Articles
Coping with Life 40 – Sex
Coping with Life 40 – Sex
Mike Willis
American culture has such a distorted view of sex that one may forget that God made us sexual beings and revealed how sex relates to human life. The sexual relationship is beautiful and re-enforces the bonds of love between man and woman. There is nothing sordid, sleazy, dirty, filthy, or shameful about sex in the biblical framework of sexual expression.
The Bible reveals that God made man and woman in His “own image” (Gen. 1:26), a statement never applied to any animals created by God. Mankind alone is made in the image of God. Furthermore, He made humans male and female: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; MALE AND FEMALE HE CREATED THEM” (Gen. 1:27).
In the expanded account of the creation of man and woman in Genesis 2, man was given the responsibility of naming the creatures God created and, during the process, Adam realized that there was no helper fitted to him. “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’” (Gen. 1:18). So God created woman from the rib of Adam and brought her to him. “Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man’” (Gen. 2:23-25).
The two beings created in God’s image formed a family: a man joined to a woman in marriage. Moses added the comment about what happens in marriage: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). The final comment is this: “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25). Sexuality within the bonds of marriage has no shame. The Song of Solomon 4:1-7 celebrates the joy of human sexuality in marriage.
The Scriptures use the verb “to know” (the Hebrew word yāda‘) to describe the intimacy of the sexual relationship between the man and his married wife: “Now Adam KNEW Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD’” (Gen. 4:1). Sexuality was never intended to be “hooking up” with a different partner each night, in which one has trouble remembering the name of the other! Sexual cohabitation is the means God has created for human reproduction; God instructed the newly created couple to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28). The husband and wife joining together their hearts to raise their children bonds the two together for a lifetime, because it was always God’s intention that marriage last for the entirety of one’s life: “For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress” (Rom. 7:1-2). Such lifetime commitments in marriage are rare in twenty-first century American society.
In the next several articles we will consider how sexuality outside the bonds of marriage distorts God’s divine blueprint for human sexuality.
