By: The Rev. Dr. W. Ross Blackburn

Law. Culturally speaking, our response to law runs somewhere between tolerating law (for we know it is sometimes necessary) to despising it. Law suggests restriction, sometimes from things we might really want to do. Nowhere does our culture chafe more than when faced with God’s laws concerning sex.

Yet we must be missing something. Look at how David, the psalmist, describes the law of God: the law is perfect—it revives the soul, rejoices the heart, and enlightens the eyes. It is clean. Nowhere is there even a hint that the law is burdensome. David knows that in the law he finds his own good.

In the Bible, law exists to protect the good of God’s people, to create a community that lives under the blessing of God and at peace with one another. For instance, God commands that people not bear false witness, creating a community where people live honestly with one another. God commands that His people honor their parents, for any people that don’t do so will not live long or prosper. And God draws a boundary around sex, precisely for the purpose of protecting marriage, so that it can be the blessing that God created it and intends it to be. Behind the initial “no” is a much larger and more beautiful “yes.”

Our culture intuitively understands this. For instance, athletes say “no” all the time—with what they eat, with how they spend their time, with what they choose to do or not to do—in order that they may embrace what they really want. While the discipline may be difficult, they don’t begrudge the path they take. The end is worth it. With sex, however, our culture has missed this entirely. There is no grand vision of God’s intentions, nothing that would put awe and wonder into young men and women that they might protect it as a treasure. Rather, sex is cheap, and sought cheaply. God’s law, properly understood, lifts our heads above the unclean world in which we live and calls us to behold a vision of blessing beyond anything we can imagine.