(upbeat music) - Eli writes in to ask this, Dear Pastor John, in a message titled, For Men, Augustine's Sin and Sovereign Joy. You said this, quote, "The Pleasures of God," your book, "is not a book about sex at all, "except that everything about God is about sex." End quote.

Can you provide more clarity on what you meant by everything about God is about sex? What do you mean, Pastor John? - Well, the first thing to clarify is when I say everything about God is about sex, that's not a unique statement about sex. I would say the same thing about everything.

Everything about God is about everything, meaning everything about God relates to everything. Everything about God shapes the way we think about everything and the way we handle everything and the way we feel about everything and the way we do everything, or it should. In other words, nothing in the world, absolutely nothing has existence apart from God.

And therefore, nothing in the world has meaning apart from God. God designed everything and created everything and holds everything in being, governs everything for His purposes, and His purposes always include supremely the display of the fullness of His glory, that is, everything about God. Therefore, sex exists because God designed it, God created it, God sustains it, God governs it, and it gets its meaning from God, and that meaning is the display of the fullness of the glory of God, and the fullness of the glory of God includes all that God is, or as I said, everything about God.

Therefore, sex exists to display God in His fullness. So let me put a text under all those claims, 1 Timothy 4, 1 to 5. Now, the Spirit expressly says that in the latter times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons.

What do those demons teach? Through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who do this, forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth for everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving for it is made holy by the word of God in prayer.

The point of that passage is to warn us against those who think that marriage and its sexual relationship are not a proper place for the expression of faith in God and thanks to God based on truth about God. That's all from that text. But Paul says that marriage and its sexual relation and food are designed precisely for those who believe and who know the truth and who give thanks to God whose glory is displayed precisely in those things.

Or we could put it this way, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink or have sex, do all to the glory of God. That is, recognize the fullness of the glories of God manifest in the design and creation and sustaining and governing of sexual intimacy and turn all of it into a reflection of the fullness of God's glory.

Now, if a person hears me say, everything about God is about sex, he might wonder, well, how is the wrath of God about sex? Or he might pick another one. So let's just take that one. The answer is that in a world where every human being deserves wrath, this world, and any human being gets the pleasure of sex, we should be astonished at the massive contrast between the mercies of God and the wrath of God in that very moment of exquisite pleasure.

Every person who enjoys the pleasures of sex should be astonished precisely because of that pleasure that they are not at that moment in hell instead, because that's where we all deserve to be at any given moment, and only mercy keeps us out and some of those mercies are poured out precisely through food and sex on the very people who don't even think the giver exists.

And so, yeah, sex is very much about wrath. So I would affirm, reaffirm what I said, namely that everything about God is about sex because everything about God is about everything. - It doesn't get more comprehensive than that. Thank you, Pastor John, and where else will you get this kind of cosmos-embracing, comprehensive worldview like you get on the Ask Pastor John podcast?

Thank you for the question, Eli, and thank you for listening. For more information about this podcast, go to desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)