The Covenant and the Sign

We are sexual beings. As sexual beings, God will judge us by how we used our sexuality. This article will give you the right perspective in how we should view our sexuality in marriage.

The Covenant and the Sign

            One of the first covenants mentioned in the Bible is the covenant of marriage. Although the word marriage is not specifically mentioned in the beginnings of Genesis, the Bible makes it evident that Adam and Eve were indeed married to each other. Moses states of the newlywed, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:24-25). We call this first marriage a covenant because a covenant is an agreement. What is the agreement? To be devoted to the other as long as I or he/she lives (Rom. 7:2) And, the one common denominator of all covenants is that they have a sign. As Albert Mohler states in John Piper’s book “Sex and the Supremacy of Christ,””The sign of [the covenant of marriage] is the physical act of becoming one flesh in sexual intercourse.” So, sex isn’t the end goal of marriage; sex reveals the commitment of love towards the spouse and points to the greater pleasure that we will have in God when we are in heaven. God didn’t create marriage just so we enjoy it (although that is the case); God created marriage to glorify Himself because “for from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever” (Rom. 11:36). God uses marriage and all its benefits to give us a further knowledge of Him in Christ Jesus. After all, He is the one who created and ordained marriage in Genesis 2:18. Not only does God use marriage to glorify Himself, but also, God uses all our other desires to glorify Himself. Marriage specifically glorifies God because the correlation (marriage) shows that God has a relationship with you (spiritually speaking). Marriage is a covenant established by God by a means to better know Him. Kissing, touching, caressing, sexual language, and sex are all meant to stay in the confines of this covenant because it is how we can know God better: enjoyment in our spouse points to the greater enjoyment we have in God. Our sexuality is meant to be expressed in marriage only because that is the purpose of sexuality. It is why God created us. By knowing that everything belongs to Christ, this knowledge can help use our relationship with our spouse to better glorify God.