Theme of the Week: Our Sexuality Matters to God
Bible Verse: “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.” Proverbs 18:22 ESV
Scripture Reading: Proverbs 5:15-21
Why does sexuality matter that much to God? He is way up there, we are way down here. How much difference can our lives make to him? Augustine asked God, “What am I to you that you command me to love you, and that, if I fail to love you, you are angry with me and threaten me with vast miseries?”1 Especially in our manhood and womanhood, such an earthy aspect of our existence, why does God care so much?
Our sexuality certainly matters to us, even intuitively. For example, when you are walking down the street, maybe going to the Post Office, and you happen to notice someone out of the corner of your eye, what is it about that person you notice first, without even thinking about it? Don’t you notice whether that person is a man or a woman? And if you cannot tell, don’t you take a second look? Or when you meet someone with a newborn baby, you ask, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Sexual identity matters to us.
Here is why. The gospel reveals something we never would have known. We are men and women playing out this drama of human romance over and over again because of who God is. Romance is not an evolution-generated mechanism for the survival of the human species. Romance came from God. Romance reveals God. Ultimate reality is not cold, dark, blank space out there going on forever with no meaning or message or emotion. Ultimate reality is romance.
God loves us, and not with a platonic love but with a romantic love. God loves us not with chilly indifference but with hot passion. The gospel reveals that is who God is.
This wonderful truth means many things. For starters, it means marriage is not just another mutation in human social development. Marriage is a divine creation, pointing to something beyond us. A man and woman falling in love, committing themselves with lifelong vows of faithfulness, uniting sexually, living life together “’til death us do part”—it is all pointing to the mega-romance of Christ and the church in love forever.
Just being a man is a gospel privilege. Just being a woman is a gospel privilege. What we are is about the gospel. That is why we need to learn gospel sexuality.
1 Saint Augustine, Henry Chadwick, trans., The Confessions (Oxford: The University Press, 1991), p. 5.
Taken from Proverbs: Wisdom That Works by Raymond C. Ortlund Jr., © 2012. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, crossway.org.
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