Sexuality and the
[We Were Made for Ecstasy!]
I recently read "The Journey of Desire -
Searching for the Life We've Only Dreamed Of" by
John Eldredge. It’s been a long time since
I’ve come across anything quite as mind-expanding and uplifting. He brings out some most interesting and
profound points - one being that we were created to experience ecstasy. In his book, John Eldredge
gives Christian believers permission to explore more deeply the God-given
passions that lie within the heart of every person.
Mr. Eldredge states
that "Our problem, as C.S. Lewis has said, is not that we desire too much,
but that we desire too little. Desire
was given to us as a good and holy gift.
Christianity refuses to budge from the fact that man was made for
pleasure, that his beginning and his end is a paradise, and that the goal of
living is to find Life."
"Two things contribute to our
sanctification, " wrote Pascal. "Pains and pleasures."
And while we know that our journey is strewn with danger and difficulty,
"the difficulties they meet with are not without pleasure, and cannot be
overcome without pleasure." God is
realistic. He knows that ecstasy is not
an option; we are made for bliss, and we must have it, one way or another. He knows that happiness is fragile and rests
upon a foundation greater than happiness.
Walter Brueggemann
suggests that faith on its way to maturity moves from "duty to
delight." This is the great lost
truth of the Christian faith, that correction of
Judaism made by Jesus and passed on to us: the goal of morality is not morality
- it is ecstasy. You are intended for
pleasure!
In chapter eight, John tackles beautifully
the question that naturally arises when we realize that we are meant to
eternally experience intimacy and ecstasy: "Will there be sex in
heaven?" This chapter confirms what
I have always known in my heart - that sexual union
and intimacy are a direct reflection of what our relationship will be with
God. Shocking to some, but true! But how could it be otherwise?
Below is a condensed/slightly edited version
of this wonderfully inspiring and beautifully written chapter:
Several years ago I gave a series of lectures
on eternity to a group of singles on the East Coast. Over lunch one afternoon, several of the
women asked if they might have a word with me.
I sensed they wanted to ask a question that they didn't feel comfortable
raising during our group discussion.
After a bit of nervous hemming and hawing, they got down to the
point. Though successful professionally,
they were feeling the ache and disappointment of singleness.
And as the years seemed to be racing by, they
weren't feeling so young anymore. A
lifetime of singleness was becoming more and more a reality for each one,
though by no means her heart's desire.
What I had been saying about heaven was certainly attractive, but still,
they could not shake a fear that they will forever miss one of the deepest joys
of human experience. "Will there be
sex in heaven?" I smiled at their
courage; it's a question many haven't let themselves wonder, even though they
do wonder.
To understand the importance of the question,
you've got to recognize the ache that seems to be met only through sexual
union. When God created Eve, as you will
recall, he took her straight from Adam's side.
None of us have fully recovered from the surgery. There is an aloneness,
an incompleteness that we experience every day of our lives. How often do you feel deeply and truly
known? Is there another soul to whom a
simple glance is all that is necessary to communicate depth of
understanding? Do you have someone with
whom you can commune in love? This is
our inconsolable longing - to know and to be known. It is our deepest ache, which we feel to be
healed only in our union with another.
Even physically, there is an incompleteness
until our bodies are joined together.
But let's take a closer look. What are we looking for in the opposite sex?
In the Song of Solomon, we see what has
stirred the woman's heart - it is to see her man's strength. And she invites that strength to come to her
in the night. There is an emptiness in the woman that only her man can fill. Is this not physically true? But it is more than just physically
true. Our bodies are an outward sign of
an inward reality. So too, the woman
completes her man in a uniquely beautiful way.
Her beauty and grace are most alluring.
Her dark eyes are as rich and deep as pools of water, soft as
doves. She is mysterious, but her
mystery is not one that forbids, rather, she is captivating.
There is no union on earth like the
consummation of the love between a man and a woman. No other connection reaches as deeply as this
oneness was meant to; no other passion is nearly so intense. People don't jump off bridges because they
lost a grandparent. If their friend
makes another friend, they don't shoot them both. The passion that spousal love evokes is
instinctive, irrational, intense, and dare I say, immortal.
Small wonder that many
people experience sexual passion as their highest transcendence on this earth. This love surpasses all others as the source
of the world's beautiful poetry, art and music.
Lovers reach for the stars to find words fitting enough to express what
the beloved means to them and still feel those words fall short. Granted, much of it is hyperbole, expressing
more the dream than the reality. But
that is precisely my point.
It is not merely hormones and sex drives
projected outward. It is a clue to a
deeper reality, a reach for something that does exist. For this exotic intimacy was given us as a
picture of something else, something truly out of this world.
After creating this stunning portrait of a
total union, the man and woman becoming one, God turns the universe on its head
when he tells us that this is what he is seeking with us. In fact, Paul says it is why God created
gender and sexuality and marriage - to serve as a living metaphor. He quotes Genesis, then takes it to the nth
degree: " 'For this reason a man will leave his
father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one
flesh.' This is a profound mystery -but I am talking about Christ and the
church" (Eph
A profound mystery indeed. All the breathtaking things in life are. The Cross is another great mystery. But these
things are now understood when the Bible is studied as a whole. We must see the Bible for what it is - the
greatest romance novel ever written. God
creates mankind for intimacy with himself, as his beloved. We see it right at the start, when he gives
us the highest freedom of all - the freedom to reject him. The reason is obvious: love is possible only
when it is freely chosen. True love is never
constrained; our hearts cannot be taken by force. So God sets out to woo his beloved and make
her his queen.
If you're writing a romance novel, love is
the goal; you must allow for the possibility of betrayal. This is precisely what God calls our turning
away from him. The Hebrews thought that
he would be satisfied with some religious rituals and rule keeping. God calls them an "adulterous"
wife, of all things. The hero's heart
has been broken. He rails with a jealous fury that flows only from a lover who
has been rejected. But the story does
not finish with their divorce. True love
never fails; it always perseveres. God
will fight for his beloved. So the Old
Testament ends with a promise of reconciliation.
To give yourself
over to another, passionately and nakedly, to adore that person body, soul and
spirit - we know that there is something special, even sacramental about
sex. It requires trust and abandonment,
guided by a wholehearted devotion. What
else can this be but worship? After all,
God employs explicitly sexual language to describe faithfulness (and unfaithfulness)
to him. For us creatures of the flesh,
sexual intimacy is the closest parallel we have to real worship. Even the world knows this. Why else would sexual ecstasy become the
number one rival to communion with God?
The best impostors succeed because they are nearly indistinguishable
from what they are trying to imitate.
We worship sex because we don't know how to
worship God. But we will. Peter Kreeft
writes, "This spiritual intercourse with God is the ecstasy hinted at in
all early intercourse, physical or spiritual.
It is the ultimate reason why sexual passion is so strong, so different
from other passions, so heavy with suggestions of profound meanings that just
elude our grasp." (Everything You Wanted to Know About Heaven)
Will there be sex in heaven? A better question might be,
will there be worship in heaven? For
sexuality as we know it is only a dim glimmer of the intimacy and ecstasy that
will be experienced when we are truly at one with God in his kingdom.
Don't let your disappointing experiences
cloud your understanding of this. We have grown cynical, as a society, about
whether intimacy is really possible. To
the degree that we have abandoned soul-oneness, we have sought out merely sex,
physical sex, to ease the pain. But the
full union is no longer there; the orgasm comes incomplete; its heart has been
taken away. Many have been deeply
hurt. Sometimes, we must learn from what
we have not known, let it teach us what ought to be.
God's design was that the two shall become
one flesh. The physical oneness was
meant to be the expression of a total interweaving of being. Is it any wonder that we crave this? Our alienation is removed, if only for a
moment, and in the paradox of love, we are at the same time known and taken beyond
ourselves. In The Mystery of Marriage
Mike Mason asserts, "For many people, certainly, sex is the most powerful
and moving experience that life has to offer, and more overwhelmingly holy than
anything that happens in church. For great masses of people, sex is the one
force which can actually tip men and women completely off their accustomed
centers of gravity and lift them, however briefly, right out of
themselves."
As Allender says,
our hearts live for "an experience of worship that fills our beings with a
joy that is so deeply in awe of the other that we are barely aware of
ourselves." Many people have a hard
time conceiving of this kind of intimacy with God. For their entire lives they have related to
him in a distant, though reverent way.
Our worship services don't get anywhere near
something like our wedding nights. Men
in particular have a hard time relating to the bridal imagery used in
Scripture. Do we take on femininity to
relate to God? What does it meant to
know God as our lover?
It is a mystery almost too great to mention,
but God is the expression of the very thing we seek in each other. For do we not bear God's image? Are we not a living portrait of God? Indeed we are, and in a most surprising place
- in our gender. "So God created
man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he
created them" (Gen
"I thought there was only one kind of
soul," said one shocked friend. "And God sort of poured those souls
into male or female bodies." Many
people believe something like that. But
it contradicts the Word of God. We bear
his image as men and women, and God does not have a body. So it must be at the level of the soul that
we reflect God. The text is clear; it is
as a man or as a woman that the image is bestowed.
God wanted to show the world something of his
strength. Is he not a great
warrior? Has he not performed the daring
rescue of his beloved? And this is why
he gave us the sculpture that is man.
Men bear the image of God in their dangerous, yet inviting
strength. Women, too, bear the image of
God, but in a much different way. Is not
God a being of great mystery and beauty?
Is there not something tender and alluring about the essence of the
Divine? And this is why he gave us the
sculpture that is woman.
You men will know what Mason means, though
perhaps you've never made the connection;
My wife's body is brighter and more
fascinating than a flower, shier than any animal, and more breathtaking than a
thousand sunsets. To me her body is the
most awesome thing in creation. Trying
to look at her, just trying to take in her wild, glorious beauty ... I catch a
glimpse of what it means that men and women have been made in the image of
God. If even the image is this dazzling,
what must the Original be like? (The Mystery of Marriage)
What, indeed.
God is the source of all masculine power; God is also the fountain of
all feminine allure. Come to think of
it, he is the wellspring of everything that has ever romanced your heart. The thundering strength of
a waterfall, the delicacy of a flower, the stirring capacity of music, the
richness of wine. The masculine
and the feminine that will fill all creation come from the same heart. What we have sought, what we have tasted in
part with our earthly lovers, we will come face-to-face with in our True
Love.
For the incompleteness that we seek to
relieve in the deep embrace of our earthly love is never fully healed. The union does not last, whatever the poets
and pop artists may say. Morning comes
and we've got to get out of bed and off to our day, incomplete once more. But oh, to have it healed forever; to drink
deeply from that fount of which we've had only a sip; to dive into that sea in
which we have only waded.
It is a manifestation of the humility of God
that he creates a kingdom so rich in love that he should not be our all, but
that others should be precious to us as well.
Even in
Is it not the nature of true love - to be
generous in love? This is something of
the reason that married couples long to have children; they want to share in
their happiness. The embrace of lovers
does not stay confined to the lovers; rather, it builds a home, it fills a
household. And so our longing
for intimacy reaches beyond our "one and only." We come to discover that others mean so very
much to us. There is no joy like the joy
of reunion because there is no sorrow like the sorrow of separation. To lose those we love and wonder if we shall
ever see them again - this is our deepest grief.
What is vital for us to grasp now, is that
the life we now have as the persons we now are will continue in the universe in
which we now exist. By all means we
shall know each other's name - not if - but when we see each other in God's
great kingdom. We'll hold each other's
hands, and far better than that. The naked intimacy, the real knowing that we enjoy with God, we
shall enjoy with each other.
George MacDonald wrote, "I think we shall be able to pass into and
through each other's very souls as we please, knowing each other's thought and
being, along with our own, and so being like God."
Brent used to call it multiple intimacy without promiscuity. It is what the ancients meant by the
communion of saints. All of the joy that
awaits us in the
The setting for this will be a great party,
the wedding feast of the Lamb. Now, you've got to get images of Baptist
receptions entirely out of your mind - folks milling around in the church gym,
holding Styrofoam cups of punch, wondering what to do with themselves. You've got to picture an Italian wedding or,
better, a Jewish wedding. They roll up
the rugs and push back the furniture.
There is dancing: "Then maidens will dance and be glad, young men
and old as well" (Jer 31:13).
There is feasting; "On this mountain the
Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples" (Isa
25:6). (Can you imagine what kind of cook God must be?). And there is drinking
- the feast God says he is preparing includes "a banquet of aged wine -
the best of meats and the finest of wines." In fact, at his Last Supper our Bridegroom
said he will not drink of "the fruit of the vine until the
And guess what? It will all be held right here on the good
old earth. The earth was the scene of a
"I love the earth," wrote a friend,
"and it makes me sad to think it will be destroyed one day." We have all probably shared in this
sadness. But we needn't. "Behold," says the Lord, "I
will create new heavens and a new earth (Isa 65:17, Rev 21:1). When he says he is making all things new, he
includes the earth.
All the strip mines and strip malls, all the
incredibly ugly things we've done to the earth will be cleansed and healed,
once and for all. Thus John (the writer
of Revelation) sees the New Jerusalem not floating in the clouds, but
descending from heaven to the earth, and he hears "a loud voice from the
throne saying, 'Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with
them. They will be his people, and God
himself will be with them and be their God'" (Rev 21:2-3).
The life we now have as the persons we now
are will continue in the universe in which we now exist. The earth has been our home and will continue
to be our home in eternity. This is a
great consolation. When we place
eternity "out there somewhere," in a place we cannot conceive of, we
are left longing for home. To lose the
only world we have ever known - a world so full of memories, so rich and
beautiful, with so much left to explore - is to lose something deep and
priceless to our hearts.
[Editing
and comments by Bill Lenhart]
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