Peter Barnes | Genesis 2:18-25
SERMON NOTES
SEXUALITY BEFORE THE FALL
Genesis 1:28; 2:18-25; Matthew 19:1-12
– cohabitation before marriage has become the norm, where there is pornography readily available and widely used, and where a virgin is seen as someone who is anorexic. Yet this has not led to greater joy but more confusion, more alienation, and less contentment.
1. God created sex as good.
– Gen.1:28. Ever thought how sex could have just evolved?
– 2:18; 2:24, 25; note the Song of Songs; Prov.5:15-20; Heb.13:4.
– C. S. Lewis said that if I object to boys’ stealing my nectarenes, I am not objecting to nectarines or to boys. I am objecting to boys’ misusing my nectarines.
2. God intends for sex to take place within a heterosexual, monogamous and lifelong relationship.
– 2:24. At the end of the fourth century Jerome wrote of one woman who was marrying her 23rd husband, and she was his 21st wife.
– challenge the Christian view to your peril. Alex Comfort: ‘I think we may come to the view that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.’ He suggested that adultery helped marriages, but his own marriage ended in divorce – like the marriage of Williams Masters and Virginia Johnson.
3. Sex unites us to another person in a way that other physical acts do not.
– 2:24; 1 Cor.6:16.
– in sin it thrills for a time, then becomes either boring or insatiable.