Let’s talk about sex.
Like everything else, sometimes you have to back off completely outside of things in order to line up the proper approach, the proper line of sight so the essence of things becomes clear. Even if you stumble upon this blog without having read a single previous post, the title and subtitle should indicate something of the priorities here. When I talk about sex, it’s a matter of placing it in the perspective of what God intended. We might argue about God and what He intended, but you should at least get the idea I’m pretending to know what He intended for me to say about it.
So let’s back off — waaaaaay off. Absent the Curse of the Fall, we lived in the glow of God’s glory. Nothing could possibly benefit us more than reflecting His glory as Creator. The story of the Fall is something about how we no longer reflect His glory instinctively. Somehow we decided to seize some of it for ourselves. That’s also the parable about how Satan came to be fallen, so it’s no surprise our biggest problem is that we too readily agree with Satan’s viewpoint. That means we rely on something inside ourselves to discover and define morality without direct reliance on God for the answer. Having that “divine spark” means nothing unless we remain in direct and constant reliance on Our Maker.
The fundamental task of humanity after the Fall is breaking the Curse. Breaking that curse is a simple matter of reversing the bad decision that brought us here. It means returning to God’s glory. The problem is that we are still fallen and do not easily absorb what that means. We have moved away from the place where we knew it by instinct, so God works with us in our current sad state. He gives us a hint of what His glory means by offering a revelation of moral conduct. Yes, He is the one who defines morality; it’s simply consistent with His divine character.
Part of what’s going on here is that, while the Curse has a snowball effect across time, so does revelation drawing us in the opposite direction. The earliest humans bore an entirely different cultural context that was much closer to our divine origins, but over the centuries humans have moved farther and farther away. The demands of glory have also risen to a higher pitch. In the climax of history, God offered one final revelation of His moral demands in His Son. The idea was that we absorb His human character so as to fulfill the Father’s glory. It can’t possibly be any clearer for us than the Person of Jesus, while we have continued our long slide even farther.
Without chasing the meaty rabbits of how radically different our intellectual assumptions about reality are from those of Jesus the man, I simply note that we today in our Western society are painfully alien to that Man of Men. We think we know what His followers wrote, but we as Westerners are not even on the same planet with the folks who left us the Scripture. I’m looking at you, Christian churches and leaders, when I say that. Organized religion is generally hostile to the truth even as it claims to teach it. You waste a lot of resources proclaiming your unique adherence to God’s Word in the face of opposition (often imaginary), but you are all alike in getting it wrong for the same basic reason. I’ll demonstrate by pointing out the radical shift in thinking it requires to see sex as God taught it in His revelation.
The Laws of Moses reflect God’s viewpoint on human nature. The social expectations were not simply quaint reflections of barbaric times long ago. When Hebrew people obeyed the Law of Moses, there are some elements merely contextual, but we tend to dismiss the whole thing without obeying Paul’s warning to rightly divide the Old Testament. You’ll notice his letters describe a limited adherence to Moses in some ways in how churches were to behave. Dismissing Paul as a Hebrew fuddy-duddy is dismissing God.
The masculine portion of overcoming the curse is dominance. Adam refused to lead Eve away from temptation, so the corrective is some measure of masculine dominance — get off your lazy butt and take the moral leadership. Not because such dominance is a part of God’s glory, but it is the path through this cursed existence back to His glory. Eve wasn’t evil; it wasn’t her job to discern where that moral boundary stood. The feminine portion of the curse is supporting the dominant male. But that dominance is fundamentally moral in nature. Adam should dominate by resisting the Devil’s intrusion in the mission, and Eve should faithfully support the mission in teamwork with her man.
She doesn’t decide the shape of civilization. He needs her input on things he does because the mission has a distinct division of labor, but the final decision is his before God. The two are one team with one goal.
Of course, the implications are far bigger than that, but dominance and support is the distilled essence in our language of what it takes to work our way back to God’s glory. As you might expect, our long descent into ultimate darkness and the End of All Things is reflected in how thoroughly our culture militates against that basic understanding. The act of balancing where we are against where we ought to be is the art form of following Christ.
Women do not define manhood. Paul said to cool their nattering in church and let the Word speak. Eve was deceived, not Adam; it’s a question of divine assignment. The modern Western Christian trend with calls to “man up” is just heathen feminism in disguise. Women are supposed to recognize moral manhood when they see it manifested in a man’s commitment to bring God glory according to the unique calling of that man.
The strongest, most dominant man is the one who tells the Devil to slink back into Hell. That is, he first dominates his own sinful nature. While that may well also manifest in things like hitting the gym and looking all manly, and learning to exercise whatever amount of charisma he can muster, the requirement for spiritual women is to discern the underlying truth that this particular man is truly strong against sin first and foremost. Second, he should be busy in some mission can understand, a mission that calls her to support him. He will most certainly at times be strong enough to tell her “no” and leave her standing there if she isn’t ready to follow his lead. The assumption is not that he’s always right, but that it’s his job to decide in the end because God said so.
The supportive woman understands her greatest power is serving on her man’s team. There is a lot of room for negotiation. Most people understand what’s wrong with the secular American brand of sex and marriage. Yet they probably can’t comprehend how the bulk of what’s sold as American Christian sex and marriage is little more than a slightly older, more conservative version of the exact same Anglo-Saxon heathen cultural mythology. The entire range of Western Post-Enlightenment thinking about marriage is wrong, totally wrong. But even when you can demonstrate how completely foreign it is to Scripture, all you get are blank looks from those nice church folks. What passes for Western Christian womanhood is pagan in the worst sense of the term, because it retains the fundamental assumptions that make modern American feminism evil.
Our men are conditioned to focus on the lust of the eyes and of the flesh. They are taught to pretend they aren’t paying attention to that, but I can promise you that pink Cadillacs and the glitzy cosmetic barn paint that they represent do not convey God’s way of projecting femininity. Just as manhood is not confined merely to muscles but morals, so womanhood is not enticing by cultural sexual attraction. Here’s a clue: It’s the male peacock who struts his stuff and the females who choose their mates. We have it backwards.
Men, you do not pick your woman. That’s because you have zero capability to choose wisely until way too late in life. She’s ready to make babies by the time you have your first clue where God might be leading you. Our society frowns on men waiting until they are ready and taking a young wife, and we have zero cultural background for a community mate selection system, so we are left with letting her choose her man. She is better equipped to work out where she fits best, so the men need to keep their focus of projecting moral dominance. If you pursue the gal, it’s virtually guaranteed you won’t lay hold of God’s best blessings in marriage. Make her choose you. She will let you know if she is ready to take you on. How that communication takes place is subject to a very wide range of variables. You may be the one to initiate all the conversation and social contacts, but it’s up to her make the first signals, however subtle they may be.
That’s how you glorify God; sex on that path can’t get any better in this life.
