The Intimacy We Need: “Love Me”
We respond to the prospect of marital intimacy with some ambivalence.
We experience both an attraction and an aversion to the prospect of intimacy.
Intimacy attracts us because God made us for intimacy. God made us to be intimate with Him. God made us to be intimate with our spouse. When we were married, we became one flesh. By our one flesh union, we are to image the divine intimacy which the persons of the Triune Godhead enjoy. The intimacy known by God’s two-in-one creatures is a reflection of the being of, and intimacy known by the God who is Three-in-One, a plurality in unity. As His image bearers, we are oriented toward and attracted to intimacy.
Adam, before the Fall, did not have an individualized self-consciousness like our fallen self-consciousness. He would not have defined himself as detached and isolated from his God, his wife, his labor and his creation stewardships. He would not have understood himself with a severed self-consciousness conditioned by death. But his fall through sin into death brought this experience of division into and within himself. As a fallen sinner, he not only separated himself from God and creation, but he experienced separation within himself. Before the Fall, he would not have thought about himself as disconnected from the creation into which God had intimately knit him. He would not have studied his ‘self’ as we, in our fallen state, are so prone to do. He would not have known himself in any other context than that of his union with God, the earth, his labor, God’s words, the animals, the plants, and his wife. Adam would have had no knowledge of himself other than that which God revealed to him by having created him in His image and having assigned the creation mandate to him.
After the Fall, God salvaged creation and preserved the man and the woman in their original place. So even though we are fallen, we still live according to the original order of God’s creation. By nature we bear God’s image as God originally designed: imaging Him in our labor, our family, and our religion. We instinctively seek intimacy and join ourselves to those endeavors and those people with whom we find significance and fulfillment. When we ponder the prospect of marital intimacy, it attracts us.
We yearn for someone to know us, to understand us, and to accept us. This desire to be understood propels us to seek intimacy with others. We long for companionship. We are social beings by nature. It is not good for the man to be alone (Genesis 2.18). Loneliness is an unbearable pain from which we seek relief, if not in personal engagement with another person, then with a pet. If another person or pet is not available, we will personalize an inanimate object, like the Tom Hanks character Chuck Noland in the 2000 film version of Robinson Crusoe, Castaway. Chuck Noland has to talk to someone. Robinson Crusoe talked to God, Chuck talks to his volleyball: Wilson. Chuck has to talk to someone because he is a social being. He needs personal intimacy even if it is with his own bloody handprint smeared on a volleyball. We watch Chuck talking passionately to his volleyball, and we understand. We know why he is doing that. He needs intimacy. He wants to be loved, even if only by projecting himself back onto himself off his volleyball.
The Privacy We Want: “Leave Me Alone”
Modern man, although made for intimacy, wants privacy. That is our modern demand: the right of privacy. Modern man wants the right to hide behind his fig leaf. He wants to be able to be alone in the darkness of his self-indulgences where, ironically, he often seeks the specter of intimacy without the legitimate demands of intimacy. He spends hours as a disembodied persona in an internet chat room where he hides behind his pseudonym seeking a perverse intimacy: an intimacy without physical presence. Cyber-souls sit in the steamy sauna of internet chat, unzipping their hearts, expressing their secrets to disembodied entities that may or may not be who they say they are. Internet pornography offers the same angst-ridden attraction: the chance to stay hidden while becoming intimate with what is most private. Modern man is attracted to the prospect of sex without intimacy. He wants to be loved, but has hidden himself beneath the fig leaves of superficial social roles and self-deception.
With our cherished right of privacy we live disconnected lives in a fragmented society. The modern technological lifestyle affects even how we live out our faith. For example, what does “local” mean when we speak of “the local church?” The local church is not local today the way it used to be. We live in one county, we work in another county, we go to church in another county, and our children go to school in another county or even another state. Our extended family lives in another state or even another country. We navigate among the islands where we perform our various tasks and relate to various clusters of people. As we move from island to island, we are liable to become socially schizophrenic, having one persona on one island and another person on another island. We can become a certain character at work, a different character at church, and yet another character in the home. All the while we can be reasonably confident that none of these social environments will ever overlap one another. We can lose track of ourselves as we don various costumes and play-act different roles on several stages each with their own supporting casts. Amid such social fragmentation, our associations with others become superficial, sporadic, unengaged, and distant.
Intimacy attracts us, but – because of our sin – we are also averse to the prospect of intimacy. Although God made us for intimacy, we sinfully separate ourselves from others. We still stitch fig leaves together and run away hurting, hiding, wanting someone to find us. Privately, we still want intimacy, but our sin drives us into isolated self-absorption. There, alone with self, we are reminded of things we want to keep hidden. Intimacy involves exposure. Intimacy invades privacy. But we know our shame. We know our sin. So we cover ourselves with any convenient fig leaf. When intimacy approaches, we start maneuvering; dodging, weaving, and avoiding direct contact in case we disclose our true selves. We evade, deceive, and lie. Lies keep people away, at a distance, not up close and intimate.
We strangely strive to be private and hidden even to ourselves. Lies not only stifle intimacy with others, they hinder our ability to be intimate even with ourselves. The person we are most likely to deceive is our self. Scripture repeatedly warns us against self-deception.6 Due to sin, we can not only live deceptively detached from others, but self-deceived and unknown even to our selves. We do not even want intimacy with our selves!
Marital intimacy has a way of breaking through the layers of self-deception. It was common when I was young for people to go off on some journey to a distant land to “find oneself.” Actually, self-discovery is more often found in the journey into marital intimacy. Finding myself was one of my most unsettling discoveries during the early years of my marriage. Getting to know my wife was a privilege, but what I learned about myself was painful. I was not the loving, caring, romantic guy I thought I was in my singleness. I had deceived myself. But I yearned for intimacy. I needed intimacy in the innermost core of my being. Yet the prospect of being intimate repelled me because the closer I got to my wife, the more I discovered my sin and less often, my wife’s sin. The eruptions of sin hurt us. The pain of our sin made us pull back from each other. It brought death and threatened to separate us. Learning to be intimate was painful, but I knew that, for me, being single was more painful. I knew that it was not good for this man to be alone. Thankfully, I wanted intimacy more than I wanted to continue in my self-centered self-absorption. I started to stop kidding myself and, by the grace of God, forced myself to get honest and be honest with God and with my wife. I had discovered that deception murders intimacy. We often purchase the culturally valued commodity of privacy with the currency of deception. But the reality of who we are as created in the image of God compels us to be counter-cultural and to reach out for intimacy, even marital intimacy. So we marry. Marriage summons us to love and love demands honesty and honesty relinquishes privacy. When we marry, our privacy evaporates.
Excerpt from Gospel Intimacy in a Godly Marriage, used with permission.
Gospel Intimacy in a Godly Marriage is available at Trinity Book Service.
Table of Contents
Preface ………………………………………………………………………….11
PART ONE:
NAVIGATING THE JOURNEY INTO MARITAL INTIMACY
Introduction ……………………………………………………………… 15
1. The Doctrine Of God Directs Our Journey
Into Marital Intimacy……………………………………………….17
Being intimate and the being of God
We are “the image of God”
Unified plurality
The picture of perfection
Jesus’ language of “oneness”
2. The Doctrine Of Creation Directs Our Journey
Into Marital Intimacy……………………………………………… 28
The needs inherent in creation
The earth needs man’s labor
The man needs the woman
The man named the woman
What God has joined together
3. The Doctrine Of The Fall Directs Our Journey
Into Marital Intimacy……………………………………………….36
The essence of death is separation
Fig leaf rebellion
Divine justice
Divine Grace
A propensity to perversion
4. The Doctrine Of Redemption Directs Our Journey
Into Marital Intimacy……………………………………………….49
A showcase for the gospel
A signpost to glory
PART TWO:
MARITAL INTIMACY AND THE GRACE OF GOSPEL LOVE
Introduction ……………………………………………………………….57
5. The Challenges To Gospel Love ……………………………..58
The intimacy we need: “Love me.”
The privacy we want: “Leave me alone.”
The invading conscience
The love that overcomes sin
6. The Enemy Of Gospel Love …………………………………….68
Not any old love will do
Gospel realism: “Yes, that is sin!”
7. Be A Gospel Lover ……………………………………………….. 77
The loved lover
Love with love
A disposition of forgiveness
A disposition of forbearance
8. The Transaction Of Gospel Love …………………………… 84
An exchange of gospel commodities
Confession offered
Repentance expressed
Forgiveness bestowed
No vengeance
I promise
PART THREE:
OVERCOMING CHALLENGES TO MARITAL INTIMACY
Introduction ……………………………………………………………..107
9. The Challenge Of Headship And Submission ………..109
Leadership: not “source”
Submission: not egalitarianism
Christ – the model of headship and submission
10. The Challenge Of Selfishness………………………………130
The attitude of Christ
Discipleship and self-sacrifice
Wisdom from above
11.The Challenge Of Unbiblical Communication
Patterns ……………………………………………………………….141
Meaningful words
Cleansing words
Affectionate words
Sexual communication
12. The Challenge Of Unavoidable Death …………………..153
Married to my wife
Married to my sister
Discipleship – “Until death do us part”
A society of love
Even so, come Lord Jesus
Notes ……………………………………………………………………….167