Intimacy in Marriage
In reading Ephesians 5, we are given a clear picture of God’s purpose and plan for marriage:
Instructions for Christian Households
21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
When I go back to verse 31, and read verse 32, I’m reminded first of Christ’s incarnation, and then His atonement: He left His Father in heaven and became flesh (incarnation) in order to reunite mankind, His church, to the Father (the work of the atonement on the cross, which brought at-ONE-ment with God through the gift of the Holy Spirit). Jesus came to earth, fully God and fully man, so that we could become “members of His body” through His sacrifice on the cross.
Paul the Apostle, citing Genesis, draws parallels here between the message of the Gospel and the marriage bed. He calls it a “profound mystery,” and raises the act of sexual intimacy to a sacred rite of deep spiritual significance. Sexual intimacy, when properly understood, is sacramental. It is life-giving—physically, spiritually, emotionally, relationally—and it begets new life. It is a gift from God, as holy as communion, because this is precisely what it is.
