Application: How Sex Serves God

Let us apply this overarching rationale for sex as the service of God to the three kinds of traditional answers: procreation, relationship, and social order.

Procreation: Serving God Through Children

First, procreation: How does having children serve God? The answer is that it may or may not serve God. It depends on the children! We are not speaking of the mere physical act of conception (which for many couples is pretty easy, fun, and painless), or even of conception, gestation (which is more costly for the mother), and birth (which is often painful). It is not enough simply to bring new human beings into the world, nor even to care for their physical protection in infancy and their material needs for food and shelter as they grow. Since the goal of their lives (as for ours) is to participate in the glorious privilege of ruling God’s world, it is also necessary for them to grow into a relationship of glad response to the call of God. We are speaking therefore of the whole long, costly privilege that begins with conception and continues for many years in patient, loving discipline and nurture. Thomas Aquinas wrote that the purpose of marriage “is the begetting and upbringing of children: the first of which is attained by conjugal intercourse; the second by the other duties of husband and wife, by which they help one another in rearing their offspring.”³³

What this understanding of the purpose of sex does is to reorientate us so that we no longer decide whether or not to have children as a matter of right (I have a right to a child) or of lifestyle choice (I will have children when and if I feel like it). We are not to want children for selfish reasons, neither because we find children sweet (they may or may not be), nor because in some way we need to be needed,³⁴ nor because we desire sons or daughters to care for us in old age. It is because God has entrusted humankind with a noble task, and that task cannot be carried out without a race of men and women conceived, born, and nurtured to know, love, and serve their Creator. So we are to ask God for the gift of a child, recognizing that it is in his gift and not our right, with the hope and prayer that if he entrusts us with a child we will be enabled to bring that child up to love and serve God in his world.

Christians are not asking people to be falsely spiritual about children, but simply to recognize that in a world where people die, each generation needs the next generation to be born. The crime writer P. D. James wrote an unusual novel called The Children of Men (now made into a major movie).³⁵ This story conjures up a world in which human fertility has fallen to zero, and the youngest human beings are twenty-one years old. It is a haunting novel with no playgroups, no schools, and no hope. (Well, there would be no hope unless … . But that would spoil the story!)

This means that under normal circumstances sex within marriage ought to be accompanied by the desire, or at least willingness, to have children. Protestants have, in my view rightly, argued that there is nothing in principle wrong with contraception in the context of an ongoing sexual relationship that includes (or wants to include) children. But a sexual relationship in which the desire for children has (or has had) no place is not in general sex in the service of God. There are circumstances in which a couple may reluctantly decide that they cannot have children (e.g., because of age or for medical reasons), but their decision not to have children is taken within the moral framework of the longing to have had children had they been able to do so. Their intention not to have children is “a reluctant ‘intention.’”³⁶

It also means that when a couple cannot have children we ought to grieve with them because they are experiencing something of what both Paul (Romans 8:20–22) and the writer of Ecclesiastes call the frustration of a broken world longing to be restored and remade. Their marriage is no less a marriage for being childless, but one of the natural purposes of marriage has been denied them, usually through no fault of their own.

Relationship: Serving God Through the Marriage Relationship

Second, how does the delight of the sexual relationship serve God? On the face of it, this enjoyment and fun serve the couple, but not God. The Bible consistently affirms the naturalness of sexual desire and delight, and it positively encourages a healthy sexual relationship within marriage (notably in 1 Corinthians 7:1–6).³⁷ Sexual attractiveness, beauty, desire, and delight are affirmed and accepted as a right and natural part of the world. In Psalm 45:11, the king desires the beauty of his bride, and this is affirmed as right and natural and a cause of rejoicing.³⁸

Furthermore, the Bible chooses this relationship as one of the most significant images to help human beings understand the relationship of God with his people and of Christ with his church. The Bible even speaks of God himself as feeling like a husband passionately desiring intimate delight with his wife: “as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:5). This is bold sexual imagery and is possible only because the Bible is warmly in favor of sex within marriage.

The faithful love of husband and wife serves God by providing in this world a visible image of the love God has for his people and their answering love.³⁹ God wants this kind of relationship to display one of the ways in which the invisible God becomes visible in his world. When a couple devotes time and energy to nurturing their own love for each other, paradoxically they may also be serving God, if they love one another with the longing that their love will begin to approximate the love between God and his people.

Public Order: Serving God by Guarding Sex for Marriage

Third, to guard sex within marriage serves God by preserving sexual order in God’s world. We keep our sexual urges for marriage and resist the desires to express them elsewhere, not because this is an arbitrary rule imposed upon us from outside, but from an understanding that this safeguard, these boundaries, are necessary to preserve our societies from sexual chaos.

It is worth asking in this connection what the difference is between unmarried cohabitation and marriage. Why not just live together? The main truth to understand is that there is an intrinsic connection between sexual intimacy and permanence. Sex is designed for permanence, and the breaking of a sexual relationship, whether by death, by divorce, or by infidelity, is always the breaking of something created to be maintained. This is expressed in a saying of Jesus: “those whom God has joined together, let not human beings tear apart” (Matthew 19:6). Every married couple is joined together by God. This has nothing to do with whether or not they were married in a church. It is a simple fact about marriage: when a man and woman publicly pledge themselves to lifelong faithfulness, God joins them together and holds them accountable for keeping their promises. Sexual intimacy is either in the context of the public pledge of lifelong faithfulness, or it cuts across Creation Order. This is important for at least three reasons.

Protection Against Injustice

First, the public pledge of marriage helps to provide a measure of protection against injustice. Whenever someone walks out on a sexual relationship, someone is hurt. It may just be the other partner; often it is children as well. If we swallow the myth that “what happens in the bedroom” is not the concern of the rest of us, then much injustice will be done, especially by men, and there will be no redress from those who are wronged. The public pledge of marriage, upheld by a healthy society, begins (at least approximately) to ensure that justice is done.

In the UK legislation is very gradually imposing obligations of justice on cohabiting partners. Perhaps before long no one will be able to walk out of a cohabitation without some obligation to fulfill responsibilities to the other (especially if there are children). We must welcome this. But we must also note that every move in this direction makes unmarried cohabitation less attractive to those who entered it precisely in order to avoid the obligations of marriage. Indeed, we could make a case for saying that society ought to treat cohabiting partners as if they were married, with all the obligations that entails. This would mean that to break a cohabitation one party would have to sue for what would effectively be divorce! If that were to happen, then the mere action of moving in together would come to signify the commitment verbalized in the marriage vows, and then cohabitation would mean marriage. It does not at the moment. And until and unless it does, only marriage provides proper protection for the vulnerable.

The Removal of Ambiguity

Second, the public pledge removes from a sexual relationship all ambiguity. When a man and woman begin sleeping together and perhaps move in together, others are left guessing as to what exactly is the basis of their relationship. Clearly they have agreed to sleep together; otherwise it would be rape. But what have they promised one another, if anything? On what basis or shared understanding are they together? The answers are as many as there are couples, ranging from very little commitment to a fair degree of privately promised commitment, sometimes expressed, for example, in a joint mortgage.

But always there is ambiguity. It may be that sometimes the woman’s expectations are higher than the man’s. Perhaps the woman really thinks this is “for keeps” whereas the man is more cautious and waits to see how good it is, happy to enjoy the benefits while it’s fun. Sometimes it may be the other way around. But always it is unclear. And therefore others do not know quite how to relate to them. Nowhere is this ambiguity more painful than when one of them dies. Who is the next of kin? With whom should we grieve most deeply? The parents or the live-in partner? But in a marriage, there is no lack of clarity. Each has publicly pledged lifelong faithfulness to the other. They are next of kin from that day on. They have left their parents in that fundamental sense (Genesis 2:24).

The Accountability of a Public Promise

Third, we must be realistic about the difference between private intentions and public promises. When we make public promises, we lay our reputation and integrity on the line behind those promises. There is all the difference in the world between a fond promise made privately during a cuddle on the sofa (“Will you stay with me forever?” “Of course, darling, how could you ever imagine otherwise?”) and a public promise made before witnesses in the cold light of day. Private assurances are terribly easy to break; they evaporate like the morning dew. After all, it is only her word against his when he says that she misunderstood him and that he didn’t really say or mean what she thought. We are deeply prone to self-deception in this area above all.

But when all my wider family, my friends, my work colleagues, and my neighbors know that I have publicly made this pledge, then I am much more inclined to keep it. I do not want them thinking I am a liar. Marriage begins precisely with those public promises. It doesn’t matter, incidentally, if the marriage ceremony is attended by only a few. The point is that those who witness my promises represent the rest of society. To say “I am married” means precisely that I have made these promises and that all the world can know it.

Public promises, like the skins or clothing given to Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:21), are necessary because of human weakness. Someone has said that democracy is possible because human beings are capable of justice, but that democracy is necessary because we are also capable of injustice. That is, we couldn’t create a democratic society without some sense of justice, and we need to create one to provide safeguards against injustice. In a similar way, our capacity for faithfulness makes marriage possible, but our tendency to unfaithfulness makes marriage necessary. We need the public promises to hold us to the faithfulness we pledge.

When we struggle in difficult marriages, it is a great help to know that we have publicly promised to be faithful for life, that everybody else expects us to keep that promise, and that if we don’t, then we must expect to experience shame. All this strengthens and supports marriage and helps us keep to the end the promises we made at the start.