This Is a Mystery: Marriage, Sex, and the Trinity
After explaining the proper relationship between spouses to the Ephesian Church, the Apostle Paul makes an intriguing statement: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32). Through the centuries, this passage has spawned deep reflection. The seventeenth century poet John Donne wrote several rich poems that dig into the correlations between marital relationships, our relationship with God, and the Godhead’s Trinitarian relationship.
This may seem odd, but Scripture clearly describes our marital relationships as a God-designed window offering glimpses of the deep truths contained within Himself. Like Donne, let’s mine our earthly, marital relationships to gain a better understanding of our relationship to God as well as His Trinitarian nature.
The Exclusivity of Love
Despite modern culture’s insistence that love is purely inclusive, it’s actually exclusive too. Love demands an order of priority. The moment we say that we love someone we’ve separated them from other possible recipients of our affection. Therefore, love is exclusive. We can see this in at least three relationships.
a. Our Relationship with Each Other
Though we’re called to show agape-love toward all men and women as creatures made in God’s image and likeness, our romantic or eros-love shouldn’t extend so far. Rather, God creates us for exclusive monogamous sexual relationships (Gen. 2:24). Solomon calls his son to “drink water from [his] own cistern,” and to “let [his] fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of [his] youth” (Prov. 5:15, 18). Paul commands Timothy to ensure that church leaders have no more than “one wife” (1 Tim. 3:2). By implication, Scripture’s precept for us today is an exclusive relationship: monogamy.
Though the world often derides monogamous relationships as backward and limiting, it’s only through sustained monogamy that love’s full wonder is truly realized. Sexual exclusivity brings two people into a privileged relationship that’s shared only between the couple. By excluding all others from this most intimate act, the couple honors the sanctity God has vested in the marital union. As wonderful as this exclusive relationship is, it finds its ultimate model and source in God.
b. Our Relationship with God
God continually reveals Himself to mankind as a jealous God boding no competitor for our affections (Exod. 20:5). In the Garden of Eden, God demanded from Adam and Eve strict adherence to His commands. Once they began listening to the snake’s whisperings, they fell into sin. After their spiritual adultery, God expelled them from the Garden and His presence. God also demands spiritual monogamy from Israel when He commands, “you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, Who’s name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exod. 34:14).
Jesus reinforces this strict monogamous relationship with God when He declares that it’s impossible to serve two masters: “[F]or, either [you] will hate the one and love the other, or [you] will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Mt. 6:24). Only through a sustained monogamous relationship with God can we truly serve and please Him. Therefore, the monogamous sexual relationship that we have with our spouses is a picture of our spiritual relationship with God.
c. The Trinitarian Relationship
Neither does the Trinity bode competition for Their interpersonal love. Jesus tells a gathering in the Temple, “I and the Father are one . . . . [T]he Father is in Me and I am in the Father” (Jn. 10:30, 38ff). As the 1700s English General Baptist Thomas Monck states, the Godhead relationship of being “in” one another is a logical result of the Trinity’s one essence: “[I]t follows that in respect of the essence, one person is in another.”[1] By being “in” one another, the individual persons of the Son and the Father are inseparably united.
Yet, the person of the Holy Spirit is also of the essence of the Godhead. As Jesus puts it, the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” (Jn. 15:26). Thus we see that the three persons of the Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are bound up in a relationship of extreme unity. As such, They’re giving and receiving perfect love to and from one another.
The True Nature of Intimacy
In a post-fallen world, clothing’s designed to cover the shame of our sin (Gen. 3:7, 21). This physical reality also speaks to a deeper spiritual truth. In our public relationships we may present ourselves as more perfect than we are through our dress, controlled emotions, and mostly unspoken thoughts. However, sex strips away all these pretenses and defenses by demanding nudity. When sexual relationships are monogamous, they’re also intensely intimate. And in these moments we reveal our true physical selves to our spouse. This is the physical aspect of a deeper nudity experienced by married couples—that of the soul. Yet it also correlates to our relationship with God, and His Trinitarian nature.
a. Our Relationship with Each Other
Those who engage in non-monogamous sexual relationships may succeed in maintaining some pretense with their partner. However, these momentary sexual relationships can disintegrate the moment the mask of desired persona is torn; perhaps their bodies begin to change, emotional and psychological imperfections begin to show, or the couple’s interpersonal relationship becomes difficult. By contrast, this is not the case for monogamous couples.
Monogamy allows us to become our truest selves to another person. Our daily lives will sweep away any pretense of perfection that we may try to retain. In monogamous relationships, we are given the blessing of forgiveness and acceptance. We realize each other’s physical and spiritual imperfections, and we accept and embrace our spouse regardless. In return we experience deep acceptance and forgiveness that cannot be matched by any other relationship.
Physical nakedness also speaks to the deeper spiritual nakedness between couples. If physical nudity reveals our physical imperfections, committed monogamous relationships reveal our spiritual imperfections. Committed couples learn to forgive one another and lovingly support each other’s spiritual growth. When this occurs, we’re given a reprieve from the shame we feel about our sinfulness, and experience deep love and forgiveness. Thus, nudity returns couples to an Eden-like sense of innocence, while simultaneously looking forward toward glorification in the new heaven and new earth.
b. Our Relationship with God
Since that fateful day in Eden we’ve tried deceiving ourselves into believing we can hide our sin from God. Adam and Eve even tried to hide themselves under flimsy leaves. Yet the Psalmist clearly states that God “knows the secrets of the heart” (Ps. 44:21). No sin can be hidden from Him. As Monck wisely put it, “God is the knower of the heart. For, nothing is hidden from that nature which is within all things and without all things, which is included in nothing nor excluded from anything.”[2]
Yet if we turn in repentance and seek forgiveness, God promises to forgive us through Christ’s substitutionary death. Therefore, the only way to receive God’s acceptance is to admit our moral nakedness before Him. If we continue to try to hide our sin and deny our imperfection, we will experience the just wrath of the holy God.
c. The Trinitarian Relationship
The Trinity knows no deceptions. Each person of the Godhead is intimately and completely revealed to the other two. Because each person of the Godhead has the same essence, “it follows that . . . one person is in another” as Monck says.[3] By being in one another, there can be no dishonesty.
Additionally, Scripture tells us that the persons of the Trinity also know one another exhaustively. Paul explains that the “Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10). Therefore, there’s no hidden corner of the Trinity that’s not intimately known by the other two individual persons.[4] This sort of unbounded intimacy can only serve to feed Their infinite love for One another.
Conclusion
We could draw many more insights from our earthly relationships, but we haven’t the space here. I highly recommend the Divine Poetry of John Donne as a good place to start, however.
By contemplating these correlations we begin to build a deeper intimacy with God. As we grow in our understanding of His intimate love for us, which expands far beyond even the most intimate marital relationships, we begin to develop a quickened sense of intimate love for Him as well. And, as our relationship with God deepens, our marital relationships will also begin to take on a richness and complexity that was not present before. So let’s enjoy the spouse of our youth and the God of our eternity.
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[1] Thomas Monck, A Cure for the Cankering Error of the New Eutychians… (London, 1673), 38.
[2] Ibid., 29.
[3] Ibid., 38.
[4] Some may point out that the Father seems to have excluded the Son from knowing the timing of last things (Mt. 24:36) or that the Father forsakes the Son on the cross (Mt. 27:46). We must remember that while the Trinity contains perfect unity, They also contain perfect distinction. This is among Christianity’s greatest and most marvelous mysteries.
February 17, 2015
Excellent Article!
February 18, 2015
Thanks, Bro. Tim.