A Christian View of Sex

Here’s a slightly longer version of a piece that I wrote for the Daily Trojan (you can find the DT article here).

Sex seems never to be too far from our thoughts here at USC, whether it be cuddle parties during Gender & Sexuality Week or women moaning their way through The Vagina Monologues around Valentine’s Day. I’d like to add a voice that is often missing, namely that of an evangelical Christian. While Christian opposition to pre-marital sex, adultery, pornography, and homosexuality is well known, I fear that many don’t know how positively Christians view sex. Christians have a far higher and far more wonderful view of sex than that of a culture that made a hit out of a song that said “you and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”

The Christian view of sex begins not with proscriptions and prohibitions but with a simple fact: God invented sex. God created humanity male and female, and he designed us for sex. He constructed the human body with parts specifically made for sexual pleasure, He placed in humans a powerful sex drive, and He affirmed that all this was very good. God blessed the first humans by telling them to “be fruitful and multiply,” and He made multiplication a very enjoyable activity. Contrary to some misimpressions, sex has nothing to do with “original sin,” it isn’t “dirty,” and God doesn’t get upset when people engage in passionate lovemaking. Lust does not mean sexual desire; lust means illicit sexual desire. God gave sex as a gift, and He’s happy when people use it.

While many people are familiar with verses in the Bible condemning adultery, homosexuality, and other sexual sins, they often have not heard the other, more positive verses that give context to these condemnations. The Bible affirms from beginning to end the beauty and essential goodness of sex within marriage and the blessing of children it brings. Proverbs says to “Rejoice in the wife of your youth….Let her breasts always satisfy you, May you always be captured by her love.” The Song of Solomon is an entire book of the Bible filled with romantic and erotic poetry celebrating marital love (sample line: “May your breasts be like clusters of grapes on the vine, The fragrance of your breath like apples, And your mouth like the best wine”). Verses such as these make clear that while modesty may be a biblical virtue, prudery certainly is not. Indeed, the Apostle Paul, who is often derided as repressed and anti-sex, actually commanded married couples to regularly make love, and he viewed the one flesh union of marriage so highly that he saw in it a picture of the most wonderful thing imaginable, the union of Christ and the church.

However, sex cannot be viewed in isolation, cut off from God’s larger purposes for human beings. God did not design sex to be used in any and every way; rather, He made it to be an integral part of marriage, the joining together of a man and woman in a lifelong, loving, intimate, and committed relationship. God made His design clear from the very first, establishing marriage by saying that a man “will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”

Unfortunately, we humans are often unwilling to follow God’s design for sex. The Bible teaches that humans have been corrupted by sin, and because of this we naturally desire to use our sexuality in ways that God has forbidden (namely, sex outside of marriage). Now since God is our Creator, He has the absolute right to tell us how we must act sexually, and we owe Him complete obedience.

Yet what we often fail to appreciate is that the rules God made about sex were meant not to arbitrarily restrict us but rather to free us. Just as the law requiring us to drive on the right side of the road doesn’t unnecessarily restrict our freedom to travel but actually allows us to go wherever we want without fear of a head-on collision, so God’s laws liberate us to have a pleasurable, passionate, and meaningful sexual relationship within the safe boundaries of marriage. The lifetime monogamous commitment of marriage allows sex to take place in an environment of commitment, love, and trust, in which a person is freed to be “naked and unashamed” with their partner. It removes the fear that their partner will abandon them if someone more attractive comes along. It ensures that every child conceived within this union has both a mom and a dad to nurture and provide for them.

Beyond these positives, God’s design for sex and marriage shields from the host of ill effects that accompany extra-marital sex. One need only contemplate the many victims of the Sexual Revolution—millions dead or suffering from STD’s, single mothers struggling to raise children who will never know their fathers, over 40 million children slaughtered before they were even born, innumerable people bearing spiritual and emotional scars from pasts of empty, meaningless promiscuity—to see that God’s laws are for our benefit. Of course, some might argue that completely restricting sex to marriage is unreasonable since many people have had sex outside of marriage without obvious negative consequences. And yet this argument is flawed. If we used this logic, we’d have to abolish laws against running red lights, since many people have done so without getting into an accident.

In all of this, God’s goodness in His design for sex and marriage shines through. I, for one, would ask this question: if Someone was brilliant enough to invent sex and benevolent enough to give it to us as a gift, shouldn’t we listen to Him when He gives a few instructions for its use?

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