My Body Given for You

I never met my father-in-law; he died when my wife was a young girl. But I admire him tremendously because of the intuition he had as a new husband. At church the day after his wedding, having consummated his marriage the night before, he was in tears as he came back to the pew after receiving communion. When his new bride inquired, he said, “For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of those words, ‘This is my body given for you.’”

Make no mistake: when all of the smoke is cleared and all of the distortions are untwisted, the deepest meaning and purpose of human sexuality is to point us to the “wedding supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9). In other words, God created us male and female right from the beginning to live in a “holy communion” that foreshadows the holy communion of Christ and the church. And this is precisely why questions of marriage and sexuality place us right in the center of “the situation in which the powers of good and evil fight against each other.”