day no. 14,604: sex, sin and salvation

In studying for a Salt Company sermon from a series on Sex on the topic of "Dating and Marriage" I had the following observation from the first chapters of the Bible. 

In Genesis 2:24-25 it says, 

"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."

Before the Fall there was sexual freedom. Man and wife were naked before each other and before God and there was no shame. It was good. The isolation of the solitary man was remedied by his helper and they were together an image of their Creator. God removed Eve from Adam's side and then escorted her back to him. Where there was once only one, God made two, but reunited them in a oneness more glorious and good than the solitary man was by his lonesome. All that to say, sex was not only possible and permissible, but perfect. It was the mechanism by which two became one. It was the way things were made better than before. Sex was God's design for making man fully reflect His image.

Fast forward to the fallout of the Fall. Adam and Eve sinned against God by believing the Serpent's truth claims over the Creator's. They partook of that which was forbidden and it ruined everything.

But in Genesis 3:15, God surprisingly hits the problem head on by offering a promise of hope. When everything is out of order for the first time in history, God announces that He will put things back right when He proclaimed,

"I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her Offspring; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel."

Don't miss the fact that God's plan of salvation required people to have sex. His Serpent Crusher would come as a son of sinners participating in His redemptive history by faithfully marrying, having sex and raising godly offspring. The hope of the entire world hinged on His people multiplying and producing the next generation through sex. If His people had taken a position of clerical celebacy, His Messiah would have been snuffed out by their highfalutin snobbery. Their piety would have strangled the progeny and the promise.

God likes sex. He made it and delights in married people having it. He inserted it as an essential ingredient of redemptive history. No sex, no Savior. Sex is not our savior, anymore than good works are. But they are part of the process of redemptive history in both producing the seed of Eve who would conquer sin, Satan and death and in producing the nations for whom the Savior was sent to redeem.