This post is part 4 of a 5 part blog series called ‘Shaped By The Gospel’ on the subjects of race, politics, individualism, sexuality, and materialism. What does it look like to be shaped by the gospel on relevant issues shaping our culture?
About 10 years ago Christians who hold a historic, biblical, sexual ethic were seen as old-fashioned. Today, this same ethic is seen as bigoted and dangerous. Is it? Do we need to abandon the biblical vision for sexuality in order to get on the right side of history?
At the core, our view of sexuality is shaped by defining what we believe sex is for and who defines it. Modern Western culture prioritizes discovery of our authentic selves and living out what we find there at all costs. But from a Christian perspective, who I am in relation to God is my authentic self. These are very diverging visions.
This article responds to this question: What does it look like to be shaped by the gospel when it comes to our sexuality? We’re going to see what the Bible has to say about sexuality and seek to follow the basic arc and storyline of the Bible on it.
THE PURPOSE OF SEX
The only way to know how we should act sexually toward others is to first answer the question, What is sex for?. The Bible’s answer to this foundational question is fundamentally different than society’s answer to the question: Self expression & Self-fulfillment. According to God—the Creator of sex—there are 3 primary purposes for sex. Sam Allberry points them out as follows in his book, Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With?
- Procreation
God’s first command in the Bible involves and necessitates sex: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28). It is both a blessing and a command. So a purpose for sex that we discover in the first page of the Bible is that sex between a man and a woman is a procreative act. Even if a child isn’t conceived, male and female sex is nonetheless oriented toward the procreation of new life. - Oneness
One isn’t about numeric value but about unity: Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24). Deuteronomy 6 tells us, The Lord is One. In Genesis 1:26 we see God say Let us make in our image, hinting at a plurality to God; and yet He is One. And this is something of the unity and union we see reflected between Adam & Eve. They are One in a way that reflects or images how God is One. And it’s not unity in sameness or in uniformity but in difference. The two become One Flesh.
When a couple has sex, something changes in their relationship. It bonds them. They’ve entered a deeper unity that is not only spiritual, but also emotional, relational, and scientific research confirms that this bonding also takes place on a neurochemical level. A key neurochemical important to healthy sex and bonding is oxytocin. It’s sometimes referred to as the “love hormone”. The release of oxytocin generates bonding and trust with another person, especially in females.
God meant for this to be a beautifully bonding experience that blesses and enriches marriages. The consequences can be destructive and soul-numbing when we flippantly bond our bodies to many others. Or in unhealthy manipulative and abusive circumstances where, for example, a young woman bonds herself to a guy who uses her rather than cherishes her.
Another neurotransmitter in the brain is dopamine, which is the chemical that mediates pleasure in the brain. It’s the “feel good” hormone. A dopamine rush to the brain can create a sense of euphoria. Viewing pornography has the same affect as cocaine in the pleasure centre of the brain through dopamine. In recent years young men have come out saying that porn is ruining their lives. These dopamine hits that porn brought them over and over again actually began to rewire their brains so much so that they were incapable of having sex with a real life person.
I want you to see both God’s beautiful design and intent as well as some of the ways that we misuse it. So a second purpose for sex that we see in the opening pages of Scripture is the sexual union creates a physiological, emotional, and spiritual oneness — intended for a husband and wife in the context of committed love — to reflect something of the Oneness of the Trinity. - Foreshadowing Something Greater
The “One Flesh” union between a husband and wife in covenant-keeping love is a bond that entails an emotional, relational, spiritual, and physical element. And this kind of holistic union foreshadows the greater union to come. The purpose of sex — designed by God as a gift — is a blessing and command to have children, create oneness, unity, and pleasure in marriage, and ultimately is a foreshadow of an even greater union to come for all those who follow Jesus.
THE PROBLEM OF SEX
Because we live in a fallen world we don’t always experience sexuality in the way God designed it to be experienced. Christopher West’s categories of sexual formation, Fill These Hearts Presents 3 “Diets” that speak to the way the church and the surrounding world understand sexuality and spirituality: The Starvation Diet, The Fast-Food Diet, and The Banquet — and Rich Villodas interacts with these in his book The Deeply Formed Life.
- The Starvation Diet
Many people of faith live on a starvation diet. It’s the diet that sees our longings and desires (particularly our sexual longings and desires) as aspects of our humanity that need to be rejected, suppressed, or ignored. This kind of theology permeates our churches so much that even talking about desire, sex, and longings is done in whispers. Sex and sexuality are territories to be avoided at all costs. Instead of the church being the community and place to help people make sense of their longings, the longings are seen as antithetical to a robust spirituality. Notoriously, in order to emotionally survive, those who subscribed to this diet often ended up living secret, duplicitous lives, looking for illegitimate outlets to meet their legitimate longings. The unfortunate consequence in this is seeing our bodies, pleasure, and sexuality as impediments to true spirituality. There must be appropriate space within our lives with God to say no to some of the desires and passions that arise in us — yet many of us have erroneously believed that God is only pleased in the suppression of our passions.
The starvation diet—so prevalent in the church today—keeps so many of us from feeling like it’s even possible to share our temptations, trials, and sexual sin, which the devil loves, and we all suffer for. If you relate to this starvation diet, something you can ask yourself is, “Who can I talk to who would compassionately understand and lovingly encourage me toward hope, healing, and wholeness?” If we can’t talk about this stuff in the church in the day and age we’re living in then something is deeply wrong with our Christian community. - The Fast-Food Diet
If the starvation diet is about repression, the fast-food diet is about reduction. This diet is the attempt to reduce our deepest longings to our physical desires. Whereas the first diet shapes many in the church, this diet is broadly consumed by many in the surrounding world. This diet says, “Whatever your desire, you deserve to have it met. Does it feel right? Then go for it.” The fast-food diet is about the casual posture people have toward sex and sexuality. It’s the inability or refusal to see sex as a sacred fire that, when not treated with care, leads to entire lives and communities being burned.
The fast-food diet places humanity at the centre of sexual desire. In the starvation diet, the soul is exalted to the point of denying the body. In the fast-food diet, the body is exalted to the point of denying the soul and the soul-numbing pain we’ve experienced. Although you might feel satisfaction for the moment, it makes you sick.
The world we were made for is the home of God’s love. But in the fast-food diet, we try to suck out infinity from finite sources. Eventually, we find that we have placed too much weight on other people or on sexual experiences to satisfy the deep needs of our souls. Yet we go on trying. The starvation diet has no imagination to see sexual desire as a means toward God. The fast-food diet relegates sexual desire to being its god. Both are missing the point. - The Banquet
The gospel offers us a banquet. That’s what we all yearn for: a feast that doesn’t just fill our bellies with tasty things but nourishes our souls as well. After a while, diets exclusively consisting of ice cubes will never satisfy us or of McDonald’s will kill us. There is an invitation—whether married or single—to a life of communion, joy, and delight.
With the banquet diet, we are reminded that from the very beginning, humanity was made for community and intimacy with each other. We have often misplaced our longings and reaped the consequences, yet the offer remains. The sexual desires we possess, when ordered rightly, bring us to union with God and communion with each other. The love of God doesn’t remove our desires; it reorders them.
The banquet is the recognition that we were created for ecstasy but that this ecstasy is found only in God. He is the ultimate source of our lives, joy, and sexual desire. The starting point and the end point of our desire is God—believing that our bodies and sexuality were meant to point to something outside ourselves.
Here’s what so many of us are guilty of today: We’re thinking of sex both too much and too little. Too much because we’re tempted to find ultimate fulfillment in our sexual expression and sexual intimacy. Too little because we are missing what our deepest romantic and sexual desires are meant to point us to.
A question so many of us have—especially young people today as they wrestle with what they feel and what God says in the Scriptures—is: “Why are we so negatively tempted by sexual desire if sexuality is God given and purposeful?” It points us back to the reality that we are sinners who break everything we touch. It can go so badly because God designed sexuality to be very powerful and we remain sinners.
All of us at some point in our lives have looked for love in all the wrong places. Consequently, we live with a profound sense of our sexual brokenness. We’re all sexually broken,having hurt others and/or been hurt by others. This is the story of humanity from Genesis 3, on.
We can’t read the Bible and not be offended—and condemned—unless we come as broken sinners. If we come like that, we’re tenderly embraced. So while Jesus’ condemnation of sexual sin is terrifying (He doesn’t loosen the Old Testament Law, He tightens it), His consistent welcome to repentant sexual sinners is equally shocking.
A perfect example of this is King David. What began as an objectifying lustful look at a woman turned into rape, adultery, and murder. And yet even David was able to come before the Lord in Psalm 51 and say,
1 Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!
And you’re invited to do the same.
There is grace for you.
And there is hope for you, my sexually broken friend.
THE COUNTERCULTURE OF CHRISTIAN SEXUAL ETHICS
The social norms in the First Century Greco-Roman world were that a man could have access to a mistress, sex slave, and/or prostitute and it was socially acceptable and normal. Women, on the other hand, had significantly less sexual freedom. Adultery was forbidden but only because it was seen as a violation of the man she was thought to be the property of. Sex with slaves and prostitutes, though, were not considered adultery for men and so this put women at a significant disadvantage.
Women were seen as commodities, the best they could hope for was to be faithfully married because then they’d be given protection by Roman society. Slaves and poor women were readily and often exploited (unfortunately not much has changed in this regard). Against this backdrop the sexual ethics of Christianity were unprecedented. So much so that Historian Kyle Harper wrote that the Christian sexual ethics were “the first sexual revolution”.
In Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? Sam Allberry shows three fascinating contrasts that the Christian sexual ethic brought about in culture:
- Constraints on Men
Scripture insists on sexual boundaries and controls for men and not just women. Christian men—in contrast to their secular counterparts—were to be exclusively faithful to their wives (1 Corinthians 7:2; 1 Thessalonians 4:3-4). This would have been unthinkable and humiliating to the Roman men at the time, much like talk of virginity, celibacy, and monogamy are seen today. According to the Christian faith, your position in society has no bearing on your obligation to abide by the sexual ethics that come with the gospel. - Mutuality
The Christian faith brought with it a radical mutuality in its understanding of sex within marriage. It’s hard to overstate how radical this would have been at the time it was written. Both parties are equal. Each is to be served by the other. This was unheard of.
The Christian vision for sexuality has always included this reciprocal idea. The Apostle Paul puts it this way, The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband (1 Corinthians 7:3). As Song of Solomon puts it, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”. - Consent
A third significant distinctive in the Christian vision for sex, Consent. This remains the most important sexual ethic that our western society continues to insist upon. Paul would only permit couples to abstain from sex by mutual consent and the same is true of engaging in sex also. Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians 7 to write that a woman could choose whether or not to get married. This seems like obvious to us today but that’s only because of Christianity. Beth Felkner Jones put it this way, "Sex as a commodity was a pillar of the Roman Empire. Christian sexual ethics developed as a rebuke of that world. Christians claimed that Christ gave us the kind of freedom that allows us to choose sexual holiness. Truly consensual sex was a rarity in the world in which Christianity got its start. Christianity, we might say, invented consensual sex.”
So much of what we take as obvious rights today are owed to the Christian vision of sexuality.
SEX IS A SIGNPOST
What’s the greatest love story ever? The Notebook is good but the answer is The Bible. Every love story you’ve ever heard, ever read, ever watched, is but a dim shadow of a better story. Every deep sense of longing, feeling of euphoria, ecstasy, and sexual bliss, is a signpost and a foretaste of what God is offering to all people in Jesus.
The Bible begins with a wedding (Genesis 2). The Apostle Paul tells us marriage has existed since creation to point us to the mysterious union between Christ & the Church (Ephesians 5:31-32). And human history even culminates with The Marriage of the Lamb which is the heavenly wedding of Christ (the Groom) and the Church (the Bride).
Rebecca McLaughlin put it this way, “Just as God created parenthood to show us how He loves His children, so He created sex and marriage to give us a glimpse of what it means to be united to Christ”. This is what it means to be shaped by the gospel when it comes to our sexuality: We see that it’s a signpost, perhaps the most powerful and euphoric signpost of all, of the gospel and its consummation.
Revelation 19:7–8
7 Let us rejoice and exult
and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
8 it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure”
[for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.]
Revelation 19:7-8 reveals how the Bible describes the end of the world: the long anticipated wedding of God and His bride. In other words, the whole Bible is a romance. Marriage and sex are a signpost of the great wedding and consummation to come.
That vision in Revelation mentions that the Bride is clothed in fine, bright, pure linen. Why? Because she’s worthy? She’s good enough? No. Because of grace. She is pure because of the Groom’s gift of grace and the Holy Spirit’s empowering grace.
Jesus stands before you now offering you exactly that. Our sexuality is complicated in a Genesis 3 world. It’s helpful for us to see God’s Genesis 1-2 vision for marriage and sex, that it’s an Ephesians 5 gospel signpost of Christ and the Church, all heading toward a Revelation 19 consummation. That’s a big, cohesive, beautiful vision we should be mindful of here and now. We also need the grace offered to us in Jesus as we live toward a Revelation 19 future in a Genesis 3 world. Your sexual brokenness (through sexual sin, addiction, abuse, confusion, etc.) is no match for the forgiving and empowering grace of Jesus. He loves you. He died for you. You are His. May we be shaped by the gospel more and more in our sexuality.
PRAYER
May Christ dwell in your heart this week. That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to live fully as a new creation in Christ.
May you comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ for his handiwork; that is you.
And may you be filled with all the fullness of God; as one who has been crucified with Christ and brought into His glorious light.
Amen.
FURTHER STUDY
+ Deep Thoughts Episode 46 “Born Again This Way” (with Rachel Gilson)
+ Deep Thoughts Episode 34 “Confronting Christianity” (with Rebecca McLaughlin)
+ Deep Thoughts Episode 32 “Porn: Deadliness of It, Grace for It, Recovery From It” (with Dave Currie)
+ Deep Thoughts Season 2 Episode 8 “Love Thy Body” (with Nancy Pearcey)
+ Deep Thoughts Season 2 Episode 1 “LGBT+, Jesus, & the Church” (with Preston Sprinkle)