The Inseparable Mystery

John could scarcely believe his eyes. After all the patchwork visions, now appeared the simple image of a Father's canopy, beneath which stood a bride to one side and a groom to the other. John blinked. And then he no longer understood. To one side: a royal horseman aflame, a roaring lion that could swallow worlds, a gold-belted priest offering up galaxies, a living tempest storming from before the first heartbeat of time. Opposite him: the most radiant woman, with a flowing gown of white linen just like her groom's long robe... but she was a city, a church, a creation, containing multitudes, gathering up into herself all things made to last, and now gleaming far beyond all gold and every gem, wrapped in the Most High's very own glory. The thunderous cry began to go up all around. “Hallelujah!” “The Lord God Almighty reigns!” “The marriage of the Lamb!” “His Bride has made herself ready!” (Revelation 19:6-7).

She stepped toward the center of the canopy, descending the stairs out of heaven, “beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun” (Song of Songs 6:10), “lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners” (Song 6:4). “All glorious is the princess in her chamber, with robes interwoven in gold; in many-colored robes she is led to the king” (Psalm 45:13-14). Then the groom stepped toward her as well, shining with the same light, “anointed... with the oil of gladness..., [his] robes all fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia” (Psalm 45:7-8), “crowned” for “the day of his wedding, the day of the gladness of his heart” (Song 3:11).

And with a piercing voice, the groom shouted, “'Behold, you are beautiful, my love!' (Song 4:1). 'You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride, you have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace.' (Song 4:9). 'You are altogether beautiful, my love, there is no flaw in you!' (Song 4:7). 'Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away, for behold, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone' (Song 2:10-11), 'death shall be no more, neither shall there be... crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away' (Revelation 21:4). 'Look, I'm making all things new' (Revelation 21:5): 'the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come... Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away!' (Song 2:13).”

And the bride – well, what can she do? She spreads her arms wide, she leaps to him, and she shouts aloud, “'I am my Beloved's, and,' at last, 'my Beloved is mine!' (Song 6:3). 'Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is better than wine!… Your name is oil poured out!' (Song 1:2-3). So 'make haste, my Beloved!' (Song 8:14).” And with that, the two became – infinitely beyond imagination – one, for all eternity.

John sees here the end for which all things were made, the destiny the whole sweep of scripture makes clear. History is leading up to an everlasting honeymoon, and in the wedding that will tie up all history, the groom is Jesus Christ, and his lovely bride is the Church, in all her spiritual and corporate reality. And that is what the entire story of the entire universe has been, and is, and always will be, about. From the very dawn of creation, God was announcing nothing less. He foreshadowed it from the instant he opened the side of Adam and brought forth for him an Eve. As Paul says, “This mystery is profound” – the mystery of Adam and Eve, the mystery of marriage itself – “and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:32).

Over the past couple weeks, we've said repeatedly that the standard for marriage is the life of Eden. Now what becomes equally clear is that the life of Eden was itself a window on the marvels of Eden-to-Come, the mystery of Christ and his Church, the Lamb and his Bride. And that means every marriage is meant to take its cues from Christ and the Church, matchless love and redemptive beauty. Christ and the Church are the very blueprint of marriage since before Eden, the blueprint upon which Adam and Eve were designed, to say nothing of all of us!¹

Paul's treatment of the mystery unrolls for us at least seven features of the blueprint for marriage. First of all, marital love is born in self-sacrifice. Marriage is, fundamentally, about the cross. Christ's blood was the bride-price for the Church: he “gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25), “bought” her redemption “with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20). And likewise, husband and wife are summoned to sacrifice in one another's service for the sake of God: to patiently bear suffering for one another, to give themselves to and for one another, to persevere through the most paralyzing trials – that is where marriage reaches its roots.

Second, marriage involves cleansing. The Church became betrothed to Christ when he “cleansed her by the washing of water by the word” (Ephesians 5:26). Like God said to Israel, “I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil” (Ezekiel 16:9). And when that bath is given to the Church, that's baptism, the “washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5) which “now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21). Each of us experiences it at different times from our limited perspective, but they're all part of a single seamless action of Jesus Christ. And on that blueprint, wife and husband are summoned to cleanse each other from the stains of their past, the seasons they've been bloodied and dirtied, to speak healing over one another.

Third, marriage seeks to nourish. One of the next gifts Christ brings to the Church is to “nourish” her, feed her (Ephesians 5:29). As God said to Israel, “I fed you with fine flour and oil and honey..., my bread that I gave you” (Ezekiel 16:19). Here, Paul has in mind the gift of communion, the eucharist, the bread and wine, the body and blood of the Bridegroom, in which Christ feeds the Church with his very own substance, his flesh for her flesh, which is always good for her and never hurtful. On this blueprint, husband and wife should feed each other with every lawful fruit of the garden, should ensure each other nourishment, should sustain one another.

Fourth, marriage seeks to cherish. Another thing Christ does for the Church, Paul says, is to “cherish” her – he literally says, Christ “keeps her warm” (Ephesians 5:29). He clothes the Church. As God said to Israel, “I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with fine leather; I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk” (Ezekiel 16:10). Christ clothed the Church with robes of righteousness like clean linen (Revelation 19:18), “clothed [the Church] with Power from on high,” the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49). The fire of the Spirit's love burns deep in the Church's belly. On that blueprint, husband and wife should keep each other warm through the coldest nights of life, nurturing and caring for one another with utmost tenderness.

Fifth, marriage seeks intimacy and closeness. Paul hints that Christ loves the Church as his own flesh and bone, an extension of his very soul and self – an incredible thing to think, when Christ is God! And it is natural, given that Christ and Church are one, for them to passionately seek and desire closeness, for them to lean toward the consummation beyond comprehension. And so, Paul says, “in the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies,” and vice versa (Ephesians 5:28). A body isn't meant to be away from itself. Husband and wife, building from the blueprint, will naturally seek and desire to be close at every level. Emptying themselves to fill themselves with each other, each will say, “Not only I but my spouse lives in me” (cf. Galatians 2:20).

Sixth, marriage seeks to beautify. Christ is working to prepare the Church with a purity she can't muster on her own. He aims to “present the Church to himself in glory, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:27). Paul's speaking of the Church's glorification, the splendor of heaven in her. And on that blueprint, husband and wife are summoned to help each other be beautiful, to enrich each other, bring out the best in each other, journey together on the voyage into the heart of glory.

Finally, marriage is meant to be unbroken and unbreakable. Christ already gave everything to the Church (Ephesians 5:25). Having seen the end in advance, we have absolute assurance that Christ is not going to call off the wedding. And it isn't just that he will not. Paul tells us that Christ “remains faithful” to his Church because “he cannot deny himself,” cannot reject the Church who is his own flesh (2 Timothy 2:13). He is Truth, and his vow to marry her is an “unchangeable thing... in which it is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18). By vowing himself to marry the Church, he's made it literally impossible for him to leave the marriage. In that regard, the Church has perfect eternal security as Church, as the predestined Bride of the Lamb.

Now, to look around, it might seem as though there's a risk of the Church getting cold feet and calling it off! After all, individual Christians certainly do, even congregations do. They desert Christ. They fool around with false gods and pestilential powers. They play the harlot on every high hill. They fall away from their first love. They divorce themselves from their God. Individuals may, groups may. But the Church, the Church as a whole, will not call off the marriage. God's word of love did not return to him void (cf. Isaiah 55:11). The vow by which Christ bound himself also binds him to give grace that guarantees the indefectibility of his Church. The Church, anchored in that grace, is prevented by the Holy Spirit from quitting – she cannot strand Christ alone at heaven's altar, cannot finally elope with any of her woeful worldly suitors. As one ancient Christian mused, “The Church has obtained her Bridegroom; she cannot marry another.”² And that being so, on the blueprint, husband and wife neither will nor can cancel the marriage once it's begun.

But Adam and Eve lit flame to the blueprint. Sin entered the world, and their sons and daughters were too weak to carry the weight of that structure of marriage on their shoulders. They could not manage marriage as it really is. The nations, in their pagan straying, were “alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that's in them due to their hardness of heart” (Ephesians 4:18). Even “all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart” (Ezekiel 3:7). “Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives,” Jesus explained (Matthew 19:8). That is, God temporarily refrained from holding them to his true standard. He let them get away with their Jenga towers, he refrained from enforcing the building code in full, until the day he'd bring the grace that would empower them. Then he'd lay out the blueprint again.

And that has now happened. Christ entered the world, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Jesus revoked the Law's concessions to our hardheartedness. “From the beginning, it was not so,” nor is it any longer, for Christ overturned the concession with his “And I say to you...” (Matthew 19:8-9). So make careful note of this: It is entirely possible that the laws of the nations will say that some things are marriages when God says that they aren't. (In our day and age, we know at least some cases where this is happening.) But it's equally possible that the laws of the nations will say that some things aren't marriages when God says that they are. Legality in mortal law and validity in heaven's court are two distinguishable (and, alas, separable) things.

Jesus Christ taught that Christian marriage now really does receive the grace to make the endless mystery of Christ and his Church visibly present. Each marriage in the Lord is a parable that tells the story of the universe. And since Christ and his Church are unbroken and unbreakable, both forever having renounced the possibility of renouncing the other, every Christian marriage is lifted toward that standard – that's why, at every wedding, a necessary part of the vows made before God is confessing that no force can dissolve the union but death. And so Jesus teaches clearly, emphatically, firmly against divorce.³ “The wife should not separate from her husband... and the husband should not divorce his wife” (1 Corinthians 7:10-11).

In fact, when we take a close look at the Gospels, we find that Jesus was very specific about some of the kinds of wrong that can take place. Jesus said that “everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery” (Luke 16:18a), that “whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her” (Mark 10:11). “If she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:12). “Everyone who divorces his wife... makes her commit adultery” (Matthew 5:32a). “He who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery” (Luke 16:18b), “whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5:32b). What all this means is that the original marriage bond of first husband and first wife survives the verdict of the earthly court, whether they realize it or not. Therefore, any attempted marriage by either one after the divorce is not a marriage, Jesus says, but an adultery. God joined together the first valid marriage, and “what God has joined together, let no human being separate” (Mark 10:9; Matthew 19:6).

Now, that is absolutely a hard saying! And Jesus' disciples thought so, too. When they heard him teach it, they objected, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it's better not to marry!” (Matthew 19:10). To be united with someone so closely, to give up the power of the escape hatch – the disciples were scared to do that. But Jesus didn't back down. And once he'd poured out the Holy Spirit on them, they faithfully relayed his teaching to others, even as they found grace enough to live it themselves (cf. 1 Corinthians 9:5).

And the early church received the teaching and believed it, too. Listen to their voices: “Anyone married shouldn't seek divorce.”⁴ “God didn't intend the united body to be divided and split in two.”⁵ “Of our own free will, we cleave to the bond of single marriage... We're content with one wife or with none.”⁶ “Those who, by human law, make second marriages are – according to our Teacher – sinners.”⁷ “We are... concerned... either to stay in the state in which a man was born or to remain satisfied with one marriage, for a second marriage is gilded adultery. … He who detaches himself from his previous wife... is a covert adulterer. He thwarts the hand of God (because, in the beginning, God formed one man and one woman), and he destroys the communion of flesh with flesh in the unity characteristic of the intercourse of the sexes.”⁸ “If there is somebody who has a wife, or a woman who has a husband, so should they be taught that the man be contented with his wife, and the wife with her husband.”⁹

So far, all clear. (And that is very clear and consistent, isn't it, what the Christians closest to Jesus all taught about marriage?) But Matthew expands what Jesus has said. “Everyone who divorces his wife except on the ground of porneia makes her commit adultery” (Matthew 5:32). “Whoever divorces his wife except for porneia and marries another commits adultery” (Matthew 19:9). What did Jesus mean there? Are there valid divorces?

I've been studying for months and years, and I've come across seven real options for what's going on here in Matthew and what it means. Here's Option #1: When Jesus says 'except,' that's Matthew's way of having Jesus refuse to get in the middle of a fight among Pharisees. Jesus' teaching is so radical that he's making their debate pointless. It's as if Jesus is saying here, “I'm not even going to open up the door to talking about exceptions based on your debates over that word.” On this view, a valid marriage would be indissoluble – period. Can't be broken. No need to raise an argument. Any divorce is ruled out, 100%.¹⁰ That's Option 1.

Got that? Well, here's Option #2: When Jesus says 'porneia,' he's referring to impediments to marriage that render the initial marriage as having been unlawful in the first place – the things Leviticus objects to, like (for example) if the marriage was between an uncle and his niece. Invalidity of the original marriage would then be the only basis for divorce (which is then annulment). But a valid marriage is indissoluble. No valid marriage can be divorced in God's court.¹¹

Does that work for you? Here's Option #3: When Jesus says 'porneia,' he's referring to sexual misconduct in the betrothal period, what we'd today call engagement. But in Jewish law, betrothal was a legally binding contract. You needed a divorce to get out of it. Given Jewish law and the story of Joseph, Matthew has to qualify Jesus' words to say that a betrothal can end in divorce for that reason. But once betrothal becomes a valid marriage, it can't be broken: it binds both parties for life.¹²

How about Option #4? In this one, when Jesus makes an exception, he's highlighting cases of divorce that took place before the person converted and joined the church. In that case, when a divorce took place in a person's pre-Christian past, that prior marriage and divorce can be disregarded when it comes to the convert's freedom to marry a fellow believer. But valid marriages between two Christians can't be dissolved: they bind for life.¹³

Things change when we get to Option #5. In this view, when Jesus says 'porneia,' he's talking about adultery, talking about unfaithfulness in the marriage. On this ground, the offended spouse who's been cheated on is permitted to divorce the offender. However, this doesn't fully and entirely dissolve the marriage in God's eyes; it has only limited power in heaven's court. Therefore, neither party is free to remarry as long as the other one is living. All second marriages contracted while the first spouse is alive will therefore be invalid.¹⁴ Divorce (in the earthly legal sense), sometimes; remarriage, never.

And when we get to Option #6, things change even further. Again, in this view, Jesus is making an exception to his ban on divorce in the case of adultery, unfaithfulness in the marriage. Again, on this ground, the offended spouse is permitted to divorce the offender. But in this view, a divorce on the grounds of adultery really does dissolve the marriage. The offended party is therefore free to remarry even while the other former spouse is still alive. However, that is the only lawful basis for divorce followed by remarriage.¹⁵

Finally, there's Option #7, which is a lot like #6. But in this view, Jesus has really changed nothing from the Old Testament. Divorce is valid in case any of the biblical marriage vows are violated, such as vows of food, clothing, and intimacy (or, today we'd say, material support and emotional support). Therefore, on any of those grounds, the offended spouse is permitted to divorce the offender. This really does dissolve the marriage, on this view, and either party is then free to remarry even while the other former spouse is alive. However, only this group of lawful reasons for divorce exists, and divorces for other reasons are still invalid.¹⁶

Those are the seven interpretations I've seen put forward. The first four rule out divorce altogether. The first five rule out remarriage. The sixth and seventh just restrict divorce and remarriage, either to cases of adultery alone (#6) or to tangible violations of any of the marriage vows (#7). But which one is right? What did Jesus actually mean? Which is the right rule? I'd love to be able to tell you. But I don't know. And I'm not going to stand up here and pretend I do. When I preached on this topic five years ago, I was a man totally convicted of Seven, the most permissive possibility. But that's an outlier. Six has more modern support. Two is defended by some respectable scholars. Three and Four can't be counted out. And Five has been the majority reading for almost the entire history of Christianity, and that's so immensely hard to argue with, I personally would have to trust it as a safe bet, and could not in good conscience presume on anything more permissive than that to be true.

We could debate the possibilities for days. And they do matter, especially between 5 and 6 and 7. But our real problem is that neither country nor church believes in any of them. Over the past few years, we've been prone to complain greatly about how our culture has decided to redefine marriage. And that's true! America is guilty of redefining marriage, which isn't hers to create in the first place. But same-sex marriage wasn't the start of that trend. No-fault divorce laws were as big a turning point, starting when California's were signed into law in 1969 by Gov. Reagan (yes, that Reagan). Everything else in American marriage law and marriage culture today is downstream from that signature. But even that was not the beginning. Stretching back centuries, people have thrown away marriages and tried to start new ones (valid or invalid), with scarcely a moment's thought to what Jesus said.

So where does that put us? Some of us have kept up the law of Christ in this. Maybe you're content without a spouse – either because you never married or because the bonds of marriage were dissolved by death, and so you're free, if you wish, to live the angelic life for heaven's kingdom. Or maybe you're content with your one spouse, the only one who walks this earth, one living wife or husband in Christ, and in that way, the two of you live a parable of the Great Mystery. And that is holy.

But for all of us, it hasn't been so. Some of us have, tragically, been divorced under the laws of man. Your wife or your husband vowed to be with you until death parted you, but he or she walked away from that commitment and broke that vow or behave in ways that made it impossibly dangerous, to you or your children, to share room and board any longer. So mortal law divorced you, decreed you separated. But maybe that mortal law didn't have power to dissolve that bond. Maybe you know God's court in heaven didn't ratify that divorce. And you know the words of Paul, that if you've had to separate, it falls to husband and wife alike “to remain unmarried or else be reconciled” to one another (1 Corinthians 7:11). You obey that word. And you please the Lord.

Yet some of us may realize we haven't obeyed that word. Maybe you didn't know the word was there. Maybe you weren't thinking with the mind of Christ at the time. You've been divorced by mortal law and have even attempted another marriage, even though you still had a living husband or wife in the eyes of God, and maybe still do. And now you realize that Jesus, gently but firmly, speaks from the Gospel page that this is adultery.

What can you do? What does repentance look like, if you entered an invalid union, and yet it turns out that your first bond is still valid, undissolved? Some might say that repentance involves legally severing ties – a divorce of the invalid union. Others might say that repentance doesn't need that, just a physical separation of household – moving out.¹⁷ Still others might say that neither legal divorce nor separation of household is necessary, but that it's enough to live together in continence, to end the sexual dimension of the relationship, and so to recognize one another as not husband and wife in God's eyes.¹⁸ Others think that only the initial act of remarriage was an act of adultery, not the later relationship. So some think that it's enough to have sorrow and contrition over the act of adultery and to undergo a season of penance, but then the couple can live as husband and wife.¹⁹ And still others think that the season of penance isn't necessary – that repentance can be a quick and easy apology to God, after which God will happily and indulgently let the new couple get on with their life together, regardless of what other spouse may still be out there, still actually married to you in God's eyes.²⁰

For my part, I wish I could tell you God is calling only for one of the easier, gentler roads of repentance people have envisioned – that wouldn't be too painful, wouldn't put too many demands on your lives. It sure would be nice if repentance were always easy to complete. But... then here comes Jesus, and he starts talking about denying ourselves and carrying a cross and following him (Mark 8:34). It's oh-so-easy for us to preach that to others – to people with same-sex attraction, or to people who desire a spouse but struggle to find one! We find it easy to lecture them – sometimes rather smugly – about the way of the cross, don't we? But perhaps Jesus was talking to us, too. Maybe he's getting more personal than we find bearable. Maybe he says we've failed to practice what we preach. And maybe that sense of discomfort you're feeling now could be conviction, and a sense that this calls for far more prayer than you ever dreamed it did. Maybe real repentance in such a sensitive area of life will have to be so radical, it'll feel like getting crucified. And maybe nothing less than radical repentance will save us from a broad road that leads ever further down.

Whatever the details of what Jesus said, and however he invites us to fully repent of having broken them, what we can all agree on is this: that we Christians should, as a rule, be known as a people who live out the mystery of marriage – a people who treat our bonds as no more breakable than Christ's love for the Church, who treat our spouses as our very own flesh to be respected and nourished and cherished, who spur one another on to deeper holiness and health, and who live to make the good news a little bit more believable in the world (and, yes, that includes by how we marry and how we value our marriages).

But whether you're married or not ultimately doesn't matter, for whatever your state in life, you have the same call: to live toward that Great Mystery. Live toward the mystery of a Christ whose love can never let the Church go, nor can leave any opening for the Church's final love to ever let go of him. Our marriages are meant to be training grounds for, scale models of, and pathways to that Great Mystery. So above all else, let us be just “sick with love” for our Jesus (Song 2:5; 5:8)! And may the world know it by how we live, in marriage or in singleness, toward the Great Mystery – by the blueprint. Amen.

A Love That Keeps Faith

It was 1632, and Robert Barker was brought into court at the Palace of Westminster. He was on trial, and things were serious. All for printing a Bible. Oh, don't get me wrong: Barker had every right to print a Bible. He was, in fact, the only authorized publisher of Bibles in the realm of England; he had the very coveted exclusive rights to do that. This time, however, neither bishop nor king were happy with his work. It was William Laud, bishop of London, who first caught what he'd done, and brought it to the attention of King Charles. By the end of the year, Barker would see this particular run of Bibles recalled as a defective and dangerous product to be burnt, and he himself would face a fine the equivalent of about $70,000 today. All for a typographical blunder.

Now what typo could so scandalize church and crown? Early printed Bibles were always riddled with typos. But this typo, however simple, was important. It's made the few surviving copies that escaped the recall into collectors' items. In the Ten Commandments, the last word you want to leave out is 'not.' Robert Barker's crime, for which he'd eventually go to prison and have to sell off his rights to publish Bibles at all? Releasing into circulation a Bible that read, “Thou shalt commit adultery!” Is it any wonder the courts stepped in?

These days, there are a few places you can visit to see Barker's blunder – the Museum of the Bible down in DC has a copy, and I've seen that perilous page. But why's it such a big deal? Because marriage, which adultery violates, is a big deal. So what is marriage, exactly? One recent definition is that marriage is, at its natural minimum, “a union between one man and one woman which is exclusive, permanent, and open to life.”¹ And that's simple, short, and sweet. I also like this longer definition: Marriage is “a comprehensive union... joining spouses in body as well as in mind..., begun by consent and sealed by sexual intercourse..., especially apt for and deepened by procreation,” calling for “that broad sharing of domestic life uniquely fit for family life,” which therefore “objectively calls for all-encompassing commitment: permanent and exclusive.”²

Even more could be said, but either works as a starting point. This thing called 'marriage' is a reality created and instituted by none other than God. And what God decreed was a structured kind of relationship in which a man and a woman were to 'cleave' to one another – they glue together, become one another's other self, nearest kin, the other's highest earthly loyalty, commanded by God himself to put one another first among all creation (Genesis 2:24). Physically, emotionally, socially, they're to be bonded tighter than any other two things you can find. Such it was in Eden, and the life of Eden is our model for holy and healthy sex and sexuality even now.

At its best, marriage is free, total, faithful, and fruitful – that is, the husband and wife freely chose each other and freely choose to grow together; the husband and wife share themselves unreservedly with each other; the husband and wife reserve themselves always for each other exclusively; and the husband and wife are open and welcoming to God's gift of new life in his time and in his way.³ These are the things that make marriage the only appropriate outlet for our sexual activity. And they call for our sexual behavior to accord with and respect what marriage is, and the holiness of the One who built that marriage bed for us. That's why it's written for us in the Scriptures: “Let the marriage bed be undefiled” (Hebrews 13:4), uncontaminated by what's unethical and impure, preserved from being a scene of sexual sin against or even within the marriage.

The New Testament talks often of what we usually translate as 'sexual immorality,' what the King James Version called by the good Latin word 'fornication.' It's just one word in Greek: porneia. And in classical Greek, porneia literally meant 'prostitution.' But the New Testament lumps all kinds of sexual misbehavior as porneia. Last Sunday, we covered some kinds of porneia, like bestiality, homosexuality, and incest. But it also covers promiscuity, premarital sex, and more. All get thrown in the basket labeled 'porneia,' 'sexual immorality.'

That's why the Apostle Paul warns, “Don't you know that he who cleaves to a prostitute becomes one body with her?” (1 Corinthians 6:16). That is, sexually uniting with someone outside the marriage covenant still has that gluing effect, and still (however temporarily) identifies your body (which, if you're a Christian, is a temple of the Holy Spirit [1 Corinthians 6:19]) with the other person's body. And therefore, Paul adds, “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). The more sexual partners a person has before getting married, the higher the statistical likelihood of adultery after marriage.⁴ “The body is not meant for sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:13). So all these things are in view when Paul says, “This is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you possess his own vessel in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who don't know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things..., for God has not called us in impurity but in holiness” (1 Thessalonians 4:3-7).

Now, marriage isn't for everyone. It might be hard to get that through our heads, even though Paul told the Corinthians that “he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better,” if that refraining is for the sake of the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 7:3-8). And yet that isn't to diminish the value of marriage in God's plan for us. The Bible calls marriage a “covenant” (Malachi 2:14), a family-creating bond built on solemn oaths. In Hebrews, we read, “Let marriage be held in honor among all” (Hebrews 13:4). Since man and woman become one body in marriage, neither keeps the right to do with his or her sexual life just whatever he or she sees fit: “The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Corinthians 7:4). In marriage, we're called to learn together what it means to show love and to be satisfied by and in one another: “Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well” (Proverbs 5:15).

So one of the people discipled by the apostles declared that “it is proper for those men and women who are marrying to form their union with the consent of the bishop,” their local pastor, “so that their marriage may be in accordance with the Lord and not out of desire. Let everything be done for the honor of God. … Instruct my sisters to love the Lord and to be satisfied with their spouses in flesh and spirit. Similarly, charge my brothers, in the name of Jesus Christ, to love their spouses as the Lord loves the Church.”⁵ The early Christians wrote that when Christ returned, he'd bring a special reward for his people “who love marriage and refrain from adultery” (Sibylline Oracles 2.53). There's that word again: 'Adultery.'

Adultery, at its core meaning, is sexual misbehavior that bursts outside of an existing marriage covenant, disrupting or intruding into at least one marriage relationship. A husband is supposed to be sexually faithful to his marriage covenant with his wife, but he finds himself acting sexually with somebody else: his sexuality has leaked outside the marriage covenant, and that's adultery. A wife's sexuality leaks outside the marriage covenant with someone else, and that's adultery too. Ancient Israel, blessed with God's Law through Moses, recognized adultery as especially evil: a kind of treason against a sacred oath, a rupture in a solemn covenant, a betrayal of an intimate trust, a true injustice and a crime. Not even consent or acquiescence of the spouse could remove the immorality of adultery. No, the law was simple and plain: “You shall not commit adultery!” (Exodus 20:14).

Israel found it, first of all, to be unwise. Toying with it is like trying to hug a fire: “Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned? … So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife: none who touches her will go unpunished” (Proverbs 6:27-29). Adultery is costly: “A man's wife hunts down a precious life” (Proverbs 6:26). If adultery goes public, it destroys reputations: “He who commits adultery lacks sense; he who does it destroys himself. He will get wounds and dishonor, and his disgrace will not be wiped away” (Proverbs 6:32-33). Adultery, because it was so serious, was treated more absolutely in God's Law than in the laws of the nations. In Israel, an offended spouse had no right to pardon after conviction: “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:10).

And yet, in darker seasons in Israel's history, adultery became a commonplace sin. Hosea complains, “They are all adulterers” (Hosea 7:4). Jeremiah complains, “The land is full of adulterers” (Jeremiah 23:10). Even after the exile and return, Malachi has to warn his people: “The LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless though she's your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make you one, with a portion of the Spirit belonging to it? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring! Therefore watch out for your lives, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth” (Malachi 2:14-15). After Malachi, one Jewish writer gave four reasons for calling adultery “the greatest of crimes.” First, it flows from excessive love of pleasure, which ruins body and soul and wastes God's gifts. Second, not only is adultery evil, but since it 'takes two to tango,' it lures another body and soul into that evil. Third, it “makes havoc of three families,” because each person impacted – the two spouses and the intruder – comes from his or her own family that's deeply harmed by the shockwaves of the adultery. And fourth, not only does adultery weaken trust between spouses, but between generations when there's secrecy or suspicion over who someone's parents actually were.⁶ And so Jews of the era prayed for a Savior who'd bring righteousness, that in his kingdom there'd be “no adulteries” and no other sexual sins to be found (Sibylline Oracles 5.430).

For Christians, or even just humans who have feeling hearts, all we've said so far should hardly need saying. We should know it. We should live it. None has an excuse for regarding our marriages, or the marriages of our neighbors, as things to treat with contempt. But the sad thing to say is, many professing Christians do pretend they have an excuse. I've seen churches wrecked by it. I've been part of a church where adultery ran rampant. Between pastors and church workers. Between members of the worship team. The devastation was profound. It left long scars on the life of the church, to say nothing of the individual lives involved. It isn't for no reason that the Apostle Paul tells us “not to associate” with a Christian “if he is guilty of sexual immorality” and won't repent (1 Corinthians 5:11). These are such serious sins that they exclude the unrepentant from fellowship.

And let's be clear. The Apostle leaves no wiggle room here. “Whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God” (1 Thessalonians 4:8). Catch that? Whoever embraces sexual sin, lives by lustful passions, dishonors his or her own body and the spouse's body he or she is one flesh with – whoever does that is mistreating God. The author of Hebrews warns that “God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4). Paul urges us, “Don't be deceived!” Oh, people will try to deceive you, tell you it's no big deal, but don't listen. “Neither sexual sinners... nor adulterers... will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). “For you may be sure of this: that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure... has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God” (Ephesians 5:5). Even if your spouse never finds out, God sees. Unless you get that stain off your soul with repentance, it pits you against his kingdom. John sees “the faithless..., the sexually immoral..., their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur..., the second death” (Revelation 21:8).

And that's hard news today. A few years ago, a general social survey found that here in the United States, 20% of all husbands and 13% of all wives admitted to having committed at least one act of adultery while married.⁷ It's even more common among Americans born – guess when? The 1940s and 1950s. Americans born in those decades are increasingly adulterous. Of those who've ever been married, one in four has been guilty of adultery. And in the past decades, the percentage of older Americans who still agree that sex outside marriage is always wrong has been dropping.⁸ Don't just blame those 'kids these days'! It's their elders leading the way.

As if that weren't challenge enough, Jesus raises the bar. “It was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart!” (Matthew 5:27-28). A later rabbi echoed him, that “even he who visualizes himself in the act of adultery is called 'adulterer.'”⁹ A righteous man should be able to say, “I have not had intercourse with any woman other than my wife, nor was I sexually immoral by lustful look.”¹⁰ And what is lust? It's sexual desire treated or pursued as a good in itself, cut off from the desire to unite a whole life in marriage.

What Jesus makes clear is that adultery doesn't start between the legs or on the lips. It doesn't even start with the caressing hand or the ogling eye. It begins with a dirty heart. “For out of the heart come... adultery [and] sexual immorality” (Matthew 15:19). Where Jesus breaks new ground isn't in deeming lustful looks sexual sin, not even quite in calling lustful looks 'adultery,' but in his uncompromising insistence that the real battle is fought in the heart, and must be fought to the death. Even the dearest things in our lives, a hand or an eye, would be better to lose than to lose this fight against lust. Heaven and hell hang in the balance (Matthew 5:29-30). But it's a battle that can be won. As an early Christian said: “Lust is nurtured and vitalized if we minister to its enjoyment. On the other hand, it fades away if it's kept in check.”¹¹ We must cut lust from our hearts.

Jesus' teaching about lust is why early Christians, hoping to help their neighbors, campaigned so vigorously against popular entertainments that aimed to stoke lust (since, as we say today, 'sex sells'). One said that in the Roman world, there were so many plays that “offer classes in corruption, teaching adultery even as they present it... What are boys and girls to do when they see all these shows being put on without shame and being watched with pleasure by all? Frankly, they're being told what to do. They're being inflamed with lust, and lust is most excited visually. According to their sex, they can see themselves in the acts. In laughing at them, they're accepting them. And they go back home to bed all the more corrupted, with the vices clinging close – and I don't mean just boys (who ought to be kept out of vice early on) but even old men (who ought to be beyond such misbehavior by now).”¹² Sound at all familiar? Today's popular entertainment rivals all the Roman stage offered. In ever-more graphic terms, it presents sexual sins as positive virtues – even adultery, so long as the spouse being cheated on is made out to be dull enough, inconsiderate enough, or even just off-screen enough.

As Paul tells us, “put to death what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire” (Colossians 3:5). Following where he's pointing, the early church would tell those coming for baptism, those who wanted to be born again, that here's the deal: “The way of death is... adulteries, lusts, sexual immoralities” (Didache 5.1). “You shall not commit adultery..., you shall not be sexually immoral...” (Didache 2.2). “My child, do not be given over to passion, for lust leads to sexual immorality; nor be a speaker of base words, nor immodestly curious, for from all these, adulteries are begotten” (Didache 3.3). The earliest Christian preachers to follow the apostles said that the life of holiness requires “fleeing from... abominable and impure embraces, from... detestable lusts and foul adultery.”¹³ They commanded “to keep chastity and not let anything enter your heart about someone else's wife or about sexual immorality..., for if you do, you commit a great sin; but if you remember your own wife” or your own husband, “you will never sin.”¹⁴ Early Christians were reminded that to be self-controlled and not commit adultery was one way of confessing Jesus with our lives (2 Clement 4.3).

Even the pagans could see that Christian worship regularly included a binding oath not to commit adultery.¹⁵ It was an oath that early Christians were confident they kept. In the earliest days, defenders of Christians could honestly say that “Christians... don't commit adultery, nor sexual immorality... Their wives are pure as virgins, their daughters are modest, and their men keep themselves from every unlawful union and from all uncleanness, in the hope of a reward to come in the other world.”¹⁶ “We're so far from promiscuity that it isn't even allowed for us to look with lust.”¹⁷ “Of our own free will, we cleave to the bond of single marriage. In desire of procreation, we're content with one wife or with none.”¹⁸ Christians, they said, “take care not to corrupt the temple of God by unlawful sexual indulgence, and practice self-control as an act of piety towards God.”¹⁹

To the early Christians, these things had spiritual meanings. They knew that the prophets had accused Israel of “adultery” in chasing other gods (Hosea 2:2). Judah “polluted the land, committing adultery with stone and tree” (Jeremiah 3:9). God denounced Jerusalem as an “adulterous wife” (Ezekiel 16:32), with his prophets graphically describing her political and religious contact with foreign powers in lurid terms as “the deeds of a brazen prostitute” (Ezekiel 16:30). And yet amid Israel's adulteries, her Lord's love kept faith with her.

And each Christian realized that his or her soul was espoused to Christ, finding in him its spiritual Bridegroom. And so James is especially sharp in warning us not to seek Christ's gifts only to spend them on our lusts for our own lives. “You adulteresses!” he accuses us. “Don't you know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” (James 4:3-4). In other words, when we become so enamored with the affairs of life and our attachment to society that it divides our affections from Christ, our souls are cheating on their Savior. That's adultery on the spiritual level. And that brings home this law to the heart, if nothing else does.

But there's hope for the wounded and the unfaithful who repent. There's a story told – it's in most but not all manuscripts of John's Gospel – and I bet you know it (John 7:53—8:11). The scribes and the Pharisees enter the temple courts, where Jesus is teaching, and they have a woman in tow. They say she's been caught in the act of adultery. With whom? They don't say. They treat the man as blameless, accusing only the woman. If it's a trial they want, there must be multiple eyewitnesses to the act itself (Deuteronomy 19:15), but they bring none. Yet she's left to face a judgmental mob in her vulnerability and shame. With no eyewitnesses, no co-defendant, not even a clear sign her husband's aware of the situation, the scribes and Pharisees terrorize this woman as their pawn. They have no interest in justice, only in trapping Jesus. So they've exposed her in the temple courts – hardly a suitable place for an execution! But it was the place where, with appropriate offerings and sacrifices, an Israelite man might bring a wife he suspected of adultery, to have the priest ritually leave the matter in God's hands by an oath. The dust from the tabernacle floor would settle such questions (Numbers 5:17, 24).

So Jesus touches his finger to that temple-floor dust. And in that holy dust, he wrote with his finger, just as God wrote the Ten Commandments in stone with his finger (Exodus 31:18). Laying out the Law in its fullness, Jesus invites judgment to begin, coming from anyone who carries no weight of sin. In a stoning, the eyewitnesses of the crime were supposed to cast the first stones (Deuteronomy 17:7). But here, there are no eyewitnesses, only culprits – no one stands outside the sin they seek to unload on this woman's head as upon a scapegoat. For it was they, even more than she, who stood there guilty of adultery against the Lord God who was sitting in front of them – they were indeed an “adulterous and sinful generation” (Mark 8:38). So, one by one, they leave her with Jesus. He was sinless enough to throw the stone. But no: he saw her fear, her regret, her willingness to repent. So in mercy he set her free to return to her husband. He calls her to be an adulteress no longer.

And then Jesus died for adulterers, for the immoral, for sexual sinners of every stripe. He calls to repentance, offers forgiveness, washes clean; he gives them the grace to treat marriage with honor and their spouses with justice. And the early church carried forgiveness forward. In the second century, one teacher, celebrating that Jesus came to save “the irreligious and licentious and unjust,” knew an “innumerable multitude of those who've changed from licentiousness and have learned these things” in Jesus' teaching about marriage.²⁰ A century later, another preacher said that “among Christians, if adultery has been committed..., cleansing from sin isn't established through bodily punishments but through repentance. See that, if one person performs a worthy penance, he can earn mercy for it! … Let that person flee to the aid of repentance, so that, if caught once, he doesn't do it a second time; or, if he's committed it a second or even a third time, he doesn't add any more.”²¹

Here's the beauty of it: Christ is risen! Our Bridegroom is “able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:25). Our Bridegroom is faithful even when we're faithless, all love even when we're loveless (2 Timothy 2:13). So long as we live, it's never too late to repent, not even for sins a year past, a decade gone by... even be they sixty years behind us, time cannot free us from them, but Jesus can and will, if we now repent and turn ourselves over to him!

Jesus calls us back to, and models for us, a love that truly keeps faith. We owe the same to our spouses. We have to relatively 'leave' other ties for their sake, including the ties of sexuality leaking beyond marriage. We have to 'cleave' to them only, accept him or her as our highest earthly priority. And we have to see ourselves as 'one flesh' with them, with all its radical implications of love, “for no one ever hated his own flesh,” says Paul, “but nourishes and cherishes it” (Ephesians 5:29).

And this is all meant as a witness to the faith-keeping love that God shows us and that we owe back to him in Jesus Christ. We're called to 'leave' worldly ties for his sake – to turn down what James called “friendship with the world” (James 4:4), to say no to conflicting allegiances and allures that aim to seduce us. We have to 'cling' or 'cleave' only to Christ, accept him as our highest priority, period: “You shall cleave to the LORD your God,” as Joshua said (Joshua 23:8). And whereas you and your husband or wife are made one flesh, Paul adds that “he who cleaves to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Corinthians 6:17) – and that's even better. Amen.

Male and Female Created He Them

Sleepy. That's how the man of dust was starting to feel. Sleepy. It had been a long and lonely day's work, and disappointingly little to show for it. High and low for most his life, he'd been scouring the animal kingdom to find a helper. He couldn't handle this mission by himself. He needed someone, needed something, that was enough like him to rise to the challenge, enough like him to share a history and a future, enough like him to... to... Well, it had been a frustrating day. Thing after thing had paraded past him through the foliage, but none of the fauna met his needs. None of them were what he was. He knelt next to a serene pond, a pool in the garden, and looked in. Reflection. Staring back was a picture. Eyes, lips, hands. That's closer – that was like him. If only he had a twin! But on second thought, that might get dull in a different way. Duplicating everything all over again. Something didn't feel right about the thought. That just wouldn't work, another self like that – no, he needed a helper who was like him, and he needed a helper who was his opposite. He gave up. There came a rustling in the branches, a cooling breeze in the day. The sunlight seemed to get faster, stronger. It was peaceful, it was soothing. The Maker was near, and the sleepy man of dust felt reassured as he drifted off...

Slowly he began to come to himself. His eyelids had felt like stones at the bottom of a river, slowly floating to the surface. Groggy. Something felt... not as it had before. His eyes weren't all the way open as he started feeling around beneath his arm. There was a hollowness near his heart. His eyes fluttered, adjusted to the light. He lifted his head – and shouted in awed surprise. He was not alone. But it was not the Maker there, in the cool of the day. It was another. It was his reflection, brought to life – but not his reflection. Like him, but the opposite. His opposite, but the same. He recognized his kind. This one stared back with two eyes, smiled with lips like his, beckoned with five fingers like his – but no, not just like his, not as the reflection had been his. This was a new way to be what he was. It was an opposite way. A body like his, but very unlike his. His mind strained to grasp how it could be both.

Suddenly he understood the hollowness within, and he delighted in it. This body before him, this other self, had been built up out of his very own flesh, out of his own bone, transformed and differentiated and rearranged and glorified to be his equal. Like him, the perfect image and likeness of God. They both bore it, but not the same – no, in two different and complementary ways. And it was together that they would display the inner richness of God, together that the Maker's creativity would find its image, when this way and that way united for fruitful multiplication. Such were they designed to do – to fit together, to be at each other's side, to fuse and attach.

No sooner had the booming breath escaped his lungs in astonishment than the Maker approached, the Almighty, listening in delight to the dust-man's reaction. He and this other one turned to face him together, their fingers intertwined. Together saw they the light, together felt the rush of wind, together breathed in the aroma of the garden, together heard the voice of the Lord bless them and join them and call them by one name. Their hearts beat in time. Their eyes locked again, and each could see reflected in the other's eyes not only him- or herself, but the light of the Almighty shining bright. The human male, sculpted of dust and mud by the Divine Potter. This shapely female counterpart, built and constructed by the Master Architect and Crafter. They needed no words to say it. They were one flesh, they were a continuous unity, one made to receive the other. Together, they could act as a single organism, a single body, fruitfully united for multiplication and increase; and the committed union of the whole of their lives would extend that oneness beyond an event, beyond one act, into a saga of beauty. They heard their Maker call it marriage. There would sexuality belong. And Adam's sex as man, and Eve's sex as woman, made it all astonishingly and strikingly possible.¹ Everything was obvious, plain as the leaves on the tree of life, clear as the crystalline streams. God's handiwork had declared itself and himself evidently since the very hour of creation (cf. Romans 1:20). And it was all very, very good.

But, with the passage of time, stole the shadow upon their souls. A bite of proudly seized fruit, passed from one body to the other; and with that, this flesh was poisoned in both its places by shame and confusion. Their body, their mind, infected. Like demons exorcised from a holy temple, like tender flowers ripped up from their roots, they tumbled to a world of withering east of Eden, where they roamed far from home. Thrown back into the calloused hands of an impoverished nature, they did increase, they did multiply. But not everything continued as clear as it once was. In Eden, there were no chromosomal abnormalities, no developmental anomalies, no psychiatric illnesses. But east of Eden, all these things slowly crept in. Down through the generations from this Adam and this Eve, some would indeed – in the Lord's words – be “eunuchs who from their mother's womb were born that way” – those physically or psychologically incapable of joining into one flesh with a helper like and opposite them (Matthew 19:12a). East of Eden, some would be born with birth defects that caused their maleness or femaleness to seem less than obvious at first. East of Eden, others would be born with a feeling of disconnection between the sex of they saw in reflection and the sense of self they carried inside – men ill at ease as men, women ill at ease as women. Also east of Eden, some would be born and raised, desiring impossible unions with helpers only alike, not opposite – sons of Adam yearning for sons of Adam, daughters of Eve for daughters of Eve. All creation was groaning in agony to be set free from the chains of corruption, laboring under perplexity and pain (Romans 8:21-23).

East of Eden, God was suddenly not so obvious. The fruit had opened their eyes, alright – opened them too wide, too wide to retain the focus that had once been theirs (cf. Genesis 3:7). The world seemed a jumble of mismatched pieces, a cacophony of voices crying out for their devotion. Obsessing in the mud and dust whence they came, nations of Adam's sons, of Eve's daughters, couldn't keep their bearings fixed on the light handed down to them. “Although they knew God” by inference from what he'd made, “they didn't honor him as God or give thanks to him,” didn't recognize him for what he'd done, didn't appreciate, didn't acknowledge his authority as the Author. So “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21). And as the light faded from their minds, occluded by the clutter and the fog, obvious truths seemed no longer true or even good any more. Boasting they knew better than the God of nature, determined to bend the skies above and earth beneath to their will, heeding the many voices calling them this way and that (cf. Romans 1:22), they fell madly in love with all the unsuitable things brought before Adam that sleepy day, the creepy-crawlies, the four-foots, the winged things, even their own decaying reflections (Romans 1:23). So God mournfully let them chase these lesser loves, generation by generation reconfiguring their hearts after passions (Romans 1:24-26), offending as much against their own bodies as against their Creator (1 Corinthians 6:18).

Ages rolled on, and one day, some of Adam's sons, some of Eve's daughters, stood beneath a mountain, where they heard the sweet-courting Voice that once blessed their first parents. The mountain burned between Egypt behind them and Canaan before them. But both were lands of confusion, where these foundational truths of the creation were muddled, where the people gave themselves up to impurity, shame, passion, abusing God's gift of difference and union. When Israel lived in Egypt, they labored under the eyes of many pharaohs who routinely set the example of marrying their own sisters and siring children by them.² Some pharaohs of ages past had even been rumored to sneak out at night for sexual contact with some of their military officers – men with men.

Leaving that world, Israel was marching to inherit the land of Canaan, whose various nations worshipped devious gods of whom they celebrated revolting tales. To hear the Canaanites tell it, their high god El was not only a hopeless drunk but a senile sex fiend; while his son, the rain-giving god Ba'al, lusted after his very own daughters and then mated, in more than one myth, with cows and heifers in the field.³ And if that's what these nations worshipped, their lives could hardly lag behind. Nor did they.⁴

And so to this fragile people caught between, God from the mountain thundered forth first a simple word: “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). But how to know what that is, without the truths it rests on? And so God unpacked that word in many words for his yet-blind people, who often were led astray from their Maker's designs for sex and sexuality. God elaborated so as to retrain them away from the recklessness of their perplexed eyes, their darkened minds, their uncircumcised hearts, all of which lusted after the chaos all around.

Thus God spelled out laws to govern their appreciation and use of his gifts of sex and sexuality. “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt where you lived,” the Lord said, “and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan to which I'm bringing you” (Leviticus 18:3), “for by all these things the nations I'm driving out before you have become unclean” (Leviticus 18:24), “but you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations” (Leviticus 18:26). For as God would one day make clear in the Bible's closing chapters, those who surrender their gifts of sex and sexuality into what the Law abominates will be unable, for just so long, to enter into the New and Everlasting Jerusalem (Revelation 21:27; cf. 21:8).

So, with Canaan up ahead, God reminded his people that, just as Adam quickly discovered, no animal could be a suitable mate, even for a moment: “You shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion” (Leviticus 18:23). They were to be like Adam, not like Ba'al. Sex begins with being human, and at the very outermost limit, a minimum requirement for sexuality is that it be shared only among humans.

Then, God reminded his people that, as Adam opened his eyes to find, humans come in two kinds. Some are male. Others are female. And none of the trouble that's entered east of Eden – abnormalities and anomalies, disorders and diseases, desires and disorientations – none of that trouble can eradicate these two fixed ways of being human. Each is a distinctive gift from the Creator, which cannot be exchanged or erased, only abused and harmed. They are good gifts, and neither is better than the other. This God reminded them when he said that “a woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 22:5). That is to say, a human gifted with being a man is called to receive that gift with gratitude, to accept it and acknowledge it, and to live accordingly – to put himself forth into the world as a man. And a human gifted with being a woman is to do the same with her gift. She isn't to assert herself as a man, because she isn't and can't be. He isn't to assert himself as a woman, because he isn't and can't be. No change of clothes can make it so. Neither can chemicals bought at a price or even surgical prowess manufacture this gift of God, but only simulate it. God knew that some would try, so he warned his people, “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 23:1). For some were eunuchs not by birth but by self-determination, “eunuchs who were made eunuchs by human beings” (Matthew 19:12b). Whatever burdens any Israelite bore, such practices were to have no place among God's holy nation of old.⁵

Having thus summoned his people to each receive their sex as man or woman as a gift, he called them first to never use that gift to unite sexually to those who were already one flesh with them. They were not to imitate any longer the incestuous Egyptians. God had higher standards. Marriage was no longer to be an affair of a single family. “None of you shall approach any one of his close relatives to uncover nakedness,” God insisted (Leviticus 18:6). A man wasn't to have sexual contact or marriage with his mother or stepmother (18:7-8), his sister or half-sister (18:9), his granddaughter (18:10), his step-sister (18:11), his aunt on either side (18:12-14), his daughter-in-law or sister-in-law (18:15-16), his stepdaughter (18:17) – none of that. For these Israelites brought up in Egypt, this was a hard word to hear. Some standing beneath the mountain had their supposed marriages unravel before their eyes. It was a hard word for Moses, for by this even his parents' marriage was undone – his mother was also his father's aunt (Exodus 6:20). But, however painful, all these things were exposed as sexual confusion, the impurities of abused sexuality.

Furthermore, God commanded them to use sexuality only with those who are opposite, complementary. For good reason do humans come in more than one type: both are needed for true sexual union to occur, without which there can be no reproductive fruitfulness. Two humans both gifted with maleness can't unite that way – it isn't possible, so no marriage can arise from it. Two humans both gifted with femaleness can't unite that way – not possible, and no marriage can arise from it.⁶ And the gift of sexuality was only meant for true, full, organic unions that are true marriages. All else is sacrilege. And as Paul would later describe, that's exactly what the pagan world got: “Their females exchanged the natural use for that which is contrary to nature, and the males likewise gave up the natural use of females and were inflamed with passion for one another, men committing indecency with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:26-27). For that reason, God thundered from the mountain through Moses, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman: it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22). In other words, it simply isn't what sexuality is for.⁷

Every body, mind, and life that “does not submit to God's Law” is “hostile to God,” we're told (Romans 8:7). But all these different rules of the Law are really just boundary-markers around a few simple truths, lit up to stand out to our hazy vision: Sex, being a man or being a woman, is a gift from God, each being one of the two unique ways to be human. To be a man is just to be the same kind of human as Adam. To be a woman is just to be the same kind of human as Eve. Sexuality is a gift for uniting the two kinds of human as a single new flesh, a union structurally designed for the prospect of procreation, with pleasure and partnership and parable coming with it. All other applications of sexuality are abuses of, or even rejections of, the gift itself. And well-ordered sexuality takes its cues from Eden, and nowhere else. To be a man the right way, or a woman the right way, and then to live that out sexually the right way, is to imitate the life of Eden. And that is exactly what God wanted Israel to see – and to teach the nations, as his national priesthood in the world (cf. Exodus 19:5-6).

The nations still need to be taught. For today, as much as in Egypt or Canaan, modern-day America and plenty other nations have been sliding back into a shadowy confusion when it comes to living out healthy sex and sexuality as God gave it. Asked what a man is or a woman is, many of our neighbors and leaders will skirt the question, having renounced the answer. What America has come to believe, effectively, is that male and female are two of many genders one could have; that each is a complex reality emerging from many factors, the most important of which are thought or felt, not observed by mirror or microscope; that a man can choose to become a woman or to reveal himself as having inwardly always been a woman, or vice versa; that sexuality is ours to employ in any way we choose, inside or outside marriage, so long as everyone involved is on board; and that justice is only done when every person is free to express themself sexually as they please, and no relationship structure infused with romantic love can be excluded from the definition of marriage, which is ours to write and rewrite until all are satisfied. So now America believes. What America increasingly disbelieves is that “in the image of God he created him: male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27), that only a man and a woman can cleave to one another and become one flesh (Genesis 2:24). A modern American may be less certain to believe that than any Egyptian or Canaanite ever was.⁸

Faced with the new America, we can't shelter ourselves in a bubble, pretending that most people still secretly agree with us about the things they've learned to forget. The era when most Americans at least made a show of nodding when the church taught and spoke is over. Nor will it be helpful for us to just be angry and dismissive all the time – although we are grieved when today's revolt against reality victimizes real bodies and real souls. Instead, we're called to give a truthful answer. God has not left himself without witness (Acts 14:17). To be a human being is to be fundamentally embodied: you're not a soul stuck in the wrong spot; your body is you. Each of us still has our sex, as either a man or a woman, as a gift from God's hand, however distorted or misunderstood sin makes it. The capacity for sexual union is still God's very good gift, too. These gifts can't be exchanged or erased, and must not be abused. Your body once had and still has a meaning and a purpose; and misdirected sexuality, out-of-place sexuality, isn't it (1 Corinthians 6:13).

We have the task, in today's world, of insisting on these forgotten truths. These truths were the consistent awareness of God's ancient people Israel and their heirs.⁹ The same truths have also been the consistent witness of the New Israel, the Church, from the very beginning and through the ages.¹⁰ But these aren't easy or popular truths to speak today. They're getting harder by the year, and more necessary by the year. About 42% of Americans now personally know someone who identifies as transgender (that is, other than as the sex God gave them).¹¹ The vast majority of Americans personally know someone who identifies as homosexual. You'll find them in your community, and maybe in your family – and if you haven't, your grandchildren definitely have and will. When I was in college, one of my closer friends for a while was a woman who was mainly attracted to other women. When I was in seminary, one of my best friends there was a man who, by God's grace, refused to surrender to his same-sex temptations. I have a male cousin who's mainly attracted to other men, and a half-sister raising a child with a woman whom American law regards as her spouse. I have a sister-in-law who takes hormone treatments to assist her in her effort to live as if she were a man. People have – and care deeply for – friends and family in those shoes. It's not for no reason that so many Christians in our country try to affirm those friends and family in what they think and desire. Whole church bodies have been led to do likewise, in spite of the Apostle Paul's warning that those who “give approval to those who practice” these things are in the same mortal or eternal danger as those who do them (Romans 1:32). And that isn't kind or compassionate.

We have to speak the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help us God – but only, ever, and always in love (Ephesians 4:15). Because this isn't about abstract issues. It's about real people, real individuals made in God's image, broken and disordered east of Eden, confused and barraged and sometimes led astray by the loud voices of social encouragement and inner wrestling and the craving for self-pride. And that describes all of us. Each of us has been inflamed by desire, urged on by the flesh. Each of us has found fierce warfare within, as we aim for the good but do the evil we didn't want to do (Romans 7:19, 22). But all of us are called by the Lord to discipline ourselves – including our sexual thoughts, attitudes, actions, and sense of self – for his sake, expressing them joyfully only as he decrees good. And in this, none of us have room to boast over another.

For those whose burdens take certain forms (such as gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction), this call can seem especially challenging. Some burdens are laid upon some by chemical influences encountered in the womb, or by psychiatric conditions, or by the pressures and temptations of a culture that knows just which levers to pull to unleash social contagion. But such burdens, non-culpable effects of the Fall, aren't chosen. It's little wonder it's so prevalent to surrender instead of struggle to tame this area of life beneath the will of God.

And too often, we who claim to be truthful, we who claim to love, have made these burdens all the heavier on those around us. We've piled on added cultural expectations of what's masculine and what's feminine, and so have substituted our man-made traditions for the less burdensome commands of God (Mark 7:8). We've cast stones like the maddest Pharisee out to justify ourselves by trampling the 'sinner' into the dust at our feet, too afraid to admit our own fellowship of weakness and need with him or her. We've excluded as forever unclean those whom God is ready to cleanse and claim. And we've neglected the awesome hope brought into the open as the Lord dignifies the state of life that surrenders the gift of sexuality on his altar, and instead we choose to make marriage the one-size-fits-all idol, as though life without it were incomplete. Lord, help us repent!

But Jesus Christ was born into the world – born as a man, born of a woman, born under the Law (Galatians 4:4) – to call us all to take our burdens and temptations, of whatever form they come, and to nail them to his cross. And then he bids us lift that cross and carry it in his footsteps, laying claim to him by denying ourselves (Mark 8:34). Oh, it's deeply self-denying to crucify your own thoughts about your God-given sex. It's deeply self-denying to crucify your deep-seated passions, your sole desired outlets for romantic or erotic intimacy.¹² But to sacrifice visions and passions and intimacies for Jesus is to be heir to his promise of hundredfold reward (Mark 10:29-31). Some will sacrifice these things so as to, in effect, “make eunuchs of themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12c) – that is, anticipating life like angels, wedded now to God and no other, offering their sexuality to him in celibacy. Others come to Christ, having been born not by choice but yearning to be born again, maybe having undergone treatment to efface God's gift in them, crying out in pained longing – and where once the Law bore a word of exclusion, the Prophet relays God's word of welcome in Christ: “Let not the eunuch say, 'I am a dry tree,' for thus says the LORD: 'To the eunuchs who... choose things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters..., an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. … These I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer. … Their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar'” (Isaiah 56:3-7).

And such things aren't only theoretical. Paul mentions that the early church had members who were formerly sexually immoral, formerly adulterers, formerly involved in same-sex sexual encounters (1 Corinthians 6:9). But Paul says they've now surrendered that life to Jesus: “Such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Jesus Christ, perfect Image of God, died on his cross to reprint his image on them and make them shine with it. And that made them every bit as worthy of being part of God's temple as you are or I am (1 Peter 2:5), even if life were to be a struggle against temptations and doubts each and every day.

But along the way, Christians (then and now) could hope for the Holy Spirit to be the new focus of their minds, rather than dwelling on their own impulses or perceptions (Romans 8:5). They could now be “transformed by the renewal of [their] minds,” learning to “discern what is the will of God” (Romans 12:2). Where the old self had been “corrupt through deceitful desires,” a mind- and heart-renewal by the Holy Spirit would more and more clothe them with a new identity, with “the new human,” which was “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22-24). And that's true for all of us.

Best of all, Jesus Christ rose from the grave to give us new hope – hope of a glorified body, brain, heart, and soul no longer at odds among themselves, no longer burdened or fallen, no longer vulnerable to temptations and lusts and confusions. We all now “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for... the redemption of our bodies” in the resurrection that's to come, “for in this hope we were saved” (Romans 8:23-24). In the resurrection, each one who follows Jesus now will then perfectly shine with the image of God, unmistakable and fabulous. In the resurrection, each one who has the gift of being a man, and each one who has the gift of being a woman, will know what his or her gift means, and will see new and glorious ways to live it out, better than this passing age can ever know, for “what we will be has not yet appeared” (1 John 3:2). In the resurrection, every body and every mind will be unchained into the harmony of freedom (Romans 8:21). And in the resurrection, in the new creation, in the kingdom of God, we will have a life that “nothing unclean will ever enter” (Revelation 21:27).

Now that's good news! Until that blessed hope comes, let us all love and speak the truth in love – for God is the Truth, and God is Love, and God finds no gap between them. Let us openly cherish and thank God for his good gifts, for “every good gift and every perfect gift” – including male and female, including sex and sexuality, and including the guidelines to exercise them in healthy and joyful ways – “is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). And let us carry the cross, groaning all the way, waiting in hopeful patience and with the Holy Spirit's help (Romans 8:25-26) for the day when everything about us, including sex and sexuality, will be as Christ is creating it to be. Amen.