It does not take much to get people’s attention when the “S” word comes up. The “S” word, if you can’t already tell, is sex. For some people, the word sex gets their attention immediately because it is something they really enjoy or can’t wait to enjoy. For other people, it gets their attention because they see the word sex and freak out. “This kid is twenty years old, he has never had sex, and it is completely inappropriate for him to talk about. He should not be thinking about sex,” some would say. To the person who sees the word sex in this light, he has a wrong view of sex. I’m not thinking about sex, at least not in a perverted way. I am not writing this paper to be controversial nor am I writing this paper to be offensive, I am simply writing this paper to rightly redeem sex to Jesus in the minds of those who might be perverting sex. I would like to make the point that this paper will by no means say all that I would like to say concerning this topic nor is it all that could be said of this topic. So understand that this is a brief summary of the redemption of sex. To start off, we are going to take a look at God and his creation.
Before we can correctly talk about sex, we must have a right understanding of who God is, which is best shown by how he acts and what he does. We are told in Genesis, or the book of beginnings, that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). From that point on, God begins creating different things, from the oceans and the fish, to the skies and the birds, to the lands and the animals. After all six days of creation, God says that he saw that it was good. After he was finished creating all things, he saw all that he had made, and it was all very good. We see here that God always creates things good. This is especially seen in the way God creates animals male and female, one for the other. Adam is sitting there looking at the animals seeing that each male has its female counterpart, and each female has its male counterpart. He sees all the creatures and recognizes that none of them fit him as his own counterpart. God saw that Adam was alone and he said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). So God created Eve out of the side of Adam. Both man and woman together is what God created in his image. They are complimentary of each other. They are equal to each other in that they together maintain the image of God, but they both have a different role in that image. God says that the man and the woman together become one flesh, that they were naked and unashamed. One without the other is not whole, unless they are gifted with celibacy.
From this point on in the Bible, we begin to see good sex and bad sex. God created one woman for Adam. He did not give Adam a house with thirty girls in it and the ability to choose which one he liked best; he gave Adam Eve. Adam and Eve enjoyed a pure sexual relationship just the way God intended them to. After the fall of man, there began to arise different forms of bad sex which included, but is not limited to sex outside of marriage, sex with multiple wives, sex with daughter-in-laws, sex with daughters, homosexuality, lust, the list goes on. We also see good sex: sex inside of marriage; the way God intended it. G.K. Chesterton says it like this: “The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”
As stated before, Adam and Eve had a pure sexual relationship within the confines of their marriage, which is the way God made it. Noah, like so, was married to one woman. He fathered three sons through this one woman, whose names were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Genesis 9:1 says, “And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’” God blessed Noah in his marriage and he and his wife obviously had good sexual relations.
The marriage between Isaac and Rebekah is a beautiful picture of good sex within marriage as well. Rebekah was a very attractive woman, according to Genesis 26:7. With that being the case, while Isaac settled down in Gerar, he told people that Rebekah was his sister. He was afraid that he would be killed so that some other guy could take her as his wife. “When he had been there a long time, Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out of a window and saw Isaac laughing with Rebekah” (Genesis 26:8). The words here used for their “laughter” infers some kind of intimate relationship. Isaac and Rebekah were doing something that would make it seem as though they were married. Isaac and Rebekah obviously enjoyed pure sexual intercourse within their marriage. With the example of Isaac and Rebekah, we see that some people enjoy sex the way God intended it to be enjoyed.
There are many examples of bad sex within the Bible. At one point in time, sexual sin had gotten so bad and so corrupt that God destroyed the entire earth and everything on it. In the first eight verses of Genesis chapter six, there are men of God who had sexual relations with people they were not supposed to have sexual relations with. It then says, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). God saw the continual evil of man was prevailing, and in his own words, he says, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land…for I am sorry that I have made them” (Genesis 6:7). With the example of the society before the flood, we see that some people pervert sex into a false god, turning sex into wickedness. As Mark Driscoll often says, “Don’t let a good-thing become a god-thing, that’s a bad-thing.”
So what exactly does sex need to be redeemed from? I believe there are two main offenders of sex, both of whom are making sex into something that it is not. The first offender of what God calls good is the liberal. Let me first say that any sex outside of heterosexual marriage in sin. Some people, including some Christians, think that they can mess around sexually (ex. oral sex) as long as they do not have “real sex.” The Bible does not tell us where the line not to cross is concerning sexuality, it gives us a time for sexuality, which is in marriage. “That you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases” (The Song of Solomon 3:5). The time for any sexual activity is once one is married. The liberal person makes sex into a god and uses and abuses it. This would include, but is not limited to all of the things I have listed early: sex before marriage (fornication), sex with people who one is not married to (adultery), lust (pornography), homosexuality, etc. etc. Let it be known that everybody struggles with different sins; so struggling with any of these things without giving in is human and is not a sin. When any sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage is practiced and done habitually, than it is a sin. If there were a practicing homosexual in church sitting next to an unmarried couple who were having sex sitting next to a guy who looks at pornography like it were no big deal, not one would be worse than the other. All are sinning and all need to repent from their sins.
Sex needs to be redeemed from this near prevailing idea in society that sex should be enjoyed in anything and everything other than wedlock. This is how wicked our society is: by age fifteen, 13% of teens have had sex, but by the time they reach the age of 19, 7 out of 10 teens have had sexual intercourse; 10% or young women between the ages of 18-24 who had sex before the age of 20 said that their first sex was involuntary; each year almost 750,000 women between the ages of 15-19 become pregnant; there were 214,750 abortions among 15-19 year-olds in 2002; 6 in 10 minors who have abortions do so with at least one parent’s knowledge, the great majority of parents support their daughter’s decision to have an abortion. This is the way our society looks at sex and it’s effects. We are so jacked up that even parents are giving their approval of the murder of innocent babies. It has become so nonchalant a practice and we have become numb to the holiness of sex and the sanctity of life. Sex is a good thing that was, is, and always will be intended between one man and one woman inside marriage. God gives us confines to live within because he knows the consequences of sin and that they are not good. We know that within the marriage bed, nothing is defiled (Hebrews 13:4). So go and do whatever you want sexually within the confines of marriage, always thinking of your wife more than yourself.
The second offender of the gift of sex is the religious person. These kinds of people see the perversion of sex that other people are fostering and they swing to the opposite end of the pendulum. Because some people abuse sex, they decide sex is wrong altogether. For example, in earlier history the Catholic Church got so foolish as to say that sex was only for reproduction and that it was only okay to have on certain days of the week. Here is what Paul says concerning this: “Some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth” (1 Timothy 4:1-3). Paul says that these ideas are teachings from demons and not from God. This perversion does not only happen with the topic of sex and food, but I have heard of it concerning other topics such as psychology, the internet, spiritual gifts, doctors and therapists, etc. When somebody perverts something, that doesn’t mean we throw that thing away; rather we redeem it to Jesus. Some people use things such as psychology, the internet, spiritual gifts, doctors and therapists, and sex and abuse them terribly, turning what was meant for good into evil. All the things God made good are like millions of separate forests. Sin came in and infected some of the trees in all of the forests like termites. The religious would rather destroy all of the forests than simply chop down the few trees that are infecting the forests. Just because we have one tree with termites in it does not mean we chop down all of the trees. Rather, we should destroy the infected trees and redeem the rest of the forests.
The Bible says sex is a good thing, created for both man and woman to enjoy with each other within a heterosexual marriage. This is not only a call for the redemption of sex, but of the redemption of all of the things that God created as good in this world. All the things God created were declared by himself as very good! We understand that sin has muddied up the picture originally painted, but we can still find the good that God intended in this world. It is not our place to declare things unclean or not good, especially when they are declared as good by God. Who are we to decide when something should be thrown out from our lives? Can we go against what God has said? Brothers and sisters, let us look to Jesus in every aspect of our lives, knowing that he has created all things good. It doesn’t matter where you go and what is around you, Jesus is good no matter where you are, and creation around us declares the goodness of God.
Works Cited
The Holy Bible. “English Standard Version.”
Crossway Bibles. A Publishing Ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois. 2001
Chesterton, G.K. “ILN”. 1/9/09
http://chesterton.org/acs/quotes.htm
Driscoll, Mark. “Putting Preachers in their Place.” The Resurgence Conference: Text and Context.
Mars Hill Church, February 25-27 2008, Seattle, Washington.
Guttamacher Institute. “Facts on American Teens’ Sexual and Reproductive Health.” 09/2006
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_ATSRH.html
