WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL? IT’S JUST SEX.

Welcome to my first-ever blog post! In the spirit of our sermon series on “The Ten Commandments,” and the seventh commandment against adultery, I want to share with you the fruits of some of my thoughts over the last few years about God’s design for healthy sexuality. 

Many of us who were raised in Christian households share similar experiences from our upbringing:

• “The talk” with our parents.
• The discussions in youth group about waiting for marriage.
• The sexual purity retreat.

I apologize if I am digging up some uncomfortable memories. These are all well-intentioned attempts to instill Christian values in our often hormone-driven teenage populations, but in my experience – and I am sure in others’ as well – they sometimes lacked the ethical backup that we can more easily supply for some of the other well-known commandments. Of course, there is the standard, “You should do this because God commands it.”

But why does God care? What’s the big deal? 

I think that there is a piece that is missing from a lot of our typical Christian teaching on this subject: We don’t necessarily communicate any kind of comprehensive framework for how sexuality operates on a metaphysical level. I wonder if the Western Church of today may be uniquely positioned to miss out on this, both because of our attachment to some historical theology that distinguishes strongly between a person’s body and their spirit, and because of an idea that the subject of sex is crass and is not appropriate for polite conversation.

On the contrary, however, our God is the one who breathed the spirit into our bodies and invented sexual intimacy in the first place. So, as usual, these Genesis stories should be our starting point for figuring out what God is up to when it comes to sex. 

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Let’s start with Genesis 2:7:

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

The word here for “living being” is nephesh, which can also mean soul, mind, life, person, or self. This concept is of a unified, connected self. There is no meaningful sense of a living body without it being connected to a soul or spirit; that would just be dust. God’s people historically believed that what one does with their body is what they do with their whole self. We could spend a whole blog post on just this, but I’ll try to stay on topic. Moving on, in Genesis 2:22-24, we read: 

Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, 

This is now bone of my bones
  and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
  for she was taken out of man. 

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” 

God is the driving force behind sexual intimacy here. Creating this connection is one of the first things that he does. It is important to him, and he does not expect his people to sweep it under the rug because it can sometimes be controversial or messy. 

These verses can also serve as the foundation of our framework for how sexuality works and why God cares about it so much. Remember how we said that what you do with your body, you do with your whole self? What, then, will happen if you unite with someone else, and become one flesh? This is what makes sex unique among human interactions. Sex not only connects two bodies; it connects two nepheshes. And because sex is such a powerful experience, it stays with us. In other words, sex creates a lasting spiritual connection between those living beings that are participating in it. 

Most of us are familiar with some wonderful marriages where this is exemplified. We celebrate those couples who have a vibrant connection across several dimensions of their humanity by uniting in marriage. Even when every marriage has its difficulties and bumps along the road, relationships like this are a holy demonstration of what God intended all along. 

But, what about when things are more complicated? How is there so much potential for damage that God chose to include this instruction in the Ten Commandments: “You shall not commit adultery.” (Exodus 20:14) 

BROKEN PROMISES

Adultery is perhaps the clearest example of how human sexuality can cause destruction. Not only is sexual intimacy violated, but a covenant commitment is broken. It is clear throughout scripture that God sees our commitment to him as analogous to a marriage covenant. Throughout many of the prophets, including seven times in Jeremiah, seven times in Ezekiel, and once in Hosea (which is a prophetic object lesson structured entirely around this idea), variations on this refrain are echoed: 

Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. (Jeremiah 7:23) 

Pastor Matt’s latest sermon explored this idea thoroughly, as well as the breakdown in intimacy and failure of Christian distinctiveness that accompanies adultery, so I won’t go into too much detail here. What I want to emphasize is that, alongside the loss of trust and intimacy inherent in a violation of that holy covenant, a living being has been torn in two by creating a lasting spiritual connection with another person who is outside that covenant.

An act of adultery doesn’t only damage the other person, their family, and the community, though these things are tragic in and of themselves; the act damages the adulterer as well, both through losing relationship with others and through polluting their own spirit with broken spiritual connections to multiple people. This is yet another fundamental reason why adultery is wrong, and its implications stretch far and wide across all aspects of sexuality. 

OBJECTS IN MOTION

Not everyone who has sex is married. You can’t violate a covenant you don’t have, right? This may be so, but the concept that we have been exploring applies here as well. This is a place where American culture is conflicted.

You may be aware (or potentially blissfully unaware) that the guardrails on sexual discussions have largely been eradicated over the last few decades. Bragging or shaming about “body count” is commonplace in some circles, and sex with multiple partners is embraced under the guise of “empowerment”. There is a general sense among many young people that your twenties should largely be dedicated to casual sex and experimentation, and then, once you are in your thirties, it will be time to settle down and think about commitment. 

This lifestyle can mask the presence of the lasting spiritual connection that comes with these sexual experiences, and we can convince ourselves that the spiritual or emotional component of sex is optional. Like building up a callous on a repeatedly damaged hand, we power through for the sake of the goal, and after a while, maybe we really don’t feel anything. We expect the spiritual component of sex not to exist when we are having casual sex, but then we hope that it does exist when we are committed to someone we love. If we want to be consistent, we need to admit to ourselves that the lasting spiritual connection is typical of all sexual experience, even if we might have been desensitized to it.  

If sexuality does form a lasting spiritual connection, then the relationship between the two people is imprinted into their psyches in a powerful way. In a marriage, this serves to strengthen the relationship and build a healthy partnership. However, this means that in any sexual encounter, the relationship between participants is of extreme importance.

Sex is spiritually formative.

We must ask ourselves, then: What people and what types of relationships do we want imprinted into our psyche? What if, in some of our sexual experiences, there is no meaningful relationship there at all? What if the sex is just about enjoying the other person’s body and has nothing to do with relational intimacy?  

Perhaps this is an uncomfortable thought, but I think we have to admit to ourselves that what we are talking about in those situations is objectification. (Pastor Matt touched on this sermon briefly, with regard to adultery, but it applies here as well.) Even if the interactions are agreed upon by both parties, it is not the core of the other person that we are interested in, but simply their body and their ability to provide physical pleasure. If we give each other permission to connect without caring, we repeatedly imprint into our identities the reality of that relationship as a consistent message: “I am an object to be used for the pleasure of others.” This is profoundly unhealthy and even dehumanizing, and many people do it all the time without realizing it. In some ways, this is a slavery that we sell ourselves into. But, God has delivered us from Egypt and wants to teach us new ways of living. This is what the Ten Commandments are all about! 

A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE

As a final example of how this Genesis-informed framework can apply, we can examine how self-directed sexuality can be damaging. Pornography and masturbation fall into this category, since these are usually solo experiences.  

Porn addiction and masturbation are twin epidemics in our nation. The National Institute of Health has performed studies on adolescent exposure to pornography, and results of self-reported online pornography viewing among teens ranged from 42% to 68%. Keep in mind such self-reported statistics are usually underestimated. Studies consistently report that more than half of men and more than a quarter of women masturbate on a regular basis. All sexual activities are addictive, and these ones are not exceptions. The neurochemicals involved in sexual pleasure train the brain to expect, and even crave, the sensations and activities that create them, eventually making it feel impossible to break these habits. This is why 11% of men and 3% of women now report that they have an addiction to pornography. 

Both pornography and masturbation have been shown to desensitize people with respect to real sexual connection with others. Alongside this, if sexual experiences form lasting spiritual connections, then these activities imprint a self-centered pattern into our inner selves. These two powerful effects support the idea that self-directed sexuality can be a subtle form of psychological self-harm.

Since sexual impulses are specifically designed by God to foster healthy connection within marriages, these practices are distortions of the life we were intended to live. A self-centered mindset, in particular, is antithetical to the self-sacrificial teachings of Jesus and can act as a breeding ground for all kinds of evil thoughts and behaviors. 

These challenges may seem daunting, but there are countless stories of people who have broken free of these patterns through surrendering their sexual desires to God and allowing him to reshape their hearts in his own image. Sexual brokenness is not a special case. God can heal us from all afflictions if we adopt the posture of Jesus in saying to God, “not my will, but yours be done.” 

A SEXUAL REVOLUTION

This can all be a lot to contemplate. More likely than not, if you are not struggling with adultery or one of its many variations, someone in your inner circle of friends or family is. As followers of Jesus, our goal is not to condemn anyone. We are all ultimately victims of the disease of sin that has plagued our world since the time of Adam and Eve.

Consider these three other ways of responding to the messy situation we find ourselves in: 

1) We can live our own lives in alignment with God’s intentions for healthy sexuality.

The covenant promises of marriage are meant to be the safeguard against the damage that can be caused by the repeated forming and breaking of lasting spiritual connections. If we internalize the realities of the ways that we damage our own inner selves by operating outside of the security of a lifetime commitment, we can more effectively resist temptations toward actions that ultimately damage our hearts.

2) We can cultivate a collective understanding within the church of how sexuality works, what healthy sexuality looks like, and what harms can be done when sexuality deviates from its proper context.

Encouragement toward a distinctive set of values is much more effective when we can articulate the “why” behind the “thou shalt not”. I have heard people outside the church, more than once, when they are presented with traditional Christian views on sexuality, express a conclusion along the lines of “their god just doesn’t want them to have a good time.” Not so! God seeks to enhance our good times by steering us away from the traumatic experiences of sex lives that repeatedly connect us to each other and rip us apart. The fact that such a serious misinterpretation of God’s intentions is so common is a result of our failure as the church to talk about sex in a thoughtful way, or even to talk about it at all.

3) We can prophetically advocate for healthy sexual values to be adopted by the world around us and for harmful practices to be ended.

In the interest of keeping this blog post manageable, I’ve left a lot of territory unexplored. There is much to be said about those even more dehumanizing situations, like sexual assault and sexual exploitation in sex trafficking, stripping, and filming of pornography, that fill our society with pain and injustice.

As inheritors of Abraham’s call to be a blessing to the whole earth, we are responsible to speak out against those forces that seek to devour and destroy other human beings. Keep in mind that this does not need to be through political advocacy. It is more important to change hearts and minds than to change laws. If more people understand what is at stake, the social incentives around sexuality can shift to properly reflect those potential harms and deter people from actions that damage themselves and others.

A BENEDICTION

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” (Psalm 51:10)