“The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25).

In the very next sentence of Adam and Eve’s story, God gives us one of the best pieces of wisdom for how to enjoy the best possible sex life:

“The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25).

This is God’s desire for every couple:  that on their wedding day—when the ceremony is over and the guests have gone home—the bride and groom can take off their wedding clothes, with nothing to hide and with no sense of shame, and can finally become one flesh.  Once they’re married, God wants them to be able to continue to come together like this, naked and unashamed, over and over and over again.

While this may seem easy enough in concept, once our hormones kick in, triggering our God-given sexual desires, it can be a long and difficult wait until our wedding day.  The wait is worth it, though, and God makes it clear that He not only wants us to wait, but He will help us to wait.

God’s Protective Seal

In the days when Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt, the Israelites had a marriage custom that proved whether or not a woman was a virgin—someone who has never had sex—on her wedding day.

When any woman has sex for the first time, the man’s penis presses through a thin membrane of tissue, called the hymen, that partially covers the opening to her vagina.  When the penis passes through the hymen for the very first time, a small amount of blood is produced as the hymen stretches open.  This stretching occurs only once in a woman’s lifetime, then the hymen remains fully open forever.  The hymen acts like a protective seal on a medicine bottle:  once the seal is broken, you know the bottle has already been opened.

In Moses’ day, the newly married couple would save this first release of blood from the broken hymen on a piece of cloth.  The cloth served as proof that the girl was indeed a virgin on her wedding day.  If a man were to have sex with his new wife and find that there was no such sign of this proof, he had the right to bring her back to her father’s house for swift and serious judgment.  The law regarding this, as recorded in the Bible, says:

“If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you” (Deuteronomy 22:20-21).

A man, too, was expected to be a virgin on his wedding day.  While a man’s body has nothing comparable to the hymen that could break during sexual intercourse to prove his virginity, the Bible is just as clear that a man is not to have sex with anyone before marriage either, as described in detail in the rest of Deuteronomy 22.

(Please note that some women today do not bleed the first time they make love, especially those who have been active in sports or who have used tampons.  Such activities can stretch the hymen prior to making love.)

While we no longer put people to death for breaking these laws, it’s not because the laws are no longer valid, and not because the laws are no longer valuable.  Thankfully, it’s because when Jesus came to earth, He paid the price for our sins, including our sexual sins, so that whoever puts their faith in Him does not have to pay the penalty for their sins themselves, and is even able to live forever with Him.  To finish the quote I began earlier about how much God loves people, the Bible says:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Jesus made it clear that while the law is still valid and valuable, He was willing to pay the penalty for our sins Himself, even the death penalty, because He loved us so much.

In a story that illustrates this, some people brought to Jesus a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery, which means she was having sex with someone else’s husband.  They asked Jesus if she should be punished and stoned to death according to the law or if she should be set free.  The Bible says that the people were doing this to try to trap Jesus.  His response revealed both His own brilliance and the wickedness of their hearts:

“If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7b).

Amazingly, they all dropped their stones and left.  They knew, as Jesus knew, that everyone has sinned at some point in their lives.  Jesus also knew something that they didn’t know:  He knew that He Himself was about to pay the penalty for her sin, not to mention their sins, and yours and mine.  The law was still valid and would soon be fulfilled by his death.  But by taking her place and extending forgiveness, Jesus also extended her life, allowing her to fulfill the rest of the purposes for which God had created her in the first place.  After all the other people had left the scene, Jesus asked the woman to turn away from the sins that almost got her killed:

“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:10b-11).

God’s expectations for, and the great value of, being sexually pure on our wedding day remains the same for us today as it was for the people in Moses’ day.  In order to have the best possible sex life within marriage, the first step is to stay pure before marriage.  How can we do that?  God tells us that, too.

A Pivotal Conversation

A few months before I married Lana, I had a brief, but pivotal conversation with a man named John Smid, Executive Director of an organization called Love in Action.  I had heard that John regularly counseled people regarding their sexual relationships, so I called him to ask about ways to safeguard my upcoming marriage so that it could be all that God wanted it to be.

Within the first few minutes of our conversation, I could tell that his words were going to be like nuggets of gold for my marriage.  The first nugget appeared when he asked me about my current physical relationship with Lana.  Did we kiss, hold hands and romantically touch each other in other ways?  I told him we did.  He then challenged me by asking me if she were someone else’s wife, would I touch her in these ways?  No, of course not!  Then why, he asked, would I touch her in these ways before we got married?  Because the truth was that until the day that we actually did get married, it was still possible that either of us could become someone else’s husband or wife.  Although I felt no hesitation about our commitment to our upcoming marriage, I knew that anything was possible and that John was telling me the truth.

A friend of ours told us recently about a sad situation involving her brother.  He was engaged to be married to the girl of his dreams, but one month before the wedding, he succumbed to his temptations and had sex—not with the girl of his dreams, but with her sister, who had been unsuccessfully pursuing him for some time.  Afterwards, he felt terrible about what he had just done, but his fiancé forgave him and they continued to plan for their wedding.  Sadly, just days before the wedding, the sister discovered that she was pregnant with this man’s baby.  Torn between what he should do now, he married the girl’s sister so that the child could have a father.  Even more sadly, the sister then had a miscarriage shortly after the wedding, leaving the man in a marriage he hadn’t planned on, leaving their unexpected child dead from the miscarriage, and leaving the girl of his dreams all alone.  What a heartbreaking story, one that could have been avoided, even for two people who were “absolutely, positively” going to be married within a month.  The truth is that we simply don’t know what might happen prior to marriage.

Another woman wrote me to tell me that she and her boyfriend were living together, and although they weren’t engaging in full sexual intercourse, they were, in her words, “simulating” sex.  They hoped to get married sometime in the future, but not right now.  She said she had heard that some Christians felt it was wrong to have this kind of sexual contact before marriage, but that she would need lots of explanation if this was wrong, because she craved the affection of her boyfriend and because she felt it was so natural to touch someone she loved.

Since I had just been shopping that day for a small rug for the entrance to our house, I used my shopping experience as an illustration to help her see the issue from God’s perspective.  Whenever I’d pull a rug off the shelf to see how it looked on the floor in the store, my two youngest sons would immediately start to walk on it.  I kept having to tell them not to step on any of the rugs because they weren’t ours yet.  I didn’t think someone else would want to buy a rug that had been walked on and soiled from other people’s shoes.  I know I wouldn’t!

I told her that if that’s how we’re to treat a rug that’s not yet ours, even though it is designed for being walked on, how should we treat someone else’s precious and delicate body?  If it’s not ours, we shouldn’t act as if it is, even if we’re hoping it will become ours at some point.  We wouldn’t treat a rug as if it’s ours until we went to the counter and paid for it properly, and we shouldn’t treat another person as if they’re ours until we walk down the aisle and commit our lives to each other “until death do us part.”  It is then—and only then—that we become husband and wife and belong to each other, as the Bible describes in the book of First Corinthians:

“The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife” (1 Corinthians 7:4).

Waiting to Awaken Love

This sense of belonging to each other only comes within marriage between husbands and wives.

If this is the case, then where do we draw the line in our physical relationship with someone before marriage?  The safest place to draw it is in the same place that we would draw it with someone else’s husband or wife.  Would I romantically kiss someone else’s wife?  Would I let my hand linger on her knee?  Would I touch her breasts or her bottom, whether she were clothed or naked?  Would I sexually stimulate her in any way, or let her do the same to me, whether it involved full sexual intercourse or just a “simulation” of the real thing?  Absolutely not!  And furthermore, would I want someone else to touch my future wife in these ways before I married her?

In one of the most romantic books in the Bible, the Song of Songs, one of the lovers in the book cautions repeatedly:

“Promise me, O women of Jerusalem, by the swift gazelles and the deer of the wild, not to awaken love until the time is right” (Song of Songs 2:7b, and again in 3:5b and 8:4b, NLT).

God doesn’t want us to even awaken romantic love until the time is right.  Once love is aroused in a relationship, it is very difficult to back up again without tearing apart our hearts in the process.

I talked to another woman who was living with a man to whom she wasn’t married.  She told me that this man really treated her poorly, but that she had already gotten involved with him and didn’t know how to get out of it.  She asked me what to do.  I told her, “Stop the relationship right now.  Ask him to leave your house.  Don’t give your heart to someone who’s not willing to commit to taking care of it for the rest of your life!”  Her eyes were opened to what she was doing.  Unfortunately, instead of stopping the relationship right then, it took her another month before she finally asked him to leave.  In another sad turn of events, after he had finally left, she found out that she had become pregnant with his baby during their final month together.  By the time she found out, the father was gone.

Please, don’t do anything that would awaken love until the time is right.

This isn’t to say that you can’t give people a friendly hug or a “holy kiss” of greeting.  But there’s a big difference between a friendly hug or a holy kiss and a romantic, sexually arousing hug or kiss.  Any activity that is sexually stimulating or arousing with anyone other than your husband or wife is unnecessary, unproductive and potentially damaging.  You might ask, “What harm can it do?”  That’s a great question.  Like the examples I’ve just given, it can do a lot of harm!  But even if there weren’t pregnancies or diseases to deal with, the damage that can be done to your heart is serious enough to warrant not “awakening love” with anyone but your husband or wife until “the time is right.”   One of the main regrets that people tell me they have about their sexual relationships prior to marriage is that they bring those memories into their marriage, memories that interfere with an otherwise beautiful relationship with their spouse, and which cannot be erased.

What harm can it do?  Plenty.  But there’s still a better question:  “What good can it do?”  If engaging in sexual activities doesn’t fulfill one of the twin purposes for which God created sex in the first place, to build intimacy or yield fruit with the husband or wife God has created for you, then it is more likely to be destructive to you or to others, whether now or down the road.

Not Even a Hint

There’s no need to step on a rug to see if it’s the one for you.  You can, and should, look at it, admire it, and even carefully examine it before you commit to buying it, but you don’t need to walk on it, soil it, or worse yet, muddy it up so much that no one else would even want it, which unfortunately happens in many sexual encounters.

Where, then, should we draw the line in our physical relationships?  The Bible says that we should not have even a hint of sexual immorality among us:

“But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people” (Ephesians 5:3).

My conversation with John Smid gave me new eyes regarding my relationship with Lana.  Even though she and I were engaged to be married several months later and had already gone beyond the “hinting” stages in our physical relationship, I felt it was important that we pull back physically for those remaining months to the point where we physically treated one another as if we were someone else’s husband or wife—because as remote as the possibility seemed, until our wedding day, there was still a chance that either of us could become someone else’s husband or wife.  It wasn’t easy to keep our distance, and we weren’t perfect at it, especially since we had already crossed those lines before.  But I still saw the value in waiting to even kiss Lana again until that moment in the ceremony when the pastor finally said:  “You may kiss the bride!”

And what an awesome moment that was when it finally came, to be able to kiss Lana, knowing that I would soon be able to fully embrace her, with all the rights and privileges that marriage gives to husbands and wives.  By intentionally trying to refrain from even a hint of sexual immorality before marriage, it made the transition from singleness to marriage all the more sweet.

Review Questions

1. What did Adam and Eve not feel when they were first together, even though they were both naked? (Genesis 2:25)

2. In the days of Moses, what did the law say should be done if a man or woman had sex before marriage? (Deuteronomy 22:20-21, Deuteronomy 22:29)

3. Why do we no longer enact the punishments for these laws?  Because they are no longer valid or valuable?  Or because of some other reason? (John 8:1-11)

4. What does God not want us to have “even a hint of” in our lives? (Ephesians 5:3)