Besame Mucho

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth?for your love is more delightful than wine. Song of Songs 1:2

I intend to write about marriage a few times this year but let me start with the good stuff a few weeks before Valentine’s Day. Married, romantic, erotic love is a marvelous gift from God and worth celebrating?even as the Scriptures do. It is also one of the most frequently perverted and disrespected things in our society. I think we are reaping the whirlwind for this great sin.

Many of us remember the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement. In those days, and according to the evidence we had at the time, we dreaded the masculinizing of women as they were urged to leave behind the honored roles of wives and mothers. A lot of other things went into the movement also. There was inequity and, in many ways, a low regard for the abilities and needs of our wives and sisters and mothers. Making our ladies more like gentlemen didn’t seem an attractive alternative.

Who could have seen the results of this well-intended effort? I can’t imagine that the stone-age attitudes of the 60s would have led to our current misogynistic and exploitive attitudes toward women. I resist the temptation to catalog our society’s selection of starlets, singers, strippers, and cultural roadkill that stand in for role models for young women?and exclusively for the enticement of young men. No one on either side of the liberation movement saw this coming.

The disrespect of God-honored roles, the separation of childbearing from marriage, and the thorough devastation of the marriage institution have indeed liberated young men and women (some now grown) from any clear understanding of how men and women should love one another. Ironically, the hypersexualizing of popular culture has led to the farthest thing from erotic love. A biblical view of marital love enables us to chart a course that avoids the perversions.

First, the Bible disrespects neither marriage nor sex. Very much the contrary?the great analogy between a human marriage and God’s relationship with his people is inseparable from the message of both testaments. Sexual relationships within marriage are never discouraged and are in fact celebrated in an entire book of our biblical canon. Some generations have missed that. In one example, the church of the 4th and 5th centuries began to discourage marriage among pastors, even to the point of denying ordination to married men who would not swear to live with their current wives as brothers and sisters rather than husbands and wives.

The thinking of this era was that a full marital relationship was not possible without sinful lust. The living out of God-given sexuality was seen as a hindrance to piety. Contrast this to Proverbs 5:18-19 where a husband is told to be “intoxicated” in the love of “the wife of [his] youth.” See also the words of Jesus in Matthew 19:5 when he describes marriage (after the fall) in exactly the same words as Genesis 2:24 (before the fall). A brother-sister relationship between an otherwise able husband and wife is not what God determined we should have, and it implies an incomplete gospel.

Think of the metaphors God uses in explaining his love for us. When he calls himself “father,” we understand that all positive aspects of a father-child relationship can teach us something about his love for us. When Jesus compares himself with a hen that would gather her chicks, it’s picturesque because we can imagine the giving, protection, care, and even anxiety he feels for the people because we can imagine a mother bird interposing her body between danger and her young. The same thing happens when the Lord is called a warrior, counselor, comforter, shepherd, or vine?our imaginations go wild with the ways this metaphor teaches us about our God.

And yet God also calls himself a faithful husband, and the son of God the bridegroom. We are a little leery of using the one flesh aspect of marriage to describe the unity of our relationship with God. We leave the bride and bridegroom at the altar in their formal clothes, standing six inches from one another. No other metaphorical explanation of our relationship with God shuts us down in quite this way. We have more in common with the church of 1,500 years ago than we would immediately think.

The Bible also protects us from another extreme understanding of marriage and human sexuality?insignificance. This is the sin of our day and one that creeps into our churches. We express the view that human relationships of all kinds are fairly insignificant when we step in and out of them without consequences or commitment. Thus shallow friendships, thus serial marriage, thus widespread cohabitation, thus ubiquitous unwed motherhood, thus casual sex, and thus young men and women become commodities. Can we honestly say that these symptoms are not easily observable in our churches?

The best and holiest of human relationships take place in a family. The foundational relationship in a family is between a husband and a wife. The fact that these relationships are holy indicates that they should be fully and joyfully expressed. No less for a husband and wife than with a wife and daughter. The fact that they are holy also means that they should not be used as common things.

Commandments against extramarital sexual behavior of all types and at all stages of life are not dated, unrealistic, or optional. When we use this holy gift as a toy, we embrace a thing that has become diseased and corrupt. It is holy because God makes it holy for his purpose. To use it in a lesser way makes it a much different thing than we first saw in the store window.
That’s what we see today?joy turned to sorrow, bonding turned to dissipation, trust turned to betrayal, and hope turned to crushing disappointment.