How Sex Points to God

There’s a difference between gratitude and adoration. Gratitude is when I say, “thank you for this, God.” Adoration is when I ask, “how does this reveal an attribute of God that I can admire him for?” Gratitude goes as far as saying, “thank you for sex, God; it is a good thing”; adoration takes it further, asking “what does sex reveal about God’s nature and narrative?”

Putting God and sex in the same sentence can seem awkward, which I think reveals how much we are creatures of our culture, and how powerfully Satan uses sex to drive us towards shame, instead of pointing us towards God.

J.L. Packer writes about how sex is a signpost to God: now if you camp under a signpost you’re not going to get much of anywhere. If you’re driving down I-64 and camp under the sign that says “Virginia Beach, 60 miles” and say, “we’re here, honey!” you won’t get there. Yet that’s what we’re doing: our appetites are so habitually inflamed as to distract us, or our shame is so great as to paralyze us, from moving on to the destination.

So how does sex point us to God?

It points to one way in which we were made in his image. God is one God, but in three persons, and at the center of the Trinity is a state of mutual, self-giving love. C.S. Lewis calls this the “great dance”: a dynamic, pulsing activity in which the Father, Son and Holy spirit pour love and joy into one another continually, and sex mirrors that.

Sex points to what it will be like to be with God in heaven. In Ephesians 5:31-32, Paul writes, “the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” This is why, I think, sex can never be just about the body—it involves the heart, mind, soul, all of us—because it is meant to point to the wholeness of union we will have with Jesus one day for all of eternity. That is the story God is writing us for, and sex now is somehow just a faint foretaste of it.

Sex points to the gospel in involving the ability to create new life. After all, God didn’t have to create sex for procreation. I can think of a few alternative ways of mingling genomes. But God chose to have a covenant act of self-giving bring new life, a life that we cannot take credit for masterminding, and I can only think that it points to the gospel.

Ultimately, I think sex makes us realize we are creatures with needs that only Jesus can meet. If I dig deep enough, I see that sometimes underneath the need is a desire for connection, meaning, understanding, and identity that ultimately only Jesus can satiate. As Isaiah 54:4-5 says, “Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer.”

Eternity-Conscious Relating

“I have imagined what it will be like when Lisa comes face to face with God. The Bible guarantees this will actually happen. One day, my wife will stand before the Creator and Judge of all things. … Because I am crazy about Lisa, I want her to have a great life. But more than that, I want her to have a great eternity.” – Francis Chan, You And Me Forever

I’ve been meditating on the singular emphasis our culture places on sexual romantic love—as Tim Keller said, “there’s never been a culture in the history of the world that puts so much emphasis on and hope in sex”—and how I like to think I live on my own terms, but in reality, I’m a creature of my culture. How could we not be? And how can our fixation on sex and romance not bleed into our relationships? So in some teensy way, I think that a great marriage means we have to always be jumping into bed together. That our marriage is about what fulfills me, or makes me look good, or solves my problems. Because our idolization of the romantic other is really about writing our own self-worth or meeting our own needs.

Not that our needs aren’t met in a healthy marriage, but that’s not really what it’s about. I like how Francis Chan describes it: and when I picture Dave standing before God one day, what do I want for him? I want him to have no regrets about how he lived his life. I want him to be so accustomed to worship that to be finally in God’s presence is a joyful extension of his life. I want him to know his closest friends and family will be in heaven and to have the peace of knowing he did all he could to see that. I want him to have a great reward; to know that he served and suffered faithfully, that he rooted out sin in his life, that the path he walked was straight and true.

So the question I should be asking is: how do I help prepare him for that day? How do I present him in splendor, without spot or wrinkle, holy and without blemish [Eph 5:27]? I create an attitude of God-centered worship in our marriage so we can practice that together. I support his ministry and career calling; I help process visions, call out gifts. I identify, work through, and pray for areas of sin or growth. I join in praying and relating to his friends and bring healing and build bridges in his family. I help create margin so that he can enjoy personal time with God. I delight in him and show him God’s affection, delight, humor and joy.

And yes, sex is a way I do those things: have delight, affection, humor; deepen our bond; foreshadow reunion with God in eternity. It’s important, but certainly not everything, and not really anything like the me-centered consumeristic image-and-performance conscious sex we are blasted with culturally.

It would be interesting to ask: how does an eternity-conscious perspective of marriage affect how we date? It probably wouldn’t be finding the externally-perfect person who also happens to be a Christian. Or finding someone who meets every item on my checklist. Or finding someone who makes me feel good or look good. If I were talking to Ellie in twenty years, I’d probably ask, who helps you be sanctified? Pushes you to grow in Jesus? Who can you relate to so closely, easily, and have such delight in, that you see yourself helping in their sanctification over your lifetimes?

Fantasy Sex Lives

I’m going to go on a limb here and talk about secret sexual sins. Not a comfortable topic. Twice in my life, I met with girls who were brave enough to confess their struggles in this area, and both times it opened the door to me doing the same. While recent studies have highlighted how often women watch porn, and certain bestsellers have shed light on erotic literature, this is still a hard topic to talk about, especially for women.

I was reflecting recently on how it is so common, even for those who are outwardly moral, to have a fantasy sex life, defined as watching or reading anything that leads to having mental fantasies often manifesting in masturbation. The actual content one struggles with may range from what most believers would call bad (porn, erotic novels) to more acceptable things (lyrics in songs, TV shows with sex scenes, christian romance books with sexual tension).

The reality is, it’s almost impossible to grow up in this culture without struggling to some extent with a fantasy sex life. Before you get married, you figure actually having sex will fix all of it, but it doesn’t: while the fantasy sex life affects the real sex life, having the real life doesn’t always affect the fantasy one. Because at heart, they are two totally different things. The real sex life is about relationship, about a real person, about putting ourselves aside, about being vulnerable. The fantasy life is about consumerism, objectification, and immediate gratification, without actually giving anything. It’s faster, easier, and more addictive.

What’s behind the fantasy life? Sometimes it’s time-of-month hormones, or being tired, or being angry, but mostly it’s an idolization of feeling desired, at least I think for women. You don’t have to foray far into the romance novel industry to figure this out: the longer the book can draw out the pursuit and ongoing sexual tension, the better.

That’s why, to me, the issue is at heart a spiritual one. There are so many rational reasons to stay away from this stuff (objectification of women, bad examples to our kids, polluting effectiveness in ministry, contributing to pedophilia, rewiring our brains, affecting our sexual expectations, wasting our time, practicing deceit), but what will make us stop?

The other night I was confronting the reality of this in our lives, and I felt overcome with sadness in a way I never had before, just sadness for myself, my friends, for those I loved, that these things which we struggle to utter to the people closest to us on earth will one day come before a holy God. I saw how much these things hurt God, and cheat us of what he wants for us, and as I was crying I started thinking about the picture of Jesus in Revelation 5: Jesus with seven eyes, seeing everything. A slain lamb, because he loves me. Standing, because he has resurrected and overcome the darkness. With seven horns, because he has complete power, power that he gives me to overcome. It’s a bit of a horror-movie image, but at that moment, it felt precious.

It doesn’t take much to see that our story with Jesus is the stuff of fantasies. He went from one world to another, changed form, became poor, suffered for us. He is the ultimate alpha male, sensitive lover, and unfailing protector that all these novels hark on about, and I suppose there is a kind of tension that we exist in, anticipating the ultimate consummation of our lives forever with him in eternity. But there’s a difference between knowing these things and feeling them deep in our hearts, in a way that takes away the hungers and habits we nurse in the dark. I think it can. I’ve experienced that, and I’m praying it for the people I know and love.

More About Sex

So this marriage class is giving us a good structure to work through some deep-rooted, difficult issues in our marriage, as well as providing a safe group environment to share some of that in. Two weeks ago, we worked through what it would mean to overcome angry outbursts. Last week, we worked through what it would mean to have a fully fulfilling sexual life—without getting into too much detail, I thought I would continue along the lines of an earlier post about sex in highlighting a few things I learned this week:

It is important and healthy to talk about this with each other. Sex can be one of the hardest things to talk about—we are often brought up without a model or experience of how to talk about it appropriately; we lack the verbage. We may feel embarrassed or haunted by past sins or hurts. We may subconsciously have a difficult time truly believing that sex in its intended nature is entirely good. We often expect our spouses to read our minds in this area in ways we would never expect them to read our minds otherwise. The more we talk openly about it, the easier it becomes and the better our relationship.

Solo sex in marriage is dangerous. I use that term to refer to any sexual experience or thought not involving our spouse—it would be easy to think that all disappears after you get married, but it doesn’t necessarily. If we aren’t careful, it can create a harmful pattern of behavior and drive you apart from your spouse sexually—because you are applying to them norms of sexual behavior you are gleaning from other sources, or conditioning your body to seek arousal or experience pleasure in certain ways that do not involve your spouse, or decreasing your sexual drive or desire for your spouse.

Our sexual life is a relationship, not an event. The world tells us our sex life is not fulfilling unless we are having sex at a certain frequency during which we experience simultaneous climax every time—and especially in our performance-oriented, results-driven, comparative culture, it can get too easy to focus on that. All that is really not the point. We may not need or want to climax every time. Frequency may ebb and flow depending on our needs or circumstances. The point is that we are talking, understanding, learning, growing, basically that we focus on relationship over results.

Never compare. This really goes for any area of what we do together—ministry, parenting, working—but there is no surer way to destroy or devalue what we have together than comparing, comparing ourselves to other couples or what is implied to be normal, comparing each other with other women or men. Maybe because there is so little healthy talk and appropriate community out there about it, we grasp at these comparisons, but in essence what we are doing is doubting God’s sovereignty and goodness, not accepting each other, opening the door to judgment instead of increasing intimacy. Our sex life is a room in which there is only him and me, and God. No one and nothing else.

Invite God in. Invite him into our sexual life. We did that this past week and I felt it was really powerful. Mostly we did that by praying together every night. It brought out clarity of purpose, unearthed important issues to work through. Have you considered what God is trying to say to you about your sexual life? Have you considered how much he cares about this aspect of you and your spouse?

In Which I Talk About Sex

I’m going to write about something I wish we talked about more: sex in marriage. And how it can be hard, and confusing. Most Christian couples seem to struggle with it, but no one ever talks about it. So I thought I could at least write down a few things that have helped me over the years, if only as reminders for myself:

A healthy sex life does not come naturally or immediately. Did we meet, get engaged, and get married in one night? This sex thing is a relationship. It putters. There are ups and downs. It takes work. One couple shared that it took them a few days to figure out the technicalities during their honeymoon. One couple told me they didn’t really start enjoying sex until after their five kids were grown.

Everyone has baggage. Our first kiss was at the altar. Neither of us had dated much, if at all, before each other. But there is still so much baggage, which I’m starting to think just means we’re normal people living in a super-messed-up world. There is so much in the way of expectations, shame, guilt, habit, fears, that we’ve inherited or absorbed from our families, books, media, both from the Christian world and the secular world. It is impossible to ignore the effects of pornography. We are so far removed from Eden before the fall, when it was just about the two of us and God—nothing else.

My spouse is God’s chosen sexual partner for me, even if it’s not always what I would have chosen. Not my choice, God’s choice. Not accidental, but purposeful. Not good, but somehow best. Probably because my choice would have concerned primarily myself, whereas God is not as interested in what I want as in what I need, or what my spouse needs. He’s not interested in sex as an end to itself, but as a means to something more important.

Our sex life wouldn’t be better if we had experimented more before marriage. It’s what our culture tells us, but the personal experiences of friends seem to testify to the contrary.

Whatever I’m struggling with, even if I think I am weird or abnormal, I’m not the only one. In fact, the more I think I’m alone, the more likely a ton of other people are dealing with the same thing. Sometimes the sense of isolation is the worst, the idea that there is some norm that we are falling outside of, and getting over that feeling is half the battle. Like we’re always hearing, Satan likes to isolate us, to make us think we’re defeated before we even begin.

It’s not “his” issue, which hurts “me,” or vice versa. It’s our issue. Everything our world teaches us about sex is that it’s about me; it’s only about someone else to the extent that it makes me feel a certain way about myself. But here God asks me to unlearn that, and relearn a mindset where I take ownership of the issues we face, together. He asks me to stop the mental commentary in my head and asks me to be open to sharing my hurts and thoughts. He asks me to get into my spouse’s head and imagine how he is feeling. He asks us to do it together.

I think our world has so heavily conditioned us to view sex in a certain way—as consumers, as performance, as an end unto itself—that it is nearly impossible not to think in unhealthy or unloving ways. It is nearly impossible for selfishness or guilt or insecurity or doubt not to creep in, and in those times, I hope I remember these things. Sometimes I get a glimpse of what sex can be—a powerful thing in which God is present, which actually draws us towards God and each other, which shows us something about God and each other that we couldn’t have learned otherwise, which redeems the naked shame from the fall, which shows us what waits for us in eternity. Sometimes it can be funny, or awkward, and that can be just as poignant. It is all so far from where our world has come, but I have to believe these things are true, and possible, and that in the meanwhile, it is okay to talk about it sometimes, to find it a work in progress.