Male and Female
The Image of God
Sex
Adam Knew Eve:
Sex and the Bible
For a sacred book, the Bible has an awful lot of sex in it. As early as chapter 4, Adam and Eve are getting it on, fulfilling God's command to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.”
The following pages tell stories of marriage, polygamy, adultery, incest, rape, homosexuality, prostitution—and that's just in Genesis alone.
Those who think that the Bible is opposed to sex can think again; the Bible is actually very pro-sex. Sex is a gift from God, given to the first man and the first woman before they ever ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But it is only to be enjoyed within the very specific context of marriage. Paul writes that it is “better to marry than to be aflame with passion”
(1 Corinthians 7:9). The greatest love stories of the Bible all revolve around marriage—Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Boaz and Ruth, even Joseph and Mary—and marriage is consistently venerated and even celebrated. Consider this steamy passage from Song of Songs 5:2-5:
I slept, but my heart was awake.
A sound! My beloved is knocking.
“Open to me, my sister, my love,
my dove, my perfect one,
for my head is wet with dew,
my locks with the drops of the night.”
I had put off my garment;
how could I put it on?
I had bathed my feet;
how could I soil them?
My beloved put his hand to the latch,
and my heart was thrilled within me.
I arose to open to my beloved,
and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with liquid myrrh,
on the handles of the bolt.
Our so-called “liberated” culture views sex within wedlock as being decidely un-sexy and yet it is precisely this which is regarded as being beautiful, arousing and the best which love has to offer. Intimacy (which results from a physical and spiritual union so intense that it is described in Genesis 2 as “one flesh”
) is one of the chief purposes of sex apart from the procreation of Godly offspring (Malachi 2:15). Anything outside this union has dire consequences (see Proverbs 5:20-22).
Sex had nothing to do with the fall, but perverted sex is a result of the fall. It didn't take long for humans to deviate from God's pattern of sexual relations and rebel against God's created order, engaging in polygamy, adultery, incest, rape, homosexuality, prostitution and bestiality. I will now spend a bit of time looking at each of these in turn.
POLYGAMY: Polygamy first appears in Genesis 4:19 with Lamech and his two wives, Adah and Zillah. Abraham, God's chosen one, lies with Hagar, Sarah's maidservant, at Sarah's urging in order to try to bring about the fulfilment of God's promise of a son his own way instead of trusting that God would eventually accomplish this (Genesis 16). The son that is born as a result of that union (Ishmael) goes on to father a great nation himself (the Midianites) but it is a nation that gives much trouble to Isaac's descendents, the nation of Israel (see Numbers 25 and Judges 6-8). Jacob's two wives, Leah and Rachel, try to do out-do each other in the baby department and end up fracturing the family between them because of the resuting favouritism. David's multiple marriages set a bad example for his son, Solomon, whose 700 wives and 300 concubines turned his heart away from the Lord to follow other gods (1 Kings 11:3-5). Though there is nothing specifically about polygamy in God's laws, the model clearly set down in the creation account is one man for one woman in a life-long union.
ADULTERY: Coveting another man's wife was strictly forbidden in Mosaic law (Exodus 20:14) and was punishable by death.1 Yet David, Israel's most celebrated king, coveted Bathsheba when he saw her bathing from his rooftop. When he found out she was pregnant, he had her husband killed on the frontlines of battle and then took her for his wife. The Lord, displeased with David's sin, caused Bathsheba's child to sicken and die despite David's pleading. Marital adultery is often equated with spiritual adultery (and therefore idolatry) in the Old Testament. In Exodus 32, the Israelites bow down to a golden calf and indulge in sexual immorality while Moses is on Mount Sinai, negotiating the “marriage” covenant between the Lord and his people (compare Exodus 32:6 with verse 25 and 1 Corinthians 10:6-7). Israelite men who took foreign wives and who were led astray into worshipping false gods were condemned by God (see Numbers 25). The Jews were still doing this after the return of the exiles and so Ezra commands them to put away their wives and return to the Lord (Ezra 10). Among the many sayings of Proverbs, this one sums it up the best:
He who commits adultery lacks sense;
he who does it destroys himself.
INCEST: God's laws in Leviticus 18 prohibit an individual from, not only having sexual relations with the members of his immediate family, but with his/her in-laws and extended family too. For a man to sleep with his father's wife, even if she is not his mother, was an abomination in God's sight. Violation of these laws resulted in the death penalty. Before the law, there were no such rules and regulations. Abraham marries his half-sister by another wife (Sarah) and, several generations on, Judah is tricked into sleeping with his daughter-in-law, Tamar, because he did not fulfil his promise to her of his son (Genesis 38). After the law is given to Moses, Israel cannot claim ignorance. But consider the story of Amnon and Tamar which occurs just after the chapters on David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 13) which spark off a chain of events that fulfil Nathan's prophecy in 2 Samuel 12:11: Amnon is David's eldest son by Ahinoam of Jezreel; Tamar is David's daughter by Maacah, the daughter of the Talmai king of Geshur who also bore him Absalom, David's third son. Amnon, sick with love for Tamar, contrives to have Tamar sent to him to wait on him by pretending to be ill. Once she arrives, he dismisses everyone else from the room and takes her by force despite her protests. To make matters worse, he then scorns her afterwards, ordering her out of his quarters without bothering to make amends. As a result, her brother Absalom has Amnon killed and eventually revolts against his father and tries to seize the kingdom for himself. On the very same roof where David first spied Bathsheba and coveted her for his own, David's son goes in to his father's concubines in an incestuous act of dominance (2 Samuel 16).
RAPE: Rape of betrothed virgins was punishable by death (see Deuteronomy 22:23-30) and rape of virgins who have not been betrothed resulted in a monetary fine and marriage to the girl. That Amnon rejected Tamar after defiling her, refusing to take her to be his wife and lessen her shame, showed him completely worthy of death despite being David's heir. But it was Absalom, not David, who ended up executing judgement, and this in turn spawned Absalom's rebellion.
The rape of Tamar by Amnon and the rape of David's concubines by Absalom echo other acts of sexual violence in the Old Testament. Dinah is violated by Shechem the Hivite and her brothers, Simeon and Levi, take revenge by deceiving the men into accepting circumcision and then slaughtering them while they're still rolling around in pain (Genesis 32). The men of Sodom and Gomorrah surround Lot's house, demanding that he hand over his guests, God's messengers, so that they may “know” them (Genesis 19). Lot offers his daughters in exchange but before he can act on his offer, God strikes all the men with blindness and pronounces judgement on those cities. This episode is evoked later in Judges 19 when a Levite forces his concubine to go out and sate the evil desires of the men of Gibeah who wish to commit rape. They abuse her all night long until she dies, and the Levite, in protest, cuts her up into twelve pieces and sends them throughout the territory of Israel.
HOMOSEXUALITY: Homosexuality is dealt with in more detail in another article. Briefly, it should be mentioned that sexual relations between men is forbidden in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.2 Offenders were punished by being put to death. It should be remembered that the driving principle behind the laws in Leviticus (what some scholars refer to as the “Holiness Code”) was God's desire for his people to be completely different to the nations that surrounded them. Homosexuality, for many of these nations, was cultural norm but it was detestable in God's sight. Unfortunately, upon entering the promised land, parts of Israel did not adhere to God's laws, as seen in the Benjamite men of Gibeah whose behaviour uncannily echoes that of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah.
PROSTITUTION: During the reign of the kings, the existence of male cult prostitutes dedicated to Asherah was common (1 Kings 14:24), despite God's decree in Deuteronomy 23:17 that “None of the daughters of Israel shall be a cult prostitute, and none of the sons of Israel shall be a cult prostitute”
. Some of these cult prostitutes actually practised in the Lord's temple (2 Kings 23:7), thus defiling it and leading God to reject his house and his people, giving them over to the Assyrians and Babylonians to be conquered and taken off into exile (see Ezekiel 8-10).
Prostitution seems to have been fairly common in the ancient world, within Israel and outside Israel. Consider Rahab in Joshua 6; Jephthah, son of a prostitute in Judges 11; Samson, who visits a prostitute in Judges 16; the two prostitutes who come to consult the wisdom of Solomon in 1 Kings 3; and Hosea who was ordered by God to marry a prostitute, his marriage symbolising the faithlessness of Israel towards God (compare with Ezekiel 16 where the nation of Israel is accused of prostituting herself with other nations). In the New Testament, prostitution was still prevalent; Jesus was known for eating with prostitutes and tax collectors but he had great compassion on them. One of them—Mary Magdalene—anoints Jesus with oil (John 12)—the only time during which the Christ (ie. Messiah—king—“anointed one”) is ever anointed with oil throughout the entire period of his ministry.
BESTIALITY: The Bible totally condemns sexual relations with animals (Exodus 22:19, Leviticus 18:23, Leviticus 20:15-16, Deuteronomy 27:21). Such a practice is commonly held to be abhorrent in our postmodern culture. But according to Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, bestiality was a common practice among the Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Hittites (see the writings of Venette, Plutarch, Sonnini and Vergil). It surfaced in both Greek mythology (gods taking the form of animals to copulate with human women) and Cretan mythology (the queen of Crete lying with a white bull and giving birth to the Minotaur). Israelites who were caught in the act of bestiality faced the death penalty for themselves and the animal they had defiled.
As I said earlier in my article, perverted sex is a result of the fall. Out of sinfulness and a desire to rebel against God, men and women have completely strayed from God's perfect model of one man for one woman for life, giving themselves over to the lusts of their flesh in multiple marriages, adulterous affairs, incestuous liaisons, violent rape, homosexual unions, prostitution and bestiality. These activities have been around throughout the whole of history and I am sure that they are still being practised today.
Perverted sex, too, can result in the multiplication of sin. Even if the majority of the world's population do not indulge in such sinful behaviour, there are few who are exempt from its effects. Pornography is booming, especially on the internet where it is cheap and easily accessible from the privacy of one's own home. More and more sexually-explicit movies are being made and screened in our local theatres. The gay lobby, despite being in the minority, have been successful in pressuring the media to increase their representation so that it's now okay to view women kissing women on television. And who can escape the advertising industry where sex is used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to breath mints? In this cultural environment, I'm sure all sin sexually—if not in deed, then in thought and in word. This in turn may cause us to have “bad” sex, even when we are trying to be obedient to God's rules for “good” sex.
However, in Christ, we can experience deliverance from whatever sexual perversion has enslaved us. We can be cleansed from those filthy thoughts we wish we'd never had and pardoned from those awful deeds we wish we'd never done (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). We can learn discretion and modesty and strategies for keeping sexual sin out of our lives. For, in Christ, God's gift of sexual purity (in marriage and outside of marriage) can be experienced anew. Lust can turn to love; self-gratification can turn to self-sacrifice; selfishness can turn to selflessness; and, most glorious of all, what once gave birth to sin, now brings forth goodness, making sex within marriage the sexiest of all.
Upon Christ's return, however, how should we conceive of sex? Jesus indicated that humans will not be married in heaven (Mark 12:25) but instead the people who constitute the body of Christ, his church, will be united with Jesus in spiritual marriage at the end of the age when he returns (Ephesians 5:25-27, Revelation 19:7-9, 21:1-2). Unfortunately I have no concrete answers to this question but I do know that our God is a beautiful gracious God and, as Adam “knew” Eve, so too he “knows” us.
Since getting married, Karen would have to agree with God that sex is “good”.
1 According to Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, “Adultery was understood as sexual intercourse between a man and another man's wife or betrothed woman. Similarly, any act of coition between a married woman and a man who was not her husband was also regarded as adultery. Certain exceptions to these stringent rules were tolerated in Old Testament times, however. A man was not considered an adulterer if he engaged in sexual relations with a female slave (Genesis 16:1-4), a prostitute (Genesis 38:15-18), or his wife's handmaid with the spouse's permission (Genesis 16:4). Nor was a man deemed to be in an adulterous relationship if he happened to be married to two wives.”
(R.K. Harrison, “Immorality, Sexual”). Jesus, therefore, was quite revolutionary when he claimed that adultery was a matter of intent and that sins could be committed in one's heart, not just in one's actions (Matthew 5:27).
2 Interestingly, lesbianism isn't mentioned in the law of Moses at all. Perhaps it wasn't as much of a problem as sodomy. Unfortunately we do not have much information about its existence in the ancient world but what we do have shows that it was consistently condemned so it is unlikely that it was characteristic of any nation.
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