From the Beginning – The Law of God and Public Policy: Marriage and Sex (1)

From the Beginning

The Law of God and Public Policy: Marriage and Sex (1)

Marriage is the proper context for sexual enjoyment.

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” Matthew 19:8

Perhaps nothing illustrates the corrosive power of sin as well as the practice of sexual enjoyment. The Law of God outlines broad policies both for defining legitimate sexual practice and for preserving marriage as the proper context for its enjoyment. God intends human beings to have sex and to enjoy doing so; however, He has not left us to our own imaginations as to how, when, and why we may do so. When public policies toward sexual enjoyment become untethered from Biblical teaching, marriage and the family fall into disarray and dissolution. The breakdown of the Biblical view of marriage, in turn, is an incubator for all manner of social problems which invite a more intrusive role for government and public policy than the Scriptures envision.

The Law of God does not treat the matter of marriage specifically, but only indirectly. Like Jesus, the Law assumes the standard of marriage which God established “from the beginning.” The seventh commandment, which forbids adultery in all its forms, assumes that marriage, as ordained by God in Genesis 2, is the model and norm which the people of Israel will follow. The Law assumes that marriage is between a man and a woman—one man and one woman—and that it is the foundational social institution for bringing good to the world. The Law of God assumes that husbands and wives will practice the most intimate form of neighbor-love and will produce children whom they will instruct and rear in the ways of God’s Covenant.

The sexual relationship which marriage privileges provides a kind of model for the overarching purposes of the Law of God—love for God and for neighbor. Concerning the latter, sexual enjoyment embodies the kind of offering of oneself for the pleasure and needs of another which is the essence of neighbor-love. With the respect to the former, sexual pleasure provides a foretaste of the eternal spiritual pleasure which the knowledge of God provides (Ps. 16:11). Sexual enjoyment is therefore a unique experience of human love. The Law of God indicates that sexual enjoyment must only be pursued, and therefore can only be truly known, within the confines of marriage between a man and his wife. Any compromises of that arrangement turn the purposes of sexual enjoyment on their head, diminishing the true experience of sexual enjoyment and defeating the purpose of sexual enjoyment as an aid to instructing us in love for God and neighbor.

In every age alternatives to the divinely appointed use of sexual enjoyment have been practiced. In our day, however, this Gresham’s Law of sexual enjoyment has been abetted by declining spirituality, advancing secularity, popular culture, and relativistic ethics. The result is that the Biblical view of sexual enjoyment is almost everywhere rejected or compromised, even among the faithful; the institution of marriage is under assault and tottering; a veritable Pandora’s Box of moral ills has been unleashed on society; and an increasingly desperate populace looks more and more to government for public policies to save it from its own ethical folly.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.