by erika haveman
“…True worshipers act in unconventional ways – including distancing themselves from family – to give God first place in their adoring service of Him. The estrangement between husband and wife [David and Michal] also functions as a foil to the warm intimacy between I AM and David that forms the background to God’s reward to David of an everlasting covenant.”
Bruce Waltke, Old Testament Theology
I realize the title of this post may have caused a stir. Good. I’m glad you’re here. Please read this in its entirety before you get all angry and upset.
Currently I’m taking an Old Testament Seminar course, and I read the above quote in our required textbook. Something about this sentence really struck a chord with me. It seemed to suggest that intimacy with God is not fully realized exclusively in a covenant marriage relationship and that, in fact, one can achieve true intimacy with God outside of a spousal relationship. This may seem very obvious, but it still resounded in my head a fresh, new perspective on intimacy. I would 100% concede that intimacy between God and man is a personal thing that doesn’t involve someone else as a precursor. But there was something in Waltke’s statement, which was a response to Michal feeling ashamed of David’s spontaneity to worship God in the streets in a loincloth, that got me thinking about the topic (topics?) that seem to be on my mind the majority of the time – marriage, sex and relationships.
I am not convinced that a large portion of the church teaches well that intimacy with God is found in one’s personal relationship with God. They may use their words to speak this truth, but in their actions and conversations marriage seems to be the forefront of intimacy, and truth regarding personal intimacy usually seems to find a backseat. My question therefore becomes this:
Do we use marriage as the only avenue to achieving full intimacy with God?
I’ve heard it suggested that marriage is the place where you attain full intimacy because it is the place where you are privileged to exercise and engage with every part of your being (due to the fact it involves both Creator and another of His created). It seems that because marriage is the concession for sexuality it is synonymously the epitome of intimacy. I do not believe this is true.
Let me try to explain to you more of what I mean by looking at the life of a man after God’s own heart: David. David’s intimacy with God evidences that marriage isn’t necessary to achieve complete, whole intimacy with God. David’s intimacy with the Lord and the promises God realized in David’s life had nothing to do with who his spouse was. There was always a bigger picture God had in mind for David. The covenant’s that God promised to have come about in David’s own lifetime were that He’d give:
(1) David a great name (2 Sam. 7:9b)
(2) Israel a secure place with wicked oppressors (2 Sam. 7:10)
(3) Him a rest from all his enemies. (2 Sam. 7:11)
The point here being that David’s intimacy with the Lord was dependent on God, not on David’s relationship with anybody else. Yet somehow in today’s day and age we tend to lump a lot of our solutions to our relationship angst (ie. not being known, wanting to do life with someone, sexual desire, longing for true intimacy) into getting married. There’s an unspoken suggested answer that marriage will fix these angst’s, when this is clearly not what the Bible is suggesting. Although Paul does say that if the young women cannot control their sexual desires then they should just get married, I don’t think this is any way translates to “if you want to experience true intimacy with the Lord, you should get married.” Unfortunately, I think this is what permeates into the thinking for so many young people because so often we use the covenant marriage relationship as the example for what intimacy with God looks like: being fully known in all of our vulnerabilities.
There is, of course, a paradox in all of this because God ordained marriage in perfection by suggesting that it wasn’t good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). The question then becomes this: Was God suggesting that man cannot find intimacy with Him as long as man is an unattached individual? If this was the case then surely Christ in all of His humanity should have married. Or is it that being alone isn’t suggestive of a lack of intimacy with God but rather, quite simply, a lack of intimacy with another?
Is a marriage only truly intimate when God is the centre? If this is the case, then it demands that a person is intimate with their Creator before another person’s life is joined with their’s. So why isn’t this explicitly taught? I’m not sure we actually explicitly teach that intimacy with God in its fullest is realized in marriage (which can be very misleading lie), but I don’t think we explicitly teach the opposite, either. On the contrary I think the way the church may pedestal marriage over singleness (which is something else that may not be done forthrightly) leads to an implicit suggestion of intimacy being fully realized only within a marriage. Sure, a lot of young Christians see marriage as the solution to their sexual restlessness, but I think they also, then, parallel sex with intimacy, and somehow think that true fulfilment is only found once they’ve been released to have sex in their marriage. Of course, sex is a very intimate act, so it’s easy to understand why one may suggest that marriage (and therefore, sex), are the embodiment of intimacy. All that to say that David was a man after God’s own heart, and even though he made bad choice after bad choice (which ironically involved sex on occasion), he was still, as an individual, the recipient of an extremely intimate relationship with God. His life proves that intimacy with God doesn’t come through marriage, but a life of faith that results in obedience to God.
David starts off very well living in full obedience and openness to what God speaks through the prophet Samuel. We see later in David’s life a complete meltdown, but it isn’t for lack of wives who I am sure he had intimate experiences with on many occasions. His life falls apart because of a lack of faith and obedience and therefore an intimacy with God.
It is by having intimacy with God that His kingdom is made greater. This happens with God but plays itself out in all relationships and experiences that we are a part of. As much as marriage is a God ordained covenant, it can be warped into a set of human ideals to achieve something it was never meant to offer on its own. Without true intimacy with Jesus things won’t ever be brought into their full potential – even a marriage. We have to be careful to present intimacy with God in a way that all people can experience, regardless of their relationship status.
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the rambling missionary 