God And Sex

God and Sex

As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one.

Ephesians 5:31-32

Sex is all about relationship. That’s the point. It’s a personal encounter, not just a biological action. As Philip Yancey points out in his book Rumors of Another World, just thinking about how we humans have sex, as opposed to the mating of other mammals, should give us a clue. We are the only species that commonly copulates face-to-face, so that partners look at each other as they mate. Why? It’s because human sex is designed to be more than physical. Sex certainly engages our bodies, but it also touches our souls. Perhaps that’s why G. K. Chesterton made the memorable observation that “every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”^a

Yancey goes on to explore the connection of sex to the sacred—and how we as a culture have severed that connection. He says that when that happens, we neglect our spiritual longings because, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul saw, our modern fixation with sex is really a symptom of an intimacy failure. Think of it this way: when a man and woman sever sex from relationship, they seem to gain much in the way of freedom, but they lose much in the way of spirituality. And we’ve worked with enough couples in counseling to see firsthand the desperate look of loneliness and despair when someone has compulsively relegated sex to simple self-gratification. But that’s inevitable when we neglect the sacred aspect of the gift of sex.

The very word sex comes from a Latin verb that means to cut off or to sever. Yancey explains, “Sexual impulses drive us to unite, to restore somehow the union that has been severed.” He points out that while Freud identified the deep pain within us as a longing for union with a parent, and Carl Jung linked the same as a longing for union with the opposite sex, the Christian sees a deeper longing—that is, a longing for union with the God who created us. After all, it was the Spirit of God who made the connection first, in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church, the source of today’s verse.

Lean into your longings for connection and intimacy, and ask God to use them to bond the two of you together in deeper and more profound ways.

Sex is the most wonderful thing on this earth, as long as God is in it. When the Devil gets in it, it’s the most terrible thing on this earth.

—Billy Graham

^a 60