A podcast listener named Hannah writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, I often hear people and pastors say that sex between a husband and a wife is a picture of the love between Christ and His church. When this comparison is given, I almost always see people or the pastor speaking blush, as well as the audience, as if it is an awkward and unexpected comparison.

I believe this picture of sex and Christ with His church to be true, but I am one of many who has a hard time wrapping my mind around it and would have a hard time describing it to someone else. I have two questions regarding this. One, how is sex between a husband and a wife a practical example of Christ and His church?

Number two, why is this truth something so many are so uncomfortable with?" Well, I am not blushing, and I'm excited. I like this question. So, in answer to the second question, "Why is this truth something many are uncomfortable with?" My guess is there are at least three reasons. There are probably more, but here are my three.

Number one is that we don't have a robust enough vision of the beauty and depth and sacredness of the actual event of sexual intercourse as God designed it. Number two, our own experience of sexuality is so tainted with selfishness and pornographic corruption, either in our head or in the media, that we can scarcely have a thought about sex without the presence of those corruptions.

And to be fair, there's a third factor that creates discomfort. Very often, when this comes up, there may be children present. I'm thinking of a worship service, for example. Or a sensitive older person who's just not at all comfortable with saying some of the things I'm going to say in this answer.

Or single people or divorced people or somebody else who just, for various reasons, might be really put in an awkward position by explicit talk about what happens in the marriage bed and its relationship to the relationship of Christ in His church. So for those three reasons, our theology of marital intercourse is lame, our experience of sex is tainted, and our situations in which we speak about this often have audiences that make it awkward for them to hear, if not for us to speak.

So I want us to have some patience, you know, and mercy upon pastors who might appear like they're awkward. Maybe they're not awkward for valid, I mean, deep reasons, but maybe for more audience-oriented reasons. Now, before I say anything about the answer to the first question, like, what is the real analogy here?

Let me draw the text out that Hannah is referring to so we get at least some of it on the table because I'm sure some listeners are just not familiar. Here's the Bible portion that she's talking about. "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that he might present the church to himself." So he's going after a bride.

"In splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish." In other words, Christ is after a beautiful, splendid, spotless, wrinkle-free, holy, blemish-free, gorgeous wife. And then, verses 31 and 32, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." That's in the sexual act of intercourse.

Verse 32, "This mystery," this union, this leaving, cleaving, and sexual union, "This mystery is profound. I am saying it refers to Christ and the church." Now, there it is. There it is. The one-flesh union of man and wife are Christ and the church in emblem, in metaphor, in foretaste.

And, let's just make it as explicit as we can, you could stir in here the Song of Solomon, where the sexual pleasures of the man and his wife are described with such remarkable graphicness, we have to blink and say, "Is this the Bible?" For example, chapter 7, verse 7, he says to her, "Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters.

I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples." Okay, so that is the whole Bible portrayal of the marriage bed that Christ and the church are being pointed to.

So, for those familiar with the Bible, not to mention ordinary experience of married couples, we cannot escape the truth that Jesus is not ashamed to describe his relationship to the church in terms of a marriage, including its one-flesh union in the sexual act of the marriage bed. So, Hannah asks, here's the first question, "How is sex between a husband and a wife a practical example of Christ and his church?" And I'll mention three things, and I do not doubt that these are the lowlands of the Himalayas of glory that better people than I could climb into and explain.

Number one, very prominent in Ephesians 5 is the asymmetry, lack of symmetry, between the roles of husband and wife. She is to submit to his Christlike, loving, sacrificial headship. But there is, just as clearly, a mutuality and reciprocity in seeking to bless and satisfy the other as leadership and submission find their way toward maximum mutual pleasure.

In 1 Corinthians 7, Christ says that the man does not have authority over his body, but the woman does, and the woman does not have authority over her body, but the man does, which creates, if you're a logic chopper, a total stalemate. But Paul clearly doesn't mean for there to be a stalemate in the marriage bed.

The point is that the wife often desires, has desires, and the husband in love should want to satisfy them and labor to. And the husband often has desires, and the wife in love should want to satisfy them. But as they proceed, the way the man pursues the satisfying of his wife is in the capacity of a head and the initiative taker.

And this doesn't rule out her own particular kinds of initiatives, but it does set the tone and establish a context in which he is felt to be the strong, caring, loving, creative leader in this event, which is what Christ and the Church are about. And so my first answer is that in the act of sexual relations in marriage, the beauty and the complexity and the mystery of headship and submission in their most satisfying expressions are being realized.

Number two, the second thing I would say is that the reason the rare and extraordinary pleasure of simultaneous orgasm is as great as it is, is not only to point us to the ecstasies of knowing Christ, but also to give us a very taste of those ecstasies. When Jesus says that he is the bread of life, he means for us to taste something of his life in our favorite bread.

Some good German bakery. The pleasure of the emblem, when it is consecrated to God, becomes a foretaste and a pleasure of the thing itself, Christ in the bread. So it is with the pleasures of the marriage bed as an emblem of Christ and the Church in fellowship. When a couple loves each other and brings that love to climax in sexual consummation and lie there still restful, thankful at the end, their hearts should be brimming with how wonderful Jesus Christ is, that he would give them such pleasures and that he would show them in those pleasures what he is like and how precious is the Church's relationship to her husband.

Number three, I would say that the metaphors in general are always lesser realities than what they are metaphors of. So a wedding ring is precious. I still have mine on. I think I've only had it off two days because of surgery and something else in 46 years. So my wedding ring is precious to me.

A wedding ring is precious, but it's not as precious as the marriage and the pleasures of the marriage that it signifies. And sexual pleasure in marriage is precious, but not as precious as what it signifies in relation to Jesus. Jesus said that in the age to come there will be no marriage or giving in marriage.

Now that may seem like a colossal disappointment for those of us who have enjoyed the pleasures of the marriage bed. But what if someone said, "In the future, I'm going to take away your wedding ring, and all you're going to have is heightened ecstasies that it stood for." Would you be disappointed?

Well, a little bit, but not very long. Not very long. No, you wouldn't. In other words, the sexual pleasures in marriage point not only to the present pleasures of knowing and loving Christ, but they also point to the age to come where the ring, that is the pleasures in this analogy, will be taken away.

And we will experience the reality in such greater measure of pleasure that we will wonder how we could have ever been satisfied with the best sex in the world. There you go. A blush-free theology of sex. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this episode. We return tomorrow, and you can keep up with the daily Ask Pastor John podcast online or through our free apps.

For more, go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, 2016 is upon us already, and one listener wants to know, "What challenges are in store for Christians in 2016?" I'll ask John Piper tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.