Happily Ever After? Sexuality, Marriage, and the Gospel
Sex without permanence, like a gospel without permanence, provides no safety at all, only a miserable striving after what cannot be grasped. Without the joy and security of marital permanence, it utterly fails in its purpose to point to the joy and security of the gospel.
A recent discussion in my home centered around a television episode in which the “happy ending” consisted of the hero and heroine deciding to move in together but not get married. I suspect most readers of this post do not believe that that is truly a happy ending. But why? Is it just because God says so? Well, that would be enough, but there is more to say about it—God has given us more.
First, we must understand that sex, in its true form, is inseparable from marriage. This is more than just saying that marriage is the only proper context for sexual expression. It means that the very essence of sex, as its Creator designed it, includes it being an expression of the marital union. You can see this if you do a study of the passages in Scripture that use the phrase “the two shall become one flesh.” This phrase refers most literally to sex itself, but it also refers to the whole marriage union, of which sex is the physical expression. C.S. Lewis explained it this way:
The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ’s words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism—for that is what the words “one flesh” would be in modern English.… The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again.¹
Sex as a physical union has its meaning only in the context of the relational, emotional, legal union that is the whole marriage. So while Paul speaks of sex with a prostitute as “becoming one flesh” (1 Corinthians 6:16), he does so only to point out how horribly such sex fails in its God-intended meaning. That meaning is only properly expressed when sex is an expression of the marriage union. Just like a word out of context can actually carry a different meaning, so, too, sexual activity outside of the context of marriage carries a meaning different than that for which God designed it.
And that God-intended meaning is nothing less than the gospel itself. In both 1 Corinthians 6:12–20 and Ephesians 5:25–32, the union termed as “the two shall become one flesh” is described as pointing to our union with Christ. And because sex is inseparable from marriage, it is not just marriage as a one-flesh union, but also sex as the physical expression of that union that is meant to picture the union of Christ and his Bride, the Church. Sex as an expression of marital union speaks the gospel; sex independent of marriage speaks anti-gospel.
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A Brief Review of Abigail Shrier’s “Bad Therapy”
Shrier’s book is giving parents permission to rethink the therapeutic paradigms that have dominated child-rearing literature for a long time now. She gives parents permission to see their children as moral agents who need their character formed by loving parents rather than as merely victims of an array of alleged pathologies that require third-party interventions from the medical authorities.
I finished Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up about two or three weeks ago. I’ve had a lot of time to ruminate on it, and I think it will be one of the most important books of the year. It really is a bit of a barn-burner. Her reporting gathers evidence against some of the sacrosanct totems of our age:
1. Trauma-informed therapy2. Gentle parenting3. Hyper-medicalization of children4. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score5. Empathy run amok
Shrier begins the book with a giant disclaimer that she’s not writing this book about kids with actual serious, debilitating trauma. She’s not writing as if real trauma doesn’t exist in the world or as if therapeutic interventions can never be helpful for people. She’s writing about an overweening therapeutic mindset that pathologizes the ordinary challenges of a child’s life. Parents who rashly thrust their child into therapy or under the influence of psychotropic drugs may be doing more harm than good. She argues that our presumption should be for our children’s resilience, not for our children’s inability to cope without medical interventions.
My sense is that Shrier has tapped into something that many parents are already beginning sense for themselves. They are starting to recognize that “gentle parenting” and a lack of skepticism about psychiatric interventions have led to a situation in which ordinary problems have been pathologized and medicalized—problems that in previous generations were dealt with through loving discipline.
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One Unexpected Key to a Joyful Marriage
Serve, serve, and serve some more. Act in love even when you don’t feel loved, act with grace even if you don’t feel particularly gracious. Sow extravagant love to the love of your life, and reap the reward of joy. For the path to joy in marriage leads away from you and runs straight to your spouse.
You probably keep score. I’m sure you don’t mean to. You may not even be conscious of it. But there’s a pretty good chance that you do it. You keep score in your marriage.
You keep score when you tally up the things you do for your spouse and when you tally up the things your spouse fails to do for you. You rarely keep a running total of your own failures or your spouse’s successes. Rather, you maintain records in such a way that you come out ahead. You probably keep the score in your marriage. And I’m sure it makes you unhappy.
Why does it make you unhappy? Because comparison is the thief of joy. Comparison is the thief of joy because it causes you to focus on yourself. Comparison leads inward, to what you desire, to what you long for, to what you are certain you deserve. Yet the path to joy leads outward rather than inward. It leads toward others rather than toward self. There is more joy in loving than in being loved, more satisfaction in doing good to others than in having good done to you. The path to joy in marriage does not lead from your spouse but to your spouse.
Thus, one of the keys to a joyful marriage is to simply stop keeping score—to stop tallying up the good things you’ve done for your husband or wife and the good things he or she has neglected to do for you. Keep no ledger of wrongs and keep no ledger of rights.
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A Survey of Presbyterian Mission History in Africa, Whytock, 2023
A Presbyterian missionary to Africa told me several years ago that Africa is large with peoples of many cultures and languages distributed over its varied topography that provides a spectrum of climates from Cape Town to Casablanca to Cairo. Africa is a mission field that is complex with unique challenges. The nearly 800 pages of the book are indicative of the size of the continent and two-hundred years of Presbyterian missions history. The twenty-six authors unite to provide through their varied experiences and scholarship a panorama of Presbyterian history in Africa.
BOOK NOTICE–On January 1, 1824 the Presbytery of Kaffraria was organized the first presbytery in Africa. In celebration of this bicentennial A Survey of Presbyterian Mission History in Africa: Historic Beginnings (c.1790s to c.1930s) is the first of a two-volume set by Barnabas Academic Publishers. Volume two is scheduled for publication in 2024. The editor, J. C. Whytock, has taught church and missions history at colleges and seminaries across Africa more than twenty years and his work includes An Educated Clergy, 2007, as well as contributions to The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, 2012, and A Companion to The Reformation in Scotland, 2021. The book cover shows a reproduction of a painting by Thomas Baines of the intimidatingly large tree Baobab; it was painted while the artist travelled with Dr. David Livingstone on his Zambesi Expedition in 1858.
Following a forward by Ronald Munyithya, retired church pastor and lecturer in Biblical Studies at Mukhanyo Theological College, the text is divided into four parts including 13, 9, 3, and 7 chapters respectively. The first part considers the historic beginnings and developments in western and southern Africa; the second part addresses the same subjects for western and central Africa; then the third part looks into the Nile corridor in the northeast part of the continent; and the fourth part ponders assorted topical studies. Some of the chapter titles from the four parts are—African Presbyterian Sung Praise–Principles, Early Psalters and Hymnals; Presbyterian Developments in Kenya; History of Presbyterians in Rwanda; Presbyterian Ethiopianism in South Africa and Malawi; Old Princeton Seminary & the Missionary Imperative, which includes an article about Princeton alumni that served in Africa; Jewish and Muslim Missions in Northern Africa; The History of Early Presbyterianism in Sudan; legacies of African American Missionaries of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission; Beginnings of Presbyterian Work in German Kamerun, c.1879–c.1940; and Revival and Exile: The Madeirans, A Story of Influence on the Fringe.
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