible say about my particular situation here and now?
These are relevant questions. But they are difficult, if not impossible, to illuminate and answer healthily and truthfully if we don’t first have the basics in place: Why did God create sex? What does sex tell us about God, first, and second, about us? And what is God’s greater meaning and purpose for sex?
In Christian contexts, you can sometimes get the impression that the Bible’s “vision” for sex is something like: Don’t watch porn and wait until marriage to have sex. And then go for it and it will be great!
But the Bible has much more beautiful, deep, and true things to say about sex. And we believe it’s crucial that the church, and perhaps especially our youth, are trained in a solid, nuanced, and gospel-centered theology around sex. And why is that? Because it’s the only thing that can really put our own sex lives in the right frame. And because we and our young people cannot and should not settle for incomprehensible prohibitions or practical advice to optimize our sex lives. Instead, we need a holistic and well-founded ballast to root ourselves and to face the media and society’s individualistic, materialistic, confused, and shallow approach to sex.
In this and two subsequent articles, we will examine sex through the lens of the four main parts of the gospel: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, because we believe that sex only makes deep and true sense when we illuminate it from God’s big story. In a biblical light, sex becomes more noble and valuable than our sex-fixated society can muster. At the same time, it removes the performance pressure from sex because God frees us from making sex an idol, and because the Bible makes us realistic about the consequences of sin, while also pointing us towards forgiveness and restoration in Jesus. Finally, the gospel shows that sex is only a temporary gift pointing to a greater reality that is so amazing and robust that even the best sex looks like a withered leaf in comparison.
We hope you’ll read along and be challenged, encouraged, and that your understanding of Jesus will grow!
We start where it all began, in the garden.
Creation: Sex reminds us of the garden
Everything starts with God. He is the protagonist, the center, the creator, and the origin of everything. Including sex.
We can sometimes get the impression that sex is a human invention, something we came up with almost in rebellion against God—and then God came along and tried to regulate it and limit it because he doesn’t really like it. But no, sex was invented by God.
And if we don’t start with God, we are headed to a dead end.
Everything starts with God. He is the protagonist, the center, the creator, and the origin of everything. Including sex.
God created the first humans, Adam and Eve. For what? For fellowship with each other and with their God, creator, and father. He put them in a garden where all was good. Ever since mankind was banished from the garden, we have longed to return because that is where we belong.
We long for the garden where we were created to live with each other and with God. Unashamed, known, loved.
Sex reminds us of the garden in several ways.
First, as we hear seven times in Genesis chapter 1, there was ultimate “good” in the garden. And when sex is really good, a celebration of love, of the body and the soul it carries—it is really good, almost paradisiacally good.
Secondly, sex reminds us that we are made in God’s image for love, for fellowship. That the body—despite its sinful and fallen state—is fundamentally an amazing creation, willed by God. That we are created as man and woman, and that something amazing happens when the two genders are allowed to unite in their differences, because we reflect God better there than separately. And that God has put some of his creative power into us; (through God-given creative power) we can create life and bring new creatures into the world through sex and thus fulfill one of the life tasks God gives people in the garden: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth (…)” (Gen 1:28).
Sex is a tool God has given us to fulfill, celebrate and—again and again (1 Corinthians 7)—renew and confirm the unique covenant that a man and woman make when they get married. It has existed since the first wedding in the Garden of Eden, where God as a proud father leads the first woman Eve to Adam, who unreservedly and selflessly rejoices and delights in his wife (Gen 2:22–24)!
Sex gives us glimpses of the closeness that Adam and Eve experienced between each other and with God in the garden. They were naked and without shame (Gen 2:25). They saw each other from head to toe and rejoiced in what they saw (Gen 2:23).
More than physical closeness
The closeness wasn’t just physical. There was a spiritual fellowship between Adam, Eve, and God. They knew, loved, and honored each other. Several times when the Bible talks about sex, it uses the term “knowing,” e.g. “Adam knew Eve.” As Juli Slattery points out in her book God, Sex, and Your Marriage, the Hebrew word yada is used here. Yada means to know someone else on a really deep level, and it’s the same word David uses, for example in Psalm 139, about God’s deep knowledge of us. “Lord, you search me and know (yada) me.”
As Juli Slattery writes:
“Sex without yada is like food without nutrition. God gave you the gift of sex not simply so that your body could experience pleasure, but so that the physical act of becoming one would usher in a deeper knowing and intimacy with one another.”
When we physically long for sex, underneath the physical longing is a deeper spiritual longing to be fully known, seen, and wanted—and fully loved. A longing to belong, to be at home. If we only satisfy the physical longing—whether it’s for ourselves in the form of porn use or masturbation, or if in a relationship we only focus on the physical technique and forget to cultivate the spiritual unity—we become empty inside, and even hungrier than before.
True biblical eros, as C.S. Lewis describes it in The Four Loves, is not just for a body, but for a whole person:
“In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”
The closeness, boldness, affection, and unashamed nudity remind us of the garden we left behind and which we long for so fervently.
When we physically long for sex, underneath the physical longing is a deeper spiritual longing to be fully known, seen, and wanted—and fully loved. A longing to belong, to be at home.
When sex between a husband and wife is at its best, it echoes what our hearts remember and miss from that garden.
But we no longer live there. We hear echoes, longing after and seeing only glimpses of what we lost. Our present reality is completely different.