Why not boldness rather than bashfulness in our
approach to sex? Christians, of all people, should be so open about the
physical wonders of human gender and reproduction that it makes the world’s
treatment of these subjects seem prudish in comparison. We owed it to the
Designer of the human body to have developed such expertise and excellence in
the realm of sex education that secular authorities would resort to us
for in-depth informational and audio-visual teaching materials, rather than
vice versa. In this crucial area of stewardship, the church has not only failed
our Lord but left a promiscuous modern society to flounder in a more diabolical
degree of sexual confusion than history has ever known.
Why didn’t we take our cue from God’s Word in this
area? The very first words God uses to state how humans reflect His image are
not the commonly assumed aspects of personality (ie., reason, emotion,
volition, etc.), but physical gender! (Re-read Genesis 1:27, and if you don’t say “Ouch!” you’re
in theological denial!) Yes, He did equip us rationally for the task of
governing creation, but His very first command to us in Genesis 1:28 was what? To reproduce!
If God’s very first words about His purpose
for humans—that is, procreativity from sexual union between complementary
genders—aren’t sufficient to gain our attention, maybe we’ll listen to His
last words. There’s someone who joins the Holy Spirit in the last few sentences
of Scripture (Revelation 22:17) to invite sinners to salvation? It’s “the
Bride,” the Church, the corporate “wife of the Lamb.” The present symbolism of
gender and sexual union ultimately find fulfillment in our spiritual union with
Christ the Bridegroom. But until then, God has placed marriage as the Bible’s
bookends for the redemption story, and right in the middle of it all is an
erotic drama portraying just how sensually passionate He means for His
symbolism to be (Song of Songs)! If both temporal and eternal marriage have such centrality in
God’s mind, where have our minds been? When it comes to dealing with the
fleshly dust from which God fashioned sexual body parts and their physical
union, it’s obvious that our minds have been in the gutter.
Far from honoring the human body and it’s gender
distinctions as sacred ground, we’ve religiously depicted them as avenues of
temptation and lust. Our confident legalisms and manmade scruples to insure
purity and morality have basically pornified the body! By redefining our
physical forms and our sex organs as obscenities, we’ve paved the way for
pornographers to defile that which was meant to be part of our Trinitarian
Maker’s Self-portrait. With a prudish brush we’ve painted a lewd image of the
sexuality through which God intended to proclaim His message of redemption. If
this theological error is not sin, then missing the mark has lost
its meaning!
Sexuality wasn’t created as an end in itself. It was
intended, first, to image the Trinity’s unity in divine love and cosmic
creativity through marital love and human procreativity. The sexuality of our
complementary genders was meant to prophetically display the future one-flesh
union we will enjoy with the incarnate Son of God, our Bridegroom. Why have we
neglected or ignored these aspects of God’s emphasis on sexuality in Scripture?
Perhaps they would have been more easily recognized, if Christian minds had not
been culturally mesmerized through early Gnostic influences that heretically
despised the material world and the physical body. But just as heretical, and
even more blinding, has been the Protestant church’s wholesale religious
embrace of the false standards of Victorian prudery.
It’s way past time for Christian repentance in this
area. The need for reformation in the church’s view and treatment of the body’s
gender and sexuality has never been greater nor more urgent. Embarrassing as it
may be for Christian leaders to confess to bowing down for so long before the
idol of cultural Victorianism—difficult as it may be for the average believer’s
mind to be purged of the rituals of such idolatry—we can still return to the
healing Word of God. The truth in Scripture about our bodies and their gendered
sexuality has the power to set the church free from an unholy prudery and to
equip saints with the transforming message our sex-obsessed, gender-confused,
marriage-deforming world needs to hear.
[For an even more thorough critique of our failure
to deal properly with the human body and its sexuality, I challenge you to read
my doctrinal paper on this subject: “Incarnational Truth about Humanity’s Sexual Nature (Doing
Body-friendly Theology Free from Gnostic Prudery).”]
