Credo
21 September 2026
This is a two-part reflection on Judeo-Christian marriage as an eschatological sign. Visit this link for the first part.
In my earlier article, I looked at how the New Testament (NT) presents marriage as an eschatological sign. There, I highlighted how the bond of marriage between husband and wife points prophetically to the relationship between the Son and the People of God in the NT. I went on to explain how this prophetic/eschatological dynamic puts the gender hierarchy of the NT in perspective.
In this follow-up piece, then, I will take my reflection on the prophetic meaning of Judeo-Christian marriage further. Here, I will discuss how the sexual aspect of marriage is also an important aspect of marriage’s sign-value. I will also consider how this helps us develop a properly NT response to a contemporary hot-button issue: same-sex sexual activity.
For the apostle Paul, the anchoring Old Testament (OT) text that explains the meaning of the act of sex is Genesis 2:24: ‘a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.’ Genesis 2:24, however, does not occur in isolation. It is a part of the two creation accounts[1] that comprise the first two chapters of Genesis. To fully appreciate this verse, one must read it in the light of both Genesis 1 and 2.
Old Testament scholars are of the general consensus that the theme of Genesis 1 is God’s vanquishing the forces of chaos, symbolised (as they typically are in ancient West Asian cultures) by water.[2] God defeats chaos by acts of separation – light from darkness (1:4), waters from waters (1:6-7), land from sea (1:9-10), etc.
The climax of this series of separations occurs when God declares his intention to ‘make man’ (1:26), and then proceeds to introduce a separation according to physical sex into his definition of “man” (1:27). With this separation, then, comes the blessing for humanity to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (1:28a).
Genesis 1, however, does not go on to spell out the exact dynamics of this separation. That is where the second creation account in Genesis 2 comes in. There, the text tells us that the separation occurs by God removing ‘flesh (from Adam’s) flesh’ and ‘bone (from Adam’s) bone’ (2:23) to form woman. Thus, she is physically differentiated from him even as their similarity in nature is noted. And this is the basis of the sexual bond between ‘a man…and his wife’ (2:24).
Sexual differentiation, then, is inextricably tied to the act of sex in the Old Testament. And it is this differentiation as expressed in the sexual act that Paul uses to expound the sign-value of Judeo-Christian marriage in Ephesians 5:29-32. For him, when a husband and wife ‘become one flesh’ (5:31), it mirrors how the Son and his people respectively become one body (5:29-30). In a negative application of this principle, Paul also excoriates the Corinthian Christians for their sexual immorality precisely because it insults the spiritual oneness between the Son and his people. (1 Cor 6:16-17)
From this we can tease out the dynamics underpinning the relationship between the Son and his people. It is their differentiation that, paradoxically, facilitates their union, for it makes their mutual self-giving other-oriented and thus truly love. So, the Son ‘(gives) himself up’ in his sacrifice to his Church who is other to him (Eph 5:25); likewise, the Church gives herself by ‘submit(ting)’ to the Son and not to herself (Eph 5:24). The nature of the bond between the Son and the People of God is the very antithesis of narcissism.
This in turn helps contextualise the NT’s injunctions against same-sex sexual activity. It is not because the God of Israel is a repressive or restrictive prude. It is because God’s eschatological sign i.e. Judeo-Christian marriage is carefully curated, and thus he is protective of it.
Consider again the sign of the Eucharist. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian congregation tells us that ‘factions’ among them had created a “pecking order” at the Communion table, where the “haves” indulged in food while ‘those who ha(d) nothing’ were ‘humiliate(d)’ in turn (1 Cor 11:18-21).
For Paul, this fundamentally goes against the meaning of the Eucharist, which signifies not only Jesus’ physical body but his Body that is the Christian community, formed by his sacrifice. Thus, the factionalists were partaking of the Eucharist ‘without discerning the body (of Christ)’ [1 Cor 11:29]. The outcome: God let illness and untimely deaths come upon them in response (1 Cor 11:30).
In the same way, a failure to undertake the act of sex within the bounds that God has established is a failure to discern the (human) body i.e. its sexual differentiation and its accompanying prophetic significance. Same-sex activity, just like adultery or sex before marriage, breaks the sign of that true marriage that the New Testament foretells will culminate the coming of God’s Kingdom.
One, however, might encounter the rebuttal that this way of looking at sexual differentiation ignores or even erases a person’s sexual identity. In the face of this possible accusation, it must be noted that up until the 19th century, the dominant understanding of sex was that it was something one did, not something that defined one’s self/identity.[3] The idea that the physical gender you engaged in sexual relations with defined who you are is fundamentally foreign to the ancient world.
So it is that the NT too doesn’t follow the modern, constructed claim that sexual activity and identity are intricately tied. Instead, its sexual ethics is mainly informed by a very different question: how should the body be used as per the will of God? Its assumption is that bodies matter as God designed them to be from the beginning, and so the real issue is how Jesus-followers should use their bodies as God’s very own people.
On this point, it must be noted that the truth that “bodies matter” has been all but forgotten in “pop” Protestantism. Most churchgoers think that the NT defines salvation as being able to live in heaven forever after death releases one from one’s body. But this cannot be further from the truth. The resurrection of Jesus serves as a sharp rebuke to this idea – which seeped into Christian thought from the Greeks[4] – for it declares that the reward of the righteous is a resurrection of the body unto everlasting physical life.
With the resurrection as its theological centre, this truth resonates throughout the NT. It is the body that God has set apart to be the temple of Holy Spirit through the resurrection of Jesus (and our own coming resurrections) [1 Cor 6:13-20]. And it is through the healing of sick bodies that the victory of Jesus over the realm of uncleanness and death is visibly seen (Matt 8:16-17; 10:1-8). And when the NT desires to present a concrete picture of what it means for a human being to be the image of God, it points to Jesus being physically transfigured on a mountain (Lk 9:26-29).[5]
Unlike the god of Greek philosophy, then, who eschews the physical world as ultimately inconsequential, the God of Israel is the God who thoughtfully designed humans as spirit, soul, and body. Thus, physical sexual differentiation matters. Sexual differentiation must be maintained in the act of sex as a witness to the unity-in-otherness that characterises the eternal bond between Jesus and his people. To do otherwise is to fail to discern the body and thus to sin against it (1 Cor 6:18b).
[1] Presenting multiple accounts of the same event, even if their details are inconsistent with each other, is an ancient West Asian literary convention. It definitely boggles the modern/contemporary mind, but the Torah is still ultimately a product of its West Asian context(s), never ours. For an exploration of this aspect of West Asian literary culture, see Joshua A. Berman, Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Conventions and the Limits of Source Criticism (Oxford, UK; Oxford University Press, 2017).
[2] See for instance John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddess of Canaan (London, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 98-102.
[3] Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 7.
[4] This is not to deny the use of Greco-Roman philosophical categories by New Testament and Patristic writers; but it is an incontrovertible point that seeing salvation as the spirit leaving the physical world for good is Greek in origin and not Judeo-Christian. See Onyeukaziri Justin Nnaemeka, “The Platonic Influence on Early Christian Anthropology: Its Implication on the Theology of the Resurrection of the Dead”, in Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy 23.1 (2022): 53-58.
[5] Andrei A. Orlov, The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology (London, UK: T&T Clark, 2019), 123-128.
Christopher is a historical theologian in training who researches early Christian beliefs and their Second-Temple Jewish roots. He is also interested in all things Bible. He earned an MTh and an MLitt from Trinity Theological College, Singapore.