This is also available in Danish.
This is the second article in a planned series of three. Read the first article here.
There is so much good and blessedness on this earth. The proofs of God’s grace towards all people are numerous. But even the good is not perfect. Since the Fall in Genesis 3, everything good and perfect that God created has been knocked off course, distorted, and infiltrated by the invasive plague of death and sin.
“(…) badness is only spoiled goodness,” as C.S. Lewis writes.
This also applies to physical intimacy.
In our eagerness to distance ourselves from the past’s overly prudish attitudes towards sex and the body, we have found that the church now often wants to stress all the wonders of marital sex. We want to emphasize that it is something good, positive, and a gift from God.
That is why you might get the impression that if we wait until marriage to have sex, only good things await you in the marital bed. Author, artist, and Bible-teacher Jackie Hill Perry has called it a form of prosperity gospel in which unmarried Christians may fall under the illusion that if they are obedient and wait until marriage to have sex, it will be unproblematic and wonderful.
Sex is a gift from God. Good, God-honoring sex is a glimpse and echo of what we had in the garden (explained further in part I of this series). However, sex is not automatically good in and of itself. Sex can be abused in a myriad of ways. If we neglect to be realistic about the consequences and devastating effects of sin on sexuality, we set ourselves—and those we counsel about sex—up for a sea of disappointment and frustration. This can threaten both our relationship with God and the union with our spouse. We risk forgetting to run to our Savior who can redeem and free us from our sinful nature. He is the Good Shepherd whom we need in all of life’s struggles.
However, if we are realistic about the reality of sin and if we seek Jesus in that struggle, then the imperfect union between husband and wife holds the potential for amazing spiritual growth. This form of sanctification brings us closer to our spouse and to Jesus.
This article will look at how human sexuality is broken by sin and what God has done to restore a fallen world. The upcoming sections will detail how sin affects our marriages and our physical relationship as spouses, as well as how Jesus is both our power, role model, and gracious savior.
Broken, but not without hope
You do not have to live long in this world to see how God’s good gift of physical intimacy is misused again and again. Spousal abuse, child abuse, and the objectification of men and women are just some examples.
However, even in the most exemplary Christian marriages, sex is affected by the fallen reality we live in. Sexuality is broken, both inside and outside the church. It is damaged for both those who engage in physical relations before marriage and for those who wait.
Let’s examine just a few examples.
- We come to the marriage bed with an excess amount of baggage. We bring our low self-esteem, guilt, shame and trauma with us.
- Many of us have a distorted view of beauty, especially regarding the female body.
- Our bodies are broken. We can experience physical pain during sex and our lives are often marked with illness whether it be physical or mental.
- Many couples struggle with infertility. In this instance, sex is not just a simple escape into physical pleasure. Rather, it can be a sharp reminder of a painful struggle to conceive the child they so desperately want but cannot have at the moment.
- Because our hearts are not in sync with who God is and what He wills, we have misconceptions that physical pleasure is an “instant reward.” We believe that it is, or should be, something effortless and natural that requires very little of us.
- Furthermore, we long for this gift in the wrong places and at times that do not align with our spouse’s wants and needs. We also often crave it in a self-centered way that is focused on our own satisfaction.
Overall, we crave sex in a less beautiful way than what God has created it to be. As C.S. Lewis famously says, our “desires are too weak.”
The ripple effect of sin that was set into motion in the garden extends to every area of our life, including physical intimacy. But the gospel tells us that God did not stand idly by as we struggled in our sins. He acted. He did something to save us from our sin and to heal the brokenness. This should give us courage to be realistic about the consequences of sin in our sex life.
The ripple effect of sin that was set into motion in the garden extends to every area of our life, including physical intimacy. But the gospel tells us that God did not stand idly by as we struggled in our sins. He acted. He did something to save us from our sin and to heal the brokenness.
However, we should also be hopeful, because God’s unfathomable love, unparalleled perseverance, and perfect salvation set us free to fight for what is good and true. He liberates us from bondage so that we can strive to be more like him and to love others better.
God’s covenants
When Adam and Eve first sinned in the garden, they lost their close communion with each other and with God. In his mercy, the Lord sought to restore this broken relationship. The great narrative throughout the Old Testament paints the story of a faithful God who persistently loves and seeks fellowship with his people who repeatedly turn away from and dishonor him. To bind himself to this people, God makes a covenant with them. He promises that he will be their God, bless them, and that one day he will send a messiah who will restore all that is broken (Genesis 12:1–3).
Perhaps the strongest metaphor used to describe God’s covenant relationship with his people is marriage between a man and a woman.
In the book of Hosea, God says this to his people, Israel:
“I am betrothed to you forever; (…)
I am betrothed to you in faithfulness,
And you shall know the Lord.”
(Hosea 2:21)
When God heals the broken, He does it through marriage. By “marrying” with his people (i.e. Isaiah 62:4–5) and by devoting all his power and strength to make those who left him and rejected him, his own (Isaiah 43:1–7; Hosea 2:25).
The New Covenant
The culmination of God’s covenant relationship with his people occurs when he sends Jesus as the mediator of the new covenant by his own blood (1 Cor. 11:25). This covenant makes it possible for sinners from all nations to access a restored, intimate, and deeply loving relationship with God.
Jesus’ blood and resurrection paved the way for us back to the garden. In Jesus, the “paradise road” is found as we sing in the Danish Christmas hymn ‘Christmas has brought blessed tidings’ (‘Julen har bragt velsignet bud’). He provides the way for God to dwell with his people (Revelation 21) again and for us to be part of perfect community. This is the sense of unity and belonging that we had in the garden and for which our hearts yearn.
Glimpses of hope in a fallen world
Just as God brought hope and restoration through covenants with his people, so our marital covenant can create an oasis of hope, truth, and goodness in a confused, lost, and fallen world. With our marriages, we can reflect God’s faithful, committed love for us.
Sexuality can and should play a crucial role in that mission. Physical intimacy is one way in which we can renew and reaffirm our covenant with each other.
In the Old Testament, God gave his people the opportunity to renew the covenant through certain ceremonies (e.g. Jer 34:18–22). In marriage, we also have the opportunity to reaffirm the covenant we made when we got married. In Tim and Kathy Keller’s book The Meaning of Marriage, intimacy is described as our covenant renewal ceremony:
“An opportunity is needed to reflect anew on all that the other person means to you and to give yourself anew. Sex between husband and wife is a unique way to do that.”
While this one flesh union strengthens and reaffirms the covenant between husband and wife, intimacy blesses far beyond the individual marriage. The closeness, connection, and devotion that physical intimacy catalyzes in a marriage helps to create a secure and stable home where children and adults can rest, thrive, and grow. The way in which this union grounds us, strengthens us, and fills us with joy and a deep sense of belonging frees us to be of far greater service to others— in our workplace, in our church, and for our friends and neighbors.
However, we don’t achieve this on our own. If we as sinners are to succeed in covenant-renewing sex that strengthens our marriage and reflects God’s love for those around us, we need Jesus first. Without the great Physician and Deliverer, we cannot have a marriage that becomes an earthly glimpse of God’s love and faithfulness to us.
If we have grasped the gospel, then Christ has become our enabling power to love our spouse just as Christ has loved the church. His love and grace for us, expressed through his life and death, is the life-giving spring that flows into our heart and soul, empowering us to love sacrificially.
Christ as the power
Firstly, Jesus provides us with the grace we need to love our spouse.
Jesus Christ gave himself completely as a sacrifice for his beloved church. He left his heavenly glory and became part of a sinful world. He went all the way to the cross and defeated sin and death to secure the salvation of the lost. He completely renounced his own interests and took care of ours instead (Phil 2:5–8).
If we have grasped the gospel, then Christ has become our enabling power to love our spouse just as Christ has loved the church. His love and grace for us, expressed through his life and death, is the life-giving spring that flows into our heart and soul, empowering us to love sacrificially. Jesus’ loving example should be reflected in Christian marriage and in physical intimacy with our spouse. He is our role model, the one who shows the way to true devotion and self-sacrifice.
Christ as a role model
When Paul writes about marriage in Ephesians 5 (and thus implicitly about sex), he mentions Jesus over and over again. We are to submit to one another (v. 21) in reverence for Christ. Husbands are to love their wives “as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25). When he speaks of the unity— “one flesh”—that a man and woman have in marriage, he again refers to Jesus Christ, “This contains a great mystery, I refer to Christ and the church” (v. 32).
So, how can the marriage bed concretely reflect the love that Christ has for his church?
To love with self-sacrificial, Christ-inspired love means, firstly, that our own pleasure cannot be at the center.
We are made in the image of the triune God. When Keller writes about the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he writes that each person of the Trinity has for all eternity “glorified, honored, and loved the two others.” Keller calls it an “orientation toward the other.”
If we are to reflect God and resemble Christ, we must be oriented not only toward ourselves and our own physical needs, but to our spouse’s needs. This does not mean that our own pleasure is wrong. Enjoyment is a God-created gift. However, I cannot expect to have intimacy whenever and wherever I feel like it. It is God-glorifying to sometimes wait and exercise self-control (a fruit of the Spirit, cf. Galatians 5:23) in order that I may honor and respect my beloved and our union.
Furthermore, physical intimacy, being a unifying, covenant-renewing act, is a blessing that we share exclusively with my beloved and none other—including other people, ourselves, or images of other women or men.
At the same time, my spouse must never be merely a tool for my own pleasure. They are a precious human being that I must love and honor. Therefore, I must sacrificially elevate their needs above my own. This means, among other things, that I need to make an effort to learn what pleases my spouse and understand the gender and body that God has given them.
Treasuring the other
Secondly, we shouldn’t use sex to highlight ourselves, but to treasure the other person. We should show love, tenderness, esteem, and honor, as Christ does toward the church. It is not a loss for us to elevate our spouse; there is no zero-sum game, for we are one flesh. As Paul writes, “He who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph 5:28).
Consequently, we must also help our spouse to be like Christ by allowing them to serve us and accepting the favor he or she strives to give. This can perhaps be especially challenging for women in this century, as they are repeatedly told that they should be able to fulfill themselves independently from a man. As Miley Cyrus sings in the song Flowers:
“I can take myself dancing
And I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can.”
We are told by the secular world that we should also be able to satisfy ourselves sexually and not be dependent on a spouse to do it. It is true that neither men nor women need a romantic partner to be whole or valuable human beings. However, it is a false gospel to determine that we are “saved” or whole by being enough in and of ourselves. Only one can make us whole: Jesus.
Furthermore, God created both women and men to live in community with the opposite sex. This takes place in marriage and in our church family. These are diverse communities where we with our differences reflect the triune God himself in service and devotion to one another.
In marriage we can help our spouse to fulfill their call to serve by sharing what we need and how they can best nurture and care for us and our body. And we must hold fast to patience, love, and forbearance as our spouse gradually becomes skilled at loving us well.
Known and loved
The truth is, though, that even if we have grasped the gospel and God’s spirit lives in us, and we strive to be Christlike in the way we love our spouse, we will fail. We will put ourselves at the center, we will hurt our spouse, and we will be influenced by society’s misconceptions of what it means to love.
And physical intimacy, in particular, has a way of bringing difficult things to light.
The vulnerability that good physical intimacy is built upon can reveal insecurities, guilt, anger, and jealousy. When intimacy brings these things to light instead of just being easy and giving us pleasure, it can feel like a defeat—but it is not. We have found that when we let our spouse see our brokenness and ugliness it can lead to deeper healing and a deeper one-flesh union. When we love each other amidst our brokenness, we can be glimpses of Christ to each other.
Tim Keller has described the gospel beautifully and aptly: “To be loved but not known is superficial. To be known but not loved is our nightmare. Only Jesus knows us to the bottom and loves us to the sky.”
When one’s spouse sees and knows them fully and loves them, it is a reminder of the even greater love Jesus has for them—despite knowing everything about us. In this sweet union, husbands and wives can be a ray of light reflecting Christ’s sacrificial love towards one another.
To the cross
However, we need more than glimpses of Christ’s love. We need Jesus himself. The vulnerability and brokenness that sex reveals shouldn’t just bring us closer to our spouse. It should drive us towards the cross.
Jesus Christ, who had nothing ugly and broken to hide, made himself naked and vulnerable. He bore the guilt for our darkest thoughts and most selfish choices and was punished so that we could be free.
When we make sex anything but what God created it to be—then we must run to the cross. We must lay our burdens at the feet of Jesus and listen to the precious words over and over again, “It is finished.” He bore the penalty, paid the final price, and atoned for our sin.
When we are reminded of sexual sin or when we are selfish lovers, we must run to the cross. When we set impossible ideals for our husband or wife or when we believe the world’s lies about beauty and love, we must run to the cross. When we make sex anything but what God created it to be—then we must run to the cross. We must lay our burdens at the feet of Jesus and listen to the precious words over and over again, “It is finished.” He bore the penalty, paid the final price, and atoned for our sin.
My (Katrine’s) great-grandfather, pastor and missionary Daniel Dirksen has written: “May God draw us closer to him every day, then we will see our sin greater, but peace will be so much richer.”
Some may question, should sex be mixed up with sin and grace, cross and confession? Isn’t it the whole point of sex to be easy and pleasurable? Can’t we be allowed to turn our convictions off and put the Bible in the other room?
It is possible to have a kind of sex that is primarily physical, where the other person’s body (or the image we look at or the way we touch ourselves) becomes solely a tool to elicit a physical response. Yet as followers of Jesus, we remain convinced that God created sex to be more than just that. This purely physical reaction utterly diminishes the deeper familiarity, affection, and sacrifice required to become more like Jesus and come closer to him.
Certainly, God-honoring, good intimacy also has elements of lightness and pleasure. Indeed, this is celebrated in the Bible (Song of Soloman, Prov 5:18–19).
Yet, if sex involves two whole people with souls, sin, baggage, hopes and dreams, and gender and personality differences, and if they are accompanying each other through the ups and downs of life, it inevitably becomes more complicated. You can lament that. However, one can also see it as the path to something deeper and greater than instant gratification. Namely, a process towards a deeper joy that is the fruit of being known, loved, forgiven, and having worked through and overcome rough patches together. As life-partners, we come out on the other side as imperfect people that are united on a deeper level having encountered the grace of Jesus 77 times. That is a joy that lasts and that is the best underlying foundation for fueling desire, fulfillment, and devotion in the long term.
Deep and true joy is like a diamond; it needs to be cut and drilled to get to it. It can be painful in the process, but the reward is truly worth it.