Sun 9:30a Class; 10:30a Worship; 11:35a Communion
Bible Bites
Cultural Lies About Sexuality: Why We Need the Song of Solomon
For many Christians in many congregations the principle message preached with regard to sexual activity is primarily negative. Stereotypically, the way many congregations have handled talking about sex—especially to our young people—is to just say “if you’re not married, just don’t do it.” In a promiscuous age, this is a right and necessary message. However, the reality is that by primarily focusing on abstinence, we have let the world have its uncontested say about what sex is, about what it is like, and about how it should affect us personally and emotionally.
We seem to think that so long as we get our people to that marriage ceremony without having yielded to sexual temptation that we have done our job. However, the result is often, in a sense, still a win for the world. It wins because even if we win the battle by keeping sex itself confined to marriage, the world still too often wins the war by having the last word about what sex itself is. It wins, because even within the bounds of marriage, too often the world’s version of sexuality still sets the standards by which we think and evaluate the sexual relationship even within marriage itself. Hollywood fills the void we have left by setting attitudes about and expectations for sexual experience that even two virgins may well bring with them into the marital bedroom. The culture lies to us about sex and we have not countered all of those lies with all of God’s truth.
What does the world teach us about sex?
The world never provokes us to think of the sexual act in anything other than biological terms. Even the warnings that we often use to frighten our teens into doing the right thing —you might get pregnant, you might get a disease—while true, are merely biological issues, based in the pragmatic concerns of materialistic assumptions. This is not the vocabulary of righteousness based on the nature of God or the nature of man. Thus Paul chastises the Corinthians: don’t they understand that sexual immorality is a sin against the body itself (1 Corinthians 6:18)? It is not just dangerous medically, it violates the very nature of the body itself when God made humans into male and female with the intention of the two uniting their bodies into one in marriage (Genesis 1:27-28; 2:24). The reasons we give for the rightness or wrongness of an act—and the worldview those reasons imply—matter.
The world tells us that sexual fulfillment should come easily and naturally, as well as be available at any moment, for those who truly love each other. Movies and sitcoms depict willing partners effortlessly enjoying the experience as though there is nothing to it. Experiencing ecstasy is easy. Christian young people enter marriage with these expectations given them by the culture. When those expectations are exposed by intimate experience to be typically unrealistic for two virgins on their wedding night and early days of marriage, the young and newly married sometimes suffer in silence. They live in silence because they think “they’re the only ones” or are unsure if the church is the place to bring their sexual questions. Perhaps they endure false feelings of guilt for their sexual activity within their marriages having been conditioned by all the teaching they have heard over the years that primarily spoke of sex in negative terms, as something dangerous or even dirty.
The world teaches us that sex is selfish. It’s about getting my needs met. My spouse is a means through which I can fulfill my own desires. Too many young people go into marriage with the world’s expectation that sex is about their own needs. It’s about getting my wants and desires fulfilled. We can even find ways to simplistically rationalize this attitude. After all, 1 Corinthians 7 says not to deprive each other and that I have authority over my spouse’s body!
We are often afraid to give biblical wisdom on this subject because it makes us uncomfortable to talk about it, especially publicly. But have we not noticed there is an entire book of the Bible devoted to exploring sexual love in marriage? It is the Song of Songs. Ultimately, it is not merely an allegory for God and Israel or Christ and the church. It is wisdom literature—divine guidance on how to live a fully thriving human life as God created us to experience it. It profoundly captures the deep satisfaction found in the physicality of marriage. But it does so in a way that utterly exposes and explodes the shallow sexuality of the world. Where the world uses the animalistic responses generated by the simplistic titillation of the visual (i.e., pornography or scantily clad women in commercials, etc.), the Song uses words—the power of poetry—to verbally portray the enormity of what transpires between a man and a woman so thoroughly married that they share a common life right down to a deep knowledge of and joy in each others’ bodies (cf .Song of Songs 7:1-9). We see in the Song that sexual love is only at its best when it is completely embodied in some other particular person to whom we are utterly committed in marriage (cf. Song of Songs 2:7, 16; 3:5; 6:3; 8:4). The Song refuses to be crude in its description of the other person—even in marriage. The metaphors and similes draw the power from connecting the beauty of human sexual love rightly expressed to images of all that is good and beautiful in nature (cf. Song of Songs 4:1-6).
The “men’s magazines” of our day have nothing on this. But our culture desensitizes us so that even in our marriages we may be satisfied with far less than what we could have if our perspectives could be rehabilitated by the power of this Song. We’ve got to give more Truth to our young people (and to married couples as well). We’ve got to teach what sexual love is instead of just saying to avoid sexual relations until marriage. We’ve got to read our culture more closely and speak out against it much more thoroughly if we are going to do marriage the way God intended. For certain, the beginning of speaking out against wrong views of the sexual relationship is to say what the Scriptures are for within the boundaries of married love. A good beginning place for that is to comprehensively and courageously read, know, and teach the Song of Songs.
— In Pressing On, February 2014
