Thursday, 11 February 2010 17:26 | and posted in Sex & Relationships
After re-entry to the Garden of Eden becomes impossible, the first thing Adam and Eve do is to have sex.* Since that day sex has been used and abused to selfishly try and grasp at the connection that has been lost with our creator or to simply gratify a need in us.
But this is not the way sex was created to be.
Sex is a part of creation that God declares is very good. You can clearly see this within the blessing God gives to Adam and Eve a couple of verses before this declaration when he tells them to “be fruitful and increase in number.”**
Genesis 2:24 gives us a clue about why sex is an important feature of God’s blessing of Adam and Eve. It talks about Adam and Eve becoming “one flesh.” Two people becoming one. On the surface this appears to be another Bible euphemism for sex but it’s far more than this.
When it says that Adam and Eve become “one flesh,” the word used for one is the Hebrew word echad. This word is incredibly significant to Jews as it appears in their central declaration of faith the Shema. Found in Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema is a prayer that states: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
The Lord is echad.
Adam and Eve are to become echad.
Through sex Adam and Eve are to become one in the same way God is one.
Sex gives us a glimpse of what God is like. Which begs the question: what is God like?
God has revealed himself both as one God and as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.*** We could say that God is a community of love where the love shown between Father, Son and Spirit is so unconditional, unending, unselfish and given completely without reserve that their three-ness is somehow “lost” in their one-ness.
If God is like this, then sex is an unselfish giving of yourself for the other person that mirrors the self-giving nature of the trinity.
I can’t better how Rob Bell phrases it: “Sex is not the search for something that’s missing. It’s the celebration of something that’s been found. It’s designed to be the overflow, the culmination of something that a man and a woman have found in each other. It’s a celebration of this living, breathing thing that’s happening between the two of them.”^
FOOTNOTES: [Back to Top]
* Read Genesis 3:24 to 4:1
** Read Genesis 1:28 and 1:31
*** The theological term we used to describe this three-in-one-ness is trinity.
^ Sex God, page 123
