(For part 1, click here.)
Sex before marriage is a violation of God’s design for sex. There are three primary reasons God has designed sex.
Here’s the first one: He’s a good, good father.
God designed sex as a gift for our joy and our pleasure, but as a gift that is not meant to be selfish but selfless.
I’ve had young people ask questions about masturbation and porn. And I would just say that this is why those two things are unhealthy: masturbation and porn are ultimately self-centered, they are addictive, and they set up unrealistic and even harmful expectations for your spouse or the person who might be your spouse one day.
Some of you may say, “Well, I’m not married. I’m single right now, so it doesn’t really matter.”
My response would be this: I don’t know if you’ll get married one day in the future, but you might. And the time to start working on your marriage is not when you get married; it’s now. What makes a healthy marriage is healthy people, and you get healthy now when you don’t have that other person in your life just yet.
Here’s the second thing:
God designed it for pro-creation. That’s pretty self-explanatory.
Number three: God designed sex to illustrate who God is as well as the covenantal love he has for us as his people.
God uses the description of male and female in a marriage relationship to describe his relationship with the Church. This relationship starts in Genesis. It’s a thread that runs all through the Scriptures and it culminates in Revelation.
In fact, my favorite depiction of God’s covenant relationship with us is in Hosea. God would give Old Testament prophets a message to give to the people. In Hosea, God gives Hosea a painful experience to live out that the people can watch.
Here’s the story: Hosea was told by God to go down into the red-light district of town to find a prostitute. He told Hosea to marry her and take her home as his wife.
Hosea brings her home. They have a beautiful life together. She’s remade. She experiences his love and his grace and his forgiveness. He truly loves her and speaks dignity into her life. They start a family together.
Then, one day, Hosea comes home from work and sees that she’s not there.
He knows she’s not at the store. He gets a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He goes back down to the red-light district of town where he found her years before and he sees her in the arms of another man.
He’s heartbroken and he’s angry, as anyone would be. And God says to Hosea: Now you know how I feel because this is what my people have done to me. And it’s what they continue to do to me over and over and over again. So I’ll tell you what you do, Hosea. You go back, you buy her from her pimp, you bring her home, and you forgive her, just as I have forgiven my people.
That’s the description God uses to describe his love for you and me.
We see this thread all the way through Revelation. It’s the reason why it’s male and female in a marriage relationship. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
There’s a singularity to humanity, but there’s also a plurality: male and female. We are one, but we are two. We are similar, but we are distinct. We are equal, yet we are very different as our physical bodies even illustrate.
When a male and female make a covenant promise to each other and come together in sexual intimacy, that’s the ultimate pinnacle of how we image God. In other words, our bodies were designed to display who God is and his love for us.
All over Genesis 1, we find complementary pairs of things that God creates that are similar but different, and they work together to image God.
We see it in the heavens and the earth. God created light and darkness. God created day and night. God created fish and fowl, water and land.
Can you imagine a world where it was all light and no dark, or all dark and no light? Can you imagine a world of all water and no land or all land and no water? Could you imagine a world with all logic and no emotion? Some of you are like, “Yeah. I’m married to him.”
These things are similar, but they’re different and they actually work together to image something.
God created the heavens and the earth, but the culmination of his creation was male and female. In creating male and female, he implied that the ultimate way in which we image God is through different things working in harmony to display the glory of God. God didn’t just tell us; he gave us an active example to show us.
