We are all here because of sex. A man and a woman have sex (married, perhaps) and we came along. Sex, like death, like life, is universal. We need no apology for speaking about it. This edition of Crossway should be a resource for the Mothers’ Union, Youth Groups, school lessons, home groups and sermons. In this article I want to consider the sweep of the word of God, as it talks about sex and marriage and love, to see how the Spirit of God wants to speak to us and shape us to be his community in this hour of the life of the world.
I want us to see how all pervasive the words about sex and marriage are throughout the Bible, not only in law and instructions and doctrine , but also in the lives of those who show what it is to receive the word of God and live within it, and especially how these show the reality of our flawedness and brokenness and sinfulness in sexual matters, as in so much else. In the Old Testament, the references can be broadly grouped into “Gift and Promise”, “Sex and Marriage”, and then “Rebuke and Warning”. In the New Testament the texts are more mixed, both Gift and Rebuke sometimes in the very same verse, but all given for the wellbeing of the community as well as the life of the individual believer.
First, “Gift and Promise”, which begins with the beautiful core texts from Genesis 1 and 2. How could there be a higher description of our dignity than to be the image bearers of God? God says to us in his word: ‘You are like me. You think, you love, you trust, you desire; you are men and women.’ People say that my older son, Peter, looks just like me and he does. I am different from my son and the living God is different from us, gloriously different, but we bear his image, just as Peter bears mine.
Everything else in the whole of Scripture about sex, men and women, and marriage, comes from this text. The Spirit of God in the second account of creation, in Genesis 2, speaks of the physical union: ‘Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, one flesh’. This is sex. And as this is Genesis, before the fall, the man and the woman are naked and not ashamed. And, as Genesis 1:31 tells us, ‘It is very good’. This text is quoted by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6, and by St Paul in Ephesians 5:31. This is God speaking and he has not stopped speaking: Sex is still for a man and woman and sex is still for marriage between a man and a woman.
God does not stop speaking about sex after the opening chapters of Genesis. Sex is embedded in the covenant promises made to families, through flesh, expressed in the genealogies. A sign of the covenant (circumcision) is a sign of the sexual organ of the man. Sex matters and it matters in God’s creation and covenant. Sex and marriage are there in the law: implicit in the command to ‘Honour your father and mother’ who in God’s good purpose have given you life, and explicit in the command against adultery, which destroys marriage, where sex is being used wrongly and sinfully. In the history, story after story, shows how even outsiders such as Rahab and Ruth are still recipients of marriage as the promise and the gift of God. They show us how law and life go together, including the goodness of love between David and Jonathan – not in a sexual relationship, because that is not what God intended us for in creation and it is not what sex is for. The Wisdom literature is a celebration of the way the law loves life, and that life is celebrated supremely in the Song of Songs. The biblical truth is that erotic love can be enjoyed safely and wonderfully, when it is received as the gift of God in its entirety. The prophets go still further when they relate the gift of sex and marriage to the wellbeing of our relationship with God himself. The picture of the bride and the bridegroom describe intimacy and commitment of the people and the living God.
All of this is good and all of this is at the core of our enjoyment of creation, the experience of the covenant and the blessing of the nations. Sex and marriage, a man and a woman in the image of God, down the generations. And because it so good and so central and so full of all the covenant promise, we need the rebuke and warning.
From the beginning we have doubted the gift and denied the promise. The disobedience feeds on itself and multiplies in sin. We see the covenant-breakers, such as Lot, and a picture of judgement that is echoed all down Scripture, parading what happens to a city and a culture that moves away from the gift of God. We see the Levitical law, where the meaning of sexual holiness is outlined, with the prohibition against same-sex practice listed alongside incest. The Old Testament follows through with story after story of what this does to the people and the communities, if we ignore what God has given for our good. As we read the prophets, we see how immorality, the generic term to describe sexual activity other than between a man and a woman in marriage, is linked to idolatry and injustice, and to the pollution of the land. Just as the gift blesses every part of our life, so the disobedience destroys and touches every part, which is why we need a Saviour and Lord, and why the living God became the Word made flesh.
The New Testament begins with a genealogy, with all the promises of God fulfilled through sex and marriage between men and women, woven into the story of the Gospel. Even here the reality of sin does not prevent the promise and grace of God from working, as we see from the mentions of Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. This is not a story of perfect people. It is a story of about God working with imperfection, including sexual imperfection. It’s a story which begins again with a family. Sex and marriage provide the key tensions in the infant narratives. The virgin birth is not at all a denial of the beauty and goodness of sexual love in marriage between a man and a woman, but it ensures that this birth is not touched by the sin that has been around since the man and the woman listened to the serpent. In the gospels, Jesus takes the rebuke and warning to a new depth: adultery in your heart, and the promise and gift to a new height: a wedding banquet in heaven. Jesus gives full authority, as we have seen, to the texts of Genesis 1 & 2 and warns against all sexual immorality, which includes same-sex practice.
So when we come to Romans 1, it is almost like a New Testament equivalent of the early chapters of Genesis. God gives up those who exchange his truth for a lie. None of us can point the finger, for we are all sinners, and we are all sexual sinners. But just as we were in Adam, now we are in Christ and that means not being conformed to the world, in our sexuality as in everything else, but being transformed into the likeness of Christ. These New Testament believers were transformed. Some were indeed involved in homosexual practices, as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:9, “but now you are washed, you are sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God.” Some were single, and that sacrificial act for the Kingdom of God was known and celebrated.
What we see in all these early communities is the early church living in the light of the revelation of God: honouring marriage, refusing to gratify the flesh, not living as the Gentiles, discovering in Christ the fullness of marriage between a husband and a wife, and seeing the possibility of imitating Jesus in singleness. Hebrews 13:4 tells us: ‘Let marriage be held in honour.’ Why should we honour marriage so greatly? Because it is the means of life and community and the enjoyment of the land. And these are God’s gifts enabling us to know ourselves as bearers of his image, men and women.
Not only this, but there is a greater mystery revealed in marriage, of Christ and the church. It is a beautiful picture, so utterly radically different from what had been settled for in the marriage of antiquity. As well as submission, honouring one another, there is the astonishing call to the husband to sacrifice himself to his wife out of love, just as Christ does for the church. The same call is made in the books of John and Jude and Revelation: to reject sexual immorality and recognise the judgement that is coming. There is no place for same-sex practice in the new heaven and new earth.
Our response must be to receive the gift and promise, and take heed of the warning and the rebuke. The goodness of God’s gift, the glory, profundity and the blessing of sex and marriage is what we are to receive. Although we are all affected by sin, in Christ, we are all capable of knowing the reality of the resurrection life. We still hear the strict words, even of Jesus himself and need God to come to us in our disobedience, to meet us and save us through his grace.
So what then of Christians who believe they must self-identify as gay and that God does not love them? I hope we can see in the Bible teaching that God’s love and promise extends to the whole of creation, and that same Spirit is given to all who are in Christ. But we can also see the rebuke and warning.
As part of a Shared Conversation activity in the Scottish Episcopal Church, I was asked by a gay Christian in one of the churches: what would be lost if the church accepted same-sex practice? It was even then a year or two before we knew that same-sex marriage was coming. I thought overnight and came back the following day to the group with one word: what would be lost? Obedience would be lost. The one quality the Lord God needed in Eden for the relationship of the man and woman with him and the creation to flourish was obedience. Their disobedience led to distance and distortion, and in the end destruction, and so does ours.
Imagine I had done this study on injustice and idolatry and then concluded: “It’s OK, we can just have good disagreement about this. You can have idolatry and be true to the living God, and you can tolerate injustice and live with it.” I hope you would say, “Are you kidding?”
It is no different with respect to immorality and God’s gift of sex and marriage.
Last year, in America, I came across a passage in C S Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’, which I must have read a hundred times, and as I read these words from the preface, they struck me with a new force.
Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind.
I believe that the texts of the gift and promise and those of rebuke and warning which run right through Scripture in relation to sex and marriage invite this kind of choice. Because the gift of sex and marriage is very good, and when we say “yes” to God’s gifts and are willing to trust him for the warnings, then we are invited into the fullness of creation. Not only of this creation but of the new creation, the new heaven and the new earth. And so the Spirit and the bride say: ‘Come’.