Gospel Love, Marriage and Divorce: Legacies of the Divine Romance

By Randall Lamb

The centrality of God in all things is not a novel concept to Christianity, at least not in theory. For centuries, it would appear that the Church has somehow allowed herself to remove the God-centered gospel definition from marriage and has subsequently fashioned a culturally subjective definition of love, marriage, and divorce that has left God, in many respects, far from the center. This book, however, will pay less attention to our own domestic legacies of love, marriage, and divorce. It is more so about the church, covenants, conditions, true fidelity, perseverance, God-centered joy, authenticity, fraud, legalism, and apostasy. It is a journey into the kingdom of God wherein the visible and invisible church, along with love, marriage, and divorce, all seem to collide with the gospel of glory and grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644713785

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Gospel

Love, Marriage, and Divorce

Legacies of the Divine Romance

Randall Lamb

ISBN 978-1-64471-377-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64471-378-5 (Digital)

Copyright © 2020 Randall Lamb

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

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Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

~ Preface ~

~ The Power of Tradition ~

~ Biblical Legacies of Divorce ~

~ Gospel Indecency ~

~ The Yoke and the Name ~

~ First Corinthians 7: Concessions and Commands ~

~ Legacy of Temple Peace ~

~ Divine Divorce Today ~

~ Conditionally Beloved ~

~ Love Is Not an Action ~

~ From Marriage to Idolatry ~

~ Redemptive Love and Gospel Hate ~

~ It’s a Marriage—Not a 501(c)(3) ~

~ To Nullify or Not to Nullify ~

~ Gospel-Centered Parenting ~

~ Questions and Answers ~

~ Epilogue ~

~ Acknowledgments ~

~ About the Author ~

To my divorced

Redeemer whose gospel of glory and grace

forever betrothed me to his love.

To Ashley Noel, my beloved,

Storms will surely come.

True love is a choice you must make,

And you are the one

That I have set my heart to choose.

As long as I live, I swear I’ll see this through.

~ Thrice

To Brooklyn, Jude, Ryder, and Sawyer, my children,

You are wonderful, and I belong to you.

God could not have blessed me more with four children the way he did with you. You are living testimonies of God being faithful to our family despite a fallen world bent on trying to keep us apart. You are children of God before you are my dear offspring! You four are my great joy.

Love,

Papa

~ Preface ~

The gospel works (Isaiah 55:11). As followers of Christ, whether we care to admit it or not, we are all divine pragmatists. William James, the psychologist, was not the originator of what is commonly known as pragmatism, that something is true because it works. That has always been God’s turf. Jesus makes this point when he taught us "I am the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6; italics mine). God’s truth, simply put, works.

The apostle Paul shared these sentiments when he wrote, The kingdom of God is not a matter of talk, but of power (1 Corinthians 4:20). At the end of the day, after all the dust has settled, the gospel will manifest and validate itself not just as theoretical points of view, but as a demonstration of something real, genuine, authentic, transforming, and powerful (Hebrews 4:12).

God’s truth is undeniably practical, and everything about it works. Some elements of it may be challenging or even painful at times. Athletes devote themselves to self-discipline, pushing themselves both mentally and physically to the virtual brink of collapse. But once all is said and done, it works. At the end of the day, they attain (or come closer to) the prize they have sought after.

This journey will deal primarily with the gospel. It will begin with God, remain centered upon God, and will come to rest around God. As a literary and biblical term, my usage of the term gospel is more synonymous with a God-centered reality rather than the strict theological definition of justification (Philippians 1:5, 2:22, 4:3; 1 Thessalonians 1:5; Philemon 13). The gospel deals not only with the doctrinal understanding as it pertains to our salvation (a.k.a. our justification), but the gospel is also about the truths of our day-to-day life, also known as our sanctification. And so to gospelize the entire concept of love, marriage, and divorce, I would say is to center them upon God.

The subject matter that we will be dealing with, gospel love, gospel marriage, and gospel divorce, are all concepts we as Christians should understand are intended to be understood from God’s perspective first. Alike any absolute truth, when God thinks about these things, he does so in terms of his reality. It is we, the fallen ones, who struggle with having to unlearn our sinful understanding of these concepts, having to relearn how to gospelize love, marriage, and even divorce.

This journey, however, is going to be about much more than earthly love, marriage, and divorce. Far too often, marriage is understood merely as a human tradition that we as Christians try and draw some spiritual parallel to. It’s our Christian version of what the world also refers to as marriage. Nothing could be further from the divine truth and legacy. Such a casual perspective on marriage is really missing the design of marriage. This book will engage the gospel parallels of marriage and salvation. It is about obedience and joy. It is about sanctification and holiness. It is about apostasy and perseverance. This book is about the divine romance that fleshes out in sometimes what is understood as the great story of redemption.

Oddly, as gospel centered as I have sought to be, this book will very likely not be alike anything else you or I have found written this lengthy on this subject matter. Recognizing there is nothing new under the sun, it is likely there will be historic literary works that will surface consequent to this publishing (but I have not been privy to them). In doing my research for this book, I do admit that I encountered many Christians who have, for the most part, agreed with many of these seemingly novel conclusions. Many online blogs and internet discussions opened my eyes to the reality that there are already many believers who seem to embrace many of these concepts I intend to share. It only appears that there has not been anything, to my knowledge, that has been formally written or published to reflect those biblical beliefs in an exhaustive and systematic manner.

To be very honest and upfront with you, the concepts and implications that will be presented will be challenging and will exhort you, hopefully, to undergo various spiritual yet biblical gospel-paradigm shifts. Lord willing, the gospel will be presented as a liberating concept that will increasingly flow from your lips. I want you to utterly enjoy the gospel, to relish in the gospel, to find liberty in the gospel, to literally find yourself living out a day-to-day faith that, very authentically, boasts in the gospel (Isaiah 26:8). And Lord willing, you will not only want to reread this book but mark it up and pass it along as you come away with a fresh perspective on Christ, his bride, and what I hope to demonstrate as some fresh perspectives on love, marriage, and even divorce.

When we read the story of redemption, we discover the simultaneous legacy of the divine marriage that God does not shy away from. Time and time again in the Scripture, we read of a divine bridegroom who is having to repeatedly contend with a bride who not only brings him much joy, but one who constantly dabbles with spiritual infidelity (Exodus 32; Judges 10:13; Ezra 9–10; Amos 9; Isaiah 30; Jeremiah 3; Hosea 1:9; Revelation 2:1–5, 18–23, 3:15–24). From the testimony of Scripture, we learn of the reality that love, marriage, and, yes, even the pains of divorce (Jeremiah 3) are all divine legacies that God himself has experienced. Yes, God is ultimately the center of his love, marriage, and even his divorce.

From the perspective of virtually all modern-day Christian counselors and psychologists, God would appear to have far too many marriage problems to have the human credibility of knowing what he is talking about. He’s divorced, for crying out loud. Can he possibly really know what it takes to make a marriage work if he doesn’t seem to make his own work? This is because we have redefined gospel love, marriage, and divorce to be man centered rather than gospel centered. What we seem to learn from the divine legacy is that God values his gospel greater than anything else. Hence, he works at making his gospel work more than anything else, and that is where the divine credibility stems from.

Divine Pragmatism

By the end of this book, I hope you will likewise conclude that God’s love and passion for perfect holiness, his standards of relational love, is something he does not even struggle with preserving. He will not compromise his covenant to himself, even at the cost of losing his relationship with his creation. God does not negotiate his gracious and holy love. Believe it or not, this is actually how we understand the gospel.

From time to time, we do well as the church to step back and evaluate the pragmatic value of certain beliefs. After all, if what we are said to believe is from God and that what God has revealed to us is in fact true, then it also follows his truth will work. Sometimes we do not think in these terms, and so we have a tendency, at times, to just blindly accept something by faith, regardless of whether or not it is yielding the spiritual evidences of a truth that works or not. We rarely, if ever, think in terms of whether or not spiritual growth can be measured.

To borrow a nautical sailing concept here, from time to time, in the history of the church, we encounter the practical need of doctrinally tacking in order to continue moving forward. Tacking is a navigational correction, be it small or large, which enables the sailboat to more effectively realign itself with the wind for its sails. Whenever you see a sailboat’s sails shift from one side to another, the sailboat is about to tack. The reason the sails shift is because the wind is to a sailboat the way gasoline is to a car. And so the boat is constantly in need of tacking so as to keep the most wind in its sails as possible. The boat must forever continue to tack in order to continue to move. Failure to tack when necessary will result in the failure of the ship moving forward with the greatest of speed and efficiency. It is necessary in order to ensure continued progress. Pragmatism drives the need for a sailboat to tack when it does.

Likewise, in contemporary Christianity, it would appear in this day and age that a navigational correction regarding the teaching of biblical love, marriage, and divorce is appropriate. The cultural landscape in our country and around the world appears to be undergoing various challenges as it pertains to how the institution of marriage is truly to be understood. As a result, various societies are experiencing a fallen world simply doing what it does best as it pertains to various practices of morality: embrace moral relativism. And so the definition of marriage has been challenged, on a civil level, and we as Christians do not have much of a leg to stand upon because we have, in years/centuries past, allowed the definition of marriage to be something that is not God centered.

For far too long, I believe the church has traditionally embraced an understanding of love, marriage, and divorce that, at first blush, seems virtuous, but is in reality closer to a tiny little idol. As time has elapsed, the traditional views seem to have proven themselves in increasing numbers as a view that simply does not work. The traditionally predominant and conservative views on divorce, for example, grant license to somewhere it should not and condemns others who are honestly struggling to honor God. As a result, far too many marriages end in divorce that should not, and the few that do end for legitimate reasons, for redemption’s sake, are wrongly condemned.

Granted, there are many learned men and women who have gone before me, who have exhausted this subject matter in lengths far beyond this book, but I must dissent or break away from those who have embraced such a generic and culturally defined view of love, marriage, and divorce and build my understanding from the ground up, from the Scriptures to reality. It can only be with this approach that we genuinely take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). If our previous thoughts, which may have even been a prevailing thought throughout much of our lives, do not align themselves with the thoughts of Christ, then we do well to seek after the liberty and joy found in knowing the thoughts that are true and obedient (John 8:32). I hope to provide some sound biblical basis, a defense for many of the defenseless, for some much-needed comfort for many of you who have honored God, to the point of divorce, and have lost your lives in order that you might find it.

However, because there is such a generic grasp of the institution of marriage, when it begins to fail, in most cases, millions of dollars and myriads of hours are spent in counseling for couples that are trying to figure out how to make a broken and ungodly relational paradigm work. But that has made about as much sense as spending trillions of dollars and countless hours of penance, trying to save ourselves. On the one hand, we read Jesus’s words,

Do not suppose that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, [husband against his wife]…a person’s enemies will include the members of his own family. (Matthew 10:34–36)

I tell you the truth, Jesus said to them, no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life. (Luke 18:29)

But then we compassionately or legalistically condemn the marriage of a believer wherein they are doing these very things Jesus taught. We tell them they are obviously doing something wrong. The truth is, the truth of Christ functions very much like a sword, and the function of the sword is to either reflect peace and protection for the righteous, or it reflects judgment and division upon those who will not acquiesce to it (Ephesians 6:17). Jesus spoke these words to give peace and encouragement to certain followers who were doing exactly as they should, living the gospel, only to experience a relational sorrow within their immediate family that was not expected.

The gospel alone is the only way taught in Scripture as being the remedy for these sorts of relational and family dilemmas. Marriages that do not have God as a necessary common denominator work about as good as an apostate or false church that does not have Jesus as the central and divine center of their worship. Marriages trying to survive without Jesus do not need counseling or psychological methodology to fix things. That will not and cannot relationally correct what unrepentant sin is destroying. That approach undermines the beauty, wisdom, and glory of the gospel.

Please understand that I am not attempting to throw all biblical counseling and psychology under the bus. There is a time and a place for such counseling. I have given as well as received much in the way of psychological counseling. However, when the gospel light is shed upon relationships as intimate as marriage, both divine and human, we seem to have found a spiritual license which differs substantially from what has been traditionally taught and practiced far too commonly. I believe a time has come where a reevaluation of the divine and human paradigm of marriage does well to be revisited and the biblical consistencies applied.

This may sound odd, but spiritually speaking, I have been married for nearly forty-five years (physically, I was previously married for nine years), so I am very acquainted with the principles of divine pragmatism that makes the most real of marriages work and the same gospel principles that can divide an earthly marriage when we remain equally devoted to them (Matthew 10:24; Luke 18:29).

As a spiritual bride, I am very happy with my marriage to Christ. His glory is my glory. His yoke is my joy. His headship is my calling. His rebukes are for my good. I know what it is to literally always be the one who was/is in the wrong. I know what it is to repeatedly ask for forgiveness from the captor of my soul. I also know what it is to experience a relational fervor and passion that compares to none, only by grace, remaining faithful to my covenant.

The biblical principles and practices that will be set forth in this book are not some abstract ideas or concepts that I have simply found interesting and thought provoking. Nor should they be considered novel in any way, shape, or form. There should never be anything new or novel about a God-centered principle or institution that he put forth all the way back at creation. I hope to present both a biblical and systematic approach to the teaching of love, marriage, and divorce.

I hope to share some divine principles that I have not only learned from Scripture, but principles that I have put into practice and have found much comfort, transforming joy and peace as a result. They are principles that, contrary to much of the well-intended pressure of the church, have given me a strength to endure the relational hardship, including divorce, that Jesus promised would befall some of us, even in our broken marriages (Luke 18:29).

Consequently, I have taken great comfort in knowing that neither I nor the gospel has failed. I know what it is to be divorced, to walk in the very shoes of a Redeemer who has demonstrated a value for his gospel above that of an earthly relationship, to value the loss of my own life that I might find it in Christ. A Redeemer whose love for his gospel will never falter, never compromise, never leave him lonely, and never leave him with regret. And so as difficult as this may be for me to pen, I for one have practiced what it is you are about to hear me preach, and by God’s amazing grace, as broken as I am in Christ, I have overcome and continued to walk boldly in the shadow of his incredible glory.

Having grown up myself as a child of divorced parents, I for one know from both Scripture and personal experience what human love, marriage, and divorce looks like. I also know of the absolute faithfulness of God upon my life as his providence steered me through a life that should have labeled me an unfortunate statistic of divorced parents. I know what it is to have experienced sexual molestations by a close family member, of which would not have happened if my parents hadn’t divorced. Yet I have never once thought to blame my parents’ divorce as the reason for my painful misfortune (Genesis 50:20; Job 13:15).

Because of God’s amazing grace, never once have I ever walked a day in this life, harboring unforgiveness toward this family member. I count all this a great gain and credit to the promises and power of the gospel that are there for any to lay hold of. At the end of the day, I can actually glory in the genuine healing power of the gospel and the goodness of God’s sovereign hand over my life. The existence of the scars in my life give testimony and glory to the greater healing power of the gospel. These same scars are carried by many, and part of the aim of this book is to exalt Christ and his glory as those scars bear witness to a myriad of believers living out the gospel.

Love, marriage, and divorce are all elements of the divine romance: redemption. To the Christian, all three should be understood in terms of God’s relational dealings with humanity. Christ’s relationship with his redeemed people is not something sort of like marriage. Marriage, we will find in Scripture, is designed to be a horizontal reality, a covenant between God, a man and a woman; albeit that covenant is a shadowed reality of a vertical spiritual reality that exists: Christ and the church. But human marriage is very much a spiritual institution, as old as spirituality and religion itself, because God was at its inception designing marriage no less than spirituality is to be primarily about him. Simply put, true marriage and true religion cannot be without God.

We should understand and practice the legacy of love in terms of how we understand the many facets of God’s love, both conditional and unconditional. God’s love is both gracious as well as holy. One has the license of being unconditional while the other is purely conditional. Yet in the wisdom of God, he is able to exemplify both without contradicting himself.

We should also understand and practice the human divine marriage legacy no differently than God has demonstrated for us. And lastly, divorce is a legacy that God has also left, one in which we are no less called to mirror in our reasoning and practice.

Biblical marriage, we will find, is an active and covenantal agreement and relationship between a man, a woman, and God (Genesis 2:24; Mark 10:9). It is an authentic relational contract that includes conditions, consequences, and rewards. However, for it to be a truly God-centered contract, it is absolutely necessary that both spouses are genuine and persevering believers in Christ. In a marriage covenant, God agrees to love, bless, and make happy (i.e., reward) the husband and wife who likewise agree to the covenant. When husbands and wives keep their end of the covenant by obeying and loving God (and consequently one another), then the marriage covenant remains healthy and intact. I would also call this a gospel or orthodox marriage.

However, nowhere in Scripture is God shown to be intimately involved in the unorthodox marriage covenants (or any covenants for that purpose) of nonbelievers. Couples who ceremonially stand before god or an atheist minister to marry are not standing before the one true God of Scripture if their god does not command them to make him the center of their lives/marriage. This is also why inherently God does not recognize marriages between homosexuals. When God is not at the center of their relationship to one another, he does not make a marriage covenant with them either (Proverbs 15:29; Isaiah 59:2). That being said, this makes an orthodox marriage covenant impossible when only one person is a believer. In a biblical marriage, it always takes three to tango (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Not even the marriage covenant between Christ and the church is exempt from God the Father being central to it.

My hopes in writing this book are not to simply have another book published simply for controversy’s sake. We live in a fallen world, one in which love, marriage, and divorce exist as everyday realities. We as the church, however, have the redemptive privilege of identifying the gospel in all areas of life and deriving great joy, wisdom, safety, and direction in life as the gospel renews every fiber and thought of our being (2 Corinthians 10:5). The aim of this book, therefore, will be to identify and illustrate the biblical and gospel usages of the concepts of love, marriage, and divorce as they are revealed from the divine legacies. Having done that, we will seek to partially reconstruct our human legacies and how the gospel should properly influence them.

To the benefit of each reader, whenever the truth about love, marriage (and even divorce) is sought out, an awakening to the glory of God, the transforming power of the cross in the lives of the redeemed, and the inexpressible joy and liberty that comes from knowing and living the truth are what are found (Ezra 10; John 8:32; 1 Corinthians 4:20). Even in this delicate subject matter, we herald the magnificent truth, For by him and through him and to him are all things. To God alone be the glory forever. Amen (Romans 11:36).

As a personal advocate and student of many of the classical reformed teachings, my whole summation of the story of redemption consists in a simple motto: The Gospel of Glory and Grace. That being understood up-front to the reader, I, as a writer, am coming from a biblical perspective that is very heavily influenced by the gospel of God, the glory of God and the amazing grace of God.

While I do believe and have much theological grounding in the breathtaking and sovereign grace of God, I have also sought to demonstrate with Scripture that our human responsibility contains many facets that will determine the validity and extent of how the saving grace of God has touched an individual’s life. And at that, our human responsibility is the means whereby we experience the joy of obedience and avoid a manipulative and sloppy understanding of grace that can hold an obedient spouse wrongly captive. There is nothing that will be written in the pages to follow that will, in my hopes, direct the reader away from any of the three tenets of gospel, glory, or grace. Granted, many naysayers will object claiming novelty, but that is to be expected when any liberating proclamation of God’s truth is set forth. If a freshly gospel-centered understanding of love, marriage, and divorce is in deserve of the description novelty, then God help us all, for we have lost our way.

The apostle Paul teaches us in Ephesians 5:32 that the earthly marriage is designed to be a reflection of the great divine marriage between Christ and the church. Our human understanding and practice of marriage is intended to be a reflection of the divine legacy. As a reflection, we understand that the reality is something else.

Very frequently, there are Judeo-Christian concepts and principles that any society or our nonbelieving family and friends may put into practice, and for the most part, they frequently experience part of the subsequent societal benefit of those principles. Love, marriage, and divorce are examples of such practices. Society also benefits, so to speak, as it takes the principles of true religion given to us from God, even though society distorts those principles for its own end, thereby creating false religions.

Often at times, the church finds itself deriving certain concepts and principles from the world that are not biblically deduced (e.g., that marriage need not necessarily include God). Marriage is one of those relational institutions, I believe, where we as the church have allowed much of the societal pragmatism of love, marriage, and divorce to trump our spiritual pragmatism of the divine legacies. We have allowed the cultures of history to redefine religion as well as marriage, all the while believing they will accept us if we humbly allow them to redefine these institutions.

All too often, we as Christians forget the relational paradigms of love, marriage, and even divorce come to us from the top down, from the divine to the human (Romans 12:1–2). These concepts must be understood in terms of the divine legacy we are given rather than projecting our human understandings upon the divine. God has painted a portrait both theologically as well as practically of what divine love, marriage, and divorce looks like. Too frequently, we have the human tendency of reversing these paradigms, and consequently, we have done a pretty good job at contaminating them (Hosea 4:6).

Gospel love, I hope to demonstrate, is much more than a simple action of benevolence toward another, regardless of any subjective reward. At the same time, gospel love is much more than just a subjective feeling that may or may not be objectively substantiated. Such traditional understandings of love have, in my opinion, deprived us as the body of Christ from experiencing the greater magnitude that gospel love truly carries with it.

In this day and age, we as the church have written volumes of books, many of them psychologically driven, which emphasize the practical needs of understanding the love language of our spouse, of learning how important love and respect is to one another. However, the greatest of love languages that all of us need to experience from our spouses is a gospel love toward God, not just theoretically, but in real genuine practice.

As married Christians, the greatest way that we can demonstrate our love for our spouse, the way God has wired us to truly believe they genuinely love us and have our best interest at heart, is for us to see in their lives the gospel centrality of God. Simply put, spouses cannot genuinely love one another all the while placing one another on relational pedestals and catering to their every need, except their need for God. But because of common relational disconnect that we have allowed the gospel to experience in our married culture, we seem to have found ourselves gravitating toward plan B psychological remedies that are definitely pragmatic, but have taken the preeminent place of the pragmatic value and necessity of gospel love within a marriage.

Gospel marriage is another traditional paradigm that I hope to clarify and realign what I believe is an honest misunderstanding. Contrary to the prevalent conservative view of many of my theological mentors of the faith (both historic as well as contemporary), that marriage is primarily about companionship, that it is a civil institution, that it is not inherently spiritual, I hope to demonstrate to you as the reader how such an understanding of marriage is not as gospel centered as may have been thought. Granted, companionship is a definite but subservient reason for marriage. However, the gospel-centered heart and the glory of God has taught us that God, and not one another, is the central motif for any marriage. The divine paradigm for why marriage exists between Christ and the church stems from a reason far greater than the emphasis placed upon companionship. The greatest and primary reason for marriage, we will find, is no different with Adam and Eve as it is with Christ and the church: glorifying God.

Marriage is about a man and a woman primarily seeking the greatest relational joy and happiness known to mankind found within the pursuit and obedience of glorifying God. To suggest that God would have designed a relational concept such as marriage that would eventually be a reflection of God’s relational concept between Christ and the church, and that somehow that concept could in any way be devoid of God’s glory being central to the relationship should be unheard of.

This seems to be somewhat descriptive of how we as the church have allowed ourselves to define or redefine marriage. The glory of God—this is the reason primarily of why two should seek to become one flesh, stemming from the example found within the divine legacy itself (Ephesians 5:25–32). Any concept of marriage that is not inherently a God-centered covenantal concept is very simply not a biblical concept of marriage.

It is because, by and large, the church has, for far too long, so detached itself from connecting spiritual obedience (i.e., glorifying God) as literally the greatest of life’s joys and pleasures. It has not understood the primary and greatest of relational joys that a man and a woman can experience in the spiritual form of an eros love, better known as genuine koinonia. For far too long, the church has wrongly demonized the joy, beauty, and pleasure of sexual intimacy within marriage. We have taken something that should be understood as bringing joy, happiness, comfort, and pleasure and experienced as mutually invigorating and turned it into something far less than that, even a dutiful obligation. In fact, we have almost guilt-ridden subsequent generations for experiencing such pleasantries during their marital intimacies.

I also hope to demonstrate to the reader that as eros love is to a physical marriage, so too is koinonia fellowship and obedience to the spiritual marriage. Once that connection is made, the true joy, beauty, and exhilarating truth of Christian obedience and holiness will become even more intoxicating and addictive than the physical foreshadow of eros love. I will say this as plainly as possible: the gospel, which should be understood as genuine glorifying obedience to Christ is better than, more pleasing than, more addictive than, and far more sustaining than sexual intimacy or its intimate counterpart (Psalm 16:11, 63:3; 84:10; John 15:10–11). But we do not believe this because many of us have