There are two basic ways to approach life as in how to live
it: On the one hand, Christians believe
that God created the world and everything in it, and then He gave to humans the
instruction manual on how it works. The
other view believes that there is no instruction manual, because either there
was no God in the first place, or God is not the kind of thing that has a
relationship with people. That’s just vain
human thinking. But either way, the result
is the same. We are on our own.
So essentially, we make up the rules as we go along. Society may gradually develop some rules, but
it has no real authority to impose it on you unless it wants to punish people who
don’t comply.
Because I find human life, and life in general, too
incredible to account for by chance and accident, I have to believe there had
to be a creator. Does this Creator love
his creation and did he provide for us an instruction manual to tell us how
this works?
The only thing in life that we have that could pass as such
an instruction manual is the Bible, and for reasons well beyond the scope of
this article, I believe it to be God’s Word to us telling us how life works.
When God first created human beings, the Bible says that “God created man in his
own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he
them.” [Genesis 1:27] It took two
distinct sexes to fulfill the image of God.
Why would that
be? From what I have read in human
psychology, human traits seem to come in pairs.
Now this is my thinking about the matter. The Bible doesn’t go into detail here.
It seems that for
every strength, there is a corresponding weakness. Think of justice and mercy. If a person is strong on justice, he is
probably weak on mercy, and a person strong in mercy is usually weaker on
justice. If you were to make a list of
your strengths and weaknesses, you could probably link each one to its
opposite.
Psychologists used
to think of the different sexes as having different basic temperaments, but
current psychological thinking often dismisses this as stereotypical thinking,
social constructs, and sexism. To them,
differences imply a hierarchy of values, and to the politically correct,
equality is one of the foundations for modern morality. This doesn’t mean that the modern view is
correct or more accurate. I believe
modern science is influenced more today by the presuppositions brought to the
investigation of things than by the facts uncovered by the investigations.
I see the joining
of a man and a woman forming something that could not exist on its own. The marriage is intended to form and complete
the personality of each person in order for each of them to become more like
God.
Genesis 1:28 And
God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill
the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over
the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
God tells the
first people to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. A lot of people challenge this thinking,
saying that the earth is already full, and its resources are limited. Actually, no.
It looks full in certain places, because people tend to live in one
place, because they have learned to be dependent on others for jobs and their
needs for food and shelter. If there is
a lack of food today, it is only in parts of the world, and this is generally
due more to political issues than that of resources. But that is an issue for another article.
The Bible assumes
that marriage will have children, and teaches that children are a blessing from
God [Psalm 127 3 Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the
womb is his reward. 4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are
children of the youth. 5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.]
I would contend
that raising children contributes to the forming of our characters in ways that
can’t be duplicated by other means, even the raising of other people’s
children, like orphans.
God is always in the
business of trying to reveal Himself to us.
Having children is one of the best ways to do this, and He gives us two
chances to get it right.
Hopefully a person
learns what unconditional love is from one’s parents. A love that is both tender and firm, that
does what is best for us even though it may hurt for a time. A love that seeks our benefit above all else.
But then that
doesn’t always work, so we get a second chance when we have our own children. Hopefully and generally we find ourselves
loving these beings with a love we hadn’t thought possible. We would easily give up everything for the
sake of our children.
Now the trick is
to extrapolate this love onto God, recognizing that His love for us is at least
as much as ours for our children or our parents for us. Sometimes our parents fail us, and we fail
our children, but we call that broken families, because we know what the family
is supposed to look like.
Families are also
the place where we learn what love is in other ways. It is more than this intense love for another
human being, but it pushes us to develop this love in loving sacrificial
service to someone else. Feelings of
love just aren’t enough when speaking of love.
The Bible says later: “For this cause a man shall leave his
mother and his father and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one
flesh.” [Genesis 2:24]
In another place in the Bible [I Corinthians 6], this theme
is explained a bit for those who may have missed its significance the first
time. A man who has sex with a prostitute
becomes one flesh, or one body, with her.
So sex is how the two become one.
In thinking about this, I am inclined to think that this
union is the result of the emission of a life-generating fluid into the body of
another person, that this is when and how this mystical connection and union is
formed.
But then I think about all the modern forms of contraception
that either block or kill the living parts of this fluid, and I wonder how this
affects that.
And then I think about a phenomenon I have seen over and
over again in my life. A girl will have
her first full sexual experience, and she is changed. This man could be and often is a complete
jerk, but she is in love. But more than
just being in love, she is hooked. Everybody else sees and knows that this guy
is a jerk, but she will have none of this.
Unless or until this person completely rejects or hurts her, she will
hold on to this person as long as she can, and I wonder if she can ever really
let him go.
After this first encounter, if this person is no longer a
part of her life, sex can almost lose any really special meaning for this
woman. First date, second date, it’s
more than a hug, it’s not given away cheaply, at least a dinner or two first,
but then often it can be there for the asking.
Just ask nicely or maybe wait until she has had a few drinks.
But something else happens here. Our whole culture has separated sex from
marriage. Without the instruction
manual, without a God in our lives who has the plan for how this is all
supposed to work and who expects us to live according to that plan, we are left
with a human experience, clearly the most pleasurable one we can have apart
perhaps from certain drugs, we are left with what we want to make of it, what
we want to do with it.
Apart from a God who we can’t see, can’t touch physically,
don’t hear audibly, we find these impulses and desires, and we look for answers
on what to do with them. But who can
tell us what is right or wrong, good or bad, wise or foolish here? It’s our life, we want to do it, and who’s to
say what we should or shouldn’t do?
But what is marriage all about anyway? Is it just the vehicle for having
children?
This shouldn’t require a lot of Bible verses to help us
here. The fact is that people get
married and divorced all the time. We
used to make it a lot harder to get divorced in the past, because we valued
marriage more in the past. We knew the
value of the family in raising children, even when marriages were
struggling.
Marriage is clearly about a lot more than having sex. In talking with some single friends about
marriage, I identified about six subjects that I suggested two people need to
talk about and resolve before they should think about getting married:
religion, sex, children, money, values (what is important to you), and how you
spend your free time. You can add other
things as well.
I suggest not getting involved with someone too early in
your life. Say, for example, after you
and your partner have been long involved sexually and emotionally, you decide that
you want to be a rock star. So now you
want to travel for months at a time, and your wife wants you home every night
with her and the kids. There’s going to
be a problem here. You usually don’t
know what you are going to do with your life when you’re young. Even if you do, you don’t know if you
actually will end up doing that either.
But what does this all have to do with sex?
Sex is meant to unite people on a spiritual and emotional level. I contend that we don’t understand all that
that entails. We can’t see the spirit
world. Something happens when people
have sex. Oh, it can be stifled. It can be dulled. I heard a pornstar talking about how she felt
when she saw her boyfriend holding hands with somebody else. Sex had become recreation and casual, and
something else had become the sign of bonding and commitment.
So, yes, I would say that getting married is part of the
program. I believe that God’s plan for
human beings is to get married with very few exceptions. The Apostle Paul thought he was an exception. I believe it is an essential part of becoming
all that God intends for us to become.
God created a man in the Garden of Eden where he had complete access to
and fellowship with God in a perfect world, and then God says that it is not
good for the man to be alone. If man in
a perfect state in a perfect world needed a wife, how much more today?
But marriage involves a lot more than having sex. Like I told one friend of mine, after you
have sex, you have to talk to each other.
People have sex, and even if sex has lost that emotional bonding felt
with first love, there is still a sense of unity and a bond of persons. But then in real life, there are all those
other issues that two people need to be in harmony on if they are to have a marriage:
agreeing on religion, sex (how often, how important, how done, etc.), children
(how many, how to raise). money (save, spend, mine or ours), values (eating
right, exercise, what you live for), would you rather go out with the guys or
come home every night.
These are all issues that should be cleared up before
getting married. In the past, these
might have been less of an issue, because there were more clearly defined roles
in marriage. People got married younger,
and they were more adaptable when they were younger.
But then I believe sex screws up your mind.
You feel the bond and the love, but these other issues won’t
go away. The attraction, the feelings,
the love, and the desire for sex generally will long precede any discussions
about how you divide your money, whether you want a joint checking and savings account
or whether your money should remain totally separate. So using your head, you might think that
there are so many potential irreconcilable differences, but you are in love,
and you can make it. If you knew all
these things before you got involved with this person, you wouldn’t have gotten
involved with them in the first place.
Think of it like speed dating or finding love on the internet. You meet all these people or see all these
pictures of attractive people. You could
feel chemistry and desire sex with almost all of them given the right circumstances. But instead, everyone lists their interests
and you immediately eliminate 95% of them from consideration. But if you knew them from work and didn’t
know all these things ahead of time, you might long ago already have had sex
with them and bonded before you even got so far as knowing all their interests.
Half the marriages today end in divorce, and I doubt any of
them thought they would have ended up that way when they started. And you really don’t want to put your kids
through a divorce. Trust me on that one.
Children are the furthest thing from your mind when you’re
thinking about sex, but even with so much precaution and modern technology, people
are often surprised to learn that a child is forthcoming. Oh, you could destroy it, but then you may find
yourself wondering in ten, twenty years what that child would have been
like. Some people seem able to live with
that, but many aren’t. And I’m not sure
you will know which you would be until long after you are able to do anything
about it.
Today more than ever people are living together without
being married. You get some of the
benefits of being married without actually being married.
People usually live together, because they aren’t sure if
this is the person they should marry, and they think this will help them make
that decision. Or they just don’t have a
reason not to. The problem is that
though it looks a lot like marriage, it lacks two of the most important elements
of marriage, so it won’t give you all the information you are looking for. This is probably why more people who lived
together before they get married get divorced than those who don’t.
People living together don’t have the commitment that is
necessary to make a marriage work. That’s
one reason why they didn’t get married in the first place. They won’t be trying as hard now to make it
work. And because there is no
commitment, people generally cannot and will not fully be themselves. It’s a little like you’re still dating. You’re still trying to make a good impression. People living together know that they don’t have
to stay in this relationship. It need
only be temporary. It’s like that test
drive on that new car you want. If you
find something you don’t like, you don’t have to keep it.
When people choose to live together, they are forming a half
marriage. They are investing their lives
in something that is just as likely to fail as to succeed. And their experience together won’t really
help them to know which it is going to be.
They run the risk of having children which will bind them together
though they may not be the person they should be binding themselves to.
The fact of living together will make it harder for them to
know what they should do and to do it.
Their lives will become so enmeshed and tangled that trying to separate
them later on may seem to be more trouble than it is worth. And the time they spend living together will
take a huge part of their life that take a huge price.
Learn the things you need to learn about each other before
taking the step. Talk through these deep
issues. Marriage is more the gritty day
to day stuff than intense feelings of passion.
Pretend you’re on a speed date, and see if you would make it past the
first round. Make internet profiles, and
see if this person is someone that you would contact.
The younger generation is far more casual about sex than
older generations. Take a survey. Ask the young men you know if they would
rather marry a virgin or somebody who has already had maybe some of their
friends. It seems most would rather
marry a virgin, but they have no problem being somebody’s first in order to
satisfy their craving for it.
So, contrary to the casual nature of sex as seen on
television and in movies, sex is the tool God uses to join two people together
for life to create and form the next generation. This union is not just for creating and
forming the next generation though, but it also forms our own lives and increases
our own enjoyment of it.
The pressure from society can be immense to just do what you
feel like and any call for restraint or ‘traditional’ thinking can seem
strange. But any time you try to bring
God’s perspective on anything in life, you can expect that it will often stretch
our thinking and ask us to trust Him where we might want to have different
thoughts. That’s just the nature of
humans and God looking at the same issues.
