Lesson 47
Bible Doctrine of Sex II – Gen. 2:15-25
We’ll see if we can finish this, the doctrine of sexuality in the
Bible. We have gotten into a passage of
Scripture which in order to understand why there are restrictions I want to
take you back to the basis of sex and the divine institution of marriage and
show you why the Bible says what it says.
We want to do this because in our day it is insufficient to tell someone
you shouldn’t do this or you should do that; you should give reasons why. That might have been a nice sweet thing to
tell someone fifty years ago but it doesn’t hack it in this age. So in order to substantiate why the Bible
says what it does and the bounds that it establishes and lays down for man, we
have to go back to the nature of man and understand a little bit of who and
what he is and why sex was given.
Last time we went through seven points of the doctrine of man’s nature
and briefly summarized, we found that man has a soul, and he has a human
spirit. The human spirit is used to
activate the physical body but it primarily has a spiritual function which is
to process doctrine and it inspires us and so on, and it is a place where the
Holy Spirit indwells and so forth. Then
man has a soul, he has a volition, he has conscience, he has personal
affections, and he has mentality. These are various functions of the soul. We said that man is unique in the universe
because man is a union of the spirit and matter. Angels are pure spirit beings, no body,
though they have form, but they do not have a corporeal body, at least if they
do have one it comes under the general classification of pneuma in the
Scripture. So they are spirit
beings. Animals on the other hand have
bodies but they do not have the image of God. So man is unique in that his
spirit, which is the human spirit, is united with the body an indissoluble
union until the point which God terminates it, which we call physical
death.
This has important ramifications in the area of sex, why for example,
man alone has sex; angels do not, never had, never will. Man has sex but only in phase two, only in
the time of his physical life. In
eternity, in phase three, no sex, no marriage; it’s all eliminated at the point
of death. Why? Obviously because it is closely related to
the soul’s position in the physical body.
Therefore beginning tonight we are going to work through four points on
the doctrine of man’s sexuality. And in
order to do this we are going to go through various sections of Scripture.
The first point under man’s sexuality is that the reason for man’s
creation, this is a real short point, the other points are very long and
detailed, but this point says that man was created for two reasons. It goes back to the reason for man’s
existence. Why was man created in the
first place in the universe? We find the
Bible giving us at least two reasons.
Man was created in order to serve two functions. First function was to complete the master
plan of God. The master plan of God is
that plan of God which includes all things in space time history from one end
of the spectrum to the other and therefore includes all the details of
life. It includes all the details of the
universe, it includes the whole plan of history and man has an integral part
and in order to finish this off and complete it and bring it to its pinnacle
God has placed man into the system.
The second reason gets involved with what is known as the angelic
conflict. The angelic conflict has to do
with the tremendous spiritual battle that’s being waged and was waged prior to
the creation of man, a struggle that exists in the spiritual realm, the
struggle that is mentioned by the Apostle Paul, “For we wrestle not against
flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers” and so on. It is generally the failure of Christians to
recognize the existence of the angelic conflict that causes them to have a
self-righteous attitude, self-confident attitude that they can do it all,
etc. When in actuality we are caught in
a cross-fire in a tremendous angelic conflict that extends out into the outer
galaxies and exists throughout the entire solar system and universe. The angelic conflict is described in
Revelation, it’s described in other passages of Scripture. But the Church has a tremendous role to play
in this; man himself does and one of the reasons that he was brought about was
to help resolve this angelic conflict.
Basically we know the angelic conflict exists because we know at a
certain point in time Satan fell, Isaiah 14, Ezek. 28. Satan fell at a point in time and God passed
a sentence that said Satan, I will sentence you to the Lake of Fire, explained
in Matt. 25:41 and at that point when God said to Satan I sentence you to the
Lake of Fire, He set up the Lake of Fire and this is why in the New Testament
it says the Lake of Fire was not created for man but it was created for the
devil and his angels. So that is the
sentence that God has put on Satan.
However, it is very obvious that God has not carried out the sentence,
so here you have the ironic fact, you have rebellion, negative volition on
Satan’s part, God passes judgment and yet you do not have that judgment
executed until the end of history.
Therefore all of man’s history falls in a parenthesis between these two
points and the reason for man’s existence is to help resolve this conflict, to
show Satan again and again and again that a free being, one with volition, will
choose for God under test, and will do it again and again and again. This, for example, is why you have the book
of Job written and why in the first two chapters of Job the whole book starts
with a conflict that exists in the heavenly places first, then it is shown in
Job’s life. This is also covered in the
area of suffering. So the angelic conflict is important man is created to help
resolve this.
Therefore the first thing that starts off our four points on the
doctrine of man’s sexuality is that man was created for a spiritual reason and
everything including sex is oriented to this goal. Now this is going to
immediately lift it out of the usual animal context that the sex educators love
to paint it in. This is the first thing
you want to remember, that man, including his sex, comes about in order to help
resolve these problems.
The second thing, man was given a test and the test was not to eat of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil while he was doing two things. So the test was don’t eat of this particular
tree and while he is given that command he is to have two roles. Role number one and role number two. Role number one was to defend the Garden and
it is given in Gen. 2:15, “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the
garden” or park,
The second role that Adam had was to conduct an offensive operation and
that is described in Gen. 1:26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So the first thing that Adam was to do was to
move out from this Garden and gradually bring into dominion under him the
animal kingdom. The animal kingdom was
to be the subject of man’s rule for reasons we can’t go into but also related
to the angels. But he was to go out in verse 26 and obtain dominion over
these.
Verse 27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him; male and female created he them.” Then in verse 28, “And God blessed them, and
God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth,” not
replenish, it means to fill up the earth, and so here we have his second role,
and the offensive role must be sustained by a population increase. Adam and Eve can’t do it alone, they have to
have a family, so you have the generation of a family and of course immediately
you can begin to see one reason for sex, not the only reason but it was
originally given to generate a family of conquerors that would spread over the
earth and bring it under the dominion of man, under a massive prolonged testing
campaign that God had designed for man.
So here we have then a test given to Adam. The test was don’t eat of the tree of
knowledge while you’re doing these two things.
Now what happen if Adam beat the test?
Suppose Adam tested out positive; suppose in al this Adam went positive,
what would have happened to Adam had he gone positive and not fallen. We can infer from 1 Cor.
The other thing He would have given Adam was eternal life. Adam was not born with eternal life although
he had fellowship with God. And this
eternal life that God has given us, of course, is a possession that we should
treasure and value; Adam did not have this.
Then we come to if Adam fell what would happen, it would have been the
negative of these. Instead of getting a
resurrection body, Adam would have died; his body would be subject to decay
which would cause physical death and spiritual death. And finally, the second
thing he would have had, he would have had a complete disruption, which
happened, of his environment. So these are the choices before Adam and we know
very well which choice it wound up in.
So the second thing under the points of man’s sexuality is that man was
given a test; he was not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
until God changed His mind or until he finished this test.
The third point, sex was given to man to help him in this test. To get this turn to Gen. 2:18; sex was given
to man to help him under this test. Now
sex cannot be explained and I always have to laugh at all the religious
professors that say oh, isn’t this a sweet little mythological story that
somebody cranked out to explain where the birds and the bees came from. Of course we know so much in the 20th
century about everything and they didn’t have the benefit of our vast
intelligence and so they made up this thing to explain it. And of course it’s completely reverse, the
reason why we have sex is because the story is true. The story doesn’t hang on the fact that we
have sex; we have sex because first the story is true, that’s why. So this story is not myth, you can’t prove
it’s myth, it never has been proven to be myth unless people want to assume
certain other things which is beside the point.
But this is a real story that is to be interpreted literally. And if you do not interpret it literally then
logic requires you to deny Jesus Christ.
Why? Because 1 Cor. 15, Romans chapter 5, chapter 8, 1 Timothy 2 and 1
Cor. 15 all point to an analogy between a literal Adam and a literal
Christ. The apostles believed in a
literal Adam; Jesus believed in a literal Adam.
So if you think you know more than Jesus you go ahead and make it a
myth.
In the third point on sexuality, sex was given to man to help him in
this test, Gen. 2:18, “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man
should be alone,” now this is the way it worked out. On the sixth day of creation God comes along
and He’s done everything on these previous days and He comes down to the sixth
day and He makes man but He makes man individual and apparently at this point
sexless. There is not any sex on the
scene, this person is a soul and he has volition but he has none of the sexual
characteristics which we would attribute to him. Therefore what do we make of Gen. 2:18, the
Lord God makes man and He says but “it isn’t good that this man be alone.” Why isn’t it good? It goes back to the essence of the soul, here
you have volition, conscience, personal affections and mentality, and since man
is a person and possesses all of these characteristics you cannot have a
solitary personality. The whole point
about the Bible saying man is a person means that he can’t exist by himself
absolutely alone.
No man is an island; the Bible confirms that truth. In fact, this is why we have the doctrine of
the Trinity, because God is a person and you can’t have a personal God existing
for all eternity before creation out in the middle of the Milky Way somewhere
all alone; it’s a violation of the doctrine of personality and so that is why
we have the Trinity. The Trinity says
God was never alone because the Father had fellowship with the Son; the Son had
fellowship with the Father, etc. and the Trinity is what protects the
personality of God. If you drop the
Trinity ultimately logic forces you to drop the personality of God. So personality in the Bible insists on having
another personality with which to have fellowship and that’s why God says in
verse 18, “It is not good that man should be alone,” it is not good that man
dwell alone, even in innocence. It is an
inherent quality that has nothing to do with the fall. This is a quality that has to do with man’s
very nature as created by the hand of God.
He is created a person and he must have another person with which to
have fellowship.
So God says, “I will make a help meet for him.” I used to read that as though it was one
verb, a helpmeet. And that’s wrong, it’s
not helpmeet; it’s “help fit for him.”
Let’s look at the word “help” that we worked on a little bit last time
by way of introduction. Help, it looks
like this, hazar, with a very short
“z”, almost like a “ts.” We don’t have a
rough “h” in the English so the only thing we have to imitate this ayin is kind
of like an “h” but actually it’s ‘azar,
and you can see where this has come about in Scripture, for example, you know
of a name in the Bible called Eliezer, now let’s take that name apart and you
can tell what the man’s name means.
“ezer” is the Hebrew word help, so that’s one part of his name, help, so
that takes care of that part of the name, now let’s look at the first three
letters, Eli, what does “El” mean? God,
“e” is the first common suffix singular for this noun, you put this on and you
put it “my God” so there is Eliezer’s name, “My God is help,” or “is a
help.” And that’s what his name
meant. And this introduces us to this
word hazar, which as we found out
last time is generally used in the Bible of God Himself. I cannot find another place where it’s
clearly used of a man. In some cases
it’s used, the man didn’t come through and they say there’s no help available,
but usually throughout the Psalms we find “God is my help and my shield,”
you’ve seen that if you’ve read the Psalms at all. “The Lord is a help and a shield,” you’ve
seen that expression again and again.
The word “help” in that expression is hazar here.
So that is what help means, the person who comes alongside someone to
help out in a jam. This is the whole
concept of a help. This is why God is
called help in the book of Exodus because Israel is in a jam, she can’t get out
of it and so what happens? God comes to
her side as her helper. Now you have the
same thing set up in the Bible. You have
Man with a capital “M”, this is the man as part of mankind, you have him as an
individual, but he represents mankind, and alone he needs help. Why does he need help? Because he’s under test, he’s under pressure
and to meet this test he needs help. So
this is why God in verse 18 says I am going to make an hazar for him, a help for him.
Now the word “meet.” The word
“meet” comes from a Hebrew combination of things which actually means according
to his [can’t understand words], and it’s an expression or an idiom that means
corresponding to him. What do we mean by
a help that corresponds to the first man. We mean that he can’t be an
angel. For example, man has a human
spirit, he has a soul and he has a body.
There is man. Now if an angel
were to help him, an angel could in one sense, an angel is a person, so the
angel qualifies by being a person and in that sense an angel could help him and
have a personal relationship. But this
isn’t enough, Adam, under test in a natural body has to have someone else in a
natural body and this person is called a soul in the Bible, he has to have
another soul or a help fit and corresponding to his soul [can’t understand
word]. So therefore the Bible says that
God is going to make woman from the man to be a help and she will be a help
because of two things. She will be a
help because number one she’s a person, bearing the image of God, and the
animals of course were not, they did not bear the image of God.
Then the second thing, the reason why woman is a help is because not
only is she a person but she is a soul and a soul we defined last time and this
is why these definitions are important to pick this up. We’re going to tie it all together. Soul, we said, was the person that is brought
about by the union of a human spirit and in a human body. Soul is the result of a union between the
human spirit and the human body. So
therefore the woman too is not a pure spirit being, she is spirit in flesh too,
so therefore, and this leads to the area of sex, she is going to help man out,
and she is going to help him out under a time of testing and the time that she
helps man is only during the test because the test begins in the Garden of Eden
and is terminated at the resurrection.
So you go from the Garden to the resurrection and it is only this era of
eternity that has sex. Sex has only to do with a natural body, not the
resurrection body.
So we identify two things in the Bible, man is going to be under a test
for this whole time and you have sex for the whole time. You might say sex is a test and that seems to
be the way it’s working out. But that
wasn’t the way it originally was. Sex
was put there to help in time of testing.
Now let’s see what we find. In
verses 19-20, “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the
field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he
would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof.” The important thing to
remember about this process of naming, and this is not every animal that He
made, like some religious professors would have you believe that want to find
contradictions in the Bible when they’re not there. This means some of the animals, the domestic
animals, as anyone who knows the Hebrew understands. Verse 19 are domestic animals and these are
the ones that happen to be floating around the park, and the Lord Jesus Christ
in incarnate form brought these animals before Adam and said Adam, how do you
like this. So here’s Adam and a little
worm comes up, and then some dog comes up, and so the dog wags his tail and he
says what do you call that? And Adam
would call this “dog” and then something else would come up and he’d name these
things, one after the other, the name indicating Adam’s insight into the nature
of that animal.
So here we have the first man unhindered, remember his brain cells
aren’t subject to deterioration and he is a brilliant man, he is a genius, and
he his able at first glance, empirically to understand the nature phenomena,
and he looks at these animals and he can judge them, and this is why verse19
ends with the phrase “whatever he called it, that was it.” And that’s the way it reads, “whatever he
called it, that was it.” In other words,
Adam had perfect empirical perception, and whatever he saw he could analyze and
categorize and name. And of course we
have the idea of empiricism which persists down to our day but it’s distorted
by problems of the fall, etc. So Adam
had almost perfect empirical perception here on these animals. That’s going to
play a role later on which we see in this text.
Verse 20 concludes with a note, among these “there was not found an help
meet for him,” because every animal failed man in two categories. It failed man by not being a person bearing
the image of God. Animals are not people; those of you who want your dog and cat
to go to heaven, you have my apologies, I cannot find it in the Scripture. Animals disqualify on the basis that they are
not a person. The animals also
disqualify on the basis that in one technical sense, although he is a soul he
is a spirit united with matter, he is not of the same sort as man. So among these, then, Adam could not find
anything that corresponded to himself.
Now verse 21-22, the first surgery of history performed under
anesthesia. “And the LORD God caused a
deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and
closed up the flesh instead thereof.”
There’s no reason to allegorize this passage; there’s no reason why God
could not take actual flesh, and this is obviously important too, He is taking
part of Adam’s body and re-molding it into a woman. In verse 22, “And the rib, which the LORD God
had taken from the man, made He a woman,” or built as we said last time, an
engineering term, for a woman. Woman was
built for the man. And this is part of
God’s divine design, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of, that’s the way the
ladies were made; God made them for a purpose.
So in verse 22 it tells you the purpose.
Now verse 23 you have Adam and he looks out and he sees this; of course
this is the first time, and the first of many, many times I might say for you
who are single, that the Lord Jesus Christ was personally interested in dating
because it was He who introduced Adam to his wife. And Christians today have the marvelous
opportunity of claiming promises because God still is in the matching business. And if you trust Him He will lead you to your
partner and you can relax and you don’t have to take the unbeliever’s frantic
stand, oh, I’m 26 and not married yet and what am I going to do, and all the
rest of it. You just relax and trust the
promises of God and God will lead you to your partner, if you don’t do certain
things which we’ll mention next time. So
here you have the Lord taking the woman from the man and verse He brought her
to the man.
Notice too that in this passage you have the Old Testament doctrine that
protects the woman, that has to do with the Deut. 22 passage, and that is that
the woman in the Word of God has been elevated out of her pagan position that
she was in at this time the Scripture was written. Woman was considered a little bit better than
a horse, and you could buy and sell and trade them off, etc. And this was her status in the ancient world,
not a very nice status, and it was the Word of God that gave woman her position
in the world. And so it is grounded
actually on her nature and she is said to be here that which completes the
man.
Verse 23, Adam looking out, you can just see him here, he’s been
watching the dogs and the cats and the horses and the birds and the bees float
by and then all of a sudden the Lord brings this other creature up. And of course for a moment he ogles, and then
he says in verse 23, and this is written in a song form in the Hebrew, so this
is the first song. The first song in
history was a love song. “And Adam said,
This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of the Man.”
And here we have another identification. Notice God builds a woman from
the body of a man and when Adam identifies her he does so on the basis of
body. This woman not only is a person
but she has a physical body and a physical body is what makes her a living soul
and it’s that that Adam responds to. He
responds to a soul which is spirit, human spirit plus body. And that is what Adam responds to empirically. He is looking and he sees this and he sees
this person and he sees that he corresponds at last, of the same type.
Now verse 24, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother,”
now verse 24 is a common verse put in by Moses after, of course, this event
happened, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall
cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.” This is the sexual relationship and I will
develop this in a few minutes as we go into other passages of Scripture. Here is the center of sexuality.
Verse 25, “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not
ashamed.” So in this passage we have
under our third point of sexuality we have the fact that sex was given in some
way, and we’re going to define what way in a moment, but sex was given to help
man under a testing situation.
Turn to the New Testament to a corresponding passage, 1 Cor. 11. This passage in 1 Cor. 11 backs up Genesis 2
and shows once again why you can’t drop out Genesis 2 as mythology without
destroying the whole New Testament. It
all hangs together. If you flush one, be honest, flush the whole thing, but
don’t try to take your cake and eat it too, you just can’t do it. 1 Cor. 11:7-9. We won’t go into the long and short hair and
whether women should wear hats or not; that’s not the objective tonight, we
have too much Scripture to cover. Verse
7, “For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image
and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man.” Now there are two things to notice in this
verse. The first thing you want to
notice, and you can’t really notice is the verbs in the original language are
different. First in verse 7 it says the
man “is” and the word “is” comes from a Greek word, ‘uparcho, huparcho and huparcho
is the Greek verb for continuous existence.
In other words, this verb is laying stress one existence. So man exists in the form as the glory and
the image of God. Now when it speaks of
the woman it shifts the verb, “but the woman is” and this word is another Greek
word, “is” and it’s eimi, and eimi means state or condition. And this is important to see this, otherwise
you’re going to kind of drop woman out of the whole thing if you don’t. You have the first verb that has to do with
existence, huparcho. Your second verb is eimi and has to do with her state.
Why is this put in here? Because
the second thing of this verse is an analogy that Paul is setting up. The analogy is set up between God and man,
not God and the male, God and the man, Adam.
And the second half of your analogy is the male and the female.
Now we’ll see what is analogous and what isn’t analogous and the verb
form saves us from making a wrong conclusion.
This is not to say that the male becomes a god to the female. The reason for it is in verse 7 where it says
man is the image, or exists in the image and glory of God, that word “man”
there includes both male and female, just as in Genesis what does it say? “He made them male and female” in the image
of God. So both male and female are in
the image of and the glory of God. Both
share that. But then Paul wants to point
out what is unique to the woman besides this… besides this. She has these things; he’s not denying that
woman is not made in the image of God, that’s not the point of the contrast in
verse 7. But when he repeats Himself,
notice, on the left side of the analogy the man is the image and the glory of
God; now what does he do? What does the next phrase say? “And the woman is the glory of the man.” Do
you see something missing? There is no
word for “image” there, only glory, and the verb is shifted. So now he’s moving over and making his
analogy and the analogy now is woman’s condition, she is to the man as the man
is to God in the sense of glory, not image.
You see image has to do with our attributes of personality, etc.
volition, conscience and so on. And that’s not what Paul wants to draw the
conclusion to. He wants to emphasize
glory; he wants to say that as Adam is the glory of God so the female is the
glory of the male.
Now he explains what he means by this in the next verse. He gives you two reasons for making this
statement. Verse 8, “For the man is not
of the woman, but the woman of the man.” So that tells you immediately what
he’s got in mind when he uses this word “glory.” “Glory” means that which flows out of; glory,
for example is a light shining in darkness, it is the projection outward. So therefore the first idea he has in his
mind is that the female came from the male.
You say well great, I knew that from Gen. 2. Well the reason that he’s saying this is that
the woman has a form, for example, that is never seen in angelic regions. You see, an angel always appears in the Bible
as a male; Jesus Christ appears as a man, God in the visions of the apocalypse
appears as a male and you will never, never, never find any angel or God
Himself ever appearing in the form of a female.
And the reason is this, that man as a male form represents the basic
concept of Adam, man himself, mankind.
The female is a special sub form that exists to complete him.
So this is why in Scripture God never appears as a woman. This is important because every in other
ancient religion in the world you have goddesses but you never can find one in
the Bible, they are all male, every one of them, all the angels, always appear
as males. And the reason is evidently
tied to this, that the woman proceeds out from the male, she is a dependent, or
you might say a modified version of the man.
The man is the original version and she is a modified version; she is
the glory of the man.
Verse 9 explains another reason, “Neither was the man created on account
of the woman, but the woman was created on account of the man.” And the word “on account of” is an expression
of purpose. So in verse 8 you have one
reason that Paul gives, in verse 8 the reason is the mode of creation, that
says that woman is the glory of man and in verse 9 the purpose of creation
shows that woman is the glory of the man.
How? Because in verse 9 it says
the man was not created to fulfill a prior existing purpose that existed before
he came on the scene. The woman,
however, was. Before Eve existed man had a purpose, so when Eve comes on to the
scene the purpose is already there. She
is brought in to help the purpose, but the purpose… it’s not like God put first
the man, then the woman and then He gave him a test. The order was not that; the order was not
man, woman, test. That was not the
sequence in Scripture. The sequence in
Scripture was man, test, then the woman and the woman was on account of the
test given to man and it’s not reversed.
There’s a definite procedure.
It’s like the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Now again, the analogy of the Trinity helps us here because certain
people will draw the wrong conclusion and say therefore woman is inferior, and
that is not what is meant. What is meant is the same kind of procedure that you
get in the Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Is the Holy Spirit less than the Father?
Absolutely not, He has the same attributes of the Father. Is the Son less than the Father? Absolutely
not, He has the same attributes of the Father.
But there is a logical progression that has been recognized on down
through history, that you can think of one but you have to think in this
order. First God the Father planned, the
Son executes and the Holy Spirit reveals and applies the results of the
work. There is a logical sequence, a
logical conception that ties this together.
So the same thing is with man, woman and the test. It is not man, woman and test; it is man, the
test and the woman. In other words, for
the ancient mind if they would read this passage they would say woman came
about because of blank, and you would fill in the blank, she came about to help
man in his test.
So woman has a fantastic role that is given to her in the Word of God
but it is exactly that role that tells her where her position is, not only in
the local church as in 1 Cor. 11 but in the sex relationship which we will see
in just a moment. Now that’s the third
point of our doctrine of sexuality and we want to have enough time to finish
the last one which gets into the details.
The third point again: sex was given to man to help him in a test. This is why there is not sex in heaven, that
is why there are no marriages in heaven.
So those of you who have a happy marriage, fine, just enjoy it. Those of
you who don’t, don’t sweat it, it’s all over soon. There is no marriage, no sex in heaven.
Now we come to the fourth point and the fourth point is sexuality is
designed, now here we have to get into a long dissertation, sexuality is
designed to provide man with a soulish experience parallel to his spiritual
experience with God. In other words you
have two parallel experiences. You are
going to have a spiritual relationship that man has to take in history. He has a spiritual relationship between
himself and God. Here’s God, here’s
man. And then in order to help man God
is going to so design sex to give man a soulish experience that will correspond
as closely as possible to this God/man experience. The reason for doing this is to reinforce the
terms of the spiritual experience upon his consciousness. Man is going to be required, both in his male
and female forms, to do certain things connected with sexuality that outline
and give to him the purpose for which he exists on the left side of the
analogy. In other words, sex has been
deliberately designed with a teaching view in mind, as is basically all of
history. History is designed to teach,
to constantly present facts to man. Sex is designed to teach certain
things.
Now we are going to examine in detail the relationship that exists
between sex as a soulish experience and the God/man relationship, the personal
relationship a man has with God. To see
this to begin with turn to Eph. 5:22.
This it he passage which continues right after the filling of the Holy
Spirit. And it’s interesting that one of
the manifestations immediately in the filling of the Holy Spirit is in the
marriage relationship. Do you know why? Because of all of the details of life
it is the marriage situation and the marriage experience that is the most
profound experience man ever has, apart from his relationship with God. You can take all your business relationships,
all your relationships as a person examining things in the universe, etc. and
yet the Word of God says there’s no more complex difficult relationship than
the sexual experience between a man and a woman [blank spot].
This is fraught with details and yet it has been designed for a teaching
purpose. Man is built up and
edified. As Martin Luther was fond of
saying, if the Pope had been married he’d never have thought of papal
infallibility. But the point was well
taken, and that is that all men are matured in their relationships by going
through this, you might say the college of hard knocks. So we have the soulish relationship
paralleling the spiritual relationship beginning in verse 22.
“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the
Lord.” The word “submit” here means take
your place under in an administrative framework. This does not mean the female takes the
position of inferiority. It goes back to
an organizational position such as the Father takes to the Son, such as the Son
takes to the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit would never complain, oh, I feel left out, I’m the third member. Obviously the Holy Spirit doesn’t turn around
to the Son and say I don’t like the role you’ve given me frankly, Lord, and you
have a fight in the Trinity. That’s not
what’s going on, there’s a [can’t understand word] organization logically
working and this is what hupostasso
means, “Wives, get in your position unto your own husbands as unto the
Lord.”
Verse 23, “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is
the head of the church; and He is the savior of the body,” speaking of the Lord
Jesus Christ and the Church. Now here
you begin to develop another analogy.
We’re going to have to tie all these analogies together because they’re
different. I got off when I first
studied this because I thought they were all the same and then I discovered
they aren’t the same. So let’s watch, an
analogy that Paul is bringing in is between Christ and the Church as between a
man and his wife. Keep that analogy in
mind because it’s going to switch down inside here.
Verse 24, “Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the
wives be to their own husbands in everything.”
In other words, as the Church is given to the Lord to perform the
purpose for which the Lord Jesus Christ was sent, it gets back to the angelic
conflict. During the age of the Church
between the time of the cross and the resurrection and the time of the Second
Advent the Lord Jesus is doing something.
Some persons have the idea He’s sitting up in heaven at the Father’s
right hand twiddling His thumbs while we do all the work. Actually that’s not at all true. The Lord Jesus Christ is the One who is the
commanding officer who is in charge of the tremendous angelic conflict that’s
going on today. It is He, for example, that is moving believers into position
to fight the angelic hordes, an unseen battle that’s going on all the time, and
the Lord is using the Church to fulfill the purpose for which He came for. What did the Lord come for? He came to eliminate death, to solve the sin
problem, and basically He is accomplishing this in the angelic realm through
the Church.
So here again you have the analogy, just as the man was given a job to
do, the woman came to help him with his job, so the Church came about to help
Christ with His job. Now you’ve got an
analogy that works out. Sunday mornings
we are going to get on the social gospel, what’s wrong with the social
gospel? The social gospel doesn’t
recognize this relationship. The Lord
Jesus Christ had a purpose. Again you go back to this, Christ, purpose,
Church. The Church came to fulfill a
purpose that preexisted the Church. In
other words when a church gets on the scene it isn’t a democracy, hey Lord,
what do you think we ought to do in the 20th century? Oh, we ought to march on Washington DC,
great. In other words what you would
have then would be Christ, Church and then purpose; in other words Christ and
the Church get together to decide on the purpose. That’s not the order. Christ has already determined the purpose and
the Church is there to fulfill it. So
you have the same thing with the man and the woman. The man has been given a destiny in history
and a purpose to perform and the woman is brought in after the purpose has been
established to fulfill that previously established purpose. So it’s not the case of the man and the woman
get together and decide well, I wonder what we can do today. In other words, that’s not the concept of
Scripture. The Scripture says the purpose is already pre-established. Woman comes on the scene to fulfill it, the
job is already there, she has no say about it, as the Church has no say about
it. We don’t say Lord, I think our job
is to bring in the Kingdom, and He says great, what do you think the Millennium
is all about. So the purpose is already
pre-established.
Now let’s continue the analogy.
Verse 25, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the
church, and gave Himself for it.” In other
words, the analogy continues; in order for the Church to fulfill Christ’s
purpose the Church must be loved and activated by Christ’s love. In other words that Church to function
depends on Christ loving her every moment.
So therefore similarly, in order for the wife to fulfill the purpose she
depends fulfillment on her purpose to be loved by the man continuously, and
that’s how she fulfills her purpose, as we will see in a moment, she fulfills
it when the man loves her. So the Church
fulfills its purpose when Christ loves it, barring problems of volition and so
on.
Verse 26, “In order that He might sanctify and cleanse it” and so
on. Verse 27, “That He might present it
to Himself a glorious church, not having spot…” and so on. Verse 28, “So ought men to love their wives
as their own bodies.” Notice for the
third time, when the sex relationship is not to do with the human spirit, it
has to do with the body, the Bible recognizes this and you see it again and
again crop out in these discussions. “So
ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loves his wife loves himself.” Now begging in verse 28 you begin to enter
into a union problem and here’s where this analogy shifts and you have to pick
it up or you lose the point. The analogy is not going to be any longer between
Jesus Christ and His Church. The analogy
is going to shift and the analogy is now going to be between the union that
exists between Christ and the Church, called in the Bible by the technical term
“the Christ.” When Christ has the
article preceding His name in some times in Paul’s epistles this does not refer
to Jesus Christ. When he uses the term
“the Christ” he is referring to Jesus Christ plus the body as one group. So inside the circle you have Jesus and inside
the circle you have all members of the Church and that whole unit is called
“the Christ.”
So now the analogy is going to shift not from this relationship, the
administrative relationship but is going to move now to the unity that exists,
the organic unity that exists between Christ and the Church. In verse 28 he anticipates this because he
says, men when you love your wives you love your own bodies. Now that cannot be true unless there is some
union that’s going on over here between the man and his wife. So this then begins to develop the concept of
the union in marriage.
Verse 29, “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh,” do you see that,
that verse would be utterly stupid if man wasn’t united bodily with his
wife. See the absolute stupidity to talk
the way Paul does in verse 28 and 29 if there wasn’t a bodily unity, so that
when this man takes care of his wife he is loving his own body. Let’s go further, “but nourisheth and
cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church.”
Verse 30, “For we are members of His body,” period, “of his flesh and of
his bones” is not in the original text so you can forget it. We are members of His body. Verse 31, “For this cause shall a man leave
his father and mother,” now verse 30 gives you the reason; verse 30 gives you
this unity here, “the Christ” unity, it gives you the unity of positional truth
in Christ. Christ is there, we’ll draw
Him with a circle around Him, and every x you see inside that circle is a
believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and together they make one body called “the
Christ.” And that is the purpose of
verse 30, “we are members of His body.
Now verse 31 moves to the right side of the analogy and now he’s going
to shift and come over here, “For this cause shall a man leave his father and
mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.” And here you have quoted that famous verse of
Gen. 2:24 and this is why you begin to have the basis of sexuality developed,
for sexuality basically is a physical union outlined in verse 31 which
parallels the spiritual union of “the Christ.”
This is why you have sex in the human race. You are producing a unity which we’ll examine
in more detail in the next passage. This
unity that is anticipated in Gen. 2:24 is a physical unity between a man and
his wife and it parallels the spiritual unity between Christ and the Church.
Now verse 32, “This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ
and the Church. [33] Nevertheless” and this sounds like he’s knocking the whole
illustration and that’s not quite that force in the original language, “this is
a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” Here’s His
unity. Verse 33, “Nevertheless, let every one of you in particular so love his
wife even as himself; and the wife, see that she reverence her husband,” and
with this he moves back to this other analogy.
Here you have the administrative analogy, Christ loves the Church; here
you have the administrative analogy, not the union, the adimistrative
analogy. So Christ loves the Church, man
loves his wife; wife responds to man, Church responds to Christ. And you have the cycle of initiation response
set up. This is the administration; this
is the administration analogy but over here he’s talking about the unity
analogy.
Now watch the conclusion you draw.
On what basis do you have this analogy?
You have this analogy, the administrative analogy because of the second
one, the unity. In other words it’s like
this. You have first bodily union as
producing this administrative analogy.
The administrative analogy of course is the love that exists from the
man to the woman and you have the spiritual union which sets up the
administrative analogy between Christ and His church. So out of the union in
both cases, the union is the basis for the action in other words. Like we always say, positional truth is the
basis for experiential behavior patterns.
And so here we have then you have the bodily union between the man and
his wife, the basis for the administrative relationship. And so here you have the spiritual unity
between Christ and the Church the basis of why He loves the Church and why the
Church responds to Him
Now come to our final passage, 1 Cor. 6.
The purpose of going to 1 Cor. 6 is to show you the nature of sex and
its physical union and the profound implications to set up the stage for next
week when we deal with the perversions of this union that exists in our society
today. 1 Cor. 6:9-7:7 is probably one of
the most foremost clearest expositions of exactly what the sex relationship is
in all of literature. It will give you…
here you have packed in this section of Scripture plus the other passages
compared, more on sex and more deep material on sex than you’ll ever get
reading any book anywhere.
1 Cor. 6:13, now remember, this is the church of the swingers and the
Corinthians were known in the ancient world for their loose living, they had no
problem with legalism. And these people
went the other route, they went the licentious route, so therefore Paul has to
calm them down a bit, and obviously one of the troubles that the Corinthians
had was they had the perverse sexual relationships within the congregation,
fornication and so on, they even out-sexed the unbelievers. Paul says good
night, you’re supposed to be witnesses for Christ and yet you’ve done things
here that the Gentiles don’t even do. So
now he has to pull their horns in and this is how he does it and I want you to
see how Paul meets promiscuity in Scripture.
He doesn’t say oh, you shouldn’t do that and wave a little Kleenex in
front of them. That’s not the way to
stop it; the way to stop it is to show people what they’re doing. And that’s the way Paul is going to deal with
the problem. He’s not going to tell them don’t, don’t, don’t, he is going to
give them an explanation of what they are really doing when they’re engaging in
promiscuity.
Beginning in 1 Cor. 6:13 “Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats;
but God shall destroy both it and them.
Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for
the body.” Now to catch this you have to
understand, it should be in quotes, “Meats for the belly, and the belly for
meats,” that is a proverb, that’s not part of a text, that’s a proverb that
Paul is dealing with. So in 6:13 you have him start off with a proverb. The
proverb was quoted by the Corinthians to Paul.
They say look, the proverb is we’ve got a stomach and we’ve got food,
and they go nicely together. Now you
begin to see the application of the proverb.
In other words what he’s saying is that the stomach has hunger pains, it
has a drive, it has a hunger drive and we’re going to satisfy it, that’s what
the food is for. So the obvious
implication is that God has given you a sex drive and so why not fill it any
way you please. And that’s what his
point is in verse 13, “Meats for the belly; the belly for the meats,” but… and
now Paul is going to take proverb and turn it right around. He says you Corinthians, you quote this
proverb and when you quote the proverb you are saying to me that God has given
you a sex drive and so therefore this mean you can go ahead and do anything you
want to just to fulfill it, like I’m hungry so I come in and take a bite to
eat. So I’m a playboy and I go out and
get a few pickups and stuff, it’s the same kind of analogy.
Now let’s see what he does, “But” he says, “God shall destroy both it
and them.” Now he’s going to make a
contrast, he’s going to turn this proverb right back on the Corinthians. They come out with this proverb saying this
and Paul says now just a minute, there is going to be a fantastic difference
between bodily desires such as food and drink and the sex drive. Now some of you always included this and this
is where the Bible says unh-unh, there’s an absolute difference that exists
between the sex drive given to man and his normal bodily desires. That’s the whole point of this and this is
why promiscuity is tremendously injurious.
“Meets for the belly, and the belly for meats; but God shall destroy
both it and them.” “It” refers back to the stomach; “them” refers to the
food. And so what Paul says is look,
just look at this stupid thing. Here you
have a stomach and you have food. The
food goes in the stomach but the stomach isn’t going to be in the resurrection
body, God is going to destroy it. When you die physically where’s all the
food? In the resurrection body you don’t
need food. In other words this desire
that goes on here for the food drive and so on, God is just going to destroy
it; it’s going to have absolutely nothing. So therefore, he says, it’s an
entirely qualitative difference because in the next phrase. “Now the body is not for fornication, but for
the Lord; and the Lord for the body.”
Now do you see what he’s done?
He is saying look, you Corinthians, you’ve said the stomach is for the
food (colon): food for the stomach. Now
he turns around and says oh, body is for the Lord, it’s not for fornication,
and the Lord for the body. So now he’s
drawn a parallel and made another proverb and his proverb expresses the divine
viewpoint, the Corinthians proverb expresses human viewpoint. The stomach for food, food for the stomach,
the whole thing is going to be destroyed, it’s irrelevant, it’s short term. But, God wants to use your body and that is
not short term. Although the sex drive
will be terminated in the resurrection body, the result of what you have done
will not be terminated in the resurrection body and he goes on to illustrate.
Verse 14, “And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up
us by His own power.” The point that
he’s making is look, God, when He designs the resurrection body it completely
destroys things like food and stomach and everything else, that’s all
irrelevant. But the body, these desires
are going to go but the body itself is not going to go; the body itself is
going to be raised again and your resurrection body is continuous with your
natural body. And by “continuous” I
don’t mean it’s made of the same material.
Obviously it’s not. We have the resurrection body and we said the
resurrection body is made up of flesh, bones, minus blood, minus death. So you have two additions, flesh and bones,
same as we have, but minus blood. Why no
blood? Because blood is the feature of the bodily system that causes the
interaction dependence with the physical environment. O2, CO2, waste and food. Now all these things are going to be
eliminated, but the body itself as a unit is not going to be eliminated.
You say what does this have to do with sex? Because Paul, anticipating what he’s going to
say for a moment so you catch the thought, Paul is going to say that when you
go back and look at these physical desires down here, like food, thirst, etc.
those are just desires of the body, pieces of the body, but sex involves the
whole body as one complete unit and so it’s not just satisfying here… Here’s
your body and you’ve got one little desire there, but sex involves the whole
body. And so therefore what you’re going
to do is you’re bringing into condemnation the body which is the instrument God
wants to use and if He considers it so important He’s going to raise it again;
He does not consider important these things like food, drink and all the rest
of the stuff. That’s going to be done with, and that is not brought over into
the resurrection body because it’s just part of the natural body. But He is going to bring the whole body as
its identity over.
Verse 15, “Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall
I, then, take the members of Christ, and make the members of Christ the members
of a whore? God forbid.” Now here you begin to picture what this unity
is all about. Let’s look at it for a
moment. Here you have one unity; now
he’s developing in detail what I tried to show you from Ephesians 5; he is
going to develop the unity of “the Christ,” which results in Christ’s love for
the Church. Let’s look at “the Christ”
for a moment. Here is your human spirit;
here’s your soul. Your soul has
volition, conscience, personal affections and mentality and it also has bodily
affections; sex is built into the soul and is part of the soul, at this moment
anyway. And the human spirit is that
part of you that receives the Holy Spirit.
So when you are born again and you receive the Lord Jesus Christ the
Holy Spirit indwells the human spirit, like the Shekinah glory indwelt the
early temple in the Old Testament. Now
what do you have? Now you have a union
but the union is a spiritual union; it is a union that involves the Holy Spirit
plus the human spirit. These two things are involved. Notice both are spirit, and somehow, unknown
to us, the Holy Spirit has a spiritual union with a human spirit. And it is characterized as a spiritual
union. That sets up this “the Christ.”
Now he says let’s go and consider in verse 15 your bodies are the
members of Christ. Why is the body a
member of Christ? Because if the Holy
Spirit indwells the human spirit, and the human spirit is in union with the
physical body, therefore my physical body becomes a member of Christ too. Christ is united to me spiritually, therefore
He is united to my body since my spirit is in union with my body. Now he says, and this is one of the most
important verses to understand the whole thing, in verse 15. “Shall I, then, take the members of Christ,”
now definition, what are the members of Christ?
You got it in the previous sentence.
The members of Christ are the body, so let’s keep this in mind as we go
through this last crucial section. He’s
talking about your body as an entire entity and he says, “Shall I lift up,” the
word “take” means to carry off, it comes down in certain cases in John 1:29,
“Behold the Lamb of God that carries off the sins of the world,” and so what
he’s saying is are you, in promiscuity, going to take the body, carry it off,
and do what with it? Verse 15, “make it
the members of a whore.”
Now in this you have the mechanics of sex and here you see why sexual
promiscuity is so serious in the Word of God, because this is what evidently is
happening. You have the soul, you have the human spirit, you have the soul with
volition, conscience, personal affections and mentality, there’s the soul,
there’s the human spirit, and you have this body through which they express
themselves. Now he is saying the human spirit
is in union with this, obviously, and so therefore my body is a member of
Christ, but then he says I’m going to take up this body and move it over and
make it one member with a prostitute.
Now how can this be unless the following is true: sex in the Bible is
depicted? Here’s the soul, here’s the
man, here’s a female, here’s the soul, volition, conscience, personal
affections and mentality; body, body, body union. All right, there you’ve got the union and
it’s that union… what did the Bible tell us way back in Gen. 2:24 is true? It said there is no longer two bodies, there
is one body and that one body means something in Scripture. It means that the souls of the two people
involved actually are expressing themselves through both the bodies as though
both the bodies were one. It’s like you
have two souls connected with one body at that point.
So therefore he says in verse 15, what you are doing in promiscuity is
taking the body and offering it to the use of an unbelieving soul over
here. In other words you’re taking the
body, and that body at the point of the sex act becomes an instrument for the
other person’s soul. Now this is the
only way you can get through this Scripture and make any sense out of Paul’s
argument. What is this saying? It is saying that the way God has designed
sex for man is not the way He has designed it for animals. For animals sex is a purely mechanical
biological thing, but when it’s man, something else happens. In addition to the biological there’s an
override and the override that occurs is the exchange of the soul. The soul, at the point of the sex act,
evidently from one person expresses itself through the body of the other, and
there is a union of souls through the one flesh.
So you have one body, two souls at this point. And that’s what he’s saying here in verse
15. When it’s promiscuity you have taken
the members of Christ, made them members of the prostitute. Now how can you do that? The only way this can be possible is that
your body has become one with a prostitute so that her soul can now express
itself through your body. And that’s
what he’s pointing out, that the soul expresses itself through a body and
therefore what you’ve done, you’ve made them members of the prostitute. Why?
Because look, back here he said… what was the basis for him saying that
your body is a member of “the Christ?”
All right, it was because the Holy Spirit indwelt your human
spirit. Jesus Christ indwells you. This means Jesus Christ is in union with your
body, because obviously your human spirit is in union with the flesh. If Jesus Christ is in union with your body
that makes your body a member of Him.
Now keep the analogy going and what do you come out with when you read
verse 15? You come to verse 15 you say
the same thing has happened over here, when you got into promiscuity what
you’ve done is taken the body and you’ve submitted it to the soul of the other
person and that’s what has happened, and this is why the Bible says don’t think
for a moment that sexuality within the human race is like sexuality in the
animal race. It’s not. It’s designed differently, it’s for different
function, although there are obvious parallels, there is a tremendous override
factor that occurs here.
Verse 16, he develops it further.
“What? Know ye not that he who is joined to an harlot is one body? For
two, saith He, shall be one flesh.”
Obviously again referring to Gen. 2:24.
So what do you have? Again Paul goes back to this phrase and to him what
you have is at the point of sex you have soul number, soul number two, you have
one body made; soul number two expresses itself to it; soul number one
expresses itself to it. Therefore, sex
within the human race is not just biological, it has fantastic spiritual
repercussions.
Now let’s go on, verse 17, “But he that is joined unto the Lord is one
spirit.” In other words, the analogy
keeps up, he goes right back to this diagram, he says look, the Lord Jesus
Christ indwells you, the Holy Spirit indwells your human soul, that makes your
body a member of Jesus Christ. That is a
spiritual unity, resulting of course in a physical union. And now you have this soulish phenomenon and
the soulish phenomenon of sex is that when you have two souls expressing
themselves through one body, that’s verse 16 and then verse 17 just draws the
other side of the analogy again.
Verse 18, now this is an important one because here he isolates sex sin
as particular, not that it’s any bad as far as sin itself is concerned but as
to the danger of what is happening when this goes on. Verse 18, “Flee fornication. Every sin that a
man does is outside the body; but he that commits fornication sins against his
own body.” In other words, there’s a
separate category involved here so that at this particular point all the sins…
let’s look at a profile situation here.
Okay, here I’m going along and here’s my soul, here’s my body, and I
experience some mental attitude lust, or I have some jealousy or gossip or
something else, so I have a mental attitude sin. This leads to some overt activity, but so far
what have I involved? It’s my soul… it’s
my soul that’s controlling the body, I haven’t yielded my body to someone
else’s soul, so at this point the sin is still in a sense outside the body,
outside the body means that it’s irrelevant to the body, not that it’s
irrelevant to God but it’s no matter to the body, it’s expressed through the
body and so on, you haven’t broke that hierarchy of the soul expressing itself
through the body. But, he says, when you
have fornication in verse 18 you sin against your own body. And he says, obviously, because at this point
your body becomes a vehicle for the other person’s soul.
Now let’s continue on and we’ll see this again, this time within the
marriage relationship. 1 Cor. 7:1, “Now
concerning the things about which ye wrote unto me, it is good for a man not to
touch a woman.” And “touch” means to
have sex with her, and he’s saying it’s not necessarily wrong to be celibate. He’s saying it’s not necessary for you to
marry some woman, you can go through life single, sex is a detail of life. It’s true sex is designed for health but it
doesn’t mean everybody has to get married, under subject to condition in verse
7 which we’ll get into in a moment.
Verse 2, “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own
wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” The word “have” is present
tense, and it means continually have, and here it’s a continual relationship,
the sexual relationship depicted as the center of marriage. “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication,” and
this warns us of something about our day that the fundamentalists had better
get through their head or fundamentalism has had it. The way to combat a licentious society is exactly
the same way Paul did it in Corinth and that is that you have established a
Christian basis of sex, you don’t pile it under the rug and hide it and don’t
talk about it; you talk about it all right but you do it in a Biblical
terminology. And one of the greatest
advances that the Christian church can make against a sex polluted society is
to have a healthy mature Biblical attitude toward sex. And in the home and in the marriage
relationship have a healthy sex life.
Now that may sound kind of funny, and of course some of you are smirking
about it, but that’s the way Paul taught it in Corinth. Instead of panicking and saying oh, dear, I
don’t know what’s happening in Corinth here, this is a swinging town and we’re
just about to get swung out into the Aegean Sea, he didn’t do that. What did he do? He said I want you to establish sex, take
sex, don’t deny it, but use it the way God intended it and use it to the
full. That’s what he means here in verse
2.
Verse 3, “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence; and
likewise also, the wife unto the husband.”
The word “due benevolence” is what owed in the ancient world as a legal
debt. Now do you catch some connotation,
because when we get back to Deut. 22 we’re going to talk about sex rights, and
in verse 3 what does it say? “Due
benevolence,” it means that in the realm of sex and divine institution number
two the union that is made is a legal one in God’s sight. And it means that each partner has a debt to
the other.
Let’s look at it again, verse 4 explains more of it. “The wife does not have the legal authority
[power] of her own body, but the husband; and likewise the husband has not the
legal authority [power] of his own body, but the wife.” Now this word “power” isn’t power at all; it
sounds like you just can’t exist or something.
This is not that at all. The word “power” here means authority, and it
goes back to this unity that I’ve been telling you about. It goes back to the fact that here is the man
and here’s the wife, and the wife does not have authority over her body because
she’s exchanged it, and the man over his because he’s exchanged it. That’s the nature of sexuality in the
Bible. And that is the center… you see,
it’s completely different from the Victoriana prudish concept and yet it’s not
the licentious slutty in which sex is handled in our society. This gives you orientation, it gives you
direction, it defines purpose and actually this provides, the Biblical doctrine
of sex will provide you with the best possible sex life that you could possibly
have. The Bible itself, if followed to
its logical conclusion, who designed sex?
So therefore the guy who designed it ought to be able to tell you how to
use it. And that’s what the Bible is
saying, use it and use it to the full.
Verse 5, again here you have this legal concept, “Defraud ye not one the
other,” and the Greek verb here for “defraud” is apostereo and apostereo
was when you had a treasurer and he was in charge of a bunch of money and he
absconded with the funds. What does it
mean? It means steal, and so here he
says abstinence is likened to stealing.
Do you see how strong the Bible is at this point? All right, where does the Bible place the
boundaries? It places the boundaries at
marriage and it says when you cross that marriage, sex is inside the circle of
marriage but inside that circle it is to be used and has a tremendous and vital
function. “Defraud ye not one the other,
unless by consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and
prayer;” the word “fasting” is not in the original text, it means give to
yourselves to prayer, “and come together again, lest Satan tempt you for your
incontinency.”
Verse 6, “I speak this by permission, and not by commandment. [7] For I
would that all men were even as I myself.
But every man has his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and
another after that.” And in verse 7 is the doctrine of celibacy. In verse 7 what Paul says is that God in
history takes up the sex flag in certain people, so that although the people
have a sex drive God is able to neutralize it.
This is what Jesus said when he said some have been made eunuchs for the
kingdom of God’s sake. It means there is
a spiritual gift given of celibacy and celibacy has been given to certain
believers in order to perform a ministry to the Lord. Paul had the gift of celibacy, he said
legally couldn’t I marry a sister, he says lead her about like a cow, that’s
the verb. And couldn’t I lead her all
around the Mediterranean, but I’m not going to marry a Christian woman because
my ministry doesn’t call for it; I’ve got a purpose. Again, going back to the
concept of man, purpose, and then you have the woman fulfilling the
purpose. If the purpose was such that
the woman can’t fulfill it, then no woman.
And that was Paul’s ministry.
Paul had a ministry around the Mediterranean, he was exposed to danger,
he was exposed to death, he was exposed to murder, robbery and so on, and he
didn’t want to carry a woman with him to be exposed to that kind of life. So Paul’s life had a purpose and that purpose
could not be fulfilled by a woman and therefore God took up the slack because
He is the One who designed sex, He provides for it, and so He gave Paul the
gift of celibacy and Paul simply says it’s a great life, you can go around, no
complications, and he had a perfectly relaxed ministry in this area and didn’t
sweat it because he didn’t have a wife and all the other preachers had
wives. And all the rest of it, he just
relaxed about it because God had given him the gift of celibacy and He moved
on. God had given him a purpose, no
problem.
All right, then what do we have.
Woman is a hazar, how is she a
hazar? Three things, summary of this fourth point
that man has been given… sexuality gives man a soulish parallel to his spiritual
relationship.
First, woman helps the man through the sexual union, through the sexual
union itself, through the sexual union of one body, souls exchange each body,
and this evidently acts in the Scripture, according to the Scripture as a
teaching device, as an edifying device.
Sex conducted in the proper boundaries is edifying, not destroying. Now I don’t know why it is but it seems like
people go either one way or the other; either people say sex is great and then
they go out and destroy it because they use it in the wrong area, of then the
react and say sex is bad and don’t use it.
Now both attitudes are wrong. The attitude is that sex is edifying
within boundaries and we’ll cover those boundaries next week.
The second area in which woman is an hazar
to man is that according to Gen. 1:26 out of sex will come reproduction; out of
reproduction will come an army of believers who will conquer in history, so
reproduction is identified with sex and it’s one of the ways woman compliments
man by providing him with children.
Those children can go out and be testimonies to the Lord Jesus Christ.
And finally, the third way in which woman is hazar to the man is that she’s going to bring in the Messiah. Messiah will come through the woman and this
is why Eve called her first son as though… she said in Gen. 4, “I’ve gotten a
man from the Lord,” because the woman is the one that’s honored by bringing
Messiah into the world. This then is how
the woman is the hazar.
Once again, the four points on the doctrine of man’s sexuality.
The first point was that man is created for a test. Man was created for
two reasons, fulfillment of the master plan resolving angelic conflict.
Second point, man was given a test consisting of not eating the tree,
being under spiritual pressure of conquering the earth and of defending the
Garden. Of course this purpose would be
transformed in our day.
The third point is that sex was given to man to help him in this testing
situation, to help him in the testing
situation.
The fourth point was that this help comes about because man has a
soulish experience designed deliberately by God to parallel his spiritual
experience.
One more application of this.
Look again at this formula that we’ve used; man, purpose, woman. Look again at it and notice something. This is the key to courtship and
marriage. A man determines his purpose
in life as unto the Lord, not his wife.
And that purpose ought to be pretty well established before he even
meets the woman. That’s the way it was the first time. Adam already had a
purpose in life and then the woman came along that would fulfill that
purpose. And so the man has already got
his directions; he’s not one of these slouches that goes around well, I don’t
know what I want to do and leaps from one job to the next and has no stability,
etc. A man should have a purpose and a
drive and have goals. And you girls
watch this, this is something you can look, it’s based on a solid Biblical
analogy. If you’re boyfriend doesn’t
have some idea what he’s going to do in life, drop him like a hot potato
because he’s unstable, he hasn’t settled down yet, he’s not mature. And until he has this maturity forget it.
The second thing about the woman, this goes for the men, the women are
there to help you in the purpose as your life is lived unto the Lord, so you
pick one out and ask the Lord to bring her to you just as God brought Eve to
Adam. And you look for a woman that will compliment your life. You have a purpose in life; look for one who
will compliment it. God has a right
woman picked out, it’s stupid to think that He doesn’t and next week we’re
going to show how you can find the right man and the right woman but some of
you are going to be [small blank spot] before we get to that point so I want to
save all that for next week when we deal with promiscuity and the benefits of
avoiding it.