I’m thinking this passage may just answer the age old question about whether or not we have sexual relations in heaven….I’ll bet you want to read further now…
Okay, that was a “hook” line for sure. But I wasn’t kidding, I think we might learn something here.
Usually when I come to passages like this I read them really fast and then don’t spend any time pondering them. Probably because they are describing things that are uncomfortable…or gross.
That reminds me of a story my mother used to tell: Mom grew up as the second oldest child. She had a big brother and two younger sisters. Every once in while, when the family sat down to dinner her older brother would finish his food, and then want hers as well. Of course, she refused. Knowing my mom, she would have refused even if she wasn’t hungry…but that’s a different story. Anyway, when that happened, her brother would gross her out by talking about something disgusting, like puss oozing from his ear. When she pushed her plate aside and woudn’t eat he would grab whatever it was on her plate that he wanted.
The moral of the story: bodily discharges are gross
Most discharges are caused by some injury or illness, and all injuries and illness are a product of the fall from grace. We didn’t get hurt or sick before sin, so discharges are a byproduct of sin. No wonder they make us unclean, they are a reminder that we are no longer perfect (as we were created). Our bodies are dysfunctional now. Thank God that He didn’t allow us to eat from the tree of life…we would be stuck in these dysfunctional bodies forever. But now, since the body can die, we can be forgiven (before death) and then inherit a new perfect body in the next phase of life. Praise the Lord for His wisdom and concern for us!
Back to the “hook”… I notice that semen and menstruation both make us “unclean”. Now, those aren’t the byproduct of sin that I’m aware of. God created us to be reproductive. But if you look closely at Genesis 3 and 4 you will find that there isn’t any reference to children or sexual intercourse until after the fall. What does that mean? It could mean that Adam and Eve didn’t have intercourse in the Garden of Eden…there wouldn’t be any need for it, really. They were blissfully happy already, weren’t aware that they were naked, and lived in Utopia. Several of the desires that you and I feel and deal with every day, and consider as normal would have been foreign to them. All of that to say that discharging semen and menstruation would have been unnecessary. By means of full disclosure: in Genesis 3:16 God tells Eve about how the curse will affect her by saying “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing”. Until now, I had considered the idea that Adam and Eve were already having intercourse, and producing children…perfect children, and they were doing so with very little pain. But now God was saying it would be more stressful. I also thought that maybe that’s how part of the earth was populated apart from Adam and Eve. Cain was afraid of someone who would have been upset that he killed Abel. Maybe a perfect brother, perhaps?
But this reading in Leviticus tells us that these discharges make us unclean, so they aren’t something that will be happening in heaven. Therefore, even if God gave us these functions in order to populate the earth, and even if He blessed them and approves of them, and wants us to engage in such behavior (within the confines of marriage), I don’t think that it is an activity that we will be carrying into heaven.
And, I think heaven will be even more wonderful than the Garden of Eden, so we won’t miss it at all.
Please….let’s talk about something else…
Faithfully,
PR