The question, therefore, that Paul places before us is simply this: What is that to which God has called you? As I read 1 Corinthians 7, I suspect that there was a division in the church between a Jewish mentality and what we would call a “super spiritual” Greek mentality. In the Jewish culture, marriage was normal. It was vitally important and expected that you do that. But in the Greek culture it was not quite that way. The Greeks had a division in their philosophy between spirit and matter. The spirit, or the world of the mind, was good, while the body, and matter in general, were bad. They recognized, of course, that there was a certain necessity there. But anybody who really wanted to be a philosopher—or, where this Greek interest in the spirit over matter influenced the church, if you wanted to be a truly spiritual person—really should abstain from anything physical because that was bad.
Of course, at that point, Paul would counter that God has created the body as well as the spirit. And God has also created marriage as well as the fact that God has called some to the celibate life. And, therefore, neither the extreme of the Jew nor the extreme of the Greek was right. Rather, marriage was good, though not the only good.
As Paul begins to talk about the goodness of marriage, he is talking about the goodness of sex. This is the sort of thing that Christian teachers do not always talk about today. And yet, Paul is not shy at this point. He is quite open and direct. He says, “Look, in marriage a husband and a wife are to have a sexual relationship. The reason for that is that in marriage, God has made two individuals one flesh. This means that the wife’s body is no longer just her body, and the husband’s body is no longer just his body. Each belongs to the other.” For that reason, neither the wife nor the husband can say, “Well, I don’t want to have a sexual relationship.” Paul says that holding back in that way is not the spiritual thing to do. It is wrong because within marriage the sexual union is a good thing. Furthermore, if you do not have that, you leave your marriage open to all kinds of temptations and problems.
It is hard to realize how that sort of thinking would be a problem in our time because our culture is so much on the other side. It does not talk about sexual restraint or denial, but instead glorifies any number of forms that sexual satisfaction is achieved. Howard Hendricks, who is a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, spends a lot of time counseling Christian people. One of the difficulties he discovers in Christian marriages, especially among young couples, is that one or the other, usually the wife, thinks that somehow sex is not the kind of thing a godly person would do. It might be necessary, but it is not the sort of thing you would do if you were really spiritual. So when the husband has a desire for a sexual relationship, the wife kind of holds back on that and thinks, “Well, you know, he’s young and immature yet. And I suppose it’s the sort of thing you have to do. But maybe as he grows in the Lord, this will become less necessary.”
Sometimes these wives say to Hendricks when he explains the validity of the physical relationship in marriage, “Oh, yes, Dr. Hendricks, but you don’t understand? He has so much desire.” He answers them, and I think quite rightly, that this desire is given to the man by God. Hendricks says, “What did you think you were marrying, a man with no desire? That’s part of what makes him what he is.” One of the glories of a marriage relationship is that the wife is the sole person on the face of the earth who is able to satisfy that desire for the particular man that God has given her. That is not bad; that is good. And if you think that too much sex in marriage is bad because one can get into trouble that way, Paul says the opposite is the case, because trouble will come that involves somebody else.
