Sex... According to God - Hardcover

Kay Arthur is one of America’s best known and most-beloved Bible teachers and authors. With her husband, Jack, she is the cofounder of Precept Ministries International, the leaders in inductive Bible-study resources. Kay is the author of numerous books, including As Silver Refined, Our Covenant God, and Search My Heart, O God. Kay also reaches hundreds of thousands of people internationally through her “Precept upon Precept” inductive Bible studies. In addition, her daily and weekly television programs air on more than 900 stations in 30 countries. Kay and Jack live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

1

In the Beginning
Why Did God Create Sex?

There’s great confusion in our society today about sex. We live in a culture
where we almost breathe sex! Grab the television remote for a few
minutes of channel surfing, and it’s there, discussed, debated, demonstrated,
and used to sell anything and everything from cars to shampoo, from coffee
to toothpaste. The message is loud and clear: We have to be desirable. One
way or another we have to attract the opposite sex if we ever want love. It’s
no longer love that makes the world go round; it’s sex!

Go on the Internet, type in an innocuous word, and without warning
you’re offered titillating sights and experiences you never knew existed—or
you wish you never knew. Your curiosity tempts you to investigate further.
Your mind tries to rationalize how you can go where you know you
shouldn’t. You find yourself battling a desire—a longing so unexpectedly
awakened.

You get out of the house, walk down the street, and it steps right in front
of you—parading long, luscious legs and a short, tight skirt that rides every
movement of her hips. You look up to distract yourself from the thoughts
invading your mind, and you see a billboard that only entices you to carry
the thoughts further.

You walk into a corner store to grab something to eat or drink, and the
magazines catch your eye. The pictures and headlines promise answers to
your questions, ways to get or keep a lover excited and interested, and ways
you can test your sexual IQ.

You get together with your friends, and eventually the subject turns to
the opposite sex—conquests are shared, frustrations are expressed, advice is
given, or you’re laughed at because you haven’t had it! You’re told you just
don’t know what true excitement is.

That night you go to a movie; it’s rated PG, but the upcoming attractions
are not. Most of them sell sex, and you’re sitting with your arm around
someone whose skin is warm and soft, her perfume sweetening the aura of
her femininity—or you’re snuggling closer to a guy who exudes strength and
tenderness. Your mind is going where it shouldn’t go, your flesh is longing for
what it shouldn’t have; she’s not your wife...he’s not your husband.
You go home with your date and what do you do? Should you really go
in, even for just a few minutes? If you do, will you engage in intercourse—
or everything short of it? And whether or not you “go all the way,” will you
experience sex the way God intended it to be when He created sex?

The Original Design
Let’s go back to the very beginning, to Genesis, the first book in the Bible. I
want you to see for yourself what God says about sex, about our gender differences,
and why He made us this way. As you read Genesis 1, a portion of
which is printed out for you below, I suggest that you mark the text as you read
it. When you do this and then write out your observations, it helps you not
only grasp for yourself exactly what God says and means, it also helps you
remember what you discovered. Now then, color or underline every reference
to man, including every pronoun (every him, every them).

G E N E S I S 1 : 2 5 - 2 8
25 God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after
their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God
saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;
and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and
over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps
on the earth.”
27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created
him; male and female He created them.
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and
fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds
of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

What did you learn from marking the references to man? Did you notice
the word you in that question is italicized? That’s because this book is about
you. Our study together is not an issue of your agreeing or disagreeing with
what I write; rather it’s about seeing with your own eyes exactly what God has
to say about sex. Then you can make an informed, intelligent, rational decision
about what you’re going to do with what you’ve learned. And when you
come to the final page of this book, you’ll never have occasion to say with
regret, “Well, if only I had known!” You will know. You’ll know it all, because
we’ll cover it all.

Now let’s get back into our study, starting with listing your insights.
Observing the text in this careful way helps you see exactly what God is saying,
and it keeps you from straying into “I think,” “I heard,” or “I just feel”
as you strive to grasp God’s truth. These comments are not bad; you just need
to get the facts first and go from there. So in the space provided, record the
facts you learned about man from reading Genesis 1.

Before we discuss what we observed in Genesis 1, let’s look at Genesis 2.
What God does in this next passage is tighten the focus on the telescope and
take you in for a closer look, enabling you to see the details of the creation of
man and woman.

As you read the text, mark every reference to the man like this and
every reference to the woman like this: . Also mark pronouns the same way.

G E N E S I S 2 : 7 - 8 , 1 5 - 2 5
7 Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
8 The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He
placed the man whom He had formed....
15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden
to cultivate it and keep it.
16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden
you may eat freely;
17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for
in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will
make him a helper suitable for him.”
19 Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and
every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call
them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
20 The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and
to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable
for him.
21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept;
then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
22 The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken
from the man, and brought her to the man.
23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she
shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined
to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Now list below what you learned in this passage from marking man and
woman.

M A N WOMAN

Genesis 1 tells us that both man and woman were created on the sixth
day, yet Genesis 2 shows us there was an order to their creation. Adam was
created first from the dust of the earth, while the woman was created from a
rib taken from the side of the man. God makes sure we know His purpose
in creating the woman: She is to be a helper to the man, because among the
beasts of the field no suitable companion for him was found. The Hebrew
words in this passage translated as helper suitable (help meet in the King James
Version) are ezer neged. Ezer means “an aide,” while neged means “a counterpart,
a mate.”

If it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone, why didn’t God just create another
man to be Adam’s companion? Is there a difference between the sexes? You
need to know what the Bible teaches, because an opposing view has long
been promoted—and many have bought into its lie.

I’ve saved a page of notes given to me by a college student who wrote
them down while sitting in a class on child development in 1979. As you
read verbatim what my friend wrote, please know these are not the ravings of
a lone liberal. I wish they were. Rather these notes reflect the cleverly wrought
lies that had to be presented—and believed—to make way for the perversions
that would follow in the name of “scientific” research. I will share only
the first three; they’re enough.

1. We are born asexual, neither homosexual nor heterosexual.
2. Children’s sex is determined by labels parents place before two
years of age.
3. All our sexual behavior is learned. Sex drive is learned, influenced
by our environment.

Although these statements were supposedly based on the latest scientific
research in the study of human sexuality, are they true? Do they concur with
the Word of God?

What did you see in Genesis 1 and 2? Were we created asexual?
And were we designed to reproduce asexual offspring? Genesis 4 answers
that quickly: When Eve gave birth to their first child, she said, “I have gotten
a manchild with the help of th...