God, Sex and Truth: The Script: A philosophical treatise

Product Information

We find ourselves as we give ourselves away. There is great grace in the gift of Eve to Adam; she is given as he sleeps. But it is costly grace; she is formed from his own body. The great mystery of one becoming two foreshadows the greater mystery of two becoming one. God’s math is that one and one don’t equal two, but one (Genesis 2:24). And the one flesh is greater than the two that preceded it. In marriage as with the gospel, we find ourselves as we give ourselves away (Luke 9:23-24). In the Gospels, Jesus said he is like a bridegroom to his people. Therefore people must be joyful in his presence, for “How can the guest of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them?” (Matthew 9:15, NIV). He said the coming of the kingdom of heaven is like people waiting for a wedding (Matthew 25:1-13). When John the Baptist was asked his opinion of Jesus’ rising popularity, he said it was time for him to step aside because his friend the Bridegroom had come. It’s now Jesus’ party, not his. “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30, NIV).

This poem is by Andy Patterson, a senior at Westmont College, where I am the pastor. He is also my son, I am proud to say.) Then he did something astounding with what he made: he put us in charge of it, as stewards. What is a steward? A steward is someone entrusted with the management of someone else’s property and charged with managing it in the owner’s best interest. God’s great interest is his glory.

Also Watch

The goodness of the creation. God made it, so it must be good. He said so. He made it good because he made it ex nihilo, out of nothing. To say God made it all out of nothing is to say he made it with no outside limitations, because when you make something out of nothing, the only limitations are those in your own mind. No one brought God the raw material of creation, dropped it into his lap, and said, “Now see what you can do with this stuff.” God made us sexual creatures. “So what else is new?” you say. This does not mean, primarily, that we have sexual drives and urges. I will not be less a male when my hormones give out. My masculinity will not be reaffirmed if I am shot to death by a jealous husband when I’m a hundred years old, as my father once quipped. The hormones are part of it, but they are peripheral to the center, which is that we are differentiated as male and female. Apart from this basic differentiation, we cannot be understood as human beings. The words of Jesus are, “Haven’t you read, . . . that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’?” (Matthew 19:4, NIV). The sexual, in the Bible, is a chief arena of the brokenness of sin — and therefore occupies an important place among the things Christ came to redeem. There is one more thing to be said about the goodness of sex and the glory of God: Thank you. Sex is good because the God who created sex is good. And God is glorified greatly when we receive his gift with thanksgiving and enjoy it the way he meant for it to be enjoyed. Gratitude may be the greatest joy of sex, and what brings the greatest glory to God, because joy is what you experience when you are grateful for the grace that has been given you. The Greek language gives us a picture of how this works: grace, gratitude, and joy all have the same root, char, which is a word having to do with health or well-being. Grace is charis, gratitude is eucharistia, and joy is chara. The three are organically joined, theologically and spiritually. Karl Barth’s insight is vivid: I’ll never forget the pastoral visit I had with a woman whose husband had just died that morning. She had nursed him at home through a protracted and painful bout with cancer. When I walked into her living room, his corpse was still on the hospital bed she had wheeled beside the fireplace. I stood on one side of the bed, and she on the other, as I prayed for her. Before I finished praying I opened my eyes to see her massaging her husband’s feet, patting his cheeks, and rubbing his calves and hands as she must have done innumerable times in their marriage. I was deeply moved at what I saw, and as I drove home I thought, This is what sex is finally all about: one man and one woman to the end, loving and caring for each other’s bodies, with their bodies.

ODI World Cup: The traits that make Rohit Sharma the captain, and how he differs from his predecessors Kohli and DhoniPut simply, he feels about her the way a student expressed to me his love for his fiancée: “I look at her . . . and I can’t breathe!” Breasts like grape clusters? A navel like a goblet of wine? Thighs as finely shaped as jewels? Is this really in the Bible, the Word of God? It really is! How wholesome and richly erotic sex can be when enjoyed in the ways and within the context God intended. How much better it is than the cheap, toxic ways the world recommends. Contrast the joy of this text with the confusion and shame a young man experiences as he walks past the lingerie in the window display of a Victoria’s Secret store: It’s risky to talk about the goodness of sex these days, because ours is an age of sexual hyperbole. Never before in history has the goddess of sex offered so much with so little to give. Never before has sexual pleasure been sought with such grim earnestness. Never before has so much merchandise been moved on the implicit promise that it will make you more sexy or get you more sex. If the advertising industry is any indication, the threat of AIDS and STDs, rather than diminishing or disciplining the sexual urge, has simply made it more daring and more exciting. It has raised the stakes and upped the bets, so to speak. What are the theological foundations for this celebration of sex — and what does it have to do with the glory of God? The gigantic secret of the joy of sex is this: Sex is good because the God who created sex is good. And God is glorified greatly when we receive his gift with thanksgiving and enjoy it the way he meant for it to be enjoyed. The reason we like sex so much is that it is a little bit like the God who created it. That is not what the Bible means by our maleness and femaleness. To say we are sexual creatures is to say that we cannot be understood except as male and female, and except as male or female. As male and female we make up one humanity. As male or female we make up the two poles of that humanity, with our bodies as concrete expressions of those poles.

Victoria’s Secret is Victoria’s Lie. God’s good idea will always outpleasure the ersatz pleasures of the world.NIV): “I liken you, my darling, to a mare harnessed to one of the chariots of Pharaoh.” When his beloved deprecates her physical beauty, he strongly disagrees and says she is like a mare, a female horse, in Pharaoh’s cavalry. But there were no mares in Pharaoh’s cavalry, because a mare would excite all the males into a pandemonium of sexual excitement! Precisely. Does she think she is unattractive? He begs to differ. On the contrary, her attractiveness to men is like a mare released in a corral of stallions. She not only looks good to him, she looks good to others, too. Music Director Keeravani Heaps Praises on RGV, GST". Sakshi. 29 January 2018 . Retrieved 19 May 2020. With all of this sexual obsession, one is tempted to downplay the pleasures and goodness of sex — to say they are overrated. But that might do the devil’s will as much as the obsession itself. Pleasure is God’s idea, and God is the devil’s Enemy. The devil actually hates pleasure, because he hates the God of pleasure. How do we know this is true? We know it’s true because of its place in the Bible. “The Bible is a book about marriage.” That’s the way David Hubbard put it in his commentary on the Song of Solomon (Hubbard, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, The Communicator’s Commentary [Word, 1991], 267). To say the Bible is a book about marriage is to say that it is also a book about sex and the meaning of sex. For marriage is the only natural condition for the pleasure of sex. The Bible Is a Book About Marriage and Sex But according to the Bible, this is not how it is with God or his world or our bodies. He created the heavens and the earth graciously and freely, using the finest of materials — whatever was in his loving, wise, and holy heart. Paul says God is for the body (1 Corinthians 6:13). He should be: he made it.