Put that Sex Back Where it Came From…
The following post is an adapted extract from my talk at our recent conference ‘Male and Female He Created Them’. The following describes only one way in which we have rejected the fruitful design of God and embraced fruitless barrenness. The others include: Rejecting fruitfully hierarchical homes, rejecting fruitful wombs, and rejecting a fruitful culture. Let me encourage you to listen to the full talk, as well as other material from the conference, which can be found here (video) or downloaded here (audio only).
I’m sure that to many of us the sudden war on the foundational realities of male and female seems like something sudden. It feels as though it came out of nowhere in the last few years and has caught us all off guard. But that’s simply not the case. Because before you get to the transgender confusion, and the complex of sins involved with homosexuality, you first have to get rid of something more fundamental. The biblical idea that there is only one context for sex: The marriage covenant
If homosexuality and transgenderism is to take any ground you first have to ignore that reality. For these things to have any hold, you have to replace the biblical context for sexual intimacy with something plastic enough to mold to any new design. If you want to put sex anywhere; you first need to rip it out of where God put it. And that’s what the world has been doing for a long time; just watch sitcoms from the late 80s and early 90s. It was already well underway then.
God has one context for sex; the covenant of marriage. He made marriage to contain sex, and he made sex to serve marriage.
Marriage is what turns illicit desire into righteous sexuality. That context is the sanctifier, as it were, it makes it right and good. It makes sex beautiful.
The world hasn’t done away with a sanctifying context for sex entirely. It can’t quite do that, it would lead to anarchy. Instead, it has replaced the original context with a new one. The sanctifying context for sex is now:
The consent of two adults
Consent is the sanctifier. It’s the thing that makes everything ok. As long as the two (for now) adults (for now) are of one accord, even for the briefest time, consent has the power to make the unclean, clean – or so the world says.
But that change reflects an even deeper change. It’s not simply that the world is busy changing its social standards. Standards of what it will permit without major social repercussions. This change in context of sexual activity reflects something deeper.
It reflects a fundamental reorientation in what people think sex is for.
To the modern-mind sex is for one thing only – pleasure. It is perhaps for mutual pleasure if everything works out but certainly its purpose is ‘my own pleasure’. I use it to get, to fulfil my appetites.
And if that is what sex is for what need is there for any context other than consent. If this activity is simply for my pleasure, and you are willing to do it with me so that you get pleasure as well… then who can stop us? What reason is there for us to deny ourselves?
For the modern mind there is no greater purpose, no history of love and loyalty, of faithfulness and fruitfulness that this act is tied into. There is no story, no context, except for the minute tale of one person’s individual pleasure pursued to the bitter end.
That’s it.
A Wasteland
The world that this has led to is immediately recognisable to us I think:
· For a while it led to the one-night stand hookup culture, to revolving doors of sexual partners. It led to people using each other and consenting to be used for nothing more than a few moments of enjoyment.
· Somewhat surprisingly though, hookup culture seems to be fading. That might sound like a good thing but it’s not being replaced with anything good. Counterintuitively, It’s leading to a nearly sex-less generation, to an intensely lonely generation who’s only solace is a treacherous one, that of internet pornography.
· It has led to no-fault divorce. After all, sex belongs where there is mutual consent for the sake of mutual pleasure and so, if the pleasure is gone, why keep the consent.
Perhaps for some of us the recent all-out war on male and female seems like a sudden tidal wave but this is where it began; at least in the popular imagination:
· Rip sex out of its context and give it another.
· Rip sex away from its purpose and swap it for a new one.
Only when you’ve done that can you move on to other things.
And so now sex has been spent, used-up, wrung out. The marriage bed sits on the curb – cheap, soiled, no good for anything. Simply a sign to the world of its own unassailable loneliness. That they are nothing more than atomised souls using and being used until they are sucked dry.
This was never the way it was meant to be.
Here’s Hebrews 8:
“Let marriage be held in honour among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled…”
How things would be different now if we had kept this word from the beginning. If we had kept sex where it was meant to be: In the covenant of marriage.
God didn’t shape sex for marriage for no reason, it has always meant to be part of a bigger story than the mere desire and pleasure of two people. It was made to bind together a people. And it is mightily powerful to do that.
There’s a reason the marriage bed sits at the heart of a home. It is close to being the beating heart of life and delight in the home but despite its honour it is kept in the inner parts. The marriage bed is protected by walls and doors that keep the world out. This honoured yet fragile thing spills over into joy and nurture and fruitfulness. It is meant to be in the centre of a marriage covenant.
Covenant is one of those words that we Christians hear a lot, but don’t necessarily understand very clearly. Often, we treat it as synonymous with a promise; but it’s not. It’s bigger than a promise.
What is a covenant?
A covenant is a formal, legal, and yet deeply personal relationship: It is formal and legal. It’s not simply a casual relationship, it is not something whose form can be made up from person to person. It has a particular shape and terms; it has obligations and benefits. It is a binding thing. A covenant is the kind of thing that forces you to tear the fabric of reality if you want to get out of it. The breaking of a covenant is more like a death than the end of a business agreement (hence why many covenants throughout history have had exactly that penalty if one of the parties breaks it).
And yet, it is not cold and barren. It provides a solid framework, a trellis for a full vine to grow on. A covenant lays the foundation for a shared story of faithfulness, of love, of communion, from one generation to another. A shared history of:
· Joy in the good times
· Comfort in the bad times
· Provision in the lean times
· Courage in the hard times
This is the kind of relationship that marriage is.
Marriage creates something new. It changes the fabric of reality such that one man and one woman stand in a fundamentally different kind of relationship to each other than they ever did before. And even if the great tragedy of divorce happens; there’s no going back, no resetting of creation. This is where sex makes sense. This is where it can be honoured and protected, and where it can serve the greater purpose, it was designed by God to serve.
God was not being stingy when he put something this powerful within a walled garden. Without those guards the power of sex turns the garden into a wasteland. We see the evidence of that clearly around us. Ours is an age marked by loneliness, despair, barrenness; Generations turned in on themselves and consuming themselves.
But here in the covenant of marriage, with the walls in place, the garden can bear fruit: The fruit of a shared story of faithfulness; of love and loyalty from generation to generation. The garden can bear the fruit of true friendship.
Sex within the marriage covenant creates. It is fruitful.
(Once again, for the continuation of this talk and to see some of the ways sex and marriage were designed to be fruitful, watch the full talk here.)
