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Gods Order For Mates
This text was taken from Chapter One of “The Christian Family” by Larry Christenson. It illustrates that back in 1970 some Christian authors were trying to help Christian culture arrive at a Biblical balance in the area of sex within marriage.
God's order for mates is nowhere more clearly and simply stated than in the Bible's very first commentary upon the man-woman relationship: “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). To “cleave to one's mate” takes in every aspect of the relationship between husband and wife. There is no problem which can arise between mates, the solution for which will not be found in a deeper grasp of what it means to cleave to one another, to become ‘one flesh' with one's mate.
God made us male and female as part of His basic creation. It is part of the innermost expression of God Himself. When He created mankind in His own image, He didn't just create a man. There was something missing. So God said, “I will make a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). He created woman. Now He had the whole thing. Man and woman came together in marriage, manifesting God's ideal of completeness.
It is God's intention, as a general rule, that man shall find a mate. This is even borne out by statistics. There's about the same number of men and women born in the world. After a war, when the male population is depleted, an amazing thing happens: in the next generation, there will be bumper crop of male babies. This happened in Europe right after the war. Within one generation, the population was restored to balance again.
The Role Of Sex
“For best results, follow instructions of make.” So advised a brochure accompanying a jar of common cold remedy. If such advice is good for the relief of a simple physical ailment, how much more it is needed for the relief of sick marriage relationships! Movies, television, novels, magazines, and billboards constantly bombard us with wrong ideas about sex. Sex is not an invention of 20th century Hollywood. It is a creation of the eternal, holy God, who also gave us definite instructions for its right expression in the relationship of marriage. Sexual union in marriage is a wonderful mystery of God. It occupies a relatively small space in the marriage. Even with young and newly married couples, the sheer amount of time spent in sexual activity is relatively small. Yet without that union the marriage is no marriage. It is like the sparkplug of a car: small but essential; it sets the whole mechanism in motion.
We say that sexual union is a mystery, because no rational explanation can fully account for its powerful and pervasive influence in a marriage – indeed, in life itself. While it is primarily a physical act, it draws much more than mere physical sensation into orbit around it. While its primary purpose is procreation, this is not usually its immediate objective; indeed this result may actually be undesired, without diminishing the desire for union. It so merges and unites two human beings that the Bible speaks of them as ‘one flesh,' yet no other human act so accentuates one's own identity and self-awareness, at such an elemental level. It is a deep and fundamental giving of oneself, a yielding of the procreative powers to another. Yet the more successful the relationship, the greater degree of self-pleasure obtained by both partners.
Christians tend to fall into two basic errors in their attitude toward sex. The one error is to regard it as a kind of necessary evil. This grows out of the old Greek idea that the body is essentially evil, and the way to be truly ‘spiritual' is to subdue and suppress the body as much as possible.
This idea is not altogether absent from the New Testament. In writing to the Corinthians, Paul makes a strong case for celibacy, then concedes, “If they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). As is true with many wrong ideas, there is undoubtedly an element of truth in the belief that evil has a special link with the body.
It is well to recognize the powerful potential for misuse which lies resident in our sexual appetites. In plain truth, our bodies are easily aroused to lust. This tendency must be guarded against all life long. But this should not cast a shadow upon the sexual relationship between husband and wife. God created man and woman with the capacity for sexual pleasure, and means them to enjoy this in marriage.
This first error – regarding sex as base, shameful, evil – finds no spokesmen today. Not even the most conservative churchman would be caught holding a brief for Victorian prudery. Yet it needs to be mentioned, for it still holds a grip on the unconscious attitudes of some Christians. We can change a conscious attitude with relative ease. The unconscious tends to cling to old patterns with a stubborn will.
In reacting against this first error, Christians have tended to fall into a second, more subtle, error: This is the tendency to over-spiritualize sex.
Oh, we would never think of the hush-hush, naughty-naughty approach. No, no. We are far too enlightened for that. “Sex is beautiful.” “Sex is wonderful.” “Sex is a perfect blending of two personalities, an expression of love that takes in the whole range of man's being – at once a physical, intellectual, and spiritual encounter.” “Sex is an act of total self-giving.” “The sexual act is profoundly spiritual.” “In the act of sex, a man and woman express the essential unity which overarches their separateness.” All this may be more-or-less true, if one makes sex an object for intellectual dissection.
But where is the husband who embraces his wife with high thoughts of “overcoming the separateness of their being in an act of overarching unity”? This is no man, but the invention of Christian apologists for sex, who imagine themselves commissioned to lift sex from the mundane level which it seems inevitably to occupy. Isn't there anybody around to say that sex is fun?
A woman once had the temerity to say this straight out while giving one of the inevitable “boy-girl relationship” talks without which no teenage Bible camp can pronounce a benediction. Some of the adult eyebrows went up, as though a dangerous secret had been betrayed. But afterward one of the girls came up and said, “I really appreciated your saying that it was fun. They always say how wonderful it is, but I sort of had the idea that you weren't supposed to enjoy it too much, because it was too holy.”
The philosophers of sex seem unable to accept the fact that physical and emotional pleasure is the dominant feature of the sexual relationship. That does not seem dignified enough. So by words they attempt to lift sex to what they feel is a higher plane, describing it in almost transcendental terms. This spiritualizing of sex, however, does not make sex more spiritual. If anything, it is an anemic throwback to pagan fertility rites, which assigned mystic significance to sex.
The Bible indulges in no such philosophizing over sex. The total marriage relationship is pointed to as symbolic of the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32). But when the sexual relationship per se is in focus, it is treated very practically for what it is – a physical act, with a strong emotional impetus.
It would be hard to find a more mundane handling of sex than the 7th chapter of 1 Corinthians: “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. Do not refuse one another … lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control.” And this is the only chapter in the New Testament which offers specific advice on the sexual relationship in marriage!
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