fter the death of his wife Sarah, and when he was into his old age, Abraham organized the marriage of his now forty-year-old son Isaac. It was important to Abraham that God be the one to choose his son’s wife. He sent his servant on a journey back to Haran to find a wife for Isaac. Now the servant didn’t know the Lord personally, as Abraham did, and he was afraid to return with the wrong bride. Therefore, on the way he devised a plan, a kind of test to ensure his success. As he was approaching the outskirts of Abraham’s birthplace, he saw many young women at the well drawing water, so he prayed to ‘the God of my master Abraham’ saying, ‘if the girl you have chosen is here, she will offer me a drink of water, and also offer to draw enough water for my ten camels’. This was an almost impossible idea considering that the poor girl would be offering to draw about 600 liters of water from the well.
As it turned out, a young lady called Rebekah spoke the exact words he had prayed and he had his answer. She agreed to marry Isaac, although she had never seen him, and after consulting with her parents she traveled with the servant and married the man God had chosen for her. This story is unusual for people living at that time in world history. Usually marriages were incidents involving money, property and power and a girl had no options but to obey her parents. Also, it was common for a wealthy man to have several wives. The message of this story is that God knows who your ‘other half’ should be, the person who is most perfectly suited to help you develop into the person He wants you to be. Marriage is a sacred union designed by God. When people enter into this covenant it is sealed for life, and like all sacred sacraments it is sealed with blood, the symbol of life. The marriage covenant is sealed through physical union, the two becoming one like the original human being. God’s plan has always been one man and one woman. Ideally, on her wedding night a woman is joined to her husband for the first time and the seal of her virginity is broken when the ‘two become one flesh’. It is God who designed her body this way. Atheists have great difficulty in trying to find a reason in evolution theory for the existence of a woman’s hymen, as it serves no purpose except as proof of virginity. Our Creator is a holy and idealistic God and our bodies have been designed to reflect his holiness.
Unfortunately, the Church has sometimes developed a very negative attitude towards sexuality because of a misunderstanding on certain Scriptures. The apostle Paul writes extensively about sexual immorality1 and the idea developed that any form of sexual desire was wrong, even within marriage. Tertullian, one of the early Church theologians, was convinced that even sexual desire for one’s wife or husband was immoral; therefore he refused to have sex with his wife except for the purpose of conceiving children. In 1 Corinthians 7, we have some of the Scriptures which have been misunderstood. Paul is giving advice about marriage, and this advice comes within the context of his belief that the Lord will return to judge the world within a short space of time (v29). In Paul’s opinion, because the time is so short, a person should not be worrying about marriage and starting a family, but dedicating their life to serving God in other ways. Paul admits that these are his own ideas and not commandments received from the Lord (v25) and he goes on to suggest that a person who is unmarried has an undivided devotion to God, whereas a married person is divided between devotion to their spouse and devotion to God.
It is not difficult to see how this kind of thinking produced convents, nuns, etc. However, in my opinion Paul was wrong. It was never God’s intention for people to remain unmarried; indeed the Lord stated right from the beginning that “it was not good for the man to be alone”.2 The goal of creating humans has always been for us to become like the Lord himself, and indeed this is the primary goal of every Christian. Some of the attributes of God are
learned much more efficiently in a marriage than as a single person. For example, a single person doesn’t have to think of anyone but himself. He can do what he likes, when he likes. He never has to share the TV, put up with someone else’s taste in music, he can eat what he likes, sleep when he likes, etc. He never gets dragged around shoe shops for hours, he never has to wait to use the bathroom, and generally speaking he can be totally selfish. The married person, on the other hand, has to learn to be unselfish, to put another person’s needs before his own, to be a servant as Christ was a servant, and to learn patience, love, selfcontrol, etc.
And what about the Church’s attitude towards sexual desire? Was it not God who created sexual desire? Indeed without it people may not even bother to create children. God’s first commandment to Adam and Eve was to ‘be fruitful and multiply’3. God designed our bodies to both desire and to enjoy sex, indeed there are parts of our bodies which have no other purpose than to give erotic pleasure during sexual activity. It is not sex or sexual desire which God condemns, but the abuse of these gifts. God hates sexual immorality not because he hates people enjoying sex, but because he hates sin and its consequences. God has designed our bodies to be joined with one person, and when we go against his ideal, sexual diseases are created, families are destroyed, and great suffering is created through sin. Millions are dying in Africa because of AIDS and health workers recognize that the key to fighting this disease is in educating people to have high moral values.
Inside every person is a conscience about what is right and wrong in these matters. When you are passionately in love with a person you can become quite obsessed with them, and sometimes you simply cannot imagine ever feeling like that about any other human being. But come home and discover this person having sex with a stranger and your feelings turn to hatred very quickly. We know that sin is sin because we are made in the image of God, and although that image was broken through the Fall in Eden, we still retain many of the ideals of God deep within our being. Until the last 40 years the Church has been afraid to encourage the celebration of sex within marriage and has given many people the idea that God desires to kill people’s joy, when the opposite is true.
Is God romantic? I believe that He is the original romantic and that is one of the reasons that He insisted on the Song of Songs being included in Scripture. My grandmother was a very committed Christian; however, she was also a very conservative Scottish woman who held extremely conservative and Victorian views about sexuality similar to the ones we have just discussed. She was too embarrassed to read Song of Songs and used to say that she couldn’t understand how it ever got to be included as sacred Scripture. This small book celebrates romantic love. Jewish parents would not allow their children to read this literature until they were 30 years old. Conservative theologians interpret this text as only an analogy of Christ and the Church as his bride, and liberals as a celebration of marriage. I think both are correct. Jesus Christ chose the analogy of a bride and bridegroom to speak of his Church. He could have chosen any number of other relationship types, but chose the most powerfully romantic relationship. The time when we are most infatuated, when our love is the most blind, and when we feel most passionately willing to sacrifice our own desires is when we are engaged. This is how Jesus Christ feels about his bride the Church. Song of Songs brings out the dedication and adoration of the bride to her bridegroom, and teaches also how much the Lord cherishes his bride the Church.
It is also a beautiful example of God’s ideal for romantic love. This passage of Scripture celebrates the beauty of the human body, the passions of being in love, the powerful feelings of sexual desire, and the absolute commitment of one man to one woman. The writer says that the young lovers4 were chosen for each other at birth and they have waited all of their lives for each other. Their longing for each other through the years is expressed in erotic language, and finally their friends come and attend their wedding with joy.