So, God has designed us, so that when two people become sexually intimate, you have sexual intercourse, firstly, something happens in their body. With the act of sexual intercourse, chemicals are released in the brain that bring immense pleasure, and cause a feel of bonding. When people are intimate with one another, they see and hear and experience things and their soul bonds together.
When people are intimate with one another, their spirit can flow and touch the other person. Just think about God’s design. It’s for a flow from your spirit to touch the spirit, soul, and body of the other person. So if you ignore all of that, you reduce intimacy to something little more than a physical act; and this actually, totally perverts God’s design, which is for intimacy – spirit, soul, and body.
That’s why the Bible uses this word: it uses the word ‘know’. Adam ‘knew’ his wife. They translate the word ‘know’, so it’s the word ‘yada’ – to be intimate. There was a flow from one person to the other. When a person has a relationship with someone, and they’re not married, they use the word: ‘he lay with her’. If it’s between a husband and wife: ‘he knew his wife’; but for something else: ‘he lay with her’, for example, when Dinah got raped: ‘he lay with her’. The Bible uses totally different language. Sexual intercourse is about intimacy, and the flow from the spirit and the heart of a person to another.
You can see then, why, to protect our intimacy, our capacity to be intimate, God put in place covenant. God is a covenant God. When God enters relationship with you, it is covenantal - He makes a covenant with you. A covenant is a binding agreement. In a covenant there are agreements: I will not hurt you. So God enters into a relationship called ‘covenant’.
In marriage, God designed marriage to be a covenant relationship. One person committed to the other, not to harm them, but to be faithful to them. God’s plan for marriage, man and woman, husband and wife, is that it be a covenant relationship; and it reflect what the relationship between Christ and the church is like. Covenant is a commitment of lifelong faithfulness, to protect intimacy.
Whenever in the Bible a covenant was made, there were always: words spoken; and there was blood shed; and promises made. God has designed the woman, so that in the first act of sexual intercourse, blood is shed. There’s no real reason for this, except its God’s design; and it’s God revealing again to us, that sexual intimacy is a covenantal issue. When a husband and wife have intercourse, it should be for the first time, and there’s a shedding of blood.
So it’s normal for example, for a wedding service, the couple may speak words to one another and form covenant. They exchange rings as a sign of covenant; people witness the covenant being made; there’s a celebration of covenant; but the marriage is not complete until the first act of sexual intercourse, and in that, the shedding of blood. What the parents used to do, was they would keep the sheets where the blood was shed - these were the tokens of the woman’s virginity. This was very highly valued in the Hebrew culture – that the woman kept herself for the husband, and the man entered into covenant with her.
So, when a man has sexual intimacy with a woman, and does not make a covenant with her, he is taking advantage of her. He is using her to meet his needs, but he is not offering her covenant, commitment, and security. This is devastating to women. God has set this in place - it’s His divine design. So God has also wired into us, that the man would conquer or pursue to conquer; and that women would desire security and commitment - that was the design.
So Jesus pursues us, offers us covenant, and we are secure in our relationship with Him. In the marriage, the man pursues the woman, offers her covenant, and then is faithful to her in the whole season of their relationship.
You understand then, that the whole act of sexual intercourse is in the context of marriage covenant. Everything about the whole wedding service, and the area of sexual intimacy, is to do with God’s design for marriage covenant. You can understand why we’ve just read in 1 Thessalonians 4 not to defraud the other person. That means to manipulate someone, and get something from them. When you defraud someone, you take something they wouldn’t have given you, except you put one over them. So men defraud women – leading them on, and drawing them into sexual intimacy, and then abandoning them. Women seeking to be secure, or have a relationship, can give in to this, and then feel defrauded.
You can see by what I’ve shared already, how far everyone’s moved away from God’s design; how we need to return to God’s design. If you create something, you know how it works. A designer who makes a microwave, they have a manual on how to make it work right. They say: don’t put any metal into this thing. “I don’t care; I don’t follow the manual you know. I do this my own way”. So you put a cup in with some metal stuff on it, and all sorts of things go off inside the microwave. “Whoa! What’s wrong with that?” We just didn’t follow the makers design.