The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (7 page)

Notes

1
. Jerome Rainer and Julie Rainer,
Sexual Pleasure in Marriage
(New York: Pocket Books, 1959), 30.

Four

Why God Created Sex

The most thrilling, exciting, and fulfilling experience in the world (if done properly) is the “act of marriage.” God designed it that way. And it is nearly universal, for everywhere you go on planet Earth you see its results—children.

Unfortunately, the experience is not always confined to marriage and therein is the problem—for the sex act, which God intended for marriage as a blessing to both men and women, has become one of the greatest social problems of our day. This problem is not unique to the twenty-first century. If you recall, the misuse of the sex drive so polluted the earth in the days of Noah that God destroyed all but eight people and started the population over again. History shows that nothing has changed. The Bosnian Serbs didn’t invent mass rapes; it has been practiced on almost every continent in the world, leaving behind incalculable personal suffering and tragedy.

Our own culture, by the misuse of the God-given gift of sexual expression, has created an unbelievable upsurge of unwed teenage mothers. One American woman is reported to be a grandmother at the age of twenty-four! Social tolerance of this behavior has produced a wave of sexual vice from incest to homosexuality and the murder of over four thousand unborn babies every day. The current wave of sexual permissivism cultivated by the media and humanistic educators is destroying the conscience of America and producing a generation of youth and adults who seem not to know right from wrong. The wanton exercise of the sex drive has produced an unprecedented rise in sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and AIDS-related plagues that, even in this day of advanced medical research, have no cure. The medical profession can only advise “safe sex” (which is far from safe) and abstinence.

This widespread misuse of the sex drive, of course, does not include the untold suffering caused by the rampant violation of wedding vows that recent surveys indicate has affected as much as 30 percent of the married population. Every reader of this book is acquainted with couples whose marriage was either destroyed by one partner having sex with another person or by the sexual attraction of one person to another. And we cannot say Christians don’t have that problem. They do! Not as frequently as non-Christians, but sexual sins have invaded even the church at an alarming rate. We have all been shocked by church leaders who have fallen into sexual sin.

Like all pastors, I regret to say I saw it in my own congregation, even in some couples whom I married after giving careful premarital counseling. One beautiful young woman brought her thirty-year-old husband to me and angrily said, “He gave me herpes!” Recently, a young forty-two-year-old grandmother had an “affair” with her boss, a leader in a Christian organization. I was, of course, heartbroken. I had married the woman years ago to her childhood sweetheart.

I cannot begin to convey the emotional trauma and heartache that these experiences and others like them cause many people—particularly the people they love most in this world, their mate, children, parents, and many other friends and relatives. Can you imagine going to the first big family holiday dinner after it has become known that as an act of passion or alienation of affection you violated your wedding vows? Or maybe worse,
not
going for the same reason?

Having counseled hundreds of people who made this terrible mistake, I can tell you, on their behalf, it isn’t worth it! It is true, God can and does forgive even adultery and fornication, when truly repented of and confessed, but the relationship is never the same. For many the suffering never really goes away. Unfaithful individuals may never be able to forgive themselves. Their spouses, because of love and obedience to God, may try, but it often takes years before sexual trust is restored between such couples. The suffering experienced before that injury heals is impossible to imagine. It is something you would not wish on anyone, particularly someone you love.

Sexual Sins Are Number One!

This abuse of sex is not new. The apostle Paul addressed the problem already in the first century. Twice he catalogued the most common sins of humankind, both in Romans 1 and Galatians 5. In both instances he listed sexual sins first. Why? Because they are first! In the Romans passage he listed sexual impurity even before envy, greed, and murder. In Galatians 5:19 he listed sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery ahead of fifteen other sinful practices such as idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, jealousy, and murder.

One of my favorite ministries is speaking at Maximum Man Conferences. I do about five to ten each year. At such conferences I point out to the men that if they have a problem with sexual fantasies or sexual temptation, they are not weird or oversexed as some think; they are very normal. That doesn’t mean that this universal temptation is a license to sin; God has promised to judge such sinful practice. I then show them how to have victory over such temptation, and victory is very well possible, witnessed by the fact that most Christian men (as high as 70 percent in some surveys) do not violate their sexual commitment to their wives, even though it is tempting, particularly in this day when sex is used to advertise and sell almost everything. Merchants use the most powerful force in human nature to sell their products, and today they have access to our minds in our own homes via television.

All of this brings us full circle to our question: Why would a loving God introduce the “act of marriage” in the first place? Obviously He had to precede it with a strong sex drive, and that drive, although providing billions of married couples four to six thousand ecstatic experiences over a fifty-year marriage, has also caused billions of others untold heartache and misery beyond description. The truth is, our Creator had several things in mind when giving this beautiful and sacred experience, or “blessing,” to married couples. Consider the following:

1.
To propagate the race.
Immediately after creating Adam and Eve, God blessed them and commanded them to “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). For reasons known only to Him, God intended Adam and Eve to propagate the race from the Garden of Eden. We have already seen that this command was given before their sin of rebellion to His will had reared its ugly head as we see in chapter 3. Therefore, He was commanding them to fulfill a righteous act and populate the earth. From that humble beginning of two individuals, God set in motion a replicating power that has produced almost six billion people at the present time, and some suggest that another six billion preceded us, not even factoring in the enormous population that lived before the Flood.

All of this tells us that the principal reason God gave us our incredible sex drive is to propagate the race, not just with living bodies such as Adam had when he was created, but with living souls, such as God breathed into him: and he “became a living being.” The eternal soul, with which all people are born, is the most significant part of the nature of humans and the unique feature that distinguishes us from the animal kingdom. It is this spiritual nature that God’s Son, Jesus, later came to emancipate by His death on the cross. A second reason God gave humankind a strong sex drive and the “act of marriage” to fulfill it is…

2.
To provide mutual pleasure in marriage.
One of the most misleading concepts about God’s plan for sexual expression is that He is against it. As I have already tried to make clear, the truth is that He has given this marvelous gift to married couples of all generations for mutual happiness and pleasure. Solomon makes that point in his Song of Songs that even suggests intimate techniques in the “act of marriage.” But the most obvious passage I am familiar with is Proverbs 5:18–20, where in warning his son to restrain himself from having sex with his neighbor’s wife no matter how enticing she makes herself, he should enjoy sexual expression only with his wife. Consider this admonition, “May your fountain be blessed [the use of his sexual creativity], and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth… may her breasts satisfy you always; may you ever be captivated by her love.”

You must admit that this is rather explicit for a book written three thousand years ago. Yet the message is timeless. Couples get married in their youth and should bring sexual and emotional pleasure to each other. This has been the time-honored purpose of marriage, to provide sexual pleasure. And as Solomon said, it “captivated” them in love. The more they provide sexual expression for each other, the more it enriches their love for each other. Only a loving God who has humankind’s best interests at heart could have invented such a marvelously pleasurable experience that would bind two people together in love.

And it is interesting that it is equally beneficial to primitive tribespeople as well as those who dwell in kings’ palaces. You don’t have to be rich and famous to enjoy pleasurable sex in marriage and to experience the enrichment of love that it produces. I have met many people in my world travels who married people they did not even know before they met them at the wedding altar. Their marriage had been arranged by their parents according to the custom in their culture. Yet it was obvious by their body language and treatment of each other that they had built a warm, loving relationship. How? They were “captivated,” as Solomon said, by their love. If it works in countries where the individuals do not choose the mate with whom they make love, how much more should it apply in the Western cultures, where we select our own mates.

3.
To reduce sexual temptation.
Even the apostle Paul, who was a single man as far as we know, believed that it is better to marry than to burn with passion. In 1 Corinthians 7:1–4 he also said that because there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. Notice that he said nothing about children here; he is talking about relieving the natural sexual passions that build up in both men and women. The reason is that it usually takes only one sexual experience for a wife to get pregnant, yet the average couple will have approximately 150 such experiences a year. Obviously then, God has given couples this wonderful experience to share to make it easier for them to keep their wedding vows.

That is particularly important in our day when the advertising and entertainment industries seem to function under the philosophy that sex sells. They bombard us with it in advertising everything from tires to beer. Hollywood insists on breaking every moral code in movies today, so much so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to watch TV in your own home without having every moral value taught by the church and your parents challenged. In essence, today’s producers are convinced that no matter how bad their story is, it will sell if they include enough explicit sex scenes.

In such a sexually surcharged climate, God has given married couples a gift to reduce those temptations to manageable size. It is called the “act of marriage.” As already indicated in chapter 2, when properly consummated, this act should strengthen a couple’s self-control (as the apostle calls it), which makes them less vulnerable to Satan’s temptations (1 Cor. 7:5) by the reduction of their normal sex drive. This obviously would tend to improve their spiritual life as a result.

Very honestly, one of our major purposes in writing this book originally was our anticipation of what we could foresee in the wake of the sexual revolution that promoted promiscuity without regard to consequences, conscience, or the commands of God. We determined that we would provide a manual on sexual behavior for married lovers, most of whom came to their marriage bed as virgins with only a minimum knowledge of this subject, that would not only help them enjoy to the maximum this sublime gift of God but also help them reduce their normal passions to manageable proportions. This can be achieved—even in the twenty-first century!

4.
To produce mutual ownership.
When a couple marry, they promise to give themselves to each other totally. They merge their earthly possessions, the man gives his bride his name, and they give each other their bodies for companionship, for mutual protection, and for mutual sexual expression. As Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:3–4, “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.” Essentially he is saying that a marriage is giving one’s body to the other, and it is sealed by the sexual experience. Each time a couple surrenders to each other for sexual fulfillment, they are demonstrating that mutual ownership contract they made at the wedding altar.

Marriage really is a sexual contract exclusively between two people of the opposite sex who have made this promise: “to keep you only unto me so long as we both shall live.” That is why it is not something to be done hurriedly or without careful consideration but deliberately and in the will of God. For it involves giving your body to another person as long as you both shall live. This exchange of ownership of one’s body with another is a decision that should last a lifetime.

5.
To produce a unique union and means of communion that is not possible on any other level.
One of the most beautiful teachings on the marvelous relationship of a couple in marriage came from our Lord Jesus Himself when He said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Matt. 19:5).

Marriage, then, is to be a “union” of two people of the opposite sex. The Creator designed it to be so. They leave the protection of their parents’ homes and are united together to begin their own. No longer are they under the primary obligation to obey their parents; they are now united together by the “act of marriage,” which Jesus calls the “one flesh” experience. We know He had the sexual union of the couple in mind here because Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:16 warns that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body. Instead, a couple is uniquely united or joined together by the “act of marriage.” By this “act” of exclusive and unique union, which binds a couple together through the years and serves as a constant means of expressing their commitment to one another, the couple communicates their love to each other in a manner not shared with any other person on earth. Such a relationship is not achievable on any other level. And it is approved by God.