Concerning Sex

This post is not explicit, but it does speak on a topic that some readers may find offensive.  It is recommended for mature readers only.  Please use discretion.

I have this thing about words.  I love to use them ambiguously in order to say two things at the same time (where I mean both things simultaneously), but I don’t like it when people use words inappropriately: that is, when people use one word when they mean an entirely different word and everyone knows it.  An example of this turns up in the unfortunate sex scenes that people occasionally try to write in my creative writing classes, wherein “his manhood swells” and “her legs part to reveal her treasure” and the like.  It makes me want to scream: “Those organs have perfectly good names!  Use them!”  I’m sorry for you sensitive folks (you really shouldn’t have clicked “read more”), but it’s a penis and a vagina, not a manhood and a treasure or anything of the kind.  To call them anything but what they properly are is misleading (for instance, if you are a man, your manhood is not measured by your penis; if you are a woman, the treasure of your femininity is not your vagina).

Fortunately for you, I’m not going to spend the entire post on this topic.  Some of you might die from embarrassment.  As it is, you may die anyway.

Instead, today I’m writing about another inappropriate choice of words, which has led to (or perhaps springs from) a troubling lie.  I’m talking about when people use words which imply (whether they intend it or not) that sex is inherently evil.  Think about it.  When people talk about sex, they’re said to be “talking dirty.”  When someone wants to have sex, he’s said to have “an urge to be bad.”  Two people having a sexual encounter are “being naughty.”  The sex drive is, even among its proponents, “a wicked desire.”  Sex is said to be “kinky,” “dirty,” “perverted,” “inappropriate,” “twisted,” “wicked,” “bad,” and “evil” even when it’s at its best.

To be sure, there are a lot of perversions of sexuality running rampant in our world today, to which these descriptors accurately apply.  But let’s remember that sex was invented by God and that it was, in the beginning, very good, just like the rest of His creation.  Like the rest of creation, it fell and was made subject to many evil perversions.  Still, like anything else in this world, it may yet be redeemed and practiced in holiness.

But often I find this is not the attitude I approach it with.  I find that I have bought the implicit lie in the way we talk about sex: that sex is always inherently evil.  As I said, God made sex--married sex--in the beginning along with everything else and He declares it “very good” (Genesis 1:31).  I once heard someone argue this.  His reasoning was that, since Adam and Eve never conceived a child until after the Fall (or at least, there is no mention of them doing so until Genesis 4:1), they must not have had sex in the Garden of Eden.  He used this as confirmation of his assumption that sex was inherently evil.  But if we look, we’ll see that sex is actually introduced by God before the Fall, in the end of Genesis chapter 2 (the Fall takes place in Genesis 3).  In the end of the chapter, God creates the first woman (Eve) from the first man’s (Adam’s) rib and brings the man and the woman together in the Garden, thereby marrying them.  When He does this, Adam waxes poetic upon seeing Eve, and, when he’s done, the following verses appear:

 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.  And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

--Genesis 2:24-25 (ESV)

Now take another look at those verses and tell me honestly what you think Adam and Eve were doing in the Garden of Eden.  They “were both naked and were not ashamed” and it’s said that other men, like Adam, would “hold fast [cling] to his wife” and they would “become one flesh.”  What does that sound like to you?  In 1 Corinthians 6:16, Paul says that this last phrase is explicitly about sex when he uses it to point out the perversion of having sex with a prostitute.  So yes, definitely Adam and Eve were having sex in the Garden of Eden before the Fall--which means that married sex is, according to the God who made it, very good.

Now allow me to say something very radical, but Biblical.  According to the Bible, the verses I just quoted are also the definition of marriage.  The first verse (which speaks of “holding fast to” one another and becoming “one flesh”--explicitly sexual in nature) is twice quoted in the New Testament as the definition of marriage.  Most famously, it is quoted by Jesus in Matthew 19:5-6, a passage which is often referenced as explaining why Christian marriages should not end in divorce, and many wedding vows quote it in part or in whole.  Thus, according to God, marriage is sex, or at the very least explicitly sexual.

The world doesn’t see it that way.  In popular culture, married people having sex or any form of physical intimacy is passé, boring, and gross.  Only illicit sex has it’s “wicked” charm.  As Christians, we eschew sexual immorality, affirming it’s wickedness and denying its charm, but very often we are silent about married sex and in our silence allow the lie that all sex, including married sex, is bad to slip in.  Sometimes this shows up in undersexed marriages.  Historically, there are even cases of married Christians becoming convinced that having sex with their spouse was a sin and struggling for years to become a celibate couple--which according to the Bible is a contradiction in terms.

But sex belongs in marriage, and in marriage it is, as we’ve seen very good.  As Hebrews 13:4 says, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled”.  I know this is probably a little unexpected coming from a twenty-something single virgin, but I feel it needs to be said: if you’re married and a Christian, please have sex!  Lots of sex!  Good sex, please!  It glorifies God and strengthens your union (and it is your union, in one sense of the word), and guards you against sexual sin.  It’s also good for us singles, to see it.  I don’t mean to literally see you having sex, or talking about it explicitly!  That’s not good, like telling a kid what you got him for Christmas three days early.  But we can observe your PDA and we can read between the lines and know that you’re having lots of good sex with your spouse.  We need that.  It encourages us, as singles.  It lets us know that, on the other side of this sexual desert, there’s an oasis worth reaching, a garden worth fighting for.  Otherwise, we might more easily buy into the lie that sex is all evil…so we might as well do evil now and get it over with.  Please, help us, yourselves, and glorify God by making your marriage X-rated.

As for us singles, let’s not give up on sex.  Though we haven’t had it, let’s affirm that there is good sex out there and that it’s worth waiting for.  This, I think, will give us the strength to weather temptation, by God’s grace.