The seventh of the Big Ten commandments, given by our loving Creator to bless us with a special revelation of the path of life that He wove into the fabric of His good world, is a blessed torment. It strikes at the heart of being creatures who by divine design were made for sex and reproduction. God’s first words over man in Genesis 1:28 were a blessing, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” Then, in Exodus 20:14, He goes and complicates everything by commanding, “You shall not commit adultery.”
Just kidding… God complicated it right off the bat by the very nature of the creation of Adam and Eve as the start of the human family.[1] In Moses’ divine commentary on Adam’s glorious Ode to Woman,[2] we read, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and shall become one flesh.”[3] Jesus tacks on, “So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”[4]
The pattern of creation itself is instructive. God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, or mankind wouldn’t have gone very far. Further yet, God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eve and Indira and Yolanda and Miriam and Sofia. God intends that our sexuality be funneled into the creation of a family through the preservation of marriage—husband and wife in a lifelong, exclusive, one-flesh union.[5]
The problem is that chastity, monogamy, and sexual fidelity are difficult. Just as we need to eat, but must eat the right things in the right portions lest we suffer physical harm, our sexuality must be properly channeled lest we become soul sick. Sex is a drive not a need, but it is a powerful drive… easily perverted by selfishness.
I once had a sky-diving friend who described his exploits as “better than sex.” I just figured he wasn’t doing it right. I’ve never jumped out of a plane, but I cannot imagine a greater exhilaration than sex. It is glorious fire in our bones, celestial electricity in our veins. Our bodies pine for sex. Thus, those who have lived in sexual wantonness can scarce imagine that sexual restraint is either good or possible. Wanting and not having is a suffering that those unaccustomed to such discipline can’t imagine enduring.
I encouraged pre-marital chastity to my schoolmates and lived it… though I had to white-knuckle it on more than a few occasions. I still remember one conversation with a friend, who had yet to “bag a girl,” but plotted little else. He referenced my “hang-ups” about sex with sneering tones… my “inhibitions.” I told him that morals were not “hang-ups” or “inhibitions” that needed curing with wanton exploration, which actually damages our capacity for lifelong intimate union. Sex is a beautiful God-given drive that flourishes in the right context and rends lives and souls in the wrong context. The very spirit of “bagging a girl” was, I said, disgusting and sad, devoid of soul, and a hopeless path for finding true love.[6] Back then, even my non-Christian friends hoped for a lifelong union with “The One.” Unfortunately, they thought they should use a host of ‘not-the-one’s for their own self-gratification while they looked.
As with almost every other area of life, however, self-control over one’s sexual urges is freedom not slavery. It is freedom from being driven about by lust… freedom from hurting, betraying, and neglecting those you love in order to sate your own passions. It is freedom to build something beautiful with a lifelong partner that blesses those connected to it for generations, be they their children, their children’s children, their children’s children’s children, or the many witnesses to God’s plan for man being exemplified in that hard-won union. You are never free until you are free from having to please yourself at others people’s expense.
This plan for a couple to become a family, and their family to become families, becoming yet more families is not just difficult in terms of self-control, but it is hard in terms of joining male with female. When I was young, puzzling over the “battle of the sexes,” and the struggle for not just a one-flesh union, but the one-soul union that it points toward, I often imagined… respectfully, of course… that this hope was a cosmic joke by God on man. The great spookster Stephen King has noted, “For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.” Indeed, one social theorist has posited that if women thought about sex the way men tend to think about sex, the world would blow up and that if men thought about sex the way women tend to think about sex the world would shrivel up. In truth, all the differences between men and women prove a source of great conflict, but God has arranged His world so that the seemingly impossible lifelong, exclusive union of male and female demands that each rise above themselves to meet and love the other on the other’s terms. The very act is transformative, giving life not just to children, which almost any heterosexual union can do, but to happy families and societies.
In this present age, it seems more than likely that you, Dear Reader, have failed to live up to God’s divine order through pre-marital chastity and/or marital fidelity. There is nothing that can be done about the past save repenting of its mistakes, learning its lessons, and setting the will that from this point forward, with God’s grace, things will be different.
Pray therefore, “Lord, help me find your blessed path for my sexuality, so that I, enduring the pain of moral restraint, might experience the joy that You have for me. May I be a positive example for others of the freedom and happiness that can be found in Jesus Christ.”
~Andrew D. Sargent, Ph.D.
[1] Genesis 2.
[2] Genesis 2:23: 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.” The Hebrew manifests great excitement on the part of Adam when first he meets his counterpart. Her eyes are fewer, but much nicer than the spiders.
[3] Genesis 2:24.
[4] Matthew 19:6.
[5] There is a discussion to be had about God’s tolerance for certain forms of polygamy during the Old Testament era, but it was never God’s design for man. It was a gracious concession for protecting and sustaining vulnerable women in a sin ravaged world.
[6] For the record let it be known that I did NOT in fact say, “To Blathe!” Furthermore, no MLT ever competed successfully with true love.
