Sex: A Gift From On High?

Sex: A Gift from On High?

God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”

Genesis 1:22, NIV

Why did God create sex? Procreation is the obvious answer. God clearly gave us sex to make babies (see Genesis 1:28). But he also had something more in mind. God wants us to take pleasure in physical intimacy. If you don’t believe me, read the Old Testament Song of Songs. It is replete with erotic metaphors and sexual excitement. And consider the fact that unlike most animals that mate only during the female’s fertile period, God created us to continually enjoy physical intimacies within marriage.

You don’t have to be a Bible scholar or decipher metaphors in this message: “The husband should fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, and the wife should fulfill her husband’s needs. The wife gives authority over her body to her husband, and the husband gives authority over his body to his wife. Do not deprive each other” (1 Corinthians 7:3-5).

As one of my seminary professors once said after reading this passage aloud in class, “The Bible is clear as it can be—it says if you are married, ‘Do it!’” He was making his point emphatically because people outside the church (and some deeply religious people) think of God as the great spoilsport of human sexuality, not as its inventor. But truth be told, physical intimacy is a gift from on high.

What is basic is the enriching of their relationship itself through their repeated “knowing” of each other as persons who belong to each other exclusively and without reserve.

—J. I. Packer