#008: Biblical Sexuality Part 2 - Sex in the Garden of Eden

Welcome to the Courage Reclaim podcast, where our mission is to help Christian men break free from what holds them back, fall madly in love with Jesus, and become the leaders he's called and created us to be.

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Welcome back, my friends. Last episode we covered chapter one of our Bodies Tell God's Story by Christopher West. We discussed how God created our bodies as male and female and called them good. One of the quotes that I love from this chapter is "The Bible tells a marital story. It begins in Genesis with the marriage of the first man and woman, and it ends in revelation with the marriage of Christ and the church. And these spousal bookends provide the key for understanding all that lies between. Indeed, we can summarize all of Sacred Scripture with five simple yet profound words. God wants to marry us."

The fact that marriage and sex was designed by God to convey his love for his people, the gospel makes more sense why marriage and sex seem constantly under attack. As we get into the conversation for today, I recently wrote a blog called Raising Kids in a World Filled with Pornography, and I encourage parents to self-evaluate how well they can articulate a biblical view of sex in the form of several common questions that they might receive from their kids like why did God create two genders beyond procreation? Why did God create sex? Why does God limit sex to within marriage? Biblically, what does a healthy sex life actually look like? Is all sex within marriage okay Today we'll answer more of those questions as we continue to unpack the beauty and purpose behind God's design for our bodies, marriage and sex, I want to start out with a quote directly from Christopher West's book.

He says, "What does it mean, really, to speak of "true gender identity" and to express it in "an authentic way"? According to Christ? The answer can be found by returning to God's original purpose for creating us, male and female, before the confusion of sin obscured it. Only by doing so can we save the term gender from a world untethered from reality.

The root "gen" from which we get the word such as generous, generate genesis, genetics, genealogy, progeny, gender and genitals means "to produce" or "give birth to" a person's gender, therefore, is based on the manner in which that person is designed to generate life.

Contrary to widespread secular insistence, a person's gender is not a malleable social construct."

He goes on saying, "Inevitably, the question arises in the context about those people born with ambiguous genitalia. The hope for those who suffer with this anomaly, and for all those with gender confusion of any kind, lies not in science to assign a new gender, but in Christ to restore the original order of our humanity through the gift of redemption."

Now, this is not to say that people don't struggle with identity or sexual preferences. We are fallen people. All of whom struggle with different sins and sinful bents, as we talked about last week, Satan is a created being.

He is not the creator. He doesn't have his own clay. All he can do is try to twist and manipulate and distort God's clay, which he created as perfect. However, Christ calls us to submit every area of life to him, regardless of our desires. Regardless of how bent out of shape we are, we are always called to submit our desires and all of our being to him. And it's because he wants our good. He wants our best. He actually wants our happiness.

Christopher West goes on to say, "Some choices can never bring happiness. We are free in a sense, to do whatever we want with our bodies. However, we are not free to determine whether what we do with our bodies is good or evil. Therefore, human freedom is fully realized not by inventing good and evil, but by choosing properly between them."

See, I have the freedom to choose a life of porn addiction, but I cannot make it healthy for me. This is part of why understanding truth is so vitally important. By leaning into God's design, we honor him. We live the best versions of our life, and we can ultimately experience the most happiness.

Tim Keller says, and this is quoted in the book, "sex is sacred because it is the analogy of the joyous, self-giving and pleasure of love within the life of the Trinity. God created us as male and female and called us to life giving communion precisely to reveal his eternal mystery of love in the temporal dimension."

God as Trinity existed from eternity past. He didn't create the world because he needed it. He created the world to express his creativity and share his love, all for his ultimate glory. Sex was designed to be the celebration of unity as we see within the Trinity. When used as designed, sex is an absolute gift. When used contrary to design, it yields emptiness, hurt and pain.

Christopher West goes on to say, "God gave us eros in the beginning to be the very power to express agape. In other words, he gave us sexual desire to be the power to love as he loves in a free, sincere, and total gift of self." This reminds me of the passion God pursued the Israelites with in the Old Testament. It reminds me that sexual desire isn't itself bad if it pushes me towards something good, like celebrating the unity of our marriage with my wife.

Christopher West goes on to say, "But the distortions we know so well are not the core of sex. At the core of sex, we discover the sign of God's own goodness. God saw all that he made, and it was very good according to Genesis 1:31.

"According to Pope John Paul II, in the very beginning, it was actually nakedness that revealed God's holiness in a visible world."

Think back to last episode where we talked about how the body is physical, but it is the temple of God. It is what houses our soul.

In conveying the intentionality with which God created the male and female bodies, Christopher goes on to say, "Think about it, a man's body makes no sense by itself, nor does a woman's body, but seen in light of each other, sexual difference reveals the unmistakable plan of God, that man and woman are meant to be a gift to one another in spousal love."

He goes on, "If you are looking for the meaning of life according to John Paul II, it's impressed, right? In your body, in your sexuality. The purpose of life is to love as God loves. And this is what your body, as a man or woman, calls you to. God's first directive in Genesis "Be fruitful" is not merely an injunction to propagate. It's a call to love in God's image and thus to fulfill the very meaning of our being and existence."

Now, he's not saying that a meaning filled life is not possible without marriage or without sex, rather that the meaning of life is to love as God loves. Of which marriage and sex are created to be physical representations of it. My friend. Your body, your gender are not by accident. Not only did God create you according to his purposes, he designed you as a billboard of his glory and in any way that you experience confusion, temptation, or hurt. Remember, God's power is made perfect in our weakness. I desired pornography, I thought I always would. It felt like part of me. This fallen desire eventually became the biggest catalyst of growth and has become the way I've most clearly experienced the gospel. Remember my friends, with Christ, there is always hope.