Sex Belongs to Believers
Hollywood has ripped the curtains off the sacred marriage bed and turned a luxuriant, holy pleasure into a cheap spectator sport. So we might be tempted to think that sex is so sinfully misused, maybe we should have nothing to do with it. The Bible says the opposite.
In 1 Timothy 4:1–5, Paul confronts certain ascetic false teachers who believed that sex in marriage and eating foods freely were at best for second-class Christianity. Paul called these false teachings demonic.
First, the false teaching, as Paul summarizes it in verses 1–2 and the first part of verse 3:
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods . . .
Then, Paul’s response, starting in the middle of verse 3:
. . . that [that is, the marriage and the food] God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
For those who know the truth of the gospel and who revel in the word of God concerning the all-satisfying glory of God, and who pray (Hallowed by your name!) and dedicate everything to God, the sex of marriage and the pleasures of food are made holy — that is, they are set apart from the sinful use of the world and made pure and precious and beautiful by participation in the goodness of God.
Unembarrassed by the Bible
We are not supposed to be embarrassed by the forthright sensuality of sexual love in marriage as the Bible portrays it — sometimes graphically.
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD, and he ponders all his paths. (Proverbs 5:18–21)
It is no shame that “a man’s ways are before the Lord” as her breasts fill him at all times with delight. This is why God made her that way and him that way. In fact, that this delight in her is “before” the Lord — in the presence of the Lord — points to the truth that all our joy in what God has made is meant to be a delight in God. There is something of his glory in all the glories of the world.
We are not meant to revel in his creation instead of him or more than in him but because of him, and because there is something of him in all that is good and beautiful. The heavens are telling the glory of God. We are to see it. And worship him. So it is with the breasts of our wives. The breasts are telling the glory of God, the goodness of God, the beauty of God, and more. We are to see it. And worship him.
